“Putting the top up. Not taking another two hours inthat”—she indicated the very open-topped vehicle—“inthis.” She indicated the wind, weather, and general miserable vibe of the day.
“And you know how?”
Apparently, that didn’t deserve an answer. She just wrangled the roof of Saint’s impractical, probably deadly, sixties convertible neatly into place, then jumped in the front with Spud on her lap.
Not sure what else to do, I got in beside her. After all, it wasn’t like we could walk home.
Jaz was watching me with even more suspicion than usual. “Is this,” she said, “like, your actual job?”
I nodded only a bit sheepishly. “Kind of? It’s usually a lot less weird.” I thought about it. “Slightly less weird.”
“How did you…just how?”
“Honestly,” I told her, “I ask myself that question most days.”
Most of the time, Jaz had absolutely zero engagement with me, my life, or my work. But most of the time, being engaged didn’t make me so obviously uncomfortable.
“And is that guy really going to fire you if you don’t get a bunch of old men who hate him to be in his shitty band?”
I nodded. “Pretty much.”
“Does he want you to bring the dead one back and all?”
“I think even Saint isn’t quite that unreasonable.”
Jaz looked out over the pleasant views of Droitwich Spa, Spud snuggling down beside her. “He’s a prick, isn’t he?”
“Yup.”
There was a fatal silence. “He’s going to fire you anyway, isn’t he?”
“Probably.”
There was an even more fatal silence. “And you’re still going to do everything he says?”
When you put it like that, it did sound like a pretty rubbish deal. “Looks like. But I spent most of my twenties giving up on everything. So I’m trying something different.”
“What? Failure?”
I thought about that. “Yes. Because… Oh, look, you’ve had all the ‘It’s better to fail than never try’ lectures. Don’t make me go there.”
She scowled. “You just did.”
“That wasn’t a lecture; it was a sentence. Now let’s go get Rik Jism.”
As I grappled with the reality of starting a car that was built in the 1950s, Jaz turned to me with a look of malicious innocence. “What’s Jism mean, anyway?”
I scowled. “You know, and I know you know. Otherwise you wouldn’t be asking me.”
Jaz ruffled Spud’s ears. “We don’t know what he’s talking about, do we?”
Figuring I’d dodged the jism as effectively as I was going to manage, I got us back on the road to London, trying not to think too hard about the fact that I was driving a car that predated the Big Mac, the moon landing, and airbags.
Substantially longer than I would have liked later, I parked us opposite the overpriced London flat Richard Smoddle had presumably not bought with Rancid Sputum money. In terms of “things to get arrested for loitering outside,” it was, I suppose, a slight upgrade from Celvestune Primary School and definitely a better bet than Deloitte, which would have put us on the wrong side of some very serious security types.
It took a while for Richard Smoddle to show up, and when he did I wasn’t really sure how to approach him. Which was probably why his first reaction to me was “Sorry, not interested” and his second was “Look, there’s laws against aggressive begging.”
Like Mr. Giffard, the artist previously known as Rik Jism was a skinny white guy in his sixties wearing a suit and tie. Unlike Mr. Giffard, the suit was Savile Row and the tie was—okay, honestly, I don’t know much about ties. It looked expensive and probably not made of polyester. When he spoke, though, he had the traces of an Estuary accent, which I hadn’t expected after the wall of posh that was Saint and MagiMix, and his eyes were a cold grey that said I was wasting his time. And his oxygen.
