“Okay,” I tried again, “but the thing is I’m looking for Richard Smoddle.”
“I’ll let him know if I see him,” Richard Smoddle replied, pushing past me.
And so, swallowing the smooshed, stained, slightly smelly remains of my pride, I fell back on, “I’m looking for Rik Jism.”
Richard “Rik Jism” Smoddle turned slowly to face me. “How the fuck did you hear that name?”
“Some old bastard,” said Jaz.
“I work with Saint,” I clarified.
“Fuck me.” Richard Smoddle looked like I’d just told him I’d run over his cat and also that I’d sliced it into thin strips, laid it over ciabatta, and served it to him at lunchtime as a prosciutto sandwich. “I thought I told him I never wanted to see him again.”
“You probably did,” I admitted. “But ask yourself this: Would he have remotely listened?”
Richard Smoddle glowered at me. “You’d better come up.”
He let us upstairs into his tiny but eye-wateringly swanky apartment. Then we sat on an uncomfortable sofa in an open-plan kitchen-dining-sitting-living area that seemed as though nobodyever lived, sat, dined, or kitched in it while I explained to Richard Smoddle the farcical sequence of events that meant I now really badly needed him to rejoin Rancid Sputum for one last vomit-stained hoorah.
“So if I can’t get you and Magi—and Michael to reform Sputum, just for one day, it’s looking like Saint will pull my funding, and not only will I lose my job but so will a bunch of other mostly nice people. Plus, it’ll do some very bad things to the UK’s soil aeration.”
Richard Smoddle stared at me silently. Then he carried on staring at me silently.
Eventually, the silent staring got so intense that I found myself saying, “Um. Well?”
“Just waiting,” Richard Smoddle not-really-explained.
He really wanted me to say,For what?and this was definitely a give-the-client-what-they’re-after situation. “For what?”
“For you to get to the part where this is my problem.”
Meeting Mr. Giffard, who for all his half-buried toffery had actually heard of CRAPP, actually cared about what we did, and actually seemed not to be an absolute piece of shit, had lulled me into a false sense of security. “I thought you might, y’know, want to help?”
“He’s always like this,” Jaz added. “It’s not just you.”
“Why would I want to help that arrogant fuck Hilary de Lancy?” asked Richard Smoddle.
“Old times’ sake?”
It was a long shot. I’d been gambling on all old men on some level wanting to recapture their youths, no matter how shitty. As someone whose old-manhood was less comfortably distant than it once was, and whose youth had been deeply shitty, I should have known better.
“Let me tell you about old times.” Richard Smoddle leaned forward, suddenly sounding a whole lot more Rik Jism-y. “Old times was me, MagiMix, and Gary the Cosmic Fuckstone following Saintaround like a sack of pricks with us doing whatever the fuck he said and him doing whatever the fuck he wanted. And you know what I learned from that?”
“That it’s a bad idea to form major life philosophies based on your interaction with one unpleasant person in the eighties and nineties?” I suggested hopefully.
Jaz hadn’t seemed to be paying attention. Mostly she’d been looking around Richard Smoddle’s apartment like it was a spaceship. But now, with Spud nestled on her lap, she said, “That if you were going to be a lonely miserable bastard anyway, you’d rather be a rich lonely miserable bastard.”
Richard Smoddle did a got-it-in-one finger-snap-point-thing. At Jaz, not at me. “For years, all Saint talked about was fighting the power and fucking the system and how we didn’t need anything except the music. Well, guess what?”
I nodded. “It’s a lot easier to not need anything except the music when your dad’s an earl?”
“Yup. Saint taught me that I needed to look out for myself because no other fucker would. So I’m going to ask you again. Why isyourjob atyourcharitymyproblem?”
I had no good answers. Or rather I had answers that might have been good in other contexts likeThe ecosystem is all interconnected and our work really does make a material impactor my old standby ofDonating to obscure charities will impress your hipster friends, but there was no way I could pretend that helping me and CRAPP out of a bind was in Richard Smoddle’s direct self-interest.
So I opened my mouth, hoping something brilliant would come out. “We can probably swing you free food?”
* * *
