“Jism?” said Saint again, as if he was a stuck and mildly pornographic record.
“Yes.” My jaw creaked beneath the sheer sustained pressure of my teeth gritting. “Jism.”
“Thatbastard.”
I made a noncommittally affirming sound. And for a little while we drove on in silence.
“That fuckingsellout.”
I made an even more noncommittally affirming sound, and we drove on in silence just a little more.
“You know his real name’s Smoddle?”
I’d used it to his face. Within the last half hour. It was pretty likely that I knew more about Richard Smoddle than Saint ever had. “I do, in fact, know that.”
“Jism was my idea,” Saint told me. I coloured myself completely unsurprised. “I said to him, ‘Rick, people hearJism, they know you’re coming for them.’”
I made a sound so noncommittal it wasn’t even especially affirming. I just carried on driving. We’d made it through Warwick and were coming up to Northend.
“Well,fuck him.”
I nodded.
“Fuck themboth.”
I nodded again.
“And fuck this whole reunion festival.”
I nodded one last time and then realised this was probably my last chance to save my job. And by chance, I meant a thing’s chance in a place where that kind of thing would have a notable lack of chances. “Look, wait a min—”
“Shut it down, Luc. It was a noble effort, but some dreams werenever meant to be.”
And that was it. Up until right then, I don’t think I’d really been letting myself believe that this might not work. Because as I’d painstakingly taught myself over the past five years, I was really good at this kind of thing. The plan had always been to pitch the idea as an ego project, then bring it home on the strength of actually organising a good concert. But I had fatally underestimated the size of Saint’s ego. Most people were okay if you just named a library after them—they didn’t also expect you to let them write all the books. In hindsight, it had been over the moment Saint had shown up on my doorstep in his fucking terrible mirror shades and demanded we get the band back together.
Although admittedly, maybe telling him directly to his face that his former bandmates hated him might not have been the best call either.
Northend was behind us now, and I tried my best to pull it together because I had the other half of this miserable fucking drive to turn this around..
“What if,” I tried, “what if you could, like, show them you could do it alone?”
“I’m not a solo act, Luc. I need…” He groped for the right phrase and, because the actual right phrase waspeople who’ll do everything I tell them to, steadfastly refused to find it.
“But think of the platform you could give to young, up-and-coming bands who want to be just like you.” Given the circumstances, I was pretty proud of myself for that one. That was some medical-grade bullshit right there.
“Kids today don’t have the ambition,” Saint said, with the self-assurance of a man who had gone through life assuming that what was true and what was convenient for him were the same thing.
“Right, but—”
“My mind’s made up. If they’re out, I’m out, and if I’m out, you’re out.”
It was tempting, so tempting, to just pull the car to the side of the road and ditch him there and then. But that wouldn’t have been professional.
Then again, professional had got me precisely fuck all so far.
I slammed on the brakes, letting the car come screeching to a halt in the middle of the road in the middle of the night in the middle of a motorway in the middle of, of—fuck, where even was I? “You know what. That’s the way you want it? Fine.”
It had sounded less childish in my head.
