Saint gaped at me, too surprised to be betrayed and too betrayed to be surprised. “The fuck, Luc?”
I didn’t bother answering. I just got out the car and walked away. And Saint, being Saint, came straight after me, leaving the Cadillac right where I’d left it, door hanging open, a traffic jam already building up behind it.
“The fuck, Luc?” he repeated as he trailed after me.
Not wanting an irate peer following me all the way to—to wherever I was going, into a service station it looked like—shoutingThe fuck, Lucevery twenty paces, I stopped, turned, and with great dignity and self-possession, replied, “The fuck.”
“Thefuck?”
I almost wanted to see how much of a conversation we could have using only the wordsfuckandthe, especially because in a weird way this was probably the closest Saint and I had got to understanding each other. But it did eventually reach the point where you needed verbs. “You’re firing me, Saint. I don’t have to pretend to like you anymore.”
He put his hands up in a gesture of ironic disbelief. “Oh right, becauseeverybody hates Saint. Because Saint is such a prick, yah?”
I was beginning to suspect that if I got out of this with mycareer intact, it would only be because Saint’s mind couldn’t actually encompass the idea of people having an issue with him. “Grow the fuck up, you selfish, self-absorbed, self-deluding, overgrown teenager. You know you’re old enough to be my dad, right?”
“Yeah, and you’re acting like mine.”
I was sure he’d meant that as a burn. “What, trying to run a beetle charity? Yes, it’s myjob. Have you not been paying attention?”
“Man.” Saint sounded a level of disappointed he had no right to sound. “I thought you werecool.”
I actually laughed in his face. “Oh. My. God. Are you trying to peer-pressure me? We aren’t peers. You’reapeer, but that’s not the same thing.”
“You know I don’t believe in hereditary privilege,” replied Saint.
It was predictable. So predictable that I could probably have had the whole pointless argument in my head without him even being there. I opened my mouth to reply and then stopped because what was the point? I didn’t know much about the music of Rancid Sputum, but I sure as hell knew this song. There were some people—like Saint, like good old Jon Fleming—who were so wrapped up in themselves that even calling them out on it was just feeding their egos. It felt weirdly freeing to finally put that lesson into practice. To tell myself someone wasn’t worth the effort and actually believe it.
“Fuck off, Saint.” I turned my back on him. “You’re boring.”
Probably I shouldn’t have expected Saint to have more self-respect than to unironically yell “Don’t walk away from me” as I walked away from him. But he kept shouting, and I kept walking, my heart beating faster and my feet keeping pace.
Fuck.
The reality was, I’d had nothing to lose. Saint was going to keep throwing his toys out of the pram, and if I kept giving them back to him, all I was going to get for my trouble was a teddy bear in the face.
But also fuck.
This was it.
Even if CRAPPstonbury went ahead, CRAPP wouldn’t last past the end of the year. And then what would happen to Alex and Barbara and Rhys and Dr. Fairclough? What would happen to the UK’s population ofTrypocopris vernalisand the soon-to-be unaerated soils of its moorland habitats?
What would happen tome?
Chapter 32
Banbury, by the way. I’d been in Banbury. From a certain perspective, that had been pretty lucky because it meant there was actually a train station and so I could, eventually, at far too much expense and with far too many changes, get back to London, and from there onto a night bus, and from there home.
On the whole, though, I was pretty proud of myself for not going completely to pieces. Not on the way back, and not the day after. The day after I told Saint to fuck off and also that nobody liked him and also that he was boring. I had a little cry on the train, but other than that I was extremely mature and sensible and goal-oriented.
The goals I was orienting in the immediate aftermath of the great Enbanburying were finding a new headliner for my hopeless rock festival, making sure I was home to pick up our Ocado delivery for dinner party supplies, taking Jaz to a meeting about the whole her-being-suspended thing, and then, straight afterwards, taking her to a guitar lesson in Surrey.
Finding a headliner for a music festival with no budget and no audience went about as well as could be expected. The Ocado order went somewhatbetterthan expected, which is to say they actually delivered what we ordered instead of random crap we couldn’t use which they would persist in calling “necessary substitutions.”
In the end, the school meeting wound up being the lowest-stress part of the day. Jaz said all the things that she was supposed to say, and I felt I’d walked a better line between “advocating for her” and “undermining the process.” We’d still had to make some adjustments to her Personal Education Plan, and there was talk of the school counsellor getting involved so Jaz and Trish could take part in some nonjudgemental restorative discipline, but, at the end of the day, I thought we got off pretty lightly.
Although shedidinsist we stop at the supermarket on the way to Mum’s.
“Not having that fucking curry again,” she explained as she swiped a bottle of Thai fish sauce and a packet of chicken breasts through the self-checkout.
