Jaz was giving me anI call bullshitlook.
“And also, I made a lot of it up as I went along and had a ton of support from my much more competent friends.”
“Fucking right.” Priya helped Mum into the back of the truck. “By the way, so we’re clear, not taking the dogs.”
Judy, who had been standing by the side of the road through all of this with the same placid, slightly detached air I saw a lot in Alex, snapped back to earth. “Hmm, what? Oh no, shouldn’t think so. If you’re sorted for transportation, I’ll probably walk up to the field. It’ll do the girls good to stretch their legs.” She glared at one dog in particular. “Won’t it, Camilla?”
“Are you sure, Judy?” asked Mum. “It is a very long way, and although I do not like to be saying it, you are not as young as you used to be.”
“Pish posh.” Judy took a deep lungful of bracing country air. “Been doing longer walks than this my whole life, and I won’t stop until they put me in a box. In fact”—she started climbing over a stile with her dogs gathering behind her—“I’ll race you. You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and all that.”
Priya leaned on her truck with her arms folded. “You know the low road is death, right?”
I paused, arms full of amp. “Hang on, what?”
Priya turned to me. “It’s like, you try to come back alive, but I’ll get killed fighting the English and then I’ll get brought back and buried in Scotland and I won’t care I’m dead on account of how my girlfriend dumped me up by Loch Lomond.”
“How do you evenknowthat?” I deposited the amp in the back. It might not have been an amp. It was a box with knobs on it.
But Judy was already stomping across fields and calling over her shoulder, “That high road is looking longer all the time.”
“Do not get killed fighting the English,” Mum yelled after her. “Vive the Auld Alliance.”
With Mum’s musical paraphernalia packed, those of us who weren’t taking the low road that was possibly death back to CRAPPstonbury clambered into the truck, and we set out on the higher, less fatal, but longer and windier roads through the little country lanes of Surrey.
“I’m just saying,” I insisted to Priya on the drive, “it sounds made up.”
“What else would the low road be?”
“I don’t know. The M6?”
“Google says it’s death,” Jaz said from the back seat.
Mum, who was sitting beside her, made a wise older-lady noise. “All folk songs are about death, Luc. Or fucking. Sometimes both.”
“‘All Around My Hat’?” I tried.
“The willow is a symbol of mourning,” replied Mum. “Also in some versions, she leaves her true love for another man, so there is fucking in it too.”
Jaz looked up from her phone as if she’d had a very important thought. “What about ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’?”
“That,” Mum told her sternly, “is not a folk song. It is a comic song by Lonnie Donegan.”
“Folk songs’ve got to start somewhere,” Jaz pointed out.
But Mum wasn’t letting that one slide. “When it becomes about death or fucking, then it becomes a folk song.”
“Mum,” I pleaded. “Don’t encourage Jaz to try and make ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ about death or fucking. Also, let’s all stop sayingabout fuckingin front of my fourteen-year-old.”
“What if the dustman,” said Priya, who, like Oliver, was annoyingly good at the whole keeping-your-eyes-on-the-road thing, “is actually Charon?”
“Then,” Mum conceded, “that would make it a folk song.” And just when I thought I’d got away with it, she added, “Especially if Charon is fucking.”
* * *
The CRAPPstonbury site was already buzzing, even though technically nobody should have been arriving for another few hours. The stages had been set up, the bands—and a lot of bands had come out of the woodwork now that this was also the start of the Odile O’Donnell Comeback Tour—were messing with instruments and bickering, both of which I understood to be pretty normal parts of the creative process.
Oliver, Maisie, and Spud met us as we piled out of Priya’s truck into the venue field. Spud bounded over happily and, indeed, yappily, but Maisie looked honestly dazed.
