“There was a mix-up,” Saint protested. “Also, it was in 1992. Get over it.”
MagiMix gave me an apologetic look. “As you can see,” he said, “these things tend to happen a lot with Rancid Sputum.” He stroked his chin contemplatively. “There’s probably material for an assembly here.”
“What’s the lesson going to be?” Annoyingly, my brain decided to think about that. “‘Don’t count your punk rock concerts before they hatch’?”
“I think I might go with ‘Sometimes your friends will try to get you to do things you don’t think are a good idea, and you should listen to your instincts and/or parents.’”
Saint groaned heavily. “Fuck me, Mix. When did you get so fucking square?”
“At the exact point”—MagiMix drew himself up with a surprising amount of dignity for a man in his sixties with his nipples on display—“that I got confident enough to stop caring what other people thought of me.” His eyes alighted on something past my left shoulder. “Ooh, is that vegan pop-up?”
As MagiMix set off for Bronwyn’s tent, Rik Jism hesitated for a moment and then followed him, leaving me, Saint, and something that was probably an amp standing in ankle-deep mud in the middle of a field.
“They’ll be back,” said Saint. “They always come back.”
“Maybe they will,” I told him. “But let’s be clear: I don’t care. I don’t care what they do. I don’t care what you do. You can stay, you can go. It doesn’t matter. But I have a festival to run.” I glanced across the field, where the first attendees were starting to grab food and stake out the good spots. “A festival, I might add, that’s going pretty fucking well and—”
“Jones Bowen One to O’Donnell.” Rhys’s voice crackled breathlessly over the walkie-talkie. “Jones Bowen One to O’Donnell.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “Yes?”
“Are you receiving me?”
I’d been told walkie-talkies were a really useful thing to use if you were running a big event. And that was probably true—if you weren’t working with the kind of people who thought themoment you gave them a radio you’d inducted them into the French Resistance. “Clearly I’m receiving you.”
“Thank goodness. You need to come at once. There’s a terrible problem.”
“What kind of problem?” I asked, with a sense of doom settling over me like an unfashionable cagoule.
“Well, it’s a bit hard to explain,” said Rhys Jones Bowen. “But it involves two male voice choirs, some chains, and an awfully large number of portable lavatories.”
Chapter 44
I thought I’d done pretty well on the lavatorial front. The number of portaloos I’d booked—veryniceportaloos, for what it’s worth, the kinds of portaloos you wouldn’t mind using if you were also the sort of person who donated money to extremely middle-class conservation charities—was definitely adequate for the expected crowds, even with the late rush we’d experienced after the announcement of the Odile O’Donnell Comeback Tour. Or at least they would have been if at least two dozen of them hadn’t been chained shut, with the beautifully rich but currently very angry voices of a Welsh male voice choir yelling from inside them.
“Alan Bowen,” a tall, thin man was saying outside the central toilet, “you are not coming out of there until you and your group of rebels and apostates relinquish all claim to the title of Skenfrith Male Voice Choir.”
“I will not, Bill Thomas,” Rhys’s uncle Alan replied, somewhat muffled, from within the confines of his portaloo. “You are a traitor, and I willneverlet a man like you sully the good name of the Skenfrith Male Voice Choir. Why, we’ve been onSongs of Praise, you know.”
“Oh, you and yourSongs of Praise.” Bill Thomas threw his hands in the air. “That’s all you ever talked about. There’s a reason we all despised you in the end.”
We’d tried to stop the Skenfrith Male Voice Choir politics from boiling over. We’d even booked both of them to avoid either one taking it as an insult. Apparently, that had been a mistake. “Hi!” I crashed to a halt next to an extremely flustered Rhys Jones Bowen. “Can I help anybody with anything?”
Bill Thomas turned to me with a look of outrage that, frankly, I didn’t think a man who’d just locked a whole male voice choir in a row of portaloos had any business adopting. “You can,” he declared. “You can strike thesepretendersfrom the lineup.”
“You can strike thoseusurpersfrom the lineup,” countered Uncle Alan.
“You see the impasse I’m at here,” I told both of them.
And both of them replied, “I do not.”
“It’s bad enough that they’re hereat all,” Bill Thomas continued. “But they have thegallto be performing under the name the Original Skenfrith Male Voice Choir, when quite clearly the original choir is the version led by its duly appointed director, not the schismatic version led by a disgruntled former officeholder.”
Uncle Alan wasn’t taking that lying down. Partly because he was stuck in a portaloo, so he didn’t have room. “The Original Skenfrith Male Voice Choir is the one made up of itsoriginalmembers under the guidance of itsoriginaldirector. The true travesty here is that you’re letting his lot perform under the name of the Real Skenfrith Male Voice Choir.”
“The Real Skenfrith Male Voice Choir,” Bill Thomas shot back, “is the one led by its real director elected under its real charter that meets every week in the real church hall it’s been meeting in for forty years.”
Uncle Alan wasn’t taking that lying down either. “We meet in the same church hall.”
