“Have you considered,” I began very, very cautiously, “that perhaps original music production isn’t your single greatest strength?”
As down as he was clearly feeling, Saint still gave me a challenging look. “And whatismy single greatest strength?”
“You’re…very passionate?”
He looked away, and then said, half addressing me and half addressing fate itself, “You mean I’m a talentless piece of shit who’s lived his whole life on Daddy’s millions and never built or done or achieved anything?”
That pretty much summed it up. But, once again, it felt unnecessarily mean to say so.
“That’s a…that’s a very negative way to put it.”
Slowly, he swivelled his head back towards me. “So how wouldyouput it?”
“I suppose…we’re all dealt a particular hand in life. And you, well, you happened to get dealt a…”
“A really good one?” Saint replied. “One that I could have usedto do anything, and in the end all I used it for was to piss around pretending to be a musician hoping that one day, maybe one fucking day, my old man would put hisfuckingbugs down for five seconds and—”
“Notice you?” I didn’t like to interrupt. Especially when it was the putting-words-in-somebody’s-mouth kind of interrupting. It would have been the last thing I’d do with Jaz because she was my kid—my foster kid—and I needed to let her grow and flourish and be her own person. But Saint was nearly fucking seventy. He was as grown and as flourished as he was going to get.
Besides, I’d been right.
“Yeah,” he said. “Fucking stupid, right? Fucking stupid and fucking clichéd and not at all fucking rock ’n’ roll.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I reckon probably quite a lot of rock ’n’ roll is just people trying to get their dads’ attention. Or their mums’. Or some boy or girl they liked at school. I mean, I don’t think you spend your life standing on a big platform shoutingNotice meif there isn’t somebody you want to notice you.”
In my own humble opinion, I’d handled that one pretty well. Not that you’d know it, because Saint was totally ignoring me.
As was his right. Little flourishing flower that he was.
“Just once,” he said, kind of past me, “justonce, I’d have liked him to say, ‘You know what, Hilary my boy, that song you did about Norman Tebbit’s ballsack, I was offended by it, but I respect you for having the guts to sing it anyway.’”
“Yeah.” I shrugged again. “I think all sons, in a way, want their dads to say something like that.” That was almost certainly untrue—I knew a whole range of men with a whole range of different relationships to their fathers, but I didn’t think Saint was the kind of guy who was much interested in discussing the spectrum of modern masculinity. He was way too sigma. “I mean, notexactlylike that,” I clarified. “Like the Norman Tebbit’s ballsack thing is pretty specific.”
“Wouldn’t even need to be the music,” Saint went on and went on ignoring me. “‘Good job bagging that grouse, Hilary.’ Wouldn’t even need to be about something I’ddone. Could have been, ‘Hey, Hilary, haven’t seen you for a year, how was Eton?’”
And that…that felt a whole lot more universal. I knew people who didn’t give a shit what people said about their accomplishments. But being abandoned sucked. Though the jury was out on whether it sucked more to be abandoned by somebody who’d left, or by somebody who was still there.
“And now”—he heaved a deep, tragic sigh—“the bastard is fucking dead. And he’ll never say, ‘By the way, just in case you were wondering, you aren’t a complete fucking disgrace to your ancestors.’ Fuck me, he’ll never even say, ‘Pass the sugar.’ He’ll never even have sugar. Because he’s fuckingdead.”
And out of nowhere, he slumped sideways onto my shoulder and started crying. “He’s fuckingdead, Luc. My fucking dad is fucking dead.”
This was not where I thought this day was going to go. I reluctantly gave him a pat and a platitude. “He had a good innings.”
“He’s fuckingdead,” Saint repeated, like he’d only just realised. “Do you know how hard it is to stay angry at a man when he’s fuckingdead?”
I’d find out when my own dad went. Except, actually, I wouldn’t. Because I wasn’t angry at Jon Fleming. I hadn’t been in a long time. “Well,” I said, “you do seem like you’re giving it a good go?”
Saint gave a wet snuffle. “I’ve spent nearly ayeartrying to…I don’t know…with the beetle charity and like…Fuck, I hated that beetle charity.”
“CRAPP,” I reminded him. “That’s the charity I work for.”
“Fuck,” he said for the I’d-honestly-stopped-countingth time. “And you did all this”—he looked around at CRAPPstonbury—“for me?”
“I mean if I’m honest,” I admitted, “I did it in a vain hope that I could trick you into thinking that your dad’s interests and yours remotely overlapped, which I don’t think they do.”
Saint pulled his teary, snotty head off my now teary and snotty shoulder. “Still, youdid it.” He looked at me the way I think in his head he imagined he wished his father had looked at him. “You’re a man whodoes things, Luc Fleming.”
“O’Donnell,” I reminded him. “My name is O’Donnell. Like my mother.”
