I hadn’t been asking him especially. “Okay, but let’s say that in this imaginary, purely-for-the-joke situation, you’re not trying to kill the bear. You’re just trying to get it to come out of its cave. Using cheese.”
Alex thought again. “Well, it takes rather a lot of bait to lure a bear anywhere, and you’d probably need to leave it around for some time, and that’d be a deuced waste of good cheese. But”—he raised a finger in a misguided gesture of confidence—“assuming we’re also ignoring that for joke purposes, I suppose you’d want something strong-smelling. Maybe a Camembert?”
Why did he always do this to me? Why did Ilethim do this to me? Did I just hate myself even more than I thought? “Umm,” I said. “Yes. Sort of.”
“Sort of? Is it supposed to be more a gouda or a Port Salut? Humboldt Fog?”
“No, I mean Camembert is the right answer, but you need tosayit properly.”
“Camembert?” said Alex in a surprisingly good French accent.
“No, more like”—this was going to end badly. It was going to end incredibly badly—“Cam-on-bear!”
Alex looked genuinely appalled. “Luc! Your French master must have been ghastly. How do you talk to people on the Riviera?”
“Slowly and loudly,” I replied, then followed it up at once with, “But no, it’s thejoke. It’s… It’sCam-on-bear. Because it sounds likecome on, b—”
“Did I miss anything important?” asked Barbara Clench,logging in from what looked like the front porch of a cottage with climbing roses around the door.
“Absolutely not,” I replied at the same time as Alex said, “Luc’s going bear hunting.”
“No,” said Barbara Clench, witheringly. “He isn’t.”
“He was looking for tips about bait.”
“No,” said Barbara Clench, witheringly. “He wasn’t.”
Alex looked borderline affronted. “He was asking what kind of cheese was best to get a bear out of a cave.”
“Cam-on-bear,” Barbara Clench said. “Now, are we here to discuss bear cheese or have a meeting?”
“Have a meeting,” replied Dr. Fairclough, who had logged on at exactly 10:00 and zero seconds. As usual.
“Shouldn’t we wait for Rhys?” I didn’t especially want to, but I thought we should at least reject the idea formally.
Dr. Fairclough blinked once. “No. Now, I suggest we commence. Given our circumstances, these proceedings should be rather short. We will continue with our existing commitments as normal, and, in the event that a new patron is not forthcoming, we will go our separate ways a year from now.”
It was a bit of a downer—okay, check that, quite alotof a downer—to have the boss being quite so calm about the end of all our jobs, her own career, and, given the way she talked about the importance of dung beetles, all life as we knew it. Then again, that was Dr. Fairclough for you. Being calm about things was basically her whole deal.
“C.R.A.P.P. will begin implementing redundancy consultation immediately,” added Barbara Clench. “Any of you—any of us—who feel we may need support in seeking new work shouldn’t hesitate to ask for it.”
“What sort of support?” I asked, partly because I might need it, partly because I didn’t have a lot of faith in the kind of support Iwas going to get from an organisation that would hire Alex, Rhys Jones Bowen, or, for that matter, me.
“Interview practice,” she said. Normally, I resented Barbara Clench doing her job, but today I could tell she resented it as much as I did, and that took a lot of the fun out of it. “CV tips. References, obviously. I know it isn’t a lot, Luc, but we really are doing what we can.”
I’d normally have had a witty comeback. Okay, a snappy comeback. Okay, a pissy comeback. But right then I was just too sad and defeated.
“Arroou?” said Spud at my feet. And I nodded.
“I know,” I told Barbara. “I’m just—this is reallyit, isn’t it?”
Dr. Fairclough nodded. “Definitionally.”
“Pour one out, I guess?”
A look of flummoxation settled onto Alex’s face, displacing its previous look of bafflement. “One what?”
Fuck me, I think I was actually going to miss this. “A drink, I think?”
