“Mm— What?”
“Maybe youarethe right man to pull off CRAPPstonbury.”
At this point I had no idea what was happening. I was pretty sure I’d either won or lost or Saint was just trying to get into my mum’s pants. So, in desperation, I threw up devil horns and said, “Fuck yeah.”
“Fuck yeah,” agreed Saint. “Fuck the man. Fuck the system.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it again. And finally went with, “Mm-hmm.”
He downed his pint with a worrying first-of-many energy. Then he looked me right in the eyes and said, “Let’s go fuck shit up, Luc Fleming.”
* * *
I did not want to “go fuck shit up” with Saint. I could, in fact, think of few things I wanted to dolessthan “go fuck shit up” with Saint. But Saint was the kind of man who believed he had a will of iron when what he actually had was a lifetime of getting his own way. Which meant he was the kind of man who would bully people he had power over into doing things they didn’t want to do, and still feel like he was being an antiestablishment rebel.
So I went and fucked shit up with Saint. Because the alternative was to admit that I’d rather lie on a sofa with a puppy than spit off a bridge onto a policeman, and that would probably—scratch that,definitely—have made him declare me insufficiently rock ’n’ roll to be in charge of a beetle-themed music festival. That had been my idea in the first place. And that he hadn’t even known he wanted until I’d suggested it to him.
God, rich people sucked.
Fucking shit up with Saint wasn’t the worst night of my life. In my twenties I’d spent a whole lot of nights doing awful things I hated with awful people I also hated. It was up there, though. We almost got arrested twice, and almost got killed, now I think about it, literally every time we got on the motorbike. Because he made me ride pillion and insisted that motorcycle helmets were, and I quote, “For fascists.”
The following morning, I peeled myself out of bed feeling worse than I had in a long, long time and stumbled downstairs determined to not let the pissing Earl of pissing Spital pissing Hamstead stop me giving my wonderful dog his morning walk.
I was intercepted by Oliver, who was, of course, already up, dressed, breakfasted, and on his way out the door. Or at least he’d usually be on the way out the door. This time he was waiting for me wearing his concerned-yet-compassionate face. “Lucien,” he said at once, “you should probably know that you’re in the papers again.”
I buried my face in my hands. “Fuck. Is it bad?”
The six seconds it took Oliver to respond didn’t fill me with confidence. Neither did the fact that when it came, his answer was, “Yes and no?”
My face remained steadfastly enhandenated. “Oh God, it’s going to be all ‘Wild Child Luc Is at It Again,’ isn’t it? ‘O’Donnell Falls off the Wagon,StrictlyStar Son Saucy Shenanigans Shame.’”
“That last one was actually rather good.”
“Yeah, I missed my calling.”
Oliver was looking…actually how was he looking? Notgrave. I almost wanted to sayawkward. Except why would he be looking awkward? “The good news,” he said, “is that there’s nowhere near as muchwild childframing as you might be worried about.”
“What’s the bad news?”
He unlocked his phone and held it in front of me.
I read the headline.
“‘Past It Party Boy Paints Town Dead’?” I snatched the phone from his hand and started scrolling. “‘Aging D-list no-lebrity Luc O’Donnell spotted in tragic attempt to recapture his glory days.’ Those utter bastards.”
“It does seem a little premature.”
“Andthey deliberately picked the most unflattering pictures.”
Oliver gave a little cough. “They’vealwayspicked the most unflattering pictures.”
“Yeah, but it used to be unflattering in a sexy, self-destructive way. Now it’s…it’s…” I pointed at a picture of me yawning as Saint attempted to bum a cigarette off a young woman who was clearly vaping. “This. I look like I’m trying to suck off a water buffalo and the water buffalo isn’t even interested.”
“I think,” said Oliver, in mild bemusement, “you just look like you’re yawning.”
“What time was that even taken? It was, like, half nine. Why was I yawning at half nine?”
“Because you’d been forced to go drinking with a profoundly tedious man.”
