“Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not because I’m an aging D-list no-lebrity who needs to be in bed with cocoa by eight o’clock or else he’s grumpy the next morning?”
To my profound unamusement, Oliver was beginning to look profoundly amused. “You know, youdosometimes ratherenjoy going to bed with cocoa. And you usuallyaregrumpy in the mornings.”
“Well yeah, because cocoa is great and mornings are the worst, but…”
Oliver placed his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye reassuringly. “They’re just pictures. Everybody has bad pictures.”
They did. And while I was pretty self-centred a lot of the time, I’d never really had the energy for full-on vanity. “And they’re not going to… This isn’t going to get in the way of fostering, is it?”
“A newspaper article that says you’re too grown-up and sensible to be partying all night?” Shifting his hands from my shoulders to my waist, Oliver drew me in for a kiss. “I don’t think that will be a problem, no. This”—he gently retrieved his phone—“means less than nothing. Truly.”
“Ruff,” agreed Spud, who had finished his breakfast and now wanted to know why his daddies were standing around looking at a funny shiny rectangle instead of taking him walkies like they were meant to.
And you know what? They were right. They werebothright.
Aging Party Boy Luc had come out for one night to get a dickhead peer onside. The press had been mean about him, like they always, always were. And that was it. There in our hall with my boyfriend and our dog and our passed DBS checks and our about-to-be-foster-parents-ness, absolutely nothing else mattered. Nothing else could possibly matter. Nothing could get in the way of—
Spud started sniffing the floor and walking in a circle.
“Okay,” I said, pulling somewhat reluctantly out of Oliver’s embrace, “this one definitely needs to go walkies. Have a good day in court.”
Oliver kissed me once more for luck. “Have a good day at home.”
And all at once I was overwhelmed by the thought, the strange but not unwelcome thought, that I would. That even with Saint, even with my job on the line, even with the tabloids saying mean things about my age, life choices, and body, I was going to have agood day.
I was going to have a whole lot of good days.
For a good long time to come.
Part ThreeWinter/Spring
Chapter 17
Preparations for CRAPPstonbury had to go on hiatus over the holidays as we pivoted briefly towards our seasonal Adopt a Beetle programme. Normally this wouldn’t have been required because, most years, we sold about six of them, and three of those were Dr. Fairclough shopping for Christmas presents. Unfortunately—or, I suppose, fortunately—this year Rhys Jones Bowen had gone viral.
I’d mostly lost track of his career as an influencer because following his OnlyFans account had wound up doing weird things to my algorithm, but he’d come into my office one morning to tell me that he’d “done a Tick Tock” and that it had “got pretty popular, actually,” and suddenly we had an awkward shortage of adoptable beetles.
The TikTok that Rhys Jones Bowen had done turned out to be a series of short music videos in which he performed CRAPP-themed parodies of various seasonal favourites including “Ding Dung Merrily on High,” “Fairy Tale of Poo York,” and “All I Want for Christmas Is to Adopt a Dung Beetle Through the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project’s Adopt a Dung Beetle Scheme.” Like a lot of things that get popular on the internet, I honestly couldn’t tell if the videos were amazing or terrible, but what I thought spectacularly did not matter. People loved them enough that we wound up with one thousand seven hundred and thirty-threepersonalised Beetle Adoption Packages to lovingly source, assemble, and detail.
The whole project had been overwhelming and fiddly and, since each adoption had been retailing at £4.99 since 1993, it probably didn’t make back in donations what it theoretically cost us in worker-hours. Then again,workerwas always a slightly tenuous way to describe CRAPP employees, so in a lot of ways it was the most productive we’d been in months. Dr. Fairclough had been resistant to the whole project because she felt naming insects was needlessly anthropomorphic, but shehadbeen able to provide us with well over a thousand unique images of beetles from her personal files. Barbara Clench, for her part, had turned out to be exactly the woman you wanted running things when the job involved doing more or less the same thing with slight variations one thousand seven hundred and thirty-three times as efficiently as possible. And Alex, somehow, turned out to be an absolute genius for naming dung beetles.
“That’s a Colin,” he’d say, and it would absolutely be a Colin. “Esmerelda. Monty. Godolfin.”
Sitting on the office floor making adoption certificates and drinking cocoa with the cold and dark safely outside the windows, I spent most of December feeling weirdly upbeat, weirdly positive, and weirdly not especially bothered by how fucking doomed we all were.
Then January rolled round, the cold and dark stopped being a novelty, Oliver and I got notice we’d been approved for an emergency placement, I remembered that I was still the barely adequate thread by which all our jobs were hanging, and things very much reverted to the status quo, doomed-wise.
“Did you hear,” I asked Alex over Zoom, a few days after New Year’s, “about the cheese factory that exploded?” And then, before he could go off about safety standards in the dairy industry, I went straight through to the punch line. “All that was left was de Brie.”
“No,” he replied with sincere concern. “I hadn’t. That’s terri—” Then he stopped and seemed to realise something. In a perfect world, that something would have beenLuc is telling me a joke. Hell, not even a perfect world. Just a mildly less annoying world. That I did not live in. “Hold on a moment,” Alex went on. “Might not have heard you right. Did you say all that was left wasdebrisor all that was left wasthe Brie?”
“Yes,” I replied, wondering if this might finally be my moment.
Alex blinked. “Which?”
It was not my moment. “Both?”
“No, no.” Alex was looking into the middle distance like he was trying to remember something extremely complicated. “You definitely only said one of them.”
