by Alexis Hall
I don’t know much about him and I certainly don’t know how he got his job, which is, theoretically, executive assistant to Dr. Fairclough. Somebody once told me he had a first-class degree, but didn’t say in what or from where.
“So,” I said, “there are these two strips of tarmac in a bar…”
Alex blinked. “Strips of tarmac?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? That doesn’t seem to make much sense.”
“Just go with it. So there are these two strips of tarmac, and one says to the other, ‘Aw man, I’m so hard. All these lorries roll over me, and I don’t even feel it.’ Then, just as he’s finished talking, this piece of red tarmac walks in. And the first piece of tarmac gets up, and runs away, and hides in a corner. And his mate goes over to him and says, ‘What are you doing? I thought you were supposed to be hard.’ And the first piece of tarmac says, ‘Yeah, I’m hard, but that guy’s a cycle path.’”
There was long silence.
Alex blinked again. “Why is he frightened of cycle paths? Did he get into an accident?”
“No, it’s that he’s hard, but the other guy’s…a cycle path.”
“Yes, but why is he frightened of cycle paths?”
Sometimes I lost sight of whether this was my hobby or a punishment I was inflicting on myself. “No, it’s a pun, Alex. Because ‘cycle path,’ if you say it fast and in a sort of Cockney accent, sounds a bit like ‘psychopath.’”
“Oh.” He thought about it for a moment or two. “I’m not sure it does, actually.”
“You’re right, Alex. I’ll do better next time.”
“By the way,” he said, “you’ve got a meeting with Dr. Fairclough at half ten.”
This was not a good sign. “I don’t suppose,” I began, already sure it was hopeless, “you have any idea why she wants to see me?”
He beamed. “None whatsoever.”
“Keep up the good work.”
I trudged back downstairs to my office, the prospect of having to interact with Dr. Fairclough hanging over me like a cartoon rain cloud. Don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for her—if I’m afflicted by some kind of beetle-related crisis, she’ll be my first call—it’s just I’ve got no idea how to talk to her. To be fair, she clearly has no idea how to talk to me either. Or possibly anyone else. The difference is, she doesn’t care.
As I crossed the hallway, the floorboards creaking merrily with every step, a voice called out, “That you, Luc?”
Sadly, this was undeniable. “Yes, it’s me.”
“Do you mind popping in a moment? We’re having a bit of a sticky situation with the Twitter.”
Team player that I am, I popped. Rhys Jones Bowen—CEEARAYPEEPEE’s volunteer coordinator and head of social media outreach—was hunched over his computer, pecking at it with one finger.
“The thing is,” he said, “you know how you wanted me to tell everybody about the Beetle Drive?”
The Beetle Drive is our office nickname for the annual dinner, dance, and fundraiser. I’ve organised it every year for the past three years. The fact it’s the big-ticket item on my current job description tells you all you need to know about it. And, for that matter, my job.
I tried very hard to keep my tone neutral. “Yes, I remember mentioning it sometime last month.”
“Ah, well, you see. It’s like this. I’d misremembered the password, and I was going to get them to send me another one to the email I’d used to set up the account. But as it turned out, I’d misremembered the password for that as well.”
“I can see how that would cause problems.”
“Now I knew I’d put it on a Post-it note. And I knew I’d put the Post-it note in a book to keep it safe. And I knew the book had a blue cover. But I couldn’t remember the title, or who wrote it, or what it was about.”
“Couldn’t you,” I asked carefully, “have reset the password on the email?”
“I could have, but by that stage I was a bit scared to see how far the rabbit hole went.”
To be honest, this happens a lot. I mean, not this precisely but something along these lines. And I’d probably have been more concerned if our Twitter account had more than 137 followers. “Don’t worry about it.”
He put out a hand to reassure me. “No, it’s okay. See, I was on the loo and I always take a book in with me, and I sometimes leave a couple in there in case I forget, and I see this one on the windowsill with a blue cover and I take it down and I open it and there’s the Post-it. And it’s a good job I was already sitting down because I fair near shat myself, I was that excited.”
“Lucky on both counts.” Somewhat keen to move past the toilet, I continued. “So, if you’ve got the password back, what’s the problem?”
“Well, you see, I seem to be running out of letters.”
“I emailed you with what to say. It should definitely fit.”
“But then I heard about these things called hashtags. Apparently it’s very important to use hashtags so people can find your twitters on the Twitter.”
To be fair, he wasn’t wrong about that. On the other hand, my faith in Rhys Jones Bowen’s social media optimisation instincts was not exactly running at a historic high. “Okay?”
“I’ve been brainstorming a lot of different ideas, and I think this is the tag that describes what we’re trying to achieve with the Beetle Drive.”
With a quite unwarranted air of triumph, he slid over a piece of paper on which he had painstakingly handwritten:
#ColeopteraResearchAndProtectionProjectAnnual
FundraisingDinnerAndDanceWithSilentAuction
OfEtymologicalSpecimensAlsoKnownAsTheBeetleDrive
AtTheRoyalAmbassadorsHotelMaryleboneNotTheOne
InEdinburghTicketsAvailableFromOurWebsiteNow
“And now,” he went on, “it’s only letting me put another forty-two letters in.”
You know, once upon a time, I used to have a really promising career. I’ve got an MBA, for fuck’s sake. I’ve worked for some of the biggest PR firms in the city. And now I spend my days explaining hashtags to a Celtic twit.
Or not.
“I’ll make a graphic,” I told him.
He perked up. “Oh, you can Twitter a picture, can you? I read people respond very well to pictures because of visual learning.”
“You’ll have it by lunchtime.”
And, with that, I headed back to my office where my computer was finally up and running, and wheezing like an asthmatic T. rex. Checking my email, I was disconcerted to discover a handful of supporters—quite significant supporters—had pulled out of the Beetle Drive. Of course, people were flaky, even more so when you wanted them to give you money, and especially when it was money for dung beetles. But something about this made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. It was probably random chance. It just didn’t feel random.
I quickly checked our public footprint, in case our website had been hijacked by amateur pornographers again. And when I found nothing remotely worrying (or interesting), I ended up e-stalking the dropouts like the guy from A Beautiful Mind, trying to figure out if there were any connections between them. As far as I could tell, no. Well, they were all rich, white, politically and socially conservative. Like most of our donors.
I’m not saying dung beetles aren’t important—Dr. Fairclough has told me at length, several times, why they’re important, which has something to do with soil aeration and organic-matter content—but you need a certain level of privilege to care more about high-end bug management than, say, land mines or homeless shelters. Of course, while most of us would say that homeless people are human beings and therefore deserve to be looked after, Dr. Fairclough would argue that homeless people are human beings and, thus, plentiful and ecologically somewhere between insignificant and a net detriment. Unlike dung beetles, which are irre
placeable. Which is why she looks at the data and I talk to the press.
Chapter 4
At 10:30, I dutifully presented myself outside Dr. Fairclough’s office where Alex made a show of letting me in, even though the door was already open. The room, as ever, was an eerily ordered carnage of books, papers, and etymological samples, as if it was the nest of some particularly academic wasps.
“Sit, O’Donnell.”
Yep. That’s my boss. Dr. Amelia Fairclough looks like Kate Moss, dresses like Simon Schama, and talks like she’s being charged by the word. In many ways, she’s an ideal person to work for because her management style involves paying no attention to you unless you actually set something on fire. Which, to be fair, Alex has done twice.
I sat.
“Twaddle”—her gaze flicked sharply to Alex—“minutes.”
He jumped. “Oh. Um. Yes. Absolutely. Does anybody have a pen?”
“Over there. Underneath the Chrysochroa fulminans.”
“Splendid.” Alex had the eyes of Bambi’s mother. Possibly after she’d been shot. “The what?”
A muscle in Dr. Fairclough’s jaw twitched. “The green one.”
Ten minutes later, Alex had finally acquired a pen, some paper, a second piece of paper because he’d put his pen through the first one, and a copy of the Ecology and Evolution of Dung Beetles (Simmons and Ridsdill-Smith, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) to rest on.
“Okay,” he said. “Ready.”
Dr. Fairclough folded her hands on the desk in front of her. “This gives me no pleasure, O’Donnell…”
I couldn’t tell if she meant having to talk to me or what she was about to say. Either way, it didn’t bode well. “Shit, am I fired?”
“Not yet, but I’ve had to answer three emails about you today, and that’s three more emails than I normally like to answer.”
“Emails about me?” I knew where this was going. I’d probably always known. “Is this because of the pictures?”
She gave a curt nod. “Yes. When we took you on, you told us that was behind you.”
“It was. I mean, it is. I just made the mistake of going to a party the same night my dad was on ITV.”
“The consensus among the press appears to be that you were lying in a drug-fuelled haze in a gutter. In fetish wear.”
“I fell over,” I said flatly, “in a pair of comedy bunny ears.”
“To a certain class of person, that detail adds an especial element of deviance.”
In some ways, it felt almost like a relief to get angry. It was better than being terrified I was about to lose my job. “Do I need a lawyer? Because I’m beginning to think this has more to do with my sexuality than my sobriety.”
“Of course it does.” Dr. Fairclough made an impatient gesture. “It makes you look like entirely the wrong sort of homosexual.”
Alex had been watching the conversation as if it was Wimbledon. And I could now hear him murmuring “wrong sort of homosexual” under his breath as he scribbled.
I did my best to offer my reply in the most reasonable tone I could muster. “You know I could really hard-core sue you for this.”
“You could,” agreed Dr. Fairclough. “But you wouldn’t get another job, and we’re not strictly firing you. Besides which, as our fundraiser, you must be acutely aware that we don’t have any money, making litigation rather pointless from your end.”
“What, so you just brought me here to brighten my day with a little casual homophobia?”
“Come now, O’Donnell.” She sighed. “You must know I have no interest in what variety of homosexual you are—incidentally, did you know that aphids are parthenogenetic?—but unfortunately several of our backers do. They, of course, are not all homophobic, and I think rather enjoyed having a delightful young gay wining and dining them. That, however, was rather predicated on you being essentially nonthreatening.”
My anger, like every man I’d ever been with, didn’t seem inclined to stick around. And had left me feeling tired and pointless. “Actually, that’s still homophobic.”
“And you may certainly call them up and explain that to them, but I somehow doubt it will make them more inclined to give us their money. And if you are unable to get people to give us their money, then that rather limits your usefulness to our organisation.”
Well, now I was scared again. “I thought you said I wasn’t going to get fired.”
“As long as the Beetle Drive is successful, you may go to whatever bars you please and wear whatever mammalian appendages you like.”
“Yay.”
“But right now”—she cast me a cold glance—“your public image as some kind of barebacking, coke-snorting, buttockless-trouser-wearing pervert has scared away three of our biggest donors, and I need not remind you, our donor list is straying perilously close to single digits.”
Maybe not the best time to tell her about the emails I’d received this morning. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“Rehabilitate yourself fast. You need to go back to being the sort of harmless sodomite that Waitrose shoppers can feel good about introducing to their left-wing friends and smug about introducing to their right-wing friends.”
“For the record, I’m really, really offended by this.”
She shrugged. “Darwin was offended by the Ichneumonidae. To his chagrin, they persisted in existing.”
If I had a single gnat’s testicle of pride, I would have walked out there and then. But I haven’t, so I didn’t. “I can’t control what the tabloids say about me.”
“Of course you can,” piped up Alex. “It’s easy.”
We both stared at him.
“Friend of mine from Eton, Mulholland Tarquin Jjones, got into a terrible pickle a couple of years back over a misunderstanding with a stolen car, three prostitutes, and a kilo of heroin. The papers were beastly to him about it, but then he got engaged to a lovely little heiress from Devonshire, and it was all garden parties and spreads in Hello from then on.”
“Alex,” I said slowly. “You know how I’m gay, and this whole conversation has been about me being gay?”
“Well, obviously I mean a boy heiress, not a girl heiress.”
“I don’t know any heiresses of either gender.”
“Don’t you?” He looked genuinely confused. “Who do you go to Ascot with?”
I put my head in my hands. I thought I might be about to cry.
Which was when Dr. Fairclough took control of the conversation again. “Twaddle does have a point. With an appropriate boyfriend, I daresay you’d become endearing again very quickly.”
I’d been trying very hard not to think about my abysmal failure with Cam at The Cellar. Now the memory of his rejection flooded me with fresh humiliation. “I can’t even get an inappropriate boyfriend.”
“That is not my problem, O’Donnell. Please leave. Between the emails and this conversation, you’ve already taken up too much of my morning.”
Her attention snapped back to whatever she was doing on her computer with such intensity that I half thought I’d actually stopped existing. Right about then, I wouldn’t have cared if I had.
My head was swimming as I left the office. I put a hand to my face and discovered my eyes were wet.
“Gosh,” said Alex. “Are you crying?”
“No.”
“Do you want a hug?”
“No.”
But somehow I ended up in his arms anyway, having my hair awkwardly patted. Alex was supposed to have been a serious cricketer at school or university or something—whatever serious meant for a sport that was basically five days of eating strawberries and walking slowly—and I couldn’t help notice he still had the body for it, lean and rangy and solid. On top of which he smelled implausibly wholesome, like freshly cut grass in summer. I pushed my face into his designer cashmere cardigan and made a
sound that definitely wasn’t a sob.
To his credit, Alex seemed entirely unperturbed by this. “There, there. I know Dr. Fairclough can be a bit of a rotter, but worse things happen at sea.”
“Alex.” I sniffed and surreptitiously attempted to wipe my nose. “People haven’t said ‘worse things happen at sea’ since 1872.”
“Yes, they have. I said it just now. Weren’t you listening?”
“You’re right. Silly of me.”
“Don’t worry. I can see you’re upset.”
Having dragged myself about two inches above rock bottom, I became painfully aware I was crying on the shoulder of the office doofus. “I’m fine. I’m still trying to process the fact that having been basically single for half a fucking decade, I have to get a boyfriend overnight or lose the only job that would have me—working for a charity whose standards for employment are so low that they’d hire you and Rhys.”
Alex thought about this for a moment. “You’re right. That is terrible. I mean, we’re complete duffers.”
“Oh, come on,” I growled. “At least be offended. Now you’re making me feel like a total dick.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
There are times when I almost wonder if Alex is secretly a genius and we are but pawns in his grand design. “You’re doing this deliberately, aren’t you?”
He gave a smile that was either enigmatic or just vacant. “In any case, I’m sure you could get a boyfriend easily. You’re nice-looking. You’ve got a good job. You’ve even been in the newspapers recently.”
“If I could get a boyfriend, I would have a boyfriend.”
Alex propped his hips against the side of his desk. “Chin up, old thing. We can crack this. Now, do your parents know anybody suitable?”