Husband Material (London Calling #2)(59)

“Isn’t that a children’s song?” I asked.

“Well, yes, but I don’t see why that’s causing you problems.”

Rhys kept his eyes on the road but gave me a very expressive look with his shoulders. “Unless you’ve forgotten the words.”

Was I letting myself get sucked into a conversation I couldn’t get out of again? “I think it’s more just a bit embarrassing.”

“And I think that says more about you than it does about the song,” Rhys insisted.

From the back seat, Barbara Clench briefly stopped making out with Gabriel, her unfeasibly attractive, much younger husband. “I agree with Luc. We’re adults, we shouldn’t be singing nursery rhymes; it’s inappropriate.”

“Only if you sing them to lure children into your van,” said Rhys’s date. Her name was Ana with one n, and he said he’d met her “on the social media.” Given that like many of Rhys’s dates she was bizarrely hot and carried herself in a way that suggested she had incredible body confidence, I suspected he’d met her on one social medium in particular. “Otherwise, it’s just singing.”

Beside me, Oliver had that gleam in his eye he sometimes got when he switched into good-at-joining-in mode. “What if you’re singing, but a child hears you and gets lured accidentally?”

“You’re the lawyer,” Rhys Jones Bowen pointed out. “You tell us.”

“Well, I think it would be hard to establish mens rea, but you still might have to answer some very awkward questions.”

“No children’s songs,” Barbara Clench repeated.

“What if we do the dirty version?” asked Rhys. “Wouldn’t be a children’s song, then.”

I was getting sucked in. One more question and I’d be trapped in a vortex of inanity I couldn’t escape. “Is there a dirty version?”

“There’s always a dirty version.” Rhys was speaking with the certainty of a man who knew most of them.

Schlooop went the vortex. “But…wheels on the bus? What is it?

Like, the penis on the bus goes flip, flip, flop?”

Rhys shoulder-nodded. “Something like that, yeah.”

“I am certainly not singing the dirty versions of any children’s songs.” Barbara Clench had a bit between her teeth, and normally in this kind of situation I would get rapidly out of her way. Except I couldn’t because we were stuck in a moving vehicle.

Professor Fairclough had been staring out of the window, largely ignoring us—or at least processing everything we were saying on a higher level. Now she praying-mantised her head back towards the rest of us. “I’m not sure I do know the words, actually.”

“How can you not know the words to the wheels-on-the-bus song?” I asked.

“How can you not know the Latin name of the common fruit fly?”

returned Dr. Fairclough.

Oliver leaned over to me and whispered, “Drosophila melanogaster, ” in my ear.

“Drops Ophelia Melanie Jaster?” I tried, which earned a sharp hmmph from the professor.

“To be fair,” said Ana with one n, “the lyrics are a bit controversial.”

“Why?” I wondered aloud. “Is there some hidden meaning to ‘The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish’ that I’ve been missing my whole life?”

She laughed. Honestly, she probably laughed more than the joke deserved, but she was clearly on wedding date behaviour. “No, it’s just that a lot of kids these days learn their nursery rhymes from YouTube videos, so they get the American version.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “What’s the American version?”

“Instead of the bits of the bus doing their things ‘all day long’

they do them ‘all through the town,’” she explained.

For a moment, that helped because while we couldn’t agree on what to talk about, what to sing, or if singing was even a good idea, we were completely agreed that putting the words all through the town in the wheels-on-the-bus song was absolute fucking blasphemy.

“How do you know so much about it?” enquired Barbara Clench in a moment of rare humanity.

Ana with one n craned her neck back to look at the rest of us. “I used to be a primary school teacher.”

“Used to be?” Coming from Barbara Clench, that question had a not-going-to-end-well quality.

“Yeah, now I take my clothes off on the internet.”

For a woman who, by the looks of her husband, had a full and active sex life, Barbara Clench could be difficult about this kind of thing. Her lips got very thin. “Don’t you find that rather degrading?”

“Sort of,” Ana with one n admitted. “I mean when you think about it, there’s something pretty degrading about the fact that I went to university, did two degrees and a professional qualification, spent three years working seventy-hour weeks with disadvantaged children, and at the end had nothing to show for it but crushing debts and a few nice thank-you cards.” She took a deep breath. It sounded like she did this rant a lot. “So I decided that if the choice was getting wanked over by strangers or fucked over by the Department for Education, I’d pick the one that paid better.”

There was complete silence in the bus while Barbara radiated the kind of stifling disapproval that you could radiate only after a lifetime of never bothering to examine a single preconception. A