Boyfriend Material(7)

Working at CRAPP has a number of drawbacks: the central heating that blazes all summer and cuts off all winter, the office manager who never lets anybody spend any money on anything for any reason, the computers so old they still run a version of Windows named after a year, to say nothing of the daily realisation that this is my life. But there are some perks. The coffee is pretty decent because the two things Dr. Fairclough cares about are caffeine and invertebrates. And every morning, while I’m waiting for my Renaissance-era PC to boot up, I get to tell jokes to Alex Twaddle. Or rather, I get to tell jokes at Alex Twaddle. While Alex Twaddle blinks at me.

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.”