Boyfriend Material(8)

“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 irreplaceable. 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?”