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?”
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.”