Husband Material (London Calling #2)(5)

“Well, you know, chap’s a bad conductor, gets sentenced to the electric chair. I say, it’d be rather droll if he was such a bad conductor that the chair didn’t work, wouldn’t it? Be sort of like a play on words.”

“Yes.” I was trapped. Trapped in an absurdist prison of meta-humour with a posh nitwit who was secretly a genius that delighted in tormenting me. “Yes, that would be droll. So anyway, they send him to the…umm…to the electric chair and it…um…it doesn’t work.”

Alex grinned. “Ah, because he’s a bad conductor, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Actually, old boy, wasn’t quite as droll as I’d anticipated. Not in practice.”

There should have been some kind of joke-related emergency service you could call to rescue you in situations like this. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault. Although in retrospect I think knowing the twist in advance made it less comical.”

“You don’t say?”

Alex nodded. “Yes, you see the essence of humour is surprise.

So if you want to get better at this joke-telling lark, you might want to keep your cards a little closer to your chest.”

“Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind.” Okay, this was it, I was nearly— “Tell you what, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

There was no possible way this could end well.

“I say, Rhys.” Alex stuck his head into the social media office.

“Do you have a second?”

Rhys Jones Bowen emerged walking backwards and talking into his phone, which he was holding at a high selfie angle. “Hello, Internet,” he was saying, “this is Rhys Jones Bowen from See Arr Ay Pee Pee, the dung beetle charity. I’ve just finished up my morning coffee, and now Alex from the front office has called me through because he wants something, so I’m just going to see what that is and—”

“Rhys,” I asked, “what are you doing?”

He gave me a look like I’d asked a very silly question which, to be fair, I had. “What does it look like I’m doing; I’m live streaming.”

“Is that a thing that’s happening now?”

“Got to move with the times, Luc.”

I treated him to my most sceptical expression. “We really don’t.

Half our computers are still running Windows 7, and there’s a map in the hall that shows two Germanies.”

Sadly, Rhys ignored my entreaty to keep the twenty-first century out of our office. “Why don’t you say hello to the internet, Luc.”

“I refuse to believe that anybody is watching this.”

“Excuse me, I’ll have you know I’ve got five hundred and seventy-three viewers.”

That seemed at once like not very many, and far more than I expected. “Are you sure?”

He showed me his phone, and I watched as the 573 popped up to a 574, while beneath his video a stream of chat messages spammed variations on Who’s this prick? and Where’s Rhys?

“Can I tell you my joke now?” asked Alex. “Although, in the spirit of full disclosure, it’s really more Luc’s joke.”

Rotating to bring Alex into frame, Rhys gave a nod. “Go on, then, this’ll be great”—he made air quotes with his one free hand —“‘content,’ as we influencers call it.”

Alex smoothed out his hair and did his best to look streamable.

“Right, so there’s this bus conductor who’s rather bad at his job, and a judge sentences him to be executed.”

“That seems a bit of an overreaction.” Rhys turned his attention back to his phone. “You see, folks, that’s the problem with the criminal justice system. The rich and the powerful, well, they can get away with anything. But ordinary people like you and me and this bus conductor, it’s different rules for us, isn’t it?”

If I’d been smart about it, I could’ve ducked out while they were distracting each other. I wasn’t smart about it. “It’s just a joke, Rhys.”

“It may be a joke, but it highlights a very real sociopolitical inequality.”

He had a point. “In the original version of the joke, he has legitimately killed somebody.”

“But has he, though?” asked Rhys Jones Bowen, looking grave.

“Or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? You see it’s very easy, Luc, for you to sit there in your comfortable office and judge a man, but stories like this happen every day. An ordinary bus conductor is going about his business, and the years of abuse from an unfeeling public and the exploitative conditions he’s been forced into by a privatised system of public transport…”

“Steady on.” Alex had suddenly taken an interest. “I know a lot of chaps who did terribly well out of privatisation. Picked up some absolute bargains, making themselves simply pots of money now.

And they’re all jolly nice fellows.”

Oh God, what had I done. A simple pun about a slightly obsolete public-sector job had turned into a debate about the long-term impacts of Thatcherism. “You see it’s all right for them,” Rhys was saying. “But you can’t have one without the other, can you? For every one of your friends getting rich off the proceeds of crony capitalism, there’s a poor bus conductor out there, just trying to get by, accidentally killing a passenger because he’s had to work a triple shift because his daughter needs heart surgery and the NHS doesn’t have any free beds and—”