With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (11 page)

‘Oh, Ms Farmer,’ he exclaimed, spraying chocolate cake crumbs at her. ‘Ms Farmer, I am so pleased to meet you. This is the best shed I’ve ever seen. I can’t tell you, it’s so marvellous, I –’

‘Listen, it’s a shed. Don’t pop your cork.’

Osborne looked at her. God, he wished he could place her. What a stunning woman, what a
presence.

‘Right. You’re right. I do apologize.’ Hastily, he stuffed some silver cup-cake papers in his pocket and reached for his votive offering. ‘Um, these flowers are for you.’

‘Well, thanks.’ She wiped the crumbs from her zipper-jacket and accepted the chrysanths with considerable grace. He smiled and shrugged. He was rather cute, she thought, in a ne’er-do-well, beaten-up, chocolate-cakey kind of way.

‘So what do we do now?’ she asked flatly. ‘What’s your angle?’

‘Oh, ha ha, I don’t really have one, actually. I’ll just ask you about the shed, if that’s all right.’

Angela gave him a frank, don’t-mess-with-me look.

‘Oh yeah, sure. That’s what you told my friend Trent Carmichael last week. Just ask about the shed, you said. All that boring question-and-answer about the cat locked up overnight, remember? And then you write a brilliant piece with references to crime devices in his novels so way back and obscure that Trent himself had forgotten them. So come on, tell me what you want. I’m not going to give you stuff about how long I’ve owned a hosepipe if in the end you write about how I’m related metaphorically to the goddam Angela Farmer tulip. Which has been done before, I might add.’

‘But you’ve got it all wrong,’ objected Osborne.

‘How?’

He thought quickly. He could hardly explain that all the clever stuff in his Trent Carmichael piece had been written by Michelle.

‘Well, to be honest, mainly because this really and truly is the best shed I’ve ever seen, and I desperately want to write about it.’

‘And of course you say that to all the girls.’

‘No I don’t.’ Osborne was getting worried. His dream piece seemed to be slipping away fast. He would have burst into tears, if he hadn’t suspected it might not be professional.

Angela patted his arm and smiled. ‘Don’t take any notice of me. Really. Nobody else does. Let’s just sit down and talk about the goddam shed, if you want to, and then we can go and get a drink indoors. Deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘Right. Fire away.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Just let me say one thing.’

‘What?’

‘You’re very sweet when you’re confused.’

Indoors, Gordon was feeling better. He could see Auntie Angela sitting quietly in the shed with the interviewer, everything was calm, it was all right. He hummed into his cup of camomile tea, ‘But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.’ He danced his fingers along the work surface, in time with the music. How silly to get hysterical about these men from the magazine. They couldn’t possibly know his plans, so why should they feel any animosity towards him? But even if they had somehow found out the whole story, surely it was pretty unusual for disgruntled employees to turn, in the first resort, to murder. Aside from anything else, it might hamper their case at ACAS.

So. The fact that the ‘Me and My Shed’ man was an expert on homicide (of the horticultural type, anyway) was sheer – or possibly shear – coincidence. Oh yes. Gordon kicked himself for being so hysterical, and took a sip of consoling camomile. If these guys were jumpy, obviously they were jumpy about something else. It wasn’t his concern.

The phone rang. It was Dad.

‘I’ve got him,’ he said breathlessly.

‘Do what, Dad?’

‘I’ve got the little writer. You keep the big one occupied, and I’ll come and take care of him, too.’

‘Er, Dad,’ ventured Gordon, ‘when you say you’ve “got” him, what do you mean?’

‘I’ve locked him in your office.’

Gordon could hardly believe his ears.

‘What was he doing in there? Did you ask him in? What happened?’

‘He had
broken in,
Gordon. You were right, there’s something really fishy going on.’

There was a pause.

‘Gordon? You all right, son?’

‘What’s he doing now?’

‘I don’t know, he’s gone quiet. But I think he’s tampering with your computer.’

‘What a nerve.’

‘Shall I come over for the other one?’

‘I suppose you’d better.’

‘I’ll be there as quickly as I can.’

But back at Dunquenchin, Gordon’s dad did pause momentarily to take a few deep breaths before swinging out of the front door with his hatchet. Blimey, he thought, it was really tough being so macho all the time. Why couldn’t somebody else deal with this? Why was it that whenever he looked around in a crisis, he seemed to be the only grown-up in sight? ‘Is it a bird?’ they said. ‘Is it a plane? No, it’s Gordon’s parent (male).’

Standing in the dining-room, considering whether to put down the hatchet and proceed unarmed, he felt a sudden surge of resentment. He looked at the pictures on the walls – all of them, when you came to think about it, mementoes of a career spent dousing other people’s fires, extinguishing other people’s cock-ups. It was part of family history that when Gordon was little, he had noticed an astrology column in a newspaper and said, ‘You’re Aquarius, aren’t you, Dad?’, to which he had replied that actually he wasn’t. ‘But you must be,’ persisted Gordon, ‘you’re the water-carrier.’

Of course it was useless to argue, at this stage of life, with one’s personal destiny. And if being a cross between a tower of strength and a perpetual bucket of water was his – well, at least it was better than being a poison dwarf like the little chancer locked upstairs. ‘The honorary Aquarian’ was how Angela described him whenever she saw him in the vicinity of water – be it running a bath, watering the garden, washing the car,
or just filling the kettle for a cup of tea. She admired him very much, and liked the way the title dignified him. One day, if he was agreeable, she fancied commissioning a classical fountain for the garden modelled on Gordon’s dad, with him dressed up holding a trident and bewhiskered like the source of the Thames. She visualized him surrounded by an interesting, splashy, post-modern medley of water receptacles ancient and new – deep classical urns and pitchers, of course, but mixed up with buckets and standpipes and hydrants.

Why he had given up being a fireman nobody knew, but sometimes when Angela came to dinner and they all talked late, he dropped a hint or two about a woman in London he had known; also a fire in Hammersmith, in which a friend had died. He often dreamed of fires, but didn’t discuss it much, the way the heat and flames encroached on him in the night. Once he had spoken of it with his niece Margaret, because she seemed interested, but unfortunately she rather abused the confidence, and so he learned it was best to keep his own counsel. Margaret was currently studying for a master’s degree in psychology at a London college, and whenever she came to stay, she affected a huge interest both in Gordon’s computer stuff and in his dad’s dreams. The trouble, however, was that she was extraordinarily insensitive. So the moment she acquired an insight into someone else’s imagination, she used it as a blunt instrument with which to knock them down.

‘You’re scared of impotence, it’s obvious,’ she had declared to Gordon’s dad, simply, between bites of dinner. ‘It informs everything you do. By the way, is there any more of this? It’s not very good but it fills a hole, if you know what I mean.’ Another time she had called Gordon’s dad on the phone quite late at night because something had struck her, and it couldn’t wait until the morning. ‘You should call that house “The Four Elements”,’ she had declared. ‘You cover the whole range! Do
you get it? Here’s Gordon with his higher mind and his
Digger,
all air and earth; do you see? And here’s you, all fire and water. Wow! No wonder you complement each other so well. Did I ever tell you about my last boyfriend? How he dug up some bulbs once when he was a child
to see if they were growing?
Can you believe that? Isn’t it marvellous?’ At which she snorted loudly, rather like a pig, and hung up.

Tim had always regretted telling Margaret that story. Margaret was the girlfriend who had moved out quite recently, you may remember, leaving just the cat behind. Digging up the bulbs had been silly, but that was all. It was on a par with opening the oven door to check on a soufflé: you learn from it, and then don’t do it again. And that’s it; it’s dead and buried. Yet fate had somehow contrived to make him pay for it over and over, with Margaret shovelling loam like a madwoman, to dig up the story whenever he least wanted to hear it.

Living with Margaret, he nowadays reflected, was like being with a fanatical resurrectionist, forever exhuming for the benefit of science all the stuff he had taken special care to bury in an unmarked spot. What a relief she had gone, really. Now he could bury things for good, if he felt like it – and generally he did. These letters from G. Clarke of Honiton, for example: if Lillian hadn’t known all about them already, he would gladly have paid a funeral director out of his own pocket to bury the whole lot six feet under.

‘So what do you think?’ asked Lillian, her eyes flashing. ‘It’s Michelle, you know. Michelle wrote them. She’s mad. She’s got to be stopped.’

Tim pulled himself together and gave her a solemn look.

‘I think you should put them away,’ he said, ‘and forget all about them.’

It was precisely the wrong thing to say in the circumstances, because Lillian went berserk.

‘But she’s
crackers,
you bloody neurotic!’ she yelled with great and surprising volume. ‘Good bloody God! Sit there in your fancy bloody knitwear and tell me to forget about it – well, I won’t! You’re a weed, that’s what you are! Are you saying Osborne shouldn’t be warned that Michelle wants to poke his nipples with a pitchfork? Are you?’

Tim tried to interject, but somehow failed to raise a squeak.

‘To think I considered knitting you a woolly!’ she yelled. ‘Ha! And you’d rather forget it, would you, that she’s getting Makepeace to send faxes from Devon telling us that the magazine is closed! Yes, Makepeace! He’s in on it, too, you know! He sent a fax from the same number within ten minutes of this bloody “G. Clarke” thing arriving. And Osborne is with him down there, for the Angela Farmer piece! And God knows what plans they’ve got for him between them. Forget all about it? Not bloody likely, you spotty-faced wimp!’ She snatched the letters from the desk, and grabbed the door-handle. ‘God, you make me puke!’

On which departing words she wrenched open his office door with such sudden energy that all the staff gathered outside to hear the shouting didn’t have time to run off, and were caught standing there with their mouths open.

‘Get out of my way!’ she yelled, and grabbed her coat (a bright pink one). It was extraordinary. Lillian was transformed by fury. If her husband had been present, he would scarcely have recognized her. This was no poor ickle bunny, that’s for sure. Or if it was, this was one little bunny that, in Angela Farmer’s words, was all riled up.

When Osborne Lonsdale came to look back on his momentous trip to Honiton, it was the surprising moment when he was carried bodily from Angela Farmer’s shed in a fireman’s lift that probably stayed with him most vividly. One moment he was gazing transfixed into the actress’s eyes, and feeling with a mixture of pleasure and alarm the unambiguous squeeze of her hand on his knee, and the next – well, he wasn’t. The door flew open, a large human silhouette blotted the light, and then his feet left the ground and he was hanging over someone’s shoulder, with all the blood rushing to his head. He was so surprised that he didn’t have time to think. All that flashed through his mind was the rather curious reflection that if someone were to shove a microphone under his nose and say, ‘Which would you prefer, sir: this weird upside-down thing that’s happening to you now, or a chance to clean the Augean stables?’ he would have opted, without hesitation, for the horse-shit.

He didn’t struggle. That was the funny thing about Osborne. He was quite resigned. And as he later sat on the cold lino of the small upstairs junk-room in which he had been locked by Gordon’s dad without a word of explanation, a feeble ‘Bugger’ was all he could muster by way of complaint. Osborne suffered,
unfortunately, from a rare and debilitating conviction that when nasty things occurred in his life, he must somehow have deserved them. So instead of the more conventional ‘Why me?’ he tended to ask ‘Why not?’ Hopeless, really. Instead of ‘You’ll pay for this!’ it was ‘I expect I’m paying for something!’ Arguably, then, the most distressing aspect for Osborne of being locked in a room miles from London by three crackpot strangers manifestly stronger, faster and quicker-witted than himself (and all with palpable designs on his body) was that it pointed to a past sin so heinous that it was a double disgrace not to be able to recollect it.

It was natural to be scared, however, especially if a friend (was it really Michelle?) had once lent you a copy of Stephen King’s thriller
Misery,
with all the most gruesome torture bits marked so deeply with a sharp pencil that there were actually holes in the paper. Osborne had started reading
Misery
comfortably one evening in his safe south London billet at about half-past eight, pouring himself a small brandy and listening to records; and finished it wide-eyed, stark sober, hyperventilating and peeing himself at four o’clock the following morning to the scary early-hours amplified hum of electric lights. For reasons obvious to anyone familiar with this book’s memorable plot, aspects of it now jumped up and down in Osborne’s imagination, shrieking. In
Misery,
a hapless writer is held captive by his ‘Number One Fan’ and made to write pulp fiction, under duress! Meanwhile, the fan indicates to him in various unignorable ways that she is dangerously off her rocker! She gets him addicted to drugs! Cuts his foot off! With an axe! Was this what fate had in store for Osborne, our inoffensive shed-man? Would Mad Gordon appear in flip-flops and négligé at any moment with a hatchet, a typewriter and a fistful of amphetamines?

Anyone else might have screamed at this point. But Osborne was not everyone. Rearranging himself more comfortably on
the floor, and taking a few deep breaths, he attempted, believe it or not, to look on the bright side. You had to hand it to him – really. Say the worst happened, he reasoned. Well, he had been meaning to write a novel for ages; this could be his big chance. Oh yes. As for the drugs thing, well, for heaven’s sake, why
not
try drugs? Especially in a controlled environment, and especially (he added as a plucky afterthought) if he wasn’t going anywhere,
having only the one foot.
Something about that foot amputation failed to present itself in any cheery aspect, despite efforts. But otherwise it was a brave try, and for a while it completely took his mind off the other, more pressing, thing that most people would have been doing in the circumstances, i.e. plotting their escape.

Bugger. He suddenly leapt to his feet. Should he be tying sheets together, or something? Fashioning a crude weapon from a razor-sharp sliver of window pane and a ripped-off table leg? Starting a small fire and banging on the door? Well, probably, yes. For a few moments, Osborne stood rooted to the spot, but gesturing wildly in different directions as though intending to sprint off somewhere when he’d made up his mind. But the access of energy did not last, and he soon sat down again, defeated before he’d begun. Funny how the survival instinct did not apply to everyone, he reflected. When they were giving it out, he must have been too scared to step forward.

Once, he had discussed this matter with Makepeace down at the Birthplace of Aphrodite, mentioning as a case in point the remarkable behaviour of passengers in air disasters. If there is a fire at the back of a plane, he told Makepeace with astonishment, these people just climb over each other, every man for himself; then they jam the doorways and die. ‘I know,’ said Makepeace, ‘so what?’ ‘Well, I just don’t think I’d do that,’ he had replied, baffled. ‘Yes you would,’ said Makepeace flatly, ‘because everyone would.’ Osborne looked at him and shook
his head. ‘But can you imagine yourself doing it?’ he persisted. ‘Of course,’ replied Makepeace with a tinge of exasperation. And he meant it. Afterwards Osborne found it hard to shake off the mental image of Makepeace on an aircraft blithely clambering over upturned faces not for any reason of life or death, but just to get first crack at the loos.

It was at least half an hour before he noticed the rabbit. When at last he registered its presence, it was chewing a photograph album; and to judge from the shreds of assorted paper and cloth on the carpet, this item was only the entrée in a many-coursed banquet now in full swing. Osborne also noticed that an electric flex for a small bar-fire had been gnawed right through. Oh great. An electrical fire was probably the last thing he needed (if you didn’t count the fairly unlikely sudden appearance on his ankle of a dotted line marked ‘Cut Here with Axe’). Osborne remembered with a shudder how one of his house-sitting experiences had been quite ruined by a pet rabbit chewing through the cable to the washing machine and causing a small explosion. A flash and a bang from the utility room had been followed by the sight of a rather dazed bunny with all its fur sticking out hopping lopsidedly into the living-room and then falling over. The rabbit was never the same again. If you held up three fingers and said ‘How many?’ it just looked at you.

Watching this rabbit of Angela Farmer’s, however, Osborne felt strangely moved. It reminded him of how lonely he was. And here was this innocent bunny sharing his captivity. Wow. If only he had the right teeth and shoulders, he might be Burt Lancaster in
The Birdman of Alcatraz.
He grinned widely and stretched his torso, and racked his memory for more examples of stuff about prisoners cheered up by a brush with wildlife; but beyond the little birdy in Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, he couldn’t think of much. He sighed and relaxed his face from the rather eerie Burt Lancaster impression. What about Job? he
thought. Did not the God of the Hebrews send a bunny-rabbit to comfort Job, or was this yet another case of faulty recall? It was an interesting point to ponder. For example, if this rabbit were indeed engaged in work of a divine nature, would it really just sit there on the floor eating someone else’s photo album? Osborne thought about this question for a bit, and decided he didn’t have the proper theological qualifications for an educated answer.

‘What have you got there?’ he whispered instead. The rabbit took no notice and continued chewing. ‘Let’s see,’ he said gently, and although he was a bit worried about what a rabbit might do to you if you interfered in the early stages of its main course, he tugged the album free and stood up to place it on a top shelf, noticing in passing that it said ‘Our Weeding’ in gold letters on the cover. Funny, thought Osborne fleetingly, as he popped it into the cupboard. He had met many gardening fanatics in his time, but none that kept a pictorial record of their anti-dandelion campaigns. Fancy that. ‘Our Weeding’. He took it down and looked again. Oh yes, hang on,
‘Wedding’.
Osborne laughed and shrugged. Well, ‘Wedding’ made a bit more sense, probably, but it was also somehow disappointing.

He opened it, just to be sure, and there it all was. Angela Farmer’s summer wedding, in 1975, to Barney Jonathan, the comedian and TV producer. Cake-cutting, kissing, hand-holding, marquee, the works. Lots of famous supporting characters in the background, mostly London stage variety types with shiny noses, all in seventies period costume of big collars and flared trousers and platform boots (despite the heat). As Osborne flicked through the pages, Angela and Barney smiled inanely at each other; Barney opened countless champagne bottles; Barney lit a huge cigar, with a knowing wink. Osborne’s trained eye picked out all the appearances of the shed, of course, even when it was not the main subject of the
picture. He noticed it had been decked out in ribbons and used as a cold store for drinks. But the main thing that even Osborne could not ignore was the youthfulness of Angela – Angela looking fifteen years younger than she did today, and a lifetime more optimistic.

Osborne felt uncomfortable at the sight of Angela’s bridegroom. Barney was possibly the only person Osborne had ever interviewed whose shed had subsequently received a scathing review in
Come Into the Garden.
In person, Barney had turned out to be precisely what you might expect from his roles on TV: good looking, well preserved, compulsively jokey, and a really mean bastard. It was at Barney Jonathan’s house, actually, that the terrible business with the hyperactive child had taken place, when Osborne was locked in the shed for a laugh. If his resulting piece about Barney was one of his best observed and best written, there were two reasons for it: first, four hours gives you quite enough time to examine the contents of a shed; and second, Barney’s character was so obnoxious that the writer needed to sew him up quite carefully, quoting him with deadly accuracy, so that he hanged himself with every word. Just mentioning his snide remarks about
Come Into the Garden,
for example, had been pretty useful for enlisting reader support against him; after all, you insult a magazine, you insult the person who’s reading it.

Odd to think that Angela Farmer had married him. What an awful mistake. Turning the pages of the album, Osborne felt a tear roll down his face. He absent-mindedly stroked the rabbit, drew his legs up close, and for the next couple of hours studied the images, one after another, as the short November Tuesday lost its brightness and slowly began to wane.

Makepeace, by contrast, had not been idle. The sort of person
who experiences an incandescent adrenalin rush not only from air disasters but from a harmless chat about the classics or a bit of mild criticism, this excitable dwarf had no difficulty summoning the gotta-get-outta-here energy that so noticeably eluded his chum. After an hour of frantic activity, therefore, in which his pony-tail wore loose and his sweaty hair hung down around his grim, determined face, he sat surrounded by a small armoury of improvised weapons (ingeniously utilizing paper-knives, shards of mirror, scissors, staples) and panted like a dog. He was not a pretty sight. Having inadvertently nicked his hands a few times in the course of handling broken glass, and then rubbed his face, he was now smeared with blood and dirt, which added not inconsiderably to the startling picture of miniature savagery he presented, reminiscent of something climactic from
Lord of the Flies.

He decided to ransack the room. No point doing things by halves, after all. So he started knocking things over, sweeping documents off shelves, attempting to tear directories in half (abandoning this when it proved humiliating), and flinging Gordon’s priceless work-in-progress computer disks around. It was only when he saw a set of files marked ‘Digger’ that he paused. Slavering slightly, he ripped open the first one, emptied the contents on the floor, and stirred the papers with his foot. Most of the documents seemed to be in computer code, all signed at the bottom by Gordon, but there was one that immediately caught his eye, because it was in the form of a letter. He knelt beside it to see.

Makepeace couldn’t help thinking, even in his excitement,
that he was glad not to have Gordon for a pen-pal. To a devotee of
Digger,
of course, this letter made a sort of cryptic sense, and was merely a harmless stage in a game of clues. But to Makepeace it was further evidence that the boy was mad and dangerous. Gordon had lured Digger to a country garden (‘Dig me up’ was the rather ghastly invitation), but warned him about poisoned shirts that stick to your back and tear your flesh. Makepeace had to get out of here at once. Forget the heroics with the home-made machetes, perhaps he should just wriggle out of the window and climb down the drain-pipe. On the other hand, if he calmed down and thought about it, couldn’t he see whether the key was still in the lock? Instead of fighting his way out, or crawling, there was just the faintest possibility he could unlock the door and walk out normally, down the stairs and out.