With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (13 page)

‘Would you like me to sign it for you?’ He was leaning forward again, with that half-gruesome, half-engaging, proud-father smile. His body was so close she could smell his after-shave, which was earthy and rather strong.

‘No, that’s all right.’

‘Really. It’s no bother.’ He had found a smart silver ballpoint pen in his inside pocket, and had popped it out, ready.

‘No, really, I don’t want you to.’

But he took the book and opened it at the title page. She noticed, with a flinch of annoyance, that he had carelessly lost her place. ‘Now you’re going to tell me your name.’

It wasn’t a question. Michelle looked around for Tim again, but without much hope. He had evidently got caught
up in a bullion robbery or something. At the back of the train, someone was blowing a whistle.

‘Michelle,’ she said at last, without much grace.

‘That’s a lovely name,’ he said. ‘Mmmmm. Michelle, Michelle, Michelle. Ma belle. Mmmmmm. Beautiful. Lovely.’ He kept this up as he wrote in the book. When finished, he handed it back to her, and gave her a highly practised flash of famous-person charisma.

‘Now, Michelle. Are you going to make it come true?’ He pointed to the book, and she opened it at his inscription.

At which point, with Tim just hurrying through the ticket barrier balancing a couple of coffees and some slices of fruit cake on a wobbly paper tray, the train moved out of the station, leaving him behind.

Tim had not been caught up in a bullion robbery, he was merely phoning his ex-girlfriend Margaret for a bit of last-minute sympathy and support. However, compared with being tied up, blindfolded and bundled in the back of a hijacked Securicor van, the option of making voluntary contact with Margaret was probably only marginally less distressing. It was a stupid thing to do, of course, but he was desperate. Remembering that Margaret had a cousin and uncle in Honiton (Gordon
something, an inventor, and his dad, an ex-fire-chief), Tim wildly decided that the journey in prospect was an adequate pretext to get in touch. How he thought he would obtain the yearned-for sympathy and support is less easily explained, since he ought surely to have recollected that Margaret possessed talent and inclination for neither. But he phoned her, the poor sap, he did. He even missed his train in this forlorn hope of a few kind words.

Margaret’s readings in psychology were extremely handy for a person disinclined to mollycoddle, which is perhaps why she took up the subject in the first place. It was rather neat: for Margaret, psychology meant never having to say you’re sorry; you could hurt people and then, with a single bound, get away with accusing them of textbook insecurity. Objective reality is an illusion, she reckoned; fulfilled and unfulfilled desires account for everything. Thus, if someone were to phone her up at half-past eight in the morning (say) and tell her he was jolly upset about his magazine closing, she could argue that secretly he must have wanted it to happen. Tim unfortunately had forgotten about all this when he made his last-ditch call from the end of Platform 12. He had forgotten, in particular, that Margaret would reiterate her usual theory that his feelings were all connected with his mother, with ‘pain of separation’ and something anal to which she sometimes referred darkly but never satisfactorily explained. Amazing that he could have forgotten. Less amazing, perhaps, how it all came flooding back.

‘Listen,’ he protested after a couple of minutes, almost in tears at her refusal to accept the straightforward case of the matter. ‘I’ve lost my job. It’s real. It’s happened. My job!’ He was obliged to shout, so that he could hear his own voice above the ambient station noises.

‘“Job”,’ repeated Margaret playfully. She was enjoying this. Just out of the shower, she was towelling her hair while keeping
an eye on the weather forecast on Breakfast TV. ‘That’s a very telling choice of word, Tim. It makes me wonder whether you mean your big job or your little job.’

Tim felt wretched. Was there really something psychologically revealing about using the word ‘job’? Was it this anal thing again?

‘All right, then, my
position.’

Margaret laughed. ‘Position’ was clearly no improvement. Tim looked at his watch and started worrying whether he really had time for all this.

‘How about post?’

‘Ha!’

Tim gave up. It suddenly struck him that she might be writing this down.

‘Still keeping Post-it notes in business?’ asked Margaret. Now that she had started, she seemed to be relishing the chat.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I thought of you last week when the
Independent
went up by five pence,’ she said. ‘God, how I remember the trauma from last time. I told everybody on the course about it, and they couldn’t believe it, they thought I was making it up. We had a really good laugh. So what did you decide?’

‘I decided not to let it worry me,’ he said, lying.

‘Gosh, well done.’

If this was a stupid conversation to miss a train for, it was also a stupid one to get upset about, yet quite out of nowhere Tim suddenly realized he was crying. Two huge tears welled up behind his specs, and involuntarily he felt all the muscles in his face dissolve.

‘Do you ever miss me?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’ Margaret was now brushing her long dark hair, deliberately creating static electricity in it, so that she could hold the brush to one side and observe the way the hair lifted
up, defying gravity, reaching out feebly for support. She put the brush down, and the hair collapsed.

‘I miss you,’ said Tim.

‘Of course you do.’

‘I mean it, I really miss you.’

‘And I mean it, too.
Of course you do.’

‘I can’t live without you.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

Tim choked on a sob, and noticed that his money was running out.

‘Better go,’ he said, ‘I’m worried about missing my train.’

‘That’s typical of you, Tim,’ said Margaret, to the sound of a disconnected line. ‘That’s absolutely textbook.’

As soon as she put down the phone, she grabbed for a large box on a shelf marked ‘TIM’ and hauled it down. Efficiently she made a few notes on a scrap of paper, circling the words ‘job’, ‘position’ and ‘post’ in green pen, and carefully noting the time and date at the top in blue. She was getting good at this, she reflected; the ‘TIM’ box was almost full. It would soon be time to convert all the research into a groundbreaking casebook study and unleash her ex-boyfriend’s obsessive-compulsive disorder on the waiting public. She could see it now, the scene in the bookshop, with her signing copies of
Tim: How I Lived with a Loony,
just like her old buddy Trent Carmichael sometimes did. Margaret’s mum once mentioned, tentatively, that perhaps Tim’s identity ought to be disguised when the book was written, but Margaret had set her straight about this, impressing on her the demands of proper scientific practice. ‘It’s got to be authentic!’ she declared, her eyes passionate. ‘Don’t forget I only lived with Tim in the first place because he promised to provide such fantastic material. Do you think I would compromise my own academic integrity by telling anything less than the exact truth?’ Hearing the case put like that, Margaret’s mum – who had been told about her
own inadequacies enough times to know when she was out of her depth – decided to rest her case. As Margaret had so rightly pointed out on numerous occasions, she should just count herself lucky that no companion volume called
Mum: Every Detail of What’s Wrong with the Stupid Old Bat
had, as yet, got past the planning stage.

Margaret phoned up British Rail and asked for the train times to Honiton. This was just what the book needed, Tim driven to misery and madness by the loss of all his routines at a single blow. She couldn’t afford to miss it, even though the place made her slightly uncomfortable. Gordon and his dad were pussy-cats, it wasn’t them she was worried about. It was whatsername, Barney’s ex-wife, up the road. Ten years ago, when Margaret was fourteen, there had been a bit of an incident in Barney’s garden – ever since when that creepy Trent Carmichael had referred to her as his ‘partner in crime’. But it was all a long time ago – just before Gordon and his dad moved to Dunquenchin, and just before Carmichael wrote his breakthrough bestseller
S is for … Secateurs!
Cleverly, Trent had persuaded Barney’s wife to star in the TV version, just for his own (and Margaret’s) private amusement. One day she planned to write a book entitled
Trent: Psychopaths Do It but They Don’t Get Involved,
but obviously not just yet.

On Wednesday morning, the
shedus mirabilis
lay in ruins.

‘Oh my good giddy bugger uncle,’ said Osborne in alarm, as he drew the thick heavy curtains to Angela’s bedroom at eight o’clock, and saw the devastation. Outside, the day was lovely – bright winter sunshine, Cambridge-blue sky, leafless oaks rocking gently in the breeze. But what really caught one’s attention from the vantage-point of the first-floor master bedroom, what really socked you in the mincies (as it were), was this smouldering half-collapsed wooden structure from which white smoke and twirling ash were belching, rather as though it had just exploded.

Osborne turned to look at Angela, still comatose, and wondered how he should break the news. Charred and tattered fragments of her favourite old sheet music were taking impulsive little sideways runs across the garden, settling briefly, and then somersaulting and darting off to impale themselves on rose bushes.

The double-glazed bedroom window foiling Osborne’s powerful impulse to open it, he just clawed feebly at the glass like a trapped kitten. He didn’t understand: how could this conflagration have gone unnoticed from indoors? True, as he looked back at Angela, her bedside table strewn with empty
champagne bottles, knocked-over glasses, and ravaged packets of prophylactics, perhaps it wasn’t quite such a mystery. In fact, now he came to scratch his addled bonce and give it some sensible thought, he did remember the red light flickering in the night, because, yes, he had drawn attention to it at a key moment. Angela had been sitting astride him at the time (doing an expert high-bouncing impression – quite belying her years, actually – of an oscillating suction pump), and he remembered how, in all the mounting tremendous smelly wump-wump shrieking willy-frenzy, he had gazed in transcendent wonder at a thin sliver of beautiful red-and-yellow light patterns dancing on the ceiling in the dark.

‘Is that the Northern Lights?’ he had shouted deliriously, pointing upwards. ‘Or is it me?’

Angela, concentrating rather hard on something else at this juncture, didn’t answer. Instead, she pushed her hands harder against his chest, dug in her nails, arched her back, squeezed a secret muscle, and stepped up the tempo.

‘Anje-ler,’ he had gasped, ‘is it – me? – Or is it – Oh God – Northern – Aagh – Northern –?’

‘That’s not the Northern Lights!’ she yelled, as suddenly her whole body whiplashed and convulsed in a huge, melting, electrifying spasm. ‘That’s – Oh God! – that’s Manderley!’

There had been several other climaxes, but the Daphne du Maurier was honestly the hottest and the best. If Osborne was a bit hazy about the exact order of events before and after this, however, it was not surprising, given the amount of alcohol they had jointly consumed. Angela had unlocked his door at 8 p.m., just after insisting that Gordon and his dad return to Dunquenchin (‘Go home, I’ll be fine, I’ve got – er, lots of catching up to do,’ she said, choosing her words carefully). Having taken Osborne straight to her room, she immediately opened the champagne, knocked some half-chewed scripts off the quilt, talked eagerly with him about sheds and deadlines
and house-sitting for half an hour as though honestly she had no idea what was going to happen next, and then suddenly she was undressing him and they were doing wild, intense, all-night impressions of suction pumps, piston engines, and Old Faithful in the Yellowstone National Park. Osborne still couldn’t recall where he had met her before, but it was ceasing to matter. She was wonderful. And the quite amazing thing was, she seemed to like him, too.

‘Hey, did we do that?’

She had appeared beside him in a large T-shirt printed with ‘
BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL WOMAN THERE IS A RATHER TACKY DIVORCE’
, and was staring at the shed.

‘I guess we did,’ she shrugged, and kissed him on the neck.

A great advantage of their happy deluge of bodily fluids was that, paradoxically, it had given them the opportunity to clear a few things up. In between taking fortifying slugs of Moët et Chandon and tracing affectionate patterns in spilled fizz on one another’s unfamiliar skin, they had talked, naturally enough, about how Osborne had so far veered from the road most travelled that he had wound up locked in a sitcom star’s upstairs cupboard with a voracious rabbit, in mortal fear of a teenage psychotic computer prodigy dressed in a see-through frock. Put like that, it took a bit of working out. But Osborne explained about the letters, and Makepeace’s suspicions of Gordon (it all sounded rather pathetic, now); meanwhile, Angela reassured him that Gordon was shifty only because he felt guilty about the closing of the magazine, and because he had temporarily made the natural mistake of thinking Osborne and Makepeace were hit-men.

‘What’s this book like?’ Osborne asked now, picking up
Murder, Shear Murder
from the floor.

‘Oh, the usual thing. Inspector Greenfinger investigates: “I expect you’re all wondering why I called you together in this
potting shed with a strimmer, a Geoff Hamilton video and a stopwatch.” I was in one of his things on TV once – I was the brave, red-herring, alcoholic wife whose husband was bonking a Lolita in the greenhouse. I wasn’t saddled with a tulip in those days, or God knows what that crazy guy would have made of it. Trent was real impressed with the piece you wrote, incidentally – but no, I told you that already.’

‘I don’t usually read detective novels,’ said Osborne.

‘You don’t?’ Angela looked a bit surprised. ‘Listen, why don’t you read the first few pages of this one while I go to the bathroom, and tell me who you think did it. Five minutes should give you ample time. And then we’ll have an enormous breakfast and phone the Clarkes and tell them there’s nothing –’ She stopped abruptly.

Osborne looked up confused from his perusal of the first paragraph. ‘Well, it’s a wild guess at this stage,’ he said, ‘but what about the gardener?’

Angela punched herself rather hard in the abdomen and let out a groan. ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, I just remembered. We called Trent last night. He’s
coming.’

‘What? To tell you who did it? Couldn’t you just read to the end?’

‘No, he’s coming to investigate you. Well, you and the other guy. What the hell am I going to tell him? And what the hell am I going to tell him about the goddam shed?’

Gordon had not slept much. The idea of Makepeace on the loose and Osborne forcibly holed up with the rabbit was not the thing to aid carefree slumbers; meanwhile, he knew that today’s closure of
Come Into the Garden
would make him deeply unpopular with a further group of people, whose identities he didn’t even know. In the night he sighed a lot, tossed and
turned, punched his pillow into different shapes, noticed a warm glow in the dark morning sky (but thought nothing of it), and finally climbed the stairs to his office, cleared a space in the chaos, and – for the first time in two years – took refuge in
Digger,
immersing himself in virtual reality from about five o’clock in the morning until he could speak to his dad at eight. By normal
Digger
standards, three hours was a short session, but it was highly distracting, as it was intended to be. Mentally, Gordon dug and laboured and dug again, and tried to piece together the bits that came up. If there was nothing in the real world Gordon wished to think about at present, least of all did he wish to contemplate the imminent arrival of the legendary Trent Carmichael, whom he considered an absolute gasbag. To him, the idea of inviting that charlatan down from London as if he were Sherlock Holmes was so absurd he wanted to scream. But alas, he had been outvoted. Both Dad and Angela evidently thought highly of Carmichael’s piddling, minuscule abilities; not only were they somehow impervious to his creepy, patronizing tone, but Angela seemed almost to
like
it. Considering that she could normally spot a phoney at twenty paces, this was completely inexplicable.

That Carmichael was a creep, a phoney and all the rest, Gordon had no doubt. Years ago, when the Clarkes had first moved to Dunquenchin, Gordon overheard him whispering to cousin Margaret in the dining-room, and was terribly shocked. First, he disliked the intensely familiar tone (Margaret would have been only fifteen at the time); but more importantly, he hated the way they laughed at Angela behind her back. Angela’s marriage had just broken up; it was awful that they should joke about it. Ever since, the very mention of Carmichael made Gordon alternately bristle and sulk. So when Angela had yesterday described the plot of
Murder, Shear Murder,
with its ginger-haired young victim, it was not surprising he took it so personally. Carmichael, for all his magisterial tone, was at
heart a touchy blighter, who knew perfectly well that Gordon distrusted him. It would give him nothing but pleasure to stick his young rival in a crime novel as an early casualty, skewered to the deck with a wooden-handled Spear & Jackson’s.

Gordon shuddered, turned off his computer and glanced out of the window. It was light now. With the help of
Digger,
he had made it through the dawn. As usually happened when he unlocked himself from virtual reality, he saw the everyday world as strange, flat, weirdly coloured and slightly sinister. Which was why, when he first noticed the strange tall woman in a shocking-pink coat staring up at the house, smoking a cigarette and muttering to herself, he wasn’t convinced she was real. She was holding a large file of papers under her armpit. ‘Oi!’ said Gordon, opening the window, ‘what do you want?’ But by the time he looked down again the shocking-pink lady had gone.

‘So then I wrote
S is for … Secateurs!
,’ chuckled the humble author, shouting to be heard above a set of points, ‘and after that I never looked back!’

Michelle, pointedly consulting her watch as the Carmichael monologue clocked up its fifty-fifth minute, smiled faintly and gave up trying to get a word in. She could certainly appreciate that Trent Carmichael was a never-look-back sort of person. The trouble, unfortunately, was that he was evidently a never-glance-sideways person, too, with possibly the worst case of tunnel vision she had ever in her life encountered. This absence of peripheral eyesight was literal – in that he didn’t seem to notice anything not directly in front of him (the ticket collector was obliged to bend down and speak straight into his face) – but it was also metaphorical. Trent Carmichael ploughed a very straight furrow, narrative-wise, and refused to
be distracted by any question a polite interlocutor might pose. ‘So when was this?’ Michelle might ask; or ‘So why are you on this train?’ But Carmichael told his story in strict chronology, and without deviation from a fixed agenda. Thank God we have at last reached the mega-success of
S is for … Secateurs!,
thought Michelle. The rest is surely history.

‘But that’s enough about me,’ he said, with a visible effort. ‘Tell me about yourself. Tell me what
you
think about me!’

Michelle was so surprised, she just shook her head.

‘Don’t you want to tell me all about yourself? I am disappointed, Michelle. In fact, I am hurt. People generally do, you see. Because I’m an author, and they want me to immortalize them in prose.’

‘Well, if you’re an author, why don’t you just make me up?’ said Michelle heatedly. ‘Why do you need me to tell you anything? Besides, how could you know enough about me from a chat on a train to put me in a novel?’

‘Ah, but you don’t understand. The Michelle I will write about is not the person whose life you would describe. When I put you in a novel, I have the power to take liberties with you. I can peel back your layers, rip you open like a fig; do you understand? And you will surrender, joyfully. What shall I make of you, Michelle? I think I shall make you a flirtatious, gardening sex-kitten in thick gloves who – oh, what shall I say? – who likes to tie men’s arms with garden twine and stroke their nipples with a pitchfork.’

‘What?’ Michelle almost screamed. How on earth did he know about the pitchfork? Or Osborne’s nipples? Was this man a mind-reader, a blackmailer, what?

Carmichael raised an eyebrow and pretended not to notice the strength of her reaction. This was always his favourite bit, when he met new women, teasing them with kinky scenarios and gauging the reaction, while also trying out new plot ideas. Being a naturally parsimonious person, he liked the idea of
killing two birds with one stone; the economy of effort gave him pleasure. Plus his success rate was uncanny, since sometimes (as with Michelle, apparently) he could hit home at once with dead-eye accuracy.