With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (19 page)

‘How long have we known each other now?’ gasped Trent Carmichael, clutching his chest as he raced to keep up with Michelle. She was steaming along the London platform at Honiton station for the third time, yelling ‘Mother!’

‘Since yesterday morning,’ she called back.

‘Is that
all?’

They both stopped in their tracks. They could hardly believe it. Trent Carmichael leaned against a wall and wheezed.

‘I don’t even know, why we’re doing this,’ he panted. ‘I’ve obviously lost track. You think your mother killed Margaret, using a composite of all the murder methods she’d found in my books?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Because you had told her on the phone that you’d met the original of the girl in
S is for … Secateurs!
which she was obsessed with?’

‘That’s my theory.’

‘Right. Got it. So tell me this. If she’s such a dangerous maniac, why on earth do we want to find her?’

‘Because that’s what you do to murderers. I’m surprised at you, Trent. You of all people should know that you must track them down and confront them.’

‘Can we sit down?’

‘What?’

‘I want to sit down.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t look so worried, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘I only want to talk to you.’

With a sudden intense weariness which bleached her blood, Michelle realized what Trent Carmichael was going to say. It was brush-off time. That ghastly up-beat inflection is never used for anything else – it goes with ‘It’s been fun, really!’ and ‘I’ll never forget how we found that body in the garden!’ So it was all over, bar the platitudes. Here, on a cold, dark station platform, in a place she’d previously considered entirely notional (‘G. Clarke, Honiton, Devon’), he would ditch her with a clear conscience and bugger off home. She tried to think positively about it, but with no job to return to, and now no mother she dare reside with, dismay promptly overwhelmed her. How predictable life is. Of course she will pretend she agrees with him (‘Marvellous interlude!’), promise to come and see the famous shed (‘One day!’), laugh about the hectic run of events, ask jokingly to see the novel she appears in. And then he’ll get on a train and wave, and she’ll know for a certainty that he’s secretly thinking, ‘Thank God that’s over.’

‘Well, Trent, it’s been real,’ she said bravely, trying not to cry.

‘That’s true,’ he agreed, puzzled.

‘And yes, one day I’ll come and see that shed!’

‘Oh. All right. Good.’

‘And thanks for the autograph! I’ll treasure it!’ You had to hand it to her, she was taking pluck into new dimensions.

‘Michelle, why are you talking like this? Are you going somewhere?’

‘No. Aren’t you?’

‘Not unless you are. I just wanted to ask you if you fancied going back to that garden centre we passed, where Osborne was tied up. I thought you might, you know, get off on it.’

She said nothing.

‘I think the pitchfork is still there,’ he added. Michelle’s mouth went dry. ‘Are you offended?’

‘God, no.’

‘So you don’t mind if we give up chasing your mother?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘Even though I think I can hear a faint moaning coming from the end of the platform, where conceivably she tipped over the edge into a small pile of gravel?’

‘Leave her.’ They got up to go.

‘You know something, Michelle? As a writer of crime fiction, your imagination intrigues me very deeply.’

Wincing, she put her hands to her ears.

‘Just wait till I get my hands on your dangling modifiers,’ she warned, saucily.

In the subsequent eighteen months, the following celebrity profiles and guest spots nearly (but, for reasons that will be apparent, never quite) appeared in the British press, in periodicals as divergent as
The Times,
the
Independent on Sunday, Radio Times, Old Flames
(the ex-firemen’s gazette),
Which Shed? Monthly
and the
Guardian.
They are reprinted here in no particular order.

How We Met: Gordon Clarke and Timothy Johnson

The brains behind
SHOOT!,
the internationally bestselling ecological virtual reality program, came to partnership only last November. Clarke,
20,
was the schoolboy inventor of
Digger;
Johnson,
24,
a penniless journalist working at the sharp end of gardening tips. Famously, the name
SHOOT!
(a brainwave attributed to Johnson) cleverly misled thousands of adolescent boys into playing the game (or buying the home interactive video version) in expectation of violence and zap guns when in fact it soothed the savage beast and reputedly reduced violent teenage crime in Britain by a tenth in its first week of release and sale. Both men are now based part-time in Victoria, in a large empty
post-modern distressed office environment – bare wires, no carpet, no sink in the Gents – and part-time in Honiton, Devon.

GORDON CLARKE
: It’s funny but I can’t remember now what it was like not to know Tim. He’s already the best friend I ever had. When we met, he had just been having some quite grisly girlfriend trouble – well, ex-girlfriend trouble, to be precise – and this brought us together, especially as I helped him bury the whole thing, as you might say, about six foot under. My first sight of him, I thought, ‘What a weed.’ It’s awful but it’s true. All I knew about him, before we met, was a story that in childhood he dug up some daffodil bulbs to see how they were doing. Big joke, right? But in a way, that’s what I was doing both with
Digger
and SHOOT! – playing with the idea that dormancy is only a natural phase in the cycle of growth. So I recognized him as a kindred spirit.

Tim has an extraordinary mind, but he worries too much. If I want to know what he’s thinking, I say ‘What are you worrying about now?’ and he doesn’t see that there’s anything odd in the question – you know, that his natural mode is worrying rather than just thinking. We suit each other because I can override a lot of this worry. He’s neurotic, really. And he’s obsessive. And compulsive too, I think. But the success of SHOOT! has helped him in lots of ways. He wears looser jumpers now. His specs don’t steam up so often.

Now we are working together on a project for a new monthly gardening magazine, which he will edit. Personally, I liked the idea of calling it
Maud,
since it’s the natural sequel to
Come Into the Garden,
but Tim assures me that ‘Maud’ is not a sexy name for a magazine. He says, imagine going into a newsagent and saying,
‘Maud
out yet?’ I trust Tim’s judgement in these matters. He’s the ‘words’ man, after all.

Sexually, we suit each other very well indeed. Before we met, we were both pretty hazy about our sexuality. I didn’t really ‘come out’, as such; more sort-of turned round one day and found I was out already. My Auntie Angela says my love of musicals was an early indicator that I was gay, but I must admit I didn’t suspect a thing. Tim is a lovely person. I’m going to buy him a cat for his birthday, but he doesn’t know that yet.

TIMOTHY JOHNSON
: I’m not sure about this. What did Gordon tell you? Are you trying to trick me into saying something that contradicts what Gordon said? Can I see a copy of what Gordon said? No, I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I think we ought to stop.

On My Mantelpiece: Angela Farmer

Oh God, look, I meant to tidy it before you came but oh, what the fuck, this is meant not to be serious, right? OK, so starting from the left, a crumpled bag of peanut brittle (not mine), some shed brochures (not mine either), empty Cognac bottle (that is mine), and Trent Carmichael’s new hardback,
Never the Twine Shall Meet.
(Have you read this? It’s the one where an old innocent put-upon guy gets his revenge on a young psychologist by hiring a bizarre trick cyclist homicidal hit-team, and ends up living with a libidinous ex-nun he meets by chance on a train. I don’t know how he thinks of them.)

What? Oh yes, mantelpiece. Then we’ve got a couple of scripts for new TV sitcoms (crap, actually; forget those, I’ll chuck ’em out), the lease to the local garden centre (which I recently bought, when Chimneypot went bankrupt), bits of underwear, condoms. That’s it. What do you mean, why do I keep condoms on the mantelpiece? To keep them away from the rabbit, why do you think?

Kitty Corner: Cat Rescue of the Month

This week we spotlight in Kitty Corner a very lucky puss rescued by Mrs Abigail Lewis, after a mysterious fire rendered him completely homeless.

‘I don’t know how that fire started,’ says Mrs Abigail Lewis, cradling a limp, relaxed Lester in her arms like a baby, ‘but I simply had to save the cat. Now he lives with me and I am making up for the neglect he suffered previously, living with the sort of person who starts fires out of sheer carelessness. Lester is a very loving cat, very sensitive. He’s very fond of expensive food, unfortunately, which sometimes means I have to go without. But on the other hand, who needs adequate nutrition when they could have a wonderful little cat like Lester?

‘I think he wants to have a sleep now, so perhaps you could leave. I’ve got his bed made up with a hot-water bottle and a fleecy blanket, and I’ve drawn the curtains just the way he likes them. So I just have to kiss each of his paws – mwah! mwah! mwah! mwah! – and tickle his ears, and rest his catnip toy on his white linen pillow, and tiptoe out again. Bless him. Oh yes, sometimes I lie on the floor next to him, in case he wakes up and wants something.’

My TV Dinner: Angela Farmer

It depends who’s cooking, you see. If it’s me we might just have a big drink, a piece of cheese and a slice of fruitcake, but if my lover-baby is cooking (if that’s the right word – I mean ‘cooking’, not ‘lover-baby’) he’s a lot more inventive, especially with tinned stuff, which he mixes together, cold. No, it’s fine. Really. Don’t worry about me, I can take it.

And it’s a real scream to watch, too. A subtle transformation occurs as he stirs it all together in a big bowl with
a trowel. Tuna, baked beans, sweetcorn, rice pudding, peach slices. I’ve learned a lot. It’s amazing how many different ways food can resemble puke.

A Life in the Day: Trent Carmichael

I rise at nine on most days, listen to the radio for its edifying effect on my imagination, and depending on how exhausted I am from yesterday’s efforts (at writing, I mean) return to bed with a cup of delicately fragranced herb tea for another snooze. Writing is very hard work, people should realize, especially when one is forever inventing very complicated murder plots involving Spear & Jackson garden implements in new and breathtaking combinations! People tell me I’ve made a rod for my own back with all these secateurs and buckets, but I don’t see it that way, it’s what I’m famous for, and I’m grateful. I mean, did Will Shakespeare ever complain, ‘They keep demanding the same old blank verse, but I am an artist, I want to express myself in limerick and knock-knock jokes’? Personally, I ain’t convinced.

My girlfriend, Michelle, is a great help to me, she’s one in a million, especially when she changes all my prose and rescues me from silly grammatical mistakes. She’s a whizz on my computer, evidently, although actually I’ve never shown her how to use it. In fact, quite the contrary – I keep changing the password. But even when I finish the day by putting my latest writing in a secret file, she still manages to find it! I might pop down to the shops for a new box of paper and when I get back and switch on the machine, my stuff has been rigorously rewritten, and the original discarded. What an amazing woman. Even when I write in longhand, and hide the sheets of paper in the shed in a special hole under the floorboards, I still find – when I retrieve it – that it’s covered in bright blue
sub-editing marks, with comments such as ‘Cliché?’ added in the margins. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I’m thinking of including her in the next book, but I haven’t thought how to ‘do’ her yet, if you catch my drift.

In the afternoons I sometimes go for walks, and think about my characters as though they were real people. Actually, this isn’t as clever as it sounds, since most of them
are
real people. But when I need a new twist in the plot, I like to go off by myself and stand on the horizon at Parliament Hill with my head thrown back in a thoughtful pose. You could take my picture doing that, if you like. The twin cyclists in my new book, for example, I know what you’re thinking, ‘Where on earth would an idea like that come from?’ Well, it was simply divine inspiration. All I can tell you is that I just
needed
those trick cyclists, and suddenly, with a sweet
tring! tring!
of bicycle bells, there they were.

I quite often do readings in bookshops in the evenings. As you know, my books are extremely popular, so it’s a surprise when so few people turn up. But my publisher assures me that many of my most devoted fans are simply infirm – in wheelchairs, nursing homes, hospitals for the criminally insane – and can’t get down to the bookshops for the readings. Which sounds plausible. We sometimes laugh about it. I mean, as long as it doesn’t prevent them from buying the books, they can be as sick as they like, I don’t care.

Dinner is usually at home. Just Michelle and me, or should that be ‘Michelle and I’? – either way, just the two of us. It’s lucky we enjoy one another’s company, because curiously we don’t have any friends. Michelle tried to make some once, in the West Country, but with predictably hilarious results (as they say in the
Radio Times
!). So we spend our evenings plotting murders and testing
out certain new plot devices in the seclusion of our own home, behind drawn curtains, not hurting anybody, and sometimes recording it on video. Michelle is usually as ready as I am for a bit of excitement when evening comes, as she spends a lot of her day in the unrewarding job of returning letters to fans with all their mistakes helpfully crossed out and altered.

And so to bed. When I lie awake at night I sometimes think up names for new books, as it helps me get to sleep. My good friend Angela Farmer sometimes jokes that it takes me less time to write my books than to think of the titles, which I think, in common with all jokes, has a tiny element of truth in it! But now I have Michelle to help, and she is very good at it, so I’ve already got a stockpile of fifteen decent titles to be going on with. The next six months are going to be tough!

Where Did You Get That? – Angela Farmer

Where did I get
what?
Don’t you people have anything better to do? Oh for the love of Mike. I’ve got to go now, I’ve got my leg caught in a man-trap.

Dagenham Delights

This week local woman Mrs Lillian Bugs tells us how she and her husband changed their name by deed poll to something less silly, under advice from a Harley Street psychotherapist specializing in regression in couples.

‘We’re much better now,’ says ex-Mister Bunny, in all seriousness, while waggling his ears and doing the goofy thing with his teeth.

My Perfect Weekend – Angela Farmer

Where would you go?
Somewhere where nobody asked me celebrity questions all the time.

How would you get there?
By a miracle.

Where would you stay?
In bed.

Who would be your perfect companion?
My rabbit. I mean, no, my local shed-dealer. It’s a long story.

What essential piece of clothing would you take?
Bandanna.

Which books would you read? ‘
101
Uses of a Bandanna’.

What three things would you most like to do?
Have a quiet time with the rabbit. Have a quiet time with my shed-dealer. Have a quiet time with my bandanna.

What would you like to find when
you
got home?
That I was the only kid on my block who knew enough about bandannas to improvise a makeshift bunny-hammock for a tired rabbit.

Old Flame of the Month: Henry Clarke

Ten years after Henry Clarke left the fire service, he is now embarking on a whole new life, and asks his old cronies to ‘Come on Down!’ to a new garden centre in Honiton, where he is in charge of water gardens, ponds and fountains. ‘Can’t seem to stay away from water!’ he jokes.

‘But there is a lot more besides at the new Angela Farmer Garden Centre (formerly known as Chimneypot). Visit our amazing shed museum, in which sheds of the famous have been painstakingly reconstructed, using genuine tools, bags of manure, cat-litter, Christmas decorations and carrier-bags full of carpet off-cuts, to represent – in exact replica! – sheds belonging to Harold Wilson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jane Seymour and Frank Bough. The idea came from Osborne Lonsdale, who also gives a free guided tour of the exhibit, with anecdotes! No, it’s very interesting. Where are you going? Oh, give us a break.’

What I’m Reading – Angela Farmer

I can’t believe you guys, you never give up. Every time I answer the phone! Well, what I like best are self-help books because they’re hilarious. I’m reading one about improving your telephone technique at the moment, you know, concentration, courtesy, staying awake, not rambling, that sort of thing. Hang on, sorry –
You! Rabbit! Stop eating those condoms immediately!
Get
down,
for Pete’s sake! Sorry, what was I saying, I’ve forgotten. Oh yes, self-help books. And there’s another one I’ve got which helps you remember where you’ve seen someone before, and I find that very interesting because there’s someone I can’t place – all day I’m saying, ‘Where, oh where, oh where did I meet him?’ You know? – and it’s bugging me.

Hang on, sorry – I
told you before! Do that again and, cute as you are, you’ll end up as PIE! Got that?
Sorry, just talking to the boyfriend, he’s making disgusting food again, and I just won’t stand for it any longer. Yeah, anyway, this book tells you to look at the mystery person kinda sideways, so I keep doing that, but all it does is make him nervous.