With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed Read online

  ‘Well, mustn’t hold you up.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘See you later.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you ever get tired of sheds, Osborne?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Unlike some,’ said the deputy editor darkly, and girded himself to do battle with the subs.

  Waiting for Osborne’s column later that evening, after everyone else had gone home, Michelle donned her pastry-cuffs, strapped a spotless pinny over her outfit, and tackled the reference books, rearranging them in strict alphabetical order, fixing them in a perpendicular position, and drawing them neatly to the extreme edge of the shelves. Having accomplished this, she scoured the coffee machine and dusted the venetian blinds, in the course of which activity she deliberately elbowed a large economy packet of Lillian’s cup-soups into a bin. Then she sat down at her typewriter and wrote some much-needed letters for the ‘Dear Donald’ page.

  She loved this task. Few bona fide readers were writing to the magazine these days, and Michelle’s particular joy was to write the bogus letters ungrammatically and then correct them afterwards. Subbing was a great passion of Michelle’s; it was like making a plant grow straight and tall. ‘Dear Donald,’ she would type with a thrill. ‘As an old age pensioner, my Buddleia has grown too big for me to comfortably cut it back myself …’ She could barely prevent herself from ripping it straight out of the machine, to prune those dangling modifiers, stake those split infinitives. How quickly the time passed when you were having fun. The only thing that stumped her – as it always did – was the invention of fake names and addresses, because she could never see why one fake name sounded more authentic than any other. ‘G. Clarke, Honiton, Devon’ was how she signed each one of today’s batch, hoping that inspiration would strike later. She often chose G. Clarke of Honiton. She’d never been there, but she fancied that’s where all the readers lived.

  Time to check up on Osborne, she thought, when ten letters from G. Clarke were complete, photocopied and subbed within an inch of their lives. She dialled Osborne’s number on the internal phone. It rang on his desk and startled him, so that he dropped an open bottle of Tipp-Ex on to his shoes.

  ‘Bugger,’ he said, as he answered the phone.

  ‘Going well, oh great wordsmith?’

  Kneading his face, Osborne watched in helpless alarm as the correcting fluid seeped into the leather uppers of his only decent footwear.

  ‘Anything wrong?’

  ‘No, no. Nearly there, actually. Just got to think of the pay-off.’

  ‘Oh marvellous.’ Michelle sounded ironic, the way she often did on Wednesday nights. ‘That’s dandy.’ There was a pause.

  ‘Far be it from me,’ she said sweetly, ‘but have you mentioned that he writes in his shed? And that this explains the repeated use of weed-killer as a murder weapon in the books? You know what I mean: he looks up from his rude desk of logs for inspiration, and there’s the weed-killer, next to the bone-meal. In the one I took on holiday last year, he killed off the prime suspect with a garden rake. One blow to the back of the neck, and that was it. Nasty. In the latest book, I understand, someone is dealt the death-blow with a pair of shears.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Who do you mean?’

  ‘Trent Carmichael. This week’s “Me and My Shed”. The crime writer.’

  Osborne thought a minute, thought another minute, remembered everything – in particular the bestselling author laughing apologetically, ‘Well, er, the cat got locked in the shed once, but no foul play was suspected!’ – and said, ‘I’ll call you back.’

  Things were looking bad. He unlaced his shoes, took them off, and on bended knee started to scrub them upside down on the carpet, hoping to remove the worst of the whitener while deciding what to do next. He looked up to see Michelle standing beside him.

  ‘No, you’ve got it wrong,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the floor, his pulse pounding in his neck. ‘Trent Carmichael is next week. You wouldn’t know whether this stuff washes out, would you?’

  ‘So who is it this week?’

  ‘Angela Farmer,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Angela Farmer.’

  ‘No. Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  ‘That’s very odd.’

  ‘No, I met her on Monday. Not odd at all. Nice woman.’

  Michelle narrowed her eyes as though to contest the point, and then decided not to bother. She stretched her arms instead; this conversation clearly had nowhere to go.

  ‘How nice,’ she said. ‘I’d better not hold you up, then. Have you mentioned she’s got a tulip named after her?’

  ‘I thought it was a rose.’

  ‘No, tulip.’

  Osborne looked like he might be sick. ‘Tell you what,’ said Michelle. ‘It’s been a hard day, I’ll look it up for you.’

  Osborne sat in his stockinged feet, stroking the keys of his typewriter and staring into space. In all his years as a journalist, he had never before written up an interview that had not taken place. Why ever had he believed Tim? Tim didn’t know. How, moreover, could he extricate himself now he had gone so far? Not only had he cast all Trent Carmichael’s faint and unamusing witticisms into a broad American slang, but he was now also stuck with sentences referring to (a) love being like a red red tulip, and (b) a woman who viewed the world through tulip-tinted spectacles.

  In fact, he was so absorbed in his confusion and dismay that he did not hear the phone ringing, nor hear Michelle answer it. What he did hear, however (and quite distinctly), was Michelle informing him that it had been Angela Farmer phoning to apologize. She would have to postpone their appointment for the following Monday, making it Tuesday instead. She suggested that since she lived in the West Country, he might like to use Monday as a travelling day and stay overnight at a local hotel, details of which she had passed on to Michelle.

  ‘She sounded very nice,’ said Michelle, studying Osborne’s pole-axed expression.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ said Osborne.

  ‘Oh, and she hoped it wasn’t too inconvenient – to ring so late in the day.’

  2

  Osborne dunked a piece of peanut brittle in his coffee and reflected. Perhaps it was time to bail out of this shed business before serious damage was done. From his favourite breakfast corner in his local Cypriot dossers’ café on a bleak November Friday (his belongings tucked around him like sandbags against a blast) he looked mournfully at the bright, mass-produced pictures of mythical Greek heroes adorning the walls and asked himself whether the cutting edge of outhouse journalism had not finally proved too much for him. A vision of Michelle sending him home two nights ago on a tide of unreassuring platitudes (‘It could happen to anyone, Osborne; but funny how it happened to you’), and then expertly recasting his article with firm unanswerable blue strokes (and well-informed references to Trent Carmichael’s favourite horticultural murder weapons), rose unbidden to his mind and gave him torment. He stared at a picture of Perseus amid the gorgons and emitted a low moan.

  ‘Me and My Shed’ had had its sticky moments in the past, but nothing ever like this. In the course of a dozen years’ trouble-shooting around celebrity gardens Osborne had been exposed to a variety of dangers – hostile rabbits, wobbly paving and possibly harmful levels of creosote – but none had shaken his confidence to a comparable degree. Not even when he was mistaken for the man from The Times and treated to a lengthy reminiscence of a painful Somerset childhood (none of it involving sheds, incidentally, or outbuildings of any kind) had he felt so pig-sick about himself, despite the extreme embarrassment all round when that particular ghastly mistake was finally uncovered. (It had been a terrifying example of cross purposes at work, incidentally, since for a considerable time the interviewee supposed that Osborne’s repeated prompting ‘And did that happen in a shed?’ was evidence of a deep-seated emotional disturbance almost on a par with his own.)

  Osborne did not particular
ly relish recalling his past humiliations, but while he was on the subject he was compelled to admit there had been few things worse than the time he was locked in a shed by a hyperactive child, who then cunningly reported to its celebrity father that ‘the man in the smelly coat’ had been called away on urgent business. Luckily, an old woman had let him out, but only after four hours had passed. Interestingly, this was the incident Osborne generally called to mind when he overheard people say, ‘We’ll probably laugh about all this later on’ – because he had learned that there were certain miseries in life which Time signally failed to transform into anything even slightly resembling a rib-tickler, and spending four unplanned hours hammering on the inside of a Lumberland Alpine Resteezy was definitely among them.

  ‘All right, mate?’

  A man in a tight, battered baseball cap touched Osborne by the sleeve, and he jerked out of his reverie – which was just as well, because it was turning grim.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘All right, are you, mate? Your coffee’s got cold.’

  ‘Thanks. Right. Oh bugger, yes,’ said Osborne, and stirred his coffee very quickly, as though the frantic action might jiggle the molecules sufficiently to reheat it.

  In front of him on the table lay his morning’s post, still unopened, and he looked at it with his eyes deliberately half-closed, so that it looked sort of blurry and distant, and a bit less threatening. None of the envelopes resembled his monthly cheque; most, he knew only too well, would be scratchy xeroxed brochures for self-assembly Lumberland Alpines. He recognized immediately the familiar postmark betokening a personal reader’s letter ‘sent on’ from the magazine, and put it automatically to one side. True, sometimes a reader’s letter could cheer him up enormously (‘Another marvellous insight into a famous life!’ somebody wrote once, in handwriting very similar to his sister’s), but quite often Osborne’s correspondents were OAP gardening fanatics who not only entertained very fixed ideas about the virtues of terracotta (as opposed to plastic), but allowed these ideas full dismal rein in wobbly joined-up handwriting on lined blue Basildon Bond.

  Where was Makepeace? They had agreed to meet at 11.30, and it was after twelve. Why was Makepeace always late for these meetings? It is a general rule, of course, that the person with the least distance to travel will contrive to show up last. But Makepeace lived upstairs from the café, for goodness’ sake. This was why they had chosen the Birthplace of Aphrodite as their particular weekly rendezvous. He was up there now, in all probability, while Osborne had the job of retaining his claim to the table by the age-old custom of not finishing his food and saying, ‘Excuse me, whoops, I’m sorry –’ every time a table-clearer wielding a damp grey cloth attempted to remove his plate. In fact, he had spent much of the past fifteen minutes holding the plate down quite firmly with both hands, as though trying to bond it to the formica by sheer effort of push.

  ‘So,’ said Makepeace, sitting down opposite. ‘Where have you been?’ He appeared out of nowhere: just materialized on the seat as though he had suddenly grown there, whoosh, like a time-lapse sunflower in a nature programme. He was always doing this, Makepeace; creeping up on people. It was terribly unsettling. Once, he crept up on Osborne outside an off-licence, with the result that the six bottles of Beck’s that Osborne had just invited home for a little party suddenly found they had an alternative urgent appointment getting smashed to bits on the pavement. Now, at the Birthplace of Aphrodite, the effect was less catastrophic (it did not require a dustpan and brush), but Osborne was nevertheless startled sufficiently to let go of the plate, which was whisked away instantly by a triumphant cloth-lady.

  Osborne sometimes speculated how the world must appear to someone like Makepeace – given the effect he had on it himself. You know the old theory that the royal family think the world smells of fresh paint, that the Queen assumes people talk endlessly on brief acquaintance about the minutiae of their jobs and the distance they’ve travelled to be present? Well, similarly Makepeace, with his unfortunate, disarming habit of misplaced stealth, must surely assume that the world was full of people who greet you by leaping in the air and shouting ‘Gah!’ in alarm. He must also, by extension, know a proportionately large number of people who worry ostentatiously about the current state of their tickers.

  ‘Gah!’ shouted Osborne. ‘Makepeace! Hey! Bugger me! Phew!’

  ‘Well, of course; bugger me, exactly,’ repeated Makepeace slowly, without much enthusiasm, as he gently peeled off his denim jacket, folded it as though it were linen or silk, and adjusted his long, ginger pony-tail so that it hung neatly down his back. ‘But what the hell kept you, my friend?’

  Osborne looked quizzically into Makepeace’s blank blue eyes and considered what to say.

  ‘What do you mean? I –’

  ‘We agreed 11.30, didn’t we? Well, I put my head round the door ten minutes ago – ten to bloody twelve – and you weren’t here. I was beginning to think that you weren’t coming.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t get this,’ protested Osborne. ‘I was here all the time.’

  Makepeace pursed his lips in disbelief. ‘Didn’t see you, pal.’

  ‘Well, I was.’

  Makepeace put up his palms as if to say, ‘Don’t be so defensive,’ and then changed his tone.

  ‘Listen, you’re here now and that’s what matters.’

  ‘Hang on, you can ask any –’

  But Osborne faltered and gave up. In the circumstances, actually, this was the only sensible course of action. Having known Makepeace only a couple of months, he had already learned one very useful thing – that you could never, ever place him in the wrong. Osborne had met know-alls in the past; he had been acquainted with big-heads, too. But Makepeace was both know-all and big-head, with an added complication. Conceivably, he was a psychopath.

  ‘Son,’ his daddy must have said to him at an impressionable age, ‘never apologize, never explain. Is that clear? Also, deny absolutely everything that doesn’t suit you, even in the teeth of outright contrary proof. Now, all right, let’s have it, what did I just tell you?’

  ‘Tell me?’ Makepeace must have hotly replied. ‘You told me nothing! What the hell are you talking about? I just came through the door, and you’re asking me a load of stupid questions.’

  At which his daddy presumably chuckled (in a sinister fond-father-of-the-growing-psychopath sort of way) and said, ‘That’s my boy.’

  Makepeace was younger than Osborne, thirty-five to Osborne’s forty-eight, but sometimes seemed to aspire to an emotional age of six. Wiry and five foot two, and usually attired in blue denim, he had a long face and a short, flat nose, so that Osborne was involuntarily reminded of a stunted, mean-looking infant pressing his face hard against a cake-shop window. It was easy to feel sorry for the little chap: parents warning their children against the dangers of smoking or masturbation had been known to point to him – unfortunately, in his hearing – as an example of the worst that could happen. Makepeace rose above all this by being clever, of course; and with a couple of good university degrees behind him, he presently made a fairly decent, grown-up living from writing erudite book reviews for national newspapers and periodicals, in which he used his great capacities as a professional know-all as a perfectly acceptable substitute for either insight or style.

  There was, however, still a tears-before-bedtime quality to Makepeace’s existence, which compelled Osborne to worry on his behalf. The trouble was that this prodigy, precisely in the manner of a precocious child, was utterly unable to judge the point at which he had delighted the grown-ups beyond endurance. Thus, having acquired a reputation for his readiness to write a thousand words on any subject under heaven (he would have written the Angela Farmer thing without a qualm, even knowing that it was all a fraud), he now faced a quite serious problem, in that his extraordinary level of output was beginning to outstrip plausibility. People had started to notice that he wrote more book reviews in a week than was technically possible, yet if you sugg
ested he hadn’t read the books with any degree of diligence, he would instantly offer to knock you down.

  His various editors guessed that he might not be reading very carefully, but it was difficult to prove; and Makepeace was indeed an extraordinarily compelling liar, with a particular flair for outright incandescent denial. On the regular occasions when he missed a deadline (through sheer bottleneck of work) he would never admit it, but instead swore hotly that he had personally fed each sheet of his review into a fax machine – and without missing a beat he would go on to explain in a regretful tone that he would dearly love to send it again, had it not been: (a) snatched from his hands by a freak typhoon in Clapham High Street; (b) burgled from his flat; or (c) lent to a friend who had just boarded a flight to Venezuela. ‘Tell you what, though, I can type it out again by Friday,’ he would offer, fooling nobody. And somehow he always got away with it.

  The curious thing, of course, was that while Osborne knew all this, he liked him anyway. Makepeace made him laugh. Also, Osborne enjoyed in his company the novel sensation of feeling relatively grown up. So he introduced Makepeace to more editors, and even arranged for him to review gardening books for Tim on the magazine. His one ridiculous error was in thinking he ought to explain a few basic gardening terms that Makepeace might not be familiar with. On this gross, unforgivable insult, their relationship nearly foundered. You just could not tell Makepeace something he didn’t already know; it was as simple as that. Sitting in this very Birthplace of Aphrodite one afternoon, and regarding the Greek pictures on the walls, Osborne had learned this lesson the hard way when a civilized difference of opinion about aetiological myths had hurtled seriously out of control.

  They had been talking – as all literary people will, from time to time – of the legend of Persephone, whom Hades famously stole from the earth to make Nature mourn (thus proving the existence of winter, or something). Anyway, the question was this: had Persephone eaten six pomegranates while underground, or six pomegranate seeds? Osborne said seeds, and afterwards checked it in a book at the library. And he was right. Naïvely assuming that only the truth was at issue, he made a mental note to pass on the information to his friend when next they met. After all, seeds were probably significant, seeing as the myth was concerned with seasonal renewal, and all that.