With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

3

A hard day at the typesetters had left Tim pale and drawn. His big specs felt heavy on his face, and a deep weariness sapped his soul as he trudged back from the tube station with only a few minutes to spare before his Friday night curfew of half-past seven. Being the sort of chap who responds to pressure by withdrawing deeper and tighter into his own already shrink-wrapped body, Tim was often on Friday nights so tautly pulled together that he was actually on the verge of turning inside out. Not surprisingly, then, he carried himself pretty carefully for those last few yards to the front door. After all, the merest nudge in the right place, and flip! it might all be over.

It would be unfair to say, as many had, that Tim’s outer coolness masked an inner coolness underneath. But peeling the layers off Tim was not a job many people could be bothered to undertake, especially since Tim did so little to encourage them. Once, when Tim was a small boy, he foolishly dug up some daffodil bulbs from his mother’s flower-beds to see how they were doing (this was a favourite story of his ex-girlfriend Margaret, who thought it so funny she snorted like a pig when she told it). Well, it was Tim’s great misfortune in life that nobody (including Margaret) had ever thought to dig him up in the same way, just to check that healthy growth was still a possibility.

Most people, then, considered Tim cool, aloof and just a bit of a geek (because of the specs). And that was it. To his own mother he was a daffodil murderer, a mystery never to be solved. To Margaret (a smug psychology graduate) he was a textbook obsessive. Only his cat, Lester, was really bothered to get better acquainted with him. But then, as the cynics will gladly tell you, any emotional cripple with a tin-opener is of devotional interest to his cat.

Today Tim was especially worried about the emotional turmoil ahead. A new proprietor, indeed – good grief, the whole thing spelt change, and he hated the sound of it. Textbook obsessives rarely disappoint in certain departments, and Tim was not the man to transgress the rules of an association. Thus, the past week had seen him dutifully fretting to the point of dizziness about the smallest of matters slipping from his control. The Independent had gone up by five pence! On Tuesday he had forgotten to change his desk calendar to the right day! Tonight he had trodden on an odd number of paving stones on his walk home from the tube! Tim never worried about things he could actually do something about – he never, for example, grew cross with the printers on Fridays, as Michelle did, when they were inefficient or lazy. But powerlessness made him frantic. The selling of the magazine to a new proprietor whose intentions were obscure – well, that was the kind of thing to drive him nuts.

It was with a genuine lack of enthusiasm that he unlocked the door to the flat. Since Margaret moved out, the place seemed spooky; he kept finding Margaret-shaped holes in its fabric. There were gaps in the bookshelves, empty drawers, an exactly half-filled bathroom cabinet, a clearly defined gap in the dust on the kitchen surface where her Magimix formerly stood. If he had been a sentimental person, he would have considered it sad. Nobody muttered ‘For Pete’s sake’ when Tim checked the door for the fifth time before going to bed; nevertheless he heard the words not being spoken. Margaret’s absence, to be honest, was more conspicuous to Tim than her presence had been. Sometimes, when he was changing the bed-linen, he had an awful feeling he would draw back the duvet and find a crude Margaret-shaped outline on the bottom sheet, like the ones the American cops draw around homicide victims on sidewalks.

The only thing she had left behind was the cat, a ginger tom with a loud purr, who wrecked Tim’s attempts to work at home by ritually jumping up on every sheet of important paper (with wet paws), and then ceremoniously parking his bum on it. So Tim had stopped trying to work at home (which was a good thing). The only trouble was, he couldn’t quite get the hang of feeding the cat at proper times, so that now, as Tim roved the dark, joyless flat turning on lights, Lester followed him about, making intense feed-me-Oh-God-feed-me noises combined with much unambiguous trouser-nudging. Tim shrugged distractedly and reached for a pad of sticky Post-it notes. FEED CAT, he wrote on the top sheet. This he peeled off and stuck to the nearest door-frame before continuing his perambulations.

As he moved into the hall he barely noticed that on every door-frame there were dozens of similar notes, slightly overlapping, as though left over from some jolly atavistic maypole ritual. He saw them, of course, because they were unmissable –

REMEMBER AUNTIE JOAN AT CHRISTMAS

DRY HAIR AFTER SHOWER

FEED CAT

JAMMY DODGERS ON OFFER AT PRICERIGHT

CHECK DOOR

FEED LESTER

TELL OSBORNE NOT TO WORRY ABOUT NEW EDITOR – SHEDS EVER GREEN

– he just didn’t see anything odd.

Something a great deal more lively awaited Michelle when she too reached home that evening, at roughly the same hour. Mother – a nice-looking, grey-haired old woman in natty, mauve velour track-suit and trainers – was poised and ready in the darkened living-room, having planned the moment with the precision of a true enthusiast. Just as Michelle’s key entered the lock, Mother tipped a number of smouldering cigarette butts on to the carpet around her wheelchair, pressed the button on the CD remote control (so that Irving Berlin’s ‘Always’ began to play) and finally flung herself back in her seat – in what she hoped was an attitude of death from filial neglect. A momentary quandary about whether her eyes should be open or closed was hastily resolved, so that when Michelle burst into the room shouting, ‘All right, all right, what is it this time?’ she saw her mother’s wide, staring eyeballs reflecting the little blue flames that were just beginning to reach up out of the Wilton.

There was artistry in it, undoubtedly, but Michelle had seen it before. Also, she could not help thinking – even as she stamped out the fire and switched off the music – that the gory hatchet-through-the-head accessory was slightly gilding the lily.

Meanwhile, in a nice living-room in south London, Osborne studied the expensive curtains (the words ‘Very Peter Hall’ came to mind, but he couldn’t think why) and pondered the advantages of house-sitting as a way of life.

‘House-sitting’: how calm and steady it sounds. There is nothing steadier, after all, than a house; no posture more shock-resistant than sitting. Osborne, the man who sat in other people’s sheds as a profession, also sat in other people’s living-rooms when he went home. And as far as he was concerned, it was great, because it was cheap. The deal was, he stayed for free in other people’s flats and watered their plants, while they took nice foreign holidays or worked abroad. People trusted him, it seemed; and then they recommended him to other people, who in turn gave him their keys and wrote him chummy notes about fish-food and window-locks, and afterwards overlooked the breakages. Osborne came with recommendations. He was easygoing and honest, though not particularly house-trained. Most people figured that, in a house-sitter, two out of three wasn’t bad.

For the past few weeks he had been living in the home of an old journalist friend whose job had taken him to Los Angeles for six months. The Northern Line ran directly underneath this flat, and Osborne liked to listen to the trains rumbling in the tunnels far below. He had noticed that you could feel the tremor even outside on the busy street, and he liked it; it made him feel safe. But tonight he was rattled; for he had had a perplexing day. He could hardly believe, for one thing, that he had really sat helpless in the Birthplace of Aphrodite and agreed to let Makepeace come with him to Honiton on Monday (were they really going in Makepeace’s van?). And worse than that, he seemed to remember saying that Makepeace could ‘sit in’ during the Angela Farmer interview. ‘I’ll just observe,’ his friend had said. What? Since when was ‘observing’ such an innocuous activity? Observing counted as threatening behaviour. The thought of Makepeace observing made him almost want to cry.

Taking refuge in food, Osborne popped along to the kitchen with the intention of knocking up a tasty meal, an intention which (if nothing else) paid tribute to hope’s triumph over experience, since Osborne had never succeeded in creating a tasty meal in his life. Recipe books scared him, especially when they had jaunty titles such as One is Fun!, so his usual method was to open a few tins of things left behind by the absent home-owner – some tinned spaghetti, say, and a slab of tuna – and mix it up in a bowl, with prunes for afters. This he would place on a tray with a glass of expensive cognac from a bottle found stashed behind the gas meter, and then eat in front of the TV.

Osborne entertained few qualms about helping himself to the stuff people left behind in cupboards. Being unacquainted with the notion of housekeeping, he assumed that food and booze just sort of belonged in the house and should be used accordingly. Only once had he encountered hostility to this view, when he pointed out to a returning home-owner that her supply of toilet paper had run out halfway through his six-month stay. He had been obliged to buy some more, he said, the full astonishment of the experience still making him shake his head in disbelief. The woman in question, brown and dusty from six months’ fending for herself in the Australian outback (with no Andrex supplier within a thousand miles), took this news by merely gaping and gesticulating, speechless.

It was hard to imagine interviewing someone with Makepeace listening in. ‘The maestro at work,’ Makepeace had said, with an insinuating smile. Was this man mad, or what? Osborne had certainly done some good stuff in his time (the David Essex, as aforementioned, was unsurpassable), but methodology was not his strong point, heaven knew. Osborne was convinced that Makepeace merely wanted to expose him; what other motive could he have? He imagined the scene: himself pretending to consult his notes while panicking what to ask next, Angela Farmer croaking ‘You OK, honey?’ and handing him a clean tissue for the sweat dribbling in his eyes, and Makepeace stepping in with some smart-arse brilliant question and hijacking the whole enterprise. Bluffing was hard work at any time, without being watched.

Twiddling some cold Heinz spaghetti on a spoon, he looked up to see that Angela Farmer, by some happy coincidence, was on the television screen right this minute, in her new smash-hit sitcom Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us. He could hardly believe his good fortune. ‘Blimey, research,’ he remarked aloud, with his mouth full, ‘that’s a bit of luck.’ In the old days, of course, when he was young and keen, he would have looked for Angela Farmer’s name in the reference books, got some cuttings from a newspaper library, swotted up, requested tapes from the BBC Press Office. But these days he reckoned that a chance sighting of his subject on the box was quite sufficient to be going on with. A person’s curriculum vitae, he had discovered, rarely had much bearing on their relationship with the shed.

‘Nice-looking woman,’ he said, and got up to look at her more closely. ‘Makepeace is right, she’s great.’ But then, as he got closer to the screen, he suddenly felt all weightless again – and it wasn’t the prunes, because he hadn’t eaten them yet. ‘Don’t I know you?’ he said, and peered at Angela Farmer more closely still. ‘I do, don’t I? I know you from somewhere.’ But of course she didn’t enlighten him. She was on the telly, after all.

The sitcom was a humdrum affair (as so many are) in which Ms Farmer played a wisecracking New Yorker called Eve, opposite a limp-wristed British aristo named Adam. Osborne checked the title again in the paper – Forgive Us Our Trespasses – and decided not to worry too deeply about this interesting confusion of Old and New Testaments, because it was probably the product of ignorance rather than design. Adam was played by another famous TV star (in whose sparkling greenhouse it had once been Osborne’s privilege to feel sweat in his eyes); and the idea of the piece was that Adam and Eve did not get on. That was all. The remarkable serendipity of their names was oddly never remarked on, although the title sequence did show an animated naked couple enveloped by a serpent and dithering over a pound of Coxes. What a shame, thought Osborne, that ‘Lead Us Not into Temptation’ had already been snapped up by that game show on ITV, and that this Adam-and-Eve vehicle had nothing to do with original sin (or trespass) in any case. But the audience seemed to like it. They laughed like drains every twenty seconds or so, whenever Eve and Adam had another hilarious collision of wills.

‘Milk or lemon?’ a hotel waiter would ask.

‘Milk,’ piped Adam; ‘Lemon,’ barked Eve (both speaking simultaneously); Hargh, hargh, hargh, went the audience.

But Osborne had stopped listening to the dialogue and had even abandoned the delights of his Tuna Surprise; he was peering at the snarling close-ups of Angela Farmer with an increasing unease, his initial frisson of recognition having broadened and deepened until it flowed through his body like a river and leaked out horribly at his toes.

‘Inside or outside?’

‘In,’ said Adam; ‘Out,’ said Eve; and the audience roared again.

Osborne felt ill. Had she said ‘Out’? Where had he heard her say ‘Out’ like that? Perhaps it was his imagination, but he suddenly felt quite certain he had heard Angela Farmer say ‘Out’ in that pointed manner before. And the horrible thing was, she must have said it to him.

Back at Tim’s flat, Forgive Us Our Trespasses was also playing. There wasn’t much on the other channels that evening. But in any case, Forgive Us was the sort of television Tim particularly enjoyed: safe, predictable, and OK if you missed bits when suddenly you felt the urge to check that the fridge light still worked. Watching Eve with interest, he found that he rather envied Osborne’s luck in interviewing Ms Farmer; he must ask him what she was really like, beyond the parameters of the shed stuff. He reached for a Post-it pad and wrote tell OSBORNE I THINK A.F. IS A V. FINE ACTRESS, and stuck the label on the side of the coffee-table.

Lester made a noise that sounded like ‘meat’ (but it might have been ‘me, eat’), and arched his back before sinking his front claws into the chair and ripping. Teatime was long past, yet the happy clink of spoon on cat-bowl was yet to be heard, and Lester was running out of hints. Why was Tim so oblivious to feline nuance? It was enough to drive a cat crackers. So it was back to ripping the sofa, even though he didn’t really feel like it. ‘How banal, really,’ thought Lester, as he dug in, and the fabric made poc, poc, poc-opoc-poc noises, like fireworks on Chinese New Year. ‘How stupid.’

‘Just stop that!’ said Tim in a voice so loud and commanding that Lester sprang back and gave him a look. Tim stirred in his chair, but Lester was right not to race to the kitchen, for it was a false alarm. Tim reached for his pad again. BE MORE PATIENT WITH LESTER, he wrote, and, at a loss where to put it, stuck it on the cat.

Makepeace sat at his typewriter, not watching the TV, and composed the covering letter for his Come Into the Garden book review, every word of which was an obvious lie to anyone who knew him.

Dear Tim [he wrote; actually this part not a lie exactly, but read on], Sorry [not at all] you did not receive this by fax on Thursday as requested, but as I explained on the phone I faxed it from the copy shop [no, he didn’t] and then lost my original while gardening [stretching it a bit here, but there you are]. So I have retyped this from notes [yawn] and hope you like it. I actually think it came out better the second time! [clever touch this, the maestro at work, as it were].

Funny, I agree, that we didn’t bump into one another at the launch of the Fruit Garden books last week [he wasn’t there]. I was definitely there [see previous note]! In fact, I looked high and low for you, but couldn’t see you [classic turning of tables; never fails to convince].

All the best,

M. Makepeace

Miles eastward along the river, past Greenwich Reach and the Isle of Dogs, Lillian was sitting with her feet up watching Forgive Us Our Trespasses, just like everybody else. From the steamy kitchen she could hear the pleasant sounds of George (the hubby) making dinner, and she looked up in proper feeble-invalid fashion to see him present her with a pre-prandial cup-soup, made especially in her favourite Bunnykins mug. Some people might balk at the idea of cup-soups forming any part of an evening meal, but somehow it had become part of the routine. The idea was that, with God’s help of course, it would keep up Lillian’s strength until the arrival of solid food.

‘Dwarling,’ he said in a singsong baby voice. (I’m sorry if this is ghastly, but it’s true.) Lillian looked up, saw the cup-soup, pretended it was all a big surprise and gave him a sweet, affected, little-girl look that was enough honestly to freeze the blood of any disinterested onlooker. She peered into the bunny-mug and frowned a deep frown.

‘No cru-tongs, bunny,’ she lisped, her mouth turned down in disappointment.

‘Poor bunny,’ agreed her husband (who by day, incidentally, was a used-car salesman). ‘No cru-tongs for bunnywunny.’

He hung his head, extended his arms behind his back and kicked his instep.

Fortunately, she smiled her forgiveness, and the moment of conflict passed. Otherwise there might have been a tantrum. But tonight they made secret-society gestures with their little fingers, as proof that the no-crutong incident had been forgotten. Don’t ask. They just seemed to enjoy it, that’s all.

‘Bunny tired?’ asked Mister Bunny, after a pause.

‘Bunny werry tired.’

‘Did the phone never stop ringing again?’

‘Never.’ Lillian pouted and delicately picked some fluff off her teddy-slippers, real tears of childish anguish starting in her eyes.

‘Phone went ring ring ring ring ring ring –’

‘Poor bunny, with phone going ring.’

‘Yes, poor bunny.’

‘Nice spinach for tea, make bunny stwong.’

‘Bunny never be stwong, bunny.’

‘I know,’ said Mister Bunny, with a tinge of heart-felt regret. ‘Poor poor bunny-wunny.’

‘Mmm,’ said Lillian, closing her eyes.

Osborne was trying to make notes for his interview on Tuesday, but somehow the usual all-purpose questions about sheds looked rather hollow and unsatisfactory: ‘Old shed/new shed? Shed important/unimportant? Hose kept in shed? Or not? (Any funny hose anecdotes?)’

He looked at the TV screen and there she was again, this amazing blonde woman with the mystery and the scarifying attitude.

‘Singles or double?’ asked a hotel receptionist.

‘Double,’ said Adam; ‘Singles,’ barked Eve.

It was the last line of the show, and Osborne switched off just before the inevitable gale of appreciative studio applause. Looking at his notebook, he saw he had written: ‘Bugger the trespasses and bugger the shed. Why didn’t you tell me who you were?’ And now he looked at it, aghast, because he didn’t have a clue what it meant.

Michelle heard the closing music to Forgive Us Our Trespasses from the kitchen, where she had just discovered a cache of trick daggers and tomato ketchup wedged behind the U-bend in the cupboard under the sink. She felt a twinge tired of all this, though far be it from her, etcetera. Nobody at the office knew about Mother; it was such a sad old commonplace for a single professional woman to have a loony mum at home that she simply wouldn’t stand for anyone to know, especially not Lillian; she wanted to circle the offending cliché in thick blue pen and send it back for a rewrite. But life is not susceptible to sub-editing, by and large, and the mad mum remained fast embedded in Michelle’s text. Mother was a liability – mischievous, hurtful and addicted to practical jokes. Underneath the sink Michelle found an invoice, too: evidently Mother’s latest consignment from her favourite mail-order novelty company included a new severed hand which had not yet come to light.

She sat back on her heels for a moment and, without undue self-pity, considered what she had to put up with. The irony was unbearable. Here she was, possibly the only person in the world who knew the difference between ‘forbear’ and ‘forebear’, and she was also the only person of her acquaintance who was consistently obliged to put both words together in the same sentence.

Tim made a note, WATCH FORGIVE US OUR TRESPS NEXT FRIDAY DON’T FORGET, and attached it to his jumper with a safety-pin, next to GO TO BED AT SOME POINT – which he had written carefully backwards, to be read when he caught sight of himself in a mirror.

Lillian and Mister Bunny pulled faces at one another, trays on their laps, and affected diddums-y thoughts as the credits rolled. (I’m sorry.)

‘Dat wath qw’ goo’,’ said Mister Bunny.

‘Mmm,’ said Lillian, ‘but this spinach was gooder!’

Makepeace wrote another letter, beginning with the words ‘Can’t understand how this did not reach you by post, although I wonder now whether your secretary gave me the correct address.’ He noted without pleasure that he could type this particular sentence as quickly as he could do ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’

Angela Farmer switched off the TV and consulted her diary. ‘Oh yeah,’ she remarked to no one in particular, ‘the schmuck from the gardening magazine. I suppose I better mention the goddam tulip.’