With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (6 page)

Come Into the Garden
was nothing like paradise, and never had been. But being cast out of it was going to be a pretty grisly business.

The decision to close
Come Into the Garden,
by the way, had taken only a few seconds.

‘Dad,’ said young Gordon, ‘I’ve bought this old magazine. What do you think?’ Frobisher’s had sent Gordon a few recent issues, with a compliments slip.

‘What’s it called?’

‘Come Into the Garden.’

‘Never.’

‘No, that’s right.’

‘Blimey,’ said Gordon’s dad, turning it over in his hands. ‘Your
Nan
used to read this, when I was little. I can’t believe it’s still going.’

And that was it.

Gordon Clarke, at nineteen, was a red-headed, freckly prodigy of the computer software business; his father a nice-looking, broad-shouldered ex-fireman running a pleasant B&B. They were good people, Gordon and his dad, and considering their recent soaring fortunes, not a bit flash. Devon was their adopted home, the family having been transplanted from south London when Gordon was ten. Gordon had grown up knowing how to make a bed in three and a half minutes and carry four cooked breakfasts without a tray; apart from that,
however, he was no better equipped for a managing directorship than most boys of his age. Given this background, then, Gordon’s acquaintance with magazine publishing was scarcely intimate; and his concern for the continued job security of a bunch of anonymous deadbeat journalists on a dusty old magazine like
Come Into the Garden
was bound to be in the rough vicinity of nil.

His phenomenal early success he owed to a computer game invented in the wonderful summer of 1986, which he had named
Digger.
It had made him a teenage millionaire and a darling of feature-writers everywhere. In fact, if Osborne had only been more alert to the happenings of the world in general, he would have been down to interview Gordon’s shed. The idea of
Digger
was simple: it used the principles of the traditional treasure hunt, mixed it up with some significant ancient legend and some primitive three-dimensional virtual reality, and somehow caught the public’s attention so utterly that, overnight, the Digger became a fashionable figure for the first time since the seventeenth century. ‘Where’s young Jason?’ spinster aunties would say on visits to family homes. ‘Oh, he’s upstairs
digging,’
would be the apparently meaningless reply. It was one of those instances where the new meaning of a word almost supplants the old, so that blokes heading for their allotments with shovels over their shoulders were obliged to explain to their kiddies what kind of digging exactly they were referring to.

Not surprisingly, Gordon’s position at the cutting edge of the games software business was itself usurped, in time, by even younger tykes with even fancier ideas, but by then he had made a decent fortune from
Digger
and had listened to the advice of his wise old dad, with the result that he now controlled a modest, diversified business empire, with leisure as its loosely connecting thread, and a break-even B&B in Honiton as its base. His dad sometimes lamented that Gordon’s mum had
not lived to see it all – but Gordon did not mind so very much. His mum had died when he was a baby; and anyway he adored his dad. His main concern at the moment, in fact, was that, if Digger Enterprises moved to London, his dad would be left behind to run the B&B alone, a thought he could hardly bear.

One of the ingenious features of
Digger,
much remarked upon by adult observers of the game, was that the player sometimes dug up stuff that looked like gold, only to find that it stuck to his hands and afflicted him with debilitating pain and anguish. Gordon’s classical education was not extensive, but he knew about the Midas touch, and had also been horrified as a child by the story of Hercules and the shirt of Nessus, so he had simply put the two ideas together.
Digger
devotees (as well as Gordon’s many interviewers) had often pointed out the maturity of his moral insight, and posed the obvious poor-little-rich-boy question of whether Gordon himself might have dug up more than he could handle. Would the unexpected wealth turn sour? Gordon’s generally cheerful disposition gave the lie to this idea, but it had certainly struck him lately that the possible separation from his dad would be just the thing to make him rue the day of
Digger’s
success.

It was his Auntie Angela who offered him the best advice on the subject of success. ‘Expect to lose all the pals of your ba-zoom, Gordon,’ she warned him flatly on the day
Digger
came out (Gordon was fourteen and motherless, as aforementioned). ‘Auntie’ Angela (no relation) was American, with a house just up the road. She sharpened a cracked fingernail briskly with an emery board and took a deep drag on a cigarette, with the effect of turning her already dry-throated delivery to pure essence of razor-blade. ‘Listen, Gordon baby,’ she snarled, ‘it is harder for a camel to thread a needle with its goddam
eye
than for a friend to forgive you success. Okay?’ She was a bit of a dragon sometimes, Auntie Angela, toughened by years of working in light comedy on British television,
her skin tanned to a leathery yellow hide by decades of sun and cigarettes. But although she breathed fire and snorted smoke, she was not alarming to Gordon; he basked in the warm ashes like a fledgling phoenix not sure whether to rise up flapping or snuggle down for a bit more cosy snooze. Science, by the way, had not yet revealed the full perils of passive smoking.

As Gordon remembered it, this important conversation took place one sunny afternoon in Angela’s shed; the same shed that Osborne and Makepeace were planning (as you will long since have guessed) to visit for
Come Into the Garden
in a couple of days’ time. Thinking back, Gordon could visualize the smoke and dust hanging in equal density in a shaft of sunlight from the small window; he could see Angela’s stacks of yellowing sheet music mixed in with the pots and trowels, and he could smell the earthy bulb fibre in its bag. He had spent many happy afternoons in that shed, actually, with Angela narrating the plots of Broadway musicals for his delight, and belting out all the songs by way of illustration. He was particularly fond of Showboat – especially ‘Just My Bill’ and ‘I Still Likes Me’.

So for now all was rosy in Gordon’s particular world. He played football on Sundays, made visits to Angela, reaped ever-increasing royalties on
Digger
and kept up with the latest research into the technology of virtual reality. He was a genius, of course; but not a bit overbearing with it. He seemed to have the enviable capacity of enjoying his good fortune; a talent that the profile writers, after consulting child psychologists, had deduced at length to have a rather banal explanation – viz., that he owed it to a lifetime of ‘proper parenting’. Really. One of these psychologists used an analogy which would almost have endeared Gordon to readers of
Come Into the Garden
(if he weren’t just about to close down their magazine): she said that Gordon had had the luck of being ‘planted in a soil that
nourished him’; a luck, she went on to say, that was as rare as a snowdrop in August.

And the luck was still with him, because her comment prompted him to think of a new virtual reality program, which he now hugged to himself, for he knew it would revolutionize the whole leisure-perception-Gameboy business and place the name of Gordon Clarke on the rollcall of history, along with Newton and Buddha, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Because in this new virtual reality program, the player would not vanquish opponents or dig for treasure, but would
feel himself grow.
Just by strapping a computer-generated visual world on to his bonce, he would experience an unfurling, an expanding, a reaching towards the light – like a snowdrop, a yucca plant or a mighty oak, depending on preference.

Gordon’s provisional title for it was
Phototropism
(though he suspected this might have to change), and his ambitions for it were boundless. Imagine returning to the real, warped, stunted world after an experience such as
Phototropism!
It would be like reporting back from heaven; it could change people for ever.

Meanwhile
Come Into the Garden
does well to shelter indoors from the harsh pelting weather sweeping towards it from the west. No point getting the corduroys damp in a misplaced effort to stay the inevitable. Its demise will be significant only to a small number of people – and, being mostly gardening types, the readers are well acquainted with the ruthless survivalist principles of pruning, dead-heading and plucking out anything that’s got a bit rusty round the edges. In short, they will be cross, but ultimately they will understand. But still, one can’t help feeling sorry for the poor old mag as it waits unawares for its sudden end. It has no idea it has done anything wrong. It thinks it has permanent roots; it thinks it’s a perennial. And
it even expects Osborne and Makepeace to hit the road next Monday and bring back a ‘Me and My Shed’ so brilliant, witty and generally wildly glorious that it will make the whole world of gardening journalism sit up and say, ‘Wow.’ Which just goes to show how out of touch it really is.

‘I love this van,’ said Makepeace, as he accelerated the old Fiesta away from the kerb with a screech of tyres and punched a few buttons on the crackly radio cassette so that a loud Dire Straits number drilled the air. Osborne, tightly duffled in his coat and fastened securely in his seat belt, clutched his overnight bag hard against his chest and, with his head thrown sharply back by the G-force of the take-off, prayed silently with his eyes closed to the patron saint of hopeless causes. But an immediate squeal, thunk and shout forced him to look up. Makepeace had belatedly noticed a large coach bearing down on them and braked, just in time, to a violent dead stop.

It was an ominous beginning. The van rocked furiously on its chassis, and Makepeace’s push-bike shot forward from its position in the rear so that a hurtling handlebar struck Osborne quite forcibly on the back of the head. The sound of
tring!
is not usually associated with despair, but there is a first time for everything. Makepeace, incensed, grabbed his door handle, evidently with the intention of leaping out to defend his affronted honour, but fortunately the offending coach roared off in a haze of exhaust, because otherwise a rendezvous for pistols at dawn would surely have been appointed.

‘Pillock,’ averred Makepeace, turning the music a little louder. ‘Arsehole.’ At which the van lurched off again, this time (by an undeserved stroke of good fortune) locating a perfectly Fiesta-sized gap in the stream of westward rush hour traffic.

Devon had never seemed further off than it did now to Osborne, as he contemplated London’s South Circular Road and imagined the grim prospect of his friend taking up cudgels for his legendary infallibility every six or seven yards between Putney and Stonehenge. ‘I did
not
pull out without indicating’; ‘But you did’; ‘I did not, you arsehole’; ‘You did, you fucking maniac’; ‘Take off those glasses and say that’;
Biff!;
‘Aagh!’;
Boff! Tinkle! Tring!
If debate over traffic accidents tends to bring out aggression in people, Makepeace had just the right demeanour of overweening smugness to invite a nasty smack in the eye from virtually any fellow motorist not laid low by infirmity or disqualified from punch-ups by gender or divine ordinance. Mind you, come to think of it, ‘Take off that wimple and say that’ sounded pretty feasible, too.

Osborne suddenly realized he couldn’t remember why he liked this bloke. ‘Do we need to fill up?’ he yelled above the din of music and engine, but his words were ignored. Shortly afterwards, however, Makepeace announced to no one in particular, ‘Hey,
I’d
better get some
petrol,’
and swerved into a garage, narrowly missing a woman on crutches with a baby on her back.

It is a misplaced perception tragically common among neurotics that dangerous situations are somehow not dangerous
per se,
but are merely sent to try them. Famous for worrying about nothing, the Osbornes of this world paradoxically respond to genuinely scary situations by affecting not to notice, because somehow it makes them feel better. So, while any normal person might have sprung from Makepeace’s van at this perfect opportunity, pretending all of a sudden to remember a valid train ticket in the back of their wallet,
Osborne merely breathed deeply, glanced around to check that the crutch lady was still vertical, and reached into his bag for the solace of the packed lunch.

‘Cup cake?’ he said. Makepeace applied the handbrake and stared at his passenger in surprise, as though Osborne had been deliberately keeping his presence a secret. He repeated the offer. ‘Er, cup cake, Makepeace?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said the master of all their fates. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you see I’m driving?’

An hour later, as the little yellow van screamed and rattled from the M3 on to the old West Country road, and the surrounding Hampshire scenery presented its quaint palette of November greens and browns, Osborne brushed the last of the chocolate crumbs off his lap, feeling obscurely pleased. He was, when all was said and done, a man who took his consolations where he found them, and experience had taught him there were few situations that did not contain them if you looked hard enough. So, Number One, he had survived this miserable journey thus far with only a slight bash to the head; and Number Two, eight cup cakes in a single sitting was a personal best. He noted with additional satisfaction that in six cases out of the eight, he had so carefully peeled the silver paper that no chocolate icing had been caught in the little corrugations. So, not so bad, really. Now he leaned back, tried to blot out the FM babble of the radio (the signal was wandering, but Makepeace didn’t notice), and closed his eyes so that Makepeace’s maverick tendency to thunder up close behind other cars and then scarily overtake on the left was something he merely felt in his gut rather than experienced fully through the organs of vision.

Riding as a passenger in Makepeace’s van was in one
regard quite different from what he had expected: there was apparently no necessity for talk. In other ways, alas, it was precisely what he might have imagined. Makepeace’s driving was of the God-I’m-dying-for-a-pee school: fast, tense and involved, and with his torso inclined so far forward in his seat that occasionally his nose bumped against the windscreen, leaving a smear of grease. Osborne felt no compulsion to communicate, therefore, especially since Makepeace’s few utterances were exclusively addressed either to road signs (whose information he predictably refused to believe), or to other motorists (who thankfully could not respond). ‘Since when?’ was an evident favourite in Makepeace’s open-road repertoire (‘Basingstoke “four miles”? Oh yes?
Since when?’).
Osborne guessed rightly that this was a question that required no answer – or at least none that he was in any position to supply.

So instead he turned his mind to the mystery of Angela Farmer, whose part in his downfall he was still agonizingly unable to place, despite the automatic writing he had seen on his notepad on Friday night. ‘Why didn’t you tell me who you were?’ it had said ominously, with a kind of low cello vibrato – reminding Osborne of something from a sensational nineteenth-century novel, along the lines of ‘Gone! And never called me mother,’ or, ‘But there is one thing no one has ever told you, my pretty; you are mad, quite mad.’ For a man who treasured the quietness and regularity of his life, and was convinced he had never paddled in the shallows of melodrama, this mystery was cause only for alarm. What a shame, he grimaced, that all the cup cakes had gone. Chocolate is always so helpful when a man wants to think.

It was at this point, unfortunately, that Makepeace decided to get chatty. Thirty miles from Hyde Park Corner, he suddenly relaxed with an audible sigh. He leaned back in his seat, switched off the radio, lowered his speed and altered his
entire disposition. ‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me what you reckon to this Angela Farmer.’

For a moment, Osborne was so surprised to find himself addressed that he glanced into the back of the van to find out who Makepeace was talking to, and received the full force of a handlebar just below his eye.

‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘Who, me?’

‘Mm. What angle are you going to take?’

‘I don’t know.’ Osborne hated being asked questions about his work; his answers always sounded so unconvincing. ‘I haven’t got one.’

‘Course you have.’ Makepeace apparently knew all about it. ‘You can’t do an interview without an
angle.’

Osborne, a man who had never had an angle in his life, and wasn’t sure he would recognize one if it snuggled in beside him in the Fiesta, shrugged and consulted his notes, faintly hoping that a heading marked ‘Angle’ would appear miraculously at the top. It didn’t.

‘No. Really,’ he said. ‘I just thought I’d ask about the shed.’

His friend laughed scornfully, as though he were pulling his leg.

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘I do.’

Osborne felt he was being got at. Which of course he was.

‘All right, you do,’ conceded Makepeace. ‘But there must be some sort of idea of what you want her to say before you start, surely. I mean, what do you usually ask? Tell me how it goes.’

Osborne sighed. He hated this.

‘Well, it varies from person to person,’ he said at last. ‘Sometimes they say do I want to see the shed on my own, and then talk about it indoors over a drink or something, which saves them the bother of coming out; and sometimes we go down together, which I prefer actually, because I find it leads to the best stories.’

‘Right.’ Makepeace noisily dropped a gear to overtake a dawdling 70 m.p.h. milk-tanker, his arm out of the window with a V-sign on the end, but nevertheless appeared still to be listening. Osborne continued.

‘And then we go and have a look at the shed. And I always double-check they haven’t reorganized it since the photographer came, because otherwise I might say in the piece that it’s a really neat and tidy shed and the picture shows it as a terrible mess, which makes me look stupid.’

‘Right.’

‘I mean, it’s bad enough when I describe them wearing gumboots, and the picture shows them in sandals.’

‘Right.’

‘I let them know that I’m familiar with their work, because that makes them relax.’

‘Right.’

‘And sometimes I take flowers, if it’s a woman.’

‘Right.’

Makepeace was thoughtful. Osborne had evidently failed to say what he wanted to hear. ‘But what about the excitement? Isn’t it a buzz meeting famous people all the time?’

Osborne thought about it, but the question meant nothing to him at all. He shrugged.

‘Haven’t you done any interviews yourself?’

‘Never.’

‘Is that why you wanted to come?’

‘Partly.’

‘But it’s not like really
meeting
these famous people, you know. I mean, you might bump into them in the street the next day and they wouldn’t know you.’

‘So what?’

‘I mean, take this Angela Farmer. I’m positive,
positive,
I have met her before, but I know for an absolute fact that she won’t remember me.’

‘You have met her, though; that’s something.’

‘Well, there’s the difference between us. I really don’t think that it is.’

Osborne was wrong, though, if he thought he had no impact on people in general, because there was one group of his acquaintance on whom he made an impression disproportionately large: women. Unlikely as it may seem, women regularly took a fancy to Osborne, against all the negative probability that a down-at-heel hack with only a few kilos of peanut brittle to his name would make a woman remotely happy in the long term. There was just something about him; something that the little squit Makepeace, for example, would never possess despite all his youth and cleverness, despite even his ginger ponytail. Even Osborne’s virginal vagueness about sex, which he always modestly supposed would disqualify him from the field, paradoxically served only to fuel the attraction.

Of course, cynics might say that the phenomenon owed more to the shocking self-esteem of the women concerned than to the innate attractiveness of the man; but this insight, while undoubtedly helpful, could not account for everything. Osborne had many genuine features to commend him: a pleasant manner, decent dental hygiene, and a liberality with cup cakes bordering on saintliness. To cap it all, there was an old-fashioned streak of gallantry he had somehow never shaken off – which meant that he sometimes complimented women on their appearance, opened doors for them, even kissed the backs of their hands. This knocked them dead. Such demonstrations being like showers of spring rain in the veritable Death Valley of most modern women’s emotional lives, Osborne absent-mindedly picked up female admirers the way other people pick up fluff.

Michelle, of course, had fancied him for twelve years, a fact that anyone but Osborne would have deduced long ago from her wildly divergent behaviour towards him. Why else would someone appear to be so cloyingly sweet one minute, and the next as punchy as a boxing kangaroo? It is a sure sign of thwarted passion in a naturally forceful person such as Michelle. But Osborne, unable to penetrate the mystery, merely assumed that when she was nice, she was attempting to give him the benefit of the doubt; and when she was nasty, it was because, understandably, she found she couldn’t, after all.