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
