With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed by Lynne Truss Read Free Book Online Page A

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 acquaintancewho 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.’

    And Lester the cat, festooned with Post-it notes, made his way to the darkened kitchen, knocked a tin of Turkey Whiskas to the floor, and rolled it carefully with his nose and paws in the general direction of the living-room. If that stupid bastard fails to get the hint this time, he thought, I’ll scream.

4
    The magazine for which all these people worked was a modest weekly publication, usually running to thirty-two or forty pages, with a circulation of around twenty thousand. In its far off post-war heyday – which none of the present staff could remember – it had achieved a sale four times greater, but during the sixties, seventies and eighties its appeal had dipped, declined and finally levelled out; and today it would not be unkind to say that in the broad mental landscape of the average British newsagent,
Come Into the Garden
was virtually invisible to the naked eye.
    This vanishing act represented a great lost opportunity. Gardening had become a lot more sexy in the past ten years, the garden centre had almost supplanted the supermarket as a magnet for disposable dosh, and the urgent question of morally defensible peat substitutes had become the staple talk