Pompomberry House

by Trevithick, Rosen

  Biff was dead, and the police weren’t even investigating his murder! Still, eventually, someone, somewhere, would report him missing and then the police would be kicking down my door, begging for information. D.I. Clive Taylor would be down on his knees crying, “Mrs Whittaker! Mrs Whittaker! Please help me catch the killer! My career is going down the pan.”

  And I’d look at him, and I’d remember the brash, arrogant way that he’d spoken to me. But then, I’d look at his pitiful, pale eyes and think of his pitiful, pale children and their pitiful, pale, hungry mouths and I’d decide that I would assist him. I’d be helping to feed a family as well as bringing Biff’s killer to justice.

  I took a moment to grieve for Biff. I hadn’t known him well, but something had clicked between us that night, as we watched Arrested Development and mocked the writers together.

  Then I thought back yet again to what Biff had said — “I’m sorry.” What was he sorry for? “Oh, it’s nothing,” he’d added. “Forget I said anything.” But how could I forget now, now that he was dead? What had he done?

  “Are you all right?” asked a concerned, rumbling voice. Gareth’s goofy face was a welcome sight, and I realised that I’d been missing him even for the short time he was in the bathroom.

  It was easy to fall into his embrace, into his familiar, comfortable arms. Aside from a fairly recently acquired beer belly, Gareth was rather bony. Yet his cuddle thrilled me like a fall from a great height, onto a bouncy castle covered in cushions.

  I felt his breath on the back of my neck, warm and moist like a breeze on a summer’s day. He smelt faintly of stale smoke but I found that I didn’t mind. Lovely, cosy Gareth, the only person who believed that I saw what I saw.

  At least Gareth agreed that covering up a murder was wrong. Rafe had appeared to be the only one of the writers capable of seeing sense. Did I have an ally in Rafe Maddocks? He’d refused to go along with Dawn and Montgomery’s harebrained plan. Perhaps he would give a statement to the police, if he hadn’t already. Of course he hasn’t already, otherwise they wouldn’t have given me such a hard time.

  “Are you still cold? Do you want me to run you a bath?”

  I smiled, trying to remember the last time that Gareth had run me a bath — possibly, our honeymoon.

  “Do you remember the last time I ran you a bath?” he asked, with a twinkle in his eye. I recognised that look — it was the look of lust. It was one of my favourites from Gareth’s vast range of enjoyable expressions.

  No, I was not going to sleep with my husband. Absolutely not. There was nothing that would make this break up harder than falling into bed together. No matter how good he was at the sexy stuff, I had to be strong, for both of us.

  I felt the warning sign — the tip of his big nose brushing against my neck, and I knew a kiss was coming.

  Anticipation — it wasn’t fear, it wasn’t horror, it wasn’t frustration and it wasn’t cold. For a few seconds, I felt something other than the grisly medley of emotions that had been stewing all day. There was a new option. I could have the pain casserole or, I could have ... sexy time!

  I let his lips tickle my neck. Ordinarily, I would put a stop to this nonsense. However, can anybody really be expected to resist sexy time with the man they (still) love after a day of death and police questioning?

  These were not ordinary circumstances, so I decided that I would allow a little bedroom gymnastics. After all, it didn’t mean that we were getting back together, did it?

  Chapter 7

  I began flinging Gareth’s things into boxes. The home-brew kit he’d bought (with my money) and never used, the monocycle he’d bought (with my money) and never ridden, and the Learn Italian kit he’d bought (with his own money ... no wait, I mean my money) were all chucked into a brown cardboard box.

  For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And the reaction to the sex we had was going to have to be huge. I decided to progress the break up process accordingly. I packed up a box of his things to compensate for the stupidly generous foreplay. I separated our CD collection, for the unnecessarily satisfying first shag. As for the unexpected second course — well, perhaps I really needed to consider getting a lawyer.

  I felt moved. Involving lawyers felt so final. I mean, sure, Gareth hadn’t got off his backside for eighteen months, but he had come up trumps this weekend. He’d been my knight in a shining car. I wasn’t ready to use the ‘D’ word, but a little mediation might still be in order. I needed to show Gareth that the separation really was happening. Yet immediately, I felt guilty. How could I have led him on so cruelly?

  Then I thought about it. Break ups weren’t straightforward. People made mistakes. People sometimes slept with their ex. It wasn’t right, but it had happened. I couldn’t change it, but I could do the right thing now. I looked in the yellow pages and got the number for a mediator. As soon as I read ‘your home, finances or legal practicalities’, I knew I couldn’t call. I couldn’t bear to think about finalising separate living arrangements. Gareth crashing at Barry’s was one thing; but I wasn’t ready to think beyond that.

  He’d been so lovely when I spoke to the police. Taylor had been so condescending. I still couldn’t get over my tyres getting re-inflated. Why would the vandal bother to fix them? Or had somebody else done it for me, as a kind gesture? The problem was, the only kind person who’d been there was dead.

  Annabel sent me an email. She apologised that things got ‘a bit fraught’, and said that she hoped it wouldn’t stop us from being BFFs. A bit fraught? Somebody was knifed to death. Annabel had sided with a woman who ordered me not to call the police. In what way were the events anything close to being summed up as a bit fraught. Naturally, I didn’t reply.

  I grieved for Biff — a young man cut off in his prime — it was tragic. But there was something else I mourned for, something more personal, which had also been ruthlessly cut down in its prime — my short story!

  The tale of the bickering charity representatives was gold dust! It had been bursting with potential. I mean, sure, my first draft needed work, but then babies poo their pants and plenty of them go on to become great. Thanks to the sea and my stolen memory card, I might never see my baby grow up.

  Of course, I could write a new first draft, but it wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t be creating, I’d be regurgitating, like building a robot to replace a child. It would feel wrong.

  Besides, would I really have wanted my story to be published alongside the likes of Dawn Mann and Annabel Fleming? Did my clever, witty, observational tale really fit in with pigs falling off cliffs and china dolls falling in love with gnomes? This was probably a blessing in disguise.

  I looked at Gareth’s things, now mostly in boxes. As separations go, ours hadn’t been massively successful so far. I would have to try harder. Throwing myself into the writers’ retreat hadn’t assisted me to move on at all. However, it is important not to view one weekend spoilt by murder, as an inevitably recurring pattern. I would just have to find something else to take my mind off my husband. Perhaps painting?

  No! I was a writer. It was in my bones. It was in my blood. It was in my snot, in my faeces and in my earwax. I oozed ‘writer’. The people on the trip may have been misguided, but I was not. I really felt I might be destined for great things. I just had to keep working at it.

  I put on my boots and blue spotty socks, and made my way into town. I needed to get writing again, and the sooner I bought a new laptop, the sooner I could ooze literary masterpieces.

  * * *

  Three weeks went by. The more time that elapsed, the more my weekend on Pompomberry Island felt like a bad dream. I no longer felt like a witness to murder; instead I felt like somebody who’d been unfortunate enough to walk into a really bad film at the cinema. The sort of irritating, modern ‘masterpiece’ that ends on a cliff-hanger for no justifiable reason.

  The seagulls were less of a problem in London, which helped my nerves. There were plenty of them around,
along with warnings not to feed them. Some news sources even mentioned ‘dive-bombing’. However, I didn’t feel that the gulls in London were as vindictive as those at Pompomberry House. They were certainly smaller. The gulls in London made me uncomfortable, but they didn’t terrify me.

  When I first got back to London, I drove myself mad, looking at the forum, reading every post those insane people wrote (e.g. ‘We had a lovely weekend and everything ran smoothly ...’). However, nothing gave me the answers I badly needed. I was just compulsively hitting ‘Refresh’ and making myself more and more angry.

  I sent out a private group message, asking what had happened after I left Pompomberry Island, but only Dawn replied, and that was to tell me that they’d made a decision to move on and never speak of it again. She said she’d be gravely disappointed if I didn’t do the same, then signed it with a string of XOs.

  And then there were Annabel’s prattling emails. She liked to tell me how glad she was that we were friends, whilst failing to acknowledge the big fat, Biff-shaped elephant in the room, or the even more pertinent fact that I’d never liked her.

  Eventually, I told myself that enough was enough. Stalking people who’d clearly gone into denial would get me nowhere, except possibly to a psychiatric ward.

  And so, time went by without reading the forum, without planning ways to catch them out, and without refreshing my inbox every thirty seconds.

  A few weeks later, Biff no longer felt like a person, but a character. Pompomberry Island felt like a set. Back in my own home, in North London, it was difficult to recall that chilling, unsettling atmosphere. I could even picture a seagull without breaking out into a cold sweat.

  A less well-balanced person might have had an existential crisis — had any of it really happened? But not me. I knew that I was just compartmentalising. My whole life had become one big compartmentalising exercise, with my marriage break up being stowed away in a locked, iron box, and everything else arranged in little baskets around the edge.

  There was the fiction-writing basket — a couple of hours a day where I afforded myself the luxury of thinking about nothing but my characters and their controllable lives. There was the journalism basket — several hours a week spent interviewing, typing up and submitting. There was the housework basket — dishes, tidying and laundry, all performed whilst listening to the radio. In fact, I could often go through a whole day without thinking about my marriage breakdown at all.

  So, after a short break from Gareth, I found that I was ready to arrange a mediation appointment. I tried to discuss our joint mortgage with him and he told me to ‘go fark a chicken’, which I took as evidence that we weren’t going to be able to sort things out between ourselves. His response to my invitation to mediation — ‘go fark a chimpanzee’ — I took as a sign that he was becoming more cooperative.

  Living alone, I found I missed the forum a lot. In the past, I had visited dozens of times each day, to exchange ideas, gossip and jokes with other writers and bookworms. It was a shame that my pleasure had been ruined by the five least personable indie writers in the world.

  Still, I couldn’t bear to go back to the forum now, even if I could be trusted to put my deer stalker hat away. The events at Pompomberry House had begun to recede, it was a fading nightmare that left a lingering, foetid, dead mouse-like taste in the mouth. But the thought of having anything more to do with those people sickened me to the stomach.

  I might never have visited the forum again, if it hadn’t been for two happenings, which sent me rushing to my shiny new laptop praying that I could remember my forum password. They were peculiar happenings — very peculiar indeed!

  * * *

  I was just sitting down to a nice cup of Earl Grey rooibos in front of the television, when I first noticed. It was the national afternoon news. The newsreaders had confronted us with wars, hunger and the recession, so it was now time for one of the many light, feel-good stories that they liked to run at three in the afternoon.

  Today’s condescending corner for the elderly, homebound and self-employed took us to the south coast of Dorset, to ‘a cliff-side disaster’. What was it going to be? Had a Postman Pat kite got snarled on the rocks? Had an old lady dropped her camera over Durdle Door? Had a French tourist trodden on a bee? Had a priest seen a jellyfish in the bathing area?

  Then, I realised with shock, that the news story was about a pig, a pig that had fallen off a cliff!

  Well, I’m blowed.

  The news showed the fire brigade, in partnership with an air ambulance, airlifting a pig, in a rescue success story. The emergency services had been mobilised after an anonymous call from a member of the public. I watched a tearful farmer help a fireman unfasten one of the straps that saved the pig’s life, and realised that it was actually rather sweet. I hoped that Dawn had decided to go with her happy ending.

  Obviously Dawn’s idea was not as far-fetched as I’d thought. Still, this news event was going to ruin her story’s potential. Nobody would believe that she’d had the idea independently.

  I found myself idly wondering when the anthology was going to be published. Would this latest spanner in the works delay things? And had they found somebody to replace me, or did they go ahead with only five authors? Did the book even go ahead at all? If they had all left Pompomberry House by the time the police got there, they wouldn’t have had time to finish writing. Besides, who could focus on writing after discovering a dead body?

  Just as I was opening my web browser, I registered what I was doing — letting those people into my life again. Yes, I was only looking up the anthology, but would it stop at that?

  I might see a thread that intrigued me, and start reading. Then, I might read a post that I might want to comment on, and start typing. Before I knew it, I’d be drawn back into conversations with Danger and Rafe, while Dawn and Montgomery moderated from up high. Annabel would see my activity as proof that we were still BFFs.

  It had taken me three weeks to unwind — three weeks to stop looking over my shoulder, three weeks to stop looking at gulls with suspicion, three weeks to beat the urge to become Nancy Drew. I couldn’t go back to that.

  Instead, I opened up Word, and began typing up an article about whether beige was the new magnolia. If only I could give up the lifestyle magazine work. It was so dull.

  I allowed the news to continue rolling in the background. It wasn’t as though anything this late in the programme was likely to be distracting. Any moment now, the stair-lift adverts would begin, and the personal injury bloodsuckers would start their hunt — those were the easiest of all to ignore.

  “And now we take you to Bognor Regis, where it’s gnome sweet gnome for two lucky people. Gnome pun intended!”

  I blinked rapidly. Was I seeing what I thought I was seeing?

  “Residents woke up on Saturday morning to find a gnome wedding taking place on the sands. So far, gnomebody gnomes who’s responsible.”

  One name popped into my mind, and one name alone — Annabel Fleming.

  The television crew showed several shots of the scene — some ten-dozen gnomes laid out standing around, as if watching a particularly frisky-looking gnome marry a china doll.

  You had to hand it to the woman. She did publicity stunts well. News of the gnome-doll wedding had now crossed the nation. What better way to launch her short story? It had to be her, an independent gnome wedding was just too unlikely.

  Then, a sickening thought struck me. If Annabel had staged a gnome wedding to promote her book, had Dawn ... No, Dawn must still be in Spain. The pig must be a coincidence.

  Whilst staging a gnome wedding was a socially acceptable way to promote a book, throwing a pig off a cliff was seriously overstepping the mark. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but cruelty to animals had to be an exception. This was national news, not a YouTube channel! Not even Dawn would be stupid enough to throw a pig off a cliff in the name of eBook sales.

  I found myself at my computer again. Th
is time the forum had already loaded by the time my cautionary voice stepped in, and I was far less receptive the second time around. Shut up cautionary voice. This is too interesting to ignore.

  Where should I look first? Maybe, ‘Author Arena’ or ‘Book Blog’? I was surprised to find that I needed to look no further than the header bar. There, above all the other posts, was an advert for our book.

  Oh no.

  They’d gone with Montgomery’s idea and called the anthology, ‘The Book of Most Quality Writers’. And apparently, the book had already been published — this morning, in fact.

  Hmm, isn’t that convenient?

  Without really thinking, I followed the link. Oh good Lord! The cover depicted Dawn Mann, draped over an antique chair, wearing a flouncy cardigan and even more ridiculous skirt. She was clearly wearing stockings — you could see the lace tops. Her legs splurged from her hemline, as if from a malfunctioning giant sausage machine. She had managed to flatten some of the hair frizz by tying a ribbon laterally around her head. The ribbon appeared to have some sort of feather sprouting from its left — apparently from an emu or albatross. How could anybody think that that would sell copies? It was hideous. At least, because it was a Kindle book, it would be easy to avoid looking at the cover ever again.

  I found myself wondering how she’d got away with it. With so many egos in the group, how was it that Dawn, of all people, had managed to swing it so that she, and she alone, was the cover model? Well, there was only one logical explanation — she’d been given sole responsibility for the artwork. Wow, there was a decision that the others must regret.

  With my gaze planted firmly on the right of the page, away from the cover, I sent a copy to my Kindle. Already I felt soiled, having a stocking-clad Dawn Mann on my beloved Kindle. I didn’t really want to read any of the book, but somehow I felt I needed to own a copy. I had been there for its birth, after all.