by Nicky Wells
An hour later, I woke with a raging thirst. Still no sign of Tim beside me, so I dragged myself out of bed and padded down into the kitchen. As I poured myself a glass of juice, I stared idly through the large French windows giving onto Tim’s small garden. It was still raining, but a little more gently by now, and the garden looked dark and mysterious. Hang on—dark and mysterious? Dark?
I walked up to the patio doors and peered outside. I could just make out a figure at the back of the garden digging by the beam of a torch. What on earth?
I opened the door and hissed, “What are you doing out there?” Tim turned around, and I was blinded instantly by the glare of light.
“Oi,” I shouted involuntarily, “Turn that light off.”
“Sorry,” he whispered and walked up to me. To my astonishment, I realized that he was wearing his old miner’s hat. He had picked it up at some car boot sale a while ago, and it usually lived in the display case in the lounge as some kind of exhibition piece. My mouth must have hung open in a big, unspoken question mark because Tim self-consciously patted the hat, grinning widely.
“Cool, isn’t it? I got it to work.”
“I can see that,” I grumbled. “But why?”
“Oh, the lady next door complained that my patio light kept her from sleeping, and so I had to turn it off.” He seemed far too awake for this ungodly hour of the morning. “But the going was good so I thought I’d find myself a torch, and then I remembered this. Isn’t it ingenious?”
“Quite,” I mumbled, not sure whether to laugh or cry. Here was my boyfriend, in the pouring rain, at one-thirty in the morning, killing slugs by the light of an old miner’s hat. A stranger would probably find that quite funny, but this was the man I had committed to—well, or would commit to, just as soon as he asked. I sighed, inwardly telling myself that it takes all sorts and that it could be worse. He could have been stark naked, for example.
“Right, I’m going back to bed. You coming, soon?” I asked faintly.
“Yup, nearly done!” He gave me a peck on the cheek and retreated back to the garden.
An hour later, I woke again—this time by the loud and insistent ringing of the alarm clock. At two-thirty in the morning! What joker had set that alarm? I bashed the casing vigorously, hitting all the right buttons repeatedly, but to no avail. It kept ringing. Finally, I unplugged the damn thing, yanking the cord so hard that I thought I had done actual damage to the socket, but it still continued to ring. Then I twigged. It was the phone! I seized the receiver and barked, “Whoever you are, go away.” I expected some kind of apology or explanation for the rude disturbance, but all I got was the long insistent dial tone that indicated that the line was free. And still the ringing persisted!
Almost fully awake now, I was finally able to categorize the sound adequately and identified it as Tim’s doorbell. A student prank, no doubt. I lunged towards the window and flung the sash open. However, to my dismay, I discovered not a bunch of drunken students but a police car with its lights flashing and two uniformed officers in front of Tim’s front door. My heart leapt into my mouth, and I nearly fell out of the window. Holy shit, what had happened?
“Just a minute,” I shouted shakily, “I’m coming down.”
Wrestling with the clunky deadbolts on the inside of the front door, I tried to pull Tim’s dressing gown around me at the same time in an attempt to greet the officers of the law with a modicum of decency.
“What’s wrong?” I ventured as soon as I had managed to unlock the door. I felt vaguely faint and must have looked white as a sheet because the taller one of the officers took my arm and spoke to me in that quiet, calming tone of voice usually reserved for the old and infirm.
“Ma’am, I don’t mean to alarm you, but we’ve had reports of suspicious activity in your garden. Are you the house owner?”
“Errm, no, well, yes, well, no. The house belongs to my boyfriend, Tim.”
“Right, right,” he said, taking notes on a little pad. “And are you alone in the house tonight?”
“No, Tim’s here,” I assured him.
“And you haven’t heard or noticed anything suspicious tonight?”
I considered for a second, and then shook my head. “Nothing at all.”
The other officer cleared his throat.
“Right. The thing is, though, we’ve had a report of a dark figure with a torch in your garden,” he repeated.
I stared in horror. Then the penny dropped. And okay, so it dropped really slowly, but it dropped.
“Oh. Oh! Ah. Well…” How to explain this to them? How to explain this without seeming completely insane?
“Well, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. That’s Tim. My boyfriend. You know, who owns the place.” The policemen looked at me expectantly.
“He is…” I hesitated. There was absolutely no way I would tell these people what Tim was really up to out there.
“He is…” I started again, then had a flash of inspiration. “He is an artist. He is working on one of his pieces.” That should do it. Artists were allowed to be eccentric, right? Everyone knew that artists did strange things at odd times.
“An artist,” the little officer repeated.
“That’s right,” I confirmed brightly. “An artist.”
There was a small silence as they digested this piece of information.
“Would it be okay if we just took a little look? Just for our records? We need to be certain so that we can close the incident report.”
Incident report! I swallowed. “Sure,” I croaked, “come on through and convince yourselves.”
I led them through to the kitchen where they would have the best vantage point for observing Tim’s “artistic” endeavors. Tim was still going, only now he had got much closer to the house. His miner’s lamp flickered ominously as he swayed back and forth, spraying slug repellent in gentle left-and-right movements across the decking.
“I thought you said he was an artist?” one of the policemen wanted to know.
“He is. Performing. A performing artist.” Two pairs of eyes looked at me dubiously.
“This is…he is practicing his next exhibition piece.” And then I decided to come clean, sort of. “It’s called The Killing of the Slugs on a Stifling Rainy Night in July,” I elaborated, emphasizing every word of the imaginary title. “He is planning to perform it next month at…erm…in Kew Gardens for the…er…gardening society,” I gabbled, warming to my theme. “He’s hoping to win…err...first prize, you see. Has his heart set on it. Completely.”
The other policeman had meanwhile spotted the bag of NO-SLUG pellets wilting away under the incessant drizzle. He observed a few moments longer, then smiled. Perhaps he was as embarrassed as I was.
“Okay then, I think we are done here.” He nudged his colleague.
“I think we are, too,” his colleague agreed and turned to me again. “I hope your boyfriend is going to dispose of the bodies appropriately,” he advised sternly. I stared back. Had he just cracked a joke?
“Anyway, sorry for disturbing you,” the two policemen chorused in unison.
“Oh, no problem. All in a day’s work and all that. I am glad you came. So glad that we are protected by the force of law.” I stopped, then issued my parting shot. “May the force be with us, always.”
May the force be with us, always? Even as I said it, I cringed. Where had that come from?
“Um, the door’s back through here,” I reminded them hastily, leading the way before I could dig myself in any further. “Right then, bye…and thanks!” I trilled as I closed the door behind them, leaning against it for support as giggles started to shake my body.
Chapter Four
“And then what happened?” Rachel was all agog, hardly able to believe her ears.
It was Saturday lunchtime, and I had summoned Rachel for a girlie coffee-cum-early-lunch at our favorite café on Tooting High Street. It was a slightly up-market greasy spoon, but the food was delicious, the cappuccino
s tall and frothy, and the prices low.
“Well, an hour or so later, Tim finally came to bed. He was completely oblivious to the commotion he had caused, and he hadn’t even noticed the policemen and I staring out at him. I still haven’t got round to telling him yet.” I took a sip of my cappuccino for fortification.
“Will you? Tell him?” Rachel’s eyes were full of undisguised glee.
“Oh, I don’t know. What would be the point? He’d just be embarrassed. I meant to tell him over breakfast, but just exactly how do you raise such a subject? ‘Oh by the way, you now have a police record for the unlawful termination of slugs?’” Rachel burst out laughing and I couldn’t help giggling too.
“So anyway, he came back to bed, smelling of slug repellent and quite possibly dead slugs”—I gave an involuntary shudder—“and he tried to cuddle me.”
“Yeuch!” Rachel exclaimed.
“Exactly. So I told him to have a shower, and he said he couldn’t because there was no hot water.”
“How? Tim’s anal about things like that!”
“I know. It turns out he had to mix the pellets with hot water, and so he’d used all the hot water to kill the slugs.”
“And so he ran out?” Rachel snorted. “That’ll teach him to invest in a combi-boiler, finally.”
“Not sure about that. Anyway, I said he stank to high heaven, and he said he was really tired and would change the sheets in the morning. And then he turned over and snored. So I took my duvet and my pillows and decamped to the guest room.”
Rachel looked at me with much amused eyes. “Unbelievable. Really, Sophie, your boyfriend is something else.”
And there it was, rearing its ugly head again—the mutual dislike between Tim and my best friend, Rachel. Tim wasn’t very vocal about it, but I could sense his disapproval of Rachel every time they met. Rachel was just too…spikey, too glam, too unconventional for him. In return, Rachel’s list of Tim’s flaws was long and growing, and I cursed myself for adding to her ammunition in her eternal battle to get me to “see the light,” as she put it.
Rachel and I had met at college. In fact, we had met at the college’s accommodation office, both disgruntled with the respective rooms we had been allocated. Mine was above the only kitchen of a house for fifteen students, and hers was too far away from the center of town. The accommodation officers were singularly unhelpful, and Rachel and I shared a look of commiseration as our respective “helpers” turned us away. Normally, Rachel wouldn’t have been the kind of girl that I would have addressed easily. I felt frumpy and intimidated by her glamorous, self-assured outlook. But Rachel didn’t seem to notice anything untoward about me and started chatting away without a care in the world. We went for coffee, then we bought a local paper, and within two hours, we had found ourselves a little flat right in the town. We stayed there for two years and then moved to London together to do a journalism course at City University. By then, our tastes and likes had become inextricably intertwined. We often felt like we were twins. Except when it came to men.
So Rachel’s profound and unwavering dislike of Tim was a bit of a problem. She thought he was a perfectly nice bloke, just not for me. Given half a chance, her catalogue of reproaches against him could be endless. His prim and proper nature—Rachel called it, “stuffy.” His bizarre miserliness. Tim’s obsession with his career, and the crazy hours he worked—crazier than ours, and that was saying a lot. His materialistic outlook on things—I never should have told Rachel about Tim’s reaction to my present; she would never let that go. The fact that I seemed to be organizing everything in our relationship. Most damning of all, the fact that he really didn’t approve of what he called my “wild-child” history, including my liking of hard rock music. ”So…common, darling,” Tim would say about my numerous trips to hard rock concerts “Such a waste of time…and money.” Tim even disapproved of the way I had looked back then, which of course he could only judge by photos.
When, after Tim and I had been going out for a few months, it became obvious that I had properly fallen for the guy and was seriously planning to spend my life with him, given the opportunity to do so, Rachel calmed down and fell into an uneasy stance of reluctant acceptance. If it was my unerring desire to make myself unhappy, Rachel had declared, she could do nothing more than stand by and pick up the pieces, “as and when.” So we had arranged a fragile truce on the subject of Tim—and of men in general, for my part of the bargain was to stop criticizing her turbulent and ever-changing love life.
Generally, that meant that things went well between us. But every now and then, on occasions such as this, when I needed to confide in her, she couldn’t resist digging out the old barbs. So it was no surprise when she gave me a half-pitying, half-withering look now and asked, “Are you really sure he’s worth all of this?”
“Yes, I am. Look, he’s a great guy. He’s kind and caring and good looking. Tim has a good job. He adores me. He’s funny. No, really, he can be. You just never get to see him like that. He’s intelligent and he likes reading books. We go to the opera, and we go traveling. He would never let me down. He would never betray me. If we had kids, he’d be a brilliant father, and I could be a stay-at-home mum if I wanted. He’s everything to me. And he’s taking me out of the wilderness of singledom.” I was breathless after this little tirade.
“Will you listen to yourself?” Rachel asked, quietly. “Where is the love, the passion, the romance? Doing crazy, unpremeditated things on the hop? Where does sex feature on your list of important criteria?”
“Sex,” I declared loudly, then abruptly lowered my voice as I noticed that I had the attention of everyone there. “Sex,” I hissed, “isn’t everything. If you’re going to spend your life with someone, you need to be friends first, and foremost. The sex always goes eventually. Particularly when you hit sixty or so. And then if that was all you had, where do you go from there?”
Rachel stared at me with undisguised shock. “Sex, darling, is everything. If you can’t sleep with the guy, how are you going to have children?”
“I didn’t say we didn’t sleep together. We do. And for the record, it’s good. Great. Fantastic, even, if you must know,” I added, still hissing but injecting as much emphasis as I could. Rachel wasn’t convinced, so I changed the subject. “And anyway, he does do spontaneous things. What about that trip to Paris he’s promised me?”
Rachel snorted. “That’s pure guilt. And hardly spontaneous. Although I have to say, I approve of the spectacle that he made of himself in the restaurant. Really. Hats off. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of such a gesture.”
I pounced gratefully. “There you go. He can be wonderful, and he is wonderful, and I love him, and that’s that.”
We held each other in semi-hostile looks for a few seconds, then burst out laughing and decided to leave men be men. We paid up and went window-shopping and star-spotting on New Bond Street instead. We loved strolling up and down London’s most expensive shopping streets on a Saturday afternoon, ogling jewelry that we could never afford and pretending to be famous people when sashaying through the big double doors at Tiffany’s or Harvey Nick’s. Prompted by the thought of double doors, my pesky flashbacks chimed in again.
Back then, at The Hall in Edinburgh, I faced a set of double doors with a big brass label identifying them as the artists’ entrance and took stock of my situation. I hadn’t been discovered, yet. I was entirely on my own, and exactly where I needed to be. Now for the final frontier—how to get myself from being in front of these doors to being behind them?
Without much thought, I took potluck and tapped out a random tattoo of knocks.
Well, it wasn’t so random as it turned out because the sesame opened.
“What do you want?” a big, burly roadie enquired. Mind you, not “What are you doing here” or “How did you get in here?” It seemed my luck was still with me.
“Well, yes…” I offered, “The thing is…I’m here by invitation of Darren. My name’
s Sophie.”
“Sophie.” A statement, not a question. Probably merely a repetition, but it set me off on another explanation.
“Yes, Sophie. From Bristol, two weeks ago. Darren invited me along for a repeat performance.” A repeat performance? I cringed even as I said it, recognizing the completely unintended innuendo here.
“Sophie. From Bristol. For Darren. Repeat performance,” the guy reiterated flatly. No backing out now.
“Yes, that’s right,” I confirmed brightly, and then the door closed in my face.
I had to wait for about five seemingly interminable minutes, but fate was still on my side, and it was Darren who opened the door to me next. Alas, rather than jumping for joy, he stared at me, confusion blooming in his eyes, and I wanted to die of embarrassment. More fool me for assuming, thinking, that the invitation had been meant seriously. I took a half step backwards and was just turning to leave when recognition finally hit Darren.
“Sophie?” he screamed with glee. “Sorry, I didn’t know you there for a minute—I was expecting someone else. But never fear,” he exclaimed hastily, reaching for my hand as I took another step backwards. “I’m all for a repeat performance!” He wrapped me in a big, leering hug. Not quite what I had intended, and certainly not with the right guy, but if it got me in…
Darren was still talking. “It’s too late now to get you a backstage pass, love. Why didn’t you let us know you were coming?” Yeah, like how? I asked silently, but Darren prattled on. “Give me a few minutes to get you on the list. Can’t let you in if you’re not on the list. The others will be thrilled.”
I felt dazed, confused, and overwhelmed. I had made it. I had got to Edinburgh, found the concert venue, and got in. More importantly, Darren had remembered me eventually and had made delighted noises about me being there. Okay, so that could have been because of the inadvertent promise of sex I seemed to have made, but I would fix that in a minute. Or later, anyway. There would be no sex. Of course, I couldn’t let on just then. I would explain the misunderstanding, and then we could all have a good laugh, right?