When the cat got stuck in the shed for 24 hours last year, there were red faces all round at a certain house in Highgate.
Tim wrinkled his nose and chewed his biro. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘How did things go with Angela Farmer?’
Osborne thought for a second. Angela Farmer?
‘Quite a coup getting her, I thought,’ continued Tim. ‘In fact, I made a note somewhere. I think we’ll splash it. Nice to have your name on the front of the magazine again before –’
Tim stopped abruptly, but Osborne didn’t notice. He was experiencing a strange sense of weightlessness. Was it possible to meet Angela Farmer, glamorous middle-aged American star of a thousand British sitcoms, and have no recollection of it? He tried picturing the scene at the door, the handshake, the famous smoky voice of Ms Farmer barking, ‘C’min! What’re ya waitin for? Applause?’ but nothing came. His mind was a blank; it was as though he had never met her. Panic welled in his chest, and in a split second his entire career as a celebrity interviewer flashed before his eyes.
‘So what was she like?’
‘Is it hot in here?’
‘Yes, a bit. But what was she like?’
Osborne decided to bluff.
‘Angela Farmer? Oh, fine. Fine, Angela Farmer, yes. Very’ – here he consulted his notes – ‘interesting. Very American, of course.’
Tim nodded encouragingly.
‘Good shed, was it?’
‘Angela Farmer’s shed, you mean? Yes, oh yes. Ms Farmer has a surprisingly good shed.’
‘Did you ask about those hilarious gerbils in the shed in From This Day Forward?’
‘Did I? Oh yes, I’m sure I did.’
‘And I think I read somewhere that she was actually proposed to in a shed by her second husband – whatsisname, the man who plays the shed builder in For Ever and Ever Amen – but that they broke up after a row about weather-proofing.’
‘All true, mate. All true.’
‘Should make an interesting piece, then.’
‘I’ll say.’
They both paused, staring into the middle distance, pondering the interesting piece. ‘The cat got stuck in the shed overnight once, too.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The cat. Got stuck in the shed. Overnight. She said it was quite funny.’
The deputy editor wrinkled his nose again, and changed the subject.
‘Oh, and you ought to mention the Angela Farmer rose. Smash hit of last year’s Chelsea. No doubt propagated in a shed, of course, ha ha. But I expect you covered all that.’
Osborne gave a brave smile.
‘Well, mustn’t hold you up.’
‘No.’
‘See you later.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t you ever get tired of sheds, Osborne?’
‘Never.’
‘Unlike some,’ said the deputy editor darkly, and girded himself to do battle with the subs.
Waiting for Osborne’s column later that evening, after everyone else had gone home, Michelle donned her pastry-cuffs, strapped a spotless pinny over her outfit, and tackled the reference books, rearranging them in strict alphabetical order, fixing them in a perpendicular position, and drawing them neatly to the extreme edge of the shelves. Having accomplished this, she scoured the coffee machine and dusted the venetian blinds, in the course of which activity she deliberately elbowed a large economy packet of Lillian’s cup-soups into a bin. Then she sat down at her typewriter and wrote some much-needed letters for the ‘Dear Donald’ page.
She loved this task. Few bona fide readers were writing to the magazine these days, and Michelle’s particular joy was to write the bogus letters ungrammatically and then correct them afterwards. Subbing was a great passion of Michelle’s; it was like making a plant grow straight and tall. ‘Dear Donald,’ she would type with a thrill. ‘As an old age pensioner, my Buddleia has grown too big for me to comfortably cut it back myself …’ She could barely prevent herself from ripping it straight out of the machine, to prune those dangling modifiers, stake those split infinitives. How quickly the time passed when you were having fun. The only thing that stumped her – as it always did – was the invention of fake names and addresses, because she could never see why one fake name sounded more authentic than any other. ‘G. Clarke, Honiton, Devon’ was how she signed each one of today’s batch, hoping that inspiration would strike later. She often chose G. Clarke of Honiton. She’d never been there, but she fancied that’s where all the readers lived.
Time to check up on Osborne, she thought, when ten letters from G. Clarke were complete, photocopied and subbed within an inch of their lives. She dialled Osborne’s number on the internal phone. It rang on his desk and startled him, so that he dropped an open bottle of Tipp-Ex on to his shoes.
‘Bugger,’ he said, as he answered the phone.
‘Going well, oh great wordsmith?’
Kneading his face, Osborne watched in helpless alarm as the correcting fluid seeped into the leather uppers of his only decent footwear.
‘Anything wrong?’
‘No, no. Nearly there, actually. Just got to think of the pay-off.’
‘Oh marvellous.’ Michelle sounded ironic, the way she often did on Wednesday nights. ‘That’s dandy.’ There was a pause.
‘Far be it from me,’ she said sweetly, ‘but have you mentioned that he writes in his shed? And that this explains the repeated use of weed-killer as a murder weapon in the books? You know what I mean: he looks up from his rude desk of logs for inspiration, and there’s the weed-killer, next to the bone-meal. In the one I took on holiday last year, he killed off the prime suspect with a garden rake. One blow to the back of the neck, and that was it. Nasty. In the latest book, I understand, someone is dealt the death-blow with a pair of shears.’
‘What are you talking about? Who do you mean?’
‘Trent Carmichael. This week’s “Me and My Shed”. The crime writer.’
Osborne thought a minute, thought another minute, remembered everything – in particular the bestselling author laughing apologetically, ‘Well, er, the cat got locked in the shed once, but no foul play was suspected!’ – and said, ‘I’ll call you back.’
Things were looking bad. He unlaced his shoes, took them off, and on bended knee started to scrub them upside down on the carpet, hoping to remove the worst of the whitener while deciding what to do next. He looked up to see Michelle standing beside him.
‘No, you’ve got it wrong,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the floor, his pulse pounding in his neck. ‘Trent Carmichael is next week. You wouldn’t know whether this stuff washes out, would you?’
‘So who is it this week?’