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

evidently failed to say what he wanted to hear. ‘But what about the excitement? Isn’t it a buzz meeting famous people all the time?’
    Osborne thought about it, but the question meant nothing to him at all. He shrugged.
    ‘Haven’t you done any interviews yourself?’
    ‘Never.’
    ‘Is that why you wanted to come?’
    ‘Partly.’
    ‘But it’s not like really
meeting
these famous people, you know. I mean, you might bump into them in the street the next day and they wouldn’t know you.’
    ‘So what?’
    ‘I mean, take this Angela Farmer. I’m positive,
positive,
I have met her before, but I know for an absolute fact that she won’t remember me.’
    ‘You have met her, though; that’s something.’
    ‘Well, there’s the difference between us. I really don’t think that it is.’

    Osborne was wrong, though, if he thought he had no impact on people in general, because there was one group of his acquaintance on whom he made an impression disproportionately large: women. Unlikely as it may seem, women regularly took a fancy to Osborne, against all the negative probability that a down-at-heel hack with only a few kilos of peanut brittle to his name would make a woman remotely happy in the long term. There was just something about him; something that the little squit Makepeace, for example, would never possess despite all his youth and cleverness, despite even his ginger ponytail. Even Osborne’s virginal vagueness about sex, which he always modestly supposed would disqualify him from the field, paradoxically served only to fuel the attraction.
    Of course, cynics might say that the phenomenon owed more to the shocking self-esteem of the women concerned than to the innate attractiveness of the man; but this insight, while undoubtedly helpful, could not account for everything. Osborne had many genuine features to commend him: a pleasant manner, decent dental hygiene, and a liberality with cup cakes bordering on saintliness. To cap it all, there was an old-fashioned streak of gallantry he had somehow never shaken off – which meant that he sometimes complimented women on their appearance, opened doors for them, even kissed the backs of their hands. This knocked them dead. Such demonstrations being like showers of spring rain in the veritable Death Valley of most modern women’s emotional lives, Osborne absent-mindedly picked up female admirers the way other people pick up fluff.
    Michelle, of course, had fancied him for twelve years, a fact that anyone but Osborne would have deduced long ago from her wildly divergent behaviour towards him. Why else would someone appear to be so cloyingly sweet one minute, and the next as punchy as a boxing kangaroo? It is a sure sign of thwarted passion in a naturally forceful person such as Michelle. But Osborne, unable to penetrate the mystery, merely assumed that when she was nice, she was attempting to give him the benefit of the doubt; and when she was nasty, it was because, understandably, she found she couldn’t, after all.
    Those spoof letters she wrote to Osborne from the unfortunate red-herring address in Honiton were only the latest of dozens she had written for her own amusement and then filed carefully in a special place in the office. In each brace of letters, moreover, she had conformed to the same schizoid pattern, making it a rule that for each saucy epistle there would be a reproving one of equal strength. Looking back on the two letters that (thanks to Lillian) had got away, she was proud of the part about the gold flip-flops and the gardening gloves, but relieved, on the whole, not to have made reference on this occasion to a particular sexual fantasy that recurred in the letters as it recurred in her dreams. She didn’t want to scare anyone unnecessarily, even under a false name. But this fantasy, for what it is worth, entailed the tying of Osborne’s wrists with garden twine, the staking of his body to a freshly turned flower-bed, and the stroking of