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

his exposed nipples, ever so lightly, with the sharpened tines of a rusty, jumbo pitchfork. In some obscure way which Michelle had never dared pause to analyse, the idea gave her enormous pleasure.

    Approaching Stonehenge, Makepeace ventured, ‘Perhaps you know Angela Farmer in the biblical sense.’ Osborne took amoment to guess what his friend might be getting at, because his mind immediately leapt to Angela Farmer as the redoubtable Eve in
Forgive Us Our Trespasses –
in which case, of course, he
did
know her in the biblical sense, as did millions and millions of other people.
    ‘Are you talking about sex, Makepeace? Are you suggesting
Angela Farmer
would have sex with me? The well-known glamorous person? You must be further off your trolley than I thought.’
    ‘Why not? You’re a nice-looking bloke. I’ve seen how the women look at you down at the Birthplace of Aphrodite.’
    Osborne suddenly felt rather warm and unbuttoned his coat. His window steamed up.
    ‘Just drop it,’ he said.
    ‘You’d make a nice couple, you and Angela – and the tulip. And she must have
buckets
of money.’
    ‘Look –’
    ‘You should get in there, I’m not joking. Take her some flowers. Tell her she’s got the nicest shed you’ve ever seen. Something like that.’
    ‘Leave it, please.’
    ‘I’ll bet you two dozen cup cakes she remembers you.’
    ‘Shut up. I mean it.’

    It was just getting dark when they finally located their boarding house. Fortunately there were unlikely to be two B&Bs with a name like Dunquenchin in a small town like Honiton. ‘What does it mean, for fuck’s sake – that they’ve given up alcohol?’ asked Makepeace, as he noisily wrestled the bike out of the back of the van on Dunquenchin’s gravel drive. ‘Big fucking deal.’ He had been a bit tetchy ever since the conversation about Ms Farmer, Osborne had noticed, and was starting tobehave in the manner of a loose cannon. Perhaps Osborne’s notorious helplessness with street-maps had annoyed him (it annoyed most people); perhaps something nasty once happened to him in a town famous for lace and traffic jams. Either way, he had started to say ‘Fuck’ a lot, so it was fair to assume that something was up. ‘Fuck!’ he now exclaimed for no apparent reason, as he fixed the bits of his bike together. ‘Oh, fuck
this!’
    ‘You all right?’ asked Osborne.
    ‘Fuck off.’
    ‘We made it, though.’
    ‘Dun-fuckin-quenchin,’ Makepeace went on. ‘Jesus Fuck, what the fuck is that?’
    Osborne wondered momentarily whether he had somehow stumbled into a Martin Scorsese movie, but he looked around and he was definitely still in Honiton at lighting-up time.
    ‘I expect there’s an explanation,’ he said in an attempt to mollify.
    ‘An explanation, he says. Fucking great. Mister Oz reckons there’s an explanation. So what will you be calling
your
retirement cottage, Mister Oz? Dun-buggerin-about? Or just Dun-doin-fuck-all?’
    Osborne tried to ignore this, merely dragging his bag to the front door and peering in the dark for the doorbell. This was scarcely the right time to fall out with Makepeace, because for one thing they had booked a double room. He found the doorbell and pressed it. ‘Better than Dun-bloody-knowing-it-all,’ he muttered, but loudly enough for Makepeace to hear. Which was probably a mistake.
    Makepeace threw the bike down with a clatter (that ominous
tring!)
and strode towards him, almost at a run.
    ‘Dun
what?’
he bellowed. Good grief, it was the horror of the pomegranates all over again. Osborne stifled a scream. ‘Dun fucking
what?’
    At which point, luckily, the door opened to reveal the rather dramatic silhouette of a large man in an old fireman’s jacket, and Makepeace skidded to a halt on the stones. Osborne looked around in amazement. The man, who was observing Makepeace coolly from the step, appeared to be holding a metal hatchet in his hand, possibly with the intention of using it. Everything went