by Agnes Owens
‘How did you know I needed a gardener?’ she asked in a winsome tone while boldly making eye contact.
‘Aha,’ he replied, wagging his finger, ‘A little bird told me.’
‘As you see,’ she said, ‘I have a big garden that I cannot possibly manage on my own. I would like new plants growing all over it, but the plot under the kitchen window must not be disturbed. I have a special reason for insisting on that.’
‘What might that be?’ he asked, mildly curious.
‘I’ll let you know when I decide to.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, it’s your garden, but I have a suggestion.’
In glowing terms he described a lovely bed of roses he would like to plant, roses whose scent would waft into her nostrils whenever she entered the kitchen. Harshly she interrupted him.
‘Don’t talk about what you want. A dead dog is buried in that plot whom I loved dearly. His remains must not be tampered with. Is that clear?’
He gave a slight bow, said her wishes would be respected, and they agreed on his weekly wage.
After that she often watched him from the kitchen window, digging, planting or trimming the hedge. She liked to see his muscles ripple under his shirt or better still, if the weather was warm, his body when he wore no shirt. Sometimes he asked for a drink of water and when invited entered the kitchen. He appeared to know his place in society, seeming ill at ease indoors but flirtatious when they met outside, as if he was two different people. She did not think she trusted either, yet panicked one morning when he did not come.
He arrived as usual next day saying, ‘I had a sore throat,’ but with no sign of a cold or cough so she knew he was lying. On warm days after that she sometimes went outside, lifted a rake or hoe or spade and helped him a little.
‘What happened to your mother?’ he once asked as they stood outside looking at the plot beneath the window.
‘She fell off a cliff and died.’
‘How tragic,’ he said. ‘You must be very lonely.’
‘I have my books,’ she said.
‘Books?’ he said, as if baffled. ‘I can’t even read.’
‘How awful,’ she murmured.
‘I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Reading is not for the likes of me.’
‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’ She began to tell him about one of her favourite novels, but she sensed he was bored. ‘I like doing things,’ he said, ‘not reading or hearing about them.’
Carol, greatly angered, said, ‘In that case I am paying you off. At the end of the week you can collect any more due to you and go.’
He laughed as if highly amused and asked if he could first dig up the earth beneath the kitchen window; he was curious to know why the roses bloomed so well in such poor soil, for there must be more than a dead dog enriching it. Carol, panic-stricken, hit him on the head with a spade she had been leaning on. He lay in a coma for a week before recovering, but was never the same again. He smiled at her like an angel and made snuffling noises like a farm animal.
‘Why don’t you speak properly?’ she would say, shaking him by the shoulders. He would open his mouth wide but only piggish grunts came out. She began to detest him, especially when she had to wash him like a baby and change his clothes. He joined her aunt in the plot under the window and after that the roses grew better than ever, though she longed for winter when no flowers grew and she could forget them and relax with a book.
Then a man came to fix her roof that had been leaking in the heavy October rain. He seemed honest until he tiptoed into her kitchen and asked for a drink of water. As she filled a tumbler from the tap he grabbed her from behind, threw her down on a chair and gagged her with a dishcloth after tying her hands with a rope from his pocket. She had visions of being raped but he merely ransacked drawers looking for money, finally leaving with pearls she had concealed in a tea caddy. They were fake. Carol never reported the incident in case it brought police to search the house and garden, where the plot under the window was overgrown with roses that now even bloomed in winter. People passing by would stop and remark on them, and if she was in the garden ask what she fed them on. ‘Tea leaves,’ she would say, and they would walk on happily.
Time passed until one day she realised she was old and had done nothing much with her life but read books, most of them stolen from shops or the library, and many lying unread and covered with cobwebs. Her eyesight was now so bad she could hardly read a page. She made a bonfire of books in the garden and when they had well and truly burned she danced around the ashes with a feeling of freedom. Next day she bought herself new clothes, a suitcase and umbrella. She was going abroad to see the world and would undoubtedly meet with rain. She booked a cabin on a newly built ocean liner called the Titanic because she liked the name. It sounded lucky and she was excited and happy to be leaving home. No one heard of her after that but the roses bloomed, and people passing sniffed the air and said whoever had planted them must have had green fingers and a great love of roses, for such a colour of red had never before been seen.
Meet the Author
I’d scarcely sat down on her shabby sofa when she brought out a bottle of vodka from an equally shabby wall unit.
‘I think we drink more of this than the Russians,’ she said with a twisted smile.
‘But theirs is much cheaper,’ I said, noticing the glass she had given me had many finger marks, but why should that spoil the pleasure of drinking with a famous author? I might once have thought that, but not now.
‘How’s the book going?’ I asked, trying to remember if she’d written more than one.
‘Not very well, but I’m not the kind of author who tries to write best sellers. If I bring some pleasure to a handful of readers my work will not have been in vain. And I can only write about failures, so with most readers that doesn’t go down very well.’
She gave a self-conscious laugh. I wasn’t surprised she wrote about failures. She looked like one and rubbed it in by adding, ‘I know what if feels like to be shunned.’
I lifted one of her paperbacks from the coffee table, suspecting she had put it there when she knew I was coming. The title was The Wages of Fear. The picture on the cover showed a doleful woman holding a baby.
‘I don’t know if you’ve read it,’ she said, ‘but you can have that copy if you like.’
‘No thanks, I have one,’ I said hurriedly. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but there’s a limit to being obliging.
‘How is it selling?’ I asked. ‘You should be well off by now with money from your royalties.’
‘What royalties?’ she said bitterly. ‘I could have made more money cleaning houses.’
‘Still,’ I said, ‘being known as a writer gives you prestige. The publishers invite you to cocktail parties and to signing your books in shops. Aren’t you proud of what you’ve accomplished?’
‘Not really. I wasn’t popular. Drink up, there’s more where that came from.’
I held out my glass, feeling sucked into a drinking session I didn’t want. I had come because on the phone she sounded desperate. I said, ‘One more drink then I’ll have to go home. Matthew will be wondering where I’ve got to.’
‘Surely you don’t have to worry about Matthew?’
I was annoyed by this but before I could reply she leaned forward and took my hand saying, ‘Don’t go yet, you’re the only friend I have nowadays.’
She sounded tearful. I could hardly tell her I wasn’t a friend so said, ‘I’ll stay for ten minutes.’
The bottle on the table was now half empty.
I had come to know Isabel by accident. A crowd where I worked was going to a book launch and invited me along so I went, though it was not my idea of a good time. But we were given a glass of wine and treated to a reading by the famous author Isobel Anderson, who I had never heard of. Someone said she was very entertaining. I don’t like being read to and found her boring, but we all cheered up when offered a second glass of wine, and I felt better wh
en introduced to her. Later she came with us to a pub round the corner and we stayed there late, laughing, joking and acting in the foolish way women act when drunk. Isobel fitted in well with our company and promised to come out with us on the next literary occasion. We met her once or twice again but when these meetings petered out I was not sorry. All Isobel spoke of was herself and other writers she knew, and here I now was in her shabby room and not happy about it.
She filled my glass again and I decided I would certainly leave after finishing this one. She said, ‘You don’t know what it feels like, being ostracised.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Nowadays you and your friends never get in touch with me. What have I done? I often wonder about that.’
‘Nothing!’ I said, trying not to show embarrassment, ‘We thought you had better things to do than come out with us.’
‘Not really. Nobody wants to know me and I can’t write any more. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve no energy nowadays.’
‘Why not cut down on your drinking? Maybe that’s what’s wrong.’
I was only guessing that she drank too much but had stopped caring about her. I had told Matthew I wouldn’t be long and had now been away for more than an hour. She said, ‘Why do you think I drink too much? You don’t know a thing about me.’
‘True,’ I said, and stood up, and she burst into tears. It was hard for me not to leave at once. I said, ‘Oh, come on now, it’s not that bad. You’ve just got to apply yourself like Hemmingway did, three hours of writing every morning, leaning with one elbow on a dresser.’
‘No wonder he killed himself,’ she said with a rueful smile, drying her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Unluckily my writing was based on my family.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I put all the drastic things that happened to the family in that novel. When my mother found out she said I was a disgrace, writing about events that were nobody else’s business. She’s stopped talking to me.’
‘Is that why you stopped writing?’
‘Not altogether. But I dried up, and with the family not talking to me I began hitting the bottle. So you are looking at a ruined woman. Let’s drink to that.’
I was now getting sozzled and forgot to say I didn’t want any more.
We didn’t speak for a while. The vodka was making me tired. I had difficulty keeping my eyes open. Though desperate to get home I felt sorry for her and it came as a shock when she asked for a loan of twenty pounds, saying I would be paid back first thing when she got her giro. I gave her it, just to get away, then looked at my watch and said, ‘Time to go.’
She said, ‘But you’ve hardly been here – it’s still early.’
‘But Matthew worries if I’m away for long.’
‘Is he still in a wheelchair?’
‘Yes, and always will be.’
‘I’m sorry. What happened to him anyway?’
I knew she wasn’t interested in Matthew and was just asking to keep me there.
‘He was knocked down by a motorbike. I thought you knew.’
‘I forgot. I don’t remember things half the time. I suppose it’s because –’
‘Because what?’
She hesitated then said, ‘I have cancer.’
I was shocked into silence. Saying sorry didn’t seem appropriate, and I didn’t know whether to believe her. She had already said she didn’t know what was wrong with her. At last I said, ‘Are you sure?’
‘The doctor says I’ve got roughly six months. Don’t look so serious!’ she laughed. ‘I’m used to the idea.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked stupidly, wishing more than ever to be out of this stuffy apartment smelling of vodka, then I remembered vodka has no smell.
‘No, there’s nothing, but thanks all the same. Yes there is. Please get me another bottle.’
My sympathy vanished as she handed me back the note I’d given her.
‘Alright,’ I said, ‘I won’t be long.’
Outside I hurried past the licensed grocer and reached the bus stop before turning back again. I couldn’t leave her waiting for what seemed the only medicine that helped.
‘I’m back,’ I shouted, hurrying up the stairs. ‘I’m sorry I took so long.’
The front door was unlocked but the living room empty. An empty glass lay on the floor. Her book was still on the table. I called her name but she was gone. Before leaving I took the book, though I don’t know why. I might never read it, on the other hand I might, so the next time I called I could discuss it with her instead of feeling guilty. But in my heart I knew I wouldn’t call on her again.
At home Matthew noticed the glum look on my face and asked what was wrong. In bed that night I told him about Isobel having only six months to live. He said, ‘Don’t take it to heart, there’s always people worse off than us. Besides, you’ve got me.’
He shut my mouth with a kiss. I began to feel better and fell asleep in his arms. He hardly ever sleeps but never complains, which is what I like about him. Five months later I saw Isobel’s obituary in the paper and wondered if she had been alone when she died.
Confessions of a Serial Killer
My life, as I remember it, began when I started school at the age of five years. A boy of the same age broke the zip of my new jumper so I punched and kicked him until he lay on the ground sobbing, then I ran home and told my mother that I wasn’t ever going to school again. But she was adamant. I had to return and take my punishment. At that moment I stopped loving her, for it was the first time I did not get my own way.
For the next ten years I was a sullen pupil with no aptitude for learning. I scribbled on my jotter and drew skeletons sticking out of chimney tops. The teacher said I must be attracted to evil and put me at the bottom of the class. When fifteen I fell in love with an older girl who was beautiful and proud and never looked at me. I wrote her a letter declaring my love, then immediately tore it up. It was a relief when she and her parents moved away from the district.
After school I got a job in an office where I stamped envelopes and made tea for the staff who hardly spoke to me, though I felt their glances on my back. I left that job and lay all day in my bed for as long as I could.
‘Whatever will we do with you?’ said my mother.
‘Send him to work on a pig farm,’ said my father.
They did, and I liked it. There was no one to criticise me and the pigs ignored me, making gentle piggy noises with their soft brown snouts. That went on until my father died and I was again under my mother’s thumb. She made rules that I had to follow without question. I was not allowed out to play on Sundays and on fine evenings had to walk with her along the river bank. This was humiliating, especially if we met former school mates who jeered and called me a Mummy’s Boy. But my mother said now that I was fatherless I must stay by her side or I’d be tempted to commit all sorts of crimes. But the pigs were my main preoccupation. I would sit on the fence round their pens, watching their fat bodies roll in the mud. The farmer told me, ‘Be careful – if you fall in beside them they’ll eat you as soon as look at you.’
This made me think of a perfect way to make Mother disappear, but it happened another way. She died after tripping over a crack in the pavement while taking me down to the river.
Then the war came and people started dying in air raids. That’s when I discovered my talent for killing. While pretending to save those buried in rubble I would partly dig them out with my bare hands then finish them off. I had to be careful when other rescuers were around but they said, ‘Look at that boy! He never stops trying to save those poor souls.’
Then I was called up by the army and sent abroad where I sometimes killed our own men as well as the enemy. It was an exciting time, but I was almost caught out. A fellow soldier followed me into ruins where I was pretending to help an old man find what had once been his home. I caught sight of this soldier from the corner of my eye and at once shot him dead, but was
left with a bad feeling. Perhaps my luck was running out. I told the old man to go and he hobbled away without a backward glance.
After that I decided to lie low, but I was wounded and hospitalised. I never fully recovered from the shrapnel in my head but was fit enough to join the A.R.P. who were still picking up the living and the dead after raids in Britain. With so much temptation around I resumed my malpractices, sometimes killing prostitutes, not for sexual reasons but for the thrill of the chase. But at last I couldn’t cope any more. Death was no novelty. I lost my appetite for it, being unable to compete with a war that was killing people in thousands. I decided to end my own life while I was still intact.
I took a dose of something lethal that should have killed an ox, and woke later with a nurse bending over me. She said, ‘You’ll be alright,’ and for the second time in my life I fell in love. So we married and might have lived happily ever after, if I hadn’t become restless for something more exciting. I didn’t know exactly what at the time, but had the taste of blood in my mouth.
‘Perhaps we should go a holiday,’ said my wife.
‘Where to?’ I asked, thinking of the beaches in Normandy.
‘Saltcoats,’ she said, ‘Or maybe Largs.’
‘Why not Helensburgh or Dunoon?’ I sneered. After years of disagreeing about it we finally went to Thailand and met the tsunami full in the face. I survived but my wife did not, which was unfair. But who am I to say what is unfair and what isn’t?
When seventy-five, the doctor told me I had terminal cancer. ‘Wonderful!’ I thought. At last I was going to leave this world of misery behind, but first I would put my house in order and make a list of people I would take with me, and I could be as careless as I liked about doing that since there’s no punishment when you’re dead. But a week later the doctor told me he’d read the wrong report, I had years left to live being as healthy as the next man. I got so angry that I choked him on the spot and to this day don’t remember how I disposed of the body. I think most murderers who get caught are those who have ulterior motives and plan to do it. I have always acted on impulse.
