Pompomberry House (13 page)

I felt the warning sign — the tip of his big nose brushing
against my neck, and I knew a kiss was coming.

Anticipation — it wasn’t fear, it wasn’t horror, it wasn’t
frustration and it wasn’t cold. For a few seconds, I felt something other than
the grisly medley of emotions that had been stewing all day. There was a new
option. I could have the pain casserole or, I could have ... sexy
time!

I let his lips tickle my neck. Ordinarily, I would put a
stop to this nonsense. However, can anybody really be expected to resist sexy
time with the man they (still) love after a day of death and police
questioning?

These were not ordinary circumstances, so I decided that I
would allow a little bedroom gymnastics. After all, it didn’t mean that we were
getting back together, did it?

Chapter 7

I began flinging Gareth’s things into boxes. The home-brew
kit he’d bought (with my money) and never used, the monocycle he’d bought (with
my money) and never ridden, and the
Learn Italian
kit he’d bought (with
his own money ... no wait, I mean
my money
) were all chucked
into a brown cardboard box.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
And the reaction to the sex we had was going to have to be huge. I decided to
progress the break up process accordingly. I packed up a box of his things to
compensate for the stupidly generous foreplay. I separated our CD collection,
for the unnecessarily satisfying first shag. As for the unexpected second
course — well, perhaps I really needed to consider getting a lawyer.

I felt moved. Involving lawyers felt so final. I mean, sure,
Gareth hadn’t got off his backside for eighteen months, but he had come up
trumps this weekend. He’d been my knight in a shining car. I wasn’t ready to
use the ‘D’ word, but a little mediation might still be in order. I needed to
show Gareth that the separation really was happening. Yet immediately, I felt
guilty. How could I have led him on so cruelly?

Then I thought about it. Break ups weren’t straightforward.
People made mistakes. People sometimes slept with their ex. It wasn’t right,
but it had happened. I couldn’t change it, but I could do the right thing now.
I looked in the yellow pages and got the number for a mediator. As soon as I
read ‘your home, finances or legal practicalities’, I knew I couldn’t call. I
couldn’t bear to think about finalising separate living arrangements. Gareth
crashing at Barry’s was one thing; but I wasn’t ready to think beyond that.

He’d been so lovely when I spoke to the police. Taylor had
been so condescending. I still couldn’t get over my tyres getting re-inflated.
Why would the vandal bother to fix them? Or had somebody else done it for me,
as a kind gesture? The problem was, the only kind person who’d been there was
dead.

Annabel sent me an email. She apologised that things got ‘a
bit fraught’, and said that she hoped it wouldn’t stop us from being BFFs.
A
bit fraught?
Somebody was knifed to death. Annabel had sided with a woman
who ordered me not to call the police. In what way were the events anything
close to being summed up as
a bit fraught.
Naturally, I didn’t reply.

I grieved for Biff — a young man cut off in his prime — it
was tragic. But there was something else I mourned for, something more
personal, which had also been ruthlessly cut down in its prime — my short
story!

The tale of the bickering charity representatives was gold
dust! It had been bursting with potential. I mean, sure, my first draft needed
work, but then babies poo their pants and plenty of them go on to become great.
Thanks to the sea and my stolen memory card, I might never see my baby grow up.

Of course, I could write a new first draft, but it wouldn’t
be the same. I wouldn’t be
creating
, I’d be
regurgitating
, like
building a robot to replace a child. It would feel wrong.

Besides, would I really have wanted my story to be published
alongside the likes of Dawn Mann and Annabel Fleming? Did my clever, witty,
observational tale really fit in with pigs falling off cliffs and china dolls
falling in love with gnomes? This was probably a blessing in disguise.

I looked at Gareth’s things, now mostly in boxes. As
separations go, ours hadn’t been massively successful so far. I would have to
try harder. Throwing myself into the writers’ retreat hadn’t assisted me to
move on at all. However, it is important not to view one weekend spoilt by
murder, as an inevitably recurring pattern. I would just have to find something
else to take my mind off my husband. Perhaps painting?

No! I was a writer. It was in my bones. It was in my blood.
It was in my snot, in my faeces and in my earwax. I
oozed
‘writer’. The
people on the trip may have been misguided, but I was not. I really felt I
might be destined for great things. I just had to keep working at it.

I put on my boots and blue spotty socks, and made my way
into town. I needed to get writing again, and the sooner I bought a new laptop,
the sooner I could ooze literary masterpieces.

* * *

Three weeks went by. The more time that elapsed, the more my
weekend on Pompomberry Island felt like a bad dream. I no longer felt like a
witness to murder; instead I felt like somebody who’d been unfortunate enough
to walk into a really bad film at the cinema. The sort of irritating, modern
‘masterpiece’ that ends on a cliff-hanger for no justifiable reason.

The seagulls were less of a problem in London, which helped
my nerves. There were plenty of them around, along with warnings not to feed
them. Some news sources even mentioned ‘dive-bombing’. However, I didn’t feel
that the gulls in London were as vindictive as those at Pompomberry House. They
were certainly smaller. The gulls in London made me uncomfortable, but they
didn’t terrify me.

When I first got back to London, I drove myself mad, looking
at the forum, reading every post those insane people wrote (e.g. ‘We had a lovely
weekend and everything ran smoothly ...’). However, nothing gave me the
answers I badly needed. I was just compulsively hitting ‘Refresh’ and making
myself more and more angry.

I sent out a private group message, asking what had happened
after I left Pompomberry Island, but only Dawn replied, and that was to tell me
that they’d made a decision to move on and never speak of it again. She said
she’d be gravely disappointed if I didn’t do the same, then signed it with a
string of XOs.

And then there were Annabel’s prattling emails. She liked to
tell me how glad she was that we were friends, whilst failing to acknowledge
the big fat, Biff-shaped elephant in the room, or the even more pertinent fact
that I’d never liked her.

Eventually, I told myself that enough was enough. Stalking
people who’d clearly gone into denial would get me nowhere, except possibly to
a psychiatric ward.

And so, time went by without reading the forum, without
planning ways to catch them out, and without refreshing my inbox every thirty
seconds.

A few weeks later, Biff no longer felt like a person, but a
character. Pompomberry Island felt like a set. Back in my own home, in North
London, it was difficult to recall that chilling, unsettling atmosphere. I
could even picture a seagull without breaking out into a cold sweat.

A less well-balanced person might have had an existential
crisis — had any of it really happened? But not me. I knew that I was just
compartmentalising. My whole life had become one big compartmentalising exercise,
with my marriage break up being stowed away in a locked, iron box, and
everything else arranged in little baskets around the edge.

There was the fiction-writing basket — a couple of hours a
day where I afforded myself the luxury of thinking about nothing but my
characters and their controllable lives. There was the journalism basket — several
hours a week spent interviewing, typing up and submitting. There was the
housework basket — dishes, tidying and laundry, all performed whilst listening
to the radio. In fact, I could often go through a whole day without thinking
about my marriage breakdown at all.

So, after a short break from Gareth, I found that I was
ready to arrange a mediation appointment. I tried to discuss our joint mortgage
with him and he told me to ‘go fark a chicken’, which I took as evidence that
we weren’t going to be able to sort things out between ourselves. His response
to my invitation to mediation — ‘go fark a chimpanzee’ — I took as a sign that
he was becoming more cooperative.

Living alone, I found I missed the forum a lot. In the past,
I had visited dozens of times each day, to exchange ideas, gossip and jokes
with other writers and bookworms. It was a shame that my pleasure had been
ruined by the five least personable indie writers in the world.

Still, I couldn’t bear to go back to the forum now, even if
I could be trusted to put my deer stalker hat away. The events at Pompomberry
House had begun to recede, it was a fading nightmare that left a lingering, foetid,
dead mouse-like taste in the mouth. But the thought of having anything more to
do with those people sickened me to the stomach.

I might never have visited the forum again, if it hadn’t
been for two happenings, which sent me rushing to my shiny new laptop praying
that I could remember my forum password. They were peculiar happenings — very
peculiar indeed!

* * *

I was just sitting down to a nice cup of Earl Grey rooibos
in front of the television, when I first noticed. It was the national afternoon
news. The newsreaders had confronted us with wars, hunger and the recession, so
it was now time for one of the many light, feel-good stories that they liked to
run at three in the afternoon.

Today’s condescending corner for the elderly, homebound and
self-employed took us to the south coast of Dorset, to ‘a cliff-side disaster’.
What was it going to be? Had a Postman Pat kite got snarled on the rocks? Had
an old lady dropped her camera over Durdle Door? Had a French tourist trodden
on a bee? Had a priest seen a jellyfish in the bathing area?

Then, I realised with shock, that the news story was about a
pig, a pig that had fallen off a cliff!

Well, I’m blowed.

The news showed the fire brigade, in partnership with an air
ambulance, airlifting a pig, in a rescue success story. The emergency services
had been mobilised after an anonymous call from a member of the public. I
watched a tearful farmer help a fireman unfasten one of the straps that saved
the pig’s life, and realised that it was actually rather sweet. I hoped that
Dawn had decided to go with her happy ending.

Obviously Dawn’s idea was not as far-fetched as I’d thought.
Still, this news event was going to ruin her story’s potential. Nobody would
believe that she’d had the idea independently.

I found myself idly wondering when the anthology was going
to be published. Would this latest spanner in the works delay things? And had
they found somebody to replace me, or did they go ahead with only five authors?
Did the book even go ahead at all? If they had all left Pompomberry House by
the time the police got there, they wouldn’t have had time to finish writing.
Besides, who could focus on writing after discovering a dead body?

Just as I was opening my web browser, I registered what I
was doing — letting those people into my life again. Yes, I was only looking up
the anthology, but would it stop at that?

I might see a thread that intrigued me, and start reading.
Then, I might read a post that I might want to comment on, and start typing.
Before I knew it, I’d be drawn back into conversations with Danger and Rafe,
while Dawn and Montgomery moderated from up high. Annabel would see my activity
as proof that we were still BFFs.

It had taken me three weeks to unwind — three weeks to stop
looking over my shoulder, three weeks to stop looking at gulls with suspicion,
three weeks to beat the urge to become Nancy Drew. I couldn’t go back to that.

Instead, I opened up Word, and began typing up an article
about whether beige was the new magnolia. If only I could give up the lifestyle
magazine work. It was so dull.

I allowed the news to continue rolling in the background. It
wasn’t as though anything this late in the programme was likely to be
distracting. Any moment now, the stair-lift adverts would begin, and the
personal injury bloodsuckers would start their hunt — those were the easiest of
all to ignore.

“And now we take you to Bognor Regis, where it’s gnome sweet
gnome for two lucky people. Gnome pun intended!”

I blinked rapidly. Was I seeing what I thought I was seeing?

“Residents woke up on Saturday morning to find a gnome
wedding taking place on the sands. So far, gnomebody gnomes who’s responsible.”

One name popped into my mind, and one name alone —
Annabel
Fleming.

The television crew showed several shots of the scene — some
ten-dozen gnomes laid out standing around, as if watching a particularly frisky-looking
gnome marry a china doll.

You had to hand it to the woman. She did publicity stunts
well. News of the gnome-doll wedding had now crossed the nation. What better way
to launch her short story? It had to be her, an independent gnome wedding was
just too unlikely.

Then, a sickening thought struck me. If Annabel had staged a
gnome wedding to promote her book, had Dawn ... No, Dawn must still
be in Spain. The pig
must
be a coincidence.

Whilst staging a gnome wedding was a socially acceptable way
to promote a book, throwing a pig off a cliff was seriously overstepping the
mark. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but cruelty to animals
had to be an exception. This was national news, not a YouTube channel! Not even
Dawn would be stupid enough to throw a pig off a cliff in the name of eBook
sales.