What do you think? I’ve been inspired to give writing a go. There is a short-story competition in the Evening Argus, first prize a hundred pounds and a Zoom call with a literary agent. I don’t really want to do any more Zoom calls than I absolutely have to, but I could give the hundred pounds to Alan’s rescue centre, and it might be fun, mightn’t it?
My detective is named after Gerry, though my Gerry had brown eyes, because you have to change some things. Also, my Gerry had hayfever, and I’ve changed that too. I can’t just have my Gerry pottering about solving a murder. So this Gerry has blue eyes and a gun, while my Gerry had brown eyes and an organ-donor card. But my Gerry often said, ‘Well, then, Bob’s your uncle,’ and I’m going to make that the detective’s catchphrase too.
At the moment, the story is called ‘Cannibal Bloodbath’， but I might change that, because it gives away too much of the plot.
62
So they think they know where Bethany might be buried. Buried. That just makes no sense at all. Oh, Bethany, what on earth did you get involved in?
Mike Waghorn pours himself a glass of cider. He doesn’t really drink cider in public, it doesn’t look right. In public, he drinks champagne, good wine, the sort of stuff people would expect Mike Waghorn to drink. A beer if he’s fitting in with the lads at a corporate do.
But when Mike was a teenager, he would only drink cider, and as he gets older he finds himself returning to it. He has tried expensive cider, you can get that now. Waitrose does one, but, really, the cheaper the better with cider. The one he is currently drinking is from a two-litre plastic bottle. He has poured it into a heavy cut-glass decanter, just for appearances, but he might stop doing that soon as well. Who is he trying to fool? There is no one here, so he can only be fooling himself.
He washes down his arthritis pills, then his beta-blockers, and his gout medication. You’re not really supposed to drink alcohol with any of them, but no one is going to stop him.
He is watching Stop the Clock on a very big television. Fiona Clemence looks wonderful. He thought he should probably give it a go, after Joyce mentioned it. Admit some professional jealousy, swallow a bit of pride, he has plenty to spare, and watch it once. See if Fiona Clemence is any good. He hoped not.
Annoyingly, he watched an episode and is now hooked. Fiona is OK, friendly enough, good at reading out loud, but what a quiz. Mike imagines what he might have done with it. Every time a contestant says something, Mike thinks about how he would respond. Once or twice Fiona Clemence says the same thing as he would have done, and that irks him a little, but, overall, he thinks he’d be slightly better.
But isn’t that just the thing, Mike? You can think all you like, but you never did it. Never took the risks. He filmed a pilot once, the late eighties or so. It went well, everybody agreed, ITV loved it, commissioned a series, but wanted one little change. Could they get a different host? Someone younger, someone – and these words remained etched in his mind for a long time – ‘more authentic, more real’。
Mike never put his perfectly groomed head above the parapet again, never left the burrow, however much he could smell the air outside. ‘More authentic, more real’ – for years he had railed against this insult. Mike was real, Mike was authentic, and if some twenty-somethings from London with fashionable hair and trainers couldn’t see that, the problem was not with Mike, it was with them.
So there he sat, behind his desk, year in, year out, telling the people of Kent and Sussex about fires in care homes, building-society robberies in Faversham, or a Hastings man claiming to have the world’s largest bouncy castle. And he was real enough and authentic enough for the people of Kent and Sussex, thank you very much. Walk through the streets of Maidstone or East Grinstead and see who thinks Mike is real. Everyone.
There were a couple more approaches from national TV, never anything concrete or exciting, but approaches nonetheless. But Mike refused even to consider them. He was happy where he was, thank you.