Read Online With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed by Lynne Truss - Free Book Online

His dad sometimes lamented that Gordon’s mum hadnot lived to see it all – but Gordon did not mind so very much. His mum had died when he was a baby; and anyway he adored his dad. His main concern at the moment, in fact, was that, if Digger Enterprises moved to London, his dad would be left behind to run the B&B alone, a thought he could hardly bear.
    One of the ingenious features of
Digger,
much remarked upon by adult observers of the game, was that the player sometimes dug up stuff that looked like gold, only to find that it stuck to his hands and afflicted him with debilitating pain and anguish. Gordon’s classical education was not extensive, but he knew about the Midas touch, and had also been horrified as a child by the story of Hercules and the shirt of Nessus, so he had simply put the two ideas together.
Digger
devotees (as well as Gordon’s many interviewers) had often pointed out the maturity of his moral insight, and posed the obvious poor-little-rich-boy question of whether Gordon himself might have dug up more than he could handle. Would the unexpected wealth turn sour? Gordon’s generally cheerful disposition gave the lie to this idea, but it had certainly struck him lately that the possible separation from his dad would be just the thing to make him rue the day of
Digger’s
success.
    It was his Auntie Angela who offered him the best advice on the subject of success. ‘Expect to lose all the pals of your ba-zoom, Gordon,’ she warned him flatly on the day
Digger
came out (Gordon was fourteen and motherless, as aforementioned). ‘Auntie’ Angela (no relation) was American, with a house just up the road. She sharpened a cracked fingernail briskly with an emery board and took a deep drag on a cigarette, with the effect of turning her already dry-throated delivery to pure essence of razor-blade. ‘Listen, Gordon baby,’ she snarled, ‘it is harder for a camel to thread a needle with its goddam
eye
than for a friend to forgive you success. Okay?’ She was a bit of a dragon sometimes, Auntie Angela, toughened by years of working in light comedy on British television,her skin tanned to a leathery yellow hide by decades of sun and cigarettes. But although she breathed fire and snorted smoke, she was not alarming to Gordon; he basked in the warm ashes like a fledgling phoenix not sure whether to rise up flapping or snuggle down for a bit more cosy snooze. Science, by the way, had not yet revealed the full perils of passive smoking.
    As Gordon remembered it, this important conversation took place one sunny afternoon in Angela’s shed; the same shed that Osborne and Makepeace were planning (as you will long since have guessed) to visit for
Come Into the Garden
in a couple of days’ time. Thinking back, Gordon could visualize the smoke and dust hanging in equal density in a shaft of sunlight from the small window; he could see Angela’s stacks of yellowing sheet music mixed in with the pots and trowels, and he could smell the earthy bulb fibre in its bag. He had spent many happy afternoons in that shed, actually, with Angela narrating the plots of Broadway musicals for his delight, and belting out all the songs by way of illustration. He was particularly fond of Showboat – especially ‘Just My Bill’ and ‘I Still Likes Me’.
    So for now all was rosy in Gordon’s particular world. He played football on Sundays, made visits to Angela, reaped ever-increasing royalties on
Digger
and kept up with the latest research into the technology of virtual reality. He was a genius, of course; but not a bit overbearing with it. He seemed to have the enviable capacity of enjoying his good fortune; a talent that the profile writers, after consulting child psychologists, had deduced at length to have a rather banal explanation – viz., that he owed it to a lifetime of ‘proper parenting’. Really. One of these psychologists used an analogy which would almost have endeared Gordon to readers of
Come Into the