LITMIR.BIZ

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he flirting, Miranda wondered. How lovely. That bloody word again. ‘Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely,’ she said, under her breath, to use them all up. ‘Lovely, luvverly. Luvverly bunch of coconuts. Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely? And the new word of the day is …’ she paused, putting a big lump of greenery into the bag ‘… gorgeous. Scrumptious. Handsome. Steady on, Miranda.’ What was happening to her?

      She gave herself a stern talking-to. ‘I am a forty-three-year-old woman with two children, one of whom is probably about the same age as he is. It’s disgusting. Nigel’s eyes would literally come out of his head on stalks if he knew what I was thinking. No, not literally – particularly with all that lardy, piggy flesh holding them in.’

      Her mind rambled on aimlessly as she bent to her task. She didn’t notice the time slipping by because she had wandered into a rich seam in the creases of her brain and hopped incrementally to a reverie about Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then she stood up. ‘Ow,’ she squeaked. A searing pain had shot up her back and exploded tiny pinpoints of light through her retinas.

      Will ambled back to check she was all right.

      ‘Yes. And, yes, I know you told me to stand up and stretch, but I got into a rhythm and completely forgot,’ she panted, rubbing the base of her spine.

      ‘Stand with your feet apart and drop your body forwards from your hips,’ he ordered. ‘Go all floppy. Take the strain off your lumbar region.’

      She hung forward and felt her anorak slip up past her nose, so that she was breathing into the zip and smelling something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Was it man-made-fibre scent? She suddenly realised what it was: the smell of hard work, alias sweat, and she had obviously forgotten to put on any deodorant. How very, very … in a weird way, almost pleasant. If acrid.

      She stood up to get away from it.

      ‘Feeling better?’ asked Will.

      ‘Yup,’ she announced – although, actually, she felt a bit sick from standing up so fast. ‘Onwards and upwards,’ she said, with determination.

      She reapplied herself to the task in hand, stretching every few minutes and admiring the clean and tidy state of the path. Well, tidy but muddy and a damn sight better than the view in front, with its branches and undergrowth melding together. She could just see Alex’s dreadlocks whipping to and fro as he sliced the heads off unsuspecting plants.

      It felt like days since she’d had her coffee.

      She waved Will over.

      ‘Problem?’ he asked.

      ‘Er, I hope not. I was suddenly overcome by a wave of hunger but I haven’t brought a packed lunch with me. Which I seem to recall was on the list. A bothersome omission. Is there anywhere I could get something when we stop?’

      ‘Yes – most of the regulars bring their own because they don’t want what’s on offer from the nearest shop. I’ll warn you now, it ain’t exciting. There might be a pie but it’ll be more pastry than filling. And if the filling’s meat, it might be a part of the animal you aren’t familiar with.’

      ‘A dollop of testicle, a dash of oink and an earlobe, eh? Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. That’s what I’m going to have to do when we break. Which is when?’

      Will checked his watch. ‘Half an hour. Can you last that long?’

      On cue, Miranda’s stomach howled, like a small woodland creature in pain.

      He laughed, and jerked his head upwards, revealing hairy nostrils. ‘I’ll take that as a no. If you could possibly hang on for a quarter of an hour, that would be better for us. We’re dealing with a knotty branch and it would be nice if we could get that sorted before we have lunch.’

      ‘I’ll keep my stomach on a short leash, and tell it to pull its horns in, if that’s not too much of a mixed metaphor,’ she promised. She bent forward and pushed a great wodge of vegetation and sticks into her bag, suddenly noticing a stripy snail stuck to one of the leaves. She picked it off and it retreated quickly into its shell. She held it until it came out again, then gently touched one of its antennae. It retracted. She poked the other.

      ‘Aw. Leave him alone,’ said Alex, who had arrived at her side without her noticing, absorbed as she had been in the snail’s defence mechanism.

      She smiled and put the snail on the side of the path where they watched it unfurl from its shell and make off. ‘Racing home to his wife and daughters,’ she said. ‘Or her husband and sons. Having said that, they’re hermaphrodites, aren’t they?’

      ‘Yes, they are. And the way they mate isn’t what you’d want to be doing if you were out on a date. They twist themselves round each other and cover themselves in frothy slime. Then they both set off to bury their eggs in a mulchy bit of ground. They cover them with mucus, soil and excrement, and about a month later, bingo, loads of tiny snails are ready to munch their way through your prized garden plants. Some snails live to fifteen and they’re excellent fodder for birds, toads and snakes.’

      ‘Snakes?’ she queried.

      ‘And that’s all you’ve taken from that superbly informative lecture?’ he said sadly, shaking his head.

      ‘Of course not,’ she told him, ‘but I don’t know why, I thought snakes went for fast food. Mice. Rats. Humans, if they were hungry.’

      ‘And the last time you read about a human in Britain being eaten by a snake?’

      ‘Yeah, okay, Mr Biology. Although we’ve all heard about the bloke going to the loo and finding a huge great python.’

      He smirked.

      She blushed.

      ‘Does a snail really vomit to move, as someone once told me?’ she asked quickly.

      ‘Well, it’s a gastropod, which literally means “stomach foot”. And I suppose it does essentially secrete mucus, which it slides on. So, yes. Vomit. Slide. Vomit. Slide.’

      ‘Existing on a liquid lunch. And dinner,’ said Miranda, beginning to walk back along the towpath. She could feel her stomach on the verge of making another announcement. ‘Quite nice, though, to bury your eggs in the garden and let them hatch on their own, rather than spending nine months incubating them and several years saving them from themselves,’ she threw back, over her shoulder.

      ‘How many have you got?’ he asked.

      ‘Two. But they’ve gone now. So I’m foot-loose and fancy-free.’

      ‘No father of the children?’ he enquired, kicking a stone into the grass.

      ‘He’s gone too.’ She flashed him a smile. Really, she thought, this is going to have to stop.

      CHAPTER THREE

      It felt very politically incorrect to get into a Jaguar and drive to the shop for her lunch, particularly with the collection of vehicles surrounding it. Alex’s camper van was, as she had expected, a faded orange with a scratchy cream top. How awful, she thought, to have to live in something so small when you were so tall. And where did he shower? Or maybe he didn’t. She had read somewhere that after a while you didn’t smell, that your body was self-regulating. Or maybe that was your hair. Whichever it was, she didn’t believe it for a minute. Otherwise tramps would smell fragrant. Maybe you simply stopped smelling any worse.

      She returned with a pie, a packet of crisps and a bottle of sparkling water. ‘Woo-hoo. She went and bought the pie from the local shop,’ Will exclaimed, as she joined them on the groundsheet where they were chatting.

      There was a lull in the conversation and they watched with interest as she bit into it. She swallowed and they waited expectantly. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘if I had to describe it, I’d say it was worm, with a hint of parsley. Or loam. Beautifully minced. Anyone else want a bite?’ She held it out.

      ‘No,

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