Page 29 of You Had Me At Pumpkin Patch
‘And you thought you couldn’t trust me knowing your business plans?’ His glare swept to Agnes. ‘You confide in her, over me, without even checking who the hell she is?’
Rosie swallowed hard.
‘Like I’m just some stupid farmhand?’
His eyebrows pinched together, and Rosie felt a pang of something for him.
She stepped forward. ‘Nobody thinks you’re stupid. Just...’ she chewed her words ‘...exceedingly cross.’
‘You haven’t seen cross,’ he said, his face almost giving off steam. A drip of water landed on his shoulder, and he batted it off, moving quickly and thrusting a spare saucepan under it. ‘I do not like being lied to. What else have you been hiding?’
‘Oh nothing,’ said Agnes shrilly, checking her watch. ‘I’ll just pop and make some tea!’
Rosie opened her mouth to protest, but her boss was off like a shot, singing loudly about raindrops falling on her head, as though to block out the sound of objections.
Just great.It was clear Agnes was leaving the rest of the revelations to Rosie, though perhaps her boss was right about one thing. Eating an elephant – or indeed a pumpkin farmer – one bite at a time, was probably the wisest way. Their immediate issue was to get the roof patched up. And if Rosie dared to mention robot cat factories or getting her hands on his precious gourds right then, he might just blow the roof off.
20
Thankgoodnessfor a quiet evening in the log cabin, writing by the soft glimmer from her carved Magic Lanterns. She needed it, after her stressful morning holding ladders for Zain and listening to him turn the air blue over being kept in the dark about Agnes’s roof fiasco. After that, she’d spent the afternoon dodging him, conscious that she still had more truths to spill, but desperate to give them both time to cool off.
Curiously, the robot cat tech company were soon on the phone to Agnes, upping their offer by an amount that had made Agnes’s dispirited eyes bulge. The suspicious part of Rosie wondered if they’d sabotaged those tiles themselves. Unluckily for them, Rosie was done with being beaten by the likes of technology and idiots.
But first, there were words to write. Wood crackled lightly in the burner, its smoky scent teasing the air. Rosie was cosied up in her Snoopy pyjamas, a cup of tea at her side. She stretched her fingers over the old typewriter keys, closed her eyes, and breathed in all that peace – at last.
If nothing else, it had been a good day for inspiration. As real-life dramas unfolded, she felt moved to weave them into her fiction. Hot farmers brandishing tools. A heroine with sizzling secrets. Coming together to defeat the bad guys. With a few embellishments and some wishful thinking, life was ready to become art on the typewriter paper in front of her.
‘Ahhhh, yes.’ Rosie breathed out gently. Everything was perfect and quiet and still, if only for this moment. ‘Whoa!’ She jumped up, nearly spilling tea over her manuscript. What on earth was that noise?
There was a loud, fast-paced clacking sound coming from outside in the darkness, as if a small army of castanet players was having a fiesta. It was interspersed with high-pitched quacky-squawking. Had the castanet players brought a dolphin? Rosie clambered to one of the windows overlooking the lake and twitched her curtains.
‘What the actual...?’
From the gentle glow of the solar string lights outside her cabin, she could just make out the dark figure of Zain, crouching by the water, with a screen. She knew from his previous grunts that he didn’t bother with smartphones or devices out here. Presumably there wasn’t much point without reception, and he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who had friends.
So what was he up to? The curious noises sounded like they were coming from the semi-lit screen. She pursed her lips. If he was a secret tech geek, his days as a muse were over. An image of a bare-bottomed lady robot popped into her head. Urgh. Zain’s past was a mystery, but he surely wasn’tthatweird.
Her sensible head wanted to keep her distance. Yet Zain’s unexplained magnetism had Rosie pulling on her wellies and a hoodie and creeping out into the night.
‘It’s just novel research,’ she muttered to herself, for the eleventy-billionth time. And perhaps shecouldbuild on her brave morning and broach some more touchy subjects. Anyway, it was surely her duty to check he wasn’t out there disturbing the water voles with images of robot porn. Maybe he’d found a secret Wi-Fi hotspot by the lake and was watching something dodgy.
Click clack click click clickkkkk...
It certainly sounded dodgy. Rosie drew back her shoulders as she paced towards him.
His head shot up as she approached, one finger moving crossly to his pursed mouth. From the dim light of the screen that was illuminating his face she could see he didn’t like being disturbed, which meant hemustbe up to trouble. She put her hands on her hips.
‘Bats,’ he whispered, his full lips pressing against his finger as he spoke.
They really were nice...
‘What?’ The word finally computed at the same time as another round of quaketty-clacking. Rosie ducked, her arms shooting over her head. Her feet lost grip in the slippiness of the mud, her wellies sliding. She felt the thwack as her bum hit the earth, a traitorous whimper escaping her.
‘They’re more scared of you than you are of them,’ Zain whisper-hissed. He looked like he wanted to stay cross with her but was struggling to stifle his laugh. ‘Bat detector.’ He nodded at the screen. And perhaps he was also too enamoured with his flying Halloween creatures to keep up his best Zain fury. ‘Their calls are usually too high-pitched for us to hear, but with this...’ His eyes lit up, as if he’d discovered the very best kind of secret. ‘With this we can get a little closer to nature, without disturbing it.’
She pondered his words, knowing that was exactly what they needed for the retreats. Maybe out here, where he was more at peace and less likely to start yelling, was the best place to raise it. Because if she could just get Zain on board...
She flinched again as the bat clacking restarted.
