Shooting in the Dark

said. ‘Where are you now?’
    Sam knew where she was. Not exactly, but last he’d heard she was digging up a patch in the south of France. She wasn’t a lost love, a ghost who haunted his dreams like Dora, or Donna, his first wife. She was someone else he’d abused and who held a place in his conscience. He would never look her up; knowing there would be nothing he could say or do to repair his violence. He’d have liked to offer her a chunk of her life back.
    One thing Betty had left with Sam. When he was sober she’d take him round her garden and she’d show him the plants. She’d talk to them herself; he’d sometimes find her there, squatting down by the tomatoes pouring out her heart. But when they were together, she’d point out the different characteristics of the plants, say why she was adding bonemeal around the roots of one, wood ash to another. And she’d be able to see when one of the plants, or sometimes a group of them, needed water. She’d see that several hours before they began to wilt.
    ‘How d’you know?’ Sam’d ask. ‘I can’t see that. They all look the same to me.’
    ‘You’re not looking at them right,’ she’d say. ‘You look at them and you see stems and leaves, a collection of plants.’
    ‘Well, yeah, Betty. You think there’s something else there?’
    ‘A whole lot more. In a way there’s everything there. Everything that “is” in the universe is a reflection of the whole. If you look for it, you’ll find it.’
    Wise women, there’s one round every corner.
    ‘So how can I tell the cucumber wants water twelve hours before it starts gasping?’
    ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Betty said. ‘Look at its expression.’ And it was exactly the same with Geordie. You could tell when he wanted something by his expression. Before he got through the door, maybe an hour or two before he got around to saying what it was.
    Geordie had a poker face. He blinked infrequently and he kept his head angled downward so you couldn’t always see his eyes. It was a mysterious face; the nose and chin prominent but the mouth small, with a hint of femininity in the bow of the lips. It was as if he deliberately sent out mixed signals.
    But when he wanted something, which in Geordie’s case was usually the answer to one of the riddles of the universe, he made his eyes available and the ambiguity of his features was replaced with a kind of light.
    ‘You thought any more about moving out of here?’ he asked in a voice as casual as a pit helmet.
    Sam watched him. Geordie looked back, his eyes wide open and popping, as if there was some kind of pressure behind them.
    ‘Moving out?’
    ‘Yeah. You said you was thinking of moving out, handing the place over to homeless people, something like that.’
    ‘Haven’t thought much about it,’ Sam said. ‘Been waiting for inspiration.’
    ‘JD says that’s bollocks,’ said Geordie. ‘Waiting for inspiration. JD says if he waited for inspiration, he’d never write anything. He’s written five, six books and he didn’t have inspiration for any of them. Just went ahead and wrote them without the inspiration.’
    ‘Some of them, it shows,’ said Sam.
    ‘You reckon? I thought you liked them.’
    ‘Yeah. Mostly I like them. I was being facetious.’
    ‘Anyway, he didn’t write them without inspiration, he just started them without it. He reckons once you get started, the inspiration comes along anyway. But only if you don’t wait for it.’
    ‘Where’re you going with this?’ Sam asked.
    ‘Well, this house. If you’re waiting for inspiration, you might never do anything about it. You could spend the rest of your life here, the whole building falling down around you, the bricks crumbling, ants eating away at the foundations, dry rot, cracked windows. There’s homeless people queuing up outside, praying that you’re gonna get some inspiration so they can get off the streets. You see what I’m saying?’
    Sam nodded. ‘I should just wake up in the morning and make a decision, put all my kit in a cardboard box and move out the same day.’
    ‘That’s not what I thought,’ said Geordie. ‘But it’d be better than not doing anything at all. Might mean that you start to get on with the rest of your life, and all the people who could live in this place get a chance to have a life of their own, which they can’t do at the moment because you’re taking up too much space.’
    Sam scratched the top of his head. ‘Geordie,