The One Who Is Two (Book 1 of White Rabbit)

The back garden was as prim and proper as the front: barbered lawns, colour-splashed flower beds and perfectly coiffured shrubs, all enclosed by a protective wall of beech trees whose every green leaf had been polished to a glossy shine. Loofah examined his hand, pulling fingers and flexing joints. Feeling somewhat cheated, he still couldn't quite accept that the drawer's torture had left no permanent mark.

  'I couldn't be doing with one of those new tumble dryers,' the old lady said, 'Nothing like proper fresh air. You can't beat Mother Nature, as my Billy used to say.'

  She was pegging out the flapping sheets on an old fashioned clothes-line stretched between two posts and supported in the middle by a notched pole. The tea-tray lay waiting for them on a white painted iron table on the patio. Loofah was quietly dreading his tea; would it poison him or make do with merely slicing his mouth open with a razor-sharp cup rim?

  'You and my Billy would have got on like a house on fire. He always liked a man to talk to, did my Billy. Mind you – .' But she was interrupted by the determined ring of a telephone from the open French windows.

  'I'd better get that,' she said, 'I'm expecting a call from my daughter Margaret. She phones me every day, you know. Still remembers her old mother, not like some these days.'

  Half way across the lawn she turned. 'Could you be a dear and hang out the last two sheets?' she called, 'Then we can have our tea.'

  The sheets in question – one pink, one yellow – lay damply in the plastic basket while the rest of the laundry flapped gaily in the breeze like a of a flotilla of small yachts in full sail. Loofah backed away, shaking his head.

  'Actually, I'm not very good with washing…' he began. But she was too far away and didn't hear.

  For a few moments he kept his distance, peering anxiously into the basket and waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. Two little sheets, he thought, two harmless little sheets. He took some wooden pegs from the tin and gingerly picked up a fold of yellow cotton. Still nothing: no teeth, no claws, just damp cloth. And so, opening it out, he threw the sheet over the line and pushed on the pegs. No problem. Loofah smiled to himself; he was getting too jumpy, he thought, letting himself get rattled by a bit of mischievous domestic hardware.

  As he threw the second sheet over the line, the wet material suddenly billowed out – it could have been caught by the wind – and slapped over his face, turning the world damp pink. Fumbling blindly, he managed to get one peg on the line. The wet cotton was now wrapped around his throat and as he tried to pull it away, it tightened. He let go – but the material tightened further. A thrill of panic shivered through the damp pinkness.

  Like the hungry protoplasm of an oversized amoeba, ballooning clouds of flapping cloth now completely engulfed him, smothering his face and wrapping themselves ever more tightly around his arms and torso. Gasping for air, he pulled at the wet material around his neck as it tried to throttle him, but to no avail; his struggle for breath resulted in little more than a strangled rattle in his throat. As his suffocated lungs cried out in mute agony, panic flared wildly and in mad desperation he grabbed a billow at random, hauling the material to where he thought the line was. But as he brought up a peg, pain stabbed sharply through his thumb. Somehow managing to pull a pink cloud away from his face, he saw that the peg was actually a seagull's head, which ogled him maliciously with its black beady eye while pecking at his fingers with its hard yellow beak.

  The pecking hurt, but it goaded rather than deterred. The flaring flame of panic became a focussed jet of white hot anger – was he really going to let a bit of laundry get the better of him? The wet noose around his neck tightened again, then another billow of sheet slapped sharply across his face. Spitting a curse, he snatched it over the line and rammed home the squawking beak.

  The battle – a whirling struggle of flapping cotton and snapping beaks – was soon over and he stood back, triumphantly viewing the field of his victory. The laundry fluttered in the breeze, as innocent as a young girl's smile, the only incongruity being the row of seagull heads that glared at him with impotent hatred, their beaks gagged open on the line.

  'Get out of my garden!' The old lady was standing behind him on the lawn with her hands on her hips and her face blazing with cold fury.

  'I've… er… pegged out the sheets,' said Loofah, lamely.

  'I don't want the likes of you touching my sheets,' she spat, advancing menacingly, 'And I don't want the likes of you in my garden. Get out this minute!'

  'But – I thought we were going to have tea?'

  'You're not drinking my tea, you dirty horrible man. I know all about you now, you can't fool me.'

  'I don't understand,' he stammered, backing away.

  'Don't you try to play the innocent with me,' she snarled, 'That was Miss Leggett on the phone, from the Company. They've got the measure of you, don't you worry about that.'

  'I think there's been a mistake. I don't know any Miss Leggett.'

  'Well she knows you. And she wants to see you.'

  Loofah stepped backwards as she advanced again, her old face a mask of righteous anger.

  'At once!' she added, in a quavering shriek.