✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

108. My Cheese

This chapter is dedicated to Joe, with thanks for your support on Patreon. I am aware that there are 20 supporters who are still owed a chapter for this month; I'm doing my best to get them finished on schedule. Thank you all for your patience. And thank you Joe for letting everyone see this chapter a day early.

Can anyone guess what Gabby's up to yet? I don't know if I need to drop more hints, or if I gave you enough.

The gardens behind the Old House Inn weren't well delineated; it wasn't clear where the grounds of the hotel ended and the public park began. It was a little strange, but that was actually the norm for most of Upper Ashfields. The whole town was filled with green spaces, and businesses were encouraged to let them all blend together so that everybody could work with the impression that they were surrounded by nature. As long as everything was well maintained, it really didn't matter where the boundaries between one property and the next were.

I looked around the space, between lines of flowers in different colours and the trees that provided a variety of shade, and I only saw one person enjoying the sun. He looked like a typical middle-aged salaryman, with a casual suit and just the first, faint hints of a bald spot in his sandy hair. A pair of sunglasses hung from his shirt pocket, and he had a slim paperback in his hands. He looked for all the world like he could have been one of the project's accountants, or a PR guy.

I walked over and sat on the next bench over; a couple of feet away so as not to crowd him, but close enough to be easily heard. From that distance I could see the book in his hands more closely as well. It looked like it could have been some pulp romance, a thin volume that wouldn't need too much thought, but the author's picture on the back cover was one I recognised: a portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli. The text looked like it could have been greek, which seemed a bit of a mismatch, but reinforced my confidence that I was talking to the right guy. He was rumoured to speak a dozen languages, and said that reading serious texts in any given tongue helped him to see the worldview of the people who were raised with it.

"Mark Smith?" I said. "I'm Gabby Noel. I think you might have agreed to talk to me."

"They called me Mr Smith here," he answered thoughtfully, "but on my booking I had to sign myself as Geoffrey. They really do take confidentiality seriously here."

"I didn't remember the name they gave you, they changed it a dozen times before reaching a final decision. But I figured that the way you sign your name on certain forums would work better. I was never sure if 'Mk. 2' should be pronounced as 'M. K. two' or 'Mark two'."

"Either works," he said. "I have to admit that online I seem to regard a name as a sequence of letters, and rarely even consider how it would be spoken aloud. Should I have seen some of your messages on the lists and newsgroups?"

"Not me," I answered, shaking my head. "My exposure to your work pretty much started when Claughton asked me to handle a lot of admin. But my girlfriend is a huge fan, and she's been trying to persuade me to check out your work for years. Now I actually started reading, I wish I'd taken her up on the offer sooner."

"At least you're not going to say you're my biggest fan. But I was told that you know something about my cheese habit?"

"I've built a database to track what we've sent you. Trying to get a variety every day gets pretty hard when you don't allow duplicates. Taking the list of ones we've yet to send, and how long it will take for them to arrive from the manufacturer, I then have to choose a selection that gives you a selection while also allowing enough variety for future choices. Cheese is like so many things, you don't realise how much depth there is until you start diving into it. I feel like I've learned so many things this year. About cheese, about comic books, about storytelling, even about the movie industry."