7.11: Desperation
A week passes and those in the Potting Shed carry on their normal lives of tending the market garden, volunteering in the nearby town, attending the many meetings of the packed committee schedule and fixing holes in the roof as necessary. No one gives much thought to whatever may be going on at the Swan Hotel.
Then one day, the Minkey bursts through the front door just as breakfast is being tidied away. He looks, as Lottie remarks later, ‘crazed and crazy’.
“I can’t go on any more!” He cries out. “All those poets asking me to sing at all hours of the day and night! They even started following me back to my hovel at the end of my shift. Last night, that Mike Farren climbed into my pile of leaves. He wanted to ‘sniff my odour of greatness’. They all keep asking when the Posthumous Encore Tour is going to begin. And even the Westmorland Gazette wants to know that so they can have a full spread about it. They are all mad!”
“So you no longer think that you are, somehow, Nick Drake?” Alcock asks.
“No. I don’t really know what I was thinking.”
“See!” says Lottie, though it is not at all clear why, as she had been happy to accept the possibility that the Minkey had been the long dead dolorous crooner. Teenagers, huh! No diachronic consistency.
“I’ve an idea” – pTravis – “But it may require that you die, again!”
“Hang on. I’m not sure about that!”
“What did your own version of the song say?”