In the spirit of sharing first chapters, I thought I'd offer mine up.
My agent loves the book - but he is sadly alone in this - so I might publish it myself.
It's not really comedy - more bitter-sweet with some funny bits.
Pasting it onto here it looks very long - sorry.
Interested in your views.
THE FRUIT & VEG MAN
Chapter One
The man in the frock turned sideways to check his reflection in the mirror. A calloused hand ran down the front of the dress, smoothing the material over the curves of a nascent beer belly.
"It shows the lumps and bumps a bit."
"Gold-lame will do that - it's not the kindest of materials. A little strappy belt might take the curse off it..."
It was four in the afternoon and Tim Sanders was sitting on a barstool in 'Transformations', a discreet gentleman's club off the Marylebone Road, selling outsize frocks to the manager, a Greek transvestite called Manny. A day much like any other then.
A phone rang nearby and it took Tim a full three rings before he worked out it was his. It was a new mobile -- he'd been upgraded at gunpoint -- and this was the first time he'd heard it's 'hilarious' Hawaii-Five-0 ring tone.
Shamefully, he answered it, holding up an apologetic hand to his client.
"It's your Mother."
It wasn't and he told the caller as much.
"Not me! I'm not your mother. I'm your Auntie Maureen !"
" Then why the hell..."
" How could I be your Mother when she's lying in a near vegetative state at St. Michael's?"
Tim pulled a face at the phone.
" Yes, I know that Maureen, I'm popping in on my way home tonight."
" Well, I shouldn't bother, 'cos she's dead."
And that was that.
He continued listening in silence, trying to muster the appropriate feelings, while she told him not to worry, she would organise everything, whilst at the same time tacitly implying that, had he been any sort of a son, he would have been at the bedside, calling the undertakers, phoning round the relatives and so on. He let her finish, said goodbye then snapped the mobile shut.
The man in the gold-lame slip dress was speaking.
"Trouble is, Tim, this sort of stuff's not as popular as it was. Cross-dressing has moved on - these days it's all spangly boob tubes and hot pants - look at Gerri Halliwell..."
"She' s not....is she?"
"No, no... but she's an icon to the community."
Manny began undressing and, not for the first time,Tim wondered quite how it was that things had ended up like this.
Back in the car, samples stowed and a blank order-book on the seat beside him, he tried to focus on the fact that he no longer had a mother. No longer had anyone, come to think of it. Father dead, wife living with a quantity surveyor in Droitwich, no children, no lover.
Tim looked up at the grey slabs of cloud sliding past the even greyer slabs of the North London skyline. This was not the plan, not the plan at all. But then, that particular version had come unstuck a long time ago, under a very different sky.
But his mind resisted going that far back, deciding to settle instead on the last time he'd seen his mother.
They were in her St. Albans kitchen - the kitchen of his childhood - Tim washing while she dried. He wasn't taking too much trouble - she'd wash them again once he'd gone, always did. One of the many things he didn't do to her satisfaction.
And it was this general dissatisfaction with her son's efforts to date that had formed the backbone of the evening's discussion. It had started when Tim dared to raise the subject of the ailing family business - a business he'd taken over after Dad had fallen over in the garden and never got up again.
His father had been in women's clothing. Not literally, of course, though the twinkle in his eye when he sang the praises of the reinforced gusset might lead one to suspect otherwise.
It was a small, desperately boring little business that imported unfinished garments from the Far East, sewed on a few buttons and bows, then sold them on to the more dowdier department stores.
He remembered with deep anguish being dragged through the ladies department of Sopers, as it was then called (it was a Debenham's now, and would have no truck with the kind of tat they produced) being forced to watch as his father rubbed and poked his way through rack after rack of voluminous blousery. The store had long since stopped calling the police, but his father still kept a handful of business cards in his wallet to fend off irate customers. The label had been Christened 'Gay by Simon' in the days when gay was a nice, sweet word. And his father flatly refused to believe there to be any other meaning. Consequently sales had dropped, except, interestingly, in some of the larger sizes, where business was booming.
If his father had known he was kitting out half the cross-dressers in the South of England, one wonders whether he'd have been quite so happy with, what was, a modestly healthy balance sheet. But the business continued to grow, duly dropping the smaller sizes and going all the way up to a 48 Tall and, in the process, creating a somewhat distorted view of English womanhood in the eyes of dozens of bewildered oriental seamstresses.
A temporary measure at first had soon became all too permanent. But after 'that business on the continent' as it was referred to within the family, he was happy to bury himself in the everyday graft of helping run the company. And when the old man had his first stroke it made sense to take over full time.
But, now, the business was on its last legs. No longer content to look like their mothers, the 'scene' was full of peacocks and butterfly's. 'Gay' by Simon stayed resolutely in the closet.
"Your father loved that business - it would break his heart to sell it." She had crossly put her knife and fork down on her plate and was starting to pick nervously at the sleeve of her cardigan. "Why can't you stick at anything, Timothy?"
His heart sank - he knew where this was going.
"If I could find something worth sticking at, I would, Mum. But at least we can get something for the business - maybe a hundred grand or so. You could sell this place, get somewhere smaller, live of your ill-gotten gains..."
"What, sell Brookdene?"
God, she made it sound like Chatsworth. 'Brookdene' was, in fact, 114 Langham Crescent, St. Albans, the house where Tim had done the bulk of his growing up, and where his parents had done all of their growing old.
The faces on the mantelpiece stared out in silence. Grandparents eating ice-cream, a stripy wind-break failing to keep the sand out; Mum and Dad, confetti strewn and laughing; a fair-haired schoolboy growing older in a series of cardboard frames. Then a gap where his wedding photo used to be, followed by a yawning void reserved for the non-existent grandchildren.
Single-handedly he'd bought the Sanders family to a halt, the broken branch of the family tree.
It's not like he hadn't tried.
The woman he married was perfectly pleasant - a hearty, gung-ho sort he'd met at the St. Anthony's Old Boys Club. She'd been at The Manor School for Girls and claimed to have snogged him once at Ruislip Station.
He said he couldn't remember. Which of course was a lie. Like every other schoolboy, he knew location, recipient and, often as not, duration of every single kiss he'd ever given.
The Old Boys Club was a desperate place. A monument to failed ambition, it attracted those poor souls that had found it all a bit much in the real world. These were the people who kept alive the myth that the best days of your life were at school. What they meant, of course, was the best days of their lives were at school, simply because they had rotten, horrible, shitty lives.
Essentially it was a bar, with a shed built round it, surrounded by an acre of mud, onto which the groundsman occasionally painted white lines so that grown men could act like boys again.
There was a sort of hall which, every Christmas, turned into a disco of the 'High-Ho Silver Lining' variety. As a Sixth-Former there was an unwritten understanding that you could 'crash' the event, as long as you didn't make a total tit of yourself. This was a slightly flawed policy as, by the time the next Christmas Disco came around, you'd have left school anyway, so there wasn't exactly a lot they could do about it. Consequently, by the end of the evening, you'd always find a circle of pissed, tit-like objects head-banging to 'Freebird', wondering why they couldn't pull any women.
Tim kept coming because it made him feel better. This was the one place where packing in 'all that art nonsense' and joining your father's business wasn't seen as complete and abject failure. On the contrary it was seen as quite admirable.
It was also where he was programmed with the blueprint for a happy suburban life.
Cars, above all else, were important. A man's worth could be measured in cc's, bhp and mpg. Not your flashy, fanny-magnet Ferraris for these guys. It was all about depreciation, resale value and maintenance. This was a universe where you could put plastic covers over your seats and not be laughed at.
Next came property. More specifically, the property ladder. New build was best, UPVC double-glazing essential, garaging - well, need we say more. Again, re-sale was everything. This wasn't to be a home, just a staging post to the next staging post. And, just as before, it was ok to put plastic runners down on the carpet, or, at the very least, get people to take their shoes off.
Finally wives. These were essential. Sadly, though, trading up was not so simple. Hence the need for a good first-time purchase. Solid and reliable over delicate and interesting. A sound runner rather than anything too racy. All you had to do was keep her well-upholstered and in good all-round nick. Plastic had its role here, too.
And 'Ladies Night' at the Old Boys was where you'd go to pick one up.
Tim had just turned twenty-seven and recently buried his father. By some sort of unspoken act of succession his mother had moved into the spare room, leaving the 'master' bedroom to her son, the new man of the house. This, he imagined, was the St.Albans version of the wife throwing herself onto her husbands funeral pyre. An act of nullification.
Without my husband, I am nothing.
He found all this depressing, and the drunken, forced bonhomie of the club was just what he needed. The 'ladies' were doing slammers and there was something about one of them - a cheerful looking girl called Karen Heatherton - that caught his eye.
It was, in fact, a 2oz shot glass that must have slipped from her grasp, fetching him a glancing blow, and causing a temporary loss of vision.
Blinded by love once again.
And, just as before, he remained blind to all that was wrong with their relationship. So when she suggested marriage, he couldn't think of a valid reason why not.
The bleak, loveless years that followed were punctuated by huge bust-ups, each one an opportunity to break away. Each one an opportunity not taken. Keeping the thing going - for their families - became the imperative, the reason for getting back together. Until the next time. Despite the pairs determination to stay together, their organs of reproduction were having none of it. Sperm and egg resolutely refused to get into bed together, no matter how often the couple did. The gene pool always knows best.
So they remained childless as well as loveless.
It was only a matter of time before the break-ups became more regular than the make-ups, and from then the slow drift into separation became an inevitability. Even then it was Karen who acted first, depriving Tim of just about the only noble act he could ever hope to undertake.
She left him, taking half the money but none of the pain.
He should have been pleased. But he was so tied up in the Suburban Dream that he could only look upon it as a shameful disaster. Next to failing to get the asking price for your house, divorce was about the worst thing that could happen to a bloke. His, or rather, her circle of friends had already become a little impatient with their shoddy performance on the sprogg front. Now, the divorce meant they could ditch him altogether, filing him, irrevocably, under Divorced & Separates.
So he retreated. He let work consume him, doing just enough around the house to keep Health & Safety off his back. At weekends he'd hide under the duvet, dissecting the past, tracing in his minds eye the alternative routes his life could have taken. They were all better than the cul-de-sac he currently found himself in. And they all lead back to France and 'that business on the continent'
" Come and look at the back border - I've spruced it up a bit"
His mother was smiling at him, drying the last glass and placing it carefully on the draining board.
And, looking back, it was a smile that said, let's not end like this. Not on an argument. So, he took her by the arm - an arm that now seemed as light and hollow as a birds wing - helping her down the concrete steps to the back garden, just as she'd helped him down when he was learning to walk.
But she wasn't learning, she was forgetting.
That was a fortnight ago. And now she was gone.
