Page 23 of Once Upon a Thyme
But still, deep down, deep inside there was that tiny little voice that whispered to me sometimes, the sound of wind through leaves,if it hadn’t been your birthday, if he hadn’t been hurrying…
‘Your mum told you that much, then.’ He’d started moving again now, thankfully, edging his way down the desperately steep staircase. Granny used to let me slide down on her old tin tray, I remembered suddenly. I couldn’t have been more than four. Where had Mum been? Bed probably, one of her poorly days.
‘She had to, I needed to tell school. Something about filling in a Life Book, I don’t really remember.’
‘And that’s it? That’s all you know about him? I did notice there were no wedding pictures up at your mum’s place.’
‘I never felt I could ask. Granny used to let bits and pieces slip now and then, so I know he was tall, he had dark hair, but they’d both clam up if I asked anything directly. He played guitar in a band, I know that too. Mum was apparently so totally devastated when he died that she couldn’t even bear to hear his name. I think she burned all the pictures of him, I’ve never seen one.’
‘That’s… harsh. He was your dad, surely you have a right to?—’
‘Mum and Granny brought me up very well, thank you,’ I said stiffly. ‘It wasn’t easy for Mum, often being ill and then there was the time…’ I stopped and swallowed my tongue.
‘Something else happened?’ We’d made our way to the kitchen now. It smelled of bleach and various cleaning products and I hadn’t seen it sparkle this way since Granny died. It felt like a stranger’s house.
‘I…’ I didn’t know how to phrase it. ‘When I was eighteen months old, a man tried to snatch me. Mum and I were shopping, in York I think, in a supermarket. She took her eye off me for a moment and…’ The vague memory of a smell, smoke and aftershave, and the feeling of being lifted up and held against a soft shirt.
‘Oh.’ Zeb sat against the table. ‘Did the police…’
‘He was gone before they arrived. Apparently Mum screamed and he put me down and ran for it. But it’s made her rather…focusedwhere I am concerned.’
He nodded. ‘I think I understand.’
It was weird. This was the first time I’d talked, reallytalkedabout my father and about the attempted abduction. It was the first time I’d had anyone to talkto, losing a dad being seen as slightly embarrassing when I’d been at the posh school where everyone seemed to gain parents as divorced mothers remarried and fathers acquired girlfriends. Friends had always been rather distant, and my life had revolved around the herb farm and Mum, so I hadn’t had the confidantes that might have listened. Now it was all coming out in the face of Zeb’s questioning and I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that.
‘After that was when she moved back in with Granny, and she didn’t like me being out without her. She’d put me on the school bus and fetch me from it at the end of the day and I wasn’t allowed to go into town on my own, things like that. I think it frightened her, nearly losing me when her husband had died so recently.’
‘I…’ But Zeb didn’t get any further before there was a commotion at the door and a rotating collection of people arrived. Simon was there, Tessa and Loke, two men with cameras – and Mika. All of them looking beautifully turned out, cool and achingly trendy, just as you might expect to see a band on TV, living their best lives. I just wished I hadn’t agreed that they could live their best lives in my kitchen.
‘Hey, Tallie.’ Mika stepped inside. ‘Nice gear. Very cute.’
Oh God, I was still in my pyjamas. Zeb had distracted me from the business of getting dressed, and oversleeping had meant that I hadn’t slipped into the little dress I’d hung up in the bathroom ready, hadn’t put on that carefully curated make-up that I’d been planning. It had been going to take me at least an hour to look natural and ‘just got out of bed’, and now here I was, natural and ‘just got out of bed’ for real. My skin went very tight and hot.
‘We got talking.’ Zeb sounded almost amused, but not in the same way Mika was. ‘Everything’s running a bit late today.’
‘We’ll go and do a bit more work outside.’ Simon took pity on me, probably because my face had reached the same temperature as the sun. ‘Come back in half an hour, when you’ve had chance to sort yourself out.’
He hustled everyone back outside, Mika trailing behind and giving me a cheeky wink as he left, which didn’t help my overheating problem. I watched him go with my hands up to my betraying face and a state of horrified terror pulling my ‘cute’ pyjamas even tighter around me. They were an ancient little shorts set that Granny had bought me on a rare trip into town, and pre-dated me owning Drycott by quite a way. Actually, thinking about it, they may have pre-dated puberty by quite a way. There was a kitten on the front of my shirt.
Zeb nudged me. ‘You were going to get dressed,’ he said.
I couldn’t make my body work. The dichotomy of talking about my father and Mika being in my house had made all my systems shut down and all I could do was lean rather feebly against the Aga, wondering if my legs were stubbly, if Mika had noticed and if he would care.
‘I’m just a bit…’ I said faintly.
‘I can see that. Come on.’ He gave me a firm push now. ‘Upstairs. Clothes on. I’m working on a way to charge them extra to be in here, and you don’t want to put me off, do you?’ He gave me another nudge nudge with an elbow, until I stepped forward, found there was enough strength in my legs to walk, and tottered up to the bathroom to compose myself and get rid of the stupid kitten T-shirt.
* * *
I didn’t bother with the make-up in the end. There didn’t seem much point. I tried to tell myself that I looked better ‘au naturelle’ but the back of my mind echoed with some condemnatory phrases that my mother had used occasionally when I’d tried dressing up to go out, which might have contained words like ‘pointless’ and ‘trying too hard’. And I didn’t want to be seen as tryingat all. I did put on the little dress though; short and swingy, it gave me confidence. My legs were good, if stubbly, and brown enough for the hair growth not to show, as I established with my magnifying mirror and a bright light in the bathroom.
So by the time the band returned, laughing and loud, to the kitchen, I was properly covered with my hair brushed and feeling far more able to face Mika’s particular brand of self-confident flirtiness. Zeb had gone to feed the animals, the film unit had split in two – half to film in my kitchen with Loke, Tessa and Mika, and the other training cameras on Will, Vinnie and Genevra being beautiful among the gillyflowers. I was the awkward one, the odd one out, even though this was my damn farm. I didn’t belong inside, where Mika and Loke were trading in jokes and pretending to make tea, or outside, where their bandmates posed against the high brick walls next to the crab apple trees which were full of small birds. All I could see was my saxifrage being stepped on and quite a lot of parsley getting bent.
I stood under the mallows, half-heartedly tying odd sprigs in and moving the supporting wire frames, trying to look busy and fully employed whilst feeling stupidly exposed in the dress and rather pathetic. Whoops of laughter came from the house and whenever I looked at Will and Genevra they were happily chatting whilst Vinnie submitted to being posed amid the greenery. I wasn’t sure what was giving rise to this peculiar feeling of loneliness; after all, I worked on my own. Ollie did his thing but he wasn’t company, he was a colleague. Everything I did, I did alone and it didn’t bother me. Except that now it did.
Fed up with feeling as though absolutely everyone else had a role apart from me, I sought out Zeb in the barn. He was heaving a hay bale between the pens, preparing to fill the rabbits’ rack and bed up the guinea pigs. I was pleased to note that he also looked out of place; his long frame and slender limbs were incongruous wrestling the bales, like a spider attacking a house brick.
He noticed me standing in the entrance. ‘What?’
