Page 27 of Once Upon a Thyme
I must have sounded fierce because Zeb looked startled. His eyebrows shot up to compete with his raggy hairline, which was bobbing about with an alarmed life of its own. ‘Well, yes, I know that. It’s just that you’re paying him to work here but he can only do half a job. If you had someone who knew about herbsandcould work in the shop then you wouldn’t have to close whenever you needed to be somewhere else. Maximise profits, you see,’ he finished, apologetically. ‘Unless you and Ollie have – history?’ he added, in a tone of such disbelief that I almost laughed.
‘No.’ I had to shut down that line of reasoning. ‘I took Ollie on because… because…’ I stared across at the sleepily nodding herbs for inspiration. The weight of the sunlight was pressing down on everything now with its early evening heat, as though the day was nearly fully cooked. Time to close the shop.
Zeb followed me as I went to the A frame and began dragging it into the yard. ‘Because?’ he prompted. ‘My imagination is working overtime here.’
‘I’m certainly not paying extra forthat,’ I said, and he laughed.
‘So. Ollie.’ He took the bottom half of the big stand, which proclaimed Drycott Herbs pick your own farm and shop to be open and helped me carry it inside.
I sighed. ‘Look, you mustn’t breathe a word of this to Ol, all right? Not that it matters so much now that he’s turned out to be so good, but I don’t want him to think…’
‘You have a secret desire for his body?’ Zeb hauled the frame over the step and we both stopped, back inside the deep shade of the shop again, where it felt as though night had fallen suddenly.
‘Don’t laugh,’ I said. ‘Ollie is lovely. He just doesn’t interview well, that’s all. It’s not his fault.’
Zeb tipped his head. The shadowing in the shop made him look sharper. It accentuated the planes and angles of his face and the line of stubble which drew his cheekbones in with a graphite smudge. The stalks of straw stuck to his shirt now made him look more natural, more as though he belonged here. ‘Of course it’s not his fault,’ he said, and even his voice sounded different. More thoughtful.
‘Ollie came just as I was taking over Drycott from Mum,’ I said. Without thinking I pulled a piece of straw from Zeb’s front and began pleating it in my fingers. ‘His mum knew we were looking for workers and she brought him over one day in February.’
I remembered the sheer terror on Ollie’s face that day. He’d been almost green with fear, and his mother had had to spend several minutes persuading him out of the car, his hands clenched with tension on the edge of the seat.
‘I took them both into the cottage and made them tea, and Ollie loosened up a bit when he saw all the herbs. Once he started talking to me it all seemed to get better for him, and we chatted about growing things for a while – he had his own garden at home and he’d been experimenting with – never mind.’
‘Poor Ollie.’ Zeb shifted and more straw fell off him. ‘That must have been hard for him.’
‘Then my mum came down. She’d been having one of her poorly days so she’d not been about much but she heard us talking and she came into the kitchen. Well, Ollie was off like a rabbit then, and I told his mum I’d be in touch, and once they’d gone, my mum started laughing. She wasn’t… she wasn’t very polite about him, put it that way. So I told her I was hiring him, starting next week, and it was one of the only times I’ve ever seen her speechless.’
I stopped. That was all he needed to know. Ollie had turned out to be a terrific asset to the business, and the fact I’d hired him in the first place to annoy my mother in one of the few, subtle ways that I could go against her shouldn’t come into it now. I always reassured myself that at least I hadn’t hired him because I felt sorry for him, because it was obvious he would struggle to get work anywhere else. It hadn’t been pity, it had been the desire to show that this wasmybusiness now and Mother no longer had the last word.
‘He’s great with the animals too,’ I said, twisting a barley head around the straw figure that my hands had made without thinking about it. ‘Like you. Men seem to have an affinity with Big Pig.’
‘Hm. That’s damning with faint praise if ever I heard it.’ He leaned back comfortably against the counter. ‘Why is she called Big Pig?’
I rolled my eyes at him, although I didn’t know why. He wouldn’t be able to see in the gloom. ‘Because the guinea pigs are small pigs, obviously.’
‘But why not something worthy of her? Like Tallulah or… or… Gladys? Big Pig isn’t a name, it’s a description.’
‘When she came she was only meant to be temporary,’ I said, staring out of the window now towards the animal barn. ‘She was a few weeks old and someone dumped her in the gateway. They’d probably bought a piglet as a pet and then realised how big they get. They’re cute when they’re small, but they only stay small for a fortnight, and whoever dropped her off must have known that I had a barn. I was going to pass her on to a farm, but I got fond of her.’ I thought of the bulk of Big Pig and her seemingly perpetual desire to stand on me. ‘Fairlyfond, anyway,’ I added. ‘So I made the best of it and we got the rabbits and the other pets and they see us through the winter with playgroup visits and suchlike.’
‘She’s an accidental pig?’ Zeb started to laugh now. The movement made the straw fall from his shirt onto the shop floor and I narrowed my eyes at him.
‘You’re making a mess.’
Zeb looked around the shop, rather ostentatiously for my liking. He was making the point, and rather well I had to admit, that it wasn’t exactly pristine in here. Seeds had dropped from some of the dried heads that hung from the rafters to condiment the floor, and various loose strands of stem and leaf fluttered back and forth across the stone floor in ankle-height draughts.
‘What’s your mum living off?’ he asked, surprising me because I thought he’d been about to point out that he was hardly ruining the décor with two bits of loose straw in here. ‘I mean, you’re not keeping her afloat with her proportion of your takings, are you? And she doesn’t work?’
‘Well, no, she’s ill.’
‘So she’s on some kind of disability payment?’ Zeb was looking at me very intently now, his eyes dark in the shaded coolness of the shop.
‘No, she can’t get disability because the doctors don’t know what’s wrong with her.’ There was a sting in my blood now, an increase in my heart rate as though Mika were coming through the doorway, which he definitely wasn’t because I could hear the laughter billowing across from the cottage. The band were standing in my kitchen doorway and there seemed, from a quick glance out of the window, to be a lot of photography going on.
‘Has she always been ill?’
This was more familiar territory. ‘Yes. Even before I was born, apparently. She keeps going to the doctor and coming back saying they’re going to do more tests, but it’s beenyearsand they haven’t found anything. She’ll be fine for a week or so and then suddenly she can’t get out of bed for days. Everything hurts and she’s sick and can’t stand. Like migraines but worse.’
‘Sounds rough.’
