Page 30 of Once Upon a Thyme
It was so out of context that I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. ‘Your wife did what?’
‘Come and have some of this food.’ He waved a fork. ‘There’s loads. I may have overdone it slightly. The curry looks good, I think the battered sausage might have been a step too far though, but I don’t know what you eat so I got a bit of everything that the takeaways in Pickering have to offer. You were just lucky that the pizza place was closed, or there would have been that too.’
He was weird, I decided, sitting opposite him and ladling portions of random food onto my plate, which formed a pattern more complicated than the flag of Turkmenistan. This was the second, or was it third, time that he’d talked about his life in this random, half-cautious way, as though it was a subject that slid away the closer he got to it.
‘You said your wife did something?’
‘Had an affair, yes. With that TV chef guy that I told you about, the one I trained with. I don’t blame her in one way, I was never at home, but, seriously? With anotherchef? If she’d slept with some bloke who worked a nine to five, home in time for tea and TV every night, yes, I could have understood that. Reliable, sensible hours, consistent pay. But – anotherchef! That’s like, I dunno, telling everyone you hate tattoos and then sleeping with Jason Momoa.’
We sat and stared silently at the battered sausage. ‘Actually…’ I started, but Zeb carried on.
‘It wasn’t her fault. I mean, it was, she didn’t fall on his penis or anything, but I really wasn’t a great husband. We weren’t a marriage, we were an accident waiting to happen.’
Another moment of silent staring. The sausage stared back. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked, at last, when the cracks in the batter had begun to look as though they wore a sympathetic expression.
Zeb shook his head and his fringe wobbled. ‘I’m not altogether sure,’ he said. ‘Perhaps because you’ve been so honest with me about your past? I suppose I want you to know that I understand what it’s like to be trapped and then to try to change things, only to find that it’s too late? Maybe?’
‘Only I’m not.’ I dragged the computer forward on its desk and fired up the screen with one hand as the other was holding something that I was very afraid might be a kebab. ‘Here are the figures for this financial year. If you go back a page you can see last year’s.’
‘Mika seems to like you.’
That surprised me into nearly pulling the monitor off the desk. ‘What? Really? No, he’s just being…’ I remembered that hand cupping mine, those bright, mischievous eyes. ‘Just being nice,’ I finished.
‘And you clearly fancy him.’
‘This is this month’s takings. You can see how they rise month on month from about April…’
‘I think he’s an utter dick, of course, but you flirting with him so outrageously is making sure that the band stick around to film as opposed to heading over to the coast or some stately home and garden.’
‘…and we’re about ten per cent up on the takings this year from the equivalent period last year, which is good,’ I continued, resolutely not listening to him, although his words were seeping through my desire to distract his attention and reaching my ‘desire to hit him with the battered sausage’ layer.
We both stopped speaking at the same time. I turned away from my screen to see that he was looking at me over his plate, with a suspended popadom dipping dramatically under the weight of something orange. His expression was unreadable. There seemed to be some element of hope in there, and a question rearing its head under the slightly raised eyebrows.
‘What the hell are you on about?’ I shunted myself back to the table. Despite my desire to avoid any of his questions – about my mother, about Mika – the smell of the food lured me back to my plate.
‘I like you.’ Zeb’s eyes had gone to the table now. ‘And I don’t think you deserve what’s happening here.’
His tone held a weight, an import. Every syllable bent under the doom it contained, as though they meant something other than the simple message they were conveying.
‘That’s very… I mean…’ Flustered, I tried to fork up a piece of something from the curry sauce, but it turned out not to be a piece of chicken as I’d expected, but something soft which fell apart on impact and left me scraping around to try to regather it. ‘There really isn’t anything “happening” here, you know, Zeb. I’m trying to keep the business together, that’s all.’
‘I’m not good at communicating.’ He stood up so suddenly that I was almost sure I heard the surprised squeak of a startled mouse, chair sliding back from the table to give him room to start pacing. ‘Another complaint from my wife and I seem to have got worse, side effect of a job where you poke through people’s finances when they don’t want you to. I thought it would be useful, come in to businesses and tell them what to do – but it turns out that nobody wants you there except for management. Everyone on the floor is already doing what they can and what they’re told. No one has the authority to change anything except the top bods, and they don’t really care, except for profitability, when sometimes that’s not what it’s about.’
He stopped talking and looked at me, his hair flopping with curtailed movement.
‘Well you just managed to communicate all that without a problem,’ I said tartly.
‘It isn’t what I thought it would be.’ Zeb leaned against the door, restlessly. I wondered if he was allergic to the additives in the curry or something, because he was decidedly twitchy. ‘I want to help people sort themselves out, but I’m beginning to realise that I need something more creative. I loved that, with the cooking, being able to dream up new dishes, new ingredients, and I thought I could translate it into showing people new ways to run their businesses. Turns out that everyone just wants more money for doing the same old stuff.’ He sighed. ‘I’m not cut out for this. I hate the whole “reduce expenses, advertise more”, which is all my job really comes down to.’
‘Again, not entirely sure why you are telling me this.’ I watched him carefully. There was a fidgety impatience about him which made me wonder whether he might be about to launch into a meaningless tirade, start telling me that the moon landings were a hoax.
‘To be honest, neither am I.’
Zeb came and sat down again and we ate some more of the random collection of food items in near silence. Eventually, because he was still looking anxious, I asked, ‘So, what would be your dream job? If you could do anything in the world?’
His chewing slowed, and he looked thoughtfully into the curry, as though he could read his future in the bobbing chicken lumps and the orange sauce. ‘Good question,’ he said slowly.
‘I thought so, yes.’
