Page 50 of Once Upon a Thyme
Simon swallowed another mouthful of the much-too-hot tea. His eyes skipped about again, from my face to the dresser to Zeb, and then to the window. ‘This place hasn’t changed at all,’ he said to the wilting basil plants.
‘Since it was built? It really has; we’ve got a flushing toilet, no pony and the garden isn’t full of coal.’ The anger was still coming out in my voice.
‘I mean since I was here.’ Simon was obviously trying to find his way into the topic; he had no more idea of how this should go than I did. ‘I remember you playing on a mat there, in front of the range, you’d be about six months old I suppose. Sitting there with your chubby little arms waving about, all gummy grins and sudden shrieking,’ he went on, mistily.
‘If you say “no change there” I shall pour this tea over your head,’ I said to Zeb. I was trying to move this along; I wanted it over, and yet – I wanted to know. Every word that Simon said sounded new, as though I’d never heard a baby described like this before. This wasme. A me I’d never ever heard about. A me, now I thought about it, that there were no photographs of. As though I’d only started to exist once my father had… died.
‘I met your mother in London,’ Simon said, surprising me anew. My mother had never mentioned London before in any context. ‘We were both very young, both rather inclined to be party animals.’
Again that moment of dissonance. The only kind of animal my mother could ever be compared with was something that hibernated, and the only parties she had any interest in were the rigidly anti-everything political ones.
‘We came back here when you were on the way and rented a little place in the village because your mum wanted to be close to home, to her mum, which was only right. I knew then, of course…’ He tailed off. Cleared his throat. Started again. ‘I thought she’d change. I thought things would be different when you were born. Having a baby, having a home, I thought it would make her stop. But nothing could, Tallie. Not even you.’
That ice crystal that had sunk to the bottom of my stomach was back. It crept up and became solid, as though a sudden frost had stiffened all the stems in the garden and fixed the blooms in a deadly immobility. He was speaking about my mother as though she were a person I’d never met. ‘Stop what?’
Simon seemed to come back from whatever romantic past he had been inhabiting. His eyes snapped up to mine and there was a frowned question in them. ‘They keptthatfrom you too? Oh, Tallie, I am so sorry. Things should have been so very different, but I agreed,weagreed, it would be for the best.’
‘Simon, will you stop building up your part and just tell me, outright and factually, all these things that you assume I know?’ I sounded brisk now, far more like myself. ‘Clearly Idon’tknow, and obviously everything has been kept secret and I’m getting a little bit fed up with all the allusions and careful not-mentionings. So just tell me.’
I felt Zeb press his leg against mine under the table, just a brief touch but it was comforting.
Simon made an ‘ouch’ face. ‘But I don’t know what you don’t know,’ he said, reasonably. ‘I have no idea how much of this is a total surprise to you and how much is me going over old ground.’
‘Can we just assume that I know absolutely nothing?’ I put my mug down on the table. ‘Because that is about where I am coming in at. I might need the full prologue too.’
‘Right. Okay. Yes, sorry.’ Simon’s eyes were a greenish blue, I noticed. I’d not really looked at them before, when they’d just been eyes. Now I could see that they were the same colour as mine. ‘Tallie, your mother is an alcoholic. She has been since I first met her, and from what you’ve said about her, nothing seems to have changed in nearly thirty years.’
Of course.Of course.His words slammed into my brain and everything slotted into place like a toddler’s jigsaw puzzle with huge chunky pieces and enormous easy-fit holes. The ‘illness’ nobody could get to the bottom of. Her periodic disappearances to her room, her random behaviour and never eating. My mother was so obviously an alcoholic that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it. Stupidity and anger were now at war in my brain for prominent emotion.
Anger won. I threw my mug across the room and it hit the stone sink, where it shattered. I was clearly getting good at this ‘angry’ thing. All the practice I was getting, probably.
‘Just tell me the fucking story,’ I hissed and I sounded as though I were about to commit a murder. Zeb’s leg pressed mine again.
Simon took another deep breath. ‘Right. You didn’t know that either. Right. Okay. I’d better give you chapter and verse then.’
So he did.
Amanda Kiddlington and Jonathon Fisher had met on the party circuit in London. From the description, ‘the party circuit’ had mostly been girls who did PA jobs and young men trying to make it in the music industry. Too much alcohol, a lot of drugs, and the inevitable had happened. Amanda had got pregnant, whereupon Jonathon had done the decent thing, married her and moved with her back to her home village in North Yorkshire.
But Amanda, despite wanting to come home, hadn’t wanted to quit the party. She had tried to stop drinking throughout her pregnancy but failed, she’d probably been drunk when I’d been delivered too. Her mother had tried to get her to stop, Jonathon had tried, but she was deep in addiction. The young couple had been blown apart by the arrival of a baby, my mother’s drinking,hermother’s interference, Jonathon’s refusal to give up music and go to work on a local farm, and they’d split up. Jonathon had gone back to London.
‘Youleftme?’ I asked, aghast. ‘With a drunk?’
‘I honestly wanted to take you with me.’ Simon sounded choked. ‘I came back for you, about six months later. Not my finest hour, I have to admit. I should have gone through the courts and done it properly but I didn’t think I had a leg to stand on as a single man living in squats. So…’
‘It wasyou?’ That smell of smoke and the scratch of a shirt against my face. ‘You were the man who tried to snatch me in the supermarket?’
He dropped his head. ‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘I thought, once I’d got you, they’d let me keep you.’
‘And what really happened?’
‘We went back to court. I told them all about the… the drinking. The judge was sympathetic but it was still thought best that you stayed with your mother. They made a ruling though, that she had to have help, and your grandmother stepped in, said that Amanda could come and live with her, to be supervised.’ Again his thoughts seemed to slip back a few decades. ‘The court agreed. I’d just given up playing in the band, changed my name and taken over the management side, I didn’t have a house, I was moving around all the time – there were several bands, all over the country. I didn’t look a good bet to leave a small child with.’
‘They told me you were dead.’ The words sounded emotionless but only through some effort. Right now I hated everyone and everything. Even Zeb was going to get a fork in the hand if he tried to touch me.
‘We thought it was best. I was travelling abroad, I couldn’t keep to any contact schedule, your mother and your grandmother thought it was less confusing for you if I just stayed away. I did think I might be able to come back, to visit a few times a year, that they might allow that… But no. I was dead. And they seem to have made sure that you never asked questions. I always hoped that one day you’d find me. I wrote to you. I sent you cards and presents every birthday. When I thought you were old enough, I sent you my address, my new name so you could come and looking and you’d find me… ah, who was I kidding.’
I thought of the hours spent poring through the digitised copies of the local paper, trying to find details of the accident. Of all that research into women whose fathers had died when they were young. Trying to make sense of it all, trying to work out what had made me the way I was.
