Page 18 of Once Upon a Thyme
I hadn’t got to bed until the early hours of the morning.
After all, the curtains had needed a good wash anyway, and the windows needed cleaning; there were the wooden work surfaces to sand and oil – I couldn’t get away with covering them in herb pots again.
Fortunately for my sleep schedule I managed to stop myself short of painting the walls and cleaning out all the cupboards, but I fell into bed exhausted just before the sun began to tickle the tops of the far hills.
All of which meant I was woken by Zeb yelling up the stairs. ‘Tallie? Are you here? Your curtains are closed, are you ill?’
He’d gone straight home after meeting my mother, so I hadn’t been able to tell him about the arrangements for today; if I had, I would have been able to put him to work sweeping and polishing the floor tiles.
Going home for a nice quiet lie down was the natural reaction to being in my mother’s company for any length of time, so I couldn’t even blame him for dipping out on an afternoon’s hard work.
He’d probably had a killer migraine and low-grade earache to sleep off.
And at least he’d had the decency to text me and tell me he was ‘working from home’ rather than vanishing.
But the result was I’d not told him that I’d be up late cleaning the cottage and preparing the kitchen for its starring role.
It hadn’t seemed the sort of thing I could text – by the way, while you’re not here I’m going to be martyring myself to the cause of housework in an attempt to undo six months of neglect so that Mika thinks I’m a domestic goddess .
So when Zeb shouted me awake, I jerked upright with a confused ‘blurgh?’ to hear him coming cautiously up the stairs.
‘Tallie? You sound…’
Before I knew it, Zeb was in my bedroom, looking startled at my bed hair in the morning light that filtered through the curtains at the tiny window.
‘I’m fine.’ I was performing a weird sitcom mime of clutching the covers to my chest as though I’d been caught naked, when, in fact, I was wearing T-shirt-and-shorts pyjamas. ‘I had a late night, that’s all.’
Zeb stood and stared into the room. ‘Wow. Some of the things your mum said are beginning to make sense now.’
The urge to explain myself was so strong that I couldn’t squash it down, even though this was Zeb not my mother. ‘It’s just – I spent some time doing research and studying.’
‘I can see that.’
I wondered what he really could see. Obviously the absolutely factual, that my bedroom walls were covered in books and bookshelves, and where they were naked of shelving there were magazine articles and printouts stuck to the walls.
Garden designs, yes, herbs and their uses, but also articles about people whose parents – one or both – had died or been killed when they were very young.
Psychological works on ‘Blame and the Child’, pages of work on self-forgiveness; it all made my bedroom a bit like the office of a therapist with poor short-term memory.
‘Did… err… did you learn anything?’ Zeb swept out an arm. ‘From all this?’
I looked at the walls. ‘Mostly that Blu Tack isn’t good enough to keep printer paper vertical and that nobody knows what they are talking about,’ I said, trying to slide out of bed without him noticing.
If I could get him out of the room and away from this shrine to self-improvement, then he may forget about it.
‘Did you have therapy?’ He walked over to where a corner of a newspaper article had come loose and was flopping and curling across its print. ‘Because I think you may have needed it.’
I started to bridle at this unwanted and unwarranted observation, but then relaxed.
Zeb was only saying what he saw, and even I had to admit that my wall coverings made me look as though I had issues.
‘There was no point. I was a year old when my father died. I didn’t really start to understand what was going on until I found out about the accident. ’
‘Which was when?’ Zeb started squinting, reading the print.
It was a bio piece about the actress Kate Beckinsale, describing how it felt to lose her father as a young child.
I had identified in a probably rather over-the-top way, given that my similarities to Kate Beckinsale began and ended with ‘female, lost male parent’.
‘I was about ten. Until then I only knew that he’d died.’
‘Oh, Tallie,’ Zeb said softly. The words were swallowed by the half-light, weighted to the carpet under the dust motes that sank in the sun’s rays.
‘Oh, no, it’s fine, honestly.’ I hustled him out of the room, hoping he hadn’t noticed the scatter of clothes on the floor on the other side of the bed, or the hedgehog nightlight. ‘I’m interested, that’s all.’
‘Do you know what happened?’ We’d only got as far as the tiny landing and Zeb stopped walking, so I ricocheted off his shoulder and against the banister. ‘To your dad?’
‘He…’ I held the wooden rail firmly in one hand. The smell reminded me so much of Granny; old wood and lavender water had been her signature scent. ‘He was coming home for my birthday party. He was driving too fast and he crashed into a tractor on one of the lanes near here.’
Zeb had gone very still. ‘And that’s why you think it was your fault?’
‘No! I was one! I couldn’t even feed myself, let alone ask him to make sure he was home in time for my party. Of course it wasn’t my fault.’
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… focused where I am concerned.’
He nodded. ‘I think I understand.’
It was weird. This was the first time I’d talked, really talked about my father and about the attempted abduction.
It was the first time I’d had anyone to talk to , 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.’