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Page 22 of Once Upon a Thyme

‘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 been years and 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.’

‘Yes, Granny brought me up, more or less. I mean, Mum was there, of course, but she often couldn’t go out or help with the herbs because she had to stay in bed.’

‘Hmm,’ Zeb said.

I leaped to the defence of my family. ‘Look, a long-term disability isn’t anyone’s fault.

Like… like Ollie. Mum can’t help the fact that she’s often laid up for days, it’s just how it is and it’s all I’ve ever known.

Granny was brilliant, she looked after me and taught me all about herbs and their uses and then when I took over I branched out into decorative bouquets and things… ’

‘And how did your mother feel about that?’

I recoiled at the question. Zeb was getting very personal all of a sudden with all this deep involvement in my family. It was, after all, none of his business.

‘Look. You’re here to maximise the profits and report back to Mother that the place is doing well, right? Not to prod about in my background – none of which is relevant to turnover.’

My hands had started to sweat and I picked up the crude straw figure that I’d woven from the counter to give me something to do with my fingers.

Why did discussing my growing up make me feel so…

so… twitchy ? It was all very straightforward, I was hardly the first child to be brought up by their grandparent because of parental illness, so why did it make me feel so nervous?

Or was it just the way that Zeb kept pushing, like the worst kind of counsellor, trying for a crack in my personality?

‘So, anyway.’ I cleared my throat and twisted the little straw man back into shape. I’d nearly pulled his head off. ‘That’s all you need to know. And thanks to the band filming and paying for the privilege, we’ll be solvent for a bit longer.’

I went behind the counter and began tidying the drawers of my apothecary cabinet, neatening the labels and making sure that none of the plastic envelopes of dried herbs were protruding.

It was probably the last job that needed doing, but there was something about Zeb’s continued stillness and bouncing hair that made me feel vulnerable.

Outside, the sounds of the band being raucously happy floated from the other side of the garden, like dust.

‘Tallie,’ Zeb said, steadily, ‘what the hell happened to you?’

I slammed the dill drawer shut so fiercely that I caught my finger and yelped.

‘Nothing happened to me.’ The pain filled me with the spurt of anger I could have done with a few minutes ago.

‘There’s nothing. No secrets, nothing hidden.

I’m as above board as… as…’ I searched for something visually appropriate.

‘As that dried angelica,’ I finished. It wasn’t ‘above board’ so much as ‘above the counter’, but it would have to do.

‘I’m just someone who owns a business that they are trying to keep afloat,’ I finished, definitively.

‘Can I see the books then?’ Zeb stepped towards me.

He got me by surprise. I was sucking my injured finger – that nail was going to go black, I just knew it – and almost doubling over with my urge to make him see that there were no huge secrets in my background.

‘All right!’ I snapped. ‘If it’s so important, I’ll show you.

Tonight, once we’ve got rid of that lot.

’ I jerked my head in the direction of the cottage, then had a momentary stab of ‘what if Mika chooses tonight to ask me out to dinner?’

‘Unless anything else comes up,’ I amended.

Zeb jolted into life, as though forty thousand volts had shot through him. ‘Good. Great,’ he said, cheerily. ‘Tell you what, once Mumford and Sons there have finished arsing about, I’ll go and fetch us a takeaway and we can sit and go over the figures, how about that?’

I was taken aback again. ‘Oh. I was just going to have a sandwich.’ I hadn’t even thought about food, or that inviting him over for the evening might involve eating.

‘And now you’re going to have a takeaway. I’ll drive over to Pickering, pick one up. I’m presuming that nobody delivers out here?’

He didn’t even wait for an answer. He was gone, back out into the acid-wash daylight. I heard Big Pig grunt a greeting as the barrow squeaked its way back into the barn, and the guinea pigs set up a rival squeak, ever hopeful of green goodies dropping from above.

I finished tidying the shop. Its interior was so familiar to me that I could do these day-to-day jobs without thinking, the jobs I’d done almost every day since I could walk, since Mum and I had come back to live with Granny.

Check everything is put away, remove the till drawer, make sure nothing is left switched on and then lock the door.

My body carried out the tasks without the involvement of my brain, which was busy whirling through Zeb’s questioning.

Why was he so interested in my past? There was nothing there for him to poke around in, nothing but an age-old tragedy and an impecunious upbringing.

So what had he seen, what had he thought, that would make him conclude there was anything else there?

And why did his questions make me so anxious?