Page 36 of Once Upon a Thyme

There was the kind of silence you could have hammered horseshoes on. The air felt suddenly thick and I seized the handle of my mug to steady myself. ‘No you’re not,’ I said.

There was more silence, the three of us frozen into a tableau like the final scene of a play, waiting for the curtain to come down. Finally Simon moved; he inched a hand across the table and touched my wrist. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

I leaped to my feet, freed by his touch from the odd stasis that had held me.

‘No, you’re not !’ My chair dragged and I hated the noise all over again.

‘My dad died in an accident trying to get to my first birthday party! He’s been dead for twenty-eight years!

’ I noticed the note of hysteria in my voice and stopped speaking, took a deep breath and also noticed that my eyes were burning.

‘Didn’t he?’ This was a plea, aimed towards Zeb, who was looking from Simon to me and back again.

‘Tallie.’ Zeb touched my arm. ‘Let’s just listen to Simon, all right?’ He smiled. ‘If it’s totally barking then I promise I’ll chase him out with the broom, I’ve had plenty of experience at that.’

This attempt at humour burst the bubble I’d been in and I flopped back to my seat again, shaking my head. ‘This is nuts,’ I said. ‘You must be mistaken, Simon. There’s just no way you can be my dad, he’s been dead for years.’

But, whispered a tiny breeze from the window, you’ve no proof of that at all, have you? Only the word of two women who never let you ask anything about it.

Simon’s face relaxed a little. ‘I’m sorry, Tallie,’ he repeated. ‘It’s true. I should never have let it come to this and I’m really, really sorry.’

The breath I took felt like my first breath ever. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Start talking. It’s about time somebody said something about my parentage, although I warn you, if you mention anything wacky or UFO related I will invoke Zeb and the broom.’

‘Er.’ Simon looked from me to Zeb again. I had no idea why. Was he just giving his eyes something to do, apart from resting on me? Did he not want to look at me? ‘UFO related?’

‘The only possible explanation you could come up with for not being in contact for twenty-eight years would involve being beamed up and carried off into outer space,’ I said. ‘Twenty. Eight. Years. And I’ve been here, findable, at Drycott, all that time.’

Simon gave a shamefaced half-smile. ‘No. No aliens. I honestly have no idea where to start. I’ve rehearsed this so many times, gone over and over it in my head, but in real life it’s nothing like I imagined.’

‘How did you imagine that an announcement like that would go?’ I asked, acidly.

‘How about starting at the beginning?’ Zeb suggested. ‘It might help.’

Simon sighed. He looked older now and that daft ponytail was coming untied again.

I wanted to get up and give him an elastic band.

I wanted to take away his tea mug and tell him to go, to never speak of this again.

I wanted none of this to be happening. I wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t going to be sick too, there was a ferocious burning weight in my stomach as though half a pound of hot lead had replaced the tea.

‘Okay. Okay.’ Simon took a gulp of tea. It had clearly been too hot because his eyes watered for a moment. ‘What were you told about me – about your father, Tallie?’

I wished he wouldn’t keep using my name. It was beginning to sound possessive. ‘Nothing,’ I said, almost sulkily. ‘Tall, nice, played the guitar. Oh, and I can’t stress this enough, dead .’

I also wished my heart would stop slamming itself against my ribcage like Big Pig trying to rattle her gate open. It was distracting and made me feel even sicker.

‘And that’s all ?’ Simon widened his eyes. ‘Wow. They weren’t kidding, were they?’

‘And who’s they ?’ I snapped.

‘Your mother and your grandmother. When they told me to keep away and that they’d bring you up without me. I didn’t realise that they were going to erase me from your history quite so thoroughly.’

The last bit of sunlight squeezed itself between the flopping leaves of the indoor herbs on the sill and bathed us all in a queasy light.

I didn’t need its help, I already felt green.

Between my heart going as though I were heading for a cardiac arrest and the tea refusing to go down my throat, I could have thrown up there and then.

But I managed the words, ‘I think you had better tell me,’ with a degree of assuredness.

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 was me . 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 kept that from you too? Oh, Tallie, I am so sorry. Things should have been so very different, but I agreed, we agreed, 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 I don’t know, 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.