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Temperance saw the little white message box at the bottom of the phone screen as she tucked it away. The condescending turd from the other night clearly hadn’t got the message yet.
‘That’s good of you.’
Abel looked her up and down: dirt on her limbs, scuffed trainers, dusty shorts. ‘You could help, actually. Seeing as you’re dressed for it. I need someone to stand there and hold things.’ He turned around and started to walk away before she had a chance to spit something out in reply.
Temperance shoved some sacks in her broken buckets and followed in his footsteps. If it had been Abel’s farm she would have happily let it all fall down into a wonky heap, but it was Praveen’s. And Praveen was part of their community network, so Temperance was never going to turn down the chance to help her. Even if it meant being the assistant to a perpetually grumpy sod in size small shorts.
Temperance felt a bit of plum standing three feet behind Abel as he unscrewed something from the gate post. After ten minutes, she asked wearily, ‘What can I do?’
Abel sighed. ‘There are some bricks outside the shed. Could you fetch some? Please.’
Temperance saluted to his back and turned on the spot, just in time to see little Martha walking the other way with her family. ‘That’s them!’ she called to her mum, ‘That’s the fairies pretending they’re normal!’
Temperance shared a smile with Martha’s mum. From the mouths of babes: little did Martha know that Temperance spent a lot of her time just pretending to be normal.
The majority of the fruit-picking families started to leave as Temperance was carrying over bricks, two at a time. The heat was starting to get to everyone, with meltdowns aplenty and more than once she heard the magic bribe ‘ice cream’ being promised to small people.
Soon it was just one seventy-something couple slowly mooching along the rows of strawberry plants, their arms linked and their heads leant towards each other. They looked so in sync. Temperance found herself sneakily watching them in her periphery vision. Had they come to East Prawle for a big wedding anniversary, maybe? Or had they found each other late in life and were now enjoying an Indian Summer romance? Whatever their history, Temperance could almost feel that deep, connected love radiating out from them even without reading them with her powers.
Lasting love. That’s what she wanted. That’s how she’d accidentally drawn some dark magic down onto the village: because she had a gnawing hunger in her heart for True Love that wouldn’t leave her be.
She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention: Abel was watching her with intent concentration. ‘Have you seriously been carrying those just two at a time?’ He didn’t bother concealing the tut that punctuated his sentence.
‘Yes! What was I supposed to do, tuck them under my armpits as well? Balance them on my head? I have to be careful with my hands, all right? They’re the tools of my trade.’ Despite the satisfaction in letting the whirl of anger burning in her chest out through her mouth, Temperance wished she could eat the words back up.
He scratched behind his ear. ‘Retrained as a brain surgeon, did you?’
‘Maybe I did. A lot of things have happened while you’ve been AWOL,’ she shot back.
Abel broke eye contact and studied the ground.
Temperance groped around in her blank mind for an explanation. It was hardly going to get Praveen’s gate mended if she just sniped at Abel all day. The sooner they could be civil, the sooner they’d be done and out of here.
‘I repair a lot of the vintage clothes by hand. Invisible mending. It’s really fine work, hard to do if your fingers have been mangled by a tonne of bricks.’
‘They have these amazing bits of kit now called gloves,’ he deadpanned, picking up a worn pair from the ground by his feet and tossing them over. ‘Funnily enough, you’re not the only person who uses their hands at work.’
‘Oh, so you’re the brain surgeon?’
He turned back to sanding the rusted hinge plate. ‘Not exactly. I maintain rental properties in Bath. Mum does the cleaning service. We work together.’ He stopped talking and left an open space in their conversation, as if daring Temperance to pick holes in his line of work.
‘Well.’ She shuffled her trainers in the dry earth. ‘Only the coolest people work with their mums, that much I know.’ She gave half a smile as a peace token. ‘What do you need me to do now?’
‘OK. Stack those bricks so they’re parallel to the gate. We’re going to prop it up on one end, so we can slot it back in its hinges.’
‘Do you fix many farm gates in Bath?’
He took a side step towards to her and lowered his voice. ‘I’ll be completely honest: I’m just giving it a shot. Looked up a YouTube video. Praveen was so desperate to get it sorted, I couldn’t say no.’ Abel’s mouth lost the hard line she’d now grown used to seeing and instead pulled back into a lopsided grimace.
Temperance bit her bottom lip. Now he was close to her, she could see where perspiration was making his T-shirt cling to his body, the line of reddish dust across the back of his neck where he must have rubbed sweat away with his hand. She shook her head. Now was not the moment. In fact, the moment was never.
‘Music. We need music. Always makes work go faster, right?’
‘My playlist, though. It’s too hot for your angsty girl rock – we need something calmer. Only Debbie Harry when it’s below twenty-three degrees in my book.’
Temperance was too startled to say anything for a second. The heat must really be getting to Abel if he was suddenly willing to recall something from their shared past. He’d always teased her about her love of the great female rock icons – Debbie, Stevie, Tina. But Temperance had always been unflinching in her dedication: she had two ears and a soul, didn’t she?
She fought to repress her goofy smile. ‘So what do you suggest?’
