He points to the magnet on his fridge and does a little boogie on the spot, and then steps closer, wiggling his fingers to encourage me to take his hand. I hold mine up above the bowl, my fingers coated in butter, which has made the flour stick all over my hands.
He shakes his head, not accepting my excuse, so I hold my flour-coated hand out to call his bluff, and I’m surprised when he slips his clean fingers around the floury mess of my hand.
He pulls me closer and grasps my other hand with his too, and starts leading us through some demented version of a waltz, except no one has ever done a waltz like this before.
‘You’re going to be covered in flour.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Everything is going to be covered in flour!’ With every step, flour is dislodging itself from my fingers and making a new life for itself on the floor.
‘Don’t worry about it. The more time you spend in the kitchen, the easier things will come back. The more you do it, the more you’ll remember. Or not. Maybe you won’t remember and you’ll have to add your own unique twist instead and you’ll come up with something even better.’
I’m busy trying not to cringe at the feeling of butter and flour squelching between our hands. Sometimes I love how un-ordinary he is – this is not one of those times. ‘Do you ever struggle to get magic tricks right?’
‘Of course I do.’ He lifts my hand up above my head and makes me spin around under it, so flour rains down all over me too.
I shake it out of my hair. ‘And dancing is the solution to that, is it?’
‘It doesn’t hurt. Sometimes the best thing you can do is take a step away and not think about it.’
‘At the moment, I’m thinking about the flour we’re treading into your floor tiles.’
‘Stop worrying so much – about the floor tiles and the baking. It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember. What difference does it make if you don’t? You won’t be in any worse position than you are now. You’ve got endless time.’ He spins me around, pushing me away and pulling me back until I crash into his chest, laughing so hard that it’s like it shakes something loose inside me.
‘Time! Bram, that’s it! Thyme!’ I emphasise the h sound in the pronunciation. ‘Nan had a plant growing on the window ledge at home. A row of herbs she used to use in cooking. Thyme is sort of citrusy, which complements lavender, and it tastes a bit like cloves, doesn’t it?’ I shake my head at myself, unable to stop grinning. ‘It was thyme. I never thought I’d remember.’
I let out a squeal of delight and he darts forwards and wraps his arms around me, lifts me up and spins us around, and I squeal again for a different reason. My hands are still too flour-coated to cling onto him, so I just flap them and squeak. ‘Bram! Flour!’
He’s laughing as he puts me down. ‘Sorry, you looked so happy that I couldn’t help myself.’
I hold my hands up uselessly, watching grains of flour drift towards the floor. ‘Dammit, I wish I had some lavender and thyme. Now I’ve thought of it, I want to try it right now.’
‘Your wish is my command.’ He crosses an arm over his chest and bows. ‘I have culinary lavender growing in the greenhouse, and there’s a thyme plant in the conservatory.’
My mouth falls open in surprise. ‘Seriously?’
‘Yep. We’ll go and get it now. You wash your hands while I grab the mop. Dancing with such floury hands was a terrible idea. I don’t know why you didn’t say that.’
I can’t help giggling at the rueful look on his face and the spark in his eyes. Somehow he knew exactly what I needed… long before I did.
We step out the back door onto a paved patio, surrounded by decorative planters full of spring colour. The clocks have already gone forward and the evenings are lighter now. The breeze is gentle tonight, and I breathe in the fresh air and revel in the late-evening sunshine. We go down steps and onto a gravel path running alongside a neat lawn, and he offers me his arm. Despite my better judgement, I slip my hand through his elbow and let my fingers curl into his forearm.
The hedgerow beside us is full of chirping birds who disappear into the branches as we pass, and I get the sense that he wants to ask me something.
‘What stopped the love of baking?’ he says eventually. ‘Because you’ve told me about your mum and your nan, but you haven’t told me why you stopped baking.’
I sigh, because it’s a memory that I don’t like reliving often, and yet it lives rent-free in my mind more often than I’d like to admit. At the same time, I want to be open with him. He’s so direct about his feelings in a rare way, and he deserves the same in return.
‘Losing Mum made me realise life is short and I wasn’t doing what I’d always wanted to do – run a quaint little teashop somewhere. My ex and I decided to go into it together. We found a gorgeous property over in Ross-on-Wye, close to his flat, and I was going to move in with him. My mum had left me a little bit of money, so he was going to match my investment and we were going to be partners and get a business loan to start up. And then he…’ I take a deep breath, because even after so much time has passed, it still isn’t easy to think about that day. ‘Well, it was a bit like being jilted at the altar, but I was jilted in the local branch of Barclays, with half a business plan that was now irrelevant, and an increasingly angry branch manager. While I huddled in a corner and eventually got through to my ex on the phone, he said the prospect of going into something so permanent with me had made him realise that he’d been unhappy for a while and didn’t want to continue – not the business plan or the relationship.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Bram ducks his head and murmurs the words against my forehead, and I squeeze his arm where my fingers are still curled around it.
‘Everything got so mired in grief. I still missed my nan. My relationship with my mum was never repaired, and losing her so unexpectedly threw me totally off-course, and then that sudden end to what I thought was the last relationship I’d be in for the rest of my life… Grief overwhelmed me. I went home and shut myself away. I used the money Mum had left me to live on rather than putting it into the business like I’d intended to, and every time I went near the kitchen, I couldn’t face the thought of baking anything. Instead of bringing back happy memories, it reminded me of all the things I’d lost, and I just stopped doing it.’
Bram pulls his arm in, tucking my hand against his side. ‘No one could blame you for that.’
I look up at him. ‘You must think I’m stupid, to dive into this like I have.’
‘I think you’re brave. To take a second chance and grasp it with both hands, to overcome self-doubt and trust that you’ll be able to do it even when things have been going wrong. To go through all that grief and force yourself back out into the world, even when you want to hide away. It takes courage to follow your dreams, especially when you’ve been knocked back before.’
It makes me feel flushed all over. He puts such a unique spin on everything, and I wish more people saw the world in the way Bram does. But it also makes me think of what he’s said about his own family, and how much he clearly struggles with their lack of approval. ‘You hide away too, don’t you?’
He pulls back until he can look at me, and I continue. ‘My walls were physical, but I can see the way yours go up when you slip into the Mad Hatter act. It’s like you pull a shell around yourself.’
At first I think I’ve pushed him too far. We’re wandering through lush green grounds, and I can see the glass roof of a greenhouse in the distance, but his body language is suddenly stiff. I’m not sure if he’s about to pull away and throw me out, until he lets out a long sigh. ‘You don’t grow up around my father without a bit of bulletproof armour. He’s the type of person who thinks that if you don’t agree with him, you’re wrong, and we’ve never seen eye to eye, so I’ve always been “wrong”. He had my whole life planned out. I was to go to university to study politics and business management, and then straight into the job he was going to get one of his crony mates to line up for me. The thought of it filled me with a sense of dread and the whole world felt utterly bleak. I couldn’t do it, and he’s never understood that. Nothing I’ve done since has been good enough for him.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I murmur, squeezing his arm. ‘People don’t realise how complicated families are.’
‘You do.’ He holds my hand against his side again.
‘I do,’ I echo. ‘So, instead of doing the boring, sensible thing, you…’
He raises an eyebrow at my leading question, before finishing the answer off. ‘…Became a magician’s assistant. Backstage stuff, like setting up tricks and planning his shows, but they were just that – shows. Smoke and mirrors, music, lights, and showmanship. It was flashy, but it wasn’t authentic. People left feeling like they’d been to a magic show, not like they’d seen magic. After that, I was a freelance entertainer for hire – doing magic at parties and corporate events – and I managed a magic shop for a while. We sold all kinds of tricks and props, and I did a lot of teaching people how to use them. I ran a monthly workshop, but also kids would come in and ask me how things worked or how to do certain tricks, and I’d show them. But like most tiny independent shops on high streets everywhere, it was a thing of bygone days. There’s nothing you can’t learn on YouTube or get delivered next day from Amazon now, so people stopped coming, and it was just me, standing in an empty shop, trying to figure out a trick to conjure up some customers.’
‘You really loved that?’ I ask because it’s impossible to take my eyes off his face and the way it’s lit up as he talks.
