“Well.” Galoshes pursed her lips. “Only one of you turned up looking like you’d been through the wringer, with half a bush in your hair. Not very professional, was it?”
I winced. “Hang on, Galoshes, that’s—”
“How do you know about that?” Charlie interrupted, now beet red.
Galoshes looked at her with genuine pity. “You’ve never lived somewhere like this before, have you?”
Thankfully, at this point, before Galoshes could make Charlie cry, a pig walked in.
“Oh my God,” Charlie said. “Is that a pig?”
Everyone looked quite interested. They peered over their glasses, shifted their chairs to get a good vantage point, made remarks like “Oh, it’s one of Baptiste’s, I think!” Only Charlie and I seemed to find this situation shocking—even the pig was pretty nonchalant about it.
It was…big. We had a dog growing up, a German shepherd. A big dog. This pig was bigger, and a dirty off-pink color with brown spots; it had wiry hair all over its body and looked like a barrel of pure muscle.
This was an absolute bruiser of a pig.
“I’m not sure itisone of Baptiste’s, you know,” observed the woman who supplied mushrooms. “I’d say that’s one of Rosie’s new ones.”
Everyone agreed that a fence must be down at Pipit Spinney, whatever that meant. Having surveyed us all for a few moments, the pig was heading for the hessian potato sacks pushed to the edge of the shop to make room for the committee meet-up. It snuffled and grunted, its trotters click-clacking on the flagstones.
To my shame, Charlie moved fastest.
“Hey!” she said, waving her hands at the pig. “Not that way!”
The pig must have weighed a good three times as much as Charlie. She looked tiny in the face of it, despite her height. I started to feel a bit uneasy. Pigs can be dangerous, can’t they?
“This way,” I tried. “Come this way, pig.”
I was not in the headspace for this.
“Here, pig! Here, pig!”
Some of the committee members were openly laughing at us now. The pig was ignoring us and snuffling at a sack of potatoes. I felt a rising tide of panic. Rosie and Marly were not going to trust us with their shop if a roaming pig ate all their stock, were they? And Charlie was getting so close to it. I didn’t like it.
She was typing away on her phone. I wanted to tell her to either move away or at leastlookat the massive animal she was trying to coax out of a tight corner, but instead settled for asking her what she was doing.
“Googling,” she said.
The committee members were now roaring with laughter.
“We need to stay calm and quiet,” Charlie read, and then shot the committee a surprisingly venomous look. The pig had obviously flustered some of the pretense out of her.
“Then we need to— Hey! No!”
She hauled up a sack of potatoes and dragged it away from the pig, who just followed the bag—and Charlie. It was starting to huff, and its feet were getting skittery on the flagstones.
“You’re stressing it out,” called Gintaras the basket-weaver. “That’s not good for pigs.”
“It’sstressingmeout!” Charlie said. “Comanager, would you like to comanage this situation with me, perhaps?”
I asked Charlie what Google said, grabbing some vulnerable cabbages from a crate and shifting them to a higher shelf. I also suggested she might want to step back a bit more, which she ignored.
“I’m on the Pork Information Gateway,” she said, glancing back and forth between her phone and the pig currently following heraround the farm shop as she walked backward, now dragging the potato sack. “It says we need witch’s capes. Or…sorting boards. What are these things?”
“You’ve not got ’em,” said Kim the sheep farmer. “Which is all that matters right now, I reckon.”
The farm shop was starting to feel very small, with the pig advancing on Charlie, the vegetables, and the gaggle of motley local producers. I was sweating and unfocused. I want to believe this was because of the stressful pig situation, but honestly, I was still feeling rough. I was a lot better than I had been at the start of the week, but with all those bottles of cider sitting open on the table…
