A Wedding at the Comfort Food Cafe

by Debbie Johnson

  What I’m not expecting is to be confronted by the combined menfolk of Budbury prancing up and down the hallway like they’re performing some kind of impromptu fashion show.

  They’re all here: Finn, Becca’s partner Sam, Cal, Tom, my brother Van, and Matt, Laura’s soon to be husband.

  They’re all also wearing outrageously pink suits. I stop dead in my tracks and stare at Sam as he strikes a pose, hands on hips. I burst out laughing, because why wouldn’t I? These men are all amazing in their own way. Sam looks like a surfer and works as a coastal ranger; Cal is a rugged cowboy type of dude; Matt is a vet; Tom is a millionaire inventor, and Finn is … well, perfectly Finn.

  They all look different – different hair colours, different builds, different heights – but seeing them all en masse, dressed head to toe in pink, is breathtakingly silly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, putting my packages down and surveying them all in various stages of embarrassment, ‘did I interrupt a flamingo convention?’

  Sam responds by standing on one leg and flapping his arms about while I walk around, examining them all. The suits are all different – Sam’s a bit seventies, Matt’s a classic wedding outfit with tailcoat, Finn’s very well tailored – but they’re all very, very pink. Different shades, but undeniably pink. Even their shoes are pink – ranging from Tom’s Converse to Van’s spray-painted steel-toed boots to Matt’s petal-pale dress shoes.

  I knew this was happening, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it in reality – and it is nothing short of spectacular.

  I walk over to Matt, take his sheepish-looking face between my hands, and give him a big kiss.

  ‘Laura,’ I say to him, ‘is a very lucky woman. You all look amazing.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ he replies, flustered, looking over my shoulder in a bid to avoid eye contact. ‘We couldn’t have done it without your sister and your mum.’

  This all started that day in the café, when Becca revealed that Laura’s dream wedding was entirely pink. Due to the advanced state of her baby-growing venture, and because Cherie loves to organise a good party, the wedding planning has been left to her friends. And her friends – me included – decided that if Laura wanted a pink wedding, then she’d darn well get a pink wedding.

  Willow and Lynnie, who were always more artsy and craftsy than me, have been busy with dye packs, creating these dream outfits for the men – and the fact that everything’s been home-coloured has resulted in a splendid range of different pinks. Finn’s, I notice, is at the pastel end of the colour chart – and it actually goes well with the golden skin and the blue eyes and the blond hair. The man would look good in a suit made entirely of used kebab wrappers, damn him.

  ‘Go on then,’ I say, nodding down the hallway. ‘Give me a proper show!’

  They all take turns parading down the wood-panelled corridor, some doing it with more style than others. Matt and Tom, both on the quiet and shy side, are clearly mortified to be the centre of attention. Van does it like he hasn’t a care in the world. Finn gives me an extra over-the-shoulder wink when he reaches the end of his runway, and Cal and Sam ham it up like the big show-offs they are.

  Once I’ve finished laughing, I ask: ‘Is everyone sorted now, then?’

  ‘Yep,’ says Sam, undoing his jacket. ‘Frank and Joe have theirs. The kids are all going to Primark in town at the weekend. You ladies, I assume, are well on your way to pink fashion glory.’

  ‘Kind of. If by that you mean looking like complete tools. At least in mine and Zoe’s case – have you any idea how bad gingers can look in pink? We’re the ones making the real sacrifice here …’

  Van snorts, tugs off his hot pink tie, and says: ‘Gingers don’t look good in anything, sis. Right, gotta go – that garden won’t weed itself …’

  I try and trip him up as he walks past, but he’s too experienced in my evil ways – he easily dodges my not-so-subtly outstretched foot, and blows me a huge raspberry as he clomps off towards the exit.

  One by one, the other men follow him, getting back to their real lives, to jobs and responsibilities that don’t involve them being forced to dress like a giant human candy floss.

  Eventually, I’m left with Finn – which is how I like it. Our eyes meet across the hallway, and he raises one eyebrow. He hasn’t taken his jacket off – I suspect he knows he looks good in it.

  ‘Deliveries for me?’ he asks, eyeing the box full of prescriptions.

  ‘Not all for you – unless you’re one of those people who’s allergic to the twenty-first century and needs to live in a bubble. Can you pass these out to the gang later?’

  ‘I can do it now if you like,’ he replies, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

  ‘Not right now, no,’ I say, closing the distance between us.

  ‘Oh, why’s that?’ he asks, the smile growing as I start to unbutton the jacket, and then the shirt that lies beneath it.

  ‘Because you look so hot in pink.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I know you know … and I find your arrogance irresistible.’

  ‘It’s not arrogance,’ he says, slipping his fingers into my hair, ‘it’s confidence. Would you like to discuss the difference between the two somewhere more private?’

  ‘I think I’d like that very much, now you mention it,’ I reply, leaning into him. He might be dressed like Barbara Cartland, but he’s all man.

  ‘In that case, come into my office,’ he answers, taking my hand and leading me down the hallway behind him. ‘Just promise me one thing …?’

  ‘What’s that?’ I ask, blatantly admiring the rear view as I go.

  ‘If we ever get married, we get to ban pink all together …’

  I smile as I follow him into his office. Not so long ago, a sentence like that would have churned up so many feelings I’d have felt the need to run outside and chug away on twenty Marlboro. These days, it only makes me grin.

  ‘No problem,’ I say, closing and locking the door behind us. ‘If we ever get married, I’m thinking Viking horns and feasting halls.’

  Chapter 8

  There are only two days to go until the wedding, and the latest meeting of the Emergency Dream Wedding Planning Committee is taking place at the café.

  Actually, I think, looking around me, it’s less of a meeting and more of a craft convention. Today’s project, ladies and gents, is hats. Exciting stuff.

  Laura herself is off with Willow at our cottage, getting fitted for her dress, which Willow has made for her. Given the advanced state of the bride’s belly, and the astonishingly limited range of Big Fat Pregnant Wedding Dresses available on the high street – gap in the market there – she needed to have one put together just for her.

  I know, from her complaints in the pharmacy, that the dress has involved ‘about three miles of fabric’ – but I also know, from seeing the work in progress at home, that it’s absolutely gorgeous. Much as she sees herself as disgusting right now, she’s truly beautiful – her skin is glowing, her hair is rich and shining, and her boobs are the size of small moons. They’re so magnificent she should plant flags on them and give them names. She doesn’t look like a beached whale, like she’s always saying – she looks like an earth goddess.

  While she’s taken care of, we’re all sorting out our headwear. The café has closed an hour early, but it’s busy because of the nice weather, so Cherie has let the teenagers have a pop-up shop in the garden. I can see them all out there: Lizzie and her boyfriend Josh, her brother Nate, Martha and her chap Bill.

  Lizzie is quite the entrepreneur, and has set up trestle tables with slices of cheesecake and wrapped sandwiches, and a couple of chiller boxes crammed with cloudy lemonade and cream soda and other pops. Looks like they’re doing well, and the tables and chairs out there are almost full. Lizzie’s negotiated a 20 per cent of the takings deal in addition to a flat-rate payment of a tenner each, so she’s highly motivated. She even sent Nate down to the beach with a big container of ice lollies
to sell earlier.

  I’ve joined the party a bit late after keeping the pharmacy open as long as possible. It was nothing more than an excuse, as I’m nowhere near as good at handcrafting as the rest of my family. My headdress, I have insisted, will consist of nothing more intricate than a pink hairband. Given the colour of my hair, that will look quite silly enough, thank you.

  Now I’m here, I see everyone has done fine without me. Lynnie, despite her Alzheimer’s, comes alive when she’s doing things like this. She actually leads workshops at the day centre she attends, and was the kind of mum who could whip up a fancy-dress outfit for school using nothing but a needle, a thread and an old duvet cover.

  She’s at the head of one of the long tables, a conch shell mobile dangling above her bushy grey hair, busily using a glue gun and masses of pink fluff to make fascinators. There are pots of sequins, and tubs of glitter, and rolls of lace and brocade laid out in front of her as she decorates the wire shapes. Everything, needless to say, is in shades of pink.

  Becca and Zoe are busily coating Matt’s currently grey top hat with swathes of pink felt, and Katie, her mum Sandra, and Saul are making up small pink bags of party favours containing tiny packets of Love Hearts, sugared almonds and those incy-wincy bottles of bubbles in the shape of champagne. Little Edie is sitting on Big Edie’s knee, and the two of them seem to be randomly sticking discarded scraps of pink material onto cardboard squares.

  Cherie is leaning against the counter, still wearing her flour-dusted apron, her mobile phone tucked under her chin as she speaks to the florist about the fact that only pink flowers are allowed.

  I wander over towards her, as she is very near to a large tray of home-baked scones, and nod my hellos as she finishes her conversation.

  ‘Just the girl!’ she announces, as she automatically goes to the coffee machine to get me a mocha.

  I look around to check she was talking about me, and raise my eyebrows in a query. I can’t ask her what she means, as my mouth is busy having a scone-inspired orgasm.

  She places the drink next to me, spritzes it with squirty cream, and folds her arms across her ample bosom. She’s an intimidating woman in many ways, Cherie, not least of which is her sheer size, and for a moment there I find myself feeling like I did throughout my teenaged years – casting my mind back over recent behaviour to see what I was about to be told off for. I can’t think of any misdemeanours, but Cherie knows all.

  ‘A little bird called Katie tells me you’ve been performing some kind of community service, delivering the prescriptions and visiting folk in need?’ she says.

  ‘Um, kind of,’ I reply, swallowing the last of my mouthful and wiping the crumbs from my chin. ‘It’s no big deal – mainly I just drink free tea and listen to people.’

  ‘Well, that is a big deal to some, isn’t it? It’s one of the reasons I made this place into what it is. But I’ve always been aware of the fact that not everyone can come here, for whatever reason. I can’t figure out everyone’s comfort food, or sit them down for a natter, or stuff them full of carrot cake, much as I’d like to. So I was thinking …’

  She pauses, getting distracted by a sudden whoosh of glitter flying into the air, coating the bookcases in pink sparkle. She shrugs it off, and continues: ‘I was thinking that maybe we could work together on it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask, wondering if Cherie’s secretly a pharmacist in disguise.

  ‘I was thinking I could make up some care packages for the people you visit? Nothing extravagant. Maybe some cake and home-made bread, and fruit loaf, and biscuits, and muffins, and whatever the day’s special is?’

  ‘Nothing extravagant though, eh?’ I say, grinning. Cherie is, to put it tastefully, comfortably off. To put it less tastefully, she’s minted.

  Her late husband provided for her extremely well, and in addition to owning the café and the Rockery, she has a part-share in the pharmacy and goodness knows how many other ventures that we don’t know about. Frank, her husband, owns the biggest farm in the area, and between them they’re the most unlikely property moguls the world has ever witnessed.

  But what she does have, she shares – she’s legendarily generous, and always community-minded. A capitalist with a heart.

  ‘It’s not caviar and venison, my love, is it? Just a few treats …’

  I nod, and turn it over in my mind. I see where she’s coming from, and it’s a lovely idea – but it might need to be handled sensitively as well.

  ‘That’s a nice thought, Cherie,’ I say eventually. ‘But you do know most of these people aren’t actually starving? They might see it as charity.’

  ‘Ha! They won’t say that once they’ve tasted the fruit loaf!’ she scoffs, waving her hands around. ‘But … all right, I take your point. It wouldn’t be charity, though – more a way of saying hello, letting them know we’re here if they need them. Maybe I could get Lizzie to run up some flyers for the café and include them in the boxes, so it looked like I was marketing the place as well? Do you think that would help? Make it look like I was doing it for nefarious reasons?’

  ‘It might, yes,’ I reply, giving it some brain power. ‘Especially if we include the word “nefarious” on the flyer. Look, most of the people I see would be delighted with it, and not over-think it at all. But a few of them are old school, they have a lot of pride and they might see it as a threat to their independence.They’d hate to think that anyone was feeling sorry for them.’

  ‘I understand that, sweetness,’ she replies firmly. ‘I’m married to Frank – the man who insisted on carrying on working through a broken arm one harvest. People round here can be like that. So we mustn’t step on anybody’s toes … we’ll do it subtle, like? Then I was thinking, if that went well, I might start organising some kind of social here at the café, hire a minibus to bring people in and back again, get everyone together … what do you think?’

  I lean forward and give her a kiss on her wrinkled, sun-weathered cheek.

  ‘I think it’s a lovely idea, but we need to take it one step at a time. You could maybe start with the mums – some of them are desperate for a bit of company.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ she says, smiling delightedly. ‘We shall make the world a better place, one cake at a time.’

  ‘You should make that your corporate motto,’ I say, sipping my coffee. ‘The Comfort Food Café – making the world better, one cake at a time.’

  ‘I think we probably should!’ she replies, laughing. ‘But for the time being, I’m trying to make Laura and Matt’s wedding better, one shade of pink at a time. I’ve had a complete fail on finding a pink pony, which is probably for the best as it’d be hard to get a carriage up the hill – but I have hired a pink limo to pick her up from the Rockery. And I’ve told the registry office people they have to wear pink too – it’s the same people who did mine and Frank’s wedding, so they weren’t surprised to get a weird request …’

  ‘I bet they weren’t.’

  ‘I tried to book that singer Pink to do the reception, but apparently she’s busy … I got a tribute act instead, she’s called Ponk. Should be fun. And there’s pink champagne, obviously, plus the pink ten-layer cake she mentioned, and Willow’s made pink coats for all the dogs. We decided pink kittens were too much of a health and safety hazard.’

  I nod wisely, as though I’d have come to the same conclusion myself. I wouldn’t, of course. I’d have been busily trying to spray-paint kittens for a week.

  Cherie blows out one long puff of air and looks momentarily tired. She’s such a force of nature that it’s easy to forget sometimes that she’s in her seventies.

  ‘Crikey, this wedding lark is quite the business, isn’t it?’ she asks, looking around at the hive of pink industry that surrounds us.

  I spot Lynnie placing a wobbling feather-laden fascinator on Big Edie’s grey permed head, and Saul sneakily eating the Love Hearts, and Becca trying on Matt’s pink top hat and it falling down to her chin and entirely covering
her face.

  ‘It is,’ I say, laughing. ‘But heck – she’s worth it, isn’t she?’

  ‘Laura?’ answers Cherie, smiling. ‘Oh yes. She’s worth her weight in gold, that one – which really is saying something at the moment …’

  Chapter 9

  When the big day itself arrives, I suspect we all do the same thing as soon as we wake up – look through the windows and peer up at the sky to see what the weather’s like.

  I see Lynnie and Willow both out in the garden doing the same, and then they hold hands and do a little dance around our friendly neighbourhood scarecrow. He’s dressed in a suit himself to mark the occasion, complete with pink carnation in his lapel.

  The sunshine is warm and plentiful, the sky that perfect shade of vivid blue that makes the whole world look like an Impressionist painting. When I join the ladies outside, clutching a mug of coffee to give me a kick-start, I can hear the chaffinches and wrens and blackbirds joining in with the celebration.

  Lynnie insists we do a few sun salutations to begin the day and, much as I groan about it, I do feel better afterwards. More awake. More alive. Lynnie, unfortunately, has one of her memory time-slips while she’s doing her yoga, and becomes convinced that we are strangers and she is leading us in a class. That’s okay – we’re used to that, and it’s easiest to play along. It makes her happy.

  Because of that, though, we have to handle preparations for the wedding carefully. We can’t expect her to remember that it’s Laura and Matt’s day, and wear the right clothes, and come peacefully with us when we set out for the café.

  Willow is better at all of this than me – probably at everything – and has already prepared. The day of the hat workshop, she’d asked me to take some photos, which she printed off. Then she stuck them into Mum’s notebook – part diary, part aide memoire – along with some details about the wedding, and who will be there, and what will happen at it.