Christmas at the Comfort Food Cafe

by Debbie Johnson

  ‘Oh yes. One of the most under-estimated joys of life, a good night’s sleep. Is there anything in particular keeping you awake? Anything you want to talk about? I’m just an old lady, but I’m good at listening…and I can keep a secret, my sweet, don’t you worry about that. Carry them on my back like a snail, I do, all the secrets I’ve been told over the years.’

  I have no doubt about that at all. And the shrewd look in her eyes tells me that she might be ‘just an old lady’, but she’s also so much more than that. She’s… a safe haven. A safe haven in fluffy slippers. I have no idea why I feel like that about Edie – whether it’s just her age, or her life experience, or her super-soft sofa, or the fact that she’s kept on going even though she’s just a little bit broken. But since the day we met, I’ve felt like I could trust her.

  Like I have a connection with her, in the same way that Laura clearly feels about Cherie. It’s odd that Laura – safe, solid Laura – should end up with a rock-chick hippy pensioner as her mentor, and I get the supergran, but there you go.

  I sip my tea, and look at Edie, and listen to the companionable silence of her little home. I can feel words rising to the surface, and wonder if subconsciously, that’s why I made this trip in the first place – why I drove to see Edie instead of going back to bed. If some small, inarticulate part of my mind told me that today was the day I needed to talk. To acknowledge.

  I feel the words rising, and they are words I’ve never, ever spoken out loud before. Words that belong to stories I’ve never told. Words that describe the hurt I’ve never expressed. Words that probably won’t capture the guilt I’ve never properly climbed over. I feel them there, these words, powerful, bubbling under the surface like lava, scalding hot and searingly painful.

  Edie stays quiet, letting me think it through. Letting me breathe. Letting me decide whether to talk, or to do what I’ve always done, and gloss over the past.

  ‘I don’t know, Edie,’ I say, eventually. ‘I’m about as good at talking as I am at resting. I’ve never been one for discussing my feelings. I prefer to pretend I don’t have them.’

  She nods, and places her china cup down on its saucer. She got a china cup painted with hedgehogs, I got a giant builders’ mug. She obviously thought I needed it.

  ‘And how’s that working out for you?’ she replies, one furry white eyebrow cocked upwards in a question. I can’t help but smile. She’s a sly old fox, Edie.

  ‘It’s working out…not so brilliantly, I suppose. Which has kind of been fine up until now. But for some reason, now, I feel… bad. Like something different needs to happen. And I’m not used to different. I’m not sure I could cope.’

  ‘You’re at a crossroads, you see,’ says Edie. ‘That’s the magical thing that’s going to happen while you’re here.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel very magical, though. It feels… awful.’

  I realise as I say it that it’s true. I do feel awful. Not just in the common-or-garden way I usually feel awful – sleep-deprived, borderline exhausted, cynical, stressed, lonely. I’m used to all of that. That’s my default setting. This, this feeling I have right now as I sit in this tiny terraced house being scrutinised by someone I barely know, is a whole new level of awful.

  Perhaps it’s being so involved in other people’s lives that’s done it. Being here, seeing Laura in her new glory, seeing the way she is connected to Matt and Cherie and Frank and the café.

  Seeing Lizzie and Nate moving on and growing up. Seeing the way this whole community loves and supports each other. Meeting Sam, the big lummox. Seeing all of this wonderful living going on around me – so bright and comforting and joyous – and still feeling like I simply can’t join in with it. That I can fake my way through it for a few weeks, but that it will never be mine.

  That I simply don’t deserve it. That I’m a charlatan, a fraud, a loser – and that these people would be better off without me.

  I feel big, fat, self-pitying tears sliding out of my eyes, and am momentarily confused by what is happening. I am not one of life’s criers – unlike Laura, who is a blubbering princess – I’ve always been inclined to keep my emotions inside. Because, you know, if I let them out, they might be like baboons escaping from the zoo – they’ll go on a noisy rampage and snap car aerials off and show everybody their bright red bums.

  Edie reaches out, and gives my hand a little pat. Her skin is papery and soft, and her touch is reassuring. It pulls me back into the real world, and away from the scary landscape of my internal life. Baboons, for goodness’ sake!

  ‘It’s good to have a little cry now and then,’ she says, simply. ‘Does you the world of good.’

  I just nod, and have little choice but to agree with her and hope she’s right – because the tears show no sign of stopping, whether I want them to or not. At least they’re just quietly getting on with it, not making me sob or snort snot or anything. Small mercies.

  ‘Something bad happened to me, a long time ago,’ I say, aware of how silly that must sound to Edie, to whom very bad things had happened a very long time ago. ‘And I just don’t seem able to quite get past it.’

  ‘Well, that’s a thing I can understand, child. Some things just feel too big and too bad to get past, don’t they? Like if you even try, you’re betraying a memory.’

  I nod, reminded once again that I brought an extra portion of quiche and cake for her long-gone lover. No, Edie hadn’t got past her own personal tragedy – but she seemed to have found a way to work around it. To live with it. Maybe that’s the best I could hope for. Maybe that’s why fate put her in my path – she’ll be my Mrs Miyagi of Screwed-Up-But-Viable-Living.

  ‘What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?’ she says quietly, leaning back in her chair so she’s not crowding me. ‘And tell me to mind my own beeswax if you like.’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine… maybe I need to talk about it. And what’s the worst that can happen, right?’

  Edie raises her eyebrows at that, and I have to laugh. And cry. Both at the same time, which is pretty confusing.

  ‘It was when I was seventeen,’ I explain, gazing off towards the window that overlooks the main street through the village. I might be able to make myself talk about it, but I won’t be able to look at her at the same time. The only way I can do this is by somehow pretending I’m just talking out loud to an empty room. So I stare out, at the fresh-falling snow and the passers-by huddling into their winter coats, and I talk.

  ‘I was just seventeen and I was in love. In that way you can only be when you’re that age – completely and utterly and totally. I’d always been a bit of a… well, the diplomatic word would probably be a ‘handful’. I never did what I was supposed to, even if it was what I wanted to do all along… it just seemed to be part of me to be awkward. I never felt like I fit in, even with my own family, and then when I met Shaun… well, suddenly I did fit in. It was the whole ‘you complete me’ thing that you’re always looking for at that age… maybe any age, I don’t know…

  ‘Anyway. Long story short, after a couple of months together, I got pregnant. I know now, looking back, that I was an idiot. That I shouldn’t have been sleeping with him – or with anyone, I was just a kid. But of course I loved him, and I thought I was grown up, and Laura had David and they were so happy, and maybe I thought it would all work out like that for me as well.

  ‘So, well, yeah. I was an idiot. When I found out I was pregnant, I thought – I genuinely, stupidly thought – that he’d be happy about it. That we’d go off and get a little flat together, and I’d escape my family, and we’d raise this little person in complete harmony. That we’d go to festivals with our cute toddler and I’d make hummus and he’d have a job as a park ranger or something, and that we’d live this fabulous Bohemian life. Shaun was pretty alternative – he had a nose ring before they were even cool – so I assumed he’d be alternative in the way he wanted to live, not just the way he dressed. That my weird and wacky vision of our future would be just
as appealing to him as it was to me.’

  I pause there, simply because I have to. The memories are still so real, and still cut so deep, that it feels like it’s happening to me all over again. Phantom pain.

  We’d met in the park near our house. He brought the cider and the fags, expecting a party. I brought the pee-stick, expecting a celebration. Expecting him to take me in his manly arms, and come out with a line that a boy from a film would come out with: ‘Don’t worry, Becca, I love you – together, we can take on the world,’or something like that.

  Instead, he just went pale. Chugged down half a bottle of Strongbow. Lit up a cigarette with shaking hands.

  And said: ‘You’ll have to get rid of it. My dad’ll kill me if he finds out.’

  Even now, all these years later, I still feel the sting of those words. Even now, completely understanding and forgiving him for that perfectly natural teenaged boy reaction to terrifyingly big news, I still feel the swirl of nausea in the pit of my stomach.

  The slap of the rejection, the confusion, the horror as reality started to slowly dawn on me. The shockwaves that slammed through me as I started to grasp that there was a huge gap between my expectations of what would happen and what was actually happening.

  I can still feel the fear and loneliness as I watched him walk away, baggy jeans hanging low on his skinny hips, disappearing off between the swings and the roundabout in a cloud of Marlboro Lights.

  He was a kid. I really, really don’t hold it against him. Not now. But back then? Back then I felt like my whole world had been destroyed. Like I would never breathe again. Like I wanted to die.

  ‘But I take it you didn’t get a little flat together?’ asks Edie, reminding me that I am not alone. At least not physically.

  ‘No. In fact I never spoke to him again. He avoided me at school, dumped me by text and got a new girlfriend within days. It was brutal. I suppose I probably would have recovered from all of that – most girls do – but I wasn’t only dumped, I was dumped and pregnant. I was feeling terrible in every possible way – physically, emotionally. Just a total wreck. I couldn’t talk to Laura about it – although I know now, with hindsight, that I should have. I couldn’t back then. Or my parents. I was so… embarrassed. Humiliated. And so bloody desperate.

  ‘I had no idea what to do. I had nobody I felt I could turn to. And I… well, I genuinely considered killing myself, Edie. It makes me shiver now, but I did. I’d sit and look at pictures of people like Kurt Cobain on my bedroom wall – ‘

  She looks confused, and I don’t blame her.

  ‘Dead pop star. Don’t worry, it’s not relevant. Anyway. In the end, after a few weeks of pure, undiluted misery, where I’m sure I put my entire family through hell, I decided to go and see someone at a family planning clinic in the city. I still remember the bus ride into town – huddled on the back seat, glaring at anyone who looked like they were going to sit by me, freezing cold and terrified. Everybody else thinking about Christmas shopping and me thinking about death.

  ‘The people at the clinic were lovely – they were kind to me, even when I was not an easy person to be kind to. The nurse explained my ‘options’ – keeping the baby, considering adoption or booking me in for a termination. Everything was done so professionally, and they were so understanding – but it was still terrible. None of those options were appealing. The only option I could see was either me not existing any more or inventing a time machine and going back to undo it all.

  ‘I tried to contact Shaun, to see what he thought. I told myself it was because he had a right to know, but, to be truthful, I think I was still pathetically hoping that he’d come to my rescue somehow. That we’d get back together and, against the odds, I’d be happy again. He never even replied – I was well and truly on my own.’

  ‘Oh, you poor girl,’ Edie whispers, and I see her crinkled eyes have also filled with tears. Part of me had wondered if Edie – a lady of the older generation – would be judgemental of my frankly immoral behaviour, but I was grateful to see that she wasn’t. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I lay in bed, night after night, praying to a God I wasn’t sure I even believed in. And I didn’t pray for anything worthy, like world peace or an end to famine, I prayed that he would take my baby away, or take me away. That he’d make it all go away. That he’d make an aeroplane fall on my head on the way to school, just to put me out of my misery. I’ll… I’ll never forgive myself, Edie. Because the week after, it happened. Not the aeroplane thing, but… the baby. I lost the baby.

  ‘I was at school when it happened. I won’t go into details, it’s too horrible. But it happened and I went home saying I had a tummy bug, and I locked myself in my room and I cried and I cried and I cried. I was in a lot of pain, physically, which I was trying to ignore – I felt like I deserved it, do you know what I mean? Like it was my punishment for being such a terrible person. For being the type of girl who wished for such terrible things.

  ‘Eventually, I had to go back to the clinic, and go through some awful procedure at hospital, just before Christmas – worst Christmas ever – and I did it all alone. Because that, too, was part of my punishment. I think, in some ways, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since, in different ways. Punishing myself.’

  Edie is silent for a while, and I concentrate on what is going on outside. I see people walking past, umbrellas flying in the wind, carrying plastic bags and probably wondering what they’re going to cook for tea and thinking about their Christmas shopping. I see cars slowly driving through the village, and the snow still falling. Out there, life goes on.

  In here, it feels like it’s stopped.

  ‘I’m so sorry that happened to you, my love,’ says Edie, eventually. ‘It’s a terrible thing to have gone through, all alone, when you were so very young. But you can’t keep blaming yourself, not after all this time. I’m not sure, after all these years, if I believe in God either – but I’m very sure that if He does exist, He doesn’t take babies away from confused children who don’t know how to cope. And that’s what you were, isn’t it? Just a child?’

  ‘I know. And I’ve told myself that over and over again, but… well, nothing changes. It’s still there, always. It’s like part of me just stopped right then, when I was seventeen and suffering. Just frozen still. And I have no clue how to deal with that. I think part of me has been grieving that loss ever since it happened, no matter how much I’d wished for it.

  ‘I’ve tried to build a life for myself, but I always find myself wondering what it would have been like if things had been different… if it would have been a boy or a girl. If it would be lovely like Laura, or a pain in the arse like me… whether it was a blessing in disguise, or a curse…’

  ‘Well,’ Edie continues, wiping a tear from beneath her eye. ‘That’s only natural. None of us live our lives without the might-have-beens, do we? But imagine if, heaven forbid, such a thing were ever to happen to your Lizzie. What would you say to her?’

  I feel a clutch of fear in my stomach at the thought of Lizzie going through what I went through, and make a mental note to at least try and have a few awkward conversations with her. I’ve seen the way she looks at Josh and the way he looks at her, and… well, it’s both lovely and terrifying at the same time.

  ‘I think,’ I reply, ‘that I’d tell her to talk about it. To not suffer alone. To forgive herself. And I’d give her the world’s biggest cuddle.’

  Edie stands slowly to her feet, and picks up my mug of now cold tea.

  ‘I’d think that would be exactly the right way to react,’ she says over her shoulder as she walks to kitchen.

  ‘And I think that’s exactly what you should do for yourself, as well.’

  Chapter 12

  I feel exhausted after all of that, and Edie immediately picks up on it. Wise old owl. She forces me to eat a slice of quiche, and replenishes my mug of tea, and gives me a tartan blanket to throw over my legs. I’m not cold, but I take it for what it is – a sign of
comfort.

  ‘I think,’ I say, as I snuggle under the fleece, ‘that I am all talked-out now, Edie. Thanks very much for listening. I know it’s not a pleasant story. I half expected you to show me the door.’

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Becca. There’s nothing to thank me for. We’re all fragile creatures in our own way, and you’re not the first person to sit on that sofa and cry, not by a long shot. One of few advantages of reaching my age is that I’ve seen it all. Learned not to judge anyone until I’ve walked in their shoes. That’s why we all need friends, isn’t it, to help us out with the weak spots? And sometimes the weak spots nobody can see are the ones that hurt the most.’

  That almost has me crying again. She is so kind, so generous, so understanding. I know that Laura’s move to Dorset started as something desperate, something hopeful but unsure, with her whole future dominated by her past – but somehow, she’s moved on.

  She’s found herself again. She’s bright and bubbly and optimistic – and she’d done that with the help of Cherie and Edie and Matt and Frank and the whole family that the Comfort Food Café has provided her with.

  She’s been enveloped in their love and humour and concern, and now she’s back on track, as are Nate and Lizzie. I feel a tiny flickering of hope that maybe, just maybe, it can do the same for me. That Edie is right, and something magical might just happen.

  I am pathetically grateful for the comfort of this small house, and this small old lady, and the huge gift she’s given me – the gift of hope.

  Just then, she decides to almost ruin it all.

  ‘Now,’ she says, grinning at me with glee, ‘I think we need to lighten our spirits a bit, don’t you? Do you like Strictly Come Dancing? Of course you do, everyone does! I have all of them here, and I think we should settle in and watch a bit of it… nothing like a nice cha-cha-cha and a bit of glamour to cheer you up!’

  She trots over to her collection and starts to flick through the discs.