A Gift from the Comfort Food Café

by Debbie Johnson

  These days, our lives are tied up with theirs in ways I could never have anticipated. The café gang help me out with childcare. I help them out with other things. We all look out for each other. It’s like a big, tangled, misshapen ball of string, all directions leading to each other.

  I’m still not the life and soul of any of the parties the café hosts or organises – I still dodge the big social events – but I’m getting there. Edging towards a security and comfort that I’ve never known since my nan died.

  Saul thinks this place is home. He’s little – he doesn’t remember a life before it. He thinks Lynnie is his wacky granny, and Willow is a cartoon character because of her pink hair, and Cherie is the queen of the world.

  He thinks Laura, who manages the café, is the cuddliest woman ever, and that Edie May is a magical tiny-faced elf who lives in a teapot.

  He thinks all the men of Budbury – and there are several – are there purely to play football with him, or take him for walks on the beach, or help him hunt for fossils. He thinks the dogs of Budbury – Midgebo, Laura’s black Lab, and Bella Swan, Willow’s border terrier, and her boyfriend Tom’s Rottie cross, Rick Grimes – are his own personal pooches.

  I may have left behind my parents, and Jason, but what I gained was so much bigger – a whole village of the biggest-hearted people I’ve ever met.

  He’s tugging at my hand as we approach the doors, his little legs pumping as fast as they can, like a puppy straining on the lead, desperate to get inside.

  Inside, where a world of fun awaits. Where the café starts to get weird. Weird in a good way. There are lots of things you’d expect to find in a café – tables covered with red gingham cloths; a big fridge full of soft drinks; a chiller cabinet crammed with sandwich platters and salads and whopping great slices of cake; a serving counter and a till. So far, so normal.

  Then there are the extras. The things that immediately let you know that you’re not in Kansas any more, Toto. The multiple mobiles hanging from the ceiling, dangling home-made oddities like old vinyl singles and papier-mâché fish. Half a red kayak. The oars from a rowing boat. Fishing net tangled up with fairy lights. The shelves lined with random objects – an antique sewing machine; a giant fossil in a cabinet; rows of books and board games and puzzles.

  It’s like the anti-Ikea – as though the Old Curiosity Shop got together with a tea room and had a baby. Despite the clutter, though, it all still feels fresh and clean, and is washed over with the light flooding in through the windows on all sides.

  On one side, you can see into the garden. On the other, it’s the sea and the beach and the endless red-and-gold clifftops stretching off along the horizon. It’s the kind of place you can lose hours, just watching the maritime world go by.

  Saul bursts through the doors and strikes a dramatic pose, his little arms raised in the air, fists clenched, as though he’s Superman about to take off.

  ‘Everybody, I’m here!’ he shouts, just in case they hadn’t noticed. Laura is behind the counter, round and pretty and fighting a constant losing battle with her curly hair. She pauses in her work – slicing up lemon meringue cake – and her face breaks out into a huge smile.

  ‘Thank goodness! I was wondering when you were going to turn up!’ she says, wiping her hands down on her apron and walking out to see us. She crouches down in front of Saul and gives him a cuddle which he returns so enthusiastically she ends up sitting on her backside, his face buried in her hair.

  I start to apologise, but she looks up at me and raises an eyebrow. That’s a stern telling off from Laura, so I clamp my mouth shut.

  Laura has two kids of her own – Nate and Lizzie, teenagers now – and understands children. She’s told me approximately seven thousand times that I need to stop saying I’m sorry about Saul, when he’s only doing what kids of that age do. She continues to stare at me, over the tufts of Saul’s hair, but I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong this time, so I pretend not to notice.

  I look around, and see Cherie sitting at a corner table, her feet in red and green striped socks, propped up on the chair next to her. Her husband Frank, who is an 82-year-old silver fox, is sitting opposite, drinking his thick tea and reading the paper. They both look up at me, and grin widely. They must be in an extra good mood this morning.

  There is an actual paying customer here, still wrapped up in walking gear, perusing a guide book as he eats his toast. The café is on the Jurassic Coast and is often populated by people in padded anoraks and woolly hats, taking a break from their treks. He glances at the commotion, briefly widens his eyes when he nods good morning to me, and goes hastily back to his maps.

  I glance around. There’s nobody else here. Or at least I don’t think there is, until he walks out of the gents.

  He’s tall by my standards – about six foot – but short by the standards of his own family, who are all giants. He’s bulky, with brawn he earned travelling the world digging wells and building schools in the kind of places you see on the news during droughts. His chestnut hair is cropped brutally short, and he’s wearing his usual uniform of care-worn denims and a long-sleeved jersey top.

  He looks up, and our eyes meet across an un-crowded room. He has great eyes. Bright blue, on the Paul Newman spectrum. He smiles when he sees me, and I smile back, even though I feel the usual tug of anxiety I get whenever I’m around him. He’s looking half-amused, as though he’s remembering a joke someone told him on a bus some time, his gaze moving from me to Saul.

  This is Van, and he’s Lynnie’s son, and Willow’s brother. He came back from his life in Africa when Lynnie took a turn for the worse in the spring, and has been working for Frank as a labourer ever since. I wait, knowing that Saul will spot him as soon as he’s emerged from Laura’s hair.

  Right on cue, I see my son look up and around, his eyes widening in excitement when he sees him walking towards us.

  ‘Van! Van! Mummy, Van is here, look!’ he squeals, leaving Laura lying on the floor, abandoned and forgotten, and me in a cloud of dust as he runs towards him. Van braces – this has happened many times before – catches him in his arms, scoops him up, and swings him around and around in a dizzying circle.

  All I can hear is the ecstatic chuckling of my little boy as he whirls and flies through the air, shrieking for it to stop in a way that suggests he really doesn’t want it to. Laura looks on and grins. Cherie and Frank look on and laugh. Even the random walker stifles a smile.

  It’s the kind of thing that makes everyone who sees it happy – an innocent expression of pure, unadulterated joy.

  Everyone apart from me, I suspect. It doesn’t make me happy. It makes me nervous. It makes me want to grab Saul back from him, and run away all over again. I vowed I wouldn’t, no matter how complicated it all gets – but this is a whole new level of complicated.

  Because in the same way that Saul seems to think that Cherie is the queen, and Edie is a magical elf, and Willow is a cartoon character, and all the dogs belong to him, he has views about Van as well. In his world, Van seems to have become the nearest thing he has to a real-life dad.

  Chapter 7

  This, I am starting to think, could be a problem. Van is a nice man. Okay, he’s a nice man who happens to be tremendously hot as well – and maybe that’s the real problem. I like him, a lot.

  In a fairytale world, that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it? I’d complete my new move and my new life with a new relationship. We’d all live happily ever after, in a pink castle on a hill, surrounded by unicorns and rainbows. Everything wrapped up in a sparkly bow.

  But this is the real world – my world. And in my world, all I’ve ever seen is relationships that start off good and go very, very bad. I’m determined not to let that happen to me again – or to Saul – and the best way to do that seems to be never to have a relationship at all.

  That sounds very sensible when I say it in my head. I really, genuinely mean it. In my head. It doesn’t seem to be my head that’s the proble
m though – it’s the rest of my body. Even here, now, in a café on a Saturday morning surrounded by other people, I feel that twitch when I look at him. The twitch that screams ‘take me, take me’, even when no words come out of my mouth beyond ‘hi’. That’s a blessing at least.

  Van has done nothing to provoke this inner sluttiness, apart from exist, and I can’t blame him for that. There are lots of good-looking men in Budbury, but they’re all attached. There’s Matt, the local vet and Laura’s boyfriend. There’s Sam, Becca’s partner, who looks like a surfer and has the cutest Irish accent. There’s Tom, Willow’s fella, who has a superhero geek thing going on. There’s Cal, Martha’s dad and Zoe’s man, an Aussie who manages Frank’s farm and is pretty much the dictionary definition of ‘rugged’.

  But none of them have ever given me the twitch. Maybe because they’re taken, and I just don’t do that kind of thing. Maybe because I simply never felt that kind of chemistry with them even before I knew who they were and exactly how taken they are. It’s weird, isn’t it, the way you fancy some people and not others?

  Weird, and in this case, inconvenient. I’m way too busy to even be wasting time thinking about such things, never mind doing them. I’m a single mum, I have my college course, and I work part-time in the village pharmacy, which is run by Auburn, Van and Willow’s sister. Not an hour of my day is unaccounted for, ever. No, I definitely don’t have time for a man in my life.

  Even if I did, Van’s never given any overt hint that he’s even interested. He’s probably not. In fact he definitely isn’t. I’m nothing special – I’m perfectly average in every way. I’m petite – I get that from my mum – and I’m almost-blonde. Which, if you look at it from the other direction, means I’m almost mousy. I’m not the kind of woman men look at and have sexy thoughts about.

  ‘You look stunning today,’ says Van, just as I’m thinking about how plain I am. He’s stopped spinning Saul, and now has him on his shoulders, where he’s using the extra height to fiddle with a mobile made of sea shells.

  ‘Yes, you really do,’ chimes in Laura, now busily getting my coffee ready. ‘It’s good to see somebody making an effort around here.’

  I’m quite confused by this stage, especially as Frank and Cherie are visibly shaking with compressed laughter as they look at me over their newspaper pages.

  ‘Erm … okay? Thank you,’ I say, touching my hair self-consciously, noticing that it feels a bit stiff. Probably the salty sea air.

  Saul realises what’s being said, and grins at me before saying: ‘I did that. I made her so pretty. I did Mummy’s make-up in my beauty parlour this morning. She was being a lazy bones and staying in bed.’

  I feel a horrifying blush sweep over my cheeks as the realisation sinks in. Luckily, my face is probably already so red that nobody will even notice.

  My hands fly up to hide myself, and everybody bursts out laughing at my reaction. Even the walker, who I’ve never met in my life.

  Oh God. I did it, didn’t I? I played beauty parlour all morning just to get an extra few minutes in bed, and then was so busy and tired I didn’t even look in a mirror before I left the house. Saul is perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed, with his teeth brushed and his hair neat and tidy. Me? I probably look like an escaped circus clown.

  It does, at least, explain all the strange stares when I walked in. Maybe they thought I’d deliberately done it – me, a woman who rarely even wears make-up at all, and sees not being noticed as a tick in the win column.

  Laura comes over and pats me on the shoulder in consolation. She’s trying to look sympathetic, but the tears of amusement rolling down her cheeks don’t match her tone.

  ‘We’ve all been there, love,’ she says, casting her eyes over my new look. ‘I once went to Tesco with my hair sprayed into a mohawk, when Lizzie was going through a creative stage. Completely forgot until I was in the checkout paying for my sweet potatoes and toilet roll. What time did he get you up?’

  ‘Umm … before six,’ I reply quietly. I feel embarrassed and awkward and want the floor to open up, like in one of those films about earthquakes, and swallow me whole. I want to say more – to see how funny this is and shrug it off. Play it like Auburn would, and do a spontaneous mock-fashion catwalk around the room, showing off my new look.

  But I’m not Auburn. I don’t have her energy or confidence or ‘I’m-all-out-of-shits-to-give’ attitude. I’m me. I’m almost mousy, and my default setting is to stay as quiet as possible so the predators don’t notice me.

  I try on a small smile for size, as Van looks at me in concern. Maybe he can see the slight trembling in my hands, or the ever-so-annoying sheen in my eyes. He nods at me once, sharply, and says: ‘Come on, Saul – we’re going on an adventure in the garden. Buried treasure. Let’s give your mum a chance to look less beautiful and have a coffee, and see what we can find. What do you say, pirate lad?’

  Saul grabs hold of his ears as though they’re handles, and shrieks: ‘Aye aye, Captain!’ as they walk towards the doors. I watch them go, feeling both relieved and worried.

  I don’t have time to ponder the worried part, because Laura takes me by the arm and leads me away to the ladies. She’s produced a packet of baby wipes – she’s one of those mumsy women who always have a fresh pack of hankies about her person – and perches on the fake zebra-skin stool that’s in there while I start to clean myself up. She looks a bit tired herself, now I come to notice.

  The mirror in front of me reveals that my stylish look is even worse than I’d anticipated. I have purple eyes, the colour swirling all around the socket and across my eyebrows, and my skin is the deep tan of a terracotta warrior – up to my chin, where it suddenly goes milky white again. Two giant, circular blobs of bright red adorn my cheeks like apples, and the remnants of scarlet lipstick are lining my mouth. My hair is sprayed into a kind of cone on my head, like a strange hat – he must have covered it in lacquer, and massaged it upwards like the Eiffel Tower.

  I stare at my reflection for a couple of seconds, then start to attack the whole mess with the vigour of a woman vowing never to let such a thing happen again.

  ‘I remember those days,’ says Laura, watching me and smiling. ‘The early mornings. The constant demands for attention. I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but you’ll miss it when it’s gone.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, unable to keep the disbelief from my voice as my fingertips get caught in my beehive.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she replies, nodding. ‘Definitely. These days, budging Lizzie and Nate from their bedrooms is a challenge. Getting their attention is even harder. They still need me – but mainly for money and food and lifts to their friends’ houses. I’m not the centre of their worlds any more, and even though that means I get more sleep, I do miss them being little. Of course, it was different for me – I had David around, then.’

  Laura married her childhood sweetheart when they were barely out of school, and had her kids young. From what I can gather, theirs was a perfect life – until David tragically died after an accident at home.

  A couple of years after that, she packed the children up and moved here for the summer. A summer that turned into forever, after Nate and Lizzie settled so well, and she met Matt. She’s another one of the Budbury survivors who has fitted into the routine of life here in this far-off corner of the world.

  ‘Well, it’s not too late, is it?’ I ask, as I wipe my eyes within an inch of their lives. ‘You could have another baby, if that’s what you and Matt wanted.’

  She snorts out a quick laugh, and slaps her own thighs.

  ‘I don’t think so!’ she answers, looking part amused, part wistful. ‘I’m knocking forty, you know. I think those days are behind me. Matt … well, he’d be a great dad. But I think he’s happy with being a kind-of step-dad … I don’t know. We’ve never even discussed it, to be honest. Anyway, I’m exhausted enough dealing with the kids and Midgebo.’

  She gazes off at something I can’t see, and I wonder if I’ve
said the wrong thing. If I’ve touched a sore spot without even trying. She snaps out of it and smiles at me again, as though to reassure me.

  ‘Anyway. You know what this place is like,’ she says. ‘We share our problems and we share our joys – and that means we all get to enjoy having Saul in our lives. We’re glad you’re here.’

  I feel a sudden wash of gratitude towards her – for the baby wipes, for the conversation, for the reassurance. For the way she makes me feel so welcome.

  ‘Thank you,’ I reply, as I tackle the blusher spots. ‘It’s … well, it’s taken me a while to settle in, but now I have, I’m glad I’m here as well. I’m not … not the sort of person who opens up too easily.’

  She nods, and I can practically see her making an effort not to dive right in with a load of questions. The crowd here doesn’t know much about my background, or why I left Bristol. They don’t know about the way I grew up, or about Saul’s dad, other than he lives in Scotland now. I have my privacy settings on high, and always have had.

  Even as a kid, I was guarded. There are only so many times you can bring friends home from school just to have them walk into a parental war zone before you decide not to bother any more. It was embarrassing, at an age when you’re mortally embarrassed about having a spot, never mind your mates seeing your mum whack your dad around the head with a frying pan.

  ‘I know,’ she says, when I don’t add anything. ‘And that’s fine. We’re all different, aren’t we? I hope you know, though, that we’re always here for you if ever you need a listening ear. Or some cake.’

  ‘Or some baby wipes.’

  ‘Yes! I always have baby wipes … even if I don’t have the baby. Anyway, come on out and have a coffee and some toast. Or do you want some jam roly-poly? I know you like that.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit early for jam roly-poly?’ I ask, smiling.

  She feigns shocked horror and says: ‘Hush your mouth, child – it’s never too early for jam roly-poly! I didn’t get a figure like this by watching the clock, you know!’