A Gift from the Comfort Food Café: Celebrate Christmas in the cosy village of Budbury with the most heartwarming read of 2018!

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2018

Copyright © Debbie Johnson 2018

Cover illustrations © Hannah George/Meiklejohn

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Debbie Johnson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008258856

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008258863

Version: 2018-09-10

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part 1: On Your Marks …

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part 2: Get Set …

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Part 3 – Go?

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Debbie Johnson

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Barbara Tomkinson (and Tinkerbell!)

PART 1: ON YOUR MARKS …

Chapter 1

My name is Katie Seddon. I am seven years old, and I am preparing to run away.

This is the first time, but it won’t be the last.

It is Christmas Day, and I have gathered together all of the essentials, which include the following: a selection of gifts, including my mermaid Barbie, a colouring book and felt tip pens, a musical jewellery box with a wind-up dancing ballerina inside it, fluffy pink ear muffs, elf bed socks and a four-pack of custard creams wrapped in cellophane. The biscuits weren’t under the tree that morning; I pinched them from the kitchen.

I look at my stash, and decide that I am ready for all that life can throw at me.

I pack my haul into my Toy Story backpack, and decide I will take a trip to infinity and beyond. Or at least to my grandma’s house. She only lives two streets away, so it isn’t exactly an intergalactic space quest.

I sit on my bed, and pause after I’ve zipped everything up. I wonder if my mum and dad will hear me as I sneak downstairs, get my raincoat, and leave – but a few seconds sitting with my head cocked to one side, listening to them scream at each other, reassures me that they won’t.

I can only make out the odd word, and I’ve learned already not to try too hard. I won’t hear anything good. It’s a cacophony of shrieks and yells and thuds as they chase each other around the living room. The bangs of ashtrays being thrown and high-pitched swearing and the crash of plates are all perfectly normal to me. They’re part of the soundtrack of my childhood; a reverse lullaby that keeps me awake and scared instead of sleepy and secure.

Looking back, with more complex thought processes than I possessed at seven, I know they are one of those couples who base their whole relationship on mutual contempt. On a good day, they tolerate each other. On a bad one, the only emotion in their eyes is hatred and bitterness. The overwhelming disappointment of what their lives have become.

I know now it’s not uncommon – and that their conflicts were the glue that held them together. Maybe when they first met it was exciting. Maybe they thought the arguments were passionate. Maybe the first few serious rows were put down to fire and spice. Maybe they were different when they were young, and thought they were in love – but now, with my dad in a dead-end job and Mum stuck at home, it’s not passion. It’s fury.

At the age of seven, I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know what’s going on in the big, nasty grown-up world – but I do know that I’ve had enough. That this is the worst Christmas ever. That they’re both really, really mean when they fight. Dad is bigger and physically stronger, but Mum is like a wasp, constantly zooming in to sting him. It’s horrible, and I’m leaving. Forever.

I tiptoe down the stairs and creep out of the house really quietly, although I needn’t have bothered – they’ve reached critical mass by this stage and wouldn’t pause if I did a conga through the living room wearing my flashing neon Rudolph deely-boppers. Which I am wearing, by the way – I’ve decided they will help me stay safe outside in the dark.

The walk to my grandma’s is a bit scary. I’ve done it before, loads of times, but only with grown-ups. This time I am doing it alone, at night, and with nobody to hold my hand when I’m crossing the road. I’m a good girl, and do as I’ve been taught, waiting for the green man to come on at the traffic lights even though there are no cars at all. Mum sometimes goes when the red man is on, but she says that’s all right for adults.

I knock on my grandma’s door, and she opens it wearing her quilted dressing gown and tartan slippers. She lets me in without any questions at all. I realise now it’s because she didn’t have to ask – she knew exactly what was going on in my house, and exactly why I needed a refuge. A place to shelter from the storm of my parents’ toxic relationship.

My nan was a very kind woman, and she always smelled of Parma Violets. To this day I still find it comforting whenever they turn up in a big bag of Swizzels. Halloween can be a bittersweet experience.

She settles me down with a bowl of custard-soaked jam roly-poly that she warms up in the microwave, and makes me a mug of instant hot chocolate. She even lets me sit in the big armchair that has the button that makes the footrest go up, tucked under a blanket. I hear her on the phone, but I’m so comfy and cosy and happy I’m not remotely interested in who she’s talking to. The room is lit by the twinkles of her small plastic Christmas tree, and all is well with the world.

When she comes back into the room, she’s all wrinkled smiles and loveliness, and we watch an episode of ER together. It’s an exciting one, with a big fire and lots of drama. It may even have been that early brush with Nurse Carol Hathaway that planted the seeds of my later career.

By the time my mum drags herself away from her fight, Nan has put me to bed at her house. I’m in the spare room, which used to be Mum’s when she was little and still has a giant cuddly lion in it that’s big enough to sit on.

I lie scrunched up beneath the duvet, warm and full, and hear them talking down below. It’s one of those little terraced houses with the staircase right off the living room, so the noise carries. Mum sounds tearful and her voice is wobbling and going up and down, like your voice does when you’re trying to keep a cry in and can’t breathe properly. Nan is telling her to leave me here for the night, and to stay herself as well. Telling her to consider staying for good – to finally leave him.

‘There’s never going to be a happy ending here, Sandra. You’ve both given it your best, but enough’s enough, love,’ she says, and I hear how sad she sounds. Sometimes I forget that my mum is my nan’s little girl as well as my mum. Weird.

I wake up the next morning with my mum in bed with me, curled around me like a soft, protective spoon. She’s already awake, watching me as I sleep, gently moving my blonde hair from my face. For a moment, all is well in the world.

Then I see that her eyes are all crusted together where she’d been crying, and her face is all puffed up, and she has finger-shaped bruises on the tops of her arms like small purple paw-marks. I burrow into her, and give her a cuddle – she looks like she needs one.

Chapter 2

The second time I run away, with any serious intent, I am fourteen. I’ve been staying with my nan most weekends, to the point where it is my second home. Mum and Dad are still at it, the years giving them more frown lines but no extra restraint.

The fights don’t get physical quite as often, but I still sometimes find the remnants of shattered crockery in the kitchen in the morning, or a mysteriously put-in window pane in the living room door, glass scattered on the floor in glistening zig-zags as I come downstairs for school.

I always creep down quietly, hoping they’re still sleeping it off, praying for a peaceful bowl of cornflakes before I leave. I’ve learned to tread carefully in our house, in all kinds of ways.

The year I turn fourteen, though, things change. They change because my nan dies, and my escape hatch is gone. It’s sudden and unexpected – a complication of diabetes. All those Parma Violets, I suppose. I am grieving and in pain and swamped with guilt – because as well as missing her, I am worried about myself as well. About how I’ll cope without her, and her kind smiles, and our cosy nights in watching ER and Casualty and Holby City, talking about nothing but saying such a lot.

Mum and Dad had gone out for a meal together, a pre-Christmas ‘date night’. As usually happens on those rare occasions, what started off well was ending with a row. Something to do with him drinking four pints of cider even though he was supposed to be the one driving, I don’t know.

The verbal missiles start as soon as they walk in, and had obviously been fired first on the journey home from their romantic night out. I make a sharp exit, stage left, not really knowing where I’m going or what I’m going to do when I get there.

They don’t even see me, and I stand outside the house on the driveway for a few moments, looking in at their drama unfolding. It’s dark, and it’s almost Christmas, and their row takes a festive turn when Dad gives Mum a mighty push as she screams at him. It’s not a push with intent – more of a push to get an irritating insect out of his face.

She loses her balance and topples backwards, staggering for a few steps before she finally lands sprawling in the middle of the Christmas tree, taking it down with her.

I stay rooted to the spot for a few seconds, just to make sure she isn’t, you know, dead or anything – but am strangely reassured to see her climb back up from the fake-pine branches, strewn in red and green tinsel. She’s grabbed the nearest weapon to hand – the star off the top of the tree – and is brandishing it like a shiv in a jailhouse movie, threatening to poke his eye out.

Okay, I think. God bless you merry gentlemen, and away I go. It’s very cold, and the streets are giddy with pitching snow and slow-moving cars inching through slush. I’m wearing a hoody and leggings, which isn’t really enough. I haven’t packed as well as I did last time, not even a spare pair of bed socks.

I wander the streets a little, wondering if I could hitchhike to London without getting murdered or locked in someone’s cellar, before my feet finally take me where I probably knew I was going all along.

I sit on the kerb outside my nan’s old house, ice-cold snow immediately soaking through the seat of my leggings, and rest my chin in my hands as I stare across the street.

Someone else lives there now, of course. The house was sold within a couple of months of her dying, which will always, always piss me off. I’m a teenager now, so I swear a lot more than I did when I was seven. And this? Imposters in her home? That pisses me off. It should have been kept as some kind of museum. At least had a blue plaque outside it. Instead, it’s like she was never even there.

I pull the cord of my hoody to make it tighter around my face, and look in through the front window. I see their brightly lit Christmas tree, and the cosy room, and occasionally even see a woman walking around, carrying a baby. I have no idea who they are, but I resent them. It might not be their fault that she died, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. The people who live there are pissing me off as well.

I’m so sick of my parents’ dramas. Sick of the tension, of not knowing when it’s all going to kick off again. There was a temporary lull after Nan died, and both of them were on their best behaviour, but it didn’t last.

Sometimes it comes after a flash point; sometimes it comes after days of simmering anger and snide comments and ‘your dinner’s in the dog’ sniping. He’ll go straight to the pub after work; she’ll sit at home planning her revenge.

And I know now – because my mother has said it to me – that I am apparently the cause of their determined grip on marital misery.

‘We didn’t want you to come from a broken home,’ she said – as though this was better. As though me bearing witness to a state of warfare throughout my childhood is beneficial, rather than filling me with dread.

I wade through a state of constant nervous energy every time I come home from school, standing in the hallway with my coat still on, weighing up the mood of the house, deciding whether I can risk venturing into the living room or if it would be better to run straight upstairs to my room, put on my headphones, and pretend none of it is happening.

So that’s how I live. Hiding in my room with my music; hiding at friends’ houses for way too many sleepovers, and running. Sometimes here, to my nan’s. Sometimes to town. Sometimes just buying a day pass for the bus and riding around all day.

It’s not an easy balance, and as soon as I am old enough, I go away to college to study nursing. I choose a college far enough away that I have to live in the halls, and think I have found paradise. Other teenagers are homesick – I’m just relieved. Relieved to have my own space, my own place, my own peace and quiet. Relieved to be alone.

Chapter 3

By the time I am in my twenties, I’m sharing my own space and my own place and I don’t have much peace and quiet any more. I’m definitely, 100 per cent not alone, either.

In fact, the third time I run away, I’m a grown woman, with a six-month-old baby, a job, a rented flat, and a boyfriend who never really wanted to be a dad.

That time, I run away for good. That time, I run away because of yet another screaming row – with Jason, my boyfriend.

It isn’t pretty. These things never are. When we met, he was working as a hospital porter, and I was a nurse. At the time, I suppose I thought we fell in love – but now I see it for what it was. A lot of lust, some laughs, and a strange sense that this was what I was supposed to be doing. That women of my age should be looking to find ‘the one’ and building a relationship.

It was never, ever right between us, but when I got pregnant, we both pretended it was. Because everyone knows that having a newborn baby is really easy, and completely papers over the cracks in any relationship, don’t they?

Of course, it didn’t make anything better. It made everything worse. The flat was too small. We didn’t have enough money. We were too young, and didn’t have a clue what we were doing. Mainly, I think, we just didn’t like each other very much.

While I was pregnant, we were able to pretend much better. We went to Ikea and laughed as we built cots from Swedish instructions and cooed over tiny little baby-grows. He said he’d give up drinking while I was pregnant, and even managed it for a couple of weeks.

After our son, Saul, arrived, the tensions started to build. I never slept. Jason was working extra shifts. When we did see each other, we were both filled with seething resentments – me because I was stuck at home, him because when he did get home, all I did was moan and nag.

The only good thing about any of it was the baby. He was perfect – caught between us, this chubby-faced, blond-haired angel who I always secretly thought we didn’t deserve.

The night of the screaming row, I am especially tired. I’ve been on my own for so long, I’ve started talking to the kettle. It isn’t answering yet, but in my delirious state of fatigue, it’s only a matter of time.

Saul is teething and crying and irritable. Jason has been doing extra shifts to cover for other people’s Christmas leave, and I am watching the big hand crawl around the clock in the kitchen, counting the minutes until I can hand Saul over and collapse onto my bed and cry silently into my pillow for a few moments, wondering what happened to my life.

We’re out of nappies, and Jason is supposed to be getting some on the way home. Except he doesn’t come home – not for another two hours. And when he does, he smells of lager and cigarettes and Calvin Klein’s Obsession, which is a perfume I definitely don’t wear. In fact the only perfume I wear these days is baby sick and desperation.

I could overlook all of that if he’d even remembered the nappies – but of course he hasn’t. He has, though, remembered to pick up six cans of Fosters and a bad attitude.

I yell. He yells. We both say things we will regret, but also probably mean. It gets louder, and hotter, and angrier. We’re both like subterranean geysers, all of our frustrations rising to the surface in one big, scalding explosion.

I pick up the nearest thing I can find – a dirty nappy – and lob it at Jason’s head. He retaliates by slapping me so hard across the face I feel the red sting marks shine immediately.

We’re both stunned into silence by this; me standing still, holding my stinging cheek, him staring at me, shaking his head, stammering apologies.

I’m so sorry, he says. I don’t know what came over me, he says. It’ll never happen again, he promises. He is full of remorse, full of regret, full of instant self-loathing. In a strange way, I almost feel sorry for him – our situation has revealed a side of himself he probably never knew existed.

I am hurt, and shaken, and weirdly relieved. It’s like we’ve finally pushed ourselves over an abyss that we can’t climb out of. I don’t feel scared, oddly – I can tell he won’t do it again. Not this time, anyway.

I’m trying to make words come out of my mouth when I notice Saul. Saul, my beautiful son, who has been sitting in his baby chair, in a dirty nappy and a Baby’s First Christmas vest, watching all of this unfold.

His blue eyes are wide and wet, his pudgy fists held to his ears trying to block out the noise, so scared and confused he is screaming as well. He’s probably been screaming for a while – but neither of us noticed, because we were too lost in our own drama.

I rush to the baby to comfort him, and know that I will be running away again sometime soon – not for my sake, but for Saul’s. Maybe even for Jason’s.

Now, when I look back using the magical power of hindsight, it feels like so many of the important moments in my life – like that one – involve running away. I could draw a time-map of when things started to go wrong, and add in a cartoon figure of myself zooming off in the opposite direction, vapour trails behind me.

The problem with all of these memories – all of these actions and reactions and inactions and overreactions – isn’t really the running away. The problem is, I never had any clue what I was running towards, and usually found myself blown around by the breeze, like the fluff from one of those wispy dandelion heads, without any sense of direction and no control over my own movements.

Now, a few years have passed. Saul will be four on his next birthday, and life is very different. I’m less of a dandelion-head, and am trying very hard to take root.

It’s different because the last time I ran away, I ran here – to a little place called Budbury, on the picture-postcard perfect coast of Dorset. I have a job. I have a tiny house. I have friends, who I’ve reluctantly allowed into my life. I have a community, in the Comfort Food Café that is the heart of the village. I have peace, and quiet, and most importantly, I have a gorgeously healthy little boy. Who definitely disrupts the quiet, but in a good way.

I have more than I could ever have imagined – and this time, I won’t be running anywhere. This time, I am breaking all the cycles.

This time, I’m staying put – no matter how complicated it gets.

Chapter 4

This year, Christmas Eve night

I’ve had enough. My head is pounding, and my eyes are sore, and every inch of my body from my scalp to my toes feels like it’s clenched up in tension.

All I can hear is the screaming, rising in shrieks and peaks above the sound of festive music, a playlist of carols I have on my phone to try and drown it all out. The mix is horrendous: the sublime choruses of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ alternating with yells of abuse.

Saul is sleeping, but restlessly, in that way that children will – I can see his eyes moving around under his lids, and his little fists are clenched, and every now and then his legs jerk, like a dreaming dog. It’s the night before Christmas – maybe he’s thinking about Santa, flying over the rooftops in his sleigh. I hope so, anyway. I hope he’s not about to wake up, and hear all the rowing, and the banging, and voices. I worked hard to protect him from this, but it’s chased me down, rooted me out.