Summer at the Comfort Food Cafe

‘They filmed The French Lieutenant’s Woman there,’ I say, trying to meet my daughter’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. She’s not interested, of course. She’s too busy staring at her phone, thumbs moving quick as lightning as she types. So quick they’re just vague pink blurs, in fact. If Lizzie was going to be a superhero, she’d be called Thumb Girl: the Fastest Text in the West.

Sadly, Thumb Girl doesn’t seem impressed with my cinematic reference, and really, what did I expect? Was that the best I could come up with? A sappy Meryl Streep movie from before she was even born? A historical romance featuring some award-winning moustaches and meaningful glances? It’s enough to give mothers the world over a bad name, for God’s sake.

‘Never heard of it, Mum,’ she replies, grudgingly. I’m actually surprised she even vocalises her response and suspect she’s saying something much ruder on her screen. I make a mental note to check her Twitter account later. Or Tumblr. Or Facebook. I’ve kind of lost track of which one is her favourite form of communication at the moment. It certainly isn’t good old-fashioned talking. Not with me at least.

I scrabble for something more contemporary – something cooler. Something that might make her hate me ever-so-slightly less than she does right now. Something along the lines of ‘the lead singer from Green Day will be living next door to us’, but more … true.

‘Yeah. I suppose it is a bit old for you. Well, they filmed Broadchurch there,’ I finally say.

‘The one about the murdered kid?’ asks Lizzie, finally looking up, one eyebrow raised in query just about visible beneath her straight blonde fringe. The fringe has been getting lower and lower for months now – eventually I fear it will cover her whole face and she’ll look like Cousin It dressed by Primark.

‘That’s it, yes, the one with David Tennant in it,’ I reply, encouraged to have finally found some common ground. Even if it is common ground built on infanticide and Doctor Who.

‘Wow. What a great advert for the place,’ comes the sarcastic reply. ‘Remind me to get a rape alarm.’

Okay. Deep breaths. There are at least four hours left of this fun family road trip, I remind myself. In an ideal world, we’ll at least save the shouting until we’re past Birmingham. I consider starting a ‘count the red cars’ game and realise that they haven’t played that since they were a lot younger. And I also realise – for about the millionth time – that I suck at this.

David had a way of making car journeys fun. I’d be the one making sure we all had bottles of water and muffins to eat and spare carrier bags in case Nate threw up, and he’d be the one making them laugh. I’d be studying the map – Sat nav’s for Slackers, he’d always say – and he’d be driving and somehow managing to keep everybody’s spirits up.

Well, they’re older now – and way less easy to amuse. Plus, I’m still not sure how it is going to be possible to read the map, drive the car and keep everybody’s spirits up at the same time. I’m struggling with my own spirits, never mind theirs as well. And, even though I’d never drink and drive (honest), every time I think of the word ‘spirits’, I start to yearn for a large, super frosty G&T. Or maybe a mojito. Later, I promise. Later.

I take the deep breath I’d recommended to myself and ask – silently – the question that plays across my mind at least a few times every day. Even more right now as we set off on this exciting adventure that nobody, including me, seems to find very exciting at all. What Would David Do, I think? WWDD, for short.

David, I know, would be untroubled. He’d smile and ignore the cheekiness, and find a way to deflate the whole situation with a lame joke. Or he’d start to talk in a series of fart noises. Or put on a French accent and sing ‘Barbie Girl’. Something like that, anyway.

But David did have the very big advantage of Lizzie adoring everything about him. He could never do any wrong in her eyes – whereas her feelings towards me, right now, aren’t quite so generous. At best, I suspect they go along the lines of ‘will someone please tell me I’m adopted?’, and at worst, she may be using her birthday money to hire a hitman. To say she’s displeased at being separated from her friends for the summer is something of an understatement – a bit like saying Daniel Craig is passably attractive.

‘It’s on the Jurassic Coast,’ I add, trying again. I can practically feel the black aura creeping over my shoulders from the back seat, but I have to try. Because that is definitely what DWD and I need to keep going. Sat nav’s for Slackers, and Quiet’s for Quitters. It’s 6.30am and I’ve only had one mug of coffee.

If somebody doesn’t talk to me soon, I might actually fall asleep at the wheel, which would be bad for all concerned as I’m in control of a very full Citroen Picasso, complete with equally full roof rack and a fat black Labrador snoring in the boot.

Nate perks up at my latest comment, looking up from his DS for a moment. Presumably Super Mario/Sonic the Hedgehog/Pokémon/delete as applicable is on pause. His hair’s a bit too long as well, but not for style purposes – we just haven’t found the time or the inclination to go to the barbers very much. That was one of his dad’s jobs, too. I’ve been trimming it myself with the nail scissors, which I really must stop doing – he’s twelve. He needs to stop looking like he lets his mum cut his hair, even if he does.

‘So did they film Jurassic World there?’ he asks, hopefully. I hate to disappoint, but feel that leading him to expect a first-hand encounter with a friendly bronchosaurus might ultimately result in him hating me when he realises I lied. He is, as I’ve said, twelve – so technically he knows that velociraptors don’t roam the hills and vales of Dorset. But he’s also a boy, so he lives in hope that he’s about to be whisked off to a super-secret island filled with Scenes of Mild Peril.

‘Erm … no,’ I admit. ‘But we can go fossil-hunting, if you like? Apparently there are loads washed up on the beach.’

He gives me the smile. That small, sweet smile that says ‘I remain unimpressed, but love you anyway’. The uni-dimple makes a brief, heart-wrenching appearance, before he turns his face back to what really matters. The small device on his lap.

I have a fleeting moment of nostalgia for the days when kids weren’t permanently attached to electronic gadgets, and then realise I am being both hypocritical and very, very old. When I was their age, I thought my Walkman was the absolute bees knees and used to pull very rude faces when my mum suggested I might get ear cancer if I didn’t take the headphones off every now and then.

‘That sounds cool, Mum,’ Nate says, already lost in his alternative reality.

‘Are you okay playing on that?’ I ask. ‘You don’t feel sick?’

‘No. It’s okay Mum. I haven’t been car sick since I was eight.’

‘All right. But I’ve put some bags in the glove box you know, just in case …’

He nods and gives me another grin before playing again. Beautiful boy.

I bask in my thirty seconds of maternal glory and glance out at the approaching motorway sign.

Hmmm. Sandbach Service Station – I wonder if they do mojitos to go?

Chapter 4

We drive down the M6 without a single mojito incident and very little conversation. It’s quiet on the roads – due to most normal people being asleep – and even quieter in the car.

I combat this by playing Meatloaf’s Greatest Hits very loud and singing along to ‘Bat Out Of Hell’, including all the motorbike-revving noises near the end. I’d do air guitar to the solos, but that’s probably against the Highway Code. I can just imagine the signs: cartoons of Meatloaf with a big red cross through his face.

Nate frowns a little at my performance and I hear an exasperated sigh emitted from the back seat. Even the dog lets out a half-hearted woof. Everyone’s a critic.

I choose to ignore them, as that’s what they’ve been doing to me for the last few hours. Obviously, once I decide on this particular path of action, Lizzie has something to say. Initially, I don’t hear her because of my singing. I’ve had three more black coffees since we first set off, so I feel totally wired and perfectly capable of appearing before a sell-out crowd at Wembley.

‘What?’ I shout, pausing the track when I realise she’s speaking.

‘Do you know,’ says Lizzie, who I see in the rear-view mirror is still staring at her screen, probably googling ‘ways to divorce your parent, ‘that this song is about dying in a terrible crash? Don’t you think that’s tempting fate a bit as we’re driving to the end of the world at 600 miles per hour?’

‘We’re not driving to the end of the world, we’re driving to Dorset,’ I reply. ‘And I think you’ll find that not only was Meatloaf on a motorbike, he was hitting the highway like a battering ram. We are in a ten-year-old Citroen Picasso and I barely ever leave the slow lane in case Jimbo suddenly needs a wee.’

Jimbo is the dog. He’s the third black lab that David owned – his parents had Jimbo and Jambo when we were little; then a new puppy called Jambo the Second, who died just after we got married. After that, they didn’t want any more – they were very busy with their cruise club – so we took over, with Jimbo the Second. Poor Jimbo is almost thirteen now, completely grey around the muzzle and round as a barrel. He mainly sleeps, snores and snuffles, occasionally punctuated by moments of vast and unexpected energy, where he chases imaginary rabbits and scares much younger dogs.

He’s a lovely beast, with very eloquent eyebrows and a powerful tail that can sweep a table clean when he’s feeling happy. He’s already on tablets for his arthritis and his heart isn’t brilliant, and he has all sorts of lumps and bumps that so far haven’t been anything serious.

I know he’s not going to be around forever and secretly fear that when he finally goes I’ll have some kind of nervous breakdown. That all my carefully managed grief and sadness will come spilling forth and drown me in emotion. That I’ll start crying in the vet’s surgery and everyone will be washed out, down the street, like they’re on some kind of weird water-park ride made of widow’s tears. Which sounds like the kind of water park Tim Burton would design.

I have had way too much coffee, it seems.

Lizzie doesn’t reply to my defence of Meatloaf as a valid driving-song choice. I see that she has put her ear buds back in and is now pretending to be asleep. So much for that brief detente. I glance to my side. Nate is gazing out of the window, head lolling, eyelids heavy. He looks about three years old and my heart constricts a little, remembering a time when he was. The very best of days.

I press play again, but turn the sound down, just in case Nate does want to drift off. It’s not his fault his crazy mother got him up at stupid o’clock to drag him to the far reaches of the country for the whole summer. It’s not Lizzie’s fault, either, and I get why she’s angry.

She didn’t want to come. She’s fourteen. Her friends are her world and I have the suspicion there’s a boy on the scene as well. There usually is at that age. David died during her first year at high school, so she got off to a rocky start. She was the Girl With The Dead Dad for ages, subject to the same mix of pity and fear that being bereaved always seems to provoke in people.

It’s taken us all a long time to get anything like equilibrium back, and hers seems to be wrapped up with her pals, with angsty rock music and with black eye liner. So, no, Lizzie really didn’t want to come to a small village in the countryside, even if I did try and sell it as a very long holiday.

She even asked if she could stay at my sister’s instead, which upset me so much I had to fake an urgent need for the toilet and lock myself in the loo while I wept. This is something I do quite a lot these days, as her tongue gets sharper and her hormones get louder and I fail to get any tougher.

She’s seen enough of me crying to last a lifetime, I’m sure – and it’s better she thinks I’m suffering from IBS than continues to see me soggy. Anyway, getting your feelings hurt by your teenage daughter seems to be par for the course from what I remember. I can still recall the door slamming and the eye rolling and the telling my mum she just didn’t understand.

Now I’m getting payback from my own daughter. I suppose it’s all part of the great circle of life, but not the kind they sing about in the Lion King.

The problem with crying about one thing is that it inevitably leads onto crying about another. This is one of the many pleasant side effects of grief – you have a bit of a blub about one thing (like an especially sappy John Lewis commercial or a stroppy daughter) and you end up weeping about Everything That Hurt You Ever. But once I’d got that out of my system and left the sanctuary of the downstairs lav, I did consider it.

I know Rebecca, my younger sis by two years, would have welcomed Lizzie into her life, and her flat in the city centre, and would probably have been a heck of a lot more fun than I am.

Becca, you see, doesn’t have kids. Or a dead husband. Or even an elderly Labrador. She has no responsibilities at all, which is just the way she likes it. She got her teenybopper heart broken when she was seventeen, and since then has remained steadfastly single and carefree.

Lizzie would undoubtedly have had a ball staying there for the summer, but I had to say no. Apart from anything else, Becca knows as much about boundaries and discipline as I do about particle physics. I may well have come home to find Lizzie pregnant, in rehab or starting a new life as a tattoo artist. All three risk factors could equally have applied to Becca herself.

Funnily enough, after that idea was knocked back, Lizzie didn’t ask to stay with my parents … mainly because she’s not stupid and knows their idea of a wild night out is getting all four corners in bingo at the church hall.

My parents are very sensible – so obviously they hadn’t wanted me to do this either. They thought I was nuts, though they phrased it more sensitively than that. They tread carefully around me these days, which is kind of heartbreaking in its own way. I yearn for the days when my dad can look me in the eye and be rude to me again.

Maybe, I think, surveying the now-thickening traffic as we join the M5 and follow the signs that faithfully promise we are heading towards The South West, they’re all spot on. Maybe Lizzie and Nate and my mum and dad are one hundred per cent accurate with their assessment: maybe I am nuts. Plus, now I come to think about it, Becca didn’t try and talk me out of it at all, which is probably a sure sign that I’m making a poor life choice.

But somehow … I know it’s the right thing to do. I just know it is, with a certainty I’ve not felt for a very long time. I feel scared and anxious and I miss David like hell – but I also feel something odd. Something fluttery and strange. Something that vaguely resembles hope and optimism, and a sense of potential. Perhaps it’s just the sheer shock of it all, I don’t know – but even if Lizzie hates me for a while (possibly forever) and Nate is bored, and my parents consider getting me committed, I know I’m heading in the right direction. Even without the sat nav.

It’s all as unexpected to me as it is to my family. I’d say I’m not an impulsive person, but I don’t really know if that’s true or not. I don’t really know what kind of a person I am, not in this version of reality. I was with David for so long – most of my life – that my entire identity was wrapped up with him. I’ve never been on my own – I’ve always been with him. I’ve never been just Laura, I’ve always been one half of David and Laura. Daura or Lavid … nah, neither of those work. We’d never make it in Hollywood.

Something about this – upping sticks and dragging us all off to Dorset – feels like the first step to finding out who I’m going to be next. That sounds weird, a bit like I’m an international spy with a bundle of fake IDs and foreign passports and stacks of Euros hidden in a heating vent.

But I know it’s important, this feeling. It’s taken me a long time to accept that there will even be a ‘next’ – to accept that I have to try and make a life for myself without David. Basically because I didn’t even want a life without David – in fact I still don’t. But it’s not just about me, it’s about the kids. I can’t just shrivel up and fade into the West without him, much as Lizzie might like that right now.

I have to keep moving. I have to push on, to find the courage to even believe that there will be a ‘next’. It’s been over two years since he left us and that tiny, fluttering feeling – that hope – is what’s keeping me going on this insane drive. Or, possibly, that tiny fluttering feeling is just all the coffee on an empty stomach. Either way, we’re going. It feels like the right thing to do – plus, well, I got the job. That in itself is a minor miracle, all things considered, and it would be downright rude to reject a miracle, wouldn’t it? Even a minor one.

I sent off that ridiculous letter two days before the closing date and genuinely never expected to hear from them. I mean, who in their right minds would give a job to a woman like me? A woman who not only wrote, but actually posted, a tear-stained letter that was the very definition of over-sharing?

Apparently, Cherie Moon would. Perhaps I should take that as fair warning – Cherie, my new boss, the woman who holds our destiny in her hands for the next month and a half, is entirely probably not in her right mind. Also, as Becca had helpfully pointed out, she did have what sounded like a ‘very cool but probably made-up name’.

The response to my letter had been short but very, very sweet. It landed four weeks ago, in one of those small brown padded jiffy bags that people use when you’ve bought something off eBay. As I hadn’t actually bought anything off eBay, and as my post usually consists of bills and people trying to persuade me to reclaim my PPI, I was a bit confused. I stared at it for a few minutes, jiggled it about, and eventually – in a fit of amazing clarity – actually opened it.

Inside was a small pink card, folded in two, from none other than the legendary and possibly fictitious Cherie Moon.

‘Congratulations!’ it announced, in tiny, curling handwriting. ‘I could tell from your letter that you are exactly the right person for the job, and I’m so excited about welcoming you all to the Comfort Food Café for your working holiday. Enclosed are directions to both us and to your cottage, along with your keys, a bit of information on boring things to do with the house, and phone numbers in case you need them. I’ll expect you on July 23 – and I’ll have something sweet and special waiting for you at the café!’

And that was, quite literally, it. Even I, with very limited experience in the world of work, knew that this was unorthodox. There was no request for references (thank God) and only a couple of forms to fill in. There was just that pretty little card, with its tiny handwriting, a few photocopied sheets with a map and pictures, and the keys.

The keys that were currently tucked away in my bag, which was somewhere under Nate’s feet, crammed in with a multipack of juice cartons and mini boxes of raisins and dried apricots that nobody would eat. I just like to be prepared, in case a freak snowstorm or a zombie invasion means we get trapped at the side of the road, you know?

David used to take the mickey out of me something rotten for what he called my ‘survivalist streak’. I even miss that. I even miss being mocked, which is kind of tragic. But he mocked me in a nice way, and now nobody even knows me well enough or cares enough to bother poking fun at me.

I give myself a mental whack around the head and start to sing along to ‘I Would Do Anything For Love’ instead of allowing myself to follow this familiar path to Wallow Town. I Will Not Wallow – my new mantra – I think, as I join Meatloaf on a sonic journey through affairs of the heart.

‘I like this one,’ mumbles Nate, almost-but-not-quite asleep now. His comatose tone makes me smile – it’s the way he speaks just before he conks out.

‘Me too,’ I reply, smiling.

‘I don’t,’ mutters Lizzie from the back seat.

Oh well, I think, glad to hear her voice, even if it does sound pissed off. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Chapter 5

Our arrival in Budbury doesn’t go quite as planned. In fact, it’s about seven hours later than I’d hoped for, we’re all very hot and bothered, and the dog has been whining for the last thirty minutes. I know exactly how he feels.

It’s also practically nightfall, that strange twilight between-time when the sun could be setting or rising. In this case, it’s definitely setting, sinking as low in the sky as my morale by this stage.

We had a few problems once we left the motorway. First there was the sat-nav fiasco. Or the lack-of-sat-nav fiasco, to be more precise. I decided, in my infinite insanity, that it would be a really good idea to stop off at Avebury. We could see the famous stone circles and walk the dog, and get some air and sunshine that wasn’t filtered through petrol fumes in service-station car parks.

As you can perhaps imagine, if you’ve ever met twenty-first-century teenagers, that idea went down very well.

This idyllic little detour lost us a few of the hours we’d gained by setting off early, mainly because I was convinced that we could find it without using the sat nav. It was on the map. It was a tourist attraction. Surely there would be brown signs or queues of druids in flowing white robes trekking down the lay-by?

Poor Nate was trying to read the road map, with Lizzie hovering behind him, glaring over his shoulder, poking the pages with her finger and yelling comments like ‘It’s to the right, you retard!’

Nate eventually elbowed her in the face, which I didn’t entirely blame him for. He managed to connect with her cheekbone and made her howl so loudly the dog joined in. All the way through these familial delights, I had a tractor in front of me and a Land Rover driving so far up my arse he should really have brought a wedding ring.

By the time we’d circled the same stretch of admittedly very pretty road for about the gazillionth time, we’d all had enough. Lizzie was yelling. Nate was yelling back. The dog was barking. I was trying to retain my zen, but fast losing the will to live.

Things started to really deteriorate when Lizzie shouted ‘for God’s sake, use the bloody sat nav!’ Nate had come out with the traditional response – Sat Nav’s for Slackers – which provoked her to new lows.

‘That’s what Dad used to say,’ she hissed. ‘But Dad’s not here is he? And Mum just isn’t up to the job!’

That hurt, almost physically. It felt a bit like she’d actually stabbed me in the back of the head with a fork and blood was dripping down my scalp.

The worst thing about it was that it was one hundred per cent true. I might be getting my equilibrium back; I might be trying to move on. I might be less of a nervous wreck than I was this time a year ago. But I still wasn’t up to the job – assuming the job was being her dad. Because much as I tried, I would never be her dad – and an epic fail on the road-map front was only a tiny part of that.

In the end I took the very sensible option of pulling over into one of those beauty spots where you’re supposed to take photos of the stunning scenery. As the only scenery in my car consisted of violent kids and a senile Labrador, I refrained from creating a magical Kodak moment and instead simply got out.

I put Jimbo on his lead and practically heard his old bones creak as he threw himself out of the boot. He immediately cocked his leg to pee on a fence post and then tries to eat a small pile of sheep droppings.

I gazed out at the hills and valleys and luscious greenery and completely understood why Ye Ancient People had decided to locate their mysterious and allegedly powerful stone circle here. I just wished they’d thought to leave some better directions.