Summer at the Comfort Food Cafe

I nod, and stay quiet. I’m not a hundred per cent sure I believe him – that didn’t sound like a moo to me. I proceed with slightly more caution, following him to the car, feeling a little bit more aware of the fact that countryside dark really is a lot more serious than city dark.

We get to the car, I pass him the key and he effortlessly unlocks and lifts the roofbox lid. The one that took a whole lot of huffing, puffing, effing and jeffing for me to sort out the night before. I look on, standing on tiptoes and still barely able to reach. I am starting to hate him, a little tiny bit.

In the end I give up on my ineffectual stretching. It’ll be easier if I just let him get everything out and then the rest of us start to carry it back to Hyacinth. Of course, what I’ve temporarily expunged from my mind about the roofbox is the way I’ve packed it.

Actually, ‘packed’ might be too generous a word. What I’d actually done was put masses of the kids’ clothes and shoes into bin bags, put breakables and electrics into a cardboard box, added a few essentials like coffee and bog roll in one of those big reusable shoppers and then shoved most of my stuff down the sides, squeezing it all in to whatever spaces were left.

It had seemed to make perfect sense at the time, but as the man tugs hard at one of the tightly packed black bin bags, I start to regret it. It’s a mess, frankly. The kind of mess you only ever want to see yourself.

I start to regret it even more when he finally manages to pull the bin bag away, with a grunt of effort. As it pops free, it brings with it a big, squashed clump of my underwear, which promptly scatters around us like an explosion of over-washed cotton being shot from a knicker cannon.

One pair of briefs gets stuck on the car aerial and another is caught mid-air by Nate, who immediately makes an ‘uggh’ noise and throws them on the floor. Jimbo, who has ambled out to see what all the fuss is about, straight away makes a beeline for the pants that Nate has just discarded and gobbles them up into his mouth. He runs away as fast as he can, a disappearing black blur with a limp pair of white undies hanging out of his muzzle.

I screw my eyes up in embarrassment and clench my fists so hard my fingernails dig into my palms.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the summary of my life since David died – incompetent, incomplete and incapable of being even a fraction as much fun as he was. If my knickers had come flying out of the roofbox with him around, he’d have made a game of it. He’d have organised the Underwear Olympics. He’d have had everyone laughing, even me.

Sometimes, at the most unlikely and inconvenient of moments, I miss him so much I could quite happily lie down on the floor and go to sleep for a thousand years. I could use all my old drawers as a blanket and just sleep.

I open my eyes again, as going to sleep for a thousand years simply doesn’t seem to be a realistic option. I see Lizzie, bless her, running around the driveway snaffling spare scraps of underwear from their new homes hanging off bushes and splayed over solar lights, and I see Nate chasing after Jimbo the Knicker Snaffler.

‘So,’ says tall, dark and helpful. ‘I’m Matt, by the way. As I appear to have one of your bras wrapped around my head, it seems as good a time as any to introduce myself.’

I look up at him and see that he is grinning. It’s a nice grin, genuine and playful and from what I’ve seen of Matt so far, quite a find. The lesser spotted Dorset Matt Grin.

I have to grin back, I really do, no matter how dreadful I’m feeling. Because what woman could resist a smiling man with a pair of 36C M&S Per Una bra cups hanging around his ears?

Chapter 7

I wake up the next morning with a mild hangover and a slightly less mild desire to throttle my own daughter.

I take a deep breath, grab the bottle of water I have thoughtfully placed on the bedside cabinet and glug down a few mouthfuls.

I lie still for a handful of moments, gazing at the hyacinth-covered lampshade and the rose-patterned wallpaper and the flowers-I-don’t-recognise curtains, while snuggling under my sunflower-riddled duvet. I let out a huge sneeze. I seem to have developed psychosomatic hayfever, which is odd as I don’t even get the real kind.

I have managed to snag the biggest bedroom by conceding the one with the en-suite to Lizzie. I am more than happy with that arrangement and I like my new home a lot. Even the bedrooms have beams in the ceiling and enough light is creeping past the edges of the curtains for me to know that the rooms will be bright and sunny and glorious. I can hear the TV on downstairs, which means that Nate is up and has conquered the remote, and I can actually hear Jimbo snoring all the way up here.

Other than that, again, it’s just the sound of birdsong coming from outside, beautiful trilling harmonies that instantly make me feel more joyful. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere so still and natural and peaceful.

There is, though, one small thing spoiling my burgeoning sense of tranquillity. Stopping me from reaching a state of Buddah-like zen. In fact, making me bite my lip so hard I taste blood.

It all started with the phone calls the night before. I chose not to use my mobile and instead called my mother using the brilliantly so-old-it’s-now-retro-cool Bakelite phone – the type with the massive handset and a big circular dial that takes forever to click all the way around.

The children have stared at it as though it’s a museum exhibit, Lizzie poking it cautiously with her fingertips as though it might be some deviously disguised creature from Doctor Who. She once watched an episode where plastic came to life as pure evil and she’s never quite forgotten it. She was scared of her SpongeBob lunchbox for weeks afterwards.

Anyway, museum exhibit or not, the phone worked perfectly. Now, for the sake of sanity and brevity – and in fact all of humanity – I will paraphrase my conversation with my mother. It went something like this:

Me: Hi, Mum! We’ve all arrived safely and it’s gorgeous! Best place ever!

Mum: Are you sure? It’s a long way off. How are you going to cope?

Me: It’s an adventure, we’re all going to have a marvellous, brilliant, wonderful, life-changingly positive experience!

Mum: Your dad will come and fetch you all if you need to come home, you know …

It’s a wee bit depressing how little faith she has in me – but I know, because I’m a mum myself, that it’s only because she loves me so much. She knows what I’ve gone through and it breaks her heart.

It’s not just me and the kids that David’s passing affected – it’s taken a toll on all of us. His mum and dad have never been quite right since; my parents constantly worry about me and I know that even Becca – beneath the drunken binges and party-girl persona – both misses him and feels for me and her niece and nephew, both of whom she loves beyond belief.

My next phone call was, in fact, to Becca herself. I was surprised to find her in on a Saturday night, and was touched when I realised that she was waiting for my call.

‘Wassup, girlfriend?’ she said, in a fake American accent. She likes to experiment with accents, my sister. Well, with everything really – but the accents are one of the many reasons the kids like her so much. They’re especially fond of her ‘Nordic noir’ voice, where she orders food in the McDonald’s drive-through as though she’s a Scandinavian detective making a blood-curdling discovery in a Stockholm suburb.

I filled her in on the day’s events – the driving, the singing, the vomiting. The ups, the downs, the sideways crab-walks. The uber-floral cottage. The peace and quiet and disturbingly dark darkness. The dog, and the man, and the cupcakes, and the roofbox and the delicious home-made wine I was sipping as I chatted to her.

‘Hang on,’ she said when I’d finished, and I heard a bit of shuffling going on in the background.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, wondering if that was a wise idea. With Becca, it’s sometimes better not to know.

‘Adjusting the zip on my gimp mask,’ she replied, jauntily. ‘Or, just refreshing my laptop screen, I need to check on something. So – tell me more about this man.’

‘Oh, he’s just … a man. Well, a man called Matt.’

‘Matt? That’s a foxy name. I think I read a survey once that said men called Matt have very large penises.’

‘No you didn’t,’ I said, laughing despite myself. It’s impossible to keep a straight face when you’re talking to Becca.

‘What does he look like?’

I thought about that question and realised I didn’t want to be totally honest in regard to how much I remembered about Matt’s appearance. Mainly because I remember way too much: him, bare-chested, water dripping down onto broad swimmers’ shoulders, towel hanging low on angular hipbones, the shape of muscular thighs pressed against the fabric … if I tell her that I’ll never hear the end of it. She’ll call the local vicar and start getting the banns read.

‘He looks a bit like Harrison Ford,’ I said, eventually.

‘Saggy Harrison or fit Harrison?’

‘Fit Harrison.’

‘Han Solo Harrison or Indiana Jones Harrison? Because I think the latter might be useful – your vagina is so well hidden it might as well be in that warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant …’

‘Becca!’ I snapped, torn between horror and amusement. So, it’d been a while. I think your husband dying is pretty good excuse for a lack of sex life, don’t you?

‘Okay, okay … just saying. You could always borrow my Princess Leia outfit.’

‘What kind, or do I need to ask?’

‘Slutty slave girl in Jabba’s palace, obv. You need to get a bit more slutty slave girl, you know.’

‘I do not!’ I spluttered, half-heartedly. She sounded distracted and was paying no attention to my half-hearted outraged spluttering anyway. To be honest, I’d had a couple of glasses of wine by that stage, which was definitely helping me feel more mellow. It’s hard to do full-hearted spluttering when you’re a bit tipsy.

‘Aaah …’ she said.

‘Aaah what?’ I asked.

‘Aaah, I see – yes, he’d definitely get it. Han Solo, though, with that hair, don’t you think? If Han Solo wore Levis that showed off his arse like that, anyway … gosh, he’s really tall, isn’t he? Total man totty.’

I was silent for a few seconds, wondering if Becca had developed powers of clairvoyance since I’d left home. Or if she was possibly having some kind of filthy, illicit sexual relationship with the head of NASA and he’d redirected all European satellites to focus on a small village in Dorset.

‘What … what do you mean? How do you know what he looks like?’ I said, frowning. I looked suspiciously around the room just in case somebody had installed a spycam and I was broadcasting live to the nation like some especially boring episode of Big Brother. There was no spycam. And no kids – Nate had dragged himself to bed, exhausted, and Lizzie had gone upstairs to ‘communicate’.

Becca didn’t answer straight away. She was too busy laughing. Not a polite chuckle either – but a fully throated guffaw. The type that makes you cry and potentially suffocate.

‘Oh God!’ she finally said, clearing her throat, ‘that one of you with the whole cupcake in your mouth is priceless! All that green icing over your face! You look like a Teletubby!’

By that stage I was starting to get a vague inkling of what was going on. I poured another glass of wine and decided that I probably needed a firmer inkling. Also, I wondered what an inkling was – it sounded like it could be a baby fountain pen.

‘Becca,’ I said, as firmly as I could: ‘Tell. Me. What’s. Going. On.’

She giggled, obviously intimidated by my powerful big-sister voice.

‘It’s all on Lizzie’s Instagram account,’ she said, ‘the whole day. You with your mouth wide open in the car – looks like you’re singing … oh yeah, it’s a little video! Ha ha, Meatloaf – seriously, sis? This is too funny …’

She paused and I could hear her clicking through the images.

I stared at my own mobile and considered going online myself. In the end I decided it was bad enough hearing about it, never mind seeing it.

‘There’s one of poor Nate chucking up, the little love,’ Becca added. ‘You’re holding his shoulders and leaning down over him. You have about seventeen chins, you’ll be glad to hear. One of the back of your head. One of Nate asleep, dribbling a bit … there’s loads. Oh … here’s a nice one, though. It’s one of you standing in a very pretty lay-by, gazing out over the hills … your hair’s all flowy and hippy-ish, you’re all thoughtful and pensive, and you look gorgeous, honest! She’s even captioned it “Mum looking less than hideous” – isn’t that nice?’

Nice, I thought … nice? That wasn’t the word I’d have used. ‘Nice’ applied to Cornish cream teas, or a Cath Kidston tote bag, or a cosy night in with a box set of Midsomer Murders. ‘Nice’ was a way of describing your mother’s new perm, or a bath towel set you’ve seen in John Lewis, or a recipe book you buy in a National Trust gift shop.

‘Nice’ was most definitely not the right word for this scenario – the scenario where my teenage daughter and budding photo-journalist has been reporting live to the world at large for the last twenty-four hours without ever mentioning it to the stars of the show.

As Becca went on to describe yet more of the photos, my heart began to sink even further. It really didn’t feel nice at all. I felt humiliated and hurt and ready to cry, none of which was helped by Becca’s laughter, or the fact that I knew Lizzie was entirely possibly upstairs as we were speaking, adding even more pictures.

I closed my eyes and listened as Becca continued her commentary. She was especially amused by my Incredible Escaping Underwear, and by a shot of Matt wearing my bra on his head. Oh God … Matt. I’d have to either get Lizzie to take them offline, or tell him. Or, possibly, simply pack us all back in the car and just flee the scene of the crime …

‘You’re not upset, are you?’ asked Becca, presumably when she’d noticed I’d been stonily silent for a few minutes.

‘Yes,’ I said simply, draining the glass of wine and giving in as the tears started to flow over my cheeks and pool at the base of my neck.

‘But you shouldn’t be! I know it’s cheeky – I know some of the captions are a bit rude – but it’s harmless, really. It’s just her way of dealing with the change … you know she didn’t want to come. You didn’t give her any choice, though, you made her, so she has to let that frustration out some way.

‘It’s hard at that age – you have no power, do you? You’re grown-up enough to think you know your own mind, but not grown up enough that anybody ever listens to you … you’re completely controlled by your parents, by school, by teachers. It’s horrible – especially for someone as bright and independent as Lizzie.’

I nodded, miserably, then realised she couldn’t see me. I knew she was trying to make me feel better, and I could even hear the sense in some of what she was saying. Lizzie was much more like Becca than me at that age, more naturally prickly, more fierce. Stronger in some ways, more vulnerable in others. Becca ‘got’ her, which occasionally makes me jealous, petty as it sounds.

So while the rational part of me could accept the truth in Becca’s arguments, the rest of me still felt like crap. Crap and out of touch, and useless – a million light years away from the precious baby girl who was lying only a few steps away from me. I felt old and tired and mainly – mainly – I just felt terribly, horribly alone.

The kids were upstairs. Becky was on the phone. Matt was nearby in his cottage. The dog was on the sofa. The other holiday homes were full. I was not technically alone. But none of that mattered – I could have been at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or at Trafalgar Square at New Year, or surrounded by family and friends at a party. I would still have felt alone – no matter how big the crowd. I’d felt alone ever since he left me.

‘I know,’ I mumbled, trying to pull myself together. My family were finally starting to believe that I was moving on, finally starting to believe that I was feeling better. That I might be behaving a bit irrationally, but I was past the worst of my grieving.

Clearly, they actually knew sod all.

‘I know,’ I repeated, more firmly the second time. ‘I’m just a bit knackered. And I feel bad for Matt – I mean, he probably doesn’t want the world to see him with a bra on his head, does he?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Becca, ‘he might love it. For all you know he’s the chairman of the Dorset Bra-On-Head-Wearers Committee, Han Solo branch. And anyway, it’s not really the world – it’s only people who are her friends on Instagram. That’s me and a handful of teenagers in Manchester. I’m sure she’ll add you as well, if you ask.’

‘I’m pretty sure she won’t … and that’s probably for the best. You’re right. She needs some privacy. She needs a way to blow off steam. I just need to tell her to lay off the innocent bystanders.’

‘Yeah, do that. And look, don’t feel bad – I’m sorry I described it all like it was hilarious, and I know you’re sitting there half cut and pretending not to cry even though you are. There are some lovely pictures on here as well, honest. I’ve been looking through while we’ve been talking and lots of it’s really nice – views of the scenery, the stone circles, a fab one of you and Nate eating ice cream under a huge weeping willow tree … one of Jimbo peeing on someone else’s car wheel at a service-station car park and you looking a bit shifty as you try and drag him away … one of you outside McDonald’s, with the caption “Best. Mum. Ever”.’

‘And there’s an absolutely beautiful one of the front of your cottage. It’s quite darkly lit and very arty … Hyacinth House? Is that what it’s called, where you’re staying? That’s very hip for Dorset!’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I’d been wondering why it sounded familiar all evening.

‘The Hyacinth House. It’s a Doors song. Remember, from my hippy rock phase?’

Now that she’s said it, I did remember, a little bit. Dimly and distantly, a vision of Becca with her tie-dyed T-shirts and greasy hair and the stench of patchouli oil came back to me. It had been a deeply unfashionable phase, that, not to mention smelly. Sadly we’d shared a room, so her taste in music became mine by default.

‘Just about,’ I said, a ghost of a tune playing in my head. ‘Weird. Look, I’m going to go, Becca. I need to get some rest. I just hope she doesn’t creep into my room at night and take a picture of me drooling onto my pillow.’

‘I’m sure she won’t. And just remember – there are far, far worse ways for a teenage girl to rebel than this. And I know, I tried them all.’

By the time I finally hung up, I was too exhausted to even think about it any more. I decided that the best course of action would be to let Lizzie know I knew, lay down a few ground rules, but not try anything too heavy-handed like banning her, or forcing her to close her account, or confiscating her phone, or killing her.

Besides, a sneaky part of me thought, as I let Jimbo out for his last wee of the night and prepared to climb the stairs, it might be the best possible chance I had of understanding what was going on in her brain. Surely Becca would warn me if she started posting pics of naked teenage boys or open condom packets or crates full of alcopops?

Jimbo had wandered back in and did his usual circling around routine before he curled up in a ball on his bed. I scratched his ears goodnight and went upstairs to do the same. Not circle around three times before curling up in a ball, but my own bedtime routine.

I took the framed photo of me, David and the kids that I’d brought with me and placed it on the bedside cabinet, facing inwards so it was the last thing I’d see before I went to sleep, and the first thing I’d see in the morning. It was taken when we were all scuba diving on holiday, and we have big plastic masks propped up on our heads. Nate’s missing his front teeth; Lizzie’s still a little girl, and me and David … well, we look happy. One of those perfect moments, frozen in time.

I positioned it perfectly and because it had been a very tough day and I was feeling emotionally drained, I resorted to the Sniff and Cuddle technique to settle myself off.

After David had died, I couldn’t bring myself to wash his clothes for ages. They just sat there, in the laundry basket, with everyone else’s getting thrown on top of them. Nothing was ever added to David’s pile and nothing was ever taken away from it.

I never had to wash another clean work shirt for him or sort a fresh pair of socks, or dry his favourite Superman T-shirt that had holes in the armpits. I never needed to use the special Fairy non-bio because of his sensitive skin, and I never had to iron another pair of trousers. Because he never needed anything else from me ever again.

Eventually, my mother took charge and simply bundled the whole lot home with her to do herself. She washed them and dried them and folded them, and together we decided what needed to go to the charity shop, and what should be binned. To be fair, it’s not as callous as it sounds – those clothes of his had been in the basket for three months by that stage, and it wasn’t fair on the kids, apart from anything else, constantly seeing them there. It makes me cringe when I look back, in all honesty. I was definitely a teeny bit insane, which must have been frightening for them.

So I let my mum bag them up and bin them, partly because it was the right thing to do, and also because I was going through a kind of zombie stage back then. I was very malleable and easy to move around, like a lump of play dough in human form. I wasn’t good at making decisions and I wasn’t good at resisting them either.

Luckily, my mum didn’t expand her Empire of Common Sense to the bedroom, and I took comfort in the knowledge that I had a secret stash of David lurking on a hook on the back of the door.

I had his dressing gown, a big bulky burgundy fleece. He’d had it for years and he’d lost the belt in the garden when we used it for an impromptu tug of war with the kids. Jimbo had chewed one sleeve and the left-side pocket was falling off. He’d really needed a new one and I’d mentally added it to his Christmas list.

But its ragged state didn’t matter at all to me. What mattered was the fact that it still smelled of him; of him, and his deodorant, and the Old Spice aftershave the kids had bought him as a joke birthday present and he claimed to love.

If you’ve ever lost anyone, you’ll know how important your sense of smell is. Walking into a room that smelled like David could literally take my breath away. An impromptu waft of his aftershave could reduce me to rubble. I couldn’t even sit in the car for weeks afterwards, the aroma was so very ‘him’. I also kept automatically getting into the passenger side, because he did the bulk of the driving, and waiting for him to get in next to me.

After a while, those little things – the outward signs of a life being half-lived, of a life in flux – started to fade. I got used to the driving. I accepted that his clothes were gone. I stopped bursting into tears every time I smelled Old Spice. But I never, ever, let go of that dressing gown.

I suspect it’s a sign of some kind of mental breakdown, so I keep it secret, tucked away in a Tesco carrier bag in my underwear drawer, only getting it out at night. It’s rarely seen, but always nearby – usually under the pillow he slept on (and yes, it did take me a very long time to allow my mother to strip the bed linens as well), or on particularly difficult evenings, cuddled up in my arms like a big, fleecy cat. The smell is faint now, barely there – but it’s comforting anyway.

That night had definitely been a full-on fleecy-cat-cuddling kind of night, and I finally fell asleep after half an hour of Very Deep Thinking. About Lizzie. About Nate. About me. About our future, and what it might hold. About starting a new job tomorrow. About meeting Cherie Moon. About Matt. About the fact that Jimbo was so very old. About that scene in Casino Royale where James Bond is in the shower comforting a trembling Vesper Lynd and manages to be really sexy even though he’s fully clothed … at that point, I suspect I drifted off into a happier place.