Christmas at the Comfort Food Cafe

Everyone apart from Becca, that is. Becca had had a tough time recently. She’d split up with her boyfriend Shaun, and taken it hard. Nobody else in the family could quite figure out why she’d taken it so hard, as they’d only been together for a few months and always seemed to be arguing anyway. Even Laura couldn’t get anything out of her, apart from a mouthful of bad language and a bedroom door slammed in her face.

But since the split, Becca had been sulky and sullen and had apparently forgotten how to operate a shower or use shampoo. Her skin was blotchy and sore-looking, her hair glued to her head with grease, and she spent as much time as she possibly could either asleep, pretending to be asleep, or, Laura suspected, indulging in substances – some legal, some not – that would help her sleep.

She’d been dragged out of bed by their mum for Christmas lunch, and had sat at the table in her stained Eminem T-shirt, pushing her food around the plate and not actually eating any of it. She managed to drink, though – quite a lot.

By the time the dancing started, she was halfway to hammered, and she’d had enough. Of everything. Looking at Mum and Dad and Laura and David and even the bloody adorably cute dog was all just too much for her. They were like a scene from a film about happy families at Christmas, and she was the only one who didn’t fit in. She was the evil Gremlin.

Becca didn’t feel merry or jolly or thankful or festive. She barely even felt alive, and often wished she wasn’t. It was like she was trapped in a bubble, on her own, completely isolated, even though she was in a room full of people who she knew loved her. In fact, watching them, seeing their happiness and their silliness, yet being unable to feel it herself, made everything so much worse.

She snuck out of the house mid-afternoon – seeing her dad gear up to do his rendition of Tom Jones’ ‘Sex Bomb’ pushed her over the edge. She’d told Laura she was going round to her friend Lucy’s house and she’d be back in a few hours.

She never made it to Lucy’s house. She never intended to. She stopped off in the kitchen to raid the lager stash and headed on out without even getting her coat. That, she realised as soon as she made it outside, was bloody stupid – there was snow everywhere. Laura and David had been so delighted with it, Mr and Mrs Perfect, yammering on about how pretty it was and laughing at Jambo snuffling in it and building snowmen together and having snowball fights like characters in some lame rom com.

They were just disgustingly good together, and it made Becca feel even more dysfunctional. Even more lonely. The coat, she decided, wasn’t worth going back for. Not if it meant another dose of that kind of medicine.

Back inside the house, the party meandered its way through the rest of the day. There was more singing. More dancing. More eating. More drinking.

Laura texted her sister on her little Nokia mobile phone, and got a reply saying she was fine and would be back later. She wasn’t completely happy with her being gone, but what could she do? Becca was seventeen. If she said she was fine, she had to believe her.

It wasn’t until just after six in the evening that the bell rang.

Mum – a little the worse for wear after all her Baileys – answers the door, a glass in one hand and a slice of pork pie in the other. She’s wearing a bright-green paper crown from a cracker, draped over her head at a wonky angle, drooping down to cover one eye.

The other eye can see perfectly, though. And what it sees isn’t pretty.

There is a police car parked by the pavement at the end of the drive, its tracks perfectly clear on the snow-covered road. The flakes are still falling and the evening air is so chilly that Mum’s breath makes a big, steaming cloud as she gasps out her shock.

One police officer is standing on the step, blowing into her hands in an attempt to warm them up, and another is walking towards them along the icy path. She has an arm around Becca’s shoulders, and is half-walking, half-carrying her.

Mum rushes outside, lucky not to slip, and tries to help. There is a kind of tussle, where there are too many arms and legs flying around, and Becca is eventually safely deposited into the hallway, where she leans back against the wall and slides right down it until she is sitting on her bottom, legs splayed out in front of her.

‘She’s fine,’ says the dark-haired policewoman, smiling through chattering lips. ‘Just had a few too many, as well as being too cold. We found her in the park, sitting at the top of the slide. We put her in the back of the car to warm up and gave her a check-over in case she needed to go to A&E, but… well, who wants to go there at Christmas, right? We thought you’d probably prefer it if we brought her home instead.’

Mum nods her thanks, and Dad – who has made his way through to see what all the fuss is about, along with Laura and David and the dog – manages actual words. Mum mainly looks worried and Dad looks a bit angry.

‘Don’t be too hard on her,’ says the police lady as she turns to leave. ‘We were all young and stupid once, weren’t we?’

Mum closes the door behind her and turns to look at her younger daughter. Her big, stompy black boots are soggy and there is a distinct cigarette burn in her jeans that wasn’t there before. Her eyes are half-closed, and Eminem’s face is covered in what looks suspiciously like vomit.

Laura leans down towards her, strokes a strand of chilled hair away from her face, where it has become crusted to her cheek in some kind of lager-sick combo.

‘Are you all right, Becs?’ she asks, frowning in concern.

Becca slaps her hand away and belches loudly at her face. She turns her head, unsteadily, and manages to both sneer and cry at the same time. Bizarrely, the sound of a Christmas music show is wafting in from the living room, playing that year’s number-one smash – ‘Can We Fix It’ by Bob the Builder.

Tears rolling down her blotchy skin, she lies on the carpet and curls up into a smelly, sad, fetal ball.

‘Go away,’ she says, through her sniffling. ‘Just leave me alone. I hate you all. And I fucking well hate Christmas!’

PART 2 (#ulink_de25044e-bf32-5b32-9863-edc32783323a)

Chapter 2 (#ulink_5f82eb7b-717f-51ac-9847-295b685de13a)

I have no idea when it was in my life that I had my backbone surgically removed. I was probably drunk at the time; entirely possibly stoned as well. Or maybe it was in 2002, when I tried (and failed) to go to Uni and instead spent almost a year locked in a bedsit in Bristol talking to a bonsai tree. The bloody thing never replied, which is, with hindsight, one of the few positives from that period of my life.

Whenever it happened, and whatever the circumstances, I have been rendered spineless. Devoid of vertebrae. I can’t stand up for myself. I am incapable of resistance. It is literally impossible for me to say ‘no’.

At least it is to my sister, Laura.

Laura is physically older than me by only two years, but by about three decades in terms of maturity. When we were growing up, she was always the good girl. The pretty girl. The one who everyone liked. The one my mum’s friends would look at, and go ‘aaah, isn’t she gorgeous?’

I was the one they looked at and simply went ‘aaaaagh!’ – which is a fair reaction as I spent much of my childhood having screaming tantrums, stabbing people with forks, swearing and growling at the world like a mad dog who’d swallowed a whole nest of wasps.

I was not, to put it diplomatically, a ‘pleaser’.

To be fair and accurate, my mum and dad never loved me any less. They never locked me in a cupboard, or beat me, or threatened to send me away to Miss Hellish’s Academy for Troubled Youngsters.

They displayed far more patience than I probably would if I had kids. Nothing they did ever made me feel like an outsider or like the odd one out – I was quite capable of doing all of that by myself.

So, Laura was the good one. I was the bad one. These were the roles we played, quite happily I might add, for most of our childhood.

We’ve joked about it since – about how occasionally, every now and then, one of us would slip up and act out of character. I would accidentally do something kind, or actually agree with my mum, or join in when the rest of them did the rap from the beginning of Fresh Prince of Bel Air instead of pulling a face and slamming the door as I exited the living room.

And even less occasionally, Laura would take on my role as the rebel. There was a time, for instance, that she forged my mum’s signature on an absence note so she could bunk off school for the day with her boyfriend, David.

They went to see Twister at the Odeon; I remember this quite clearly because for days afterwards, they used to run around, ducking under tables and shouting ‘Debris!’ as though it was the funniest thing in the world.

And once she climbed out of my bedroom window, onto the garage roof and down the drainpipe, so she could sneak to a party with him.

And another time, she… well, no. She didn’t. I’ve actually run out of bad things she did now, which I think means it comes to a grand total of two. She wasn’t perfect – she could roll her eyes with the best of them – but neither was she difficult. She was one of those girls people liked; one of those girls whose mums could safely say ‘she gives me no trouble’ about, even when she was a teenager.

I, however, wasn’t one of those girls. At heart, I was all right. I think my family always knew that, which possibly explains their superhuman patience levels.

I might have been vile on the surface, but underneath I always had a code. I never bullied anyone. I never hurt animals. I never stole. I did, however, turn the air blue with my language; drink to excess; buy and use recreational drugs; slack off at school; tell teachers and other authority figures to go f**k themselves on a regular basis; get piercings before everyone else did; dress like something from a horror film and hang around with a gang of other ne’er-do-wells who looked like the ensemble cast from a Goth version of Prisoner Cell Block H.

And while I was never the world’s easiest to deal with – I’m even scowling in the baby photos – things got even worse after my seventeenth birthday. I hit a bit of a speed bump that year, which I don’t like to dwell on, and took a sharp turn from surly-but-acceptable to call-in-the-exorcist-her-head-is-spinning.

As I delved even deeper into the abyss, finding brighter and shinier ways to hurt myself, Laura was busy planning her wedding. To David, the boy she’d loved since I was five years old and she was seven.

I know, it sounds crazy. It was crazy. It was as though everything between us was divvied out wrong. She got too much domesticity and no sense of adventure, and I got all the rebellion and fight. Between us, we’d have probably made one normal human being.

So, I was the bad one – and I slowly got worse, after that little speed bump I mentioned. The speed bump I didn’t just hit, but that made me crash, somersault and burst into flames. Seriously, I was so messed up that if I was a car and not a human, they’d have taken me to the scrap yard and got me crushed up into one of those little rusty metal cubes.

My chosen methods of self-destruction tended to be booze and drugs and men, which resulted in more than a couple of trips to A&E, dropping out of college, developing a very on-off relationship with personal hygiene and several other behavioural traits that caused a lot of sleepless nights for the poor, driven-mad parentals.

While all of this was going on, Laura continued to be the good girl. Even though they were initially concerned about her settling down too young, one look at the shambles of my life was enough to make Mum and Dad happy that Laura was doing what she was doing. Heck, the shambles of my life made it look like head-shaving-era Britney Spears made good choices.

I chose chaos – she chose marriage and kids and being a suburban goddess. Or maybe those roles chose us. I don’t really know.