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

Anyone else, I’d have worried about handing the baby over – more for their sake than his – but I just instinctively knew that Cherie could handle it. She’d walked him around the room, while I ate my toast and actually drank a hot beverage before it was lukewarm, and the sense of relief I felt was astonishing. In fact I had to disappear off to the toilets for a minute to compose myself – by which I mean sob relentlessly into wadded-up tissue paper.

These random acts of kindness – aimed at me, a complete stranger – were my introduction to the café. To the village. To the community that now, almost two years on, I am starting to dare to call my own.

It’s taken a long time, because I am wary and stubborn and always cautious about random acts of kindness, but I understand it all better now. This place is like the island of misfit toys, and someone is always on hand with a sticking plaster and a spoonful of medicine for the soul.

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 (#ulink_89b6d61e-b184-5def-841c-d8de63b7ec38)

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 problem 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.