Coming Home to the Comfort Food Café: The only heart-warming feel-good novel you need!

We both pause, our heads on one side like curious budgerigars, and grin as we wait for the inevitable.

“It’s only me!” shouts Barbara again, and I can just picture her on the doorstep, faffing with her scarf and checking her cameo brooch and sniffing the air like she’s a bloodhound on the track of moral iniquity. “Don’t like to intrude,” she trills, “but I’ll just use my key …”

Martha stares at me. I stare back.

“She’s lying,” says Martha, swigging down the last of the coffee. “She loves intruding. You should get the locks changed.”

She strides off to go and get properly dressed, and I attempt to smooth my crazy curls down into something less likely to make Barbara make the sign of the cross when she sees me.

It’s Sunday. Again. Which means that Martha gets the unrivalled joy of lunch with her grandparents – and I get a few more hours to plan our escape to the West Country.

Chapter 4 (#u7783cca6-a73b-5e79-a111-cc4cacd263eb)

By the time Martha comes home, I have e-mailed the landlady of The Rockery, checked out the courses at the college, and looked for dogs at the nearest rescue centre. I’ve made notes, and looked at our finances, and pondered the idea of renting out my flat to make it all stretch a little further.

I mean, it’s not like I need my flat any more. It’s across the road, the bottom half of a sandstone terrace, and is now more of a museum to my previous existence than a functioning residence. It’s full of books and clothes I’ll never wear again and cheap hippy jewellery I used to think made me look super-cool at festivals. I don’t need it any more – technically at least.

And yet for some reason, I’ve kept it – probably because in the same way that Martha needs that ‘I’m 16, you can’t make me’ reassurance, I also need my ‘I can run away if it all gets too much’ reassurance.

It has happened a few times – I’ve made the desperate dash over there, winding my way through the recycling bins and neighbourhood cats to let myself in. To lie on my own bed, in my own territory. In the end, I decide against it – I’ll keep the flat, and instead I’ll use my life savings. I’ve got an ISA – which Kate made me take out – that contains the less than impressive lump sum of just under £5,000. But I don’t need much, and that’ll keep me going for a few months at least, allow me to pay my way instead of just using Kate’s money.

There’s a lot to sort out, and I’ll have to think about it later – because right now, I can hear the strained chatter of Barbara and her husband Ron in the hallway.

I close the lid of my laptop, and hide the papers beneath it. Barbara has a keen eye for detail – especially any detail that backs up her belief that I am a terrible human being incapable of caring for her precious grandchild.

Martha slopes into the room looking sheepish and borderline embarrassed. I suspect this is because her grandparents have spent the last few hours telling her how wonderful she is, and she played along. I don’t blame her – it’s definitely the path of least resistance.

She left her nose and ear piercings out, and tied her hair up into a ponytail. To the casual observer, she could pass for a normal teenaged girl. ‘Normal’ in the sense that Barbara and Ron would use the word, anyway. I know that every time she does that, Martha hates herself a little. Tempestuous as our relationship can be, she can at least behave like herself when she’s at home – not the Stepford Teen version of herself that she presents to her grandparents.

Barbara is wearing a smart tweed suit that makes her look like one of the presenters on the Antiques Roadshow. Her hair is perfectly bouffed and frosted with spray, and her make-up is suitably age-appropriate for a respectable woman in her early 60s. Her smile, as she stares at me with laser eyes, is almost as frosted as her hair.

I suppose, if I were to look at myself from her perspective, I might feel a little frosty too. She’s never liked me. I was the bad influence, the wayward gypsy, the blemish in Kate’s otherwise perfectly managed childhood.

Barbara was always convinced that every wild thing Kate ever did – the travelling after she got her degree, the crappy jobs she started off with, the boyfriends with names like Chili Pepper, the fact that she became a single mum – was because of me.

It wasn’t true of course. There was a reason Kate and I clicked the minute we met.

A reason that Kate – clever, pretty, popular, from a stable home – immediately took me under her wing, despite the fact that I was none of those things. The reality was different. Kate had a wild streak all of her own – sometimes it even put mine to shame. She was daring and bold and yearned to break free of the constrictions of her cloying home life. The travelling – where she met Martha’s father (a polite word for ‘had a one-night-stand-with-while-under-the-influence-of-weed-and-booze’) – was nothing to do with me. I wasn’t even there.

The crappy jobs were just her way of finding out what she really wanted to do, before she settled on teaching. The boyfriends with names like Chili Pepper … well, to be fair, at least a few of those were down to me, and my borderline crusty pals with dogs on strings and only a passing acquaintance with personal hygiene.

Barbara either doesn’t know any of that, or wilfully ignores it. It’s easier to have a scapegoat. A scapegoat who is now sitting at the kitchen table still in her dressing gown, rocking electric-shock-chic hair and wired on coffee.

“Zoe!” she says, taking it all in. “How nice of you to make the effort! Late night, was it?”

Yes, I think. A late night spent looking after your butter-wouldn’t-melt grandchild. I don’t say this of course – especially as Martha is shooting me imploring looks over her shoulder. I take a deep breath, and remind myself that Barbara is Kate’s mother. That she is a woman who has lost her only child, and will probably never recover. She covers it as well as her make-up covers her wrinkles, but it is still there – the pain, and the anguish. The loss.

“Did you have a nice lunch?” I ask innocently, refusing to rise to the bait. I have mastered the art of war when it comes to Barbara – and I win my battles by being relentlessly civil in the face of her poking and prodding. Frankly, it drives her nuts. When I was younger, I used to lock horns with her all the time – with the whole world in fact – but these days? Zen master in a dressing gown.

“Lovely, thanks, Zoe,” says Ron, who is hovering in the background in his chinos and perfectly pressed polo shirt, his threadbare hair carefully arranged over his scalp. He’s not so bad, Ron. I once spent an impromptu night down the pub with him and he was a laugh. Sadly he’s one of those men doomed to be forever overshadowed by a far stronger wife.

“Yeah,” chips in Martha, keen to avert the conversation from my late night and her shenanigans. “We went to that place outside town that has the really good onion rings.”

“I know the one,” I reply, smiling. Smiling, and now conscious of the fact that I’ve not eaten all day. My stomach lets out a huge grumble in response, and Barbara wrinkles her nose at me like I’ve just soiled myself in public.

“Right, Ron,” she announces. “We better go. And Zoe? You might want to consider buying some bleach for this kitchen, you know. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and all that.”

I nod enthusiastically, as though this is the best suggestion I have ever heard, and wait while Martha sees them to the door.

When she comes back, she is quiet. Pensive. Thoughtful. None of which are words I usually associate with Hurricane Martha.

“Are you okay?” I ask, reaching out to briefly touch her fingers. Predictably enough she snatches her hand away, but she does sit down opposite me at the kitchen table. She points at the laptop and the papers peeking out beneath it.

“Are you still planning the great escape?” she asks, sounding hollow. Her face is paler than usual, and her dark brown eyes are pools of liquid sorrow. It’s not the way I want her to look, or feel, and I am overwhelmed with sadness at the shitty situation we’ve all found ourselves in.

“Yes,” I say, firmly. “I know you’re not keen, Martha, and I understand why. But perhaps you have to trust me on this one. Or at least try to.”

She is silent for a few moments, chewing the inside of her cheek so hard I know she must be drawing blood. Eventually she nods, abruptly.

“I’ll try. Gran was … well, she was full on today, you know?”

“In what way?” I ask, frowning. Barbara was, as you can imagine, deeply unhappy when Kate told her that Martha would be staying with me if the unthinkable happened. And I know that when it did, she considered some kind of legal action to get her away from me. It was only a letter left by Kate, as well as Martha saying she wanted to stay in her own home, that stopped her.

She’s never stopped trying to persuade Martha, though. She lavishes her with gifts and cash and adoration, all in an attempt to convince her to go and live with her and Ron instead of the red-haired she-devil.

“In a ‘we-only-want-what’s-best-for-you’ way,” replies Martha. “You know. The way where I live with them, and wear a lot of pink leisure wear, and learn to bake, and watch My Little Pony videos as a special treat at the weekend …”

I burst out laughing. One of those unattractive snorty laughs, where you almost choke. Somehow the image of Martha dressed in a candyfloss velour tracksuit watching cartoons strikes me as so funny, I have to let it out. Almost against her will, I see a slight upward curl on her lips. For Martha these days, that passes as an uncontrollable belly laugh.

“It’s not funny,” she says, not sounding convinced.

“It is though,” I reply, still giggling. “Just a little bit. But … look, I know it’s hard. Your gran is … a strong character. But she loves you, you know that. And she loved your mum.”

“I know she loves us! But she really doesn’t understand us, does she?”

“Not even close. She never has. It doesn’t make her evil. But … it doesn’t make her someone you’d want to live with either. This is where we are, now, Martha. We all want it to be different. We all want your mum to still be here. I lost my best friend. Your gran lost her daughter. You lost your mother. None of us will ever be the same again – but we have to go on living. I’m worried about you. About school. About your social life. About the fact that you can’t spell ‘fuck.’ I’m worried about everything – and that’s why I think we need a change.”

She nods again, and stands up. She’s not that tall, but she’s really slim and willowy and always reminds me a bit of Bambi, not quite knowing what to do with her legs.

“Okay,” she says, turning to leave. “I’ll think about it. And don’t worry about me being able to spell ‘fuck’ – I can still say it properly, and that’s what counts.”

Chapter 5 (#ulink_466d7b46-441c-539a-a193-de3e4b7ecca4)

The next few days come and go with relatively little drama. Martha is on her best behaviour, which is verging on the terrifying.

She’s not mentioned the move again, and neither have I – I suspect she is trying to placate me, trying to prove that she can be a good girl after all, hoping I’ve miraculously forgotten all about it.

I haven’t, of course. I’ve done nothing but think about it. Thinking that seems to involve chewing the ends of a lot of pencils, drinking a lot more coffee, and doodling pictures of rose-trellised cottages on the back of receipts from Bargain Booze.