Summer at the Comfort Food Cafe

‘Okay,’ I exclaim, walking towards the door. ‘Let’s get started.’

I turn back and hold one hand up in a gesture of ‘wait a moment’ to him as he follows.

‘Just cover your ears for a bit,’ I say. As soon as he does, I bellow at the top of my voice: ‘Lizzie! Nate! Come and help or there will be a ban on ALL electronic devices for the next week!’

I exit the cottage, smiling in evil maternal satisfaction as I hear Lizzie thundering downstairs and Nate groaning as he drags himself off the squishy sofa.

We walk back to the car, along the path, and around the terrace, and across the crunchy gravel. Just like we’re all going on a bear hunt. It’s properly dark now, bright spots flickering among the plants from the solar lights. The bird song has quietened down and the only sound is that of our footsteps and the occasional trickle of laughter from one of the other cottages.

‘Weird, isn’t it?’ asks Nate, looking around suspiciously, as though a mad axe murderer might leap out of the bushes at any moment.

‘What?’ I say.

‘Not hearing the police helicopter?’

‘That doesn’t happen often!’ I snap back, somehow offended on behalf of our actually very nice part of Manchester. In reality, I suppose we hear it hovering somewhere nearby maybe once or twice a week – but it’s not as though we live in some crack-den infested ghetto. There’s a Waitrose, for God’s sake!

Lizzie is holding her phone in front of her with the torch app switched on, her eyes staring at the ground as she walks, carefully measuring each step, like she’s never walked anywhere in the dark before.

There’s a sudden and very strange noise from one of the distant fields. It sounds vaguely like someone moaning in pain, deep and low and a tiny bit sinister.

‘What’s that?’ I say, gazing around us and wondering if I’ve walked into some bizarre Wicker Man-type scenario. I notice the kids both freeze solid as well, looking very young and very scared. I tense, coiled with protective instinct, ready to kill anything that threatens my young.

‘It’s a cow,’ says the man, who turns back to give me a sympathetic look. A look that says ‘you poor, sad city person’.

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 (#ulink_a723967a-ec51-5dd7-8938-bc2c27c11db6)

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.’