RECIPES FOR MELISSA
THE HEARTBREAKING STORY OF A MOTHER’S GOODBYE TO HER DAUGHTER
TERESA DRISCOLL
BOOKOUTURE
Published by Bookouture
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An imprint of StoryFire Ltd.
23 Sussex Road, Ickenham, UB10 8PN
United Kingdom
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www.bookouture.com
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Copyright © Teresa Driscoll 2015
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Teresa Driscoll has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-909490-87-1
Created with Vellum
For my mother…
1
MELISSA - 2011
Melissa Dance had two tics.
When under extreme pressure her right eyelid would flicker. This would then kick-start the second tic, which was an involuntary movement of the head – a sort of chin twitch, which she fancied, on a good day, distracted people from the eyelid nonsense.
But this was not a good day. Not good at all.
‘Are you all right, Miss Dance?’
It was the handwriting. Working on her other muscles like an anaesthetic now so that while her eyelid and chin continued in the infuriating world of their own, her mouth – in sharp contrast – was completely frozen.
Nothing would come out.
Melissa pulled her hair up into a ponytail, using a band from her pocket, while across the desk the tall and now clearly awkward man, who had introduced himself as James Hall, poured a glass of water and pushed the drink along with the book to the edge of the splendid stretch of mahogany in front of her.
He seemed to be staring at her eye. Or was she imagining that? And then suddenly he plunged onward, speaking much too quickly, about his client’s instructions. About how very specific they were. That the client had specified an expectation of some discomfort but that his duty, under the terms of the agreement, you understand, were to persuade her – Ms Melissa Dance – to take the book. And to consider it, please, in her own time. Yes?
Those were his very specific instructions.
Still Melissa’s right eyelid flickered. Still she could not speak.
Mr Hall cleared his throat to add that his client had urged that Melissa should be reassured at this initial meeting that the purpose of the book was to be a comfort. A guiding hand. Not so much recipes, per se, as recipes for life. There were letters in the book. Also photographs. Did she understand this?
Melissa stared again at the cover. She stared so hard that both her eyes – the twitching and the non-twitching – were now beginning to water.
It was the handwriting. The black ink.
The main title RECIPES was pre-printed in bold but her name had been added by hand – and Melissa knew the handwriting instantly. She glanced to the corner of Mr Hall’s office and could see her sitting right there. At the old desk in the corner of her bedroom with the fountain pen in her hand. Beautiful, sloping writing in shiny, black ink.
…for Melissa.
Mr Hall shuffled in his seat and asked if she would like the book back in its envelope?
In her head Melissa replied that she did not mind either way, but whether the words came out of her mouth she had no idea. Whatever the case, Mr Hall placed the book back in its padded envelope and held it out to her.
He clearly knew who the book was from. And Melissa did too.
It was the sloping, haunting hand of her mother.
The mother she had not seen for 17 years…
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Gran’s Cupcakes
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4 oz self-raising flour
4 oz butter
4 oz caster sugar
2 beaten eggs
Zest of one orange (crucial…remember?)
Preheat oven to 180. Cream butter and sugar. Slowly add eggs (room temperature or it will all split!). Fold in flour gently then mix in orange zest. Pop into bun cases. 15-20 mins in oven. Great-gran recipe… sorry for old money!
(Lovely topped with cream cheese goo + a chunk of strawberry or more orange zest. For the goo – mix equal quantities of cream cheese and soft butter, then add icing sugar until the right thickness and sweetness. Sorry to be so vague.)
Oh, my darling girl. You will be shocked. Yes? Even as I begin to paste this first recipe and photograph into the book, I can feel it. Your shock.
I have paced and paced and there is a waste basket full of screwed up paper. Starting this over and over. So worried about getting it right. Putting it right.
I have worked myself into such a state – truth be told – that I feel worried this is not the right day to start at all. But what else to do? Try tomorrow? The day after that?
When I get wound up like this, I have this really annoying thing. My eyelid twitches. Yes I know. Embarrassing and completely weird. It’s doing it right now. Bloody, stupid thing. I keep meaning to see an optician or something. Your father insists he can’t see it; that no one else notices either, but I find that hard to believe and the whole business makes me feel like some kind of freak. You see. This is precisely the kind of stuff I would have lain on a bed and talked to you about, grown-up to grown-up, if I had just got the chance. The very reason I am doing this.
So.
Anyway.
I have given up throwing pieces of paper into the bin. Decided – no more editing. I am just going … to keep going. To write what I am thinking – exactly as it comes into my head. So all I can do as I sit here, worrying that I am starting this on the wrong day, is to hope and pray and plead with you, my darling, to please, please, take a deep breath. To forgive me for the shock and to go with this – with an open mind – and try to understand why I have waited so long to talk to you in this way.
I simply don’t know what to say to comfort you except that, to me at least, there feels a good reason that I have done this.
Waited, I mean.
The date as I start here is August 1994. You will know better than me what that means, timing-wise, and I must tell you, in fairness, that your father and I are not at all in agreement over this. I don’t mean this book because he doesn’t know about this book. I mean about the rest of it.
By now you will not need me to tell you what a magnificent man he is. That is why I have not the slightest fear leaving you in his wonderful hands. But he is in shock too, poor darling, right now and does not realise yet that he is going to manage so very beautifully without me.
He wants us to do the whole ‘memory box’ thing. He wants us to see some counsellor woman. Some charity which has bears and balloons. And though I know that they are the experts and they all mean terribly well and they have studied ologies and all of the rest of it, I just know that is not the way for me. And you will understand by the end of this book how very stubborn I can be.
What I have decided is that I do not want you to know a thing about all the shit that has become my life. As I write now, you are eight years old – asleep in the bed next door in princess pyjamas, with a fairy costume discarded on the floor. I am sorry but I cannot do it to you.
I want to have some
time with my darling girl – just one beautiful corner of my life and yours in which I can pretend that everything is going to be completely all right.
Is this selfish? Possibly. Probably. I have no idea what you will think. But would it really have been any less painful for you to have known? To have been warned?
Max thinks so. Maybe you will too.
In which case ‘sorry’ will not help.
All I can tell you is I have a very strong instinct that this is the right way for me to do this. I cannot speak for others and I do not want to criticise the charities and the people who advise otherwise. Maybe they are right. Maybe not.
So if I got it wrong and you are very cross with me then will you please just give me the benefit of the doubt and at least walk with me through these pictures and these thoughts? If not now, then some time very soon?
Please.
I did wonder about telling you. Trying to prepare you just a bit, but last night I looked at you when you were sleeping – so very beautiful and so very calm and I thought – what’s the point? You will be shocked and sad and angry, whether you are prepared or not. The way I see it, telling you will just start the sadness sooner.
Anyway. It’s done now. Too late.
So I am putting this book together instead. My original idea was just recipes which were handed down to me by my own mother and grandmother and which I wish very much to pass on to you. They are not so very special or rare. Just simple, solid recipes I cooked with my own mother and she with hers – and which I hope, one day, you may get to cook with your own children. You will need to jot down the conversions. It always felt rather sweet to me to leave them in ‘old money’. Then later I decided that it would be nice with each recipe to put in a picture of you and I cooking – and to share a few thoughts. Just stuff which may help you now that you are all grown-up. OK. Deep breath.
Twenty five years old? You will be wondering why now? Why wait so long? Oh my darling – I did think about the usual milestones. Eighteen? Or twenty one? And then I remembered the complete state I was in at eighteen and how twenty one never felt grown-up at all.
And the whole idea of this – the point of it – is to be really open and to talk to you woman to woman.
And so I decided to pick the age I truly grew up myself. Twenty five. The age I had you, Melissa...
God. How I wish I could see you. Wish that I was just the slightest bit religious. Believed in heaven. Something. Anything.
Anyway. Whatever. I have been careful over the details, in case you are wondering. The plan is to leave this book in the care of a very good lawyer who will be instructed to check that both you and Dad are fine before this comes to you. This way I can write – knowing you will only be reading if you are both OK.
I am imagining shorter hair. Did you get it cut? Secretly I hope not, but I rather think it will suit you, however you wear it. You have that sort of face.
Oh God. I’m rambling already.
So – yes. I picked twenty five, Melissa. The age our story began. And the age, I hope, that will see you truly ready for the things that I need to say to you.
Grown-up honesty.
How weird is this? Woman to woman, as you sleep next door. Leg lolling out the bed, with Elizabeth clutched in your arm. Do you still have her? I hope so. Such a pretty doll and you do so love her.
Goodness. Rambling again. Sorry…
Focus, Eleanor. So what then is the first thing – the first really important thing that I need to share? And now this sounds like preaching and it’s not meant to be that either. Oh, Melissa. It’s just there is all this stuff.
So. Much. ‘Stuff’.
I guess you must make of it what you will. And I will trust my gut and start with the simplest but most important piece of advice I feel that I can give you, my darling girl. Which is how every single day of my life, I wish more than anything on this planet …
2
ELEANOR – 1994
Eleanor heard Max’s footsteps on the stairs and quickly tucked the book into the top drawer of her desk.
‘You home already?’ She tried not to sound flustered as he kissed her on the forehead before sitting on the bed, alongside the desk, which doubled as a dressing table – a homey mess of paper and envelopes and old ink bottles which she collected from car boots and junk shops. A myriad of colours and shapes made of thick glass, which in the summer months caught the morning sunshine to sparkle patterns on the wall which Eleanor loved.
‘So how did it go?’ He was swinging his right foot to and fro very fast as he spoke. To. Fro. To fro. He had very much wanted to go with her today but she had point-blank refused.
‘What?’ Eleanor twisted her mouth to the side, then tilted her head as she put the lid carefully back on her fountain pen.
Her husband still looked like a boy. It was his hair. Unruly curls which had never learned to behave. Often these days she looked at him and tried to burn all of these images into her brain so that she could pull them out at random when he was away at work. The mad hair. The way he fiddled with his hands when he was nervous.
‘The consultant, Eleanor. The trial. Did we get the trial?’ He was playing with his wedding ring, moving it up and down between the knuckle and the base of the finger.
It was only in that moment that she realised that she had made the terrible mistake of letting it matter so much. That tiny flicker of hope. She had tried so hard to chant the mantra of the ‘long shot’. The ‘outside chance’. To remind herself that the odds of her case being a fit for the drug trial were slim.
As indeed they had turned out to be.
She shook her head fast from side to side, fighting the hot stab at the back of her eyes and then closing them, not wanting to see his.
‘Shit,’ a long exhalation of breath and again he was pacing. Left, then right across the room. Left. Right. ‘So we appeal. Yes? There must be some appeal. Some second opinion? They surely don’t let one consultant play God over this?’
It was the last option. A tiny splinter of hope. Two letters. Consonant. Vowel. And it was over. No.
They were all so very sorry, Mrs Dance, but she had not been suitable for the trial…
She had known that Max would not accept it.
When finally she opened her eyes, he was sitting on the window seat pinching his bottom lip with his thumb and index finger. Over and over. So hard that the lips were turning white where the blood was disturbed.
‘Don’t do that. You’ll hurt yourself. There’s no appeal.’
He continued pinching and then he got up suddenly to walk into the en-suite shower room where he ran water and splashed his face.
Then very quickly he was back in the room, pacing yet again.
‘America. I read somewhere that there are new things in America. We should go. I can take a sabbatical...’
‘Stop it, Max. Please. I am not taking Melissa to America. You need to sit down.’ She patted the space beside her.
He paused for a time, fiddling with the buckle on his belt before sitting right next to her on the wide wooden stool in front of the desk-cum-dressing table, leaning his head onto her shoulder now as they watched each other through the mirror. Embarrassed then at his reflection – trying to smooth down his hair.
‘You know what I’ve decided. Please, Max.’
And now it was his turn to close his eyes.
‘No, Eleanor. If you stop everything. Stop all the chemo and all of it—’
‘It won’t make any difference. All that shit.’
‘But if you stop everything—’
‘You heard what they said. Buy an extra month or two at most. So what’s the point?’
The pinching again.
She moved her hand up to still his own and clasped her fingers through his.
‘I’m tired, Max. I just want a bit of normal. For Melissa. Please.’
He looked away to the window and then back.
‘She’s not going to get normal – Eleanor. You know tha
t. She’s going to get a whole heap of shit.’
‘So let the heap of shit wait. Because it’s coming anyway.’ She kissed him on the forehead and then tilted her own head in so that their skin was just touching.
‘It’s the only thing left I have to give her. A little bit of normal. Please? For me. And for Melissa?’ She was thinking of a blanker page. No more appeals and letters. No more hiding from Melissa – fixing sleepovers so she wouldn’t see her after the treatments. ‘No more, Max. Please.’
He would not look at her. He looked instead at the wall, leg swinging faster and faster again until she reached out to hold his chin and to turn his face back towards hers. His eyes at first off on some other planet, buying tickets to America. And writing letters to consultants and health boards and strident appeal letters over obscure drug trials…
‘Please, Max.’
And then coming slowly back to her. Eyes which filled her heart and broke it all at once. Eyes which at last said that he could not say no to her.
Would not say no to her.
3
MELISSA 2011
‘You are seriously not taking that suitcase.’
‘What’s wrong with this case?’
‘You really need me to tell you?’
She frowned.
‘It’s too big, Melissa. Way too big.’
Melissa looked at the case and then back at Sam, pulling her head back into her neck.
‘And please don’t do that,’ he was smiling. ‘You look like a tortoise.’
Normally she would tease him right back. Poke out her tongue. But not today.
‘It won’t fit in the car, Mel.’
‘Oh don’t be silly. Of course it will fit in the car. How do you think I got it home,’ Melissa continued to place neat piles of clothes on their double bed – T-shirts in one, jeans in another and dresses, folded perfectly, into a third pile. For some reason she was now unfolding the dresses and starting the whole process again. She was trying not to think about this morning. About the book.
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