Christmas at the Comfort Food Cafe

by Debbie Johnson

  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, foetal ball.

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

  PART 2

  Christmas Present – Dorset

  Chapter 2

  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.

  As it turned out, though, the parentals have probably had just as many sleepless nights about Laura as they have about me now. Because her entire life fell to pieces a few years ago, when her husband, David – the beloved David of Myth and Legend, the boy who won her heart in primary school – died.

  He died in a bloody stupid way that still makes me angry. He died falling off a ladder, while he was clearing leaves out of their guttering. It’s not glamorous, is it? Nothing involving guttering ever could be. Or death, now I come to think of it. But at least members of the 27 Club exited this world in a cloud of mystique and self-indulgence. They weren’t clearing leaves out of their damn gutters.

  David was only thirty-three, the same age as Laura was at the time. He was too young to die, and she was way too young to be a widow. He left her on her own with their kids, Nate and Lizzie, and their dog Jimbo. He left her on her own, when she’d never been on her own before. While I’d lived my life on the margins of my own family, she’d gone off and created her own – one that revolved around the love story that she shared with David.

  I can’t begin to describe the hell on earth that followed his death. Mainly for Laura and the kids, obviously, but also for the rest of us. You can’t see someone you love suffer like that and not go through it with them.

  I watched her fade and struggle and fight and fade again, over and over, like some twisted Groundhog Day. I saw her try to be brave and I saw her collapse, and I saw her paralysed with pain so strong I honestly thought she’d never move again.

  I saw her weep and I saw her tremble and, worst of all, I saw her silent – silent and withdrawn and empty, her face a blank mask, going through the motions of life and motherhood, living on automatic pilot, functioning without feeling.

  I saw all of this, and I saw Lizzie and Nate go through their own agonies, and I saw my mum and dad snarled up with their inability to do anything, and I saw myself, quietly screaming inside.

  It was the very worst of times – and it seemed to go on forever.

  Until, that is, she got her second chance. Until she applied for a job at a café in Dorset and took the kids down to the coast for a long, hot, working summer.

  Until she made a world of new and wonderful friends and got a new dog, and found her new home, and found a man who is helping her heal. Until she found the will to live again.

  Until she found the Comfort Food Café.

  Which is exactly where I am heading this month – December. Against my will, I am being dragged away from the comfortable urban buzz of my flat in Manchester, and my shallow-but-safe existence and, more importantly, my entirely Christmas-free lifestyle.

  I don’t want to go, but Laura asked me to. And when it comes to her, I have no backbone. No spine. I simply can’t say no.

  I really, really hate Christmas.

  But I love my sister more.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Where are you?’ Laura says, over the phone, her voice sounding strained.

  ‘I’m in a Parisian brothel,’ I reply, ‘learning how to do a can-can that would make Craig Revel Horwood weep. It’s fab-u-lous, darling.’

  ‘I can hear lorries making that beeping noise they make when they’re reversing. Are you at a service station? And if so, which one? If it’s the one that sells Krispy Kreme doughnuts, can you bring us a box? And when will you be here? The kids are driving me nuts asking every five minutes… they won’t even start decorating the tree until you arrive…’

  I make a small grrrr noise at the back of my throat, like a grumpy grizzly bear, and wonder how she saw through that impeccably plausible can-can story. My sister, the mind reader.

  Although if she really was a mind reader, she’d know that I was sitting here, drinking coffee in the freezing cold, shivering my backside off, and trying to think of a good excuse to turn the car around and head back Up North. It might be grim, but at least I wouldn’t have to decorate a Christmas tree and pretend to be jolly.

  Laura hears my little growl and laughs out loud.

  ‘Not thought of a good enough excuse to get out of it, yet, then?’ she says. Damn her. She is a mind reader.

  ‘Not yet,’ I reply, wrapping my hands around the paper of my coffee cup in an attempt to stave off frostbite. Christmas is not only annoying, it’s cold as well. ‘But I’m hopeful that there’ll be some kind of natural disaster that splits the world in two before I reach Bristol. You know, like in one of those earthquake films, where a huge gaping chasm opens up in the middle of the road and all the expendable extras fall into it? Or possibly a zombie apocalypse. Or a meteor shower. I’m not fussy.’

  I can hear yapping at the other end of the phone and smile as the sound is inevitably followed by Laura muttering ‘hang on…’ as she scurries around, opening and closing doors, and otherwise catering to the needs of her newest baby – an eight-month-old black Labrador puppy called Midgebo.

  He was originally Midge, and mainly still gets called that, but the ‘bo’ was added as tribute to all of David’s dogs – also black Labs, and all called either Jambo or Jimbo.

  Jimbo, the late, the great, the sadly departed, had gone to the great sausage shop in the sky not long after Laura and the kids moved to Dorset.

  I knew she still missed him, but I also knew that Midge had helped to fill in the gap. As had Matt, the local vet who’d bought him for her. Matt, I suspected, was filling all kinds of gaps – and I was looking forward to meeting him. He looked a bit like Han Solo, so who wouldn’t want to meet him?

  I was looking forward to a lot about this trip. Like seeing my sister again and checking that her apparent progress was genuine, not just faked for my benefit
. Seeing my wondrous niece and nephew, who always made me feel glad to be alive. Seeing their new home. Meeting the famous Matt, and Laura’s legendary boss, Cherie Moon, who owns the Comfort Food Café. Being introduced to all her new friends.

  Yep, I was looking forward to a lot of it. I just really, really wished it wasn’t at Christmas. It’s never been my best time of year.

  ‘Right. I’m back. Sorry about that,’ she says, and I can tell from the change of background noise that she is now outside, probably watching Midgebo have a pee in the garden.

  ‘That’s okay. When a dog’s got to go, a dog’s got to go. Anyway… I should be there before dinner.’

  ‘Assuming there isn’t an earthquake or a zombie apocalypse, that is.’

  ‘I think both of those suggestions are ridiculous,’ I reply, standing up and throwing my empty coffee carton into the bin. ‘But the meteor shower could happen. I think it was predicted on the weather last night.’

  ‘Actually it was snow that was predicted,’ says Laura, sounding distracted again. Having a puppy, I realise, is very much like having a baby.

  ‘So drive safely,’ she adds. ‘Don’t accidentally-on-purpose head back for Manchester. And don’t forget the Krispy Kremes.’

  Chapter 4

  I arrive at the Rockery, where Laura now lives, just as evening is drawing in. The promised snow has arrived, coming in small ineffectual flurries, none of which has settled. Half-hearted snow, really a very poor effort.

  I was tired on the journey, and almost hypnotised by the sight of white flakes landing on my windscreen and promptly getting squished away by the wipers. It felt wrong somehow, like I was committing some random and callous act of snowflake genocide.