The Not So Perfect Plan to Save Friendship House: An uplifting romantic comedy

by Lilly Bartlett

  ‘Well, then how about a quick shag instead?’

  ‘How about if I make a quick official complaint to Morrison’s instead?’

  As usual, my rebuff doesn’t put him off. ‘You know you love my banter. It’s the highlight of your day… you could have it all the time if you’d ever say yes to a date.’

  He’s not shimmying his head now. I can see the nice bloke beneath the bluster when he acts normal. ‘I’m okay, thanks.’ Why can’t someone I like pester me like this? ‘Besides, you’re not really interested in me, Davey. You only like the challenge because I always turn you down.’

  He rubs his chest beneath his hi-vis vest. ‘Ah, you could test your theory and say yes.’

  ‘Or I could say no, and we stay the way we are.’ I shift a few things around in the giant freezer drawer to make room for the haddock. I’ll do fish and chips next week, with minted mushy peas. Sophie’s been on at me about superfoods lately. It’s always something.

  As if my thoughts of mushy peas have conjured her up, she marches through the kitchen door. ‘Phoebe, may I have a word?’

  She’s got on her red and white stripy legwarmers today, with her usual black spandex leggings beneath a purple and green skirt.

  ‘The blokes in this place are lucky to work here!’ Davey announces. ‘I don’t know how they get any work done.’

  Sophie smiles coyly, even though she knows perfectly well that Davey says the same thing to everyone here. ‘Well, I do like to keep fit,’ she says. ‘That’s why I’m here, Phoebe. Are you putting more butter than usual in the food?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’

  She shoots a dirty look at the ricotta that I’m just about to season for the lasagne. ‘That’s not low fat, is it? You’re killing us, you know, with your fat and your butter.’

  I do admire Sophie’s dedication to her health. A little of the discipline she has would probably do me good. But it’s too much. ‘We’ve been over this already, Sophie. Fat isn’t the villain you think it is. Our bodies need it to be healthy. You know that I balance every meal so there’s not too much fat or too much carbohydrate or too many calories.’

  Lasagne has cheese in it. Get over it, I want to tell her.

  ‘Can you at least use less butter in the mashed potatoes?’ Sophie especially worries about those.

  ‘Yes.’ Give me patience. ‘I could use chicken stock, but you objected to the salt. I could use yogurt, but you didn’t want the extra dairy. And speaking of which, why do you care about the lasagne anyway? You never eat it.’

  ‘Excuse me for worrying about my friends’ hearts.’

  More gently, I say, ‘I know you’ve got everyone’s best interest in mind, Sophie. This should cheer you up. I’m making mushy peas with mint next week.’

  Her owlish eyes shine behind her glasses. ‘Mint is a superfood!’

  ‘I know, you told me.’

  She smiles, forgiving me my buttery trespasses.

  ‘I don’t know how the blokes in this place get any work done!’ Davey announces again as June comes in. When I roll my eyes at him, he gives me a cheeky grin. ‘Don’t bust my game.’

  ‘I don’t know how you get any work done,’ June says to him, ‘when you’re always hanging about bothering us.’ But she’s smiling. It’s hard to be really offended by Davey.

  ‘Want to go for a drink after work?’ she asks me.

  ‘Sure,’ Davey says.

  ‘Not you. Phoebe.’

  At first, I nod. ‘Actually, no, I won’t if that’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘We’re having dinner tomorrow, right? I’m broke till payday.’ I get by, with a little left over to save for a rainy day or, more often, the occasional holiday. But I’m no celebrity chef.

  ‘How come you’ll go out with her, but you won’t go out with me?’ Davey asks.

  ‘I’m cuter than you are,’ June says.

  Suddenly, we hear shouting and screaming from outside. We all stare at each other. ‘I hope nobody’s…’ I start to say.

  ‘So do I,’ June says as we rush out to the lawn. We might not be a nursing home with properly ill patients, but the women are older. There’s always a chance one of them will keel over.

  But nobody’s dead. At least not yet.

  Nearly all the residents are gathered together, but I can spot only a few visitors with them. It’s still early so, whatever’s the trouble, at least we don’t have to air our dirty laundry too publicly.

  That thought catches me squarely in the gut. It’s what Mum would have said. A weird mix of sadness tinged with horror wells up in me. Sadness because, well, she’s not actually here to say it. And horror because no matter how much you promise yourself that you won’t become your mum, eventually it’s bound to happen.

  It’s Mary, one of our waitresses, who’s screaming the house down. ‘What’s wrong?’ I shout over to Nick. He’s got his forearms looped around her waist, trying to keep her from reaching Terence. Every time she lunges for him, her sleek ponytail whips her in the face as Nick pulls her back.

  Terence is standing impassively just out of reach with his hands in his chinos pockets. Why am I not surprised that this involves him?

  ‘You want a piece of me?’ Mary keeps shouting as she flails her arms at him. ‘Do you? I’ll give you one!’

  ‘Mary, will you please calm down!’ I say over her protests. ‘What is wrong with you?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s him, the dirty bugger. He groped me,’ she says. ‘Right there on the lawn.’

  ‘Technically, you mean right there on your bottom,’ Terence points out. ‘Precision in language is important, my dear.’

  ‘Terence! You’ve been warned about this before,’ June says.

  ‘What will you do, fire me?’ he shoots back. ‘Throw me out of my house?’

  ‘I’d like to clock you, is what I’d like to do,’ Mary says. Then she sees our boss stalking towards us. He must have heard the commotion from the office. This is just what we need.

  ‘Max, I am not taking any more of this,’ Mary says. ‘Your father has groped me. I’ve got a good mind to ring the police.’

  Max’s expression is resigned as he turns to Terence. As annoying as it is for us to have to deal with him, it’s harder for Max. He’s actually related to the old man. He can never get rid of him. ‘Dad, did you?’

  Terence waves his hand. I’m just glad it’s out of his pocket now, given what he’s done. ‘She’s overreacting. It was only a friendly pat. I was telling her she’s doing a good job.’ He looks at Mary. ‘You should be grateful for the attention, frankly.’

  Her frustrated scream doesn’t need any interpretation. ‘I quit. Max, that’s it. I’m not going to be harassed by that man. Find yourself someone else to deal with him.’ She yanks off her apron and shoves it into the other waitress’s hand. Amber looks like she’s not sure whether to follow her colleague or not. Then she goes back to her phone.

  This is a disaster. There’s no way that Amber can handle service on her own. She barely does any work as it is. ‘Wait, please, Mary! You can’t quit. We need you!’ I say. ‘Max, tell her!’

  But it’s no use. She’s already striding across the lawn towards her car.

  Now what am I going to do? ‘Max, I can’t run the restaurant all by myself. No offence, Amber.’

  Amber looks up from her phone. ‘Hmm? Oh, none taken.’ She goes back to crushing candy or whatever she’s doing on that thing.

  ‘Well, Max? What are you going to do?’ This is his fault, after all. If he’d shipped his horrid father off after the hospital, Mary mightn’t have quit.

  Max’s jowly face flashes several expressions as he works out an answer. He’s not great at thinking on his feet. ‘Well, we can always microwave ready meals,’ he finally says. ‘That would free you up to take over for Mary.’

  He sees the look on my face. ‘Or put them in the oven?’ he tries. ‘I don’t know. Whatever you do when you cook.’

  Whatever I do when
I cook? ‘Max. I prepare three meals a day, carefully balanced for the residents’ nutritional requirements. Not to mention their weird phobias and dietary whims. You really think you can replace all that with a few ready meals?’

  I can’t keep my voice from shaking. I’ve worked here for three years, and this is all he thinks I do?

  ‘They have some very good ready meals now,’ he answers. ‘I’m only trying to make a suggestion.’

  Everything I’ve done, the exacting planning, budgeting and bending over backwards to make food that the residents will love, has made no difference in my boss’s eyes. I’m nothing but a glorified takeaway delivery person to him.

  ‘Hey, don’t get upset,’ Nick says. ‘Please don’t.’ His voice is so full of concern that I just choke up more. When he puts his arm around me, it squeezes out a very unladylike sob.

  To be clear, though, this isn’t sadness. It’s fury. How dare he.

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to offend you.’ Nick’s eyes search Max’s, looking for an apology. Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about being in the crook of Nick’s arm with his lips inches from mine.

  ‘Well, he bloody well did offend me,’ I mumble. I haven’t worked this hard to be dismissed by someone who thinks the supermarket sells haute cuisine.

  ‘God, no, I didn’t mean to upset you, Phoebe. I’m sorry. We’ll get another waitress for you, I promise. We can get a new one tomorrow, right, June?’ He sounds like he’s replacing an ice cream cone that I’ve dropped on the floor.

  All this rage can’t only be about Mary quitting, or Max’s insensitivity. Deep down it must be about Mum too, because she put this soundtrack in my head in the first place. ‘You’re Not Living Up to Your Dreams’ was on the greatest hits album, but the B-side included classics like ‘Why Can’t You Be More Like Your Brother’, and everyone’s perennial favourite: ‘If Only You’d Try Harder’. She didn’t want to hear that I was living up to my dreams and doing the best that I could. Maybe I haven’t dealt with that as well as I’d thought.

  ‘We’ll get a temp to fill in for Mary till we find a replacement,’ June says, enveloping me in her arms. ‘Don’t worry.’ Nick passes me off to my best friend like a relay baton. ‘Want that drink later?’ she asks. ‘I’ll buy.’

  ‘God, yes, thanks.’

  Nick offers to bring Terence back to his cottage. I’m surprised that the old man agrees to go. Whenever Max tries getting him to do something, he unleashes a tirade that would make a sailor blush. Nick definitely has a way with people. As they walk off, I can hear him speaking quietly to Terence. He’s a perv-whisperer.

  ‘He really is good, isn’t he?’ I say.

  ‘That’s the best hiring decision I ever made,’ June answers. ‘Aside from you, of course.’

  Chapter 5

  It’s thanks to my lucky stars that June hired me. Otherwise I’d have had to leave our little home town to find work after the bistro closed down.

  The bistro was my first job out of catering college. It wasn’t overly fancy, at least not when I first started working there. It teetered somewhere between a builder’s caff and someplace that served food au jus. Set in the old town fishmonger’s shop, its walls were tiled white with a pretty Victorian green border running around the whole room. We only had seating for twenty-eight, with the open kitchen behind the old fish counter. Jen, my boss, kept as many of the original features as she could. Pale green ironwork surrounded the huge plate-glass front windows and door, which rattled awfully in winter, so we had a heavy velvet curtain in front to keep the customers from blowing away whenever someone came in.

  There were fishy touches all over the restaurant: some of the original adverts for jellied eels and pilchards in old money, weighing scales with their enamelled dish on the battered sideboard. Fishhooks hung from the ceiling and the old barrel by the door held customers’ wet umbrellas. We even used the display counter – once upon a time piled with ice and seafood – for our desserts.

  Jen had upmarket ideas when she hired me. Best of all, she believed in me. But, being fresh from catering college, I had yet to believe in myself.

  I don’t mean that I didn’t have the skills. I knew my pâté from my parfait. I just didn’t have the confidence. Yet there I was, the new cook in a newly reopened bistro – Jen had the word ‘café’ prised off the front of the building, and ‘bistro’ just fit, though it always looked squashed together. I got to have complete say over the food we served. Once I got over the shock and stopped panicking, I started to love the job. Every week Jen and I sat down together so I could tell her what I was planning. I didn’t have to ask permission for my menu. My catering school friends were astonished when I told them that. Most of them were prep cooks, waking at 5 a.m. to chop mountains of onions, and there I was, designing my own menus.

  Jen was thrilled and so was I. Finally, finally, I was an actual cook, just like I’d always planned. I don’t want to paint it as the perfect job, because the hours were punishing and it was sweaty and nerve-racking. Still, it felt like my dream had come to life.

  Within a few months we were gaining a good reputation around the town, and people had to book for dinner on weekends. And sometimes even for lunch. But no matter how packed the bistro got, my parents still weren’t convinced. ‘What do you want to do next?’ Mum asked every single time I visited, like I was working behind a McDonald’s counter instead of running my own restaurant.

  ‘This is what I want to do,’ I always answered. ‘Why else would I have gone to catering college?’

  ‘I still have no idea,’ she’d say, ‘when you could have gone to university. Though I suppose this could be a leg up the ladder, if you leverage it. But darling, you’ve got the brains to be on your way to the boardroom, not doing dishes in a kitchen.’

  Maybe I shouldn’t be bringing this up now that Mum’s gone. After all, it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead. But it was harsh, so there’s no use pretending that she was a saint. You may as well know what she could be like.

  Mum always followed up with her main objection to my career plans: I should be challenging myself to do more than even my parents had. They were entrepreneurs with a successful building firm, but Mum always saw corporate jobs as better than what they had. That’s where you could really get a leg up the ladder. She and Dad did what they could without any education or family money. She wanted more for me.

  The problem was that every time they told me I could be more, all I heard was that I was less. That’s hard to accept at any age. I was still a teen. Meanwhile, my brother did everything they wanted. Maybe his aspirations really did align with theirs, or maybe he was brown-nosing. Whatever the case, he made them happy while, as long as I worked in a kitchen, I wasn’t going to measure up to Mum and Dad’s dreams for me. No matter what I was doing there, no matter how perfectly it matched what I wanted to do. Even after I’d been head chef for six years and built the bistro into a restaurant with a waiting list for reservations, and won awards for my cooking, they weren’t as convinced about my success as I was.

  The more they harped on about all the ways I could be doing better, the more I tried to ignore them. After all, I was happy with my progress. I was doing exactly what I’d set out to do. Their criticism couldn’t hurt me. At least, that’s what I thought.

  Now I’m not so sure, because Mum’s not here anymore, and still there’s a nagging little voice in my head. It’s not paying me many compliments.

  ‘You’re miles away,’ June says, pushing my hand towards the glass of Pinot Noir she’s just poured. ‘Do I dare ask?’

  ‘I’m just thinking about Mum.’ We’re sitting at a corner table in our local pub. We’ve been coming here ever since we got each other dodgy fake IDs for our sixteenth birthdays. We’d never have got away with that in such a small town if the man who took over the business hadn’t been from outside the area. And short-sighted and desperate for business.

  Even without the early memories, this is still my kind of pub: full
of old wood panelling and mismatched tables and chairs, with soft lighting and no TVs showing football. Just lots of familiar faces and the happy buzz of conversations going on all around us.

  I’m in my chef whites as usual, but June looks nice. She always wears smart trousers that suit her slender figure, and trendy tops – sometimes floaty and sometimes, like tonight, with cutaway shoulders, depending on what’s hot in Glamour – and she wouldn’t be caught dead in my clogs or with her hair scraped back in a ponytail. I probably embarrass her with my checked trousers and overuse of dry shampoo.

  When June pulls her mouth into the sympathetic I’m-listening pout that she uses whenever one of the residents has a whinge, the guilt sweeps over me. She’s mistaking my words for nice, normal, missing-Mum-now-that-she’s-gone thoughts.

  ‘It will get better,’ June says. ‘It has only been a few months.’

  I take a deep breath. ‘I wish it was that easy.’ But when she reaches for my arm, I say, ‘No, it’s not what you think. I’m really pissed off with her.’

  ‘For dying? That’s normal. It’s one of the stages of grief, remember the notes?’

  She gave me a packet of papers after Mum died. June likes to be prepared for everything. With handouts. ‘Yeah, but that’s not why I’m angry. Which means it’s not normal and I’m some kind of freak of a daughter.’ Even though I hate admitting that, in a way it feels good to get it out. It feels so good that, once I start, I can’t stop myself. Even though June knows all this, she’s happy to listen.

  I knew I wasn’t cut out for university years before I breathed a word to my parents. I’m not like my brother, Will. By which I mean I’m not academically-minded or completely afraid to go against our parents. He was making plans for uni while he was still in primary school. But I’d discovered cooking by the time I was that age, and I loved every bit of it. Even the tedious prep work and the cleaning up. The idea of turning a bunch of ingredients into something completely different seemed like magic. It still does.