Summer at the Comfort Food Cafe. Debbie Johnson
to him, circles precisely three times, then falls asleep with his muzzle buried beneath his own tail.
‘So what does she say, then, the mysterious Cherie?’ asks Lizzie, snapping a few pictures on her phone as she prowls around the room. A close-up of the bread, the flowers. A snarl before she takes one of the floral curtains, which are presumably not to her sophisticated tastes. One of Jimbo. One of Nate, who is now repeatedly pressing the same button on the remote, as though it might work the ninety-ninth time he does it. Then one of me, as I quickly realise that I shouldn’t have put that whole cupcake in my mouth all at once.
I wait a few moments, chewing frantically, before I am able to answer.
‘She says she’s sorry she didn’t get to see us earlier, but she has to go to her salsa class tonight. She says she hopes we enjoy the cakes and the wine – that bit’s aimed at me, obviously – and that she’ll see us all tomorrow. That we should spend the morning getting settled in and come round to the café for lunch. Isn’t that nice?’
‘Yeah, I s’pose,’ says Nate, giving up on the TV and instead shuffling down on the sofa so he can rest his head on the dog. Jimbo absently licks his face, then goes back to sleep.
‘Adorable,’ says Lizzie. ‘I can’t wait. Do you think that tall bloke is going to come round or not? I think my phone charger’s in one of the bags in the roofbox.’
‘And what would happen if your phone ran out of charge?’ I ask, sarcastically.
‘I’d die of boredom,’ she replies, deadpan. ‘And I have a signal at the moment. Didn’t you say it was a bit dodgy here? I have some serious communicating to do, so I’m going to make the most of it before we plummet back into the Dark Ages.’
Right on cue, there’s a knock at the door and the Tall Bloke walks through into the living room. I hastily swallow the last mouthful of cupcake and wipe the icing off my chin with a half-hearted swipe of my sleeve. I have the awful feeling that when I next look in a mirror, there’ll still be some there – along with the long, frizzy hair, the rosy cheeks and the harassed expression. The only sensible response to the entire situation is to never look in a mirror again. I may get Lizzie to go round the whole building covering them up with towels.
As the man enters, Jimbo looks up and lets out a high-pitched yip, thumping his tail a few times in appreciation. It makes the man smile, which I’m starting to realise is probably so rare in the wild that David Attenborough should make a documentary about it.
‘Cake?’ I ask, gesturing at the tray on the table. ‘Wine? Bread?’
Dear Lord. I’m starting to sound like Mrs Doyle off Father Ted, and probably look even worse.
‘No. Thanks,’ he says, not quite making eye contact. He’s dressed in a pair of faded Levis and an equally faded black T-shirt that fits very snugly around all the muscular parts of him I probably shouldn’t even be noticing. His hair’s been roughly towel-dried and is an attractively shaggy mass of brown and chestnut. The eyes, I note, are definitely hazel.
‘Shall we get you unloaded then?’ he prompts, which makes me wonder if I’ve been staring at him for two seconds or two hours. Awky-mo, as Lizzie would say. Or would have said last year, it’s probably not cool any more. Like LOLcats or wicked.
‘Right!’ I reply, wiping my hands down on my jeans and nodding. I look at the kids and give them my very best ‘get off your lazy arses and come help’ face. Nate immediately feigns sleep, letting out huge fake snores, and Lizzie runs away up the stairs, presumably to call dibs on a bedroom.
I suck in a breath and smile.
‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘I can beat them later. They’re overdue a whipping.’
He raises his eyebrows and I have the feeling he’s not a hundred per cent sure if I’m joking or not. Neither am I.
‘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.