Summer at the Comfort Food Cafe. Debbie Johnson
the Turquoise Table in Miss Hennessey’s class, and that was that – my fate was sealed.
That story sounds completely crazy now, I know. I look at my own kids and think there’s no way anyone they mix with at their age could turn out to be the love of their life. That’s what my parents thought – and his. I lost track of the number of times we were told we were too young. I think they thought it was sweet when we were seven, saying we were boyfriend and girlfriend – innocent and cute. By the time we were sixteen and we’d stayed together all through high school, they didn’t think it was quite so cute any more.
I get it, I really do. They wanted us to see a bit of the world. See other people. Although they were all too polite to say it, they wanted us to split up. My parents would always phrase it nicely, saying things like ‘I’ve nothing against David – he’s a lovely lad – but don’t you want to travel? Go to university? Have a few adventures before you settle down? Follow your own dreams? And anyway, if it’s meant to be, you’ll come back to each other in a few years’ time.’
He got the same speeches from his family, too. We used to laugh about it and compare notes on the different ways they all tried to express the same thing: You’re Too Young and You’re Making a Mistake. We weren’t angry – we knew it was because they loved us, wanted the best for us. But what they didn’t get – what they never really understood – was that we were already following our dreams. We were already having the biggest adventure of our lives. We loved each other beyond belief from the age of seven, and we never, ever stopped. What we had was rare and precious and so much more valuable than anything we could have done apart.
We got married when we were twenty, and no matter how happy I was, people still commented on it. I even found my mum crying in the loo at the reception – she thought I was wasting my life. I’d got decent enough grades in my exams – including a grade A in home economics, I should probably point out, as it’s the first relevant thing I’ve said. So did David. He got a job as a trainee at the local bank, and I initially worked in what I’d like to claim was some fancy five-star restaurant, but was actually a McDonald’s on a retail park on the outskirts of Manchester.
I know it sounds boring, but it wasn’t. It was brilliant. We bought a little two-up two-down in a decent part of the city, and even at that stage we were thinking about schools – because we knew we wanted kids, and soon. Lizzie came along not too long after, and she’s fourteen now. She has his blonde hair and my green eyes, and at the moment is equal parts smiley and surly. I can’t blame her. It’s been tough losing her dad. I’ve done my best to stay strong for her, but I suspect my best hasn’t been up to much. She’s fourteen. Do you remember being a fourteen-year-old girl? It wasn’t ever easy, was it? Even without dead dads and zombified mums.
Nate is twelve and he’s a heartbreaker. Quite literally, when I look at him, it feels like my heart is breaking. He got David’s blonde hair too, and also his sparkly blue eyes. You know, those Paul Newman eyes? And David’s smile. And that one dimple on the left-hand side of his mouth.
He looks so much like his dad that people used to call him David’s ‘mini me’! Sometimes I hug him so tight he complains that I’m breaking his ribs. I laugh and let him go, even though I want to carry on squeezing and keep this tiny, perfect little human being safe for the rest of his life. We all know that’s not possible now and sometimes I think that’s the biggest casualty of David dying – none of us feel safe any more, which really isn’t fair when you’re twelve, is it?
But I have to remind myself that we had so much. We loved so much, and laughed so much, and shared so much. All of it was perfect, even the arguments. Especially the arguments – or the aftermath at least. Sometimes I wonder if that was the problem – we had too much that was too good, too young. Even after thirteen years of marriage he could still give me that cheeky little grin of his that made my heart beat a bit faster, and I could never, ever stay angry with him. It was the uni-dimple. It just made it impossible.
One of David’s favourite things was holidays. He worked hard at the bank, got promoted and enjoyed his job – but it was his family life that really mattered to him. We saved up and every year we’d have a brilliant holiday together. He loved researching them and planning them almost as much as going on them.
To start with, they were ‘baby’ holidays – the most important thing was finding somewhere we’d be safe with the little ones. So we stayed in the UK or did short flights to places like Majorca or Spain.
As the kids got older, we got more adventurous – or he did at least! We started by expanding our horizons and going on camping holidays on the continent. Tents in Tuscany, driving to the South of France with the car loaded up, a mobile home in Holland. The last two before he died were the most exciting ever – a yachting trip around Turkey, where the kids learned to sail and I learned to sunbathe, and three weeks in Florida doing the theme parks but then driving all the way down to the Keys and going native for a week.
Every holiday, for every year, was also given its own photo album when we got home.
It wasn’t enough for him to keep the pictures online, he got them all printed out and each album had the year it related to and the place we’d visited written on the spine on a sticker.
They’re all there now, on the bookshelf in the living room. Lined up in order – a photographic journey through time and space. Lizzie as a baby; Lizzie as a toddler and me pregnant; Nate joining the party. They grow up in those photo albums, right before our eyes – missing teeth and changing tastes and different haircuts, getting taller each year.
I suppose we age as well – I definitely put a bit of weight on as the years go by; David loses a bit of hair, gets more laughter lines. We never lose our smiles, though – that’s one thing that never changes.
The only year we didn’t have a holiday was when the kids were too old to share a room any more, and we had to buy a bigger house. We were skint, so we stayed at home – and even then, David set up a massive tent in our new garden and bought a load of sand from a builder’s yard to make our very own beach! Even that one has its own album, although on quite a few of the photos we’re wearing our swimming costumes in the rain!
If I’m entirely honest, the main reason I’m applying for this job – and doing a very bad job of it, I know – is because of all those holidays, and the memories that David managed to build for our children. For me. The memories that are all we have left of him now.
The last holiday David planned was over two years ago. We were going to Australia, flying in to Sydney and touring up to Queensland. The kids were buzzing about seeing koalas and kangaroos, and I was slightly concerned about them getting eaten by sharks or bitten by a killer spider. David was in his element.
He never got to go on that holiday. It was the first properly sunny day after winter – February 12th, to be exact – and he decided to do some house maintenance, the way you do once the sun comes out again.
While he was clearing some leaves out of the guttering, he slipped off the ladder and banged his head on the concrete patio. He seemed all right at first – we laughed about it, joked about his hard head. We thought we’d been lucky.
We were wrong. We didn’t know it at the time, but he had bleeding around his brain – his brain was swelling and bit by bit a disaster was going on inside his skull.
By the time he started to complain of a headache, he’d probably been feeling bad for hours. Taking Paracetamol for his ‘bump’ and trying to get on with his weekend. Eventually he collapsed in front of all three of us – fell right off his chair at the dinner table. At first the kids just laughed – he was a bit of a buffoon, David. He was always doing daft things to amuse them – it was like living with Norman Wisdom sometimes, the amount of slapstick that went on in our house!
But he wasn’t joking. And even though the ambulance got there so fast and the hospital was so good, it was too late. He was gone. He was put on a life-support machine and his parents and my parents came and his brother came, all to say goodbye. The kids? That was a hard decision. Nate was just ten and Lizzie was only twelve – but I thought they deserved it,