Christmas at the Comfort Food Cafe. Debbie Johnson
at the table in her stained Eminem T-shirt, pushing her food around the plate and not actually eating any of it. She managed to drink, though – quite a lot.
By the time the dancing started, she was halfway to hammered, and she’d had enough. Of everything. Looking at Mum and Dad and Laura and David and even the bloody adorably cute dog was all just too much for her. They were like a scene from a film about happy families at Christmas, and she was the only one who didn’t fit in. She was the evil Gremlin.
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, fetal ball.
‘Go away,’ she says, through her sniffling. ‘Just leave me alone. I hate you all. And I fucking well hate Christmas!’
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