Christmas at the Comfort Food Café
DEBBIE JOHNSON

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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016

Copyright © Debbie Johnson 2016

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Cover design by Alex Allden

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is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008205881

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PRAISE FOR DEBBIE JOHNSON

‘Full of quirky characters, friendship and humour, you will devour this engaging and heartwarming novel in one sitting’

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‘A lovely, emotion-filled, giggle-inducing story’

Milly Johnson

‘Everything I hoped it would be and more’

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‘My new favourite author’

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‘Fans of Paige Toon will enjoy this beautiful story’

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‘I’ve got nothing but love for this amazing novel and its author’

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Debbie Johnson

Author Note

Part 1: Christmas Past: the Fletcher household, Manchester

Chapter 1

Part 2: Christmas Present – Dorset

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part 3: Christmas Future?

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Debbie Johnson

Also by Debbie Johnson

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

Author Note

For those of you who have already read (and hopefully enjoyed!) Summer at the Comfort Food Café, the majority of the characters in this latest book will be familiar to you. Old friends, even. For those of you who haven’t, don’t worry – this one will still make sense. At least, that’s the plan! While summer at our beautiful beachside café in Dorset focused on the story of Laura and her children, Nate and Lizzie, and was told from Laura’s perspective, this story is told by her sister, Becca. We only met Becca via phone in the first instalment, but she was always one of my favourite characters – I hope you enjoy meeting her in person, and seeing the Comfort Food Café through her very different eyes. Becca’s not always as easy to love as Laura – but she’s always fun!

PART 1

Chapter 1

December 25, 1987

Fizzy, the Twinkle-Eyed My Little Pony, is a rare and beautiful creature. She has a turquoise body and pink eyes and a silky-soft flowing mane. Fresh out of the box that morning, straight from Santa, she should be galloping across the matching My Little Pony duvet cover that is spread over Laura’s single bed.

She should be neighing and singing and giggling with her friends, Applejack and Lily and Starflower the Rainbow Pony.

Sadly, that isn’t happening. Partly because Applejack and Lily and Starflower are floating around in the toilet, with soggy loo paper clogged up around their manes, and partly because Fizzy – and her twinkly eyes – is currently being used as a weapon of mass destruction.

Laura’s little sister, Becca, is four. Laura, being a much more mature six years old, always tries to be patient, because that’s what her mum says she needs to be. And every time she’s patient, she gets an extra sticker on her star chart, and once it’s full, she will get a new Care Bear. Maybe the one with the rainbow hearts; she hasn’t decided yet.

Becca has a star chart too, but hers is empty. Mum says it should be in ‘negative numbers’, whatever that means.

Sometimes, Laura thinks, Becca is just… mean. And loud. And not very nice. Sometimes she makes it impossible to be patient. Like now, for example.

Now, she’s holding Fizzy in her chubby fist, and she’s trying to hit Laura in the face with her, hooves first. Fizzy might be rare and beautiful and have a silky-soft mane, but nothing else about her is soft. She’s made of plastic, and she really hurts when she’s poked in your eye.

Laura had come up here to play while Mum was cooking the Christmas dinner and Dad was having a ‘medicinal beer’. Becca had been crying and sulking all day, which he kept saying was because she was over-tired. He said it as though he felt sorry for her, and kept giving her hugs and carrying her around on his shoulders even when she was tearful and snotty.

Secretly, Laura didn’t feel sorry for her. It was her own fault she was tired – she waited up until way past midnight, when the church bells rang out, because she wanted to see Father Christmas and Rudolph, even though she’d been warned that if she saw them, they’d never come down their chimney again.

Staying up so late meant she was grumpy and angry when they finally managed to wake Mum and Dad up, jumping on their legs in bed until they agreed to go downstairs and see if he’d been.

He had, and he’d left them loads of stuff under the tree – so Becca mustn’t have seen him after all.

After everything was unwrapped, Becca had her own pile of toys – a Fisher Price kitchen and a koosh ball and a Play-Doh hairdresser set – but of course she didn’t want to play with them. She wanted to play with Laura’s. And when Laura said no, she screamed and grabbed a handful of the ponies off the bed, ran into the bathroom and threw them in the toilet.

She tried to flush them down but they wouldn’t go, even when she poked them with that spikey brush Mum used to clean the loo with.

When Laura chased after her and tried to stop her, Becca snatched Fizzy out of her hand and started whacking her across the head with it. And it really hurt.

She’d tried to be patient, and she’d tried to be nice, and she’d tried to talk to her. But Becca just won’t stop shouting and whacking, and Laura has had enough.

She grabs the shower attachment that is fixed to the bath with a big, bendy silver pipe, and turns on the cold tap. Not the hot one, because even if she is angry, she doesn’t want any burny water spraying out. She points it at her sister and lets it blast full-force into her scrunched-up, furious face.

Becca’s long brown hair is immediately plastered down over her cheeks, and the Strawberry Shortcake nightie she is wearing, the one that used to be Laura’s, goes dark as the water spreads over it.

Her mouth is gaping open in shock, and her eyes are screwed closed against the spray. She drops Fizzy straight away and starts to scream. And scream. And scream.

Laura hears the kitchen door open downstairs and music wafting up from the radio that Mum always listens to when she’s cooking. That song about China in your Hand.

There is a pause, and she knows Mum is standing at the bottom of the stairs listening to Becca screaming. Then the sound of footsteps coming up, and the door to the bathroom slamming open. By that point, Laura has dropped the shower head back into the bath, where it lies, twisting like a snake, sprinkling upwards into the sky.

She looks at her mum, guilt written all over her face, and feels tears sting the back of her eyes.

Her mum has tinsel wrapped around her head like a crown, and is wearing an apron in the shape of a fat Santa’s body. There is a big wooden spoon in her hand, and she waves it threateningly in the air, as though she might use it like a sword at any moment. Her cheeks are red from the cooker, and there is dusty flour on her fingers.

‘Can’t you two play nicely for five minutes, for goodness sake?’ she says, sounding as annoyed as she looks. ‘All those new toys downstairs and you’re up here arguing and fighting? It’s not very Christmassy, is it?’

‘Sorry Mummy,’ says Laura, staring at her feet and trying not to cry.

‘Aaaaaaaggh!’ screams Becca, soaking wet and almost hysterical.

‘I HATE Christmas!’ she yells, pushing past her mum and her sister and squelching her way out into the hallway.

December 25, 1991

Laura decides that her mum is a bit drunk. Or ‘merry’, as her dad describes it, as they dance around the living room together, loudly singing along with ‘I’m Too Sexy’ by Right Said Fred. They are doing actions as well, pretending they are models strutting on a catwalk, and driving a car. Maybe Dad is a bit ‘merry’ as well, she thinks, watching as he tells the world that he is even too sexy for his shirt.

At the age of ten, Laura isn’t quite sure what constitutes ‘sexy’ – but she hopes her dad isn’t it. She also hopes they don’t get so merry they collide with the Christmas tree, because the living room isn’t really that big, and they don’t seem to be entirely in control of their legs.

Becca sits in the corner of the couch, sulking as usual, rolling her eyes in a way that makes her look a bit like she’s having some kind of seizure, and making gestures of glug-glug-glug with an invisible glass while she points at Mum.

That’s because Mum had a bottle of wine open while she was cooking the Christmas lunch this afternoon, and said she needed it because ‘the dragon-in-law’ was visiting.

That’s her nickname for Laura and Becca’s grandma. She says she means it ‘in a nice way’, but she never says it to Nan’s face, so Laura’s not altogether sure she does. Plus she stayed in the kitchen for ages, saying she was busy, but every time Laura went in she was just sitting at the table, muttering to herself, and pouring another glass. Grown-ups, she’d decided with David, were weird.

She wishes that David could have come over, but his parents have taken him away to Wales. Which is a whole different country and everything. She misses him, and hasn’t even been able to speak to him on the phone to see what he got for Christmas.

He’d been hoping for a Gameboy, and had even carried on pretending he believed in Santa because he thought it would give him a better chance at getting one. Laura is also still pretending she believes in Santa, just because she thinks it makes her parents happy to think she does.

It had been harder this year, because Becca had finally decided that it was all made up. She stayed awake throughout the entire night, and all she heard, she said, was Mum and Dad going up and down the stairs, next door’s cat yowling, and some random drunk people going past very late and setting off a car alarm.

Plus, Christopher Eccles at school – who had three big brothers – had laughed at her when she even mentioned Father Christmas. Becca wasn’t keen on being laughed at, especially by Christopher Eccles, and she’d punched him in the face and run off to hide in the bike shed.

So now, Becca is mega-tired and in a mega-bad mood. Nan and Granddad have gone home, and Mum and Dad have decided to have a party of their own, and she’s really annoyed that she got a Girl’s World styling head and a Polly Pocket Country Cottage playset when she’d actually asked for nothing apart from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys – she’d drawn circles around them in the Argos catalogue and everything.

Laura has decided that the most sensible thing to do is ignore Becca and carry on making friendship bracelets from the set she got for Christmas. She plans to make one for David and one for Danielle and Sarah out of her class, and maybe – maybe – one for Becca too. Because leaving her out would be mean.

The music has changed and that Dizzy song is on now. Mum and Dad are whirling around, shouting about how their heads are spinning, and laughing out loud. Dad comes over and tugs Laura up by the hands, spilling her bracelets on the floor.

‘Come on, join in!’ he says, starting to spin her. ‘It’s Christmas! And it’s you girl, making me spin now…’

Mum spins her way over to Becca, and tries to pull her to her feet as well. Becca doesn’t want to join in, though, and instead she wriggles out of Mum’s grasp and runs off up to her bedroom.

Laura doesn’t hear it, because of the music and the dancing and the laughing, but she knows there will have been a door slam. Even at eight, Becca is really good at door-slamming.

By the time the song finishes and all three of them collapse onto the sofa, a bit sweaty and a lot happy, Becca storms back into the room.

‘I didn’t want this!’ she yells, lobbing her Girls’ World head onto the carpet. It rolls around for a bit, like a decapitated blonde, until it comes to rest beneath the Christmas tree, where it totters, red lips facing the ceiling. Laura sees that most of the shiny synthetic hair has been brutally hacked off, leaving bits sticking out in tufts, and that there are now just gaping holes where the eyes should be.

Becca stands in the doorway, hands on her hips, hair wild and tangled, brown eyes full of angry tears. She probably expected more of a reaction, but in reality, Mum and Dad are a bit too ‘merry’ to blow their top at her, even if she is behaving like a brat. A brat who likes killing blondes.

‘Crikey,’ says Dad, his chest puffing up and down after all the dancing. ‘That’ll be a good story to tell at your wedding.’

‘I’m never getting married! And Santa doesn’t exist, because if he did, he’d have brought me turtle stuff! And I HATE Christmas!’

December 25, 2000

There has been a lot of dancing in the Fletcher home this Christmas. The kids are older, and the fridge is well stocked with giant pork pies and Black Forest gateaux and multiple packs of lager, nestled next to Mum’s Baileys.

Nobody gets out of bed at 5am to check for presents any more, and Dad doesn’t have to spend the first half of the day with a screwdriver in his hand, searching for yet another pack of Triple A batteries.

The girls have their own rooms, so there is less fighting, and Laura has her own fiancé, which is a whole different story. David – the fiancé in question – has been at the house all day, with his Labrador, Jambo the Second. Even Jambo got in on the party, jumping up and down and woofing along to ‘Who Let The Dogs Out?’

David and Laura did lots of joke-dancing to S Club 7 songs, and a smoochy to ‘Never Had A Dream Come True’, and Mum and Dad did mock line-dancing to ‘Man I Feel Like A Woman’, and everyone leapt around to Robbie Williams being a Rock DJ.

Everyone apart from Becca, that is. Becca had had a tough time recently. She’d split up with her boyfriend Shaun, and taken it hard. Nobody else in the family could quite figure out why she’d taken it so hard, as they’d only been together for a few months and always seemed to be arguing anyway. Even Laura couldn’t get anything out of her, apart from a mouthful of bad language and a bedroom door slammed in her face.

But since the split, Becca had been sulky and sullen and had apparently forgotten how to operate a shower or use shampoo. Her skin was blotchy and sore-looking, her hair glued to her head with grease, and she spent as much time as she possibly could either asleep, pretending to be asleep, or, Laura suspected, indulging in substances – some legal, some not – that would help her sleep.

She’d been dragged out of bed by their mum for Christmas lunch, and had sat 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!’

PART 2

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.

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