Martha’s first day at college rolls round quickly, and I cling to it like it’s a lifeboat all made of hope. Perhaps, I think, this will change everything. Perhaps she will be inspired by her new teachers; enthused by her A-levels; won over by new friends. Perhaps she will finally decide to give this place a chance, and stop acting as though she’s been sentenced to death by Dorset.
The first dent in those rather pathetic hopes comes when she gets on the bus in the village. I drive her there, park up, and offer to wait with her.
“Worried I’ll do a runner?” she says, staring at me from the passenger seat.
“It wouldn’t be the first time. You did a runner from Miss Clarke’s class that time because you didn’t want to sing in the assembly.”
“I was eight!” she replies, sounding exasperated. “And you and mum were the ones who always told me to follow my instinct, that if something felt wrong, it probably was …”
“Oh. So it’s our fault it is?”
“Yes,” she snaps back, staring out of the car window at the centre of Budbury, “everything is.”
I follow her gaze to the bus stop. It wasn’t hard to find – there is in fact only one. In high season, tourist buses run through as they trek up and down the Jurassic Coast, but from this time of year onwards, there’s only two buses a day in both directions. Plus this one – the bus that takes local kids a few miles down the road to the high school and its college.
There is a small gang of young people hanging round the bus stop, as of course is usually the case in small towns. I’ve never figured out why the bus stop becomes the hub of under-age social activity, but it always seems to.
The weather feels cooler, with a brisk breeze blowing up from the coast, and the kids are wearing a lot of check flannel and beanie hats and chunky jumpers. The younger ones – including Nate and Lizzie, who’s in her last year at school – are in a hideous purple uniform, the older ones in jeans and boots.
“It could be worse,” I say, looking from them to Martha, who is dressed head to toe in black, nose stud in, dyed hair back-combed in a tribute to Amy Winehouse kind of way.
“Yeah? How?” she asks, looking genuinely confused.
“You could be a year younger, and have to wear that purple uniform.”
She snorts, but doesn’t respond. She’s too busy watching the school bus roll along the one narrow road that threads through the village. Her eyes squint at it, and her fingers clench into a fist around the backpack on her lap. I realise how nervous she is, beneath the anger and the tough veneer, and reach out to give her hand a very quick pat.
“Go on. You’ll be fine, you know – just give it a chance.”
She shoots me a look that might mean ‘go and drown yourself in the nearest toilet’, but I choose to interpret as ‘thank you, I will’, and climbs out of the car, slamming the door behind her. She strides over to the bus stop, head held high, strutting along as though she hasn’t got a care in the world. Attagirl, I think, smiling as she goes.
Lizzie and Josh and her gang have already boarded the bus, and I see Lizzie waving frantically at her through the window, banging on the glass to get her attention. She’s on the top deck – as the cool kids always are – and is making ‘come and sit with us’ gestures through the pane. Aaah, I think. What a sweetie.
Martha looks up at her, gives no response at all, and gets onto the bus. She’s the last one on, and I see her take a seat on her own, on the lower level. I cringe a little inside as I see her snub Lizzie, but know there isn’t much I can do about it.
Instead, I blow out a big breath as I watch the bus pull away, and feel … well, in all honesty, I feel relieved. This in turn makes me feel guilty, so I decide to get out of the car, and go for a walk. Isn’t this one of the reasons I wanted to come here, anyway? The endless paths and the endless cliffs and the endless space? Never mind that I’m so tired and ragged and borderline weepy that I could quite happily fall asleep in the car, and stay there until it’s time to collect Martha at the end of the day. No, that won’t do. I will go for a walk.
The village is small but perfectly formed, I see, as I amble along the narrow pavement. Small terraced houses line the road, along with a handful of shops – a pharmacy, a gift shop that has a 20% sale on conch shells, a butcher, some tea rooms. No book shop, which isn’t surprising but does make me sad. The world needs more book shops. I pass a small bakery, and the Community Hall advertising ‘zumablates’ for the over 60s, and navigate the flower-filled buckets outside the florists. I see a sign for the pet cemetery, which I vow to visit some time when I’m feeling less fragile, like in 2021.
I nod to people as I pass, a bit freaked out by all the ‘good mornings’ and smiles, and follow my nose down towards the coast. I see a hand-painted wooden sign for the Comfort Food Café, and decide that that’s probably where I’d been heading all along. It’s Cherie’s cafe, and Laura manages it, and Willow works there, and basically from what I heard on the day we arrived, it’s the absolute centre of the Budbury universe.
After about ten minutes of walking, I reach a small carpark, next to the bay. The bay is a perfect horse-shoe shape, the September sunlight streaking down onto waves that are racing in to foam over the sand. There are a few holiday-makers left, some with toddlers, some with dogs, all enjoying the last few days of what we could loosely call summer. There’s an ice cream van parked up, a bored-looking lad reading a collection of poetry by Yeats inside the cab. I silently applaud his taste, and start the trek up to the cafe itself.
The path is long but not steep, with low-level steps cut into it and a handrail to hold onto when it starts to feel so high it’s vertigo-inducing. I pause every now and then, and let myself soak up the view. The higher you get, the more the colours change: sea that looked grey and white from land level now looks iridescent, merged shades of blue and green and turquoise, rippling and rolling on its way into the bay.
The clifftops stretch off into the horizon on either side, yellow and red, rock meeting sand, jaggedly rising and falling as they disappear into the distance. I can see people walking along the paths, doing exactly the same as me, and pausing to enjoy the spectacle of the morning sunshine on the water. It’s so quiet as well – it may be the seaside, but it’s not the kind of place you find banana boats or fairground rides; all you can hear is the sound of the seagulls shrieking as they dive, the waves fizzing inland, and the occasional bark of a stick-chasing pooch.
It’s so different from home – it even smells different. It smells of salt and brine and wilderness, the clear air sharp and refreshing as I gulp it in. And I do gulp – I realise that as I stand there, perched on a path at the edge of the world, I am starting to feel some of that freedom I’ve been yearning for. I’m not sure if it’s the thought of my fresh start that is making me feel so liberated, or the stunning views, or simply knowing that I can spend the whole day without feeling Martha’s resentful glare boring into my back, but I am feeling it. It’s though inch by tiny inch, something in my chest is unclenching.
Or maybe, I decide, as I resume my climb, I’m just having a heart attack.
When I reach the top of the path, I walk beneath a gorgeous wrought-iron arch, decorated with beautiful metallic roses painted in red and green. At the top of the arch, in curved iron letters, I see the words: Welcome to the Comfort Food Café. They lift my spirits as I walk beneath, and out into a sloping garden.
There are wooden benches and chairs, the surfaces at slightly alarming angles, and a make-shift stage that looks as though it was used for the birthday party. The ground is grassy, and scattered with intermittent remnants: plastic fangs, a crucifix, a discarded plastic clown mask blowing around in the breeze. Jeepers.
To my left is the coast, stripes of colour as the sky plunges to the land and the land is lapped by the sea, and over in the far corner I see a paddock that is currently empty, but contains a small roofed shelter and several dog bowls. Doggie crèche for customers, I presume, which is a brilliant idea.
In front of me is the cafe itself. It’s mainly made of windows, and those French doors that are basically also windows, all set in a long, ramshackle structure that seems to have expanded organically as it’s been needed. It’s one-storey, but windows in the eaves tell me there is probably either a flat or some kind of storage room up in the attic. One customer is sitting outside, sipping a cup of tea and reading a paper that keeps flapping and folding in the wind. He nods at me as I pass, and pull open the door.
Inside, there aren’t any clown masks blowing around, but it’s still pretty weird – just weird in a good way. There are about four people inside, including a frazzled-looking blonde lady with a toddler who is currently eating a red crayon, and a fit-looking middle-aged couple dressed in full-on walker gear, stacks of maps on the table in front of them with their toast.
There are long tables, and tiny tables, tables for one and benches for eight, each one bearing a small vase filled with wildflowers. There’s a serving counter laden with cakes and sandwiches and biscuits, and an ice-cream freezer full of delicious sounding substances like Honeycomb Whip and Blackberry Bash and Peachy Cream Dream. An upright fridge is full of cloudy lemonade and ginger beer and dandelion and burdock and cola, and in the background I can hear one of my favourite sounds in the whole world: the sound of an industrial-sized coffee machine.
All of these things are fairly standard for a cafe – but the decor sets it apart. Having now met Cherie Moon, I’m less surprised – but it is, to say the least, eccentric.
I wander around for a few moments, looking at the oddments and found objects on display – some hanging from the ceiling, some mounted on the walls, some on shelves. Fossils, a red kayak, bongo drums, a huge boomerang, framed photos of the coast, an old-fashioned black-and-gold Singer sewing machine, a mobile made of 7-inch vinyl singles.
Narrowly missing banging my head on a dangling oar, I make my way to the back of the room, where an entire wall of bookshelves is bathed in sunshine, tiny dust particles floating in the yellow stripes falling in from the windows.
There are piles of boxed board games – old ones like Ker Plunk and Buckaroo, as well as chess and draughts and Chinese checkers. A few jigsaws, and an ancient set of dominos in a box. A load of colouring-in books, and some word puzzle collections, and several old tomato tins crammed full of coloured pencils – a lot of which need sharpening. A particular vice of mine, pencil sharpening.
Beneath the games, the magic starts to happen – at least for me. There are rows and rows of paperbacks – Danielle Steel, Jilly Cooper, Thomas Hardy, Len Deighton, Stephen King, Daphne du Maurier, Nora Roberts, George RR Martin, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Spike Milligan, and everything in between. Hardbacks, too: Churchill’s biography, heavy books about Dorset’s history and geology, the story of the Beatles and Roxy Music and Led Zeppelin all in print.
There’s a section for kids as well, full of battered and tattered and much-used copies of The Gruffalo and James and the Giant Peach and Dr Seuss and the Potters, both Harry and Beatrix. For a boring old book-end like myself, it’s blissful.
Everything’s ramshackle and higgledy-piggledy, and although that fits in perfectly with the whole vibe of the cafe, I still have a professional urge to alphabetise them and put them in subject order. Oddly, although I am a proud slacker on the household chores front, I do like a nicely kept book shelf.
For a single moment, I miss my job: the enormity of the change, of what I’ve given up, comes rushing in and swamps me. I was never a career woman, but I liked my job. I loved being around books, and talking to people about books, and that new-book smell when we got a delivery in and I first opened the box with the Stanley knife.
Now, I’m just an unemployed teenager-wrangler.
Before the sour mood can get a hold of me, a giant slab of sponge cake appears in front of my face. The cake is on a plate, which is attached to a hand, which, I see when I turn round, startled, is attached to Laura.
She grins at me, and wafts the cake under my nose. It’s still warm, little wisps of steam wafting up from it, and it smells … delicious. Almost as good as new books.
“Apple?” I say, frowning as I try and identify the aromas. “Cinnamon? And … something else. What is it?”
“Pumpkin!” she says, delighted that she’s foxed me. I don’t have the heart to break it to her that my culinary skills are about on a par with Noddy’s, so it’s not that much of a victory.
“It gets quiet from this point in the year,” she explains, leading me over to a small table in the corner, where she sits me down and puts the cake in front of me, along with a fork and spoon and a small pot of fresh pouring cream. “So when it gets quiet, I get inventive. Last winter it was all about the hot chocolates – chili hot chocolate, orange hot chocolate, mint hot chocolate, rum hot chocolate … well, you get the picture.
“Last summer, I introduced a load of chocolate bar milkshakes, and this summer I experimented with ice cream. There’s not too much left now, but you can see them in the freezer over there. Now I’m getting ready for autumn and winter – and that means spices, and orchard fruits, and lashings of everything warm and comforting.”
As I’m listening to her, practically salivating, she’s making ‘eat up’ gestures with her fingers, miming the spoon-to-mouth action.
“Bet you haven’t had breakfast, have you?” she asks, raising one eyebrow at me. Her face is smeared with flour, and there are equally floury handprints on her stripey apron. She smells of sugar and spice and all things nice, and is basically a kind of gingerbread woman come to life.
I think about it, and realise that no, I haven’t had any breakfast. I made sure Martha did, surreptitiously looking on as she managed a bowl of granola and strawberries, but completely forgot my own.
“No,” I reply, pausing only to shovel a spoonful of sponge and cream into my mouth. My taste buds almost explode, and I decide that if I choke to death now, I will at least die happy. Laura sees my orgasmic expression, and it clearly thrills her.
“No,” I say again, once I’ve swallowed the best cake ever baked in the entire known history of cakes, “but it was worth the wait for that. You’re a very talented woman.”
“Why, thank you,” she says, nodding her head in a mock bow. Her curls have started to frizz from the heat of the kitchen, and I feel a moment of barnet-based solidarity.
“Did Martha get off to college okay?” she asks, using another spoon to steal a mouthful of cake for herself.
I nod, and she sees my hesitation. Possibly my embarrassment.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” she asks, frowning.
“Nothing really … it’s just … well, Martha, right now, isn’t an easy girl to like. I feel terrible saying that, but it’s true. Lizzie tried to get her to sit with them this morning, but she blanked her. I can only apologise in advance if Lizzie’s upset by that.”
“She might be,” replies Laura, shrugging, “who knows? She’s hard to predict. But there’s no need for you to apologise. Teenagers aren’t always easy to like. I mean, you love your kids, always, but you don’t always like them. They’re two different emotions.”
“I’m starting to realise that,” I answer, chasing the last chunk of sponge around the plate. “I mean, I love her to bits, and my heart breaks for her, it really does. But this morning, when I watched the school bus trundle off down the street, I felt … God may well strike me down for this, but I felt relieved to see the back of her! Tell me honestly – does that make me evil?”
Laura laughs, and tucks a stray curl – the green one – behind her ear.
“And why do you have one strand of green hair?” I add, as I don’t think she’ll mind.
“Oh! Well, the hair thing was to go with the bridesmaid’s dress I wore for Cherie’s wedding on Christmas Eve. That was quite the party, I can tell you – the whole of Budbury was there, as well as some visitors from Scotland and Australia, all over. Frank’s first wife, Bessy, died a few years ago, and she always used to cook him burnt bacon butties and thick tea for his breakfast – so after she’d gone, he started coming here for brekkie, and Cherie started making it for him. Then me.
“It’s a bit like that, here – everyone has their comfort foods, at least the locals do, and we make sure we supply it … Sam likes Pot Noodles because it reminds him of his home in Ireland; Scrumpy Joe – the werewolf – likes almond biscotti because it reminds him of his Italian grandmother … and Edie May … well, that’s a long story.
“So, I did have some pink hair – the result of a close encounter between me, a bottle of wine, and Willow’s hair dye – and then it was green for the wedding. Who knows what could happen next?”
I nod, taking all of this in, and wondering what my comfort food would be … there wasn’t much from my childhood, that’s for sure. Bizarrely, my fondest memories are probably from Barbara’s kitchen – much as she disliked my friendship with her precious Kate, she did occasionally feed me, and did a mean Shepherd’s Pie. I make a mental note to give her a call later – or, as I’m not that self-sacrificing, maybe just send her a text.
“And as for your other question …” she says, confusing me – I’ve already forgotten asking it – “the one about you being evil for feeling relieved to see the back of Martha? Well, no, Zoe – it just makes you human. It’s one of those closely-guarded secrets of motherhood – we all feel it sometimes, but none of us let on in case it makes us look like terrible parents. Even when they’re little and cute – like Saul over there, with his mum Katie – you need time away. A break, where you can just breath and try and remember who you were before kids arrived on the scene. And when they’re teenagers, it’s even harder – they can be so bloody …”
She struggles to find a word, so I step in: “Annoying?”
“Yes!” she says, banging her hand on the table in agreement. “And irritating.”
“And contrary.”
“And exhausting … keeping up with a teenaged girl, all the stresses and dramas and mind-games, is like running seven marathons in a row, while wearing a Chewbacca outfit. It’s no wonder we all need a drink at the end of the night! And that’s just a normal teenager – never mind the ones who’ve gone through the mill. The ones like Lizzie, and Martha, who have every reason to lash out sometimes.”
I’m looking at Saul and Katie as we talk. He is cute – chubby and blonde – but he is also now repeatedly hitting his poor mother on the side of the head with a wooden spoon. I’m not sure how cute he is once I notice that.
“Martha,” I say, wishing I had some coffee, “is lashing out a lot. At me, at school, at the whole world really. One of the main reasons I made the move here was to give her a chance to slow down. She was racing off at 100 miles per hour all over the place. There was a lot of alcohol, definitely smoking, undoubtedly some drug use – hopefully low level, please don’t worry that she’ll be dealing smack at the school car park! – and a lot of sneaking out and hanging round with older kids, going to places she shouldn’t be. She even got brought home by the police one night.”
“Ah! Sounds familiar – hang on, I’ll be right back,” Laura replies, getting to her feet as though she’s read my mind, and fetching over a coffee pot and two mugs. On the way, she tops up Katie’s cup, gently taking the wooden spoon out of Saul’s hand as she leaves, and offers more to the walkers.
When she’s settled back down, and I am nose-deep in caffeine, she continues: “Sounds familiar because my sister Becca was exactly like that when she was a kid. The local police and A&E triage nurse were on first-name terms with my parents for a while. It was all sex, drugs and rock and roll with her.”
“Becca?” I say, recalling an enormously fat Mummy with a hula-hoop lodged on her stomach. “The pregnant one?”
“Yep – but she’s not like that now, obviously! These days her idea of a wild night in is watching Poldark while she drops some Rennies …”
“That sounds pretty good actually …”
“I know, right? He can scythe my garden any time! Anyway, she’s all cleaned up these days. She was before she met Sam, and before they made Binky. Turns out she had her reasons to lash out as well, we just didn’t know it at the time.”
“Right,” I say, knowing it’s nosy but unable to stop myself. “And how long did that take? For Becca to clean up her act, I mean?”
“Oh … well … you shouldn’t judge Martha by Becca’s past, I’m sure Martha will be an entirely different kettle of cod …”
“How long?”
“Um … about 14 years or so? But hey! Becca never does anything by halves – even visiting me, here. She couldn’t just visit … she had to go and fall in love and get up the duff, didn’t she? It’s just the way she’s made, and I wouldn’t change her for the world. I’m sure one day, you’ll be able to look at Martha and say that, too.”
Oh Lord, I think, clasping my hands around the hot mug of coffee and considering drowning myself in it. If it’s going to take Martha 14 years to clean up her act, I might as well. I don’t have the stamina to last that long.