Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2018

Copyright © Debbie Johnson 2018

Cover illustrations © Hannah George/Meiklejohn

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Debbie Johnson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book 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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008258856

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008258863

Version: 2018-09-10

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part 1: On Your Marks …

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part 2: Get Set …

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

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Part 3 – Go?

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Debbie Johnson

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Barbara Tomkinson (and Tinkerbell!)

PART 1: ON YOUR MARKS …

Chapter 1

My name is Katie Seddon. I am seven years old, and I am preparing to run away.

This is the first time, but it won’t be the last.

It is Christmas Day, and I have gathered together all of the essentials, which include the following: a selection of gifts, including my mermaid Barbie, a colouring book and felt tip pens, a musical jewellery box with a wind-up dancing ballerina inside it, fluffy pink ear muffs, elf bed socks and a four-pack of custard creams wrapped in cellophane. The biscuits weren’t under the tree that morning; I pinched them from the kitchen.

I look at my stash, and decide that I am ready for all that life can throw at me.

I pack my haul into my Toy Story backpack, and decide I will take a trip to infinity and beyond. Or at least to my grandma’s house. She only lives two streets away, so it isn’t exactly an intergalactic space quest.

I sit on my bed, and pause after I’ve zipped everything up. I wonder if my mum and dad will hear me as I sneak downstairs, get my raincoat, and leave – but a few seconds sitting with my head cocked to one side, listening to them scream at each other, reassures me that they won’t.

I can only make out the odd word, and I’ve learned already not to try too hard. I won’t hear anything good. It’s a cacophony of shrieks and yells and thuds as they chase each other around the living room. The bangs of ashtrays being thrown and high-pitched swearing and the crash of plates are all perfectly normal to me. They’re part of the soundtrack of my childhood; a reverse lullaby that keeps me awake and scared instead of sleepy and secure.

Looking back, with more complex thought processes than I possessed at seven, I know they are one of those couples who base their whole relationship on mutual contempt. On a good day, they tolerate each other. On a bad one, the only emotion in their eyes is hatred and bitterness. The overwhelming disappointment of what their lives have become.

I know now it’s not uncommon – and that their conflicts were the glue that held them together. Maybe when they first met it was exciting. Maybe they thought the arguments were passionate. Maybe the first few serious rows were put down to fire and spice. Maybe they were different when they were young, and thought they were in love – but now, with my dad in a dead-end job and Mum stuck at home, it’s not passion. It’s fury.

At the age of seven, I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know what’s going on in the big, nasty grown-up world – but I do know that I’ve had enough. That this is the worst Christmas ever. That they’re both really, really mean when they fight. Dad is bigger and physically stronger, but Mum is like a wasp, constantly zooming in to sting him. It’s horrible, and I’m leaving. Forever.

I tiptoe down the stairs and creep out of the house really quietly, although I needn’t have bothered – they’ve reached critical mass by this stage and wouldn’t pause if I did a conga through the living room wearing my flashing neon Rudolph deely-boppers. Which I am wearing, by the way – I’ve decided they will help me stay safe outside in the dark.

The walk to my grandma’s is a bit scary. I’ve done it before, loads of times, but only with grown-ups. This time I am doing it alone, at night, and with nobody to hold my hand when I’m crossing the road. I’m a good girl, and do as I’ve been taught, waiting for the green man to come on at the traffic lights even though there are no cars at all. Mum sometimes goes when the red man is on, but she says that’s all right for adults.

I knock on my grandma’s door, and she opens it wearing her quilted dressing gown and tartan slippers. She lets me in without any questions at all. I realise now it’s because she didn’t have to ask – she knew exactly what was going on in my house, and exactly why I needed a refuge. A place to shelter from the storm of my parents’ toxic relationship.

My nan was a very kind woman, and she always smelled of Parma Violets. To this day I still find it comforting whenever they turn up in a big bag of Swizzels. Halloween can be a bittersweet experience.

She settles me down with a bowl of custard-soaked jam roly-poly that she warms up in the microwave, and makes me a mug of instant hot chocolate. She even lets me sit in the big armchair that has the button that makes the footrest go up, tucked under a blanket. I hear her on the phone, but I’m so comfy and cosy and happy I’m not remotely interested in who she’s talking to. The room is lit by the twinkles of her small plastic Christmas tree, and all is well with the world.

When she comes back into the room, she’s all wrinkled smiles and loveliness, and we watch an episode of ER together. It’s an exciting one, with a big fire and lots of drama. It may even have been that early brush with Nurse Carol Hathaway that planted the seeds of my later career.

By the time my mum drags herself away from her fight, Nan has put me to bed at her house. I’m in the spare room, which used to be Mum’s when she was little and still has a giant cuddly lion in it that’s big enough to sit on.

I lie scrunched up beneath the duvet, warm and full, and hear them talking down below. It’s one of those little terraced houses with the staircase right off the living room, so the noise carries. Mum sounds tearful and her voice is wobbling and going up and down, like your voice does when you’re trying to keep a cry in and can’t breathe properly. Nan is telling her to leave me here for the night, and to stay herself as well. Telling her to consider staying for good – to finally leave him.

‘There’s never going to be a happy ending here, Sandra. You’ve both given it your best, but enough’s enough, love,’ she says, and I hear how sad she sounds. Sometimes I forget that my mum is my nan’s little girl as well as my mum. Weird.

I wake up the next morning with my mum in bed with me, curled around me like a soft, protective spoon. She’s already awake, watching me as I sleep, gently moving my blonde hair from my face. For a moment, all is well in the world.

Then I see that her eyes are all crusted together where she’d been crying, and her face is all puffed up, and she has finger-shaped bruises on the tops of her arms like small purple paw-marks. I burrow into her, and give her a cuddle – she looks like she needs one.

Chapter 2

The second time I run away, with any serious intent, I am fourteen. I’ve been staying with my nan most weekends, to the point where it is my second home. Mum and Dad are still at it, the years giving them more frown lines but no extra restraint.

The fights don’t get physical quite as often, but I still sometimes find the remnants of shattered crockery in the kitchen in the morning, or a mysteriously put-in window pane in the living room door, glass scattered on the floor in glistening zig-zags as I come downstairs for school.

I always creep down quietly, hoping they’re still sleeping it off, praying for a peaceful bowl of cornflakes before I leave. I’ve learned to tread carefully in our house, in all kinds of ways.

The year I turn fourteen, though, things change. They change because my nan dies, and my escape hatch is gone. It’s sudden and unexpected – a complication of diabetes. All those Parma Violets, I suppose. I am grieving and in pain and swamped with guilt – because as well as missing her, I am worried about myself as well. About how I’ll cope without her, and her kind smiles, and our cosy nights in watching ER and Casualty and Holby City, talking about nothing but saying such a lot.

Mum and Dad had gone out for a meal together, a pre-Christmas ‘date night’. As usually happens on those rare occasions, what started off well was ending with a row. Something to do with him drinking four pints of cider even though he was supposed to be the one driving, I don’t know.

The verbal missiles start as soon as they walk in, and had obviously been fired first on the journey home from their romantic night out. I make a sharp exit, stage left, not really knowing where I’m going or what I’m going to do when I get there.

They don’t even see me, and I stand outside the house on the driveway for a few moments, looking in at their drama unfolding. It’s dark, and it’s almost Christmas, and their row takes a festive turn when Dad gives Mum a mighty push as she screams at him. It’s not a push with intent – more of a push to get an irritating insect out of his face.

She loses her balance and topples backwards, staggering for a few steps before she finally lands sprawling in the middle of the Christmas tree, taking it down with her.

I stay rooted to the spot for a few seconds, just to make sure she isn’t, you know, dead or anything – but am strangely reassured to see her climb back up from the fake-pine branches, strewn in red and green tinsel. She’s grabbed the nearest weapon to hand – the star off the top of the tree – and is brandishing it like a shiv in a jailhouse movie, threatening to poke his eye out.

Okay, I think. God bless you merry gentlemen, and away I go. It’s very cold, and the streets are giddy with pitching snow and slow-moving cars inching through slush. I’m wearing a hoody and leggings, which isn’t really enough. I haven’t packed as well as I did last time, not even a spare pair of bed socks.

I wander the streets a little, wondering if I could hitchhike to London without getting murdered or locked in someone’s cellar, before my feet finally take me where I probably knew I was going all along.

I sit on the kerb outside my nan’s old house, ice-cold snow immediately soaking through the seat of my leggings, and rest my chin in my hands as I stare across the street.

Someone else lives there now, of course. The house was sold within a couple of months of her dying, which will always, always piss me off. I’m a teenager now, so I swear a lot more than I did when I was seven. And this? Imposters in her home? That pisses me off. It should have been kept as some kind of museum. At least had a blue plaque outside it. Instead, it’s like she was never even there.

I pull the cord of my hoody to make it tighter around my face, and look in through the front window. I see their brightly lit Christmas tree, and the cosy room, and occasionally even see a woman walking around, carrying a baby. I have no idea who they are, but I resent them. It might not be their fault that she died, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. The people who live there are pissing me off as well.

I’m so sick of my parents’ dramas. Sick of the tension, of not knowing when it’s all going to kick off again. There was a temporary lull after Nan died, and both of them were on their best behaviour, but it didn’t last.

Sometimes it comes after a flash point; sometimes it comes after days of simmering anger and snide comments and ‘your dinner’s in the dog’ sniping. He’ll go straight to the pub after work; she’ll sit at home planning her revenge.

And I know now – because my mother has said it to me – that I am apparently the cause of their determined grip on marital misery.

‘We didn’t want you to come from a broken home,’ she said – as though this was better. As though me bearing witness to a state of warfare throughout my childhood is beneficial, rather than filling me with dread.

I wade through a state of constant nervous energy every time I come home from school, standing in the hallway with my coat still on, weighing up the mood of the house, deciding whether I can risk venturing into the living room or if it would be better to run straight upstairs to my room, put on my headphones, and pretend none of it is happening.

So that’s how I live. Hiding in my room with my music; hiding at friends’ houses for way too many sleepovers, and running. Sometimes here, to my nan’s. Sometimes to town. Sometimes just buying a day pass for the bus and riding around all day.

It’s not an easy balance, and as soon as I am old enough, I go away to college to study nursing. I choose a college far enough away that I have to live in the halls, and think I have found paradise. Other teenagers are homesick – I’m just relieved. Relieved to have my own space, my own place, my own peace and quiet. Relieved to be alone.

Chapter 3

By the time I am in my twenties, I’m sharing my own space and my own place and I don’t have much peace and quiet any more. I’m definitely, 100 per cent not alone, either.

In fact, the third time I run away, I’m a grown woman, with a six-month-old baby, a job, a rented flat, and a boyfriend who never really wanted to be a dad.

That time, I run away for good. That time, I run away because of yet another screaming row – with Jason, my boyfriend.

It isn’t pretty. These things never are. When we met, he was working as a hospital porter, and I was a nurse. At the time, I suppose I thought we fell in love – but now I see it for what it was. A lot of lust, some laughs, and a strange sense that this was what I was supposed to be doing. That women of my age should be looking to find ‘the one’ and building a relationship.

It was never, ever right between us, but when I got pregnant, we both pretended it was. Because everyone knows that having a newborn baby is really easy, and completely papers over the cracks in any relationship, don’t they?

Of course, it didn’t make anything better. It made everything worse. The flat was too small. We didn’t have enough money. We were too young, and didn’t have a clue what we were doing. Mainly, I think, we just didn’t like each other very much.

While I was pregnant, we were able to pretend much better. We went to Ikea and laughed as we built cots from Swedish instructions and cooed over tiny little baby-grows. He said he’d give up drinking while I was pregnant, and even managed it for a couple of weeks.

After our son, Saul, arrived, the tensions started to build. I never slept. Jason was working extra shifts. When we did see each other, we were both filled with seething resentments – me because I was stuck at home, him because when he did get home, all I did was moan and nag.

The only good thing about any of it was the baby. He was perfect – caught between us, this chubby-faced, blond-haired angel who I always secretly thought we didn’t deserve.

The night of the screaming row, I am especially tired. I’ve been on my own for so long, I’ve started talking to the kettle. It isn’t answering yet, but in my delirious state of fatigue, it’s only a matter of time.

Saul is teething and crying and irritable. Jason has been doing extra shifts to cover for other people’s Christmas leave, and I am watching the big hand crawl around the clock in the kitchen, counting the minutes until I can hand Saul over and collapse onto my bed and cry silently into my pillow for a few moments, wondering what happened to my life.

We’re out of nappies, and Jason is supposed to be getting some on the way home. Except he doesn’t come home – not for another two hours. And when he does, he smells of lager and cigarettes and Calvin Klein’s Obsession, which is a perfume I definitely don’t wear. In fact the only perfume I wear these days is baby sick and desperation.

I could overlook all of that if he’d even remembered the nappies – but of course he hasn’t. He has, though, remembered to pick up six cans of Fosters and a bad attitude.

I yell. He yells. We both say things we will regret, but also probably mean. It gets louder, and hotter, and angrier. We’re both like subterranean geysers, all of our frustrations rising to the surface in one big, scalding explosion.

I pick up the nearest thing I can find – a dirty nappy – and lob it at Jason’s head. He retaliates by slapping me so hard across the face I feel the red sting marks shine immediately.

We’re both stunned into silence by this; me standing still, holding my stinging cheek, him staring at me, shaking his head, stammering apologies.

I’m so sorry, he says. I don’t know what came over me, he says. It’ll never happen again, he promises. He is full of remorse, full of regret, full of instant self-loathing. In a strange way, I almost feel sorry for him – our situation has revealed a side of himself he probably never knew existed.

I am hurt, and shaken, and weirdly relieved. It’s like we’ve finally pushed ourselves over an abyss that we can’t climb out of. I don’t feel scared, oddly – I can tell he won’t do it again. Not this time, anyway.

I’m trying to make words come out of my mouth when I notice Saul. Saul, my beautiful son, who has been sitting in his baby chair, in a dirty nappy and a Baby’s First Christmas vest, watching all of this unfold.

His blue eyes are wide and wet, his pudgy fists held to his ears trying to block out the noise, so scared and confused he is screaming as well. He’s probably been screaming for a while – but neither of us noticed, because we were too lost in our own drama.

I rush to the baby to comfort him, and know that I will be running away again sometime soon – not for my sake, but for Saul’s. Maybe even for Jason’s.

Now, when I look back using the magical power of hindsight, it feels like so many of the important moments in my life – like that one – involve running away. I could draw a time-map of when things started to go wrong, and add in a cartoon figure of myself zooming off in the opposite direction, vapour trails behind me.

The problem with all of these memories – all of these actions and reactions and inactions and overreactions – isn’t really the running away. The problem is, I never had any clue what I was running towards, and usually found myself blown around by the breeze, like the fluff from one of those wispy dandelion heads, without any sense of direction and no control over my own movements.

Now, a few years have passed. Saul will be four on his next birthday, and life is very different. I’m less of a dandelion-head, and am trying very hard to take root.

It’s different because the last time I ran away, I ran here – to a little place called Budbury, on the picture-postcard perfect coast of Dorset. I have a job. I have a tiny house. I have friends, who I’ve reluctantly allowed into my life. I have a community, in the Comfort Food Café that is the heart of the village. I have peace, and quiet, and most importantly, I have a gorgeously healthy little boy. Who definitely disrupts the quiet, but in a good way.

I have more than I could ever have imagined – and this time, I won’t be running anywhere. This time, I am breaking all the cycles.

This time, I’m staying put – no matter how complicated it gets.

Chapter 4

This year, Christmas Eve night

I’ve had enough. My head is pounding, and my eyes are sore, and every inch of my body from my scalp to my toes feels like it’s clenched up in tension.

All I can hear is the screaming, rising in shrieks and peaks above the sound of festive music, a playlist of carols I have on my phone to try and drown it all out. The mix is horrendous: the sublime choruses of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ alternating with yells of abuse.

Saul is sleeping, but restlessly, in that way that children will – I can see his eyes moving around under his lids, and his little fists are clenched, and every now and then his legs jerk, like a dreaming dog. It’s the night before Christmas – maybe he’s thinking about Santa, flying over the rooftops in his sleigh. I hope so, anyway. I hope he’s not about to wake up, and hear all the rowing, and the banging, and voices. I worked hard to protect him from this, but it’s chased me down, rooted me out.

I’m in my own little house, but I don’t feel safe here any more. I’m in my own little house, and there are too many voices. Too much conflict. I’m in my own little house, and I’m hiding upstairs, cowering beneath the bed sheets, paralysed by it all.

I’m in my own little house, and I have to get out. I have to get away. I have to run.

PART 2: GET SET …

Chapter 5

Six weeks earlier

It’s the weekend. Saturday, in fact. But as anyone with young children knows, kids have absolutely zero respect for the sacred concept of ‘the lie-in’.

Saul has always been high-energy. I mean, I don’t have a lot to compare it to, but even the other little boys at the playgroups we’ve attended, and at his pre-school in the next village over, seem like they’re on sedatives next to him.

He’s a force of nature. A bundle of energy. A whirling dervish in Paw Patrol pyjamas – and he never stops talking. I know this is good – he has a crazy vocabulary for his age – but sometimes I remember the days when he couldn’t speak or move oh so fondly. I am such a bad mother.

Right now, I’m lying in bed, in what my friend Lynnie calls the ‘corpse pose’. Lynnie is in her sixties and has Alzheimer’s – but no matter how much she declines, she always seems to remember her past life as a yoga instructor. Saul adores her, and she’s even managed to get him into downward dog on a few occasions – sometimes for literally whole seconds.

It hasn’t turned him into a zen master though – and he seems to think that 5.45 a.m. is the perfect time to come and climb into bed with me.

We live together in a teeny-tiny terraced house in the centre of Budbury village. There’s only one road, which runs through the village like a ribbon, lined with a few shops and a pub, a community centre and a pet cemetery and a couple of dozen little houses. They’re quite old, and face straight into the pavement, and were probably built for fishermen in ye olde days of yore.

Several of my friends – regulars at the Comfort Food Café, a few minutes’ walk away on the clifftops – live on the same road. I used to feel a bit claustrophobic, living so close to people who were keen to be friends. I used to feel like the only way I could be independent and safe was to be alone. Sometimes, I still feel like that – but I try to beat it down with a big stick, because it’s really not healthy, is it?

So, I know from my horribly early visit to the bathroom, in the grey pre-dawn November light, roughly what else they’re all up to. Edie May, who is 92 and has almost as much energy as Saul, is still tucked up in bed, bless her.

Zoe and Cal, along with Cal’s daughter Martha, also still seem to be a-slumber. Martha’s 17, and from what I recall from that state of being, mornings are not to be touched at weekends. Lucky swines.

In fact, I can see lights on in only one other house – the one where Becca and Sam live. They have a baby girl – Little Edie – who has just turned one. She’s utterly adorable and they both dote on her – but she’s not one of life’s sleepers.

Seeing them awake, and imagining Sam bleary-eyed and zombified as he tries to entertain Little Edie, makes me feel slightly better. There’s no snooze button on a baby – he’ll be up, and surrounded by plastic objects in primary colours, and elbow-deep in nappies. Ha ha.

Saul doesn’t have a snooze button either – but he is easier to distract. This morning, by 6 a.m., I am not only in corpse pose – I am playing Beauty Parlour.

This is one of Saul’s favourite games, and I have no idea where he picked it up. None of the women in Budbury are exactly dedicated followers of fashion.

Willow, one of Lynnie’s daughters, has a pretty unique style that involves a lot of home-made clothes and a nose ring and bright pink hair. The teenagers – Martha and her pal Lizzie – definitely wear a lot of eyeliner. But there isn’t a beauty parlour in the village – or possibly even in the twenty-first century. Even the words sound like something from the 1950s, and bring to mind those big space-alien dryers women sit beneath in old movies, before they go on a hot date with Cary Grant.

Anyway – I don’t know where he got it from, but I’m glad he did. It’s a game that can be played with me entirely immobile. The very best kind of game.

He’s gathered my make-up bag and a collection of hairbrushes and slides and bobbles; even some hairspray and perfume. In all honesty, I rarely even use any of it, but like most women I’ve somehow managed to amass a gigantic pile of half-used cosmetics and hair products to clutter up the house for no good reason.

He’s sitting cross-legged next to me, blond hair scrunched up on one side and perfectly flat on the other, working away with the foundation. I didn’t know I even owned foundation, and I suspect it’s some deep tan-coloured gunk I used after a sunny holiday in Majorca when I was twenty-one. He’s blending it in with all the gentleness of Mike Tyson, but I don’t care.

It’s allowing me to stay in bed, so I just make the odd encouraging noise, and keep my eyes closed really tight when he starts on the eyeshadow. I ban him from mascara though, as I’d actually like to keep my vision.

‘You’re looking so beautiful, Mummy,’ he says, when he pauses to inspect his work so far. ‘But I think you need to highlight your cheekbones a bit more. I’ll use some blusher.’

‘Okay,’ I mutter, half asleep. Where is he getting this stuff?

I hear the lids getting screwed off various pots, and know from his sharp inhalation of breath that he’s probably just spilled something. In fact, the whole duvet cover will likely be covered in powders and lotions – but hey, that’s what washing machines were made for, right?

He pokes at me with his fingers, rubbing in what I know will be two great big clown-like spots on the side of my face, before sighing in satisfaction. Lipstick is next, after he’s instructed me to make a ‘kissy mouth’ first. I bet I’m looking really sexy.

I glance through slitted eyes at the clock, and see that it is now 6.20 a.m. Wow. A massive lie-in.

‘How’s it going?’ I ask, stifling a yawn.

‘Really good. Really pretty. I think I might be finished. Shall we get up so we can watch cartoons before we go to the café for breakfast?’

Ugggh. Cartoons. I shrivel and die a little inside, and make a new suggestion: ‘Hey – why don’t you go and get my nail varnishes and you can do my fingers and toes?’

That fills in the next half an hour, and completely finishes off the duvet cover. I must admit he does a quite good job though, and am still admiring my brand-new multi-coloured fingers a little while later, when he is safely installed on the sofa watching shows on CBBC, shoving chunks of sliced-up banana into his mouth and laughing at the antics of a cartoon mouse who goes to school.

I put the duvet cover in the washer, and change it out for a new one – it’s getting colder now anyway, and I’m already looking forward to snuggling up beneath the clean brushed cotton later. I live a wild and crazy life, what can I say?

I catch up on a bit of coursework for college – I’m trying to keep my nursing skills up to date, and since I met Lynnie, I’ve become a lot more interested in community mental health – and organise some files. I do some ironing, in a vain attempt to get prepared for the week ahead, and I check my emails. Apart from being contacted by a Nigerian prince offering me an unbeatable investment opportunity, there’s nothing.

My phone shows three missed calls from my mum, but I can’t quite face that conversation just yet. It’s never fun, getting Mum’s weekly updates on what terrible crime Dad has committed recently. I love them both, but it’s like being trapped between two angry pit bulls. Except with more spite and slobber.

I intermittently check in with Saul, making sure he’s not eating the coffee table or swinging from the light fittings, and eventually take him upstairs to get ready for the day ahead. He’s excited to go to the café, and I can’t say that I blame him – it’s become like a second home to us. A home that always has cake.

It’s his favourite place in the whole world. I think it might just be mine too.

Chapter 6

The Comfort Food Café is like no place else on earth. It’s set on the top of a cliff on the gorgeous coastline, surrounded by the sea on one side and rolling green hills on the other.

You reach it by climbing up a long and winding path, and enter through a wrought-iron archway that spells out its name in an embroidery made of metal roses. Even the archway is pretty and welcoming.

The building itself is low and sprawling, and set in its own higgledy-piggledy garden. There are tables and benches that get packed in summer, as well as a barbecue area, a terrace, and as of this year, the adjoining Comfort Reads bookshop.

The bookshop is open by the time we get there, and Zoe – short, ginger, slim – waves at us through the window. She’s sitting on her stool behind the till, a paperback propped up on her knees. Saul squeaks when he sees her, as the last time we were here she produced a Gruffalo mug for him.

Zoe moved here last year with her god-daughter Martha, who is seventeen now, after her mother died. It’s not been an easy ride for them, but they’re settled now – along with Cal, Martha’s biological dad, who she’d never even met before last Christmas as he lived in Australia. Yeah, I know – if Budbury had a Facebook page, it would need to set its relationship status to ‘It’s Complicated’.

I don’t think anyone here is simple, or straightforward, or has had an especially traditional life. It’s one of the reasons it’s sucked me in, to be honest – these are people who lived through a lot, survived to tell the tale, and now seem to see it as their life’s mission to make other people happy while feeding them carrot cake.

There’s even some kind of weird vibe where they match people up with their favourite comfort foods – like me and jam roly-poly, which always reminds me of my nan. I must have mentioned it at some point, but I don’t remember when – all I know is when I’m especially down or tired, that’s what will be waiting for me there, even if it’s not on the menu.

I still vividly remember the first time I came here. It was a couple of weeks after we’d made the move to Dorset – after leaving Jason, I lived with my parents for a while, but I soon realised that was a mistake. I knew I needed to get away properly, and started looking for a place with enough distance for a fresh start, but close enough to Bristol for me to get back and see my parents, and potentially for Saul to see his dad, if that’s how things played out. It’s not, but such is life.

Mum, amazingly, helped me find the money to move here – something to do with a ‘nest egg’ that my nan had left – but it took some sorting. Jason resisted initially, made some half-hearted attempts to persuade me to come back, but it felt hollow and fake – we were better off without each other, and we both knew it. Eventually he moved himself as well, all the way to Glasgow – fresh starts all round.

It was harder than I thought, though, leaving. Setting up on my own in a new place where I knew nobody, with a baby. I’d thought it was what I needed – but I didn’t factor in how lonely I’d feel in those first few weeks. I had to stop myself from giving in, from calling my parents or Jason, from back-sliding.

Saul was almost eighteen months by that stage, and bloody hard work. I can say it now, because I’m his mum and it’s in the past – but he was actually a bit of a demon child. Endless energy, constant battles, the terrible twos way before his birthday. I was exhausted, running on empty, and secretly convinced that my own child hated me. I had no idea how I was going to cope.

Then, one morning, I came here. To the café. Out of sheer desperation, really – the need to get out of the house and at least be in some proximity to the rest of the world. I was sitting there, Saul busily throwing bread soldiers at my head and mashing his egg up like it was his mortal enemy, feeling washed out and fatigued to the edge of insanity.

A woman I now know as Becca came up to me, and brought me toast. Not Saul – me. Then another lady, who I’d thought was a customer but turned out to be the owner of the café, Cherie Moon, came and took Saul away. She’s a big woman, Cherie, tall and robust, in her seventies with a weather-beaten face and wrinkles she wears with pride. She has a lot of long hair that she often has bundled up into a grey-streaked plait, and she has so much confidence that it practically oozes out of her.

Anyone else, I’d have worried about handing the baby over – more for their sake than his – but I just instinctively knew that Cherie could handle it. She’d walked him around the room, while I ate my toast and actually drank a hot beverage before it was lukewarm, and the sense of relief I felt was astonishing. In fact I had to disappear off to the toilets for a minute to compose myself – by which I mean sob relentlessly into wadded-up tissue paper.

These random acts of kindness – aimed at me, a complete stranger – were my introduction to the café. To the village. To the community that now, almost two years on, I am starting to dare to call my own.

It’s taken a long time, because I am wary and stubborn and always cautious about random acts of kindness, but I understand it all better now. This place is like the island of misfit toys, and someone is always on hand with a sticking plaster and a spoonful of medicine for the soul.

These days, our lives are tied up with theirs in ways I could never have anticipated. The café gang help me out with childcare. I help them out with other things. We all look out for each other. It’s like a big, tangled, misshapen ball of string, all directions leading to each other.

I’m still not the life and soul of any of the parties the café hosts or organises – I still dodge the big social events – but I’m getting there. Edging towards a security and comfort that I’ve never known since my nan died.

Saul thinks this place is home. He’s little – he doesn’t remember a life before it. He thinks Lynnie is his wacky granny, and Willow is a cartoon character because of her pink hair, and Cherie is the queen of the world.

He thinks Laura, who manages the café, is the cuddliest woman ever, and that Edie May is a magical tiny-faced elf who lives in a teapot.

He thinks all the men of Budbury – and there are several – are there purely to play football with him, or take him for walks on the beach, or help him hunt for fossils. He thinks the dogs of Budbury – Midgebo, Laura’s black Lab, and Bella Swan, Willow’s border terrier, and her boyfriend Tom’s Rottie cross, Rick Grimes – are his own personal pooches.

I may have left behind my parents, and Jason, but what I gained was so much bigger – a whole village of the biggest-hearted people I’ve ever met.

He’s tugging at my hand as we approach the doors, his little legs pumping as fast as they can, like a puppy straining on the lead, desperate to get inside.

Inside, where a world of fun awaits. Where the café starts to get weird. Weird in a good way. There are lots of things you’d expect to find in a café – tables covered with red gingham cloths; a big fridge full of soft drinks; a chiller cabinet crammed with sandwich platters and salads and whopping great slices of cake; a serving counter and a till. So far, so normal.

Then there are the extras. The things that immediately let you know that you’re not in Kansas any more, Toto. The multiple mobiles hanging from the ceiling, dangling home-made oddities like old vinyl singles and papier-mâché fish. Half a red kayak. The oars from a rowing boat. Fishing net tangled up with fairy lights. The shelves lined with random objects – an antique sewing machine; a giant fossil in a cabinet; rows of books and board games and puzzles.

It’s like the anti-Ikea – as though the Old Curiosity Shop got together with a tea room and had a baby. Despite the clutter, though, it all still feels fresh and clean, and is washed over with the light flooding in through the windows on all sides.

On one side, you can see into the garden. On the other, it’s the sea and the beach and the endless red-and-gold clifftops stretching off along the horizon. It’s the kind of place you can lose hours, just watching the maritime world go by.

Saul bursts through the doors and strikes a dramatic pose, his little arms raised in the air, fists clenched, as though he’s Superman about to take off.

‘Everybody, I’m here!’ he shouts, just in case they hadn’t noticed. Laura is behind the counter, round and pretty and fighting a constant losing battle with her curly hair. She pauses in her work – slicing up lemon meringue cake – and her face breaks out into a huge smile.

‘Thank goodness! I was wondering when you were going to turn up!’ she says, wiping her hands down on her apron and walking out to see us. She crouches down in front of Saul and gives him a cuddle which he returns so enthusiastically she ends up sitting on her backside, his face buried in her hair.

I start to apologise, but she looks up at me and raises an eyebrow. That’s a stern telling off from Laura, so I clamp my mouth shut.

Laura has two kids of her own – Nate and Lizzie, teenagers now – and understands children. She’s told me approximately seven thousand times that I need to stop saying I’m sorry about Saul, when he’s only doing what kids of that age do. She continues to stare at me, over the tufts of Saul’s hair, but I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong this time, so I pretend not to notice.

I look around, and see Cherie sitting at a corner table, her feet in red and green striped socks, propped up on the chair next to her. Her husband Frank, who is an 82-year-old silver fox, is sitting opposite, drinking his thick tea and reading the paper. They both look up at me, and grin widely. They must be in an extra good mood this morning.

There is an actual paying customer here, still wrapped up in walking gear, perusing a guide book as he eats his toast. The café is on the Jurassic Coast and is often populated by people in padded anoraks and woolly hats, taking a break from their treks. He glances at the commotion, briefly widens his eyes when he nods good morning to me, and goes hastily back to his maps.

I glance around. There’s nobody else here. Or at least I don’t think there is, until he walks out of the gents.

He’s tall by my standards – about six foot – but short by the standards of his own family, who are all giants. He’s bulky, with brawn he earned travelling the world digging wells and building schools in the kind of places you see on the news during droughts. His chestnut hair is cropped brutally short, and he’s wearing his usual uniform of care-worn denims and a long-sleeved jersey top.

He looks up, and our eyes meet across an un-crowded room. He has great eyes. Bright blue, on the Paul Newman spectrum. He smiles when he sees me, and I smile back, even though I feel the usual tug of anxiety I get whenever I’m around him. He’s looking half-amused, as though he’s remembering a joke someone told him on a bus some time, his gaze moving from me to Saul.

This is Van, and he’s Lynnie’s son, and Willow’s brother. He came back from his life in Africa when Lynnie took a turn for the worse in the spring, and has been working for Frank as a labourer ever since. I wait, knowing that Saul will spot him as soon as he’s emerged from Laura’s hair.

Right on cue, I see my son look up and around, his eyes widening in excitement when he sees him walking towards us.

‘Van! Van! Mummy, Van is here, look!’ he squeals, leaving Laura lying on the floor, abandoned and forgotten, and me in a cloud of dust as he runs towards him. Van braces – this has happened many times before – catches him in his arms, scoops him up, and swings him around and around in a dizzying circle.

All I can hear is the ecstatic chuckling of my little boy as he whirls and flies through the air, shrieking for it to stop in a way that suggests he really doesn’t want it to. Laura looks on and grins. Cherie and Frank look on and laugh. Even the random walker stifles a smile.

It’s the kind of thing that makes everyone who sees it happy – an innocent expression of pure, unadulterated joy.

Everyone apart from me, I suspect. It doesn’t make me happy. It makes me nervous. It makes me want to grab Saul back from him, and run away all over again. I vowed I wouldn’t, no matter how complicated it all gets – but this is a whole new level of complicated.

Because in the same way that Saul seems to think that Cherie is the queen, and Edie is a magical elf, and Willow is a cartoon character, and all the dogs belong to him, he has views about Van as well. In his world, Van seems to have become the nearest thing he has to a real-life dad.

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