Summer at the Comfort Food Cafe. Debbie Johnson

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       Chapter 4

      We drive down the M6 without a single mojito incident and very little conversation. It’s quiet on the roads – due to most normal people being asleep – and even quieter in the car.

      I combat this by playing Meatloaf’s Greatest Hits very loud and singing along to ‘Bat Out Of Hell’, including all the motorbike-revving noises near the end. I’d do air guitar to the solos, but that’s probably against the Highway Code. I can just imagine the signs: cartoons of Meatloaf with a big red cross through his face.

      Nate frowns a little at my performance and I hear an exasperated sigh emitted from the back seat. Even the dog lets out a half-hearted woof. Everyone’s a critic.

      I choose to ignore them, as that’s what they’ve been doing to me for the last few hours. Obviously, once I decide on this particular path of action, Lizzie has something to say. Initially, I don’t hear her because of my singing. I’ve had three more black coffees since we first set off, so I feel totally wired and perfectly capable of appearing before a sell-out crowd at Wembley.

      ‘What?’ I shout, pausing the track when I realise she’s speaking.

      ‘Do you know,’ says Lizzie, who I see in the rear-view mirror is still staring at her screen, probably googling ‘ways to divorce your parent, ‘that this song is about dying in a terrible crash? Don’t you think that’s tempting fate a bit as we’re driving to the end of the world at 600 miles per hour?’

      ‘We’re not driving to the end of the world, we’re driving to Dorset,’ I reply. ‘And I think you’ll find that not only was Meatloaf on a motorbike, he was hitting the highway like a battering ram. We are in a ten-year-old Citroen Picasso and I barely ever leave the slow lane in case Jimbo suddenly needs a wee.’

      Jimbo is the dog. He’s the third black lab that David owned – his parents had Jimbo and Jambo when we were little; then a new puppy called Jambo the Second, who died just after we got married. After that, they didn’t want any more – they were very busy with their cruise club – so we took over, with Jimbo the Second. Poor Jimbo is almost thirteen now, completely grey around the muzzle and round as a barrel. He mainly sleeps, snores and snuffles, occasionally punctuated by moments of vast and unexpected energy, where he chases imaginary rabbits and scares much younger dogs.

      He’s a lovely beast, with very eloquent eyebrows and a powerful tail that can sweep a table clean when he’s feeling happy. He’s already on tablets for his arthritis and his heart isn’t brilliant, and he has all sorts of lumps and bumps that so far haven’t been anything serious.

      I know he’s not going to be around forever and secretly fear that when he finally goes I’ll have some kind of nervous breakdown. That all my carefully managed grief and sadness will come spilling forth and drown me in emotion. That I’ll start crying in the vet’s surgery and everyone will be washed out, down the street, like they’re on some kind of weird water-park ride made of widow’s tears. Which sounds like the kind of water park Tim Burton would design.

      I have had way too much coffee, it seems.

      Lizzie doesn’t reply to my defence of Meatloaf as a valid driving-song choice. I see that she has put her ear buds back in and is now pretending to be asleep. So much for that brief detente. I glance to my side. Nate is gazing out of the window, head lolling, eyelids heavy. He looks about three years old and my heart constricts a little, remembering a time when he was. The very best of days.

      I press play again, but turn the sound down, just in case Nate does want to drift off. It’s not his fault his crazy mother got him up at stupid o’clock to drag him to the far reaches of the country for the whole summer. It’s not Lizzie’s fault, either, and I get why she’s angry.

      She didn’t want to come. She’s fourteen. Her friends are her world and I have the suspicion there’s a boy on the scene as well. There usually is at that age. David died during her first year at high school, so she got off to a rocky start. She was the Girl With The Dead Dad for ages, subject to the same mix of pity and fear that being bereaved always seems to provoke in people.

      It’s taken us all a long time to get anything like equilibrium back, and hers seems to be wrapped up with her pals, with angsty rock music and with black eye liner. So, no, Lizzie really didn’t want to come to a small village in the countryside, even if I did try and sell it as a very long holiday.

      She even asked if she could stay at my sister’s instead, which upset me so much I had to fake an urgent need for the toilet and lock myself in the loo while I wept. This is something I do quite a lot these days, as her tongue gets sharper and her hormones get louder and I fail to get any tougher.

      She’s seen enough of me crying to last a lifetime, I’m sure – and it’s better she thinks I’m suffering from IBS than continues to see me soggy. Anyway, getting your feelings hurt by your teenage daughter seems to be par for the course from what I remember. I can still recall the door slamming and the eye rolling and the telling my mum she just didn’t understand.

      Now I’m getting payback from my own daughter. I suppose it’s all part of the great circle of life, but not the kind they sing about in the Lion King.

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