A Gift from the Comfort Food Café: Celebrate Christmas in the cosy village of Budbury with the most heartwarming read of 2018!. Debbie Johnson

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ