Sunshine at the Comfort Food Cafe: The most heartwarming and feel good novel of 2018!. Debbie Johnson
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cover of this one is decorated with the glued-on petals of pressed flowers she’s been squashing between the pages of her weird hardback books about stone circles for days now. It’s a bright collage of cow parsley, bluebell, foxglove, wood sorrel and the beautiful pale yellow trumpets of wild daffodil. It’s like spring time has come alive on the page, and I almost expect butterflies to fly out from the folds.
She’s shielding the pages as she writes, and glancing up at me every now and then, looking slightly suspicious. One of the many joys of Alzheimer’s is that it can be so unpredictable. Some days, she’s pretty much like her old self – bouncing around with loads of energy, burning incense in the garden, telling me off for using toxic chemicals on my hair. She doesn’t mind the nose ring I sometimes wear, or the Celtic tattoos I have on my arms, but the thought of the hair dye really bugs her.
I relish those days. I love getting told off by my mum, which are words I never thought I’d hear myself say when I was a teenager. But getting told off by her means she knows exactly who I am, and who she is, and what our roles are.
Other times, it’s not so simple. It’s not always like in the movies, where she has no clue who I am – well, it is sometimes. Like when she hits me with a frying pan and tells the police I’m a burglar. But that’s relatively rare, and I can usually spot the build-up in the days before one of those episodes. A lot of the time, it’s somewhere in between – she knows she feels safe with me, and that I’m important, but isn’t 100 percent sure why.
Those days are hard on her – and on me. I can almost see her poor brain struggling to make the connection, fighting against its degeneration to put all the clues together. She seems embarrassed by it – as though she knows she’s missing something big, and it makes her feel helpless and useless and … well, just ‘less’ in general.
That’s one of the reasons the notebooks are useful. When I see her doubts, see the way she’s trying to hide her uncertainty, I can open that front page, and point to it, and watch as she reads it through. There’s always a moment when it clicks into place, when her face breaks out into a joyful smile that makes me want to weep – the moment she remembers. When she knows she is here with me, her daughter, who loves her, and who she loves in return.
Tonight, I can tell she’s not completely sure of herself. I still have an egg-shaped reminder of the frying pan incident, and am not keen to repeat it, so I quietly sit down on the chair opposite her, and casually say: ‘That’s a really beautiful notebook. Did you make that at the day centre?’
‘I did – with my friend Carole,’ she replies politely, moving fluidly into an upright position on the couch, holding the book on her knees. She’s very slim, my mum, with long, lean limbs that are still sinewy from years of yoga and exercise. Even though her hair is striped different shades of grey, it’s still thick and curly, and frames what is even now a very pretty face. She’s sixty-five, but has the kind of looks it’s hard to date – she could be anywhere between forty-five and seventy-five, depending on the light and her mood.
‘Carole’s really nice,’ I say in return. It helps if we build up gradually as we talk. ‘When I dropped you off at the centre yesterday, she was waiting outside for you, wasn’t she? I think maybe she’s had her hair done.’
‘She has! You’re right. She’s gone blonder. Do you know Carole too?’
‘I do, yes. We’re all friends. I’m glad she helped you do that new book. Did she help you fill in the first page as well? Why don’t you have a look at it?’
I can tell she’s thinking I’m a bit doo-lally – this is a common and ironic occurrence – but she indulges me, and reads over the front page.
I see her take in the words, and look at the pictures, and cast surreptitious glances across at me. I see the moment she joins the dots, and the moment when she hides the fact that she was ever confused in the first place. Like I say, she gets embarrassed, as though her problems are a sign of weakness rather than because the nerve cells in her brain are refusing to cooperate any more.
I let her believe she’s fooled me, that everything is fine – because why wouldn’t I? She doesn’t have many places to seek refuge any more. This illness is laying her bare, bit by bit, and if she finds it consoling to sometimes pretend it’s not happening, then I’m not going to be the voice of doom.
Sometimes I have to be firm – like when she decides she’s going to book a place on a yoga retreat in Nepal, or take a road trip to visit the parents she sometimes forgets are dead – but not tonight. Not right now.
‘Guess what I did today, while you were at the café?’ I say brightly, hoping to distract her from her burgeoning self-loathing.
‘I have no idea,’ she replies, crossing her legs easily into lotus, and giving me one of her glorious smiles. ‘What did you do today?’
‘I went to the House on the Hill to do some work. Do you remember it – Briarwood? Mr and Mrs Featherbottom? All the children who used to live there?’
‘Of course I remember it!’ she replies, sounding astounded that I would even question such a thing. ‘I was there over the summer last year, wasn’t I? Holding those workshops? So many precious young people, all needing so much love …’
In fact, it’s been well over a decade since she worked there – but it’s not uncommon for her timeline to get a bit mixed up. It’s like she’s living in an especially complicated episode of Quantum Leap. I know she remembers Briarwood, and remembers it fondly, because it’s one of the places on her Wanderlust List. Every now and then, she goes walkabout, often after being agitated in the late afternoon. Usually she’ll take an unplanned and unaccompanied trip back in time.
She’ll walk to the café on the clifftops, or to the Community Centre in the village, and sometimes even persuade people that they need to take part in a yoga class. I once found her in the café, putting Laura in a downward dog over breakfast. She’s tried to make it to Briarwood a few times, but as it’s quite a way off and up that big hill, she usually either gets spotted and someone calls me, or gives up and comes home, covered in mud or scratches from hedgerows. So far, no harm has come from any of this – but it is always terrifying, the realisation that she’s gone.
It leaves me wracked with guilt as well, even though logically I know that I can’t watch her twenty-four hours a day – I need sleep, and rest, or I won’t be able to function at all.
‘I think,’ I reply, gently, ‘that it might have been a bit longer ago than that, Mum. But it doesn’t matter – anyway, someone has bought the house. One of the boys who used to live there.’
‘Really?’ she asks, frowning in confusion. ‘Have Mr and Mrs Featherbottom left, then? They worked so hard, those two … but it’s a lot to ask isn’t it, looking after so many damaged children? I do what I can to help them, but there are some you can never quite reach.’
‘I’m sure you helped a lot of them, Mum. This one certainly remembers you as being really nice to him. He’s called Tom, and he’s an inventor.’
‘Oooh! How exciting! What did he invent?’
She claps her hands together as she says this, delighted at the very thought.
‘Umm … I’m not quite sure what it’s called,’ I reply, honestly. ‘Something to do with industry, and making things. Ball bearings, I think.’
‘Shall we call it a flange bracket?’ she says, her eyes twinkling mischievously. For a moment, she’s back to being my brilliant, whacky, never-at-all-boring mother – the mother who made up stories for us at bedtime instead of reading them, and who always had an alternative word to hand. Cornflakes were crack-of-dawn-flakes; pyjamas were llamas; cuddles were muddles. There were so many of them – it was as though she had her own form of rhyming slang, or a type of Edward Lear-style nonsense language.
‘Yes!’ I say enthusiastically. ‘I think that’s the perfect word for whatever it is. He invented a flange bracket, and