The Flavours of Love (40 page)

Once the world around me is in view again, I see him. He has a perfect, cylindrical but tapered body; neat, evenly spaced black and yellow stripes; four clear, fragile wings; a long, protruding line at his bottom.

9 years before
That Day
(May, 2002)

‘You do the spiders and slugs, Babes, I’ll do the wasps.’

‘We hardly ever get wasps.’

‘That doesn’t mean we don’t need a dedicated wasp ridder.’

‘How come I get two and you get one?’

‘Wasps are more dangerous, Ffrony.’

*

He would find this hilarious, he really would. The slugs have had their way with my plants, I see evidence of spiders and their webs all over the place and now this. I can’t remember the last time we had a wasp in the house.

‘You absolute bastard,’ I say to the grin Joel’s no doubt wearing wherever he is. ‘You’d do anything to get out of dealing with things like this, wouldn’t you?’

I stare at the wasp, wobbling its way up the condensation-soaked shower pole, as if attempting to climb to the top of Mount Everest.

This is Joel all over. He was expert at reminding me that you need
to put your problems into perspective. Right now, my biggest problem isn’t all the things I’ve been crying about, it’s getting out of the shower without being stung.

‘
Let’s see how you get out of this one then, eh, Ffrony.
’

XLVII

With my notebook splayed open, a pen nestled like a blue, crystal-encased caterpillar in the valley in the middle of the pages, I sit at the kitchen table.

In my notebook I have written:

Food is not love

and

Love is love

and

Food is food

and

nothing can taste like love.

and

Everything tastes amazing when you love what you are eating.

and

Love what you eat.

and

Eat what loves your body.

I mean it all. I know it all on an intellectual level, I know what I need to do, I know how I need to see myself move towards a cure for what I have, but it is living it that will make a difference.

If I let go of what I have now, I will be back there in no time. I will be back to being the little girl told to stop eating bread and eat more fruit by her well-meaning mother, I’ll be the best friend who’s ever so nice and would suit my name if I lost weight, I’ll be the worker who needs special clothes because I am huge, I’ll be the woman at college no one notices because I am large. I’ll be fat and ugly and unsuccessful. I’ll also be the woman that Joel fell in love with. And I’ll be the woman who dropped the blackberries, the woman who hadn’t prepared for every eventuality so losing her husband nearly destroyed her.

I know what I have to do intellectually; emotionally I’m too damn scared right now. But if I write things down, I can come back, I can see what I believe. And maybe it will click in my mind and my heart and I will be able to do it. If I write things down I’ll remind myself that I can’t think clearly when I binge and purge, and right now I need to think clearly.

Now, I have little pieces of Joel in front of me. These scrawlings of his bring me closer to him, remind me he was more than his death, he was alive, too. He was so much, and he was this – a collection of recipes, each containing the foods he loved.

I adore his funny, sloping writing, the way he crossed his ‘t’, the way he curled his ‘s’, the longer slope of ‘J’ because, I guess, it was the most important letter to him. He has notes on scraps of paper, a few filed away in a notebook, some on different-shaped and rainbow-coloured stickies. Some of the sheets are crumpled and creased, others are bisected in two directions from the way he folded them up.

I’ve been looking for a blend of flavours that, when I slip them between my lips, will bring back everything good about my life with him. I’ll close my eyes and the taste will take over my senses, and I’ll be transported back to another place when I was with him. I’ll be that person who can look in the mirror and not worry about who
I’ll see looking back at me. I’ll be the woman who can experience a bad feeling and not be terrified it’s going to consume me. I’ll be the person who can cope with things. I can deal with wasps in the shower. I can deal with the person who is going to try to kill me.

If I find the perfect mix of flavours, I’ll be with him again. He’ll come back to me. I’ll find that love that made me feel normal and safe.

Joel liked to follow traditional recipes as much as possible and would add one little Joel twist. Unlike me. I keep trying out different things, mixing ingredients up, replacing one or two elements to see what they taste like together. If they’ll be him. And us. And the life we had before
that day
.

I have a whole month to indulge myself in this if I so wish. I can pretend that everything else is OK with the world and I can immerse myself in cooking and baking and making and creating. Or I can face up to what is going on and deal with it head-on.

‘What are you doing still in your dressing gown?’ my daughter says to me, causing my heart to lurch. Instinctively, I cover the papers with my hands to hide them. Then I remember that it’s Phoebe. It’s not someone who’s going to mock what I’m doing.

‘I’m off work for a month,’ I say. I release the papers and notebooks then start to gather them up, to put them in some sort of order.

‘Why?’ she asks.

After the venom of last night, the way she spoke to me, the hatred behind her words, I’m surprised she hasn’t packed her bag and left.

‘It’s a long story,’ I say. I’m amazed, too, I can still speak to her after last night, to be honest. What she said, it cut at me in ways I’d forgotten I could hurt. My daughter stands in her grey and turquoise uniform, her bag over her shoulder, ready to go to back to school. Ready to face all the words that have been fired at her. I don’t talk to her enough. I don’t let her know what I’m thinking so why would she let me know what she’s thinking? ‘But the short version of why I’m not at work is that I’ve been really unhappy there so I decided to go see the big boss, the President. And
boy
did I get more than I
bargained for there.’ I shudder. ‘Anyway, he told me to take a month off to consider my options so here I am, considering my options.’

‘After breakfast are you going to take me to school?’ she asks, uninterested in my story.

‘No. I don’t think you should go to school today. Or even for a while. I’m going to talk to Mr Newton about it on the phone, but I think you should stay home.’

‘I want to go to school.’

‘You’re being bullied, Phoebe, pretty hideously from what I saw.’

‘You can’t run away from bullies. You’ve got to stand up to them.’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ I say to her. ‘But you know what? Sometimes it’s best to take a rest, to step out before you go back into the fight. And it’s even better to fight when someone has your back.’

‘Do you even know how you sound when you say things like that?’

‘Phoebe, I know it goes against everything you believe in, but I’d be really grateful if you could do me one favour.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t go to school for a few days. Give things a chance to simmer down, let the school deal with the main culprits if they can find them, then go back if you really,
really
want to.’ Before then, though, I will have found her a new school. Even if it means going back to work for Kevin to magic up money from somewhere to send her to a private school, she is not going to go back to St Allison.

It won’t have occurred to Phoebe, but whatever she does from now on, how the people at school react to that, react to her, will shape how she feels about herself for so many years to come.

Something like this follows you everywhere. It seems to go away, to be buried and forgotten, then when you have dared to forget, it comes for you. Sneaking out of the mouth of someone who didn’t even know you at the time, written in white on a black chalkboard for everyone to see, repeated by a headteacher for your parents to hear. You never get over this type of thing, you can only pretend it never happened, stuff it down as soon as it rears up in your head. You can only do the best you can to live with it as a smudge on your psyche.

Part of who I am comes from this sort of thing. An element of who I am is from seeing the words on a blackboard about something I shouldn’t have let a boy do to me – something I never thought he’d tell anyone after he persuaded me to let him touch me. For only a second, but once it was done, it never went away.

I never thought my daughter would be there, too. This is so public, so exposed, this is scored permanently onto the fabric of time that is the internet. It won’t only follow Phoebe around, it’ll be there in the histories of the people who said it. They’ll always be known – even the anonymous ones – as architects of someone else’s despair and anguish.

‘Why were you unhappy at work?’ She drops her bag, lowers herself onto a chair and her gaze begins to wander inquisitively over the papers on the table in front of me as if she hasn’t seen them before.

‘It’s really been one person making my life a misery. Making snide little comments, questioning the time I get in, the time I leave, what I do, whether I go for lunch.’

‘What, kind of like what you do to me?’ She almost explodes with laughter. I wish she could see herself, the way her face has opened up and how she is radiating pure joy. This is what she was like before her father died.

‘Yes, I suppose if I was you that’s what I would think,’ I reply, desperate to hear her laugh again. ‘But it’s my job as a parent to do those things.’

Her naturally slender body leans forwards as if she would love to pick up the pieces of paper and have a closer look. Only Joel and I have touched them. Whenever I get them out, I try to feel him in the pages, imagining where his fingers would have touched, where he would have planted his hand to begin writing. But if she did touch them, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

J’s House Ratatouille
catches my eye. I often look at it because it seems so complicated, that it would take courage, true fortitude to attempt it.

‘How would you like to be my sous chef while I make J’s House Ratatouille?’ I ask her.

‘Mum, we’re not in some teen show where you give me a cute little assignment and we bond and become besties.’

‘That’s me told then, isn’t it?’ Smarting, I examine the recipe again:

aubergines

Courgettes

Peppers

Tomatoes

Onions

Basil

Herbs de Provence

Olive oil

It’s not
that
big a list, reading the instructions, it’s not
that
complicated, it has simply seemed that way. I’ve built it up to be something it’s not in my head. I’m not going to be scared by this. I can do this. I’ll be chopping till the end of time, but I can do this.

‘Well, I’m going to get changed, then I’m going to the shops and I’m going to buy all the ingredients to make this. It was amazing when your dad made it. I’ve never been brave enough to try it. I’m going to do it.’ I stand, feeling that familiar, almost comforting feeling of light-headedness because I haven’t had breakfast. I will. I will eat.

I honestly will. I’ll go and get this stuff first, then I’ll sit down and have breakfast. I will try to focus on what I’ve written in my notebook. I will remember I need a clear head.

‘Why don’t you ask Curtis if he can bring your homework round after school?’ I suggest to Phoebe. It kills me that he hasn’t been treated the same way she has, that he hasn’t had messages calling him a slut and saying he should have kept it in his trousers, or any of the other hideous things that have been fired at Phoebe. Even if he is the father, he’ll escape from this fairly unscathed.

She shrugs. ‘I’ll leave school for now,’ she says.

‘Great. If you don’t mind, could you make Aunty Betty some breakfast when you make yours?’

‘Yeah, fine.’

‘Thank you. I’ll see you later then.’

I take a chance and circle her with my arms.

I sense her rolling her eyes, I feel her sigh in exasperation, but she doesn’t pull away or push me off, she doesn’t reject my love. She accepts the hug, accepts me. It’s working, I’m managing to chip, chip, chip away at her.

I’m finally getting through.

XLVIII

The large wooden rectangular chopping board, its surface marked with thousands of cuts, has been laid on the largest unbroken run of worktop in our kitchen. There are four different-sized pans on the different-sized rings of our six-ring stove top. The large stainless steel colander and the smaller colander, which used to be the steaming basket part of an old metal steamer, are waiting beside the sink to be filled and used.

Phoebe rises from her seat as I enter the kitchen. I notice with a hitch in my heart and a jerk in my throat, that over her red jeans and white T-shirt, she’s tied on Joel’s black Run DMC apron we bought him four years ago. It hasn’t moved from its metal hook behind the kitchen door since he died. Joel would sing, ‘
J-J-J-J-J’s House!
’ every time he reached for it to let us know he was about to start cooking.

The plug of memories that often blocks my throat forms, and I pause in the doorway. I mustn’t mess this up by smiling or crying or doing anything that will have her ripping off the apron and marching upstairs.

Determined to not ruin this, I bustle like a busy matron on a hospital ward into the kitchen and place the heavy and bulky bags onto the floor.

I daren’t ask her to help me empty the bags in case that sets her off, so I start to unload them myself. I’m halted briefly, my heart hitching itself to the plug in my throat, when I notice she has draped my white apron over the back of the chair I usually sit on at the table.