The Flavours of Love (40 page)

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.

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.

Phoebe reaches into the other bag, pulls out the shiny, black-purple aubergines, weighing them in her hand. Out come the speckle-skinned dark green courgettes, the large, brown papery onion, the
bulbous, shiny red tomatoes, the mug-shaped red, green and yellow bell peppers, and the pot of herbs de Provence. I have olive oil, I have basil leaves from the plant on the kitchen window sill.

‘Aunty Betty was asleep,’ Phoebe says, unnerved, I think, that I haven’t spoken. ‘She didn’t stir when I went in, so I left the tray on the side.’

‘She didn’t stir?’ I ask, concerned.

‘She was snoring her head off but didn’t wake up,’ Phoebe clarifies.

‘Ahh, right.’

More things come out of the bags: fresh chicken pieces, rustic bread flour to use in the bread machine, which I have barely looked at in over eighteen months. We used to wake up to the smell of baking bread, having programmed the machine the night before, and it’d be a special treat every morning to have fresh bread for breakfast but, like a lot of things, that ended over eighteen months ago.

‘Do you want to start on washing the vegetables while I put the bread on?’ I say to Phoebe. The words melt delicately and delectably on my tongue; they drizzle stars of happiness into my ears – I am spending time with my daughter because she wants to. I am cooking with my beloved little girl and I haven’t forced her to be here.

‘OK,’ she says, without a dismissive shrug, without an irritated eye roll, without an exasperated sigh. It’s almost too delicious to believe.

*

‘How do you want me to chop the peppers?’ Phoebe asks.

‘Into large chunks.’ I resist the urge to go and show her. ‘I find it’s easiest if I lay the top down on the chopping board, slice it in half downwards. Take out all the seeds and stalk, then slice the halves into quarters lengthways and then cut them up into three? But that’s how I do it. You may find it easier to do it another way.’

‘I’ll do it your way,’ she says.

I am making chunky rounds of the aubergine. Once they are all on the chopping board like large, green-tinged white counters for a game, I start to halve them, to make them big enough to not
disintegrate while cooking, but small enough to be bite-sized. The secret, apparently, to not creating a tasteless pot of gloopy stew when making ratatouille is to cook the ingredients separately first, then to combine them all towards the end of cooking. Joel loved aubergine. I could live without it, personally, but he would eat it every day if he could.

‘This reminds me of when you were a baby,’ I say. ‘When you were about six months old and I had to start weaning you onto solid food, I used to drive your dad mad with the time I spent cooking. I’d be obsessed with trying to make the healthiest foods for you, I didn’t want to feed you any of the shop-bought stuff so the moment you were asleep I’d be in the kitchen, steaming sweet potatoes and carrots and broccoli. No, no, not broccoli after the first time because it stank! Then I’d be mashing it through a sieve and putting it into little pots and ice cube trays and freezing them.

‘Sometimes I’d spend whole Sundays doing that so you’d have fresh, homemade food to eat all the time. Most of the time you’d just spit it out – probably because it all tasted the same after it’d been defrosted and heated up – and fixate on what your dad and I were eating. Always making a grab for it. After all the stuff I read and cooking I did, I’d catch your dad giving you sneaky bites of his baby corn or garlic bread or something. I remember one time, when you were about one, he gave you a couple of chippy shop chips.

‘I got
so
mad because I’d spent so much time on getting the nutrients right in your meals and he did that. But he was like, “Seriously, Ffrony, it’s a couple of chips. All food is all right in moderation.” He was right, but still … By the time Zane was born pretty much everything was labelled organic and I’d lost the will to purée anything ever again so I let your dad do what he wanted. Poor kid. Speaking as one of them, most second-born children get a rough deal.’

The only sound that comes from Phoebe’s direction is the phumping of the knife as it comes through the peppers and hits
the wooden chopping board, scoring more cuts onto its surface. I stop my chopping and close my eyes in regret as I realise what I’ve done. It wasn’t intentional, but the effect is the same.

‘What’s it like,’ she says, quietly, ‘having a baby?’

‘Do you mean the actual physical having it, or all the stuff that comes afterwards?’

‘Both, I suppose.’