Recipes for Melissa (5 page)

Eleanor badly missed making love too. Only now – watching him and wishing that she could run it off also – did she feel it properly. The realisation there was only one thing worse than imagining Max with someone else.

And that was imagining him alone.

7

MELISSA - 2011

They met as children – Sam and Melissa – a story that so polarised people that on that long flight Melissa again watched Sam sleeping and did what she could never help. Overthinking.

Turns out he had been mesmerised by her from the very beginning. He had watched her and befriended her and quietly looked out for her right through their schooling – Melissa blissfully unaware it was anything more than friendship until very much later.

One camp of friends saw this as romantic. Others not so much:
‘So you two took precisely how long to get together?’

One of Melissa’s journalist pals had just a month back said out loud what others were clearly thinking. ‘Are you sure you haven’t – you know –
settled
for Sam?’

Melissa was thrown, not because she cared a jot what other people thought but because she suddenly worried that, deep down, this might be precisely what Sam thought. The upshot was she had in recent weeks made a point of at least trying to say more often how much he meant to her.

‘
You do know that I love you, Sam...’

Small wonder he had suddenly proposed.

Melissa crossed her legs, adjusting the lever holding the food tray in place to a perfect 180 degrees and then reaching across quietly to do the same to Sam’s.
Shit.
She had wanted to reassure him and ended up doing precisely the opposite. She took out the flight magazine from the pocket and again began to not read it.

She was trying now not to think about the dreadful kerfuffle at the check-in desk. Melissa closed her eyes. All her fault – the giant suitcase rejected on the grounds it exceeded the maximum weight for a single item of luggage. Her swearing and distraught then – certain the holiday was now off. Sam rolling his eyes but then quickly solving the crisis by buying a soft bag from the nearest kiosk and transferring all the heaviest shit from the case. This had, alarmingly, included the grey silk zipper pouch containing her mother’s book, and Melissa had panicked. Almost told Sam about it on the spot because she didn’t want the journal crushed in the smaller, bright pink bag. But no. She very much needed to read it on her own first. To work out, also on her own, how the hell she was going to tell her father…

The words on the in-flight magazine now blurred. A metallic jangling sound then drew Melissa’s eye to the end of the aisle where the cabin crew were setting up the drinks trolley.

Four and a half hours…

The other shock. She had no idea the flying time to Cyprus was so long. That had amused Sam also, as she had grabbed the flight magazine for the map when the pilot confirmed it over the intercom.

Did you not check the map when we booked this, Melissa?

Of course I checked…

Melissa glanced again at Sam, now so deeply asleep that even the noise of the trolley did not stir him.

The truth?

Her reaction to the whole proposal thing was irrational, confusing and a bloody mess. Melissa did not understand herself why she was so unsure about getting married and so had not the foggiest chance of explaining it to anyone. In the restaurant, she had argued that it shouldn’t matter.
Only a piece of paper
. But she could see this now stirring the same old doubts about their history.

Only for her, it wasn’t about doubt; at least not doubt over Sam. It was about something else. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on yet and didn’t actually want to think about…

Melissa was aged precisely four and a half when she met Sam – enrolled in the Sacre Coeur primary school as a sop to her mother’s Catholic guilt. Eleanor was what Max frequently described as a ‘lapsed catholic’. Not quite an atheist but certainly heading that way.

But Eleanor, Max explained, had made that first sacrifice of principle, so common among parents picking schools for their children. The Sacre Coeur was the best state school in their area and so what was a little hypocrisy when it was your child’s future? Eleanor and Max apparently reasoned that Melissa should make her own decision about faith when she was grown up herself. Meantime she should be taught the Catholic way with her parents on hand to dilute the scariest bits.

The strategy inevitably backfired. Melissa decided she was to become a nun – an obsession that lasted alarmingly into the third year, trumped only by the arrival of a striking new altar boy called Michael. This first infatuation came around the same time an older boy in the school called Samuel Winters began inexplicably to accompany Melissa on her walk to school, offering to carry her satchel.

‘I don’t need you to carry my satchel. It’s not heavy.’ Melissa liked Samuel very much but had not the foggiest idea where his sudden interest in her blessed satchel came from. Still. He was funny and could do impressions of all the teachers. He was kind and popular but he was four years older than her – hanging out with the big crowd, which rather scared her.

After Eleanor’s death, Melissa finished her stint at the Sacre Coeur then sat the 11-plus early to progress to the nearest girls’ grammar school, which was a forty-minute bus journey.

Michael the altar boy went on to the mixed Catholic secondary school, which was a temporary source of conflict between Melissa and her father. Samuel the Satchel, as she had come to know him, had long since gone on to the boys’ grammar school and she saw him only occasionally when they caught the same bus. On these rare occasions, Sam would sometimes sit with Melissa for the journey home, only desisting when his friends bombarded them with whistles.

‘I’ve no idea why they do that,’ Melissa complained. ‘It’s not as if we like each other in that way. Is it?’

It was not until the agony of A levels that Melissa bumped into Sam more regularly again. He was on the long haul studying Architecture at university and so was around only during the holidays when he managed to get a job at the local music shop. Melissa and her friends would often hang out there, using the booths to listen to CDs, and to her surprise, a number of her friends seemed to be in thrall to Samuel the Satchel.

‘Why didn’t you tell us you knew him?’ her close friend Emily whispered one Saturday.

‘Who?’

‘Him.’

Melissa had glanced across at Sam who was smiling in her direction.

‘I think he likes you, Melissa.’

‘Oh don’t be ridiculous. We’ve been friends since we were in primary school. That’s all.’

‘You think?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, good. Because I am hoping you can get him to notice me.’

‘You saying you fancy him?’

‘Duh, Melissa. Of course I fancy him. Everybody fancies him.’

Melissa would remember this moment always. She put the CD in her hand back in its slot on the shelf and looked again at Sam. By this time he was serving an older woman, who was in animated conversation about the soundtrack for some musical. Melissa noticed with no little amusement that even this older woman was trying to flirt with him.

Why it had not occurred to her before then that Sam would be a target for this kind of attention, she had no idea. She examined his jawline and felt her head shrink back into its neck.

Do you know that it makes you look like a tortoise when you do that…

Melissa listened to the echo as she watched him serving the customer across the record shop floor.

Good God. He really was quite striking these days. It was not so much that she had not noticed this, but rather that she had not registered that it had any significance for her.

‘So do you not fancy him then, Melissa?’

She did not know how to answer this. Sam was Sam. Sam was the older boy who walked her to school. The boy who helped her with her roller skates in the local park sometimes. The boy who did great impressions of the teachers. How could she answer a question like that?

Sam was Sam.

And then everything changed when Melissa started university herself. She was reading English Literature, which her father had actively encouraged, despite others around being a good deal less supportive.
And what precisely is she going to do with a degree in English Literature? Read for a living?

Max, of course, had been a nightmare when it came to UCAS. He knew all the rankings and he knew all the insider gossip. And so on the grounds of teenage conflict alone, Melissa resisted every single piece of advice and plumped for Nottingham. The course looked good and the shops looked good. Also it was one of the few universities that Max had not actively promoted.

‘Why would you want to go to Nottingham? This is not about some bloody boy is it?’

‘Of course it’s not about some boy. I just like the sound of the course. Very traditional.’

Max didn’t know any of the professors at Nottingham University.

And so that settled it. Melissa would go to Nottingham.

What she did not know until two weeks into the term was that Samuel the Satchel was finishing the first part of the slog that was Architecture at Nottingham.

‘You’re here. Good God. I didn’t know you were here.’

She happened across him near the library, still thick with fresher’s flu, dark bags under her eyes and a messenger bag containing her laptop across her middle.

‘If you offer to carry my bloody bag, I will have to hit you.’

She gave him a hug, shocked at the very physical pleasure at her face close in to his neck for the very first time. Then instantly embarrassed. Awkward and surprised also that he smelled so very good.

‘Goodness. Nice smell. Is that actually aftershave?’ She was now pulling back and fidgeting with her hair.

‘Present from my mum.’

‘Well it makes a change. All the guys in my house stink.’ Wishing now that she had done her face. Washed her hair that morning. At least put on some mascara.

‘And that’s not sexist at all?’

‘So how the hell are you? Oh God. It’s good to see you, Sam.’

‘And you. A very nice shock. So – you settling in OK?’

‘Loving it. Though dog-tired. Can’t hack the hours yet.’

‘Fancy coffee?’

‘Yeah, I do, actually.’

And so it finally
began.

Melissa sat there over coffee, watching, as he told her all about his course, about the university and about all the best places to study and socialise and which agent to use for a house in the second year and which bars had the cheapest drink prices and where he was planning to do his year out before the slog of the second part of his Architecture studies. She was sort of listening and sort of in some kind of daze. Because in reality she was right back in that music shop, looking across at him, at the perfect line of his jaw and the unusual shade and the warm and very open expression in his eyes. Green. Yes. Looking at him again with a completely different lens on the camera.

‘I really had no idea that you were here. At this uni? Did you ever mention it to me, Sam? That you were coming here? Nottingham?’

‘Don’t think so. Why do you ask?’

‘I don’t know. It just feels really weird.’

‘Nice weird or horrid weird?’

‘Nice weird.’

‘Good. So does that mean that I can finally ask you out for a drink without you doing your tortoise impression…?’

A very loud clearing of the throat suddenly… ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry, madam. But I was wondering if you would like a drink?’ The steward’s raised tone confirmed this was not the first request. Melissa physically started. A couple of passengers turned as her foot hit the back of the seat in front.

‘Sorry. I’m so sorry. Miles away. Two bottles of water, please. Oh – and some crisps. Any flavour. Doesn’t matter.’ She turned back to Sam who stirred momentarily at the noise but then rolled his shoulder over, trying awkwardly to nestle into the headrest of his seat, still asleep – mouth now gaping.

Melissa felt her pulse in her ear. The trolley trundled noisily past. A man stood up in the now vacant aisle to remove a small case from the overhead locker which made Melissa think again of all the luggage in the hold. The soft pink bag they bought at the kiosk. She was staring at the little cartons of crisps and then at the passengers across the aisle who had pre-ordered hot food. One older woman was tentatively dipping a plastic fork into what looked like some kind of pot roast. Or moussaka. Or lasagne. Or God knows what. It smelled terrible.

And now Melissa was thinking – why food? Why had her mother filled a journal with recipes? Melissa was a pretty average, basic cook but not an enthusiastic one. She did not understand why people made such an unholy fuss in the kitchen. Did not really have the patience for it, or understand why people devoted so much time when there were so many good restaurants and takeaways. And Waitrose. I mean – why had her mother not simply written letters? A diary? When there was so very much to say?

She twisted the cap from her bottle of water and took a swig.

Why food?