The Beach Café
Chapter One
Family legend has it that on the day I was born, when my elder sisters, Ruth and Louise, came tiptoeing in hand in hand to see me for the very first time, my mum said to them, “This is your new baby sister. What do you think we should call her?”
Ruth, the oldest twin, thought hard, with all the wisdom she’d gained in her mighty three years of life. “We should call her... Baby Jesus,” she pronounced eventually, no doubt with a lisping piety. Ruth had taken the Goody Two-Shoes role to heart from an early age. Either that or she was angling for extra Christmas presents.
“Mmmm,” Mum must have replied, probably in the same I-don’t-think-so way she did throughout my childhood, like the time I told her I had definitely seen the tooth fairy with my own eyes, for instance, and no, it absolutely wasn’t me who had wolfed half the chocolate biscuits, it was the others.
“Louise, how about you?” Mum asked next. “What should we call your new sister?”
Obviously I was only hours old at this point so I don’t remember anything about this touching bedside scene, but I like to imagine that Louise made the little frown-y face she still does, where her eyebrows slide together and the top of her nose wrinkles. According to Mum, she said with the utmost solemnity, “I think we should call her... Little Black Sheep.”
Little Black Sheep indeed. I’m not sure whether this was a Baa Baa Black Sheep reference or something to do with the fact that I had remarkably springy black hair from the word go. Whatever the reason, you’ve got to love my sister’s foresight. Because guess what? That was pretty much how I had ended up at the ripe old age of thirty-two with not a mortgage, full-time job, husband or infant to show for myself – the quintessential black sheep of the family. Spot on, Louise. Uncanny prescience. I was the freak, the failure, the one they muttered about in patronising tones, trying not to sound too gleeful as my shortcomings were discussed. Oh dear. What ARE we going to do with Evie? I’m worried about her, you know. She’s not getting any younger, is she?
Hey ho. I wasn’t too bothered by what they thought. It was better to be an individual, surely, someone who had dreams who did things differently, rather than being an anonymous, ordinary… well, sheep, obediently following the rest of the flock without a single bleat of dissent. Wasn’t it?
We have photos from that day, of course, grainy, brown-tinged photos with the rounded-off corners that seemed to be all the rage back then. There I was, cuddled in Mum’s arms, wearing a teeny pink babygro, with Ruth and Louise leaning over me, both in matching burgundy cord dungarees (this was the Seventies, remember), their eyes wide with what I like to think of as wonder and awe. (No doubt Ruth was already plotting her pocket money scam that went on for several years, though.)
I can’t help thinking that there’s something of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale about the picture. You know, when the fairies come to bestow their gifts on the little tot and they’re all really excellent bequests like how clever and talented and pretty she will be – until the evil old fairy who hasn’t been invited rocks up, bristling with malice, and wrecks everything with her, “She shall prick her finger on a spindle and DIE!” contribution.
This image tended to come back to me every time I sat in a hairdressing salon until I began to wonder if Louise’s ‘Little Black Sheep’ remark had somehow been a curse, straight from the realms of finger-pricking-voodoo. Because throughout my entire life, my hair had been frizzy, woolly and black, with a mad kinky curl to it. Just like your average black sheep, in fact, albeit one with a sneering contempt for miracle hair conditioner and straightening devices.
And so it was that on a certain Saturday morning in early May I was sitting in a big squishy leather chair at a hairdressing salon on the Cowley Road, the scent of hairspray and perm-lotion tingling in my nostrils as I pondered whether I had the bottle to get the sheep sheared into a radically different style. “I think your face could take a short cut,” the stylist said enthusiastically. “You’ve got the cheekbones for it – you could totally rock an elfin look. Maybe if we add an asymmetrical fringe… yeah. Very cool.”
“You don’t think it would be too… boy-ish?” I replied hesitantly. I stared at my reflection, unable to make a decision. I’d come into the salon fired up with brave plans to request a head-turning Mia Farrow crop but now that I was here, I couldn’t help wondering if such a cut would make me look more like Pete Doherty. I wished for the thousandth time that I had hair like Ruth and Louise – long, tawny, Pantene-advert hair, which swished as they walked. Somehow I had missed out on that particular gene though, along with the perfect-life chromosome too.
The stylist – Angela, I think her name was – smiled encouragingly. “You know what they say – a change is a good as a holiday,” she replied. She had lurid aubergine-coloured hair in a wet-look perm. I really shouldn’t have trusted her. “I’ll make you a coffee while you think it over, okay?“
She clip-clopped off, bum waggling in a too-tight bleached denim skirt, and I bit my lip, courage leaking out of me by the second. She was probably only suggesting an elfin cut because she was bored with trims and blow-dries. She probably couldn’t care less how I’d look at the end of it. And I wasn’t convinced by the ‘a change is as good as a holiday’ line either. I’d spent two weeks camping in the Lake District last year, and that was not an experience I wanted repeated in a haircut.
My phone rang as I was mid-dither. I rummaged in my bag for it, and saw that ‘Mum’ was flashing on the screen. I was just about to send it to voicemail when I got the strangest feeling I should answer. So I did.
“Hi Mum, are you all right?”
“Evie, sit down,” she said, her voice quavering. “It’s bad news, darling.”
“I am sitting down,” I replied, examining my split ends. “What’s up?” My mother’s idea of bad news was that her favourite character was being written out of the Archers, or that she’d accidentally sat on her reading glasses and broken them. I was hardened to all her ‘bad news’ phone calls by now.
“It’s Jo,” she said, and I heard a sob in her voice. “Oh, Evie…”
“Is she all right?” I asked, making a thumbs-up sign at Angela as she dumped a coffee in front of me. Jo was my mum’s younger sister, and the coolest, loveliest, most fun aunt you could ever wish for. Must give her a ring, I thought, making a mental note. I had been a bit crap about keeping in touch with everyone lately.
“No,” said Mum, in this awful shuddering wail. “She’s been in a car crash. She… She’s dead, Evie. Jo’s dead.”
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Family legend has it that on the day I was born, when my elder sisters, Ruth and Louise, came tiptoeing in hand in hand to see me for the very first time, my mum said to them, “This is your new baby sister. What do you think we should call her?”
Ruth, the oldest twin, thought hard, with all the wisdom she’d gained in her mighty three years of life. “We should call her... Baby Jesus,” she pronounced eventually, no doubt with a lisping piety. Ruth had taken the Goody Two-Shoes role to heart from an early age. Either that or she was angling for extra Christmas presents.
“Mmmm,” Mum must have replied, probably in the same I-don’t-think-so way she did throughout my childhood, like the time I told her I had definitely seen the tooth fairy with my own eyes, for instance, and no, it absolutely wasn’t me who had wolfed half the chocolate biscuits, it was the others.
“Louise, how about you?” Mum asked next. “What should we call your new sister?”
Obviously I was only hours old at this point so I don’t remember anything about this touching bedside scene, but I like to imagine that Louise made the little frown-y face she still does, where her eyebrows slide together and the top of her nose wrinkles. According to Mum, she said with the utmost solemnity, “I think we should call her... Little Black Sheep.”
Little Black Sheep indeed. I’m not sure whether this was a Baa Baa Black Sheep reference or something to do with the fact that I had remarkably springy black hair from the word go. Whatever the reason, you’ve got to love my sister’s foresight. Because guess what? That was pretty much how I had ended up at the ripe old age of thirty-two with not a mortgage, full-time job, husband or infant to show for myself – the quintessential black sheep of the family. Spot on, Louise. Uncanny prescience. I was the freak, the failure, the one they muttered about in patronising tones, trying not to sound too gleeful as my shortcomings were discussed. Oh dear. What ARE we going to do with Evie? I’m worried about her, you know. She’s not getting any younger, is she?
Hey ho. I wasn’t too bothered by what they thought. It was better to be an individual, surely, someone who had dreams who did things differently, rather than being an anonymous, ordinary… well, sheep, obediently following the rest of the flock without a single bleat of dissent. Wasn’t it?
We have photos from that day, of course, grainy, brown-tinged photos with the rounded-off corners that seemed to be all the rage back then. There I was, cuddled in Mum’s arms, wearing a teeny pink babygro, with Ruth and Louise leaning over me, both in matching burgundy cord dungarees (this was the Seventies, remember), their eyes wide with what I like to think of as wonder and awe. (No doubt Ruth was already plotting her pocket money scam that went on for several years, though.)
I can’t help thinking that there’s something of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale about the picture. You know, when the fairies come to bestow their gifts on the little tot and they’re all really excellent bequests like how clever and talented and pretty she will be – until the evil old fairy who hasn’t been invited rocks up, bristling with malice, and wrecks everything with her, “She shall prick her finger on a spindle and DIE!” contribution.
This image tended to come back to me every time I sat in a hairdressing salon until I began to wonder if Louise’s ‘Little Black Sheep’ remark had somehow been a curse, straight from the realms of finger-pricking-voodoo. Because throughout my entire life, my hair had been frizzy, woolly and black, with a mad kinky curl to it. Just like your average black sheep, in fact, albeit one with a sneering contempt for miracle hair conditioner and straightening devices.
And so it was that on a certain Saturday morning in early May I was sitting in a big squishy leather chair at a hairdressing salon on the Cowley Road, the scent of hairspray and perm-lotion tingling in my nostrils as I pondered whether I had the bottle to get the sheep sheared into a radically different style. “I think your face could take a short cut,” the stylist said enthusiastically. “You’ve got the cheekbones for it – you could totally rock an elfin look. Maybe if we add an asymmetrical fringe… yeah. Very cool.”
“You don’t think it would be too… boy-ish?” I replied hesitantly. I stared at my reflection, unable to make a decision. I’d come into the salon fired up with brave plans to request a head-turning Mia Farrow crop but now that I was here, I couldn’t help wondering if such a cut would make me look more like Pete Doherty. I wished for the thousandth time that I had hair like Ruth and Louise – long, tawny, Pantene-advert hair, which swished as they walked. Somehow I had missed out on that particular gene though, along with the perfect-life chromosome too.
The stylist – Angela, I think her name was – smiled encouragingly. “You know what they say – a change is a good as a holiday,” she replied. She had lurid aubergine-coloured hair in a wet-look perm. I really shouldn’t have trusted her. “I’ll make you a coffee while you think it over, okay?“
She clip-clopped off, bum waggling in a too-tight bleached denim skirt, and I bit my lip, courage leaking out of me by the second. She was probably only suggesting an elfin cut because she was bored with trims and blow-dries. She probably couldn’t care less how I’d look at the end of it. And I wasn’t convinced by the ‘a change is as good as a holiday’ line either. I’d spent two weeks camping in the Lake District last year, and that was not an experience I wanted repeated in a haircut.
My phone rang as I was mid-dither. I rummaged in my bag for it, and saw that ‘Mum’ was flashing on the screen. I was just about to send it to voicemail when I got the strangest feeling I should answer. So I did.
“Hi Mum, are you all right?”
“Evie, sit down,” she said, her voice quavering. “It’s bad news, darling.”
“I am sitting down,” I replied, examining my split ends. “What’s up?” My mother’s idea of bad news was that her favourite character was being written out of the Archers, or that she’d accidentally sat on her reading glasses and broken them. I was hardened to all her ‘bad news’ phone calls by now.
“It’s Jo,” she said, and I heard a sob in her voice. “Oh, Evie…”
“Is she all right?” I asked, making a thumbs-up sign at Angela as she dumped a coffee in front of me. Jo was my mum’s younger sister, and the coolest, loveliest, most fun aunt you could ever wish for. Must give her a ring, I thought, making a mental note. I had been a bit crap about keeping in touch with everyone lately.
“No,” said Mum, in this awful shuddering wail. “She’s been in a car crash. She… She’s dead, Evie. Jo’s dead.”
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