‘I’ll manage in here.’ I pat the caravan on the side – carefully, in case any more bits of her fall off. There’s a small gas stove and a tiny bit of unit space with a sink at one end – the extent of my kitchen. ‘Besides, there will be a kitchen at the tearoom. I can use that. It’ll be fine. Fine.’ My effort to reassure her ventures into Ross from Friends territory, but one of us has to believe it, and I’m terrified that I don’t.
Marnie invites me in for a celebratory drink, and it’s pouring by the time I open her door to leave and make a dash for the caravan. It’s dark and nearly midnight, but both Marnie and Darcy’s enthusiasm has cheered me right up.
This is my dream. Owning a tearoom like I grew up thinking I would, and to combine that with something I love as much as Alice in Wonderland is more than I could have ever hoped for, and even better, it’s on Ever After Street – a few doors up and opposite where my best friend works. Ever After Street is really special to me. Not only would I never have met Marnie without it, but as soon as I went there, it felt like somewhere I fitted and I’d never felt that before. I’ve barely ventured outside in the past couple of years. Since my nan died, and then Mum, and then my ex left too, I’ve hidden away. I’ve shut out the world and lived like a house goblin in my flat.
Life carried on outside my curtains and I just… got stuck. I couldn’t see a way to move forward, until I pushed myself to start visiting A Tale As Old As Time every week and made friends with Marnie. While helping out in the bookshop, I’ve become friends with the other shopkeepers too. It will be a thrill to work alongside them properly and be a real part of Team Ever After Street.
So what if I’ve told one teeny-tiny little white lie to a stern man who I’ll probably never see again? It’s not like I’m going to be serving seven-course meals to lords and ladyships and battling for Michelin stars. All I have to do is bake a few simple things and practise enough to get really good at it. I have to unchain the creativity that I once had and get back to who I was before life imploded in grief and despair.
I can’t keep living like this. I lay in the pull-out bed with the caravan rocking side to side as the wind batters it and rain beats so hard against the roof that it’s surely going to drip through one of the many patch-ups this poor old thing has had over the years to keep it watertight. I need to change my life and make something stick. I want somewhere stable, somewhere that’s mine, something constant and reliable. My jobs until now have been uninteresting sorts of jobs. Cleaning office buildings after hours. Restocking supermarket shelves. Packing online orders in soulless warehouses. Waitressing. Factories. Just a cog in a wheel that no one ever notices or values. I want to feel like I matter to someone. I want people to walk into a spectacular tearoom on Ever After Street that’s all me. I want to stay, and since I found Ever After Street, I’ve had the feeling that it wanted me to stay too, and I don’t want to let it down.
I roll over and wriggle around to get comfortable on the thin mattress. It’s definitely time for sleep when I’m talking about a street being sentient.
A few days later, the council have sent a commercial lease, the keys, and a contractor with a very small budget. It’s my first time getting to look around inside properly, and I follow him through the tearoom as he measures up the space, dodging stacked up chairs, and tables covered with dustsheets.
‘That’s too much,’ he says for the thousandth time, a sneer on his face at every suggestion I make for the tearoom makeover.
‘How about—’
‘Overbudget!’ he barks, not even letting me finish the sentence.
It’s very hard to transform a tearoom into Wonderland when the council have allocated you approximately £3.50.
All right, they’ve been a tad more generous than that, and I try to think logically while the contractor puts more numbers into his tablet and sits at a table I’ve hastily uncovered, muttering under his breath about how soon his next appointment is.
One thing I love is crafting. Give me a hot glue gun and a stack of paper to bend and shape into something new and I’m happy. A good chunk of the limited space in my caravan is taken up by storage boxes of my crafting materials, which are something I consider essential, even though other people may suggest clothes or food would be a better use of my storage space. But there is nothing I love more than sitting down at a table and losing myself in making something.
I’m good at painting too, so I can repaint the fading tearoom walls myself. I want to fill the place with Wonderland touches, like teapots and teacups, hats, clocks, mushrooms, and my beloved paper flowers, and I won’t need a contractor for that either.
‘Can you retile the floor?’ I ask as inspiration strikes for something I can’t do myself. ‘Black and white square tiles so it looks like a chequerboard?’
The contractor has already pointed out a couple of broken floor tiles at the edges of the room, and at my suggestion, he keys a few more numbers into his tablet screen.
‘Essential replacement,’ he mutters begrudgingly. ‘Within budget.’
Hurrah! It was starting to feel like those words weren’t in his vocabulary.
‘How about the shop sign? Right now it just says “Tearooms”, but I want to call it The Wonderland Teapot.’
The contractor jabs at his tablet screen again but doesn’t say anything, which presumably means it’s also within budget.
‘Can I have some pots of paint and someone to cut giant chess piece shapes out of wood?’
He raises an eyebrow at the tablet screen without bothering to look at me, and then turns it around. ‘We’ll replace the floor and repaint the sign. This is the remaining budget to do what you want with. Send your receipts to Mr Hastings and he’ll reimburse your outgoings. Don’t try to get clever. Hastings is a stickler when it comes to money. You won’t be able to pull a fast one on him.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ The thought of getting on the bad side of the scary man from the interview sends a chill down my spine.
‘Good. My men will start on Monday. Will that be all?’ His tone leaves me with no doubt that it will be all, whether I like it or not.
‘Wait, you didn’t check the kitchen. I want to be sure the appliances are up to date and health and safety checked.’ God knows, I need all the health and safety I can get when it comes to baking.
‘Kitchen? Appliances?’ His face screws up like he’s wondering what planet I’ve recently landed from. ‘You have a food preparation area. There’s a fridge for keeping things cold and a kettle for making water hot.’
‘That’s it?’ I look over my shoulder at the doorway to the back room. I’d assumed it was a kitchen, but the contractor was waiting outside when I arrived this morning and I didn’t have time to investigate. ‘But this is a tearoom. Where am I supposed to make the food?’
‘The previous owner made everything at home and brought it in. Is that a problem?’
‘No… just unexpected. I, er…’
‘As far as I’m aware, you’re only here on a trial. Hastings won’t be approving any rewiring of the kitchen or purchase of appliances without a long-term lease and a very good reason.’
Brilliant. Now what am I supposed to do? I have no kitchen. The one-hob stove in the caravan isn’t going to get me far, and I can’t encroach on Marnie’s kindness for much longer. Running a tearoom is going to involve a lot of early-morning and late-night baking to get everything ready for the day ahead – I can’t do that in someone else’s house.
The contractor is on his way out the door without giving me a chance to ask anything else. ‘Cheerio,’ he says, despite being the least cheerful person I’ve met in recent months. ‘And good luck.’
The silent ‘you’re going to need it’ is etched in the smirk on his face, and the fear that he’s right follows me like a cloud as I go inside and look around my oven-less kitchen. There’s a fridge, an industrial sized kettle, and a four-slice extra-wide toaster on the unit. There’s plenty of counter space for food preparation, a large sink area with drying racks and a draining board, bread bins and cupboards for food storage, and a walk-in cupboard with plates and cutlery stacked inside, and that’s it.
I was expecting a kitchen like you’d find behind the scenes in a restaurant. I assumed there would be at least some way of cooking food. I’d never thought about how or where Lilith prepared her food. I just assumed it was all done in this little room that was off-limits to customers.
Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Assumed that having a tearoom of my own will magically unlock all the recipes I can’t remember and turn me into a younger version of Mary Berry, when the most complicated thing I’ve successfully cooked in recent years has been cheese on toast? I can feel panic rising and I fight it by concentrating on the things I can control, like turning this little space into an all-singing, all-dancing Wonderland to inspire awe in children and adults alike. There has to be a solution to the kitchen issue. I don’t know what it is yet but something will come to me. It has to.
Two weeks later and The Wonderland Teapot on Ever After Street is ready to open. Contractors came and broke up the old floor tiles and replaced them with a black and white chessboard of shiny new squares. The boring sign on the shopfront has been repainted with an iridescent white background, and ‘The Wonderland Teapot’ is painted in swirly lettering of eye-catching pink and purple Cheshire-Cat-style stripes.
The interior of the tearoom is decked out with Lilith’s vintage chairs and tables, and I’ve gone through a million glue sticks and should’ve bought shares in a fabric paint company. I’ve stencilled roman numerals around the edges of each tablecloth and put hands in the centre so each table looks like the face of a clock, and each one has got a centrepiece of a bouquet of roses, made from playing cards, displayed in mismatched teapots.
