Chocolate Box Girls Read online

  I think of the mad gypsy lady from the post office with her talk about choices, and I know I made the wrong one, over and over. It was always plain and simple … a new mum, new sisters, a future … or Shay. It should have been no contest, yet still I messed it up.

  I was greedy, I wanted it all.

  I am the liar, the outsider, the girl who broke up Honey and Shay … except of course that Shay went running after Honey. Why am I not surprised?

  I am not sure if I can survive this.

  I’m an idiot. I thought I was fitting in, doing OK, but all the time I was kidding myself. Charlotte will never be my mum. Skye, Summer, Coco and Honey will never be my sisters … the minute I fell for Shay Fletcher, I threw all of that away.

  I have never had a family, not one I can truly remember. I just have a bunch of muddled memories and a big hole in my heart where my mum should be. I thought Dad loved me enough to make up for that, but I’m not sure any more.

  I can’t bear to think about what Dad will say when he finds out what I have done, that I have smashed up the new life he has tried so hard to build for us. I wanted a family, but right now I have never felt more alone in my life.

  I see the ‘stolen’ canoe hauled up on to the sand and I grab it and drag it down to the water’s edge. I could point it towards the setting sun, vanish without trace, the way my mum did.

  ‘Hey!’ Shay yells from the cliff path. ‘Hang on, Cherry! What are you doing? Wait!’ Shay yells. ‘Wait for me!’

  I push the canoe into the waves. Shay is the problem, of course. Waiting for him … that won’t solve a thing. He is running across the sand, and suddenly all I want is to get away from him, away from here.

  I wade into the icy water in my brown-dyed ballet slippers. I have never been in a canoe before. The whole thing dips and tilts and lurches to the side, flooding with water as I scramble in, my fairy dress dripping. I grab the paddle and push down, shoving the canoe away from the shore, but Shay is faster.

  He runs right into the water, takes the paddle from me, steadies the rocking boat.

  ‘This is crazy,’ he says. ‘Come back on to the beach with me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I say, and the tears are streaming down my cheeks. ‘I won’t. I’ve tried so hard, Shay, but I’ve wrecked it all … I just want to get away. Please … I have to …’

  ‘Cherry, don’t be stupid,’ he reasons. ‘It’s getting dark, and nobody takes a canoe out on the sea at dusk … it’s way too dangerous!’

  ‘I can’t stay here!’ I wail. ‘Don’t you understand? I want to find a desert island or a magical land where everyone is happy and nobody hates me. I want to float right out to sea and let the currents take me across the oceans to Japan. Or maybe just hide out in the smugglers’ caves for the rest of my life! I am running away!’

  Shay’s face creases with doubt, and then, so fast I barely have time to work out what’s happening, he scrambles into the canoe behind me, propelling us forward.

  The little boat wobbles and bobs and we move smoothly, silently, away from the shore.

  ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ Shay says as he swings the paddle from side to side in a slow, steady rhythm. ‘We are not running away. We are just taking a trip by canoe, a short trip, right? Maybe ten minutes, seriously. Any longer and Charlotte and Paddy will notice we’re gone and start to panic.’

  ‘Shay, they won’t even notice,’ I sigh. ‘They have enough drama on their hands right now to last most couples a lifetime. So much for the romantic dinner for two …’

  ‘Whatever,’ Shay says. ‘I am in charge of this boat, though, and what I say goes … we are not running away. Or if we are, then just for ten minutes. Right?’

  ‘I suppose …’

  There is no sound for a while except the steady dip and slosh of the paddle. The water is calm and the light is fading and everything is peaceful, but there’s a feeling of adventure, of danger almost, too. A canoe is not the most stable boat in the world, I realize. If I shift my weight to one side, it tips and wobbles. If I drag my hand in the water, it stalls and shudders. Even when I am sitting perfectly still, leaning a little against Shay’s legs, the gentle rock and roll of it goes on, reminding me that we are not on dry land, but at the mercy of the ocean.

  ‘I like it,’ I tell Shay. ‘Canoeing. I never tried it before, never thought it would be so … free.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Shay says, and I remember that it’s just another part of being told what to do, for him, and not about freedom at all.

  Above us the sky is darkening, but we are not far from the darker stripe of shoreline to our left. A new moon, a perfect sliver of light, glints above us, dusting the tiny waves with silver.

  My worries melt away like snow in summer. Darkness fills up all the corners where fears and troubles lurk, paints over the shabby, imperfect world around us. It wraps a cloak of mystery and magic around everything.

  I could happily stay right here forever, drifting and floating under the velvet sky, but Shay breaks the silence.

  ‘I’m going to turn round,’ he says softly. ‘Get you back home. It’s too dark now … I thought we might get as far as the caves, but the light is against us and I can’t tell exactly where we are. It’s not safe, Cherry … my dad would have a fit if he knew what we were doing.’

  Shay dips the paddle and steers us round. The canoe tilts a little and then we are turning, but something is pushing us back, and Shay swears under his breath. ‘There’s a current … that’s weird … we must be further along than I thought. And closer to the shore. Hang on, Cherry, I need to get us out of here …’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say dreamily. ‘We’re fine …’

  ‘No,’ Shay says, and his voice is sharp, anxious. ‘We’re not fine …’

  He scoops the paddle down furiously, and the canoe turns again, but the current tugs us back, pulling us inland, and I cannot see because the sky is velvet-black and the moon is too new, too skinny. And then something scrapes along the bottom of the canoe, and we stop suddenly, jarringly, and a rush of water floods in around us. There is a crunch of splintering wood as the paddle snaps, and then we are tilting sideways, into the icy water, into nothingness.

  28

  I learnt to swim when I was six years old. Dad took me every week to the pool, sat in the gallery and waved and gave me the thumbs-up every time I got something right. I loved that pool, the smell of chlorine, the lights, the warm, turquoise water, but it is a million miles away from this cold, cold ocean that wants to shock me, numb me, drag me under.

  ‘Rocks,’ Shay gasps, behind me in the water. ‘Be careful … but if we can get to them …’

  My shin scrapes against something hard and jagged, my hands slide across seaweed slime, barnacles. I haul myself up, slithering, and Shay is beside me, scrambling over the rocks, dragging me with him.

  It takes forever to crawl across the rocks and on to dry land. It’s dark, and they are slippery and sharp and some of them jut up out of the water and some are underneath, so we cling on, edge sideways like crabs, plunge down into arctic water and climb out again and again, hands shaking, blue with cold.

  ‘Keep talking,’ Shay’s voice says in my ear. ‘Keep going, don’t give in … not far now. Not far …’

  ‘I … I can’t …’

  ‘Keep talking,’ he insists, behind me in the darkness. ‘Tell me about Sakura, when she was little, in Japan …’

  ‘Sakura …’ I echo, but my teeth are chattering and my bones are filled with ice, my fingers frozen. ‘I can’t remember …’

  ‘Remember the cherry blossom,’ Shay says. ‘And the kimono, and the paper parasol. Keep remembering them …’

  So I try, but everything gets unravelled in my mind and all I can think of are long evenings in the flat in Glasgow, curled up on the sofa with Dad, eating chips and watching telly, with Rover staring glassily from his bowl on the window sill. No cherr
y blossom, no kimono, no paper parasol, just a drizzly playground and me standing on the edge of a group of girls … the faces change over the years, but always I am on the edge.

  Clinging on to an especially slimy rock, I lose my grip and slither downwards, grazing my arm, scraping my face. I am waist deep in water again, and cold, so cold I just want to curl up and die.

  A cool hand takes mine in the darkness, pulls me up again, and an arm slides round me, hauling me on. Just for a moment, I imagine I really can smell cherry blossom, the whisper of warm breath in my ear, saying words I can’t quite hear … and then it’s gone and I am on my own again.

  There is nothing but the salt taste of the ocean, the seaweed smell of the night, the swish of waves and the sound of Shay behind me, clambering across rocks, telling me to keep going, because I am doing great.

  ‘We’re there,’ Shay says, at last, and he takes my arm and we splash through the shallows and on to the sand, safe.

  But I am not sure where there is, because this thin spit of damp sand, fringed by sharp, black rocks and tucked beneath a towering cliff, is not the bay beneath Tanglewood House.

  ‘Smugglers’ caves,’ Shay says, reading my mind. ‘We made it after all …’

  I stumble down on to my knees, exhausted.

  ‘Shay, I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘This is my fault … we’re going to be in so much trouble … the canoe … your dad …’

  ‘My fault,’ he corrects me. ‘I should never have come over, never have nicked the canoe … never, ever, taken you out in it. I must have been crazy. If we ever get out of this, I will be grounded for the rest of my life, I bet you.’

  ‘Till you’re ninety-three,’ I joke, although I feel more like crying than laughing. ‘Then maybe you can get out just for special occasions, like the pensioners’ Christmas party and the whist drive and stuff …’

  ‘What is a whist drive?’ Shay wonders.

  ‘You may never know,’ I sigh. ‘Not now you’re grounded.’

  He shakes his head in the darkness. ‘I should have known better, seriously … it’s a basic rule. You never, ever, take a canoe out after dusk. And you never, ever, take one without wearing a proper life jacket … sheesh, I can see why now.’

  ‘We could have drowned,’ I whisper.

  ‘We didn’t,’ Shay tells me. ‘We didn’t, OK?’

  ‘So … how do we get out of here?’

  Shay sighs. ‘There is no way out, not in the dark. The cliff path is too dangerous, it was closed off years ago …’

  Shay takes his mobile from his pocket, flicks it open and sighs.

  ‘Dead. Looks like we’ll just have to wait …’

  We cannot even let people know we are safe. I feel sick when I think how close we have come to disaster, sick to think that things could have ended very differently.

  ‘How will they find us?’ I ask. ‘How long d’you think it will be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Could be a while.’

  He pulls me to my feet again and we walk up to the foot of the cliffs, find the cleft in the cliff face where smugglers came, long ago, to hide their whisky and tea and silk and cotton bales.

  Shay steps inside, and I follow.

  My hand brushes against something in the dark, and I jump out of my skin, just about. Shay explains that the cave is all set up with barrels and bales and a life-size model of an eighteenth-century smuggler in a fusty old cloak with a pistol in his hand.

  ‘Great,’ I say. ‘Just great …’

  There is nothing to do but wait. We sit down on the floor of the cave, our backs against the wooden barrels. I am beyond cold, so frozen I could cry. Ice runs through my veins and the tattered fairy dress clings to me, soaking, the wings just mangled wire and dripping net. There is no trace left of fairy dust, I know that much. I cannot feel my hands and feet, but the feeling is coming back to the rest of me and I know my shins are bruised and bleeding, the skin torn away, the flesh oozing and sore, crusted with salt and sand. I don’t even care.

  Shay drags the scruffy old cloak from the shadowy smuggler mannequin, wrapping it round me in the dark. I huddle into it, but still I can’t stop shivering, not until Shay puts an arm round me and pulls me close, and then I don’t care about anything else, anything else at all.

  You have to huddle close, I know, to stay warm, to conserve body heat. It’s what climbers do when they are stranded in the snow, what Arctic explorers do when a blizzard strikes and they are down to their last few rations, what shipwrecked sailors like us do.

  I know that … I’m just not sure if you are supposed to hold hands tightly and press your cheek against the other person’s chest so close you can hear their heart racing. Maybe you are. Maybe that is normal. Maybe it is normal for the other person to put his mouth against your ear so that you can feel his breath, warm against your skin.

  Maybe.

  I am not sure about the kissing, though.

  I think that’s just us.

  When Shay lifts my chin and kisses my mouth, the whole world spins away and I forget everything bad that ever happened to me. I forget the wreck and the fight and the hurt and confusion, and Kirsty McRae’s mean little face and Honey’s slap and the way I have always been on the outside, on the edge. I even forget the other thing, the thing I never allow myself to think about, the ache inside that never goes away.

  We kiss for a long time, and when we stop I am warm and breathless and my heart is racing so fast I don’t know if it will ever slow down again.

  Shay strokes my face in the darkness, gentle fingers tracing my eyelids, my nose, my lips.

  ‘I have to tell you something,’ I whisper. ‘Something important.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  I take a deep breath. ‘All those stories I told you … about my mum, about the cherry blossom, the kimono, the parasol, the postcards … they weren’t true. My mum died when I was four. She had a heart condition, and nobody knew, and she just … died.’

  ‘Oh, Cherry,’ Shay says into my hair.

  ‘It was awful. I didn’t understand, and Dad wouldn’t talk about it. If I tried to ask he’d get so upset … I just stopped asking, in the end. I started to wonder if I’d got it wrong, if my mum was still alive, somewhere else … it got so I couldn’t be sure what was true and what was make-believe.

  ‘I don’t have any real memories of my mum, Shay. No special festival in Kyoto, no kimono, no parasol. Mum and Dad travelled before I was born, but they settled back in Glasgow, and that’s where I’ve always lived …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Shay whispers. ‘Not to me.’

  I sigh. ‘I got the fan as a Christmas present when I was seven, and I found the kimono and the parasol in a charity shop in the Byres Road, last year. They made me feel closer to my mum, somehow … they were the kind of things she might have given me, if she’d had the chance …’

  Shay strokes my hair.

  ‘The kimono never smelt of cherry blossom, just moth balls and charity shops. No wonder Honey threw it out of the window. And the parasol was always broken, with the colours all running into each other. They were all just stories, lies. I think I do remember something about the cherry blossom, but I can’t be sure – and the park would have been in Glasgow, not Kyoto. I’m sorry, Shay.’

  ‘I knew they were stories, Cherry,’ he tells me. ‘Paddy told the Tanberrys right at the start that your mum had died, and I kind of knew you’d never been to Japan. I didn’t know I was supposed to believe it all … I just loved listening. They’re great stories … you should write them down. It’s a skill, to weave a fantasy like that …’

  A skill? Back in Glasgow, my classmates and teachers were not so easily impressed. I remember Miss Jardine’s suggestion that I see a counsellor, the way my classmates raised their eyebrows and turned away when I told them tall tales of my mum’s exploits in New York, Paris, Tokyo. They called me a liar, and
I knew they were right. I told lies, invented stories, to fill up the big hole in my heart that was left when Mum died.

  It never quite worked, somehow.

  ‘Shay … do you think Honey was really planning to stay in London with her dad?’ I ask into the darkness. ‘Never come back?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘It sounds like a part of that whole blackmail thing she mentioned a while ago. A way of making Charlotte choose between her and Paddy …’

  ‘And now it’s all fallen through,’ I sigh. ‘No wonder she took it hard.’

  Shay frowns. ‘Earlier on, when I was talking to her alone, she kept saying it was all over, that everything was ruined, that she’d lost her dad too …’

  ‘Poor Honey,’ I sigh.

  ‘Yeah, poor Honey,’ Shay says. ‘I feel sorry for her … but I can’t keep pretending I want to be with her, Cherry, because I don’t. I can’t. We’re supposed to be this perfect couple, but it’s never been that way … we were only ever marking time, making do. I don’t even know why she picked me out … maybe because I was familiar, because her friends liked me? Girls seem to think I’m good-looking, or something …’

  I cannot let that go.

  ‘Modest, aren’t you?’ I say, jabbing him in the ribs with my elbow. ‘Have you seen yourself, lately? The words drowned and rat spring to mind.’

  Shay laughs. ‘My famous charm never has worked on you, has it?’ he grins. ‘I think that’s one of the things I like about you! There’s an honesty about you …’

  My eyes open wide in the darkness, but Shay is not winding me up.

  ‘Seriously,’ he says. ‘It’s like I really know you. I know about what happened to you, and other stuff too … your hopes and dreams, all of it. Honey is different. She never gives a single bit of herself away. She can’t, because she’s still all cut up about her dad. I think she’s gonna go right off the rails, any day now. I just don’t want to have to be the person who picks up the pieces. Not any more.’

  I squeeze Shay’s hand in the darkness.

  ‘It’s you I want to be with, Cherry,’ he says. ‘I can’t help it. I’ve felt this way ever since I first saw you.’