Chocolate Box Girls Read online

  Then we will start packing, dismantling our lives and folding them away into cardboard boxes and bin bags, and we will load our belongings into Dad’s red minivan and drive into the sunset. Well, not the sunset exactly, because Dad wants to set off early, but you know what I mean.

  We really are going to live on the edge of a cliff in Somerset. Miss Jardine has no idea just how bizarre my life is.

  ‘No more lies, Cherry,’ she says.

  ‘Er … no, Miss.’

  ‘And of course, I will need you to say sorry to Kirsty McRae.’

  ‘Right,’ I say through gritted teeth.

  Miss Jardine marches me along to the nurse’s office, where Kirsty is curled up on a squashy chair sipping lemonade and eating biscuits. ‘Biscuits are very good for shock,’ she says, smirking

  I don’t care, because Kirsty also has traces of macaroni gloop in her chestnut-and-caramel hair, and a faintly cheesy smell about her. I am mean enough to feel glad about that.

  ‘Cherry has something to say to you, Kirsty,’ Miss Jardine says.

  Kirsty beams, her eyes bright with triumph.

  ‘I-I’m sorry, Kirsty,’ I stammer.

  I am not sorry, though, not one little bit. And surely Miss Jardine does not want me to lie about it? I am meant to be turning over a new leaf, being honest and truthful. No more lies.

  I look Kirsty McRae in the eye. ‘I’m just really sorry that … that … you’re such a nasty, vindictive, SPITEFUL little witch.’

  That’s when Miss Jardine tells me I am suspended, and on report, and in after-school detention, possibly for the rest of my life.

  3

  Miss Jardine calls Dad, of course, and tells him everything. She is on that phone to him the minute Dad gets home from work, before he has even had a chance to change. My crimes are clearly too wicked to wait another minute.

  I hide behind the kitchen door and listen.

  Dad tries to smooth down his sticky-up hair and he shrugs off the McBean’s overalls and tries to look as serious as possible as he listens. Miss Jardine has that effect on people.

  There are lots of long silences, and lots of sighing. Dad says ‘I see,’ quite a lot, in a sorrowful kind of way. What is Miss Jardine telling him? That I need to see a counsellor? That I am crazy, violent, living in a fantasy world?

  She is the one with the over-active imagination, if you ask me.

  Dad flicks on MTV and we sit on the sofa eating beans on toast with misshapen Taystee Bars for afters. Neither of us bothers to take our shoes off.

  ‘Miss Jardine told me you were making up stories again,’ Dad says, munching toast. ‘Apparently she didn’t get my letter explaining the move?’

  I bite my lip. ‘My pen leaked all over it,’ I admit. ‘And my Irn-Bru. So I had to explain it out loud. I don’t think she believed me. She said that I live in a world of make-believe!’

  ‘Well, don’t you?’

  I bite back a smile. Dad doesn’t like the word ‘lies’. Whenever teachers have used it over the years – which they have, quite a few times – he is quick to tell them that I am not a liar, but a skilled and imaginative storyteller, and if they cannot see that then perhaps they need their eyes testing.

  It makes me smile, but these days I make a point of keeping Dad away from school parents’ evenings, just in case.

  It is great to have a dad who believes in you, who backs you up and defends you from mean-faced teachers. It is great to know that Dad thinks I am creative and imaginative, but there is a little voice inside me that wonders if, sometimes, sticking to the truth might just be easier all round.

  Stories come easily to me, that’s the trouble. A teacher asks me where my history essay is and, right away, a fully formed story pops into my head about how our flat was burgled the night before and my essay was taken away by police detectives as evidence, to be dusted for fingerprints and DNA. I forgot my gym kit, once, and I told the teacher our washing machine had gone wrong, shredding it all into spaghetti-like strips before flooding the kitchen and bringing down the ceiling of the flat below.

  It sounds so much better than saying ‘I forgot it’, so much more interesting and colourful and adventurous. The trouble is, my teachers tend not to agree. They prefer the truth, even if it is dull and grey and boring.

  Is it really such a crime, to have a vivid imagination?

  ‘I’ve explained it all now,’ Dad is saying. ‘Miss Jardine doesn’t think you have settled in too well at Clyde Academy. She says that a fresh start might be for the best.’

  ‘I settled in fine!’ I say, outraged.

  Well, maybe I didn’t … but I scraped by, didn’t I? Miss Jardine has made it all sound so much worse than it really is, so much more of a big deal. And none of this would have happened at all if it hadn’t been for Kirsty, of course.

  ‘She deserved it, anyway,’ I say. ‘Kirsty McRae.’

  Dad raises an eyebrow. ‘Is this the same Kirsty who came to tea when you were seven, and ate all the Taystee Bars and made you cry?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘Well … perhaps,’ he sighs.

  Kirsty’s long-ago visit stirred up a whole lot of trouble, but I was grateful to her too, in a funny way. She made me ask questions I’d never even thought of asking before.

  I was seven years old, and I’d never wondered where my mum was, or why I looked so different from Dad or from the other kids at school.

  ‘Am I adopted?’ I had asked Dad, a few days later. He’d rolled his eyes and folded me in his arms and wiped my tears away, and later he gave me a photograph of my mum, young and beautiful and laughing, her ink-black hair blowing back in the breeze on the beach at Largs. I was only seven, but I knew even then that I would look just like her, one day. Dark, almond eyes, high cheekbones, skin the colour of milky coffee.

  Her name was Kiko and she was Japanese. I was half-Japanese, and I hadn’t even known it.

  I never missed my mum until I saw that photograph, I swear. Afterwards, though, she was all I could think about. I got books out of the library about Japan. I drew endless felt-pen sketches of dark-haired ladies in kimonos, twirling parasols, even though in the photo my mum was wearing jeans and a jumper. I would imagine pagodas and cherry blossom and brave samurai warriors.

  ‘Are we really leaving Glasgow?’ I ask Dad now.

  ‘We really are,’ Dad says. ‘No more Miss Jardine. No more Kirsty McRae …’

  I laugh. We clank Coke cans and drink to the future, then Dad tries to flick the TV over to the football, so we wrestle over the remote control and I manage to grab it and chuck it across the room, where it lands with a ‘plop’ in the goldfish-bowl, with Rover giving it the evil eye.

  It starts slowly, the packing up. In the first week of the school holidays, I tidy my room and chuck out a lifetime’s supply of broken plastic toys, dusty comics and worn-out plimsolls last seen when I was seven. I sort out a bag of book, two bags of board games and fluffy toys and a bin bag of outgrown clothes for the charity shop. Dad adds a few bags of his own to the haul, chucks the whole lot in the back of the little red minivan and takes a trip to the tip, stopping off at the charity shop on the way.

  By the time Dad ticks off his last-ever day at the factory, our flat is starting to look eerily bare. Even my treasures are carefully packed into a big McBean’s Taystee Bar box – the kimono, the paper parasol, the fan, the photograph of Mum.

  It feels weird, disloyal somehow, packing away my special things. Scary.

  ‘A girl needs a mother,’ Mrs Mackie, the old lady next door, used to say. ‘Paddy does his best, but …’ Her voice would trail away sadly.

  I told Mrs Mackie that some girls could cope just fine without a mum, look at me and Paddy, after all. I don’t think she believed me, and she was right. She knew me a whole lot better than I would ever admit. I wish my mum was still around to say and do all the stuff that mums are supposed t
o do when their daughters hit their teens, of course I do. An old photo is not much use when you want to ask about periods or bras or boys … or why you can never seem to hang on to your friends.

  Some things you cannot talk to your dad about.

  It’s not like I have never wondered what it might be like if Dad met someone special. I’d picture someone pretty and cool who would talk to me about girly, growing-up stuff and take me shopping for shoes and dresses, or maybe someone plump and kind, who’d bake apple pies and hug me when I felt sad. I dreamed up a hundred different versions of the woman who might be my new mum, and pretended to Kirsty McRae that they were real.

  A mum was what I wanted, more than anything.

  I never realized she might come with strings attached.

  4

  Dad found Charlotte Tanberry on one of those Internet sites where friends from hundreds of years ago hook up and catch up on what they’ve been up to. She was an old friend from his art-school days – the days before Mum, before me.

  Dad had had big ideas, back then. He wanted to change the world, paint wild, wonderful canvases the size of walls. He has shown me photos of a skinny boy with sticky-up hair and paint-stained fingers, a boy with big dreams.

  And Charlotte … she’d studied graphic design. Like Dad, she’d never hit the big time – she was divorced and living in Somerset, running her house as a B&B to make ends meet.

  Pretty soon, Dad and Charlotte were chatting the whole time, remembering the old days. Dad was glued to his laptop every evening, flirting and messaging and falling in love.

  Charlotte was blonde and pretty, I could see that, but more importantly she looked kind, as if she laughed a lot. She looked like mum material.

  ‘I like her,’ I told Dad, and he grinned and said he liked her too. The two of them started meeting up for mushy weekends, sharing hopes and dreams, making plans for the future. I would stay with Mrs Mackie in the flat next door, wishing, hoping, praying things would all work out.

  It was a modern romance, an Internet fairy tale.

  ‘Have you ever wondered if there could be more to life than this?’ Dad asked, one evening, looking around the dingy flat. ‘If you’re letting life pass you by?’

  I frowned. ‘Not really,’ I replied.

  But things were changing, even though I didn’t know it.

  Dad worked at McBean’s Chocolate Factory because the shift hours fitted perfectly with my school day. I used to think that was cool – I’d seen Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – but McBean’s wasn’t much like that, not really. There were no rivers of chocolate, no everlasting gobstoppers. Dad did not get to wear a velvet tailcoat and top hat, just a plastic apron and a hairnet and nasty rubber gloves, and the work was so dull he said it made his brain ache.

  One day I came home from school and found him making chocolate truffles at the kitchen table, melting down McBean’s Milk Chocolate Bars over a pan of bubbling water on the cooker.

  ‘Don’t you get enough of that, at work?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ he’d answered. ‘There’s money in chocolate. If an old-fashioned biscuit like the Taystee Bar can sell so well, imagine what you could do at the top end of the market. Handmade, organic truffles, beautifully packaged … we could make a fortune!’

  I looked at the gloopy mess in the mixing bowl and wasn’t quite so sure, but we tried a few, and they tasted a whole lot better than they looked.

  The next day, he made another batch, packaged them up in a little card box he’d made and decorated himself, lined with gold tissue paper and tied up with ribbon. He sent them off through the post to Charlotte.

  She told him they were fabulous, but Dad said he could do better. He switched from melting down McBean’s Milk Chocolate to something more upmarket, and the quality of his kitchen-table truffles began to improve. Some of them were pure brilliant, like the ones with fresh strawberries and cream and the ones with tiny chunks of pineapple and mango.

  Charlotte got samples of every batch. It was a long-distance love affair, sweetened by chocolate.

  Who could resist?

  Charlotte came to Glasgow and the three of us went out on a date, to the park, to the museum, to a Japanese restaurant. Dad wore a new jacket and T-shirt and put gel in his hair to try to tame it. I thought he looked great, my smiley, scruffy, lovely dad, with his rumpled brown hair and laughing blue eyes and his ancient Doc Marten boots that leak in the rain. I guess Charlotte thought so too.

  She laughed a lot, and when she couldn’t manage the chopsticks at the Japanese restaurant she ended up wearing them in her hair. The three of us stayed up past midnight, squashed on to the sofa drinking mocktails Charlotte had invented out of things like peach juice and Irn-Bru and pineapple slices. The next day, at the railway station, she hugged me tight, told me to look after Paddy and said that she’d miss me, and I was so happy I felt like I could fly.

  So what if Dad was in love? I was too.

  ‘How would you feel,’ Dad had asked carefully, ‘about leaving Glasgow? Going down to England to live with Charlotte? We could help her run the B&B, and actually get this chocolate business off the ground. And … Cherry, we could be a proper family again …’

  How would I feel? Like all my Christmases and birthdays had been rolled into one.

  Only now it’s actually happening, I’m not so sure.

  What if it doesn’t work out the way I’ve imagined? What if playing happy families is a whole lot harder than it looks?

  It doesn’t take long to pack the flat up, not once Dad is finished at the factory. The stack of boxes and bin bags by the door gets bigger and bigger. Towards the end of the week, Mrs Mackie comes round, armed with furniture polish and dusters and a mop and a bucket filled to the brim with soapy water. She puts us to work dusting and polishing and mopping the flat, from top to bottom.

  ‘I’ll miss you, you know,’ she tells us gruffly, as Dad scrubs, scours and bleaches the sink and I polish the taps to a high gleam. ‘You were never any trouble, as neighbours.’

  ‘We’ll miss you too, Mrs Mackie,’ Dad says.

  I think of all the times she took me to school because Dad was on early shift, all the times I holed up in her flat eating shortbread biscuits and watching children’s TV, waiting for Dad to get home.

  Mrs Mackie shakes Dad’s hand and presses a warm fifty-pence piece into my palm, and tells me to be a good girl. A sad twist of regret lodges in my chest suddenly, and I want to hug her tight and cry on her shoulder … I don’t, though. I am trying to be brave. After all, I am getting exactly what I wanted. A mum, a future, the chance to be a family, a chance to be like all the other girls – the Kirsty McRaes of this world. It’s just that it feels a whole lot more real, more scary, than I ever imagined …

  We have been up since six, loading the van, struggling up and down the tenement stairs and out into the lashing rain. Every box, every suitcase and bin bag, is shoe-horned in. Mrs Mackie appears in her nylon housecoat and tartan slippers, and hands us a bag of cheese-spread sandwiches cut into triangles and a couple of slices of fruit cake for the journey. My eyes really do mist over then.

  We abandon the brown corduroy sofa, post the keys through the letterbox for the landlord, and by nine o’clock we are on our way.

  ‘I won’t miss the rain,’ Dad says, trying to be chirpy.

  But I think it’s raining because we are leaving, because it’s the end of something, and the city is sad to see us go.

  By eleven, we have covered more than a hundred miles and it is still chucking down. The downpour is starting to feel less like a sad farewell and more like a really, really bad omen. What if this whole move south and find-a-new-family adventure turns out to be a disaster?

  I huddle in the passenger seat, holding Rover in his glass bowl, the box of treasures at my feet. My cheek rests against the window, and outside the rain slides down the glass like tears.
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  ‘This summer … we’ll try to see it as a trial,’ Dad is saying. ‘See whether we can make things work. I think we can, but I want you to know that you come first, whatever happens. If you’re not happy … if you don’t settle … well, we will think again. You’re still my number-one girl, Cherry. You know that.’

  ‘I know,’ I say softly, but I’m not sure if I do any more, or how long that might last.

  Charlotte Tanberry is cool. She laughs a lot, wears chopsticks in her hair, but … there is one tiny problem. Charlotte doesn’t need a new family because she already has one … four bright, beautiful daughters.

  I stare out of the window as the little van heads south, leaving Scotland – and life as I know it – behind.

  5

  It stops raining just north of Preston, and the sun comes out and a big, beautiful arc of rainbow shimmers over the motorway. We stop at a service station for coffee and milkshake, eating the cheese-spread sandwiches sneakily, under the table of the service station cafe.

  I fish around in my bag for the letters sent by Charlotte’s daughters, Skye, Summer and Coco, to tell me about themselves and make me welcome.

  Skye’s letter is written on black paper in silver gel pen and sprinkled with tiny silver stars; she tells me all about horoscopes and history and her addiction to jumble-sale dresses. Very odd. Summer’s is written in purple on pale pink paper, and her letter is all about ballet and how she dreams of learning to dance en pointe and being a prima ballerina one day. The last letter, Coco’s, is written in smudgy pencil on a torn bit of paper that looks as though it has fallen in a puddle, or been chewed by a dog, or possibly both. Coco seems to be obsessed with animals and climbing trees, and tells me all about her ambition to have a llama, a donkey and a parrot as pets.

  I’m not sure if the letters are comforting, exactly.