Chocolate Box Girls Read online

  ‘So what did you want to talk about?’ I ask.

  Shay sighs. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know. My dad hates me, my girlfriend is turning into a psycho and I’m supposed to sit back and soak it all up. Nobody ever thinks I might be having a hard time. Well, except for you. And even you can’t work out if you like me or hate me, most of the time.’

  ‘I like you, Shay,’ I admit. ‘It’s just … complicated.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he huffs. ‘But really … you’re different. Interesting.’

  ‘I’m not that interesting,’ I say.

  ‘I think you are …’

  My heart starts doing triple somersaults, at just about the same time as my head starts telling me to run for the hills. I want to be interesting. It may not be quite as enticing as gorgeous or sexy or whatever he thinks that Honey is, but it’s something. Interesting … that is something I have always wanted to be, and somehow never was.

  ‘Anyhow … it’s a long story, and I don’t think it’s going to have a happy ending.’ Shay leans back against the caravan door, sighing. ‘My life sucks, seriously. Tell me about Sakura instead … please?’

  I sit down on the fallen tree trunk, Fred loafing at my feet. Shay is right – sometimes, stories are better than reality. And much more interesting, of course, particularly if you’re me.

  I take a deep breath and tell Shay the story of the kimono and the fan.

  ‘There was a very special festival in Kyoto,’ I begin. ‘Maybe five or six months before the day in the park when Sakura saw the cherry blossoms fall. On the day of this festival, parents who had children aged seven, five or three years old would take them to the shrine to give thanks for their health and pray for future blessings. Sakura was three, so her parents hired a tiny silk kimono to dress her in, and put a clip trimmed with cherry blossom in her hair.’

  Shay smiles in the darkness.

  ‘Sakura’s dad wore a black kimono, and her mum wore one made of heavy salmon-pink silk with a deep orange lining, handpainted with cherry blossom and flying birds, all shot through with gold thread.

  ‘At the shrine, Sakura was allowed to pull on the bell rope and clap three times to summon the gods, and her mum wrote a prayer on to a little wooden board to hang up to bring good luck. Back home, she was given a present, a paper fan painted with cherry blossom. It was a perfect day, and Sakura knew she would remember it forever …’

  ‘Wow,’ Shay says. ‘I can’t imagine you at three years old, living on a whole different continent …’

  ‘Shhh,’ I tell him. ‘The story isn’t finished. I’ve already told you about the day Sakura saw the cherry blossom fall, and then, later, how she woke up one day and found her mother gone … that was maybe a year after the festival. Sakura didn’t understand. She missed her mum, and often asked about her, wanting to know where she had gone, and why, and when she might be coming home.

  ‘Sakura’s dad was silent and sad, and he never answered her questions but just lifted her up and hugged her close. Sometimes Sakura would feel his eyelashes, damp with tears, brushing against her cheek. She knew that he missed Kiko just as much as she did …’ I stop talking then.

  Shay gets up from the caravan steps and walks over to sit beside me. I flinch away from him, but Shay slides an arm round me and I am lost. I want nothing more than to curl up against him, press my cheek against his shoulder.

  I don’t, of course. Fred, the best guard dog in the whole universe, rescues me by pushing between us, resting his head on my knee. ‘Hey, hey, Fred,’ I laugh, running my fingers through his bird’s-nest fur. I pull away from Shay again, and this time he lets me go, takes up his guitar and picks out a few sad chords.

  ‘Anyway,’ I continue. ‘A few months later, Sakura’s dad gave her a package wrapped in rustling tissue paper, and when she unwrapped it she discovered the salmon-pink kimono her mum had worn on the day of the festival. Sakura lifted up the heavy silk, traced her fingers over the handpainted birds and the cherry blossom. She pressed her face against the fabric and breathed in jasmine and powder, the soft, sweet smell of her mum, and for the first time since Kiko had gone, Sakura began to cry.’

  Shay sighs and puts his guitar down on the grass.

  ‘Whoa,’ he whispers. ‘That was the kimono that Honey threw out of the window?’

  ‘Charlotte washed it,’ I say in a small voice. ‘She was trying to make it fresh and new again, but now it just smells of washing powder … there’s nothing left of my mum.’

  Shay squeezes my hand in the darkness. ‘There’s a lot of her left, I bet,’ he whispers. ‘She’s in you.’

  Shay stands up, pulling down a tree branch to pick a handful of cherries. He leans towards me in the darkness, draping a little cherry bunch over each of my ears, like outsize, dangly earrings, and I shiver, even though the night is warm.

  Then he slings the blue guitar over one shoulder and walks away, leaving me with a racing heart and a head full of dreams that have nothing to do with friendship, nothing at all.

  16

  I wake up in a tangle of sheets, Fred snuggled into me, sunlight sneaking through the caravan curtains. And then I remember last night, and guilt aches in my throat like a sickness.

  Why did I let Shay stick around? I promised myself I was going to stop, then caved in almost at once. I sigh. When Shay is around, my determination crumbles into dust.

  As I wander up to the house in bare feet and PJs, I hear the strains of Dad’s favourite fiddle CD drifting down towards me, punctuated with sudden loud crashes and bangs. I follow the sound and discover Dad, in ancient jeans and a cobwebby T-shirt, dragging boxes, bin bags and broken bits of furniture out of the old stable block while a little CD player sits on the tack room window sill, spilling out upbeat folky sounds.

  ‘Morning, Cherry!’ Dad grins. ‘Thought I’d make a start! Got enough stuff here for a dozen bonfires, and there’ll be a good few trips to the tip as well …’

  ‘Great,’ I say weakly. ‘I’ll help if you want … I slept in, and I haven’t got any plans …’

  ‘No, no, you go and hang out with the girls,’ Dad insists. ‘I’m enjoying it!’

  He heads back inside and a moment later a couple of dusty, down-at-heel kitchen chairs fly out and land on the mounting pile of junk.

  I sigh and head inside to shower and dress. I fix myself some toast and help Charlotte stack the dishwasher and tidy the kitchen after the breakfast rush. Skye has gone down to the village to see a friend and Summer has a dance class in town, so Coco and I help Charlotte to clean the guest bedrooms and then I head back to the caravan to read for a while.

  ‘How’s your fish getting on?’ Coco asks, tagging along.

  ‘Rover is fine,’ I say. ‘Better than fine.’

  ‘It’s just that I’ve been investigating,’ she shrugs. ‘The latest research on goldfish suggests that they have much better memories than anyone thought. Seriously. Like, five or six seconds instead of three. At least. Rover could feel really lonely, swimming around in that bowl for years and years with only a luminous pink bridge and a bit of plastic weed to liven things up.’

  I pick up my book and frown at Rover. ‘Six seconds,’ I sigh. ‘It’s still a very short space of time.’

  ‘I know, but … well, you want the best for him, don’t you?’

  ‘Who are you, Doctor Dolittle?’ I say. ‘Rover is my pet. I look after him well. He loves me!’

  ‘I know that,’ Coco says. ‘And you love him. But just think, if he had a pond of his own …’

  I take a long, hard look at Rover, and remember the pond I imagined for him, with water lilies and a stone pagoda and a bridge. It would be fish-heaven.

  I love having him in the caravan with me, but maybe he deserves more than that?

  ‘Do you really think he’d like it?’ I ask.

  ‘Trust me,’ Coco grins. ‘He’d love it. A goldfish in a bowl liv
es maybe five, ten years … if he is lucky. And of course, he’d never grow big, because there’s no room to grow.’

  ‘Rover’s quite big,’ I say. ‘But if he was in a pond, he’d seem really, really tiny. He might be out of his depth.’

  Coco laughs. ‘Right now, Rover is a little fish in a teeny-tiny pond,’ she says. ‘A goldfish-bowl, in fact. There is nothing left for him to explore, nothing left for him to learn. Take a risk. Let him be a little fish in a big pond! Trust me, fish don’t mind being out of their depth. They like it!’

  ‘I suppose …’

  I think about how I felt, when I first arrived at Tanglewood House. I was out of my depth too, but there was a buzz of excitement, of possibility, as well. It was the start of something new, and I liked that feeling.

  Maybe Rover would too?

  ‘He’ll grow,’ Coco says. ‘And he’ll probably live longer. He’ll be happy.’

  That swings it, really.

  ‘It can’t be all that hard to dig a fish pond,’ Coco says. ‘I’ll look it up on the Internet. We can put it by the patio, so the guests can see it.’

  ‘Might be cool,’ I say. ‘OK, let’s do it!’

  Coco grins. ‘I’ll ask Charlotte,’ she says.

  The next day, we are in the middle of breakfast when there’s a knock on the kitchen door. A bloke in blue overalls is there, grinning. ‘You wanted a digger?’ he says.

  ‘A digger?’ Charlotte echoes, frying pan in hand. ‘No, no, we didn’t want a digger, Joe. Where did you get that idea?’

  ‘Young Coco rang up last night,’ he says. ‘Something about a fish pond?’

  Charlotte looks at Coco, who is trying hard to hide behind a Cornflakes box. ‘We hadn’t agreed on a pond, Coco,’ she says mildly. ‘I just said I’d think about it.’

  ‘You said it was a very good idea,’ Coco reminds her. ‘In principle. And now that the digger’s here … it’d be a shame not to use it, right?’

  ‘But where would we put a fish pond?’ Charlotte asks.

  ‘Up near the house, by the patio,’ Coco says.

  Dad nods. ‘We could do. The guests might like it. It could be a feature.’

  ‘But it’s such a lot of work.’ Charlotte frowns. ‘You’re clearing out the stables, and there’s the festival to prepare for, and both of us are supposed to be working on our presentation for the bank to try to get a loan for The Chocolate Box!’

  Dad shrugs. ‘Do you really want a pond?’

  ‘Yes!’ I say. ‘It’s for Rover! So he feels like he really belongs.’

  ‘Well, I’m nipping into town later anyway,’ Dad says. ‘I have to go to the tip and hire a pressure washer to clean down the walls and floor in the stable. If I’m in the DIY store I can get a pond liner, and the girls could do the rest. Right, Coco, Cherry?’

  ‘Right!’ we chorus.

  ‘We’ll help,’ Skye chips in.

  ‘Sure, it’d be fun,’ Summer agrees.

  ‘So,’ asks the bloke in the doorway, ‘do you want this digger or not?’

  By the time Charlotte has served eggs Benedict to table six and kippers on toast to table three, Joe the digger man has gouged a huge hole next to the patio. A mound of soil the size of the red minivan is piled up beside it, and the digger is trundling off along the gravel drive.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Coco says. ‘That’s a LOT of soil.’

  We drive into Minehead, ditch a trailerful of soil and junk at the tip and head on to the DIY superstore to buy acres of thick black pond-liner, three water lilies in underwater buckets, six sacks of gravel and some barrel tubs to fill with soil and plant up with bedding plants.

  There are also four new goldfish from the pet shop to keep Rover company. We took ages, picking out fish that looked different from Rover, so we could tell them all apart. One has a very fancy tail, one has a black patch on his side, one has a notched fin, one has silvery-white blotches on gold.

  ‘What should we call them?’ Coco wonders. ‘Goldie and Lola and Silvertail and Princess?’

  ‘Or Fido and Patch and Spot and Butch,’ I suggest. ‘So that Rover feels at home.’

  Dad nods his approval. He spends the morning helping us to make the pond, arranging rocks and gravel round the edge to hide the liner. Dad heads back to the workshop in the afternoon, and we start filling the pond with water. By teatime it is almost ready. We lower the water lilies into position and shovel the mountain of soil into the barrel containers, stuff in the bedding plants and arrange them on the patio. We are just brushing away the last of the soil when Charlotte comes out with lemonade on a tray, a reward for the workers.

  ‘It looks very nice,’ she admits. ‘You’ve all worked really hard!’

  There is no stone pagoda, no Japanese footbridge, but there could be … one day. Charlotte is right, the pond is cool. Any fish would be proud to have a home like that.

  Dad says we have to wait a day to let the water warm and settle before the fish move in, and I am secretly glad to have one more night alone with Rover, just like old times.

  ‘Everything’s changing,’ I tell him, huddled in my bunk in the caravan. ‘For both of us. It’s time to move on, grow up. We are part of a proper family now.’

  Rover blinks.

  ‘You mustn’t think that it’s too big or too posh for you,’ I tell him. ‘You deserve it, after all this time in a little glass bowl. And don’t worry about the other fish. You’ll get used to them. I got used to Tanglewood House, didn’t I? And Charlotte and Skye and Summer and Coco. I might even get used to Honey, in the end.’

  I count to six, watching him carefully. ‘Are you listening?’ I ask. ‘You need to remember this, and remember it for more than six seconds. It’s important.’

  Rover flicks his tail.

  ‘I will still come and see you every day,’ I promise him. ‘I will still feed you. You will grow, and learn, and have adventures. You will live to be very old, and very wise. One day, you might even be a big fish in a small pond! And I will still love you more than any of the other goldfish, I promise.’

  I blow a kiss against the cool glass, and snuggle down beneath the covers to sleep.

  17

  A few days later I am lying flat out on the grass beside the new pond, staring down into the water, when a pair of blue strappy sandals step into the edge of my vision.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ a cool, bored voice says. ‘Don’t jump.’

  I scramble to a sitting position. Honey is looking down at me, an expression of pity in her eyes.

  ‘I was just looking for my fish,’ I say, as if this is somehow normal behaviour. ‘Rover.’

  Honey perches on one of the patio benches. ‘Don’t you think it’s weird?’ she says. ‘Calling your goldfish a dog’s name?’

  ‘Someone else said that, once,’ I sigh, thinking of Kirsty McRae. ‘You remind me of her, funnily enough.’

  Honey raises an eyebrow and twists her mouth into an especially Kirsty-like scowl.

  ‘I think it’s funny,’ I shrug. ‘About the name. Ironic, y’know?’

  ‘Right,’ she says, unimpressed. ‘Why were you looking for your goldfish anyhow? Don’t tell me, you talk to him, tell him all your secrets.’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ I bluff. ‘That would be crazy.’

  Rover glides soundlessly to the surface. I’d almost swear he’s laughing. He flicks his tail and dives down beneath the water lilies again, a small fish in a big pond, enjoying every minute.

  Honey opens up a sketchbook and takes a pencil from behind her ear, frowning thoughtfully. ‘I have stuff to do for my art project,’ she says. ‘And you happen to be in the way.’

  She smiles sweetly, her waist-length blonde hair fanned out around her like a golden cloak. I think she just told me to push off out of her sight, but I can’t quite believe it.

  ‘Honey, I know you don’t much like me being here …’


  ‘Much?’ she echoes, smirking.

  I sigh. ‘OK then, you don’t like me being here at all. But I am here, and so is Dad, so don’t you think it would be better if we all tried to get along?’

  ‘Are you stupid?’ Honey sighs. ‘Don’t you understand? I know the others are humouring you, but seriously, you must realize this whole stepfamily thing is not going to work. You will never fit in here, Cherry, no matter how hard you try.’

  My cheeks flush pink and I feel like I’ve been slapped.

  Fitting in … how can she tell that is the thing I want most of all? To belong, to be a part of things? I thought I was doing OK, but Honey’s words crush my hopes like eggshells.

  ‘There is no point in us trying to get on, Cherry,’ she goes on. ‘Face it – I can’t stand you. And you probably can’t stand me. End of story.’

  I am not too keen on Honey Tanberry, it’s true, but it is very hard to like someone who clearly cannot stand you. Honey looks at me like I am an especially repellent slug that has crawled up on to her suede strappy sandals.

  Beneath the pretty princess exterior, Honey is kind of poisonous … but still, there is a part of me that longs for her to accept me, like me.

  Like that is ever going to happen.

  ‘It’s not really about us, though, is it?’ I argue. ‘Honey, don’t you think your mum and my dad deserve a chance to be happy?’

  Her blue eyes flash with fury. ‘Oh, don’t pretend you care about that!’ she snaps. ‘As if! You march in here and act like you own the place … you must think you’ve really hit it lucky, but it won’t last, trust me. Your dad is a clown. He couldn’t get this chocolate business off the ground if his life depended on it, and when he fails, Mum will chuck him out. She doesn’t like wasters.’

  I swallow back my own anger. ‘You’re wrong about Dad,’ I tell her. ‘He’s … he’s great, and Charlotte likes him, I know she does.’

  ‘For now,’ Honey shrugs. ‘She liked my dad too, and then she changed her mind and threw him out. So don’t go getting too comfortable, OK? Your days are numbered. I write to Dad all the time, so he knows exactly what’s going on, and trust me, he is not impressed. He still loves Mum – this split, it’s just a blip …’