Sugar Secrets…& Lies

by Mel Sparke

  Sonja gave Kerry a squeeze and shot her an encouraging smile. Kerry managed a watery one back.

  Ah, thought Sonja. That little bunny-in-the-headlights look again.

  It had been happening more and more recently, she’d noticed. That funny, startled but yearning expression that flitted across her friend’s features when she forgot herself and just gave in to staring at Ollie.

  Sonja had been making a real effort to be more attentive to Kerry since their bust-up over Natasha, and it was this new sense of awareness that made her suspect that there was some sort of a crush going on. But no matter how much she’d subtly hinted at it (and Sonja could be subtle when she wanted, whatever the others said), Kerry hadn’t given anything away. But then it could be that Kerry hadn’t even realised what was happening. Sometimes it took an outsider to spot the truth.

  And Sonja had noticed something else – something that made her want to force the issue just a little bit. Unless she was very much mistaken, Ollie seemed to be showing signs of harbouring some more-than-just-friendship feelings for Kerry. That certain way his gaze softened when he looked at her; the way he smiled at her whenever she spoke… Could it be that two of her best buddies really were falling for each other?

  Of course, she could be wrong, Sonja admitted to herself. But what was the problem with giving the pair of them a nudge, just to see what happened?

  And she’d nearly done it this afternoon too. Her truly skilful piece of manoeuvring had got Ollie on the verge of confessing some secret – a confession that might have made Kerry blissfully happy, or at least put a lid on Sonja’s theory.

  Ah, well, Sonja reasoned, there’ll be other chances…

  Maya scuffed the rubberised playpark flooring with the toes of her trainers as she swayed back and forth on the swing. On her lap was the toy dinosaur she’d just won for her little brother. It had taken a lot of hoop-throwing and probably cost her more than if she’d just bought it in a shop, but she knew Ravi would love it.

  “Look, if those French girls were as into you as you say they were, there’s no way you’d be sitting here with us. You’d be off somewhere with them right now!”

  Matt, perched on the top of the climbing frame, gazed down in the darkening twilight at Maya and pulled a hurt face.

  “What are you saying? That I’m making it up?”

  Maya was always quick to pull Matt right back down to size. If it had been any of the others, he might have blustered out some smart comeback, but he never dared with Maya. She might be two years younger than him, but to Matt, sixteen-year-old Maya was as intimidating as any headmistress of forty plus.

  “It’s not that she thinks you’re making it up, Matt,” said Ollie, who was suspended upside-down on the climbing frame. “It’s just that you have been going on about them for hours now. Of course, maybe what’s bugging Maya is that she’s not bored with hearing about them like the rest of us – maybe she’s jealous! Oooufff!”

  A well-aimed, fluffy green dinosaur caught Ollie right in the stomach.

  “We can take that as a no, then, Maya?” he gasped, clutching at the toy before it fell to the ground.

  From across the lake, the lights of the fair twinkled in the hazy dusk, the last streams of colour from the setting sun giving way to the brightness of the ever-changing blue, green, red and yellow bulbs that flickered around the stalls and rides. A clash of music – traditional hurdy-gurdy organ overlapped by the latest dance tracks blasting from the waltzers – drifted over the water on the evening breeze to this quiet corner of the park.

  Not that anywhere could be quiet for long with Catrina around.

  “Ollie! Ollie! Come here and give me a push!” she screeched, standing on the swing next to Maya.

  “Yes, Sir! On the double! One push coming right up!” said Ollie, untangling himself from the metal bars and getting his feet back on terra firma. Deftly he tossed the dinosaur to Joe, who caught it with the arm that wasn’t busy pushing Sonja and Kerry on the merry-go-round.

  “Make it a big push,” Matt muttered to Ollie before he walked away. “You never know your luck, she might fall off.”

  For the sake of his other friend, Ollie tried not to laugh.

  “I heard that!” yelped Cat.

  “You were meant to,” Matt growled.

  “Oh, come on – you’re not going to get all wound up by that grumpy sod, are you?” Ollie teased Cat. He grabbed hold of both the rusting chains and pulled her as far back as he could. Teetering in her stacked-heel shoes on the swing seat, Cat let out a giggly shriek of alarm.

  “Not too high! Not too hiiii-ghhhhh!!” she begged uselessly.

  Dangling lazily beside them, Maya watched in amusement as Ollie put all his strength into shoving Cat high into the night sky.

  Someone else was watching Ollie and Catrina fooling around, and it wasn’t with amusement. Sonja, perched on the gently spinning merry-go-round, followed Kerry’s forlorn gaze. Why was the sight of Ollie and Cat mucking about getting her down so much? It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary – they did this sort of stuff all the time.

  “Kerry…?” she heard Joe say softly, and turned to see him holding out the fluffy toy in her dejected friend’s direction.

  “Thanks, Joe,” said Kerry, giving him a rueful smile. She took the dinosaur and curled her arms around it, resting her chin on its squashy head, looking for all the world like a little kid in need of some comfort.

  Sonja glanced back at her friends cavorting on the swings. OK, so she’d had her suspicions today about how much Kerry really liked Ollie, but what was going on here? What was she missing?

  In Sonja’s analytical mind everything suddenly clicked into place. Kerry thought she’d sussed out who Ollie was secretly in love with. And she was quietly crumpling with misery because she suspected she was looking at that person right now.

  Oh, Kerry, thought Sonja fondly, you really are crazy about him. But you’re even crazier if you think he’s fallen for Cat. Especially after what went on between them before.

  CHAPTER 5

  KERRY COMES CLEAN

  “Say it.”

  “No.”

  “Say it!”

  “No!”

  “You’ll feel brilliant!”

  “NO!”

  “Repeat after me, ‘I, Kerry Bellamy, do declare that I’m in love with…”’

  “Sonja!”

  “What?”

  “What exactly are you trying to do to me?”

  Sonja reached across the Formica table and grabbed her friend’s hand.

  “I’m trying to get you to stop lying about this – to me and to yourself. You fancy Ollie. So what?”

  Kerry looked out of the big bay window of the café and blinked furiously, her heart pounding.

  “Look,” Sonja continued, “how many years have we been friends? How well do I know you? How well do I know you even when you try and hide stuff from me? I mean, I kind of had an idea that you liked Ollie, but after seeing how wound up you got last night… well, it just made me see I was right.”

  Kerry shuffled in her seat, but still couldn’t bring herself to look into Sonja’s searching eyes. She’d known this was coming.

  When Matt had dropped her off the previous night, Sonja had grabbed her and hissed in her ear, “Tomorrow, after college, in the End – OK?” in a very definite manner. For once, Kerry had been glad of her parents’ peculiar rule of not encouraging people to phone after ten at night, otherwise she’d have been in for an epic inquisition from Sonja.

  “C’mon, Kez – why have you never told me? Me, your best mate?” Sonja needled some more.

  “Because I didn’t know myself till yesterday!” Kerry burst out.

  “Really?” Sonja looked at her friend quizzically.

  “Really!” Kerry replied adamantly.

  “What, you’re telling me that you’ve never, ever had the teensiest, weensiest ickle feelings for him?” Sonja grinned wickedly at Kerry.

  “No!” she ans
wered straight-faced, then shook her head and gave a wry, shy smile.

  “Do I take that as a yes?” Sonja quizzed her.

  “I guess – I guess if I think back… I s’pose I have sort of thought about him… that kind of way. Sometimes.”

  The expression on Kerry’s face was somewhere between a grin and a grimace.

  “Why did you never tell me?” asked Sonja, more gently, aware of her friend’s discomfort. “We always talk about people we fancy!”

  “Why?” said Kerry, shrugging her shoulders. “Well, what about he’s my friend – our friend – so how could I ever think of him as anything else? And what about the fact that even though he likes me as a mate, Ollie would never fancy me?”

  “What do you mean?” said Sonja, completely lost. Kerry sat across from her with her scatty head of curls escaping from two daisy hairgrips, her smattering of freckles, and her big, brown eyes fringed with thick lashes behind the glass of her specs. She looked as scruffily and messily adorable as ever. Sonja couldn’t figure out what she meant.

  Kerry clocked her blank expression. Of course it was hard for Sonja to grasp. When you were one of the most effortlessly gorgeous girls around, with bucket loads of confidence to match, it wasn’t easy to understand what it felt like to be one of the legions of Ordinary People.

  “Well, look at Ollie!” she blurted, her words tumbling out now that Sonja had forced her to spill. “Isn’t he one of the most brilliant, funny, original…” Kerry waved her hands around in frustration trying to come up with more adjectives to describe him.

  “Cute?” suggested Sonja, trying to help.

  “Cute!” said Kerry in exasperation. “He’s ridiculously cute too! How can I live up to that?”

  “Live up to what?” asked Sonja, now sensing Kerry’s lack of self-worth, but refusing to let her wallow in it. “Ollie likes you the way you are!”

  “As a friend, Son, just as a friend. I can’t kid myself that he’d ever think of me as any more than that.”

  “Why not?” said Sonja, watching as Kerry dropped her head on to her arms on the tabletop. “You’ve got every—”

  “I haven’t got every chance with him, before you start,” countered Kerry, raising her head sharply. “How can I compete with someone like Elaine?”

  “But Elaine’s long gone!” Sonja protested. “She’ll be half-way up a mountain in Tibet looking for the ultimate truth or something by now.”

  “That’s not the point, Son!” said Kerry, her face flushed with frustration. “She was this amazing character, and Ollie was really into her. Beside someone like her, I’m so… so dull.”

  “Of course you’re not!”

  “And of course you’d say that – you’re my best friend! And before you say one more thing—” Kerry glanced over as she heard Anna coming out of the kitchen laden with plates and immediately dropped her voice “—you’re not going to tell me that Ollie didn’t mean Cat when he spoke about being in love last night!”

  “I knew that’s what you were thinking!”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Kerry stared at her friend beseechingly.

  “No! Ollie doesn’t fancy Cat! Not in a million years!”

  “It looked like it last night…”

  “Nah – that was just their normal behaviour,” soothed Sonja, even though she didn’t completely believe it herself. Cat definitely had been going over the top attention-wise with Ollie.

  “What, the way Cat was flirting with him all night? The way she grabbed his arm when they were heading home together?”

  “So what if Cat was flexing her flirting muscles over our Ollie? It’s as automatic to her as breathing. It doesn’t mean anything!” said Sonja, trying to placate her friend.

  “But all that stuff you got him talking about!” said Kerry despairingly. “That stuff about being in love! It’s too much of a coincidence that he started opening up about that and then Cat goes all gooey over him…”

  “Kerry, think about it,” said Sonja firmly. “That time the two of them did go out together – how long did that last?”

  “Not long.”

  “Exactly – it lasted about five minutes and it was big, fat failure.”

  “But people can get back together…”

  “Only if they fancy each other in the first place! Catrina only did it to make Matt jealous, and Ollie only did it ‘cause he felt sorry for her. It wasn’t ever the romance of the century, was it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, see? My darling cousin, for whatever reason, was doing what comes naturally and ladling on the charm – Ollie just happens to be the only one of the boys who’ll indulge her. Can you imagine it if she tried all that flirty stuff with Matt? Huh?”

  A little smile flickered on Kerry’s face. Cat wouldn’t dare – Matt would laugh in her face after everything they’d been through.

  “And Joe – poor Joe! He’s all right when she’s buddying up like a bossy big sister, but he’d run a mile if she turned her full beam on him!”

  Kerry’s smile broadened. Even though Cat seemed to be growing fond of Joe in a little brother kind of way (despite the fact that he was a few months older than her). Joe was still pretty much in awe of her. There was just too much of Cat for Joe to cope with sometimes – too much cackling laugh, too much lipstick, too much cleavage. You could see him visibly shrink when she was at her loudest. But then they probably all did.

  “Well, I’m glad we’ve got that sorted out because Maya’s just walking up to the door and we’re going to keep schtum about this, aren’t we?” said Sonja, giving her a quick wink before waving over her shoulder at their friend.

  Kerry didn’t want to seem rude, but she was too agitated to sit and chat about all the usual stuff that filled their after-college conversations in the café.

  “Hi, Maya! Sorry, I’ve got to run,” she said, yanking her unfastened rucksack up from the floor, then gathering up the pens and loose coins that fell out of it on to the table. “Got to, er, do something for my mum!”

  “Is she all right?” asked Maya, sliding into the still-warm red banquette that Kerry had just vacated.

  “Yeah, she’s fine,” said Sonja, crossing her fingers under the table.

  Watched by Sonja and Maya through the slightly steamy café window, Kerry turned towards home. But mid-step she hesitated, for the briefest of seconds. Her normal route would take her right past the record shop, and she usually waved in at Ollie whenever he was working there instead of at the café. He’d be there right now.

  But somehow Kerry just couldn’t do it. She was feeling too emotionally raw after the past couple of days, especially after the conversation-cum-confession she’d just had with Sonja. All she wanted to do was go home and hibernate in her room.

  Swivelling round, Kerry stepped instead towards the kerb, waiting for the traffic to clear, so she could cross the road and be swallowed up in the anonymous crowds of commuters that were spilling from the station.

  “C’mon,” she muttered to herself, as the relentless tea-time traffic refused to throw up any gaps.

  “Oi!” shouted a familiar voice behind her.

  She turned to see Ollie standing in the grubby doorway of Nick’s Slick Riffs and was instantly aware of that familiar, uncontrollable, pink flush of embarrassment mingled with excitement.

  “Not speaking?”

  In a glance, Kerry noticed he was wearing his most beat-up trainers, a truly terrible pair of old, saggy, grey tracksuit bottoms and a faded black T-shirt that looked, even from a distance, suspiciously as if it was inside out. And, as usual with whatever Ollie chose to wear, he looked cool as hell.

  “Hi!” she smiled feebly, still rooted to her kerbside spot.

  “Come on, I need you!” he grinned, waving her over.

  If only… Kerry thought as she walked over and followed him into the dingy shop.

  Its musty smell got her every time and she wrinkled her nose. It wasn’t as if it was some charity shop wher
e the donated clothes held on to the scent of years-worth of dusty wardrobes and faded perfumes. Old records and CDs didn’t smell, for goodness sake, so why did Slick Riffs?

  “Still stinks, doesn’t it?” said Ollie, catching sight of her expression. “I keep spraying air freshener, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

  “Something didn’t die in here once, did it?” Kerry joked. Having something else to concentrate on helped her tension slip away.

  “Maybe it’s Bryan! Maybe he didn’t go on holiday after all…” Ollie exclaimed, his eyes wide with mock alarm. “Maybe Bryan was too popular with the clientele and Nick was getting jealous…”

  Kerry giggled. Bryan, an old buddy of Nick’s from roadying days who ran the record shop for him, was what most people would describe as being on the comatose side of alive. The most customers got out of him was the odd monosyllabic grunt.

  “So jealous that he murdered Bryan, chucked his body in the basement and worked up this whole story about him taking a holiday.”

  Kerry leant back against one of the many rickety record racks stuffed with old vinyl LPs and smiled as Ollie spun his tale. This was typical of him – going off on some flight of fancy and taking everyone with him.

  “Well, just supposing Bryan is actually alive and well and moping his way round Dublin like he’s supposed to be doing, what could make this place smell like so bad?” she asked, dangling her rucksack from her hand and staring round the tiny, dingy shop with its paint-peeling, poster-covered walls.

  “Damp – that’s what it is. And of course my uncle is too much of a cheapskate to waste money on sorting it out,” said Ollie. “Anyhow, discussing the damp course isn’t what I got you in here for.”

  “Isn’t it?” Kerry grinned, her heart hammering again.

  “Nope. You’re here to make some coffee and keep me company while I sort out the till.”

  “Fair enough,” nodded Kerry, glad of any excuse to be near him, she suddenly realised.

  “Two seconds – I’ve got to turn that round,” said Ollie, pointing to the handwritten Open/Closed sign hanging from the back of the shop door.