Chocolate Box Girls

by Cathy Cassidy

  Dad has met the girls, of course, a couple of times, on trips down south, but he travelled midweek, using odd days off, and each time I was left in Glasgow with Mrs Mackie. I wish now I’d asked to meet them, once at least.

  Coco is the tomboy, he reckons, and Skye and Summer are twins, a year younger than me. There is another sister, Honey, just a few months older than I am. ‘Charlotte says that Honey didn’t have time to write a letter,’ Dad explains. ‘She’s the eldest, six months older than you … she’s just finishing Year Nine at the high school. You’ll be in the year below her, if everything works out. The younger girls are still at middle school … that’s the way the system is in Somerset.

  ‘Anyway, Honey’s had end-of-term exams to revise for, but I’m sure she’s really excited about meeting you. She’s very pretty, and clever, and confident … I’m sure you’ll be great friends!’

  ‘Right,’ I say.

  ‘The English school holidays have only just started,’ Dad reminds me. ‘So you’ll have plenty of time to settle in and get to know the girls before you start school. An extra-long holiday … brilliant, huh?’

  ‘Yeah … brilliant.’

  I bite my lip. Dad doesn’t understand, really. I am not good at fitting in, making new friends. I am not pretty, or clever, or confident, and Charlotte’s children sound all of those things. Being part of a family is way more complicated than I imagined. I never expected sisters to be a part of the deal. Even their names make them sound arty and bohemian and rock-chick-cool.

  I can see that I will be the one misshapen Taystee Bar in a family of perfect chocolate-box girls. Great.

  It’s hours and hours before we finally turn off the M4 to bump along the quiet Exmoor lanes. I am tired and cramped and nervous, and even Rover is looking slightly carsick.

  We drive through the pretty village of Kitnor, with its thatched, whitewashed cottages crowded together along the roadside. The sun is still shining, as if it never does anything else in a place like this.

  ‘Almost there,’ Dad says, and panic twists inside me. What if everything I ever wanted turns out to be a disappointment, like a Christmas present you’ve prodded and dreamed about … and then when you open it, turns out it is a handknitted jumper, sludge-green and baggy and slightly lopsided?

  I have a few jumpers like that, now that I think about it. Dad is a big fan of charity-shop chic. It has taken me forever to work out what suits me, steering away from the baggy jumpers and finding refuge in primary-coloured skinny jeans and tight cartoon-print T-shirts and plastic bangles, all cheap as chips from Primark or New Look. I will never be a girly girl, but I look OK, except on the days I manage to decorate myself with jam stains or toast crumbs, or splatter my Rocket Dogs with mud.

  There’s a glimpse of the sea, glinting silver, and then we’re driving through steep, thickly wooded hillside. There’s a wooden sign jutting out from the hedge that says Tanglewood House B&B, and Dad turns the van into a curving driveway fringed with slender, twisty trees and, finally, we’re here.

  My first glimpse of Tanglewood House takes my breath away. It’s big and old and elegant, made from pale golden stone with little arched windows and swooping slated rooftops. There is even a turret, a slim, rounded tower room way up on the second floor, topped with a pointy roof. This house is huge … like a house from a fairy tale, where princesses might live. I don’t know if I belong in a place like this.

  A handpainted banner flutters in the breeze above us, strung from an upstairs window across to one of the trees … Welcome to Tanglewood, Paddy & Cherry.

  ‘Look!’ Dad grins. ‘Isn’t that great?’

  Suddenly the windscreen vanishes, engulfed by a swirl of rainbow-bright fabric, and Dad brakes sharply in a spray of gravel.

  ‘Coco!’ a girl’s voice yells out. ‘Coco, what are you DOING? You’ve dropped it!’

  Dad gets out of the car, and I follow, still hanging on to Rover’s fishbowl. A tawny-haired girl in a floppy, green velvet hat is hanging out of an upstairs window, the banner dangling from her hands down on to the van.

  ‘Hello, Skye!’ Dad grins. ‘Did you paint this? It’s brilliant!’

  ‘I’ve only just finished it,’ the girl sighs. ‘Coco was supposed to be helping me to hang it up, not drop it right on top of you!’

  A second figure, a skinny girl of nine or ten, still dressed in untidy school uniform, drops down to the ground from her perch in the branches of a tree just to our right. ‘Sorry,’ she says, all freckles and cheeky grin. ‘The string snapped!’ She turns away and sprints off through the garden, shouting, ‘They’re here! They’re here!’

  The hat girl has vanished, leaving the dangling banner to slither to the floor in a heap.

  ‘Paddy!’

  Out of a side door Charlotte comes running, fair hair flying out behind her, laughing, flinging her arms round Dad. He lifts her up and whirls her round and round, the two of them laughing like there is nobody else in the world, for that moment at least.

  It makes my tummy flip over.

  The hat girl appears in the doorway, arms folded sternly. She is wearing a faded, trailing dress that looks like it came from some ancient dressing-up box, and a pair of weird, strappy shoes that look about a hundred years old. I try not to stare.

  ‘Mu-um!’ she huffs, and Charlotte pulls away from Dad, laughing, and hugs me tight.

  ‘Cherry!’ Her warm hands squeeze mine and her green eyes shine. ‘I can’t believe you’re finally here! I want you to feel that this is your home too … I can see you’ve met Skye already, and Honey, Summer and Coco can’t wait to get to know you too! We’ve planned a little party, in the garden – nothing fancy, just family and a few friends and some of the B&B guests …’

  She bends down to scoop up the fallen banner. ‘Looks like we weren’t quite in time with this,’ she grins. ‘Never mind … Paddy, you’ll help me hang it down in the garden, won’t you? There’s a stepladder just there, against the wall. Skye, you and Cherry can check on the last bits of food for me, and bring them down … let’s get this party moving!’

  Dad shrugs, picks up the stepladder and follows Charlotte off down the garden. I am stranded on the gravel, clutching Rover’s bowl. Skye takes it from me and turns back into the house, with me following. ‘We’ve never had a goldfish,’ she says. ‘We’ve got a dog, though, and some ducks …’

  I step into a warm kitchen that smells of sausages and baking. There’s a big kitchen table laden with freshly iced chocolate sponge, trifle, cupcakes and strawberry tarts, and a tatty blue dresser with lots of mismatched china, and a pinboard made of real corks, crammed with postcards and little reminder notes. There is even a photo of me and Dad, taken on Charlotte’s weekend in Glasgow, and that makes me smile.

  Skye puts Rover’s bowl down on the dresser and heads straight for the Aga, a big old-fashioned, cream-coloured range cooker, to haul out trays of little sausages and two golden quiches that smell fantastic.

  ‘Here,’ she says, handing me a box of cocktail sticks from the dresser drawer. ‘Get the sausages speared up. I’ll do some tomato and cheese kebabs, because Coco is going through a vegetarian phase. Are you hungry?’

  ‘Starving,’ I say.

  ‘Have a sausage,’ Skye says. ‘Or a cupcake – I won’t tell! I didn’t think I wanted another sister, but … well, I’m glad you’re here!’

  ‘I’m glad too,’ I say, and I’m surprised to find I mean it. ‘Everything’s just so … well, perfect!’

  Skye laughs. ‘It’s definitely not perfect,’ she tells me. ‘But hey, it won’t take you long to work that out! Who needs perfect, anyhow?’

  She takes a tub of glacé cherries from the cupboard and sticks a whole bunch of them round the edges of the iced chocolate cake on the table.

  ‘We made this for you, specially … it’s a Cherry Chocolate Cola Cake. We sort of made it up.’

  ‘Thank you!’ I
say. ‘It sounds … um … amazing!’

  Skye loads the cakes up on to a wide tray while I try to balance plates of sausages, veggie kebabs and quiche on another, wobbling slightly. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ she says. ‘We have to help Mum out with the B&B breakfasts, sometimes.’

  As I follow Skye out to the back of the house, I notice strings of fairy lights draped through the trees, and the beat of an old Mika song and the smell of woodsmoke drifting up across the sloping lawn. In the distance, I can see a bunch of people crowded together around a bonfire, talking, laughing, eating. If this is a small party, I’d hate to see a big one.

  There are trestle tables draped in bright tablecloths, crowded with food and drink, deckchairs and a patchwork of blankets and cushions scattered across the grass, and there’s a shaky figure on a stepladder, fixing the welcome banner to a tree branch. Dad.

  I am picking my way carefully across the grass, trying to keep the tray level, when through the trees to my right, I catch a glimpse of something amazing. There’s a little oasis of trees, and among the trees, in a clearing, stands a beautiful bow-top gypsy caravan. It looks like something from a storybook, all glossy curves and rich red, yellow and green patterning. A red gingham curtain flutters from the tiny open window. Behind it all, I can see the glint of a stream, curving through the long grass like a silver ribbon.

  ‘Who lives there?’ I ask Skye.

  ‘In the old caravan? Nobody. We used it as a den sometimes, when we were kids …’

  She walks on, but I can’t move, can’t stop staring at the caravan. I remember seeing one down in the Borders, when I was little and we were staying with Dad’s old art school friends. The caravan was parked up beside the road while its owners boiled a kettle over a makeshift campfire and shared out bread and cheese. They looked tanned and tough and slightly scruffy, and the girl had long raggedy hair threaded through with a million different-coloured ribbons. Nearby, a speckled gypsy horse with feathery feet was tethered, eating grass.

  Dad said the caravan belonged to New Age travellers, but that not so very long ago real Roma gypsies had lived in caravans like that. They were adventurers, he said, wild and free and romantic.

  I thought that the New Age travellers looked wild and free and romantic too, and I told Mrs Mackie about it, once we were home in Glasgow.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a little bit of the gypsy in your family,’ she told me. ‘Paddy’s done his share of adventuring, hasn’t he? That gap year, or whatever you call it, after art college. Well, of course, it turned into more than a year …’

  ‘That’s when he met my mum,’ I said. ‘Maybe she had a little bit of the gypsy in her, as well?’

  Mrs Mackie said that she didn’t know about that, but she sang me a sad, old-fashioned song about a girl who ran off with the raggle-taggle gypsies, and I liked that. I used to wonder if my mum had run away with the gypsies too. Why not? It was just as likely as the other stories I imagined.

  And now I have walked into a whole new life, a life that seems too good, too perfect to be true. A new mum, a proper house, a bunch of brand-new sisters, a beach … and a gypsy caravan in the garden. I can’t stop grinning.

  It can’t get any better than this … can it?

  6

  Well, maybe it can.

  Suddenly, out of the trees, a big, fluffy dog appears, circling me, pawing me, jumping about. ‘Hey, hey!’ I laugh. ‘Stop that!’

  But the dog won’t stop. I think it wants food, because its wet nose keeps nudging my leg, my elbow, the tray itself. I hold the tray high, but still the dog is dancing round me, and then my foot lands on something soft and fluffy and the dog yelps and I scream, and the whole tray of quiche and sausages and veggie kebabs goes flying into the air.

  ‘Whoa, there …’

  I’m about to go flying myself, when someone catches my arm. Suddenly I am leaning against a boy who smells of woodsmoke and ocean, a boy whose arms fold me close then push me back again so that we’re blinking at each other in the fading sunshine.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I … I think so!’

  How could I be anything else, when a boy with suntanned skin and sea-green eyes and hair the colour of wheat is holding me? He looks cool, with skinny jeans and a tight blue T-shirt and a baggy black beanie hat balanced carefully on the back of his head, even though it is July.

  I catch my breath and wait for him to pull me close again, but he doesn’t, of course. He just grins and looks at me for a long moment, until I swear I will melt.

  ‘You’ve got to be Cherry, right?’ he says. ‘I’m Shay Fletcher.’

  ‘Shay …’ The name falls off my tongue like a spell, a wish.

  Then I notice the dog, hoovering up quiche and sausages from the grass, his tail wagging madly, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  ‘It’s the sausages,’ Shay tells me. ‘He’s mad for them. Bad boy, Fred!’

  I drop down to my hands and knees in the grass, scrabbling for plates and dishes.

  ‘I can’t believe I dropped them. Charlotte trusted me, and now …’

  ‘Blame the dog,’ Shay says. ‘He’s a maniac, Charlotte knows that. Seriously, it’s no big deal – nobody will mind.’

  I gather up the dishes and the tray and turn back towards the house, leaving Fred to hoover up the evidence. Shay is at my side. ‘I said I’d get some logs for the bonfire,’ he explains.

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘So, you are …?’

  ‘Me? I’m nobody,’ Shay laughs. ‘I’m not family or anything, if that’s what you mean. I live down in the village, go to the high school with Honey … and you, now, according to Charlotte. I’ve known the Tanberrys for years.’

  We slip into the kitchen through the side door, and I stack the plates and dishes next to the old ceramic sink.

  ‘You’re not a bit like I imagined you’d be,’ Shay says. ‘I’ve met Paddy before, the last time he was down, and I suppose I thought you’d look like him, but …’

  ‘I don’t look anything like him,’ I grin. ‘I know. My mum was Japanese.’

  ‘Wow! How cool is that?’

  ‘Well, she hasn’t been around for a while,’ I say.

  Shay looks dismayed. ‘No … um … obviously. I’m sorry. I mean … well, I’d better just shut up, right? I just meant … well, you look really cute and your accent is great, and … no, I really am shutting up now. Ignore me! Let’s get those logs.’

  I follow him outside. I cannot believe that a boy has just told me I am cute. Cute? Me? Shay Fletcher may be the only boy alive who thinks so.

  My heart is thumping. I have had a million crushes on cool boys, but never, ever, has a boy liked me. Boys always seem to like the confident, popular girls, girls like Kirsty McRae. They never see me as interesting, attractive. Except possibly Scott Pickles who used to live in the flat downstairs, and that doesn’t count because he is only seven, and pretty short-sighted.

  Shay is different. He is way, way out of my league, but I am pretty sure his eyesight is OK. And he is looking at me intently, with an ocean-coloured gaze that takes my breath away.

  Shay loads me up with branches and logs from the woodpile by the gable end. I end up with twigs in my hair, and he picks them out, gently. ‘You’d better tell me everything,’ he says, smiling. ‘Your whole life story, from start to finish. Then I’ll tell you mine, or play the guitar for you … deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ I whisper.

  I think I would tell Shay Fletcher anything, any time, always. I would carry logs for him, to the ends of the earth, and wear twigs in my hair every day just so he could pick them out again.

  Shay grabs an armful of logs himself, and leads the way down the lawn towards the party, the bonfire. People turn as we approach, so many smiling faces, and I’m smiling too, because my heart feels full of hope that this is really where I’m meant to be – this is the place where
I belong.

  ‘Hello, Cherry! Welcome to Kitnor! We’ve heard so much about you …’

  ‘It’s great to meet you at last …’

  Charlotte appears through the crowd of strangers, smiling. ‘Cherry! Has that wretched dog been hassling you?’ she asks. ‘He just ran through here with half a quiche in his mouth …’

  ‘I think I stepped on him … I dropped the tray … I’m sorry!’

  ‘No, no, Fred’s a brute, I should have warned you …’

  I’m right beside the bonfire, in the middle of the party, with the fairy lights flickering overhead. Shay lets the logs and branches slide out of his arms to make a new woodpile, and I do the same, watching the flames light up his face with flashes of orange and gold. He steps in behind me, his fingers brushing my arm, and his touch burns right through my sleeve and into my skin, like fire.

  Skye and Coco are in front of me, grinning, and a girl who looks exactly like Skye only glossier, somehow, and minus the floppy hat and the funny, trailing dress. Her clothes are a dozen different shades of pink, and she moves gracefully, like a dancer.

  I remember that Skye and Summer are twins, but I have never seen two girls so alike and so different, both at the same time.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says, laughing at my confusion. ‘I’m Summer … if in doubt, remember I wouldn’t be seen dead in droopy hats and jumble-sale dresses!’

  Skye swats her with a red-checked napkin, rolling her eyes.

  ‘So, I guess the only one of us you haven’t met yet is Honey …’

  The eldest Tanberry sister is sitting on a fallen tree trunk, a glossy blue guitar at her side, waist-length hair the colour of sunshine tumbling around her shoulders. She is chatting to a bunch of teenagers, laughing.

  Dad said she was six months older than me, but Honey Tanberry might as well come from a different world. She’s pretty, a whole lot prettier than Kirsty McRae. She could be a model or a singer or a teen movie star, with her little blue-print dress and her polka-dot hairband. She could be anything she wanted to be.