Sugar Secrets…& Freedom

by Mel Sparke

  “Too right!” piped up Cat, her yellow-blonde curls twirling as she bobbed her head in agreement. “I’ve never heard you say you fancy anyone – ever!”

  “I don’t fancy him!” Maya protested uselessly. She knew she was on a loser in the face of her two friends’ enthusiasm about her supposed love-life. “I just said he seemed kind of… nice, that’s all.”

  “Well if you’re keen on this lad, we’re here to give you as much advice as we can. Aren’t we, Cat?” Sonja raised her eyebrows at her cousin.

  “Absolutely!”

  Joe looked at Maya’s troubled expression. That was obviously what she was worried about.

  CHAPTER 7

  MAYA GETS A GRILLING

  The puffy white clouds were spinning above him in a circle. It made him feel slightly sick, but he liked the effect too much to stop.

  Suddenly, a badly placed knee in his groin made him gasp and a small face loomed into view, obliterating the blue sky above him.

  “Joe!” mouthed the gap-toothed, beaming boy. Joe couldn’t hear anything over the blare of his Walkman, but he could lip-read his own name well enough.

  Sitting bolt upright and hanging on to the kid who’d scrambled over him, Joe used his free hand to yank off his headphones and glance around.

  The old painted wooden roundabout creaked round to give him a full 360-degree view of the surrounding park and playground before it came

  to Maya, who waved and said “Hi!” as Joe and Ravi spun slowly past.

  Still slightly breathless with pain, Joe stuck his foot out and dragged it along the ground, slowing the roundabout to a standstill.

  “Ravi, you’ve got to take more care! Poor Joe!” Maya admonished her little brother, making an apologetic face at her friend, whose discomfort was obvious.

  “It’s OK,” Joe lied, ruffling Ravi’s almost black hair. “What are you two up to?”

  “Working off some of his excess energy before I hand him over to Brigid,” smiled Maya, sitting next to the boys on the now stationary kiddy-park ride. “I tell you, he’s got X-ray eyes-he spotted it was you lying on here from miles away.”

  “You looked like a drunk man lying down like that,” said Ravi matter-of-factly.

  Joe cringed inwardly; he did have a vague memory of lying here watching the stars weave together in the sky, in the middle of some alcohol-fuelled whirl in the not-so-distant past.

  “Or dead,” added Ravi.

  “OK, enough, Rav,” said Maya firmly. “Sorry – he’s going through a bit of a macabre stage at the moment. But I have to say, it’s just as well there’s no one in the playpark at the moment or you might have got some suspicious looks.”

  “I didn’t think of that,” Joe admitted. “We’ve usually been here in the evenings, haven’t we? Like when the fair was last here.”

  “Yes, when the children who this place is meant for are safely tucked up in bed, you big kid,” she teased him gently.

  “What were you doing, Joe?” asked Ravi, staring earnestly into Joe’s face.

  Joe was too embarrassed to explain what he was listening to on his personal stereo and so told the boy only half the story.

  “Uh, I was just seeing what the clouds look like from this angle, Rav…” he shrugged. Ravi looked at him for a second, then up at the sky.

  “Brilliant!” he said, clambering off Joe and flopping down on his back on the hard wooden surface. “Spin me round, will you, Joey? Huh, Joey?”

  Maya noticed her friend wince suddenly and wondered why. She said nothing and lifted her feet up on to the running board so that Joe could gently push them off.

  “Not too fast or he’ll just get sick,” she whispered to Joe. He nodded back.

  “No I won’t!” came a determined voice. “Make it go faster, Joey!”

  Shaking her head at Joe, Maya mouthed the word “Don’t!” at him.

  “OK, Ravi, I’ll go a bit faster,” said Joe, winking at Maya. “On one condition…”

  “What?” piped up Ravi, excitedly.

  Joe bent over the seven-year-old and whispered conspiratorially, “As long as you don’t call me ‘Joey’, OK? That kind of bugs me.”

  “OK,” Ravi whispered back, grinning a wide, fat grin back up at his sister’s friend.

  Maya pretended she hadn’t heard.

  “So, what were you listening to?” she asked as Joe straightened up and turned his attention back to her. Nothing ever got past Maya and Joe didn’t try to make anything up.

  “Er, it’s just a tape of some rough tracks of the band’s,” he muttered.

  At least that was true – he didn’t want to be too specific and have to explain that it was a track he’d written in the spring. The one he’d written about Kerry… No one but Ollie knew that he wrote songs. And no one at all knew how much he liked Kerry.

  “Anything I’ve heard?” Maya asked. She’d been to the few gigs Ollie and Joe’s band – The Loud – had played so far.

  “Nah – just some new stuff we haven’t done yet.”

  “So when are you guys getting the band together again?”

  “Dunno,” shrugged Joe. It was a sore point between him and OIlie. They’d talked about advertising for some new band members ages ago, but OIlie seemed to find excuses to put it off every time Joe brought it up lately.

  “Is the band taking second place to what’s going on between him and Kerry, then?” Maya asked astutely.

  “I guess,” Joe shrugged again. He didn’t want to moan about his best mate’s relationship in case it sounded like sour grapes. Which it was. And some…

  “I know OIlie and Kerry are all over each other, but they’ll come back down to earth soon and remember the rest of us, I’m sure,” said Maya, very wisely for someone who’d never had a boyfriend. But then, Maya was pretty wise about most things.

  Apart from maybe her own life, thought Joe, remembering her confessions from earlier in the week.

  “Yeah, I reckon you’re right,” he agreed, stepping foot over foot, keeping up the slow rotation of the roundabout.

  “Oh, I meant to ask – what was Nick after yesterday when he called you over?” asked Maya, referring to their lunchtime rendezvous in the End.

  “Not much,” said Joe, although he was well chuffed with his job offer. “He asked me to come in and help out at the End. Y’know – holiday cover and that.”

  “That’s great!” exclaimed Maya. “Why didn’t you tell us yesterday?”

  “Couldn’t get a word in edgeways, could I?” grinned Joe.

  “I know what you mean,” said Maya ruefully. “Between tearing into Nick’s love-life and, well, my non-love-life, Sonja and Cat were too busy for anything else.”

  “Anyway, I was glad to hear that you’re really keen on that, urn, thing you went to the other night,” Joe said, sensing that Maya might prefer the subject changed, but aware that she might not want the photography club mentioned out loud in front of her brother if it was some big family secret. “It sounded good.”

  “I think it will be,” Maya smiled at him, appreciative of his subtlety. “I think it might be just what I need right now. I’ve really, really missed doing something artistic, you know what I mean?”

  Joe nodded. The thought of not writing songs freaked him out. And he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have parents who were as strict as Maya’s, to stop you doing the subjects you really loved. For a second, he breathed a sigh of relief for his ordinary, kind mum, even though she sometimes drove him mad with her clinginess.

  “The only problem is,” said Maya, a troubled look crossing her face, “I don’t really have a proper camera.”

  “What – like one of those big chunky jobs with the kind of lens you swivel?” Joe asked, picturing the black and silver Konica belonging to his dad that he used to marvel over when he was young.

  “Yes, that’s right. The club had some to lend out, but I joined too late – they’d all been snapped up.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Jo
e, an idea coming to him. Doing this photography thing was really important to Maya – that was obvious – and Joe wanted to help her make it happen. “I could get you one! Like a long-term loan – to get you started!”

  “But how?” asked Maya.

  Before Joe could answer, a small voice piped up.

  “Maya, I feel sick…”

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘JOEY’ GRITS HIS TEETH

  Joe stepped off the bus, looked around the quaint village square and sighed. It was like arriving in Postman Pat land.

  Apart from the toytown-sized houses that lined the four sides of the square, a gift shop and café vied to outdo each other in cutesy appeal: lacy, scallop-edged curtains and dainty knick-knacks adorned both windows.

  Bit like Dad’s place, snorted Joe as he hauled his sports bag up on to his shoulder and stomped down the turning that led to his father’s bungalow.

  Much as he’d rather have been anywhere else this weekend, the one thing Joe was glad of was that he’d managed to persuade his dad to let him make his own way there. His father had been determined to pick him up from his mother’s, which no doubt would have meant Gillian twittering away for the full forty-minute journey, and Joe couldn’t have stood that torture.

  Coming alongside the bungalow’s flower-festooned garden, he found his feet dragging as if they were weighed down with sandbags.

  Here we go, he told himself. Just say yes, no and smile a bit and it’ll all be over. Until the next time I’m forced to come…

  “Joey! Yoo-hoo!”

  A smiling, plumpish young woman in gardening gloves appeared out of a clump of something blossomy.

  “Uh, hello, urn…”

  Try as he might, Joe couldn’t ever manage to say her name out loud. It had been four years since his dad had hooked up with Gillian, but it hadn’t got any easier to think of her as permanent enough to warrant common name usage. ‘Her’ or ‘your girlfriend’ was the best he could do when he talked to his father.

  “Bobby! Oh, Bobbyyyyy! Joey’s here!” she trilled to no one in particular.

  And that was another thing that grated. First, he was Joe – not Joey, and second, when had his dad ever been ‘Bobby’?

  Robert, that’s what everyone else calls him, that’s the only name he’s ever answered to before – before her, thought Joe sullenly, remembering how much his father had hated to have his name shortened, back in his old life. Before she turned him into some juvenile, lovesick puppy…

  “Joey! Well, hello!” said his father cheerfully, appearing from the side of the house and wiping his hands on his jeans. “We’ve been looking out for you – thought you might be here on the earlier bus!”

  “Don’t do that, Bobby, sweetie! Those are clean on!” Gillian chided Joe’s father good-naturedly before Joe could respond. Not that he could have come up with a good answer; his only excuse being that he’d lain in bed, dreading the impending visit so much that he’d been unable to bring himself to get up in time.

  “Oh, Gilly—”

  Gilly! cringed Joe. Can this get any more nauseating?

  “Don’t fuss! It’s only a bit of flour!” his father bantered back affectionately. “Mexican tonight, Joey? Fancy that?”

  Closing the metal garden gate behind him, Joe nodded vaguely. Here was yet another thing – apart from the new name. His dad had become a ‘new man’ since he’d hooked up with ‘Gilly’, doing his fair share of housekeeping and positively relishing his new responsibility in the kitchen department.

  “Come on in! Let me take that!” his dad jollied Joe along, lifting the bag from his back. “Been a while, hasn’t it, mate?”

  “Mmmm,” nodded Joe, wincing inside.

  Don’t call me mate, he said deep inside his head. Don’t act like we’re all lads together or something. Like I should understand why you should prefer this rosy, rural lifestyle with the Cabbage Patch Doll to life with me and Mum…

  “How’s, er, your mum?”

  Like you care, thought Joe, following his father through to the kitchen.

  “OK, I guess,” Joe shrugged.

  “So,” Robert Gladwin continued, slightly selfconsciously, “I thought we could have a really nice meal together tonight. You know, just the three of us…?”

  “Uh, yeah,” nodded Joe, pulling out a kitchen chair (complete with home-made gingham cushion tie-on) from beneath the shiny pine table. “But the thing is, I’ve got something on later.”

  “Oh.”

  Joe could clearly see the look of disappointment on his father’s face and felt a sudden rush of pleasure at being able to inflict that on him.

  “What… what have you got planned, then?” his father asked, in an unconvincingly casual manner.

  “My mate, Matt – you don’t know him – he’s DJing at a party near here and I’m going to give him a hand.”

  “What time will you have to be off?” said Gillian, joining them in the kitchen, hearing the exchange as she came through the hall.

  “Matt’ll be round to pick me up about seven,” Joe answered her, aware of Gillian rubbing his father’s back, the way a mother would comfort a child who’d broken his favourite toy.

  What’s the big deal with this? Joe wondered. What the hell were we going to find to talk to each other about all evening anyway?

  • • •

  “Right, time to get the tea on!” his dad said brightly.

  It had been a long, painfully uncomfortable afternoon, spent in the trellis-infested beer garden of Ye Old Boare Inn.

  And boy was it full of old bores, thought Joe as they arrived back at the bungalow. His dad – the biggest bore of them all, as far as Joe was concerned – had spent the afternoon introducing him proudly to all the other yuppies who’d swapped town and city life for their sanitised version of country living.

  The only stilted topics of conversation when they’d been on their own – with giggling Gillian, of course – was college (not a great subject to dwell on during the holidays) and what Joe wanted for his upcoming birthday. All Joe really wanted was to leap back in space and time to a point where Gillian had never come to work for his father and therefore hadn’t caused his parents to split up. But as this was an impossibility, Joe simply shrugged and said he didn’t know.

  “I’m just going to change my T-shirt,” he mumbled, hoping to while away a few minutes bumbling around in the guest bedroom. (“Your room!” Gillian had gushed when Joe had first visited them at their new home a couple of years previously.) Joe was grateful for anything that helped tick away time on this pointless visit.

  Rummaging in the sports bag that sat at the foot of the spare bed, Joe pulled out a clean but crushed, plain navy V-necked top. Yanking off the old top and sliding on the new one, he caught sight of himself in the oval gilt mirror that hung above the chest of drawers.

  / look like a sulky thirteen-year-old, Joe grimaced, recognising the pained, angry expression that had become a fixture around the time his parents had separated. He’d hated the way he felt at that time – deserted, confused, full of wordless fury – and he hated now to see echoes of the old, miserable Joe all over again.

  Joe knew he was never destined to be a happy-go-lucky, laid-back type – that wouldn’t have changed even if his parents hadn’t split up – but he liked the person he was now a whole lot more than that miserable thirteen-year-old. And all that was down to his friends and their acceptance of him and all his shy, awkward ways.

  Ollie… well, Ollie had always been there – right from sandpit and see-saw days – but the real turning point was when they’d hooked up with the girls three summers ago.

  Ollie and Joe had begun to hang out regularly at Nick’s café, and so had Sonja, Cat and Kerry, whom the boys had vaguely known at school. After a few amiable arguments over who got to sit in the window booth, they’d compromised and shared the table – and a friendship – ever since.

  Then along came Maya, followed by Matt last year. They – along with his mum – were his
family now. He belonged with them, not this man he felt nothing for and his silly, empty-headed girlfriend.

  Rubbing his face with his hands, as if that might help erase the hateful expression, Joe was suddenly struck with an idea that might take up another chunk of time…

  He thought for a second about where and how his father kept things around the house, then decided that – despite his new image – his dad was a creature of habit.

  Crossing the hall – with a quick glance to check there was no one around – he slowly pushed open the door to his father’s bedroom. He gave a cursory, dismissive glance at the pile of soft toys that languished in the middle of the floral duvet and made his way over to the fitted wardrobe.

  Opening one sliding door, Joe was met by a crush of floral clothes that seemed to match the bedspread: Gillian’s stuff. He stretched his neck and scanned the top shelf, but could only make out more folded clothes in sugary pastel shades, plus some kind of rolled up, quilted blanket with what looked like the alphabet and clowns on it.

  God, how old is this woman? Twenty-six going on five? Joe scoffed, sliding the door closed with a dull thud.

  He drew the other door open – jeans, cords, some brightly coloured shirts he hadn’t seen before and some work suits that seemed very familiar. Standing on his toes, Joe reached up and began to rummage in the jumble of old shoeboxes that were stored up on the top shelf, just as they had been back at the house in Winstead.

  Aha! Joe said to himself as his fingers collided with cool metal in a box at the back. Bingo!

  “Need a hand there, Joey?” said a soft voice.

  Joe whipped round to see Gillian standing at the door of the bedroom, gazing questioningly at him. With her light brown curly hair, round dimpled face and keen-to-please smile, she suddenly reminded him of someone.

  “Er, I was– I was just—” He scrambled for words, feeling beads of sweat break out instantaneously on his forehead. “Urn, looking for a jumper or sweatshirt or something to borrow for tonight. In case it’s cold later on. I, uh, didn’t bring a jacket with me.”