Chocolate Box Girls: Coco Caramel (20 page)

I frown, trying to remember the way things
were before Dad left. It all seems hazy and long ago, a perfect world where the sun
always shone and nothing ever went wrong, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t like
that really. I do remember Honey, bright and beautiful and kind and confident, always
laughing, always Dad’s favourite.

Then he left us, and Honey turned from
golden girl to rebel just about overnight. She yelled and shouted and blamed Mum for
letting him go, but Mum couldn’t have stopped him, of course – none of us
could.

‘What happens now?’ I ask.

‘Paddy took us home, told us
everything,’ Skye shrugs. ‘Mum’s gutted. She called Dad in Sydney but
he’s in a meeting, so they’re waiting for him to ring back, and Honey just
looks sort of shell-shocked. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Paddy said it
might be an idea to go and stay with friends tonight, stay out of the firing line. So
Mum rang Tia’s mum and she says we can all come over for an epic sleepover, me and
Summer and Cherry and you. And Millie from school, and Cherry’s friend
Haruna.’

‘We grabbed our PJs and sleeping bags,
and your stuff too,’ Cherry adds. ‘Paddy dropped us at the riding stable to
collect you, and when you weren’t there we asked that stable boy and walked up to
the school.’

I blink. ‘So I have to go to
Tia’s?’

‘Well, that’s what Mum
arranged,’ Summer says. ‘We should all stick together because I really
don’t recommend going back to Tanglewood right now.’

I try to picture the sleepover, a crush of
teenage girls wrapped in duvets and sleeping bags, eating pizza and popcorn and
dissecting every last detail of Honey’s fall from grace. I don’t think I
could stomach it.

‘Couldn’t I go to Sarah’s
house instead?’ I ask. ‘I don’t think I can face a big gang of your
mates right now … it’s quite a lot to take in.’

Skye frowns. ‘Well, I suppose
it’d be OK,’ she says. ‘As long as we know where you are. If you can
just check with Sarah …’

I tap out a quick message on my mobile and a
few moments later a reply bleeps through. No problem. See you soon

‘It’s fine,’ I say.
‘I can stay as long as I want.’

‘Great.’ Summer looks at her
watch. ‘I’ll text Mum and let her know. We should go, y’know, we
don’t want to miss the six o’clock bus. The girls will be
waiting.’

‘We’ll walk you along to
Sarah’s,’ Skye says, ushering me out into the street. ‘Make sure you
get there OK.’

I know better than to argue – my sisters are
in protective mode and it’s not hard to work out why, what with everything
that’s happening at home. Skye and Summer would freak if they knew what I’d
been up to these past few weeks – they still think I am six years old, some cute little
kid in patched dungarees with a pet spider in a matchbox.

They deliver me to Sarah’s gate, watch
me walk along
the path and ring the bell, then sprint along to the bus
stop as the Kitnor bus heaves into view, waving as they pile on board.

‘See you tomorrow!’ Skye yells.
‘Have fun!’

The door opens and Sarah peers out.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Hi, Coco. Didn’t expect to see you
tonight.’

‘Flying visit,’ I tell her.
‘I’ve just come from orchestra practice, and I wanted to check whether we
had maths homework this weekend or not.’

‘We do,’ Sarah says, frowning.
‘Fractions and decimals for that test on Monday.’

‘OK,’ I say brightly.
‘Great. See you then!’

I check that the bus has vanished, then wave
and walk back down the path. Sarah watches me, puzzled, as I walk towards the lone
figure on the corner, a boy leaning moodily against the wall, eating chips, checking his
mobile, his bike silhouetted in the lamplight.

We finish up the chips and ride out of town,
along the quiet lanes towards the hazel copse, me sitting on the bike seat with my arms
round Lawrie’s waist while he stands up, pedalling hard. I am still in school
uniform, my schoolbag slung across my body, my violin case tied on to the back of the
bike with bungees. The wind lifts my hair but it doesn’t quite blow away my
troubles – not today.

‘What’s up?’ Lawrie asks
finally, as we ditch the bike and hike up through the heather towards the ruined
cottage. ‘Why the mystery text? Friday’s normally my day because of working
at the stables.’

‘And Saturday and Sunday are supposed
to be mine, but you came up anyhow,’ I remind him. ‘I’m just fed up. I
failed my audition for the school orchestra.’

‘Well, you can’t be good at
everything,’ he shrugs.

I want to ask why not, or point out that I
am not asking to be good at everything, just one thing, for now at least, but it seems
pointless.

‘You can play for me, anyway,’
Lawrie is saying. ‘I don’t know much about music but I quite like the sound
of the violin. Sort of sad, but I bet I’d like it. Will you?’

‘I might,’ I tell him.
‘Sometime. Maybe.’

‘Is something else wrong?’

I sigh. ‘My family are in crisis –
again. Don’t want to go home, don’t want to talk about it …’

‘Fair enough,’ he shrugs.

The evening is bitterly cold and the dark
velvet sky is sprinkled with a million stars. It’s beautiful but freezing, the
kind of night when your breath hovers in little clouds just beyond your lips. We trudge
on in silence, but I can’t keep quiet. The day’s disasters are playing over
and over in my head like a newsreel.

‘My big sister’s been
expelled,’ I blurt suddenly. ‘She is fifteen years old, seeing a boy from
the fairground, truanting from school. She got her friend to hack into the school
computer system to fake school reports and told
the teachers she had a
serious illness. They’re waiting for my dad to ring from Australia to decide what
to do, but whatever it is won’t be good. Honey has been pushing her luck for way
too long.’

I pause for breath. For someone who
doesn’t want to talk about it, I am doing OK. I tell Lawrie about Honey’s
part in the stable fire this summer, her attempt to run away; how only a few weeks ago
at the start of the autumn term, she was reported missing and turned up next day,
completely oblivious to the panic she’d caused. The police warned her then they
would call social services if she got into trouble again.

This is a different kind of trouble, but
just as serious; is that why Paddy wanted us out of the house tonight? Are social
services at Tanglewood right now, making notes, shaking their heads, planning my
sister’s future? I feel sick just thinking about it.

‘OK. Not good,’ Lawrie is
saying. ‘No wonder you don’t want to go home – it sounds a bit
full-on.’

‘It is,’ I say into the
darkness, and suddenly an avalanche of hurt spills out, defensive, despairing.

‘Everyone thinks we’re so
perfect, but we’re really not.
We live in a big house, but it
doesn’t belong to us – it’s Grandma Kate’s, and since Dad left
we’ve had to run it as a B&B to make ends meet. We need the chocolate business
to take off and we have this big order just now, but Paddy’s had to halt
production to sort this mess out. Oh yeah, and one of my sisters is anorexic and one is
trying to smash what’s left of our family into little bits …’

‘I’m sorry, Coco,’ Lawrie
says.

I tilt my chin up proudly as we approach the
ruined cottage. ‘I don’t usually go around telling other people my troubles.
Don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me.’

Lawrie nods. ‘I understand. I
won’t tell anyone.’

‘You’d better not.’

A thin whinnying sound drifts down through
the darkness, and I stop short, frowning.

‘The ponies,’ Lawrie says,
running forward through the heather. ‘Quick … something’s
wrong!’

We push through the gate to Jasmine Cottage
to find Spirit trotting jerkily through the overgrown garden, kicking at her swollen
stomach, pushing herself against the hedge, crying out while Caramel paces patiently
alongside her.

‘She’s foaling,’ Lawrie
says, his face grave. ‘I knew she was close, but I thought we had a little more
time …’

Guilt and panic curdle inside me, cold and
sour. I checked the Internet for information on delivering a foal, but with all the
chaos at Tanglewood lately, I failed to follow it up. I made time to bake cupcakes and
design posters, but not to find out how best to help a pony who needed me.

I can’t remember a thing from the
online article. What kind of a would-be vet am I? ‘What do we do?’ I
ask.

‘Get lanterns and hay and hope for the
best,’ Lawrie says.

He takes Spirit’s head collar and
presses his face against hers, whispering softly, quietening, calming her, walking her
up and down while I light the lanterns and spread hay across the floor of the ruined
kitchen. After a while, he leads Spirit in.

‘Her waters have broken,’ he
tells me. ‘It shouldn’t take too long now – if things are straightforward
she won’t need us at all. Let’s just hope that they are …’

Caramel crowds into the cottage kitchen,
uneasy, curious, and Spirit stumbles to her knees on the hay,
nostrils
flaring. Lawrie soothes her and she slumps on to her side, tail swishing, eyes wide.

‘There must be something I can
do?’ I ask. On TV, when babies are being born in unexpected places, people boil
kettles and tear up clean sheets and gather towels while they wait for the ambulance to
arrive. I am not sure it is the same for ponies, but even if it were, there is no way
here to get hot water or clean linen, and no ambulance will be arriving any time
soon.

‘Well,’ Lawrie says, ‘how
about you play that violin for us?’

‘What, now?’

Lawrie nods, and although the whole idea of
it is obviously crazy, I reach for my violin case, lifting out the glossy, curvy violin.
Every time I play, my heart lifts up with music and takes me far away, to a place where
anything is possible. Even when Mum banned me from playing in the house, even when my
sisters made jokes about screeching ghosts and cats being strangled, nothing could spoil
it for me … until today’s failed audition. Gloom floods me all over
again, but I push it away, determined. If anything can calm the crackle of tension and
fear in the air, the violin can.

Spirit groans softly in the lamplight, dark
eyes fringed with long lashes fixed on me as I start to play. Music swirls around the
shadowy corners, filling up the darkness with a haunting lament that slowly builds into
something brighter, braver. I play for ages, until Spirit’s breathing steadies,
until Lawrie grins in the lamplight.

‘I think she’s almost
there,’ he says. ‘Look!’

I put my bow down, kneeling beside Lawrie as
the foal is born, long legs first, wrapped in a sticky membrane. Time seems to slow. As
I hold my breath, the head appears, and then finally the foal slides out into the hay
and I am wiping the sticky membrane from its face as if I have done it a million times
before. Lawrie is grinning and Spirit is resting now, nudging the foal gently.

‘He’s perfect,’ I say, and
my eyes brim with happy tears because in spite of everything that is messed up and wrong
with my world, the newborn foal really is perfect, a kind of miracle.

‘We could call him Star,’ Lawrie
suggests. ‘It’s such a clear sky tonight you can see whole
constellations …’

‘Perfect,’ I say again.

My memory dredges up what I read on the
Internet,
and I know that we have to let Spirit and her foal rest now
before she breaks the cord. The website said something about iodine to disinfect, but we
don’t have any and I try not to worry; there wouldn’t have been any in the
wild, after all.

‘It’ll be a couple of hours
before she delivers the placenta,’ Lawrie says. ‘I’ll stay,
obviously.’

‘Me too,’ I whisper. ‘I
can’t go back to the house tonight; I told you.’

Then Lawrie makes a tiny fire in the grate
so we don’t all die of frostbite, and Spirit struggles to her feet and the cord
breaks, and there doesn’t seem to be any need for iodine.