Chocolate Box Girls: Sweet Honey (23 page)

Saying goodbye is painful. Dad and Emma
take me out to lunch and we talk about happy times; our hike in the Blue Mountains,
our sightseeing day, Christmas Day at the beach. Anyone looking at us would think we
were the perfect family, but I know better. We don’t talk about the restaurant
scene and we don’t mention my failed new start and we definitely don’t
discuss the laptop and the iPhone at the bottom of the swimming pool; we act as if
those things never happened at all, and I wonder what kind of life it would be,
tiptoeing round the bad stuff, pretending you don’t see it. It works for Dad,
but I don’t think it’s working for Emma.

‘OK, Princess?’ Dad asks,
ruffling my hair like I’m five years old. ‘We’ve had some fun,
haven’t we, these last few months? Me and my best girl?’

‘Sure we have,’ I say.
‘But you know what? I’ve kind of grown out of the whole princess thing.
I got fed up waiting to be rescued.’

Dad frowns and goes back to his lunch,
and the moment passes. The truth is, he’s no longer my hero, and although a
part of me is sad at that, I’m glad as well. I can see him for what he is now:
weak, selfish, charming, destructive – exactly as I once was. Now I’ve worked
out the stalking thing, I can see that clearly, and I’m not proud of it.
I’m sorry that my own selfish actions could hurt someone so, push them right
over the edge. Facing my stalker is one thing I am not looking forward to when I
return home, but it’s something that needs to be done.

What can I say? I’m trying to
change. Dad never will, but I still love him, in spite of it all. Like I said, you
don’t get to choose who you love. Australia has been a learning process, and I
am not talking about calculus or that experiment we had to do in science that made
the whole lab stink of rotten eggs. I’m talking growing up, getting real,
making friends, falling in love. Those things are worth crossing oceans to find.

I spend my last afternoon at the beach
with Tara and Bennie. We promise to meet up again one day, to travel the world and
eat pizza at midnight and paint our toes turquoise and dance in the surf. Meanwhile,
we’ll write – proper letters because it’ll be a while until I can trust
SpiderWeb or the Internet again.

Saying goodbye to Ash is the hardest of
all.

‘I have a plan,’ he says.
‘I finish school in a few months’ time and I’ll come to the UK for
my gap year, OK? To be with you.’

‘I’ll come back here one day
too,’ I promise. ‘Go to art college, maybe, rent a little flat near the
beach … if you want me to.’

‘I want you to,’ he says.
‘You know I do.’

He dips into the pocket of his jeans and
brings out a tiny twist of tissue paper. ‘I saw this and thought you might
like it. So you won’t forget me …’

‘I will never forget you,’ I
tell him. ‘How could I? Besides, you’re coming to Tanglewood in the
summer. It’s just a few months.’

I open up the tissue paper and inside
there’s a tiny silver honeybee charm on a soft cotton cord. Ash threads it
round my neck, his fingers soft against my skin. We walk barefoot along the
shoreline under the stars and when we kiss, the waves wash in and out again around
us, taking our sadness far out to sea, for a little while at least.

There is one last thing I have to do
before I leave. Late at night, when Dad and Emma are asleep, I sneak into
Dad’s study and open up the laptop. I don’t click on to SpiderWeb – my
account has been suspended while their security team investigates. Instead, I search
through Dad’s online files and folders for something, anything, that might
give me a clue to the past. There’s nothing. Exasperated, I hunt through
drawers, files, cupboards. I have almost given up when I find a small, locked
briefcase, and although there’s no key, I pick the lock with a hairpin,
something Kes showed me once when his friend had shut his car keys inside the
car.

The briefcase lock springs open,
revealing a big brown envelope. My hands shake as I slide out a slim sheaf of
papers; handwritten letters, a London address and a glossy photograph of a grinning
toddler with dark blue eyes and messy fair hair. The child looks just like Coco at
that age, and my hands shake as I turn the photo over.

On the back, a name is written:
Jake
Cooke, aged two
.

I have a brother.

Less than forty-eight hours later,
I’m stepping off the plane at Heathrow into a cold, icy drizzle. Mum, Paddy
and my sisters are waiting in Arrivals with one of Coco’s home-made
Welcome
banners draped between them, and I run into Mum’s arms
and stay there a long time, holding tight.

I wish I could turn the clock back to
when Dad left because now I understand what happened much better. Mum didn’t
want to hurt me; she stayed quiet, protected Dad, soaked up all the anger and blame
I could throw at her and kept on loving me just the same. I even know the secret Dad
never told, and I wonder how I’ll ever find the courage to share it. I will,
though, one day.

I hug my sisters in turn, even Cherry.
Logic told me she had to be suspect number one in this whole stalking nightmare;
she’s the one person I set out to hurt, to drive away, yet instinct told me
from the start that she would never do those things. I’m nowhere near the
stage where I can forgive her for what happened with Shay, but I will try to be
nicer to her from now on. Maybe.

Back at Tanglewood, Mum lets us flop on
the blue velvet sofas sipping hot chocolate while my sisters ask about a million
questions, and I try to answer. I tell them about Tara and Bennie, about Ash and how
he’s going to visit in the summer, about Emma’s kindness and Dad’s
bad temper and how I pulled the tablecloth out and smashed all the glass and china
when I found him schmoozing with his latest fling.

‘Poor Emma,’ Mum says, and
she really means it; she let go of the past and moved on long ago. I look at the
life Mum’s built with Paddy and I know in my heart it is better, stronger,
happier than anything she shared with Dad. I can’t begrudge her that, not any
more.

‘Yeah, poor Emma,’ I
say.

‘Poor you too,’ Coco says.
‘Being stalked by a mad, bad Internet troll. There was me, getting all huffy
because you’d stopped texting and messaging and blocked us from SpiderWeb, and
all the time you were being hacked! Why didn’t you tell us?’

I sigh. ‘I thought I could handle
it, at first,’ I say. ‘And then it got so bad I didn’t want anyone
to see it, especially not you guys. He was clever too. He blocked you, deleted
texts, did everything he could to turn my friends against me. I guess he really did
hate me.’

‘It’s over now,’ Mum
says firmly. ‘People do bad things sometimes, lose the plot, but he’s
getting help, it’s being dealt with. Best to stay out of it.’

I can’t stay out of it, of course.
The stalking almost made me lose the plot too, and although I understand a little
about why I was the target, there are still so many things I need to ask.

‘I want to see him,’ I say.
‘Can you arrange it, do you think?’

‘Are you sure it’s a good
idea?’ Mum asks. ‘After all that’s happened?’

I shrug. ‘I’m not sure, no.
I just know it’s something I have to do.’

There’s a
For sale
sign
outside the house, a pretty cottage on the edge of the village, the manicured lawns
now white with frost. I am here, in spite of Mum’s advice; and I’m alone
because I need answers and I know that this is the only way I’ll get them.

A woman opens the door, her face creased
with worry. ‘We’ve been expecting you,’ she says. ‘Come in.
He’s just so sorry. And I can promise you it will never happen again. But
please, please don’t press charges. Charlotte and Paddy have been to talk to
us already – we know what’s been happening, and we are taking it seriously,
very seriously indeed.’

She ushers me inside, and I see a
familiar figure in the corner, staring at a blank computer screen. Anthony. He looks
across, but cannot meet my eye.

‘So,’ he says eventually.
‘How was Australia?’

‘Awesome,’ I reply.
‘Life-changing, you could say …’

Anthony raises an eyebrow.
‘Whatever.’

I clench my fists, fighting anger.
‘I am stronger than you think, Anthony,’ I say. ‘It took me a
while to work it out, but the clues were there all along. You’re the cleverest
person I know where computers are concerned. Clever enough to hack the school system
and change my grades; clever enough to hack my SpiderWeb account, read my private
journal, steal my pictures. And you’ve always known my password, of course. I
think you helped me set it in the first place.’

‘I wasn’t clever
enough,’ he says. ‘You worked it out in the end – I knew you would. And
the trouble I was in over the school hacking was nothing compared to this. The
SpiderWeb admin team has banned me for life from all their social networks, with a
threat of criminal prosecution if I break the ban.’

‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for
you?’

Anthony’s face twists into a
grimace. ‘I don’t want your pity, thanks. I’ve had enough of it to
last me a lifetime.’

He picks up a box of pills and presses
one out of the blister pack, swallowing it down with a sip of water. ‘Everyone
thinks I’m crazy,’ he says. ‘The doctor has given me tablets, set
me up to go and see a shrink. Can you believe it?’

It’s my turn to look away,
embarrassed. Anthony was always sharp, smart, logical; he was the least crazy person
I knew. He helped me with my homework and looked at me sometimes with sad, puppy-dog
eyes, and I thought things would stay that way forever.

‘Why did you do it,
Anthony?’ I ask.

‘Why?’ he echoes. ‘Do
you really have to ask? Every day you were posting pictures of your perfect life in
Sydney, even brighter and better than the one you had before. I was still here,
expelled from school, my parents barely talking to me. So … why
d’you think?’

I remember those first few weeks in
Sydney, how I tried to post happy pictures to make it look as if life was great.
Doesn’t everybody do that on SpiderWeb?

‘I saw you’d started a new
account,’ Anthony is saying. ‘I didn’t think you’d add me if
I used my real profile, so I invented one. When I was Surfie16, you liked me. You
flirted with me, cared about me. It was only on the Internet, I know. You thought I
was someone else – it wasn’t real. But it felt that way, for a little while.
Then you spoilt it all by telling me about the sad, pathetic boy you knew back home.
The boy who threw away everything for you – and you didn’t even care. You said
I was a
lovesick nobody
.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’
I argue, but the truth is I did mean it, probably, at the time. I was like Dad, too
wrapped up in myself to think how my actions might hurt others. Anthony wasn’t
even on my radar.

‘I think the photo of you with
your new boyfriend was the last straw,’ Anthony says. ‘You looked as if
you hadn’t a care in the world. I wanted to hurt you – smash up your lovely
new life, spoil your friendships, turn your family against you. You ruined my life;
I wanted to ruin yours.’

I blink. ‘I’ve never needed
much help to mess things up, you know that,’ I say. ‘Australia
wasn’t great, if you want the truth. My dad’s a cheat and a liar, I
missed my sisters like mad and school was awful. Then someone turned my friends
against me, and it went from bad to worse. So, yeah … thanks for that,
Anthony! I thought we were friends?’

He smiles, a cold, self-satisfied grin.
In that moment I can see Anthony for what he is, a lost boy who has tipped over the
edge into a very dark place, laughing as he pulls the wings off flies and poisoned
by his own self-pity. It’s scary.

‘We were never friends,’ he
snaps. ‘You treated me like dirt on your shoe, so why the surprise when I did
the same to you?’

I thought I was here to confront
Anthony, to make him confess and show him he hasn’t beaten me, but Anthony
isn’t playing the game. Instead, he is forcing me to look at the way I treated
him, to see the damage I did. He’s right – whatever we shared, it wasn’t
friendship. My past selfishness has come back to haunt me.

Anthony’s mum comes in with a tray
of tea, and his anger shuts down as suddenly as it appeared. My hands shake as I
take my mug and listen as she tells me they are moving soon, up to the Midlands,
that when Anthony is well again they’ll help him to finish his schooling, go
to university, build a future.

‘As long as you don’t press
charges,’ she says. ‘That would finish him. We’ll make sure it
doesn’t happen again. He’ll have no Internet, no access to
computers.’ She shows me the electrical lead to the PC Anthony is staring at,
the plug chopped off.

It’s hard to think of Anthony as a
monster. It’s hard to imagine how much he wanted to hurt me, how love turned
to hate, but that’s what happened, and I have to take a share of the blame. I
used him. I saw that he liked me and reeled him in, kept him dangling like a puppet
on a string. I caused real damage and hurt, and I’m not proud of that.

‘I’m sorry, Anthony,’
I say at last. ‘I’m sorry for hurting you, using you. I didn’t
realize at first; I didn’t understand, didn’t think how it might feel to
be you.’

He shrugs and turns away, back to
staring at the blank screen. As Anthony’s mum shows me out, her polite,
anxious mask slips and I see cold blame in her eyes. I wish I could rinse that
away.

Tanglewood wraps itself around me, and
life goes on, the same but different. Coco is more grown-up, inches taller, riding
Caramel and helping out at the stables in return for free lessons. Skye has a new
hobby making feathered headbands and Summer is totally loved up after a surprise
birthday trip to the ballet with Alfie.

As for Paddy, his chocolates are on the
shelves of a national department store, getting great press coverage for being
fairly traded and ethical as well as wickedly tasty. Paddy’s not my dad and
never will be, but I’ve stopped blaming him for that – he makes Mum happy. We
have a long way to go, but we’re trying, and guess what, I am trying with
Cherry too. It’s early days, but hey, it’s a start.