2: Chocolate Box Girls: Marshmallow Skye (25 page)

34

I have lots of answers now, but not all of them. Were my dreams really memories, hauntings, echoes of the past? Or just the workings of an active imagination trying to make sense of a sad story? I will never know for sure. I’m still not sure that I believe in ghosts, but I am open to persuasion.

The obsession is fading fast. The dresses are only vintage velvet, the gramophone a cool antique, the violin an instrument of torture in Coco’s hands. I make sure the door of the powder-blue birdcage is always open now, but still, it’s just a pretty place to keep a house plant.

One thing Clara has left me with is courage, honesty, the knowledge that you cannot go along with things you know are wrong. You have to follow your heart, be true to yourself, as she did.

I cannot quite work out where Finch fitted in. The boy in my dreams looked nothing like Sam Cooper, Clara’s love. Maybe he was just my imagination’s version of a cool gypsy boy? It was a fantasy, a perfect romance conjured up by a girl who wasn’t quite ready for a real-life boyfriend. What could be more out of reach than an imaginary boy, one I dreamt up myself from scratch?

The dreams have stopped, and now there is an ache inside me where thoughts of Finch used to be. But you cannot actually miss a boy who never existed to begin with, so I keep this to myself.

I may not be directly descended from the Romany gypsies, but Clara was my great-great-aunt and that means that Linnet was a kind of very distant cousin. Maybe Mrs Lee is right and I do have a sensitivity to shadows and feelings and stories from long ago? I am not about to admit that, of course, because I do not want her to start training me up to be some kind of gypsy fortune-teller with a crystal ball and a spotted handkerchief tied round my head.

It is bad enough telling her that her grandma, Jane Cooper, was a rich man’s daughter, a girl who ran away with the gypsies on the eve of her wedding, back in 1926.
That her horrified parents were so ashamed that they faked a drowning and let everyone believe she was dead.

Mrs Lee is a permanent fixture in our kitchen these days. She calls in after work a couple of times a week, sipping tea with Mum and passing on the contact details for Linnet’s younger brothers and sisters, who are still alive and well and living all around the UK and beyond. Suddenly we have discovered a whole branch of family we never knew we had.

Mrs Lee has been talking to Grace, the museum lady, and the two of them are planning an exhibition in the Kitnor Museum about the local gypsies in general and Clara’s story in particular. Mrs Lee is lending her photographs and we are handing over the velvet dresses and the letters and the old engagement ring, as well as the jazz records and the gramophone, the powder-blue birdcage and the violin.

‘Keep the violin for as long as you like,’ Mum tells Grace. ‘Seriously.’

The local paper gets hold of the story and runs a human-interest feature, which is pretty cool, and Mr Wolfe gives us a whole history lesson about it. He asks me to stand up in front of the class in the green velvet dress and cloche hat
and tell some of the story myself, and although it is scary to begin with, once I get past the first few stumbled sentences, it’s actually quite a buzz. Maybe the spotlight isn’t such a scary place to be, after all? Millie and Alfie say it is the best history lesson since the time I mummified the Barbie doll.

I get used to the fact that Summer is going out with Aaron Jones and Millie gets used to the fact that Alfie Anderson runs a mile whenever she appears. She is philosophical. ‘I’ve been kissed, anyhow,’ she says, with a faraway look in her eyes. ‘I mean, BOY have I been kissed!’

Alfie is still pining for Summer, and I have told him politely and honestly that there is no hope whatsoever for him, but he just shrugs and goes on dreaming, and I cannot blame him for that. I am still pining for a boy who never existed, after all.

Alfie and I find that hot chocolate and marshmallows can ease the heartache, though, just a little.

And just when I think the weirdness is through with me, there is one last twist in the story.

We come home from school one day to find Mum and Paddy sitting at the kitchen table chatting to a very cool
woman with grey hair cut into a choppy bob. A younger man and woman, with keen, smiley expressions are there too, making notes as they talk and eating marshmallow cupcakes that make the kitchen smell like heaven.

‘Oh, girls,’ Mum says. ‘This is Nikki and Phil and Jayde from the TV company I mentioned a while ago. They’re researching locations for a TV film, remember? They are definitely going to use the gypsy caravan in their film, isn’t that great?’

‘Brilliant!’ Summer says.

‘We’re hoping we’ll be able to find the right locations for filming in and around Kitnor too,’ Nikki says. ‘The countryside has just the right feel to it. We’ll film some test shots and then, if all goes well …’

‘We may just be having a film shot in Kitnor, over the summer holidays,’ Paddy says. ‘Wouldn’t that be amazing?’

A little fizz of excitement begins to bubble inside me.

‘With the gypsy caravan?’ I check. ‘What kind of a film is it?’

‘It’s historical,’ Nikki explains. ‘Based on the Romany travellers who lived here years ago. Your mum was showing us a feature in the local paper about the girl who lived
here … Clara, was it? Great stuff. I have a good feeling about all this, and the B&B would make a perfect base.’

I have a good feeling about it too. It’s as if the last shreds of winter’s sadness have fallen away, leaving me stronger, braver, no longer a shadow girl. The future doesn’t seem so scary these days.

I take Fred’s lead from the hook by the door.

‘I’ll take the dog for a run,’ I say. ‘I’ll be back in time for tea.’

Fred runs ahead of me down across the garden, past the caravan where I sat with Alfie on Christmas Eve, down to the woods. The little trees are unfurling soft green leaves and butter-coloured primroses carpet the ground, and there isn’t even one marshmallow-soft cloud in the clear blue sky.

I don’t dream about the woods any more, of course, or about woodfires or piebald horses or bow-top wagons glimpsed throughout the trees, but wouldn’t it be cool if those things were real again, if the film crew based themselves here and re-created the things I dreamt about?

If dreams of the past turned into glimpses of the future?

It could happen.

Fred is barking suddenly, yapping and wagging his tail and galloping back to me for reassurance, and looking up I see a figure through the trees, a boy with dark wavy hair and an easy grin, a boy who can melt my insides the way Paddy melts chocolate. My heart is thumping.

It’s not real, of course. It can’t be.

The boy walking towards me is wearing a red T-shirt and an old army jacket and skinny jeans, and his Converse are muddy and his skin is paler than the way I remember it from my dreams.

‘Hey,’ he says.

‘Hey.’

It’s not real, I know, even though Fred is licking his hand and sniffing at his Converse, even though the boy is looking at me with dark blue eyes that make my heart flip over.

‘Are you one of the sisters?’ he asks. ‘The Chocolate Box Girls?’

‘I’m Skye,’ I say.

‘OK … hello, Skye! Cool name!’ he says. ‘Mum showed me the article in that magazine. It’s what made her decide to check the place out, because of the gypsy caravan and all. She thought it would be perfect for the film, so here we are.
And it’s better than she thought, seriously, with the woods and the beach and the village with all those cool old cottages.’

I blink. ‘You’re here with Nikki?’ I manage to say. ‘With the film people?’

‘That’s right – Nikki’s my mum,’ the boy says. ‘If we end up filming here in the summer, I guess we’ll be seeing quite a bit of each other. So … pleased to meet you, Skye.’

He holds out his hand to shake mine, old-fashioned and polite, and when our fingers touch a crackle of electricity passes between us.

‘My name’s Jamie,’ he says softly. ‘Jamie Finch …’

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First published 2011

Text copyright © Cathy Cassidy, 2011
Illustrations copyright © Julie Ingham, 2011

The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

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ISBN: 978-0-141-33940-5