Maya's Secret (2 page)

“My kind does. I made it myself. It’s got mint and
dandelions in it. And golden syrup.”

“Dandelions are weeds, Poppy.” Emily was eyeing her friend worriedly. “Are you really eating them?”

“No, you chop them up and pour hot water over them. The leaves as well. It’s very good for you. I got it out of a book from the library on nature’s secret remedies.”

“Do those books call out to you when you go in the library?” Emily shook her head. “You’ve always got some random book under your bed. Is the tea nice?”

Poppy went pink. “Actually, it tastes horrible,” she admitted. “That’s why I put the golden syrup in it. It’s not in the recipe, but it sort of hides the taste of the dandelions. Almost.”

“You’re really selling it, Poppy…” Maya told her. “I’ll pass.”

“It works though!” Poppy protested. “I haven’t been ill for ages. Well. Since Tuesday, when I found the recipe.”

“Four whole days. It’s a miracle.” Emily nodded solemnly. Then she sighed. “Who knows what’s in
my
lunch. I’ll be lucky if it’s not a pot of
mashed-up
carrot and banana, or something else disgusting. I can’t stand bananas, but Mum’s trying all kinds of random stuff to get Sukie to eat. She’s the world’s
fussiest baby. I think I’ll make my own sandwiches tomorrow.”

“Oooh, banana sandwiches… I might ask Anna to do me some of those.” Maya was suddenly hungry. “Come on, let’s go and eat lunch.” Because her mum and dad were quite often out of the country they had a housekeeper who looked after Maya a lot of the time. But Maya never called her that in front of anyone at school. It sounded far too posh. Too pop-starry, having “staff ”. But Anna picked her up from school occasionally, if she was in town or Maya needed school uniform or something. Emily had thought Anna was Maya’s mum, so she’d had to explain. She’d told Emily that Anna was her au pair. It didn’t sound quite as show-offish. But even then Emily had raised her eyebrows. “An au pair?”

“Yeah, because my mum works,” Maya muttered.

Emily nodded. “I s’pose. My mum would kill for an au pair. Is she nice?”

Anna was, very. But she usually made Maya’s lunches for her, and she disapproved of Maya being a vegetarian. She was from Spain, and being vegetarian wasn’t as common there as it was in Britain. Anna had been known to “accidentally” put ham sandwiches in Maya’s lunch box, in
the hope that she might be tempted. She thought Maya was going to waste away without eating any meat, even though Maya had explained to her loads of times that humans were better off eating mostly vegetables anyway. Anna always just sniffed. Whenever she and Maya argued about it, she’d cook roast chicken for dinner the next day. She knew it was the hardest thing for Maya to resist. Veggie sausages just didn’t cut it next to roast potatoes and gravy, especially with those bits of spicy sausage she added. Maya’s mouth was watering just thinking about it, and it was cheese sandwiches for lunch – again.

The girls found a free table in the hall and got out their lunches. Emily and Maya watched Poppy opening up her flask. She poured out a cupful of dull, greenish liquid, with bits in.

“Forget sunbeds,
that
looks poisonous.” Emily shuddered. “You’re not really going to drink it? Urrggghh, Poppy, don’t!”

“It isn’t that bad.” Poppy swallowed a mouthful, and grimaced. “Not enough golden syrup. I should have put honey in it instead. But Jake and Alex keep using it all up making toast. They just live on toast. Dad says it’s because they’re teenagers, they need a
lot of energy. But they eat a loaf of bread every day. Each!”

Emily nodded sympathetically. “Brothers… You’re so lucky not having any, Maya. I would love to be the only one.”

“Wouldn’t you miss them?” Maya asked doubtfully.

Emily wrinkled her nose. “I might miss Sukie. When she’s not yelling, anyway. But Toby and James are just…” She shrugged. “Well, you know what they’re like.”

Maya smiled. She’d never met Jake and Alex, Poppy’s twin brothers; they were at secondary school, and the one time she’d been to Poppy’s house, they’d been holed up in their room, their music making the kitchen ceiling tremble. She had noticed a large pile of crumbs and a couple of sticky knives by the toaster, though, now she thought about it. But everyone at Park Road knew Toby and James, Emily’s little brothers. James was only in Reception, but he followed Toby around like he was tied on, and the pair of them were in the middle of every pile-up in the playground. If something got broken, they would be there, looking very sweetly sorry.

“What’s really unfair is they get away with it because they’re cute,” Emily muttered. “Mum wants
to put wings on them and Sukie and take a photo of them all to be our family Christmas card. With tinsel round their heads.”

Maya nearly choked on her sandwich. Toby and James looked a lot like Emily, with dark curly hair and chocolate-dark eyes. They would look gorgeous in haloes. But anyone who knew them would see through the angelic looks. “Seriously?”

Emily nodded. “She doesn’t think they’re naughty at all. Whenever anyone mentions it at school, she thinks they’re just making a fuss. And she says I ought to look out for them at school! I don’t need to look out for
them
, they beat me up in the playground!” She unwrapped her sandwiches. “Look! Tuna, and I hate it. But Toby wanted tuna in his, and Mum’s used up the rest of the tin on mine. Ugh.”

“Do you want a cheese one? Anna did me loads. She thinks if there’s no ham or anything like that, then I have to have twice as much of everything else to make up for it.” Maya handed over a cheese sandwich, and Emily bit into it gratefully.

“You’re a star. Sure you don’t want a tuna one back? You don’t ever have fish either?”

Maya shook her head. “No, it’s OK.” She’d been fishing once, on a boat in America somewhere, with
some people from Mum’s record company. The fish had been huge – great silvery things called marlin, with spiky noses. Dad had loved it, but Maya had seen the fish struggling and fighting against the lines and it made her feel sick – sicker, anyway; the rocking of the boat was already doing bad things to her insides. She could see the fish’s eyes, and it seemed to be looking at her. It wasn’t like it was cute, or furry. Actually, it looked a bit mean. But she still didn’t want anybody to kill it.

“I’m binning them, then,” Emily muttered. “And don’t tell me it’s a terrible waste, Maya, because I already know, and I’m still not eating them. Thank you, Toby.”

Maya nibbled the edge of her sandwich thoughtfully. She was lucky having Mum and Dad all to herself when they were home. No brothers nicking the nice things out of the cupboards, or getting her in trouble at school. No baby sister taking up all their time. But it would be nice to have someone else to hang around with, especially when her parents were away so much. Mum kept saying to invite her friends from school round, but Maya wasn’t sure. Their house was pretty big, and it was full of photos and things. If Poppy and Emily came round, she was sure
they’d be able to work out who her mum was, even if they didn’t actually meet her. And that was exactly what she’d moved schools to get away from.

TWO

“It’s going to be another map thing. I bet you – umm – the rest of the packet of Polos in my rucksack.” Emily folded her arms, and waited for Mr Finlay to prove her right.

Maya shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t see any maps lying around. Oooh!”

Mr Finlay had been rummaging in his bag, and now he held up a large bar of chocolate. Everyone had been feeling sleepy after lunch, but now the class brightened up at once. If this project involved chocolate, they liked it.

“Polos, please!” Maya hissed at Emily.

“Hold on.” Emily flapped a hand at her. “We could be making maps of chocolate-growing jungles.” But she sounded doubtful.

Poppy smiled dreamily. “A whole forest of toffee trees…” She started to draw in her notebooks,
sketching lollipop forests, with little sweetie birds flying through them, until Emily elbowed her in the ribs. Poppy was always getting into trouble for doodling. Mr Finlay said it meant she wasn’t listening and he didn’t believe her when she promised him that it actually helped her listen better. He refused to test it out, either, like Emily suggested, which all three of them agreed was totally unfair.

“Who can tell me what’s important about this chocolate?” Mr Finlay asked, waving it dramatically at the class.

“It’s milk chocolate?” Lucy, who sat on the next table to Maya and the others, asked.

Mr Finlay shook his head. “Someone else?”

“There’s not enough of it for all of us?” one of the boys called out. “Do we have to win it?”

“The person who gets the answer right gets the first piece, and I’ve got another bar as well. You’ll all get some, don’t worry,” Mr Finlay promised. “Look at it carefully.”

Maya peered at the wrapping. She recognised that little blue and green logo. She waved her hand hopefully. “Is it Fairtrade chocolate?”

“Exactly!” Mr Finlay tore the packet open, and handed her a few squares. “Share that round your
table. Fairtrade chocolate. Maya, can you tell us what it means, as well?”

Maya tucked the square of chocolate into her cheek with her tongue, and nodded. “The people who picked the cocoa beans got paid properly,” she said, in a chocolate-muffled voice.

“And they don’t make children work,” Emily added. “The money from the chocolate helps pay for them to go to school.”

“I’d rather make chocolate than go to school any day,” Nick said, smirking.

Mr Finlay looked at him thoughtfully, then turned round to the white board, and put up a photo of a boy who looked about their age. He was wearing a ragged T-shirt and shorts, and he was grinning at the camera – even though he was lugging a sack on his shoulders that looked half as big as he was. Mr Finlay clicked through a series of photos – trees, with children standing under them holding baskets, then another little boy who looked about seven, holding a massive knife, longer than his arm. In the next picture, the same boy was sitting next to a huge pile of greenish-red pods, the size of melons.

“What are those?” Poppy asked, frowning. They didn’t look like anything to do with chocolate.

“Cocoa pods.” Mr Finlay pointed to the one the boy was splitting open with his enormous knife. “You have to break them open with a machete to get the cocoa beans out. Cocoa beans are what chocolate is made from.”

“And children do that?” Emily asked doubtfully. It didn’t look very safe. That boy was the same age as Toby. “Imagine Toby with one of those!” she hissed to Maya.

Maya nodded, and pulled a face. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Mr Finlay went on to the next photo – the same boy, but with a group of people that had to be his family, standing in front of a wobbly-looking house with a metal roof. “They don’t have a lot of choice. Most of the cocoa beans that we get our chocolate from grow on little farms called groves, and lots of the groves are run by only one family. So when it’s harvest time everyone who
can
work has to. Even the children. If they don’t harvest the cocoa beans, and sell them on, they don’t eat.” He smiled at Nick. “Still think it’s better than school?”

Nick shrugged one shoulder, looking embarrassed. “It doesn’t look all that bad,” he muttered.

“A whole day, using a knife on the end of a stick to
cut cocoa pods off trees? Even if you’re tired?”

“He’s got a bandage round his leg,” someone pointed out quietly. Maya glanced round, surprised. Izzy was really mouse-like – she hardly ever said anything in class, even though Mr Finlay was always telling her how good her work was, especially when they did science.

“And it looks all dirty,” someone said. “He’ll catch something. He ought to get it checked at the hospital.”

Mr Finlay nodded. “But I shouldn’t think there is one, Leah. Not for a few hundred miles, maybe. And the roads – this is in a place called Ivory Coast, it’s the world’s biggest cocoa producer – the roads there are all falling apart. It’s difficult to get anywhere.”

“So, he never goes to school?” Maya asked. The chocolate had left her mouth dry, and she swallowed.

“That’s right. These photos are from a news website reporting on children who work. This boy, Sami, he works in his uncle’s cocoa grove. Only about half the people in Ivory Coast can read, because they’ve never been able to go to school. They’ve always worked, or looked after their families.”

Maya looked down at the Fairtrade mark. “But this chocolate – no children made that, did they?”

Mr Finlay was silent for a moment. “No one can
promise that, Maya, to be honest,” he said eventually. “Fairtrade works by getting farmers to sign up to a list of things, like paying their workers properly, making sure they’re safe, protecting them if they’re using dangerous chemicals. And one of the things they agree to is not using child labour. But these families, if they never let children work in the cocoa groves, ever, they wouldn’t survive. The children would be worse off than if they
were
working because they’d have no money for food. There’s a difference between child labour that treats children really badly, and helping on the farm when your family needs you. So the answer is that children probably did help make this chocolate, Maya. But the Fairtrade organisation paid more money to their parents for the cocoa beans, so the parents could afford to send them to school when it wasn’t the busy harvest time. You see what I mean?”

“But children should go to school every day,” Emily muttered. “If it was here, those parents would be in trouble.”

“Cocoa beans grow in really poor countries, though, Emily. School is a luxury. About half the people in Ivory Coast are living in poverty – they’ve got less than ninety pence a day to live on. That’s
for buying all their food, oil for cooking, clothes, medicines if they need them. School comes further down the list of priorities. But that’s part of what the Fairtrade people do – the Fairtrade chocolate costs more for us to buy, because the extra money gets used for helping the people who produce the cocoa. They work with charities in places like Ivory Coast to build schools, and health clinics, so Sami could get someone to look at his leg.”

“Do they ever get to eat the chocolate?” Poppy asked suddenly, and then looked at the table as everyone stared at her. “I just wondered. They work so hard for it,” she murmured.

“No, it’s a good question, Poppy.” Mr Finlay frowned. “I don’t know.”

Maya licked a smudge of chocolate off her thumb. It was very sweet. “I bet they don’t. There’s a chocolate factory not far from here, isn’t there? Probably most of the cocoa beans get made into chocolate in factories in other countries.”

“Perhaps you can find that out, Poppy.” Mr Finlay held up the chocolate wrapper again. “This is going to be our new project, for the next few weeks. I want you to work in small groups, and create some sort of display on Fairtrade.”

“Fairtrade chocolate?” Maya asked. “Or just Fairtrade anything?”

“Anything to do with Fairtrade. Who can tell me something else that you can buy with a Fairtrade mark?”

“Bananas!”

“Sugar?” Poppy asked. “I think we’ve got some sugar that’s Fairtrade.” She frowned. “But the golden syrup isn’t,” she added to Maya and Emily in a whisper. “I might have to change my tea recipe. I can’t believe those pictures. Those boys were younger than us.”

“I know. Loads of the stuff in our cupboards isn’t Fairtrade,” Emily whispered back, shaking her head. “I can’t see Mum agreeing to buy Fairtrade everything though, it’s really expensive. A bit would help, wouldn’t it?” she asked hopefully.

“Of course it would.” Maya leaned her chin on her hands and sighed. “I love chocolate. Anna buys the Fairtrade kind for cooking, but chocolate buttons aren’t Fairtrade. I’d miss them.”

“I want you to try and be really imaginative,” Mr Finlay called, over the buzz of everyone arguing about who they wanted to work with. “Not just a list of facts. Something exciting! And there will be a
prize for the best projects!”

“Will it be more chocolate?” Nick asked hopefully, but Mr Finlay only gave a secretive smile.

“Perhaps we could do a taste test on Fairtrade chocolate.” Emily smiled blissfully. “A really careful one. You know, giving them all stars. And flavour notes…
Hints of vanilla and lemon
… We could compare them to not-Fairtrade chocolate too.”

“I take it you three are working together then?” Mr Finlay asked, making a note on the list he was carrying around.

Maya blinked. They hadn’t even thought about it, just started talking about what they’d do. “Yes, please,” she agreed, and Poppy and Emily just nodded, as though it was a bit of a silly question.

“Do you think we could do some cooking as part of the project?” Poppy asked, and Mr Finlay was thinking about it when Izzy came and stood beside him. She looked pink and embarrassed, Maya thought, glancing away quickly.

Izzy reminded her too much of how she’d felt when she moved to Park Road. Maya had been lucky that Mr Finlay had given her Emily as a mentor, and she’d got on really well with her and Poppy, even from the first day. But for the first few weeks she’d not quite
known if that was only because Emily
had
to be nice to her. She did a lot of hanging around, wondering if she was allowed to say anything. Poppy and Emily had been friends since Reception, and it wasn’t even as if Maya had arrived on the first day of Year Six, when everyone was getting used to each other again after the holidays. She felt like she was always a bit in the way, or doing the wrong thing.

The feeling faded after a couple of weeks, especially after Emily invited her over. You didn’t have to have people you’d only been told to like over for tea, did you?

“Mr Finlay…” Izzy muttered. “Do we have to work in a group? Can I do my project on my own, please?”

Maya looked up again sharply.

Mr Finlay sucked in a breath. “Well, I don’t think so, Izzy, sorry. Part of the point of the project is that you work together. A team.”

Izzy nodded, and darted a look around the classroom. Everyone else was huddled in groups, or at least twos, mostly talking about chocolate.

“Don’t worry!” Mr Finlay sounded determinedly cheerful. “We’ll find you a group to join.”

Izzy stared at her shoes.

She’s crying,
Maya realised in horror.
Eeek. I would be too. Imagine having to go and beg to be in someone’s group. She’ll probably end up with Lucy and Ali and that lot, and they’ll make her do all the work, and be really mean to her.

“Izzy, do you want to be in our group?” she asked, before she could think too much about it.

Poppy, Emily and Izzy all looked at her in complete shock, until Maya kicked Poppy under the table. Only gently.

Poppy jumped, and then said, “Um. Yes. Come with us.”

“That’s very nice of you, girls.” Mr Finlay beamed. “I’ll think about the cooking, Poppy.” And he hurried off to sort out an argument on the other side of the classroom.

“What did you do that for?” Emily hissed in Maya’s ear, as Izzy went to fetch her stuff. “We don’t want her, she’s so boring!”

“I don’t think she is.” Poppy looked thoughtfully over at Izzy, who was stuffing things into her pencil case slowly, with her hair hanging over her face so no one could see her red eyes. “She just doesn’t talk a lot, that’s all. Sometimes she’s quite funny. Especially in PE.”

Emily sighed. “I wanted it to be just us doing our
project. You could have come round to mine so we could work on it. I don’t want to invite Izzy too! I don’t like her!”

“Why not?” Maya looked at her in surprise. Izzy was so quiet it was hard to think of there being anything about her to dislike.

Emily scowled. “Toby kicked a football at her in the playground last year. It was an accident,” she added hastily. “But she was really nasty to him.”

“He broke her glasses!” Poppy pointed out. “And
you’re
nasty to him all the time.”

“Yeah, but he’s my brother, I’m allowed. It’s different!” Emily muttered. “And I don’t like her anyway. She’s stuck-up. She thinks she’s better than everyone else. Goes round with her nose in the air the whole time.”

Maya looked at Izzy, who was still slowly gathering her things, as though she knew they were talking about her. She didn’t look stuck-up. At all. But she was so, so shy. She hardly ever talked to anyone. Maybe that’s why Emily thought she was snotty?