Fortune Cookie

by Cathy Cassidy

  No wonder my mysterious half-sister Honey decided to track me down – life out in the sticks must be painfully dull. Finally, I get off the bus in Kitnor and ask directions to Tanglewood from a woman in the high street.

  She scribbles a makeshift map on the back of an old envelope and I thank her and trudge up the lane towards Tanglewood wondering if this whole trip is a mistake. What if the letters are the ravings of a deranged mind, or a sick practical joke? Then I remember the photo of the blonde-haired sisters who look so like me, and I know that’s not so.

  This is an adventure, a quest to find my long-lost family, find out the truth about my no-good dad and put a few things right again. It’s a chance to rescue my family from certain doom, and I only have seven days to manage it. I will not chicken out.

  I won’t lie, though. I am shaking in my shoes as I walk across the gravel driveway towards the big Victorian house. The place looks busy – there are no fewer than five cars and two fancy-looking vans parked outside, and I can see a whole bunch of people through the window near what looks like the back door.

  Some kind of party must be going on.

  I walk up to the door, take a deep breath and knock three times.

  The door is opened by a spectacled young man carrying one of those outsize microphones you sometimes see on TV; it’s kind of fluffy and a little bit intimidating.

  I glance at the map on the back of the envelope again, frowning. This doesn’t feel quite right, but I know I haven’t made any wrong turnings, and besides, there was a sign saying Tanglewood on the gatepost.

  What is going on?

  ‘Oh, it’s you!’ the young man says, as if he’s been expecting me. ‘You’re an hour early. Where’s the guitar?’

  ‘No idea,’ I say. ‘What guitar?’

  ‘Funny,’ he says, deadpan. ‘Any chance you can nip home and fetch it?’

  ‘No chance at all,’ I reply.

  I have no idea who this man thinks I am, but there is no point pretending. I do not own a guitar. I do not own a kazoo, come to that. I don’t have a musical bone in my body.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ the man grumbles. ‘I just do not understand kids today. This is TV. This could be your big break, kid, and you’re just not bothered. Come in, anyway. You can help with the packing boxes scene. Get on with it. Act natural.’

  Act natural? Get on with it? I resist the impulse to turn round and walk away and step into the crowded kitchen, trying to look as casual as I can.

  It’s like stepping into insanity.

  I am not kidding; this kitchen has an entire film crew in it. The room is stuffed with cameras, mics, booms and huge super-bright spotlights. Giant white and silver umbrellas jostle for space, reflecting light everywhere; people are adjusting cameras, zooming in, positioning mics.

  And all this paraphernalia is pointed at the kitchen table, where a family is sitting, packing bright, beribboned chocolate boxes into a big crate. I spot my stalker, prettier than her photograph, looking bored and irritable; two girls who must be the twins, the dark-haired stepsister and the youngest one, pulling an outraged face as her cheeks are dusted with powder by a woman who seems to be a make-up artist.

  A fair-haired woman and a dark-haired man are standing behind the table, watching the film crew as if waiting for instructions.

  Bizarre.

  The good thing is, I seem to be invisible. Let’s face it, there are so many people in this room that one more isn’t really going to make a difference.

  ‘OK, we’ll take that from the top,’ a woman with a clipboard says with authority, and the chat fizzles out at once. ‘Paddy, Charlotte, I want you to tell the girls about your new order and ask them to help you pack up the chocolates. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ everybody says.

  ‘And go,’ the clipboard woman says. ‘Right. We are rolling. Everybody act natural; we’ll shoot it all and edit afterwards, so don’t worry if you make a mistake. Pretend we’re not here. We want natural, unguarded, fly-on-the-wall type coverage. Go!’

  ‘What about the boy?’ the mic guy who let me in asks. ‘D’you want him at the table too?’

  ‘What boy?’ the clipboard woman asks, frowning.

  The mic guy turns to look at me. ‘The kid with the guitar,’ he says. ‘Only he’s forgotten to bring it. What did you say your name was?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I say brightly.

  All eyes turn to me, accusing. Whoever Guitar Boy is, they know I am not him.

  ‘I don’t think we know you, do we?’ the dark-haired man asks politely.

  I smile nervously. ‘No, I don’t think you do …’

  The fair-haired woman, her arms full of brightly-wrapped chocolate boxes, tilts her head to one side. ‘So, you are?’

  I open my mouth and close it again, at a loss.

  Too late, I remember a snippet from one of the letters.

  ‘I still haven’t told them about you, but they’re going to be so amazed …’

  She still hasn’t told them.

  I have made a terrible mistake; what was I even thinking? It seemed so simple in my head, just a case of turning up and asking for my dad’s contact details, then collecting a wodge of cash to sort out all our troubles. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. With me, nothing ever is.

  I’m still struggling to get to grips with the idea that my new half-sisters exist, but apart from Honey, my letter-writing stalker, they have absolutely no idea about me; none at all. And trying to explain things in the middle of a crowded kitchen with a film crew recording every moment; well, let’s just say it’s not ideal.

  I look at the faces of my half-sisters, sitting round the table. Blank. Frowning. Confused. Until I get to Honey, that is. Her eyes are wide, her mouth a perfect ‘o’ of surprise.

  ‘Jake?’ she whispers. ‘Is it you? Really?’

  I throw my rail ticket down on the table, trying for a smile.

  ‘I was just passing, so I thought I’d drop in. But I can see you’re kind of busy …’

  I take a step back and bump into the sink. My exit is blocked by the film crew, and when Honey gets to her feet and sprints across the kitchen towards me there is literally no escape.

  ‘Oh. My. God!’ she shrieks. ‘Jake! It’s you! It’s really you!’

  She throws her arms round me and hugs me tight, and I panic slightly, especially when one of the cameras zooms in close to record the moment. I wonder if it is capturing the look of terror on my face as Honey finally releases me and holds me at arm’s length.

  ‘Who’s Jake?’ the youngest half-sister asks. ‘I don’t get it!’

  ‘Nobody gets it,’ another sister chips in. ‘Honey, are you going to explain? Who’s your friend?’

  ‘Yes, Honey, what’s going on?’ the fair-haired woman wants to know.

  She turns to face her family.

  ‘You’re never going to believe it,’ Honey says. ‘This is Jake Cooke, and I found out about him while I was living with Dad in Sydney. He’s fourteen – so a little bit older than Coco and younger than the twins. Does the name mean anything to you, Mum? Jake Cooke?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ the woman whispers, but there’s a tremor in her voice and I can feel her looking at me hard, like I am some kind of puzzle she is trying to work out. Her eyes narrow and her eyebrows slant upwards in surprise, and I can only imagine the thoughts that are going on behind those expressions.

  ‘I wasn’t supposed to find out,’ Honey is saying. ‘I wasn’t meant to, obviously, but I did, and I thought I’d write and make contact with him before I told you all. And now he’s here, and I never did get around to explaining, because … well, because I wasn’t sure what to say. How to break the news. I didn’t want to upset you, Mum. And I had no idea that Jake would just turn up out of the blue …’

  I find myself eyeing the rail ticket on the table. I am beginning to wish I had never seen it.

  Honey grabs me by the elbows and propels me forward.

  ‘Look, this is
going to come as a shock. There’s no easy way to say it. So – oh, Jake, just tell them who you are!’

  My throat feels dry as dust; speech seems impossible. One of those furry mics appears, hovering just above my head, dangling from an extendable stick.

  Honey prods me forward again. ‘Go on!’ she hisses. ‘Just say it!’

  So I do.

  ‘I’m Jake, and I think I am Honey’s half-brother,’ I croak out. I scan the faces at the table, watching me now with a mixture of astonishment and horror. ‘So, yeah, probably your half-brother too. Small world, huh?’

  Honey steps forward to stand beside me.

  ‘Dad had an affair,’ she says in a small voice. ‘Years ago, when we were tiny. Jake was the result. I found out about it and I wrote to Jake, and, well – here he is. I mean, he’s family, right?’

  The fair-haired woman, clearly Honey’s mum, drops the armful of chocolate boxes she is holding and slumps down on to a kitchen chair, her face bleached white.

  ‘Cut!’ the woman with the clipboard says into the silence. ‘Cut, everybody. Cut. So, can anybody tell me what just happened?’

  Nobody says a thing, and the guy with the spectacles and the fluffy mic raises an eyebrow, smiling.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure, but I think we just recorded ourselves some pure TV gold …’

  7

  Everything is chaos after that. The half-sisters are all talking at once, loudly and angrily; the fair-haired woman, Charlotte, who is clearly the girls’ mum, is crying; and the dark-haired man with the blue twinkly eyes is shaking his head and asking the film crew if everyone can have a bit of a break.

  ‘We need some time out here to talk,’ he is saying. ‘This is family stuff, not TV stuff. OK?’

  ‘No worries, Paddy,’ the clipboard woman says reassuringly. ‘We’ll wrap for today, give you some space. Let’s start over in the morning – ten-ish?’

  ‘Sure,’ the twinkly guy says. ‘Fine.’

  ‘I should go too,’ I mutter, but Honey grabs my arm and anchors me still.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ she says. ‘It took long enough to find you and get you here; you can’t run away now!’

  ‘She’s right,’ Paddy says. ‘We need to talk. Let’s leave the TV crew to pack up. C’mon, we’ll head through to the living room; get a bit of peace and quiet.’

  He herds everyone out of the kitchen, away from the bustle of cameras and mics being packed away, the dismantling of lights and reflectors. I am ushered through a wide hallway lined with framed paintings that look like they were done by my half-sisters at an early age: all spattered paint and spindly stick figures and huge amounts of glitter. I feel a strange twist of emotion at seeing them: happy for the half-sisters, sad for me. I remember a couple of my handmade Christmas cards being propped on a window sill at our old bedsit in London, in pre-Rick times, and an especially lurid collage involving pasta shapes that Isla once made Sellotaped to the fridge for a while when we lived in Manchester. Kids’ artwork framed and hung on the walls, though? It’s a whole different world.

  And then I’m in the living room, and that’s a whole different world too; there are blue velvet sofas and an open fire with Victorian tiles and a carved wooden fire surround, a big pile of floor cushions and a blue oriental-looking rug that’s threadbare in a couple of places and is most likely worth a small fortune. The sisters flop down on the sofas, still chattering and whispering, Charlotte sinks into a drooping armchair, and Paddy indicates that I should sit down too. I pull a couple of floor cushions next to the fire and sit down warily, poised for flight.

  ‘The TV crew are gone,’ Paddy says, peering out through the window; I glimpse a flash of slow-moving vehicles crunching across the gravel. ‘Thank goodness. That was spectacularly bad timing. I think they got a bit more than they bargained for today!’

  ‘We don’t always have cameras and lights in the kitchen,’ the youngest sister pipes up, throwing me an uncertain smile. ‘They’re filming a reality TV series based on us, and the chocolate business …’

  ‘I don’t think I mentioned the chocolate business,’ Honey frowns. ‘Mum and Paddy make luxury fair-trade truffles: The Chocolate Box. You might have heard of it?’

  I blink and shrug helplessly.

  I have been known to scarf down a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut or a Snickers bar, but luxury fair-trade truffles? I wouldn’t know one if it fell from the skies right into my mouth.

  ‘Will they actually use that clip of film, do you think?’ Charlotte asks in a whisper. ‘I mean, I’m sure it’s all very entertaining, but I am not sure I want Greg’s little secret broadcast to the nation.’

  My cheeks sting with colour. So I am not a brand-new half-brother, I am Greg’s ‘little secret’, something to be hidden away, hushed up, covered up. I must have been crazy to imagine I might be welcome here.

  ‘I’ll talk to them, don’t worry,’ Paddy says. ‘There are all kinds of privacy issues involved. I don’t suppose Jake knew quite what he was walking into.’

  ‘You definitely picked your moment,’ Honey says to me. ‘Lights, camera, action: cue the long-lost brother!’

  ‘I wasn’t exactly lost,’ I mutter.

  ‘No, but you’re a bit of a surprise, all the same,’ Charlotte says. ‘I wish you’d told me, Honey. Meeting Jake like this out of the blue – well, it’s a massive shock to the system. I can’t seem to take it in!’

  Honey pouts. ‘I wanted to tell you,’ she says. ‘It was just hard to find the words. I’m really sorry, Mum! I didn’t mean to upset you!’

  Charlotte blots her eyes with a tissue, squaring her shoulders. I cannot tell what she’s thinking, but I am willing to bet it’s not exactly friendly.

  ‘So,’ she says. ‘You are Jake Cooke?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I say, squirming a little and resisting the temptation to make a mock salute. ‘Jake Cooke, that’s me. Sorry to show up unannounced. I didn’t really have time to plan it. I’d have called if I’d had a contact number, probably. Or maybe I shouldn’t have come at all; it was a really, really bad idea.’

  The woman pushes her hair back, struggles to smile.

  ‘No, no, of course it wasn’t,’ she says, shaking her head softly. ‘It was exactly the right thing to do. I mean, I can’t pretend this isn’t difficult – painful, even – but you are welcome, Jake. I mean that. If we are not being too hospitable, well, I think it’s just that we’re struggling a little to absorb it all.’

  That opens the floodgates.

  ‘You’re our half-brother?’ the littlest half-sister marvels. ‘And nobody ever knew? So what’s the story?’

  ‘I can’t take it in,’ one of the twins says. ‘We were tiny babies and Coco wasn’t even born yet, and Dad didn’t care at all; he turned his back on us all to go off with your mum! It’s like everything I ever believed was a lie.’

  ‘Was Dad actually living with you and your mum?’ the other twin demands. ‘While he was still with us? Like some kind of double life?’

  I don’t know how to even start to answer.

  ‘I never met him,’ I offer, as if that might make my new half-sisters a fraction less hostile. ‘He left my mum before I was born. I only found out who he was when Honey wrote. Mum met him when she was eighteen or nineteen; they worked in the same place, I think. I’m not sure she even knew he was married …’

  ‘Eighteen or nineteen,’ Charlotte echoes. ‘So she wasn’t much more than a child herself; and I had no idea. No idea at all.’

  She smiles and shakes her head, but her eyes brim with tears again and I feel like the worst person in the world. Maybe I take after my no-good dad? I probably do. Half my genes come from him, after all. It could explain a lot.

  ‘Turns out Dad was a loser all along,’ Honey says. ‘He was just generally useless at being a husband and a dad. Sorry, Mum, but he was! It took me long enough to see it, but it wasn’t your fault; it wasn’t anybody’s. Dad’s kind of hopeless. It’s not like he’s e
ven improved or learnt from his mistakes; he’s pretty rubbish.’

  ‘He is,’ Charlotte agrees. ‘And it hurts to be reminded of it all, but, well, we’ve moved on, haven’t we? We’re a better, happier family now. And if we hadn’t been through all that I’d never be with Paddy now, and he is my absolute soulmate; I can’t imagine this family without him.’

  Honey rolls her eyes and shakes her head, but I notice the flicker of a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. I’d guess her relationship with Paddy hasn’t always run smoothly. Maybe I will tell her about Sheddie and his yurt sometime; she’ll realize just how lucky she is.

  I am kind of impressed at how Charlotte has soaked up the bombshell and recovered so quickly. The way things were going, there could have been yelling; I could have been thrown out of the house, sent packing. Instead, I am sitting in some shabby-chic living room with four new half-sisters and a stepsister, hearing about my loser dad. It’s kind of surreal.

  ‘I almost knew,’ Charlotte is saying now, her eyes on mine. ‘When I heard your name, Jake, and saw your face, well, a shiver went down my spine. You look so like the girls, you see. So much like Greg. He was – is – a very handsome man.’

  I wonder if it’s too soon to ask to see a photograph and find out what my dad actually looks like. Maybe. In time. I bite my lip, tasting blood and hope.

  ‘We’ve never had a brother before,’ one of the twins says, a little less prickly now. ‘Suppose it could be quite interesting.’

  ‘Are you staying for tea?’ the youngest sister asks. ‘Because it’s macaroni cheese and salad; me and Summer made it earlier. We made loads, so there will definitely be enough.’