The Chocolate Lovers' Club (3 page)

‘Are you going to see Addison over the holidays?’ Nadia asks Autumn.

‘Yes,’ Autumn responds, but she does it in such a distracted way that we decide not to pursue the subject.

Addison is Autumn’s new boyfriend and they’re totally loved-up. Which is good, because Addison has been Autumn’s only boyfriend since time began as she doesn’t
have time for men as she’s so busy Doing Good. It’s really great to see that Autumn is actually doing something that she wants to do rather than propping up her lame, drug-dealing brother and her lame, drug-taking clients at the KICK IT! programme she works on.

Her brother, Richard, is currently still in rehab in California or Arizona or Nevada – one of the American states ending in ‘a’ – although he absconded out there to escape a posse of thugs who were after his blood rather than through having seen the error of his druggie ways.

‘How’s Richard doing?’ I ask.

‘He’s okay.’ Autumn shrugs. ‘His emails are very sporadic. Apparently, the clinic limits his time on the computer.’

Very sensible too. Look at all the trouble computers can get you into if you begin to rely on them. I clench my jaw firmly, so that I won’t be tempted to cry again.

‘He’s not coming home?’ I squeak.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Thankfully, my parents have very deep pockets. I’m sure Rich will stay away for as long as they continue to fund him.’

‘I’m dreading it,’ Nadia pipes up. ‘I’m dreading the whole bloody thing. The last thing I need is any more expense.’

Nadia’s a beautiful, British Asian woman and, if I were her, I’d dredge up something from my cultural background – or, frankly, make it up – so that I’d got a perfect excuse for having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas. There’s got to be something, right?

‘I used to love it when I was a kid.’ She shakes her head. ‘Now it’s so horribly commercial. Why on earth do we do it?’

Nadia and her husband, Toby, are also recently estranged. Which, on the positive side, means that it isn’t only my love-life that’s a disaster zone. In present company, we’d still have plenty to talk about.

Toby had become seriously addicted to internet gambling and was on the fast-track to ruining their lives with his expensive obsession. They’re absolutely up to their eyeballs in debt. But he’s supposed to be clean now – if that’s the right term for a reformed gambler? Nadia’s precarious finances mean that the rest of The Chocolate Lovers’ Club bankroll her visits to Chocolate Heaven, but it’s a small price to pay to enable our friend to continue to use her sanctuary. Besides, out of all of us, Nadia eats the least chocolate, so her bills are relatively small.

‘Toby and I are going to spend the day playing happy families for Lewis’s sake,’ Nadia continues. ‘It’s such a farce. I just wish it would all go away.’

Christmas, I suppose, is a great time of year if you’re a happy, shiny person with no troubles in the world. For the rest of us, it’s the time of year that seems to show up your shitty little life in the worst possible light.

‘Blimey,’ I say. ‘We’re all going to be slitting our throats before Christmas Eve. It can’t be that bad.’

Chantal and Nadia glare at me. Even Autumn joins in.

‘Think of all the special edition chocolates,’ I coax them. ‘The selection boxes, the chocolate tree decorations. Chocolate advent calendars. What better way to start a day?’ I’m on a roll. ‘The oversize bars of Galaxy. Whopping great Toblerones.’ Four pairs of eyes widen involuntarily at that. Who could resist those triangles of Swiss milk chocolate
laced with honey and almond nougat? Not me, for one. Even though it meant the risk of losing a tooth. I look at my friends. ‘Surely those will see us through the dark times?’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Autumn says anxiously. She reaches for the last comforting morsel of
pain au chocolat
. ‘Maybe we’re panicking unnecessarily.’

Then Clive pops up beside us with more choccy supplies and some fresh coffee which he puts down on the table. He’s whistling ‘It’ll Be Lonely This Christmas’ softly to himself. ‘How are my darlings today?’ he asks chirpily. ‘Looking forward to Christmas?’

In unison, we all reach out for a cushion and, with a certain unrestrained venom, throw them at him.

‘I was only asking,’ he mutters at us as he rearranges his soft furnishings in a more orderly fashion.

My friends, arms folded, fear in their eyes, are still looking too unsettled for my liking.

‘We can do it,’ I assure them as I hand round the
grand cru
truffles Clive brought for us. ‘We can get through this. If we have enough chocolate.’

Chapter Four

T
his is my cunning diet plan to see me through the Christmas period. I reckon if I work out like a mad thing now, then I can have some extra calories in hand to cope with my annual Christmas greedfest. Like everything in life, it’s all a matter of achieving a balance.

The bad thing is that I’ve left it a little late to start this new regime – like by about six months. So, at the moment, I’m actually ten thousand calories or so down on where I need to be. That’s hardly any Toffee Crisps at all. Maybe less than one Terry’s Chocolate Orange. No wonder I’m in severe panic mode. Christmas will be utterly miserable if I’m both alone
and
can’t gorge myself on chocolate. That is more than one person should be forced to tolerate – although I have vowed not to over-indulge this year. But then I’m working on the premise that I’ve vowed not to over-indulge for approximately the last fifteen years and I always have.

To combat my current calorie deficit, I’m leaping around my lounge like a woman possessed by something entirely demonic and shaking the floor of my flat. I have Nell McAndrew’s
Ultimate Challenge, Ultimate Results
on fast forward and, ultimately, I’m struggling to keep up with it.
Oh, to have such toned thighs and such a ping-pong-ball-sized bottom. How does she do it? I bet not so much as a morsel of Twix ever passes her pouting lips. Am I permanently destined to look like the ‘before’ picture on a ‘before and after’ comparison? I huff and puff a bit more. I’m going to do this DVD three times more and then I’m going to have a Bounty Bar as a reward – which I will, of course, deduct from the chocolate I’m planning to eat over the next few days.

Christmas Eve is tomorrow and still no call from Crush. To say that I’m devastated is an understatement. I’m well and truly ‘crushed’. Maybe a little tear mingles with some sweat as I do my leg curls and knee lifts and thigh-ripping lunges and goodness only knows what else. I was looking forward to a very romantic Christmas for once. It only goes to show what can happen when you get too wrapped up in a lovely, unrealistic dream. At the age of thirty-two, you’d think that I’d be able to spot a bastard a mile away, but somehow I still manage to see the best in everyone – until, inevitably, I’m shown otherwise.

I’m just about to embark on my first coronary, when the phone rings. I can’t stop now, I could give myself a hernia or lock-jaw at the very least. Even if I did pick up, I wouldn’t actually be able to speak. Gasping for breath is not attractive in a woman of my tender years.

The answerphone kicks in and there’s lots of whirring and thunking. There’s also a bit of uneven breathing coming down the phone line and I wonder if I’ve got a pervy phone call until I hear a woefully familiar voice speak out, which stops me dead in mid-lunge.

‘Lucy,’ Marcus says. And then there’s another shuddering breath and a big sigh. ‘It’s me. Marcus.’ As if my ex-fiancé, to whom I dedicated five long and faithful years, needs any introduction. My heart is banging against my chest and not just because I’m terminally unfit.

‘I was just calling to see how you are.’ Lots more uncomfortable pausing. At this rate the tape on the answerphone machine is going to have run out by the time he gets to the point of his call. Strangely, I find myself urging him to continue, whilst having no similar urge to pick up the phone. ‘I feel that we left things on very bad terms last time we met.’

Ah, that’ll be the time that he was bonking busty, bouncing Joanne on his kitchen table, and I walked in on them. I very nearly returned my engagement ring to a place where the sun very definitely doesn’t shine. Marcus clearly hasn’t realised what a narrow escape he had.

‘The thing is,’ he continues, ‘I miss you and I still love you. I’m not with Joanne any more.’ Now there’s a surprise. I suspect that she was just a little bit pissed off with him too when she found out that the supposed ex-girlfriend was now, in fact, his fiancée. ‘I’m having time on my own to reflect on my behaviour. I realise that it’s ridiculous. It’s ruining my life.’

It didn’t do a lot for my life either, I seem to remember.

‘But I simply can’t seem to stop . . . well,’ he says sadly. ‘You know only too well what I can’t stop doing.’

I certainly do.

‘I’m even considering signing up for some sort of sex addicts’ course.’

A course to
stop
him being a sex addict rather than one to teach him how to be one, I assume. Marcus has more than enough expertise in that area.

‘Well . . .’ Lots more sighing and pauses. ‘I’d better go. I just wanted to tell you that I’m thinking about you and that I hope you have a great Christmas.’ His voice cracks. ‘I’ll always love you, and if you ever want to give me a call then you know where I am. Be happy, Lucy. Bye.’

And then Marcus hangs up. I stare at the television screen. The demented flashes of Nell’s Nike sportswear blur in front of my eyes. There’s nothing quite like a call from your ex to bring you down. Sinking to the floor, dazed, I reach for my Bounty Bar. If there was ever a time I deserve to experience the taste of paradise, it’s now. Sod the thunder thighs and the rest of this exercise routine. I need the sort of comfort that only chocolate can bring.

Chapter Five

A
utumn Fielding glanced at her watch and saw that her next mosaics and stained-glass class at the Stolford Centre was due to start in ten minutes. Or ‘doing good for the terminally disaffected’ as her brother sneeringly called it. Learning how to make a basic suncatcher might not seem that important in the scheme of things, but if she could teach just one of her students enough to give them a glimmer of enjoyment or relaxation, or even show them that they had an untapped seam of creativity in their abused bodies then it was worth it for her, no matter what anyone else said.

It was rare that any of her students came in early, but she always liked to have the workbenches ready prepared for them with their latest work-in-progress laid out or a selection of brightly coloured sheets of glass for them to choose from. Her clients might all be thieves, drug addicts and down-at-heel, but she cared deeply for them and wanted to make their short time in her classes as enjoyable as possible. And she hoped that what she did might occasionally reach out and touch some of the kids, improving their tough lives.

Most of the students were currently working on seasonal pieces – cheery Santa suncatchers, coloured glass stars with silver thread to hang on the Christmas tree, a festive candle-holder or two – some to brighten up squalid squats, some to go to the dysfunctional homes where the problems so often started, some to be left behind on the workbenches because there was no home for them to go to. It was hard to find a place to hang a suncatcher when your residence was a cardboard box.

Recently, there had been a new intake of clients joining the KICK IT! programme, but a few of the stalwart drug addicts remained or came back with dismal regularity, unable to KICK IT! for a depressing variety of reasons.

Addison slipped in through the door and wound his arms around her. ‘Hi, there.’ He kissed her warmly and soundly on the lips, crushing her to his broad chest.

She’d always loved her job, and now she had an extra reason to rush in here every day with a smile on her face. It perhaps wasn’t ideal to be having a love affair with one of her colleagues, but it certainly felt very nice. Addison had been the first person that she’d dated in a long, long time who had been on her wavelength. He was socially responsible, Green, kind, caring and not in any way unattractive to look at. Being Green, she’d found in the past, had meant that most men had an excess of facial hair, body odour and a penchant for brown jumpers with holes in them. They didn’t generally dress like Addison, in sharp black jackets and crisp shirts. He looked more like a drug dealer than someone from the other side of the fence; perhaps that was what made him so successful with his charges.

His job as the Centre’s Enterprise Development Officer involved him in finding gainful employment usually for people who’d never managed to hold down a job in their entire lives. He was exceptionally good at it and, with his easy charm, managed to cultivate and keep a raft of extraordinarily tolerant employers on board – employers who frequently overlooked their troubled employees’ tendency to abscond, not appear for work at all or even steal from them more often than not.

Autumn eased away from him, glancing nervously at the door. ‘Someone might see us.’ She tried to smooth down her mass of burnished ginger curls which had suddenly seemed to bounce madly with excitement. If only she had sleek hair like Chantal’s, that didn’t mirror her emotions but remained well-behaved on all occasions.

‘Don’t you think your students would be pleased to see that their tutor’s in love?’

‘Who said I’m in love?’

His beautiful black face broke into its trademark wide grin. ‘I think that was me.’

‘That’s very presumptuous of you, Mr Addison Deacon,’ she said, trying to sound stern.

‘Admit it,’ he said. ‘You’re crazy for me.’

‘I’d be crazy not to be,’ she agreed. ‘But my students would all tease me mercilessly and they already make fun of me for my upper-class upbringing and my supposedly posh accent.’

‘They love you really,’ he said fondly. ‘Just as I do.’

She grinned back at him and carried on with the preparations for her lesson while he leaned on the workbench and watched her over his dark glasses.

‘Did you decide yet what you want to do for Christmas?’ he asked. ‘It’s only a few days away.’