Mum muttered.
‘What?’
‘You should call him Dad, not Alan.’
‘All right, Dad’s always singing.’ Now was clearly not the time to get into the whole what-I-should-call-Alan debate. Deciding to play it cool, I sat back down at the breakfast bar and yawned loudly. ‘Haven’t I even got a card from my own mother then?’
Mum’s shoulders softened and she gave me a half smile. ‘Of course you have. I’ll go and get it. And the boys. Then I’ll make us all some breakfast and we can give you your pressies.’
I made my face grin. ‘Great.’
As soon as she left the kitchen I darted over to the bin and pulled out the card. The envelope was dotted with grease. I stuffed it inside my dressing gown and ran up the three flights of stairs to my room. Just like Mrs Rochester I live in the attic. (Actually it’s a loft conversion but that doesn’t sound quite as dramatic, does it?) Flinging the pile of books from my beanbag I sat down, pulled out the card and studied the writing. It was in slightly wonky capitals – like it was from someone who couldn’t write very neatly but was trying really hard. I took a deep breath and slid my finger under the seal. I ought to tell you now that if there was a question in Agatha Dashwood’s Character Questionnaire saying, ‘Do they make a habit of opening other people’s mail?’ the answer would be a definite no. But something had got my mum rattled and I wanted to know what it was.
I pulled the card from the envelope. The picture on the front was of a country landscape. It was the kind of card you’d buy for an elderly aunt. Or someone who likes cleaning and lives in Bognor. It wasn’t really the sort of thing I’d imagine someone called Cherokee going crazy for.
I opened it. There was no printed message or naff rhyme inside; instead the person who’d sent it had written HAPPY 15TH BIRTHDAY in large crooked capitals in the middle. At the top, in smaller writing, they had put To Cherokee and at the bottom from Steve. And at the very bottom, in tiny letters, as if they hadn’t been sure whether to say it at all, they had written: P.S. You can find me most lunchtimes performing in Spitalfields Market. By the record stalls. If you want to find me . . .
‘What are you doing?’
By the time I’d registered that my bedroom door had opened, Mum was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the card in my hand. Then her gaze dropped to the bright blue envelope on the floor.
‘I’m just –’ I broke off, and I could feel my face flushing. What was I doing, opening somebody else’s mail?
Mum marched over, holding out her hand. ‘I thought I told you to leave it,’ she hissed. ‘Give it to me.’
I tightened my grip on the card. ‘You didn’t tell me to leave it, you just threw it in the bin.’
‘Exactly. So why would you want to get it out and open it?’ Beneath the sheen of her morning moisturiser I could see that her face was flushed too.
‘Because –’
But before I could go on Mum made a sudden lurch for the card. I rolled over on the beanbag just out of reach.
‘I wanted to read it,’ I said. ‘I wanted to see what had got you so spooked.’
‘I’m not spooked,’ Mum spluttered, waving her hands about like an extremely spooked person. ‘But you can’t go reading other people’s mail. It’s not right.’
‘Oh, and binning it is?’ I stumbled to my feet, clutching the card to my chest. ‘It’s really weird, because this person, Cherokee Brown, is fifteen today too. Don’t you think that’s a bit of a coincidence? That we share the same birthday and someone thinks we share the same address.’ I didn’t have a clue what the coincidence meant, but it was obvious from her flushed face that Mum did.
‘What did he say?’ she asked, staring at me.
‘What did who say?’ I watched as her gaze dropped to the card.
‘What did he say?’ This time Mum almost screamed it. I looked at her in shock.
‘What’s going on, ladies?’ We both turned to see Alan poking his head round the door. He never actually sets foot in my room – I think he can sense the anti-life-coaching force field I’ve erected with my mental powers to keep him out. ‘Fiona? Claire? Is everything OK?’
‘Yes, yes, everything’s fine,’ Mum replied sharply over her shoulder. ‘Can you go and get the boys up for breakfast? We’ll be down in a minute.’
Alan smiled, his teeth all square and straight like the white keys on a piano. ‘Okey-dokey. Happy birthday, Claire-Bear.’
I gritted my teeth and smiled back. ‘Thanks.’
As soon as we heard his feet padding off down the stairs Mum and I turned back to look at each other.
‘What did who say, Mum? And how did you know it was from a man?’ I waved the card at her. ‘You know who sent this, don’t you? You recognised the writing and that’s why you threw it in the bin. Who is he? Who’s Steve? And who is Cherokee Brown? Why won’t you just tell me?’
Mum’s head slumped. She stuffed her hands inside the pockets of her tracksuit top and scuffed one of her bare feet on the floor. She looked like a little girl who’d just been told she couldn’t go out to play.
‘You are,’ she muttered.
‘What?’
‘You are Cherokee Brown.’
Chapter Two
‘It never ceases to amaze me how many writers seem to forget that they have five senses. When you are describing a scene don’t just tell the reader what your character is seeing, write about what they can hear, smell, touch and taste as well.’
Agatha Dashwood,
So You Want to Write a Novel?
When most people hear laughter they instantly look around to see where the joke is and whether they can join in. But when you know that you actually are the joke, even the slightest snigger makes you want to crawl behind the nearest rock and hide. Unfortunately there aren’t any rocks on the way to school. There isn’t anything much except house after boring house, all exactly the same with their paved front gardens and green wheelie bins standing guard like giant toads. I’ve tried loads of things to make the walk more interesting and less like a death-row march. Spying through gaps in net curtains, making up weird titles from the letters on car number plates, only treading on the cracks in the pavement. But today, for the first time in months, I didn’t have to do anything to take my mind off the laughter that I knew was coming. My head was rammed to the brim with my mum’s revelation. I was Cherokee Brown, or at least that was what I’d been called when I was first born, and the card was from my real dad whose name, apparently, is Steve Brown.
But why had he got in touch now – after fifteen years of nothing? Why had he come back from America? What had happened to his ‘commitment issues’? Question after question
