Nowadays I favour mainly criollo couverture chocolate, the best and most expensive kind, which not only tastes delicious but has a superior gloss and good ‘snap’. I temper it in the machine Jake christened the Bath and then, with an outsize pastry brush, coat specially made polycarbon moulds in the shape of angels or winged hearts until I have a thick enough shell. When they’re cold, I ‘glue’ the two halves together with a little more chocolate – but before I do that, I put in the ‘Wish’.
And I am so much happier since I began to read the Angel cards instead of the Tarot! They never seemed to come out right when I read them for myself and I often wonder if my future would have been different if I hadn’t always looked for signs and portents before I did anything. Do we make our own futures, or do our futures make us?
Granny, who was of gypsy descent and taught me how to read the cards in the first place, said they only showed what might be the future, should the present course be held to; but I’m not so sure. She would have approved of the Angel cards, though, which is more than my grandfather (whom Jake and I call Grumps, for obvious reasons) and Zillah, who is Granny’s cousin, do.
But I truly believe in angels and have done from being a small child when Granny, who despite her Tarot reading was deeply religious, assured me that the winged figure I glimpsed one night really was a celestial visitor, rather than a figment of my imagination. (And my friend Poppy saw it too, I do have a witness!)
Why an angel should appear to an unbaptised and ungodly child of sin is anyone’s guess, unless it was my own personal guardian angel making an early appearance in my life, to counter Grumps’ influence and set my feet on the right path. But if so, she hasn’t visited me since in that form, though sometimes I can hear the soft susurration of wings and feel a comforting presence that is almost, but not quite, visible. And the Angel cards…maybe she guided me to those too?
Granny died when I was twelve, but she too did her best to counter Grumps’ influence, flatly forbidding any kind of baptismal ceremony involving his coven, or involvement in its rites until I had reached the age where I could make a considered decision for myself – a resounding ‘No way!’ She had already done the same for my mother, though unfortunately without instilling in her any alternative moral code.
That February morning, when I shuffled the pack of silky smooth Angel cards and laid them out on the kitchen table, they predicted change, but at least they also assured me that everything would work out all right in the end, which was a great improvement on coming face to face with the Hanging Man or Death over the breakfast cereal and trying to interpret the reading as something a little less doom-laden than the initial impression.
Rituals completed, I went to wake Jake up, which took quite some effort since, at eighteen, he could sleep for Britain. I made sure he ate something before he set off for sixth form college, dressed all in black, from dyed hair to big, metal-studded boots, a cheery sight for his teachers on a Monday morning.
When he’d gone – with a cheeky ‘Goodbye, Mum!’ just to wind me up – I checked my emails for incoming Chocolate Wishes orders and printed them out, before going through to the main part of the house to see what Grumps was up to. Our flat was over the garages, so the door led onto the upper landing, and was rarely shut, unless Jake was playing loud music.
In the kitchen Zillah was sitting at the table over the remnants of her breakfast, drinking loose-leaf Yorkshire tea and smoking a thin, lumpy, roll-up cigarette. As usual, she was dressed in a bunchy skirt, two layers of cardigans with the bottom one worn back to front, a huge flowered pinny over the whole ensemble and her hair tied up in a clashing scarf, turban-fashion. Grumps says she was bitten by Carmen Miranda in her youth and after I Googled the name, I suspect he is right. Today’s dangly red earrings made her look as if she had hooked a pair of cherries over each ear, so the fruit motif was definitely there.
She looked up – small, dark, with skin not so much wrinkled as folded around her black, bird-bright eyes – and smiled, revealing several glinting gold teeth. ‘Read your tea leaves?’ she offered hospitably.
‘No, thanks, Zillah, not just now. I’m running late, it took me ages to get Jake up and on his way. But I’ve brought you another jar of my chocolate and ginger spread, because yesterday you said you’d almost run out.’
‘Extra sweet?’
‘Extra sweet,’ I agreed, putting the jar down on the table.
It’s really just a ganache of grated cacao and boiled double cream, with a little finely chopped preserved ginger added for zing. It doesn’t keep long, though the way Zillah lards it onto her toast means it doesn’t have to.
Zillah turned up on the doorstep the day after Granny died. She’d read the news in the cards and come to burn her cousin’s caravan – metaphorically speaking, anyway, because she’d had to make do with burning Granny’s clothes and personal possessions on the garden bonfire instead.
Grumps seemed unsurprised by Zillah’s sudden appearance, as if he’d been expecting her, which maybe he had, and his purported magical skills aren’t a complete figment of his imagination. She’d never given any suggestion of remaining with us permanently, yet here she still was several years later, cooking, cleaning and caring for us, in her slapdash way.
She handed me the fresh cup of tea she’d just poured out, put two Jammie Dodger biscuits on the saucer and said, ‘Take this in to the Wizard of Oz then, will you, love?’
‘Grumps is up to something, isn’t he?’ I asked, accepting the cup, because although he is taciturn and secretive at the best of times, I could still tell. I only hoped he wasn’t about to try some great summoning ceremony with his coven, because on past form all they were likely to call up was double pneumonia.
Zillah tapped the side of her nose with the fingers holding her cigarette and a thin snake of ash fell into her empty cup. I hoped it wouldn’t muddle her future.
In the study Grumps was indeed sitting at his desk over a grimoire open at a particularly juicy spell, which he was probably considering trying out when the weather improved. (The coven practised their rites in an oak grove, skyclad, and none of them was getting any younger.)
His long, silver hair was parted in the middle and a circlet held it off a face notable for a pair of piercing grey eyes and a hawk-like nose. His midnight-blue velvet robe was rubbed on the elbows, so that he bore more resemblance to a down-at-heel John Dee than a Gandalf, but it was a look that went down well with the readers of the beyond Dennis Wheatley novels he wrote as Gregory Warlock. Sales had been in the doldrums for many years, apart from a small band of devotees, but they were suddenly having a renewed vogue and his entire backlist was about to be reprinted in their original, very lurid covers.
Grumps is one of those annoying people who need very little sleep, so that by the time I pop in to see him in the mornings, he usually has achieved quite a heap of handwritten manuscript. There are often lots of letters too, because he corresponds with equally nutty people all over the globe, and since his handwriting is appalling I take everything away and type it up on my computer.
When I was younger there was a time when I thought Grumps was a complete charlatan. You can imagine what it was like growing up in a small town like Merchester, with a relative who both looked and proclaimed himself with every utterance to be totally, barking mad. For example, his eccentric clothing, the ghastly novels and his definitive book on the magical significance of ley lines. (Leys are straight lines that link landmarks and sites of historical and magical importance.) Add to all that the rumours of secret and risqué rites in remote woodland, and you will begin to see my point.
Yet as I grew older I came to realise that he believed completely in what and who he was and then it ceased to bother me any more: if he wasn’t embarrassed by it, then neither was I.
Now I picked my way towards the desk through a sea of unfurled maps that covered