Not Your Cinderella

by Kate Johnson

  She talked a bit more, looking more and more tired with every word. Five siblings, seven nieces and nephews, all claustrophobically cooped up in a building with badly-spelled anti-immigrant graffiti on the wall.

  “I’ve got to go,” Clodagh said to Jamie, and gave him a bit of a smile as she pushed the baby towards the front door.

  “I’ll help you—”

  “Trust me, you don’t want get in a lift that smells of piss. And you really don’t want to get caught up with my whole… family… thing. Go back to Cambridge, study your computers, be a prince, eat four kinds of mustard. Have a nice life.”

  And with that she walked away, heavy on her injured leg, not turning back to look at him.

  Chapter Eight

  The text came twenty minutes after she left Prince Jamie standing there on the cracked pavement outside the tower block. She’d peered out through Tony’s bedroom window, but the big black car had already left by the time she reached her mum’s flat.

  “Which one was your favourite?”

  She blinked at her phone. Which what? Which of her many irritating family members? Which contestant on the terrible talent show her mum and sister were watching? While she tried to work it out, her phone buzzed again.

  “Mustard, I mean. Dijon is nice in sandwiches but you’ve got to have American for hot dogs.”

  Clodagh stared at her phone. On the TV, someone began slaughtering an Adele hit. “What kind of sandwich has mustard in it?” she typed, slowly.

  “Mum, this is rubbish, put Geordie Shore on,” said Whitney, and Clodagh winced.

  “No. You know I won’t have that rubbish on.”

  “But all my friends—”

  “I don’t care about your friends. It’s—what is it, Shar?”

  “Manipulative bollocks,” Clodagh murmured. “Edited to create drama. Neither reflective nor indicative of real life.” Her phone buzzed again.

  “The best kind, obvs. Good with ham.”

  “Yeah, and it’s cruel to all them kids. What must their mums think?”

  “I noticed you had three kinds of that.”

  “I like the honey-roasted one. Olivia will only eat organic.”

  Whitney muttered under her breath about how it was called reality TV after all.

  “And the turkey ham?”

  There was a pause. “Okay don’t laugh at me.”

  “Who you texting?” Whitney wanted to know.

  “Uh, someone from the pub.” Clodagh angled her phone away. “About going back to work.”

  “Thought you was staying here?” said her mum, not looking away from the TV.

  “Yeah just until I get things sorted,” Clodagh said absently as her phone buzzed in her hand.

  “The college cat likes turkey ham.”

  Clodagh stifled a laugh. “You buy turkey ham just for a cat? They don’t have Whiskas where you live?”

  “You laugh, but my dad used to grow a certain kind of apple just because the horses liked it best.”

  “How the other half live,” she texted back, and immediately regretted it.

  This time the pause was longer. Then an animated gif of Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold coins popped up, and she couldn’t quite contain her giggles.

  The next day dawned far too early. Clodagh had given up trying to sleep in her old room, where her single bed had been replaced with a child’s bunk for whichever grandchildren happened to be staying at the time. Right now it was Nevaeh, who hadn’t forgiven Clodagh for failing to get the purple doll she wanted for her birthday and played noisy videogames all night.

  Clodagh had decamped to the living room, where she’d been woken in the middle of the night by Tony stumbling in, smelling of weed. This at least made a change because the living room, despite her mother swearing blind she’d given up the fags, always smelled of stale smoke. Then again neither the curtains nor the carpet had been changed or cleaned since Clodagh could remember.

  She barely seemed to have got back to sleep when Nevaeh came charging in to put some horrendously noisy cartoon on the TV. Asking her to turn it down resulted in a tantrum. Whitney arrived to retrieve her, complained that Clodagh hadn’t given her breakfast, and set off having a loud slanging match over the phone with someone who might have been her new boyfriend.

  Clodagh, her head splitting, reached for her painkillers and found the packet empty.

  “Mum, where are my painkillers?”

  “Oh, I had a… you know,” her mum mimed ‘period pain’, “and I couldn’t find any paracetamol, but yours’ve got codeine in ‘em, haven’t they love?”

  “They did,” Clodagh said pointedly, which set her mum off into a sulk. She’s letting you stay here for free. Don’t be bitchy.

  Her ankle hurt after yesterday’s ill-advised exercise. Getting more painkillers—which wouldn’t have codeine in them this time—would involve more exercise. No Amazon Prime Now here, either. What would Lady Olivia think of this place?

  Her phone buzzed. Ugh, if it was Charlene asking her to take the kids to school she could—

  It was a photo of a grumpy-looking tabby cat eating a piece of ham.

  “Should I call him Bernard, or Matthew?” Jamie asked.

  She thought for a moment, then typed back, “Call him Bustopher Jones.”

  “Because he’s remarkably fat?”

  Clodagh grinned. Probably, Jamie was referring to the original TS Eliot poems, and not the touring production of Cats which had come to the Harlow Playhouse when Clodagh was a kid, but that didn’t matter right now.

  “Because he’s the Lady Mathilda Street cat,” she replied, and Jamie replied with an applauding emoji.

  Most of her nieces and nephews were of school age, although there permanently seemed to be at least one of them excluded or off sick or kept home because of some dispute or other. Today it was Zayn, the youngest of her sister Charlene’s three kids. Char launched into a long-winded and complicated explanation of precisely who at school he was being kept home to avoid, but Clodagh tuned out after the fourth, “And then she turned around and said,” and asked the kid if he wanted to watch Paw Patrol.

  It had been a big hit last time she’d babysat Zayn, but apparently now he was six he’d grown right out of it. Hollee, the baby of the family at two and a half, was quite happy with Peppa Pig, but Zayn declared it ‘for babies and girls,’ which made Hollee cry.

  Clodagh looked desperately at the clock. Far too early to start drinking.

  “I don’t suppose you’d go and get me some more painkillers?” she asked her mother, who was scowling at a collection of DVD covers with the wrong discs inside.

  “Shar, I’m busy. And Scott’s bringing over Kayleigh in a minute. She’s got chickenpox.”

  “I thought they vaccinated against that these days?” Clodagh said.

  “Yeah but Kayleigh’s mum don’t believe in vaccines. Says they cause… what is it?”

  “Immunity,” Clodagh said. “That’s what they cause. With a side effect of life.”

  Her mum frowned at her. “You don’t half come back funny from Cambridge,” she said. “Anyway. How long you staying for?”

  Clodagh looked at the blankets and pillows she’d folded on the sofa, which were now being used by Zayn to make a pillow fort, and said, “Just until I find a new place.”

  Eventually she got the bus into town, just to get away from Zayn’s determined tormenting of his cousins, on the flimsy pretext of buying calamine lotion. Poor Kayleigh was covered in chickenpox blisters, which she kept scratching at and bursting, in a manner which upset little Hollee and made Zayn point and laugh. She was pretty sure he was tickling her whenever Clodagh turned her back.

  “Take Holls with you, will you babes?” said her mum, and Clodagh agreed, if only because the pushchair had storage space so she wouldn’t have to carry any bags.

  She put her earbuds in and her hood up and limped to the bus stop. Walking hurt like she’d been kicked with every step, she found herself standing up a
nd jostled on the bus, and then Hollee decided to have a tantrum and try to get herself out of the pushchair before they’d even got inside the shopping centre.

  Clodagh knew she shouldn’t bribe a toddler with sweets, but she did anyway because it shut the little screamer up for long enough to go and buy some proper painkillers.

  “Want one!” Hollee said, as she watched Clodagh pop the capsule of sweet, sweet codeine out of its packaging.

  “No. These are for grown-ups.”

  “Want one want one want one!”

  Clodagh swallowed them dry, tried to count to ten, lost her patience at three and snarled, “Shut up, you little shit!”

  An older woman walking past snapped, “No wonder she behaves like that if that’s the language you use,” and three teenagers sniggered at her.

  Clodagh’s fists balled up. She turned to yell at the woman, then caught sight of herself in a shop window.

  Pramface. The screaming baby, the cheap parka, the bruised face, the snarl, the scraped back hair. She’d basically turned into the thing she feared the most. Give her a pair of giant gold hoop earrings and the transformation would be complete.

  Right then her phone buzzed in her pocket. Probably Mum, after something from the shops, or one of her sisters begging for a school pick-up.

  “Hunter the American wants to know if the ‘hot barmaid’ will be in the pub tonight. Whatever do I tell him?”

  Jamie. Of all the places to conjure him up, the shopping centre in Harlow was probably the least likely. He probably has shops closed specially for his private perusal, she thought, formulating her reply as she shuffled slowly towards a coffee shop with free wi-fi.

  Slowly sipping the cheapest thing on the menu whilst Hollee made a mess of a muffin, Clodagh slowly typed, “Tell him Maja only works Saturdays, and Tania is gay.”

  “I will,” he replied, “but I think the correct reply is, ‘She’s moved back to her mum’s.’”

  Heat flashed through her—Jamie thinks I’m hot?!—and then she remembered her reflection in that window. “He wouldn’t call me hot if he saw me right now,” she typed, then deleted it without sending. “Tell him he’s a sexual harassment case waiting to happen,” she sent instead.

  “Ruchi already told him. She says she’s going to create a computer virus and call it Hunter.”

  Clodagh laughed at that. Hunter seemed to think that being a Cambridge PhD student made him more important than everyone else he spent time with, which was interesting since most of the people he spent time with were also Cambridge PhD students.

  One of whom was a prince. She’d forgotten that while he was texting her.

  “Would it pop up on your screen uninvited and ask you patronising questions?” she asked.

  “Yes. And it would keep going until it found something you didn’t know and ridicule you for it.”

  “But when you asked it the answer it wouldn’t know either, because that kind of knowledge is beneath it.”

  “It would then,” Jamie went on, “tell you to be flattered it is interested in you.”

  Clodagh groaned. “That’s not just Hunter—” she backtracked, “the Hunter virus, that’s pretty much every man who comes into the Prince’s Arms.”

  There was a pause, and Clodagh sipped anxiously at her coffee. She’d gone too far.

  Then, “Men are arseholes. All of them.”

  “Even you?”

  “No. Not me. I’m a prince among men.”

  She groaned out loud and sent him an eye-rolling emoji.

  “Ask anyone. They’ll tell you Jamie Wales is an absolute prince.”

  “He’s an absolute something,” she replied, and got a laughing emoji in response.

  Finishing her coffee, she got up, and her phone buzzed again. Eagerly she picked it up, but this time it actually was her mum.

  “can u go aldis need babywipes.”

  Clodagh pinched the bridge of her nose. Babywipes she could get anywhere. The pound shop if Mum didn’t want to spend Boots money. She began to reply, when her phone buzzed again.

  This time it was a photo of a long shopping list, with the caption, “& these ta.”

  Clodagh muttered a few uncomplimentary things under her breath, sighed, and typed back in the affirmative. She used up a bit more of the coffee shop’s bandwidth looking up the bus route to Aldi, and then from Aldi back home. It involved a lot more walking than she was really happy with, but at least she wasn’t sitting at home listening to Zayn and Kayleigh torture each other.

  In the supermarket, she filled the tray below Hollee’s pushchair, then started balancing things on top of the folded canopy because there were no baskets. She had to concentrate so hard not not knocking it off that she didn’t see a trolley coming towards her. It, almost inevitably, hit her ankle.

  “Look where you’re going,” snapped the man pushing it as pain shot through Clodagh despite the padded boot.

  Clodagh bit back her retort and moved on. Five minutes later, as she was checking the list again, the same thing happened.

  “Ow,” she said pointedly this time, gesturing to the large, padded and very visible cast on her ankle. A can of beans fell off the pushchair and rolled under a display.

  “Sor-ry,” said the woman with the trolley, looking anything but. “If you wasn’t looking at your phone you’da seen me.”

  Clodagh stared at her phone, willing a cheerful text from Jamie to arrive. It did not. Then again, phones couldn’t send messages to places that didn’t exist, and Jamie probably didn’t even know what Aldi was.

  Hollee started crying at the check-out, which harassed Clodagh into forgetting she was supposed to pack after she’d paid, which meant the person behind her jostled her and her ankle, tested to its limit, let out such a crackle of pain she sobbed out loud.

  “God, don’t over-react,” muttered the girl behind her, and Clodagh snapped.

  “You see this?” she said, pointing to the cast. “You think this is some kind of fashion statement? You see these too?” She pointed to the bruises on her face. “I’m not just fucking clumsy with the eyeshadow, love, I got pushed down the stairs three days ago and I broke my ankle and I have nowhere to live and this place is a shithole and if you don’t stop crying, Hollee, I’m going to abandon you in the fucking car park!”

  A slight hush fell. Clodagh realised her voice had risen to a scream.

  “You’re still blocking the queue though,” said the cashier, and Clodagh snarled at her.

  But she paid, with cash she’d never get back from her mum, and packed her groceries and hobbled outside in search of a bench to collapse on.

  There were none. And even if there had been, a handsome prince would never turn up to rescue her again.

  She leaned against the wall, trying to get the weight off her throbbing ankle, and spent a few minutes trying not to cry. Then a hand touched her arm, and she looked up to see a woman in a hijab peering at her in concern.

  “There’s a charity does accommodation for victims of domestic violence,” she said. “You can call them freephone. Do you want me to look up the number?”

  For a second Clodagh stared at her. Then she gathered her wits and said, “No, it’s okay. He’s not… I’m staying at my mum’s. I’m okay. I just… had a…”

  “Bad moment?” guessed the woman.

  “Yeah. Bad moment. Thanks, though. You’re the first person today who hasn’t just yelled at me. Like any of this is my own choice.”

  She gave a bit of a smile. “Some people don’t know how lucky they are. Okay then. If you’re sure.”

  Clodagh reassured her she was, and watched her take her shopping back to her car. Then she straightened up and went in search of the bus stop.

  Chapter Nine

  “Jamie!” Annemarie enveloped him in such an enthusiastic hug he worried she’d go into labour several months prematurely. “It’s so good to see you. How is Cambridge?”

  “Het is goed, bedankt,” he said, and she laughed, sitting car
efully back down on the striped sofa in her Kensington Palace living room.

  “You’re still trying to learn Dutch?”

  “Hey, trying? I started trying the minute Ed said he was going to marry you. I did my whole official visit there in Dutch.”

  Annemarie made a rocking ‘kind of’ motion with her hand. “I was there, Jamie. You didn’t really.”

  “Well, I tried.”

  “You’re very trying.” That was Edward, wandering into the room and straightening his tie. He’d just flown home from Wales, where he’d been visiting old colleagues and people his team had rescued from Snowdonia, and to Jamie’s irritation, he looked immaculate in a suit five minutes later. “Are you ready?”

  Jamie glanced down at his suit, which as far as he could tell was identical to the other three suits Vincent had laid out then decided against. “Yep. Let’s go and watch a crappy film.”

  “Hey, it might be all right. It’s got that guy Annemarie likes, the one off the kid’s show…”

  “That doesn’t narrow it down much. Or is there only one kid’s show in your nursery?”

  “If Nanny Christensen had her way there would be none,” Annemarie said, getting to her feet and pausing for a moment, looking pale.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. The baby is having fun with my sciatic nerve.”

  Nanny Christensen was waiting with the children, both hyper-excited at being allowed to stay up past bedtime. Little Alexander was in knee socks and shorts—because despite it being November he wasn’t allowed to wear trousers until he went to prep school—his sister in a velvet party dress. They walked slowly out to the car, chattering nineteen-to-the-dozen, and Jamie watched the careful way Annemarie bent over the back seat as Georgina was fastened in.

  “It’s worse than last time,” Edward confided in a low voice as they went forward to the second car. “She’s had physio and acupuncture but it’s not doing a lot of good. I don’t think she’ll be out much after this.”

  “I don’t blame her.” Annemarie had made public appearances right up until the last weeks of her first pregnancy, but retired much earlier when she was expecting Georgina and now it looked as if she’d be spending the next few months doing precious little.