Not Your Cinderella

by Kate Johnson

  Drinks were poured for them to pose with. “This is so cheesy,” Clodagh said as they sat in the conkers corner.

  “Making you smile, though,” he said, and she shoved him playfully.

  That was one of the shots they used. Clodagh grinning, pint of lager at her elbow, as she reached out to a laughing Jamie. There were others, of her pulling a pint while Jamie held the glass, and of the two of them laughing at a terrible joke Stevo was telling Paulie. The regulars and the bar staff populated the background of the photos, the mementos of generations of drinkers surrounding them.

  “There,” said Jamie, looking at the photos as they were emailed through that evening for their approval. “That looks like us.”

  The interview was recorded the next day at Kensington Palace. Jamie had wanted the Master’s Garden at Lady Mathilda College, but Clodagh had vetoed it as a private space and far too easy to locate with a bit of Google-fu.

  “Am I not studying for a PhD in computer science?” Jamie complained. “I could totally obscure it.”

  “Still no,” Clodagh said. “Besides, we should probably do something your family approves of.”

  “Incidentally,” he said in a low voice, as people fussed with light meters and boom mics, “have you tried looking up that footage from your old TV show recently?”

  Clodagh’s face evidently gave him the answer he required.

  “Well, if you did, you wouldn’t find it.” He looked very pleased with himself. “It keeps… accidentally disappearing.”

  “Jamie,” she said warningly.

  “What? I didn’t do a thing! But if some grad students I happen to know, let’s say invented a program that could track down a certain video clip and destroy it whenever it was uploaded, well then I couldn’t possibly comment.”

  Clodagh couldn’t help smiling, even as she said, “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Is it? Well, good job I know nothing about it then, eh?”

  The interview, by an old hand at the BBC, wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. The questions had all been carefully vetted to eliminate any traces of controversy, and she spent it all with her hand firmly holding Jamie’s.

  This wasn’t a detail the media ignored. The Palace press department had been working overtime to emphasise the incredible love story that had Prince Jamie falling in love with a barmaid. “It only works if you’re in love,” someone had said, and Jamie had given them one of his ‘descended from thousands of years of royalty’ looks.

  He told the story about the boathouse and the bacon sandwich, leaving out the way Clodagh had harangued him but keeping in the magical hand-holding. She told the story of Jamie rushing to her side in the hospital, but left out the part where she’d been thrown down the stairs by a man now in jail.

  The photocall immediately afterwards had Clodagh aiming her ring at the sea of cameras like it was a magic weapon. Later, she was told her blue silk kimono-style dress had sold out in seconds, with the red shoes close behind it. Various media outlets proclaimed her choice of colour ‘an official end to royal mourning,’ which would probably irritate the Queen.

  They were taken straight to Buckingham Palace afterwards, where the Queen informed them she had chosen their new title.

  “The last holder of this title married a commoner for love,” she informed them.

  You don’t get much commoner than me, Clodagh wanted to say, but didn’t. The Queen still scared the bejeesus out of her.

  “And given your fondness for the university it seemed only appropriate to grant you the title of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge,” the monarch went on. “This will of course be kept quiet for now and only used after the wedding. Miss Walsh, I have arranged a visit from Garter King of Arms to create a coat of arms for you so that it can be impaled with Jamie’s. Please consider carefully which symbols you would like to include on it. May I suggest details from the flag or arms of Jamaica?”

  “Jamaica, ma’am?”

  “Yes. Perhaps a pineapple. And have you given any thought to who will design your dress? I would suggest a British house. And consider your Something Borrowed, et cetera. Annemarie had a tiara, and Victoria a necklace.” Her gaze wandered to Clodagh’s earrings. “I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

  She rose, and so did Clodagh and Jamie, because by now she knew a sign of dismissal when she saw one.

  “So is this the one time I’m allowed to wear a tiara before I’m married?” she asked.

  “If you like. If it goes with the dress and the veil…”

  He left that hanging, and Clodagh pretended it was all a secret and not like she had no idea what she was doing on that front.

  Her phone started ringing before the car had even passed the Victoria Memorial. It was her mother.

  “Well, that peace was fun while it lasted,” she said, and had the presence of mind to hold the phone away from her ear as she answered.

  Jamie winced as the sound of the screaming echoed around the car.

  “You’re gonna marry a prince!” her mother hollered. Clodagh figured she could have saved herself the phone call and just shouted it out of the window.

  “Yes,” she began, and got overridden by whooping and screaming.

  “Oh my God, Whitney is so jealous, she reckoned once he met her he’d fall totally in love with her,” her mother said, when she was finally capable of putting a sentence together.

  “That’s weird,” Clodagh said.

  “So where’s your dress from? There’s this place up near Aldi, it’s well classy…”

  Clodagh covered her mouth with her hand. Jamie gave her a questioning look, and she put the phone on speaker.

  “…got hers from there, it had this diamanté all over the boobs, no what’s that word? Like your cleavage?”

  Wide-eyed, Jamie murmured, “Décolletage?”

  “Oh my God is that him!” Sharon screamed in a pitch approaching ultrasonic.

  “Do we have to go and see her?” Clodagh mouthed, and he nodded, grinning.

  A visit had been on the cards for a while with the Harlow Council, although the details had been kept deliberately vague for fear of spilling the beans. Clodagh explained when her mother paused for breath, that they’d be over at the weekend to visit the hospital and that a reception had been planned afterwards with the mayor.

  She rung off quickly. “I just don’t know what they’re going to do on the big day.” She hesitated. “We do have to invite them, don’t we?”

  “They’re your family,” Jamie said warmly, “it’ll be fine.”

  Clodagh fixed her gaze on her ten carat emerald engagement ring and tried to persuade herself she agreed with him.

  As usual with hospital visits, only the most photogenic patients were wheeled out to see them. Jamie shook hands and kissed cheeks and laughed at feeble jokes, and Clodagh did a decent attempt at the same.

  He noticed her gaze straying to the maternity wing more than once, and realised with a shot of ‘Christ you’re an idiot, Jamie’ that this would have been where she gave birth all those years ago.

  “Changed a bit, has it?” said one of the nurses, and Clodagh’s smile froze.

  “Everything changes,” Jamie said easily, and led her away.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured, “I didn’t think—”

  “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

  But a tour of the maternity ward was offered and hard to turn down, and Jamie was incredibly proud of Clodagh for squaring her shoulders and getting on with it. She cooed over new babies, offered sympathy to overdue mothers, chatted to the nurses and generally did what she’d been trained to do since that day in May when he’d first taken her to the Palace.

  He watched her crouch down to talk to a small child, her skirts spilling over her knees and onto the floor. She’d favoured 1950s style summer dresses in bright silks and cottons ever since the Palace had decreed they could move away from grey and navy. He knew the media had been cruel about the effect of such dull, dark colours on her
complexion, but what the hell did they expect? She’d turn up dressed like Jessica Rabbit and screw mourning protocol?

  “Excuse me, Your, er, Highness?” said a woman cradling a newborn. Clodagh straightened and smiled at her.

  “I’m not a Highness yet. It’s just Clodagh.”

  “Yes, um. Look, I wanted to say thank you.” At Clodagh’s mystified look, the woman went on. “I had a baby when I was seventeen. My family persuaded me to give her up. I never stopped thinking about her but I was supposed to pretend like it never happened and…” She sniffed back tears. “I never even told my husband about it til after your story came out. We’ve gone on the register. You know, so she can find us if she wants to.”

  Clodagh was getting better at hiding her reactions, but Jamie knew her well. Her smile was a little rigid as she said, “That’s wonderful. I’m glad it’s helped you. And who’s this?” she went on, diverting attention to the baby.

  “Nicely done,” Jamie murmured as they were shuttled off to some conference room for tea and cakes with the town’s dignitaries.

  “Yeah, well. That was one of the nicer ones. Sometimes it’s all vitriol.”

  Jamie squeezed her hand with its massive emerald ring. “I get people telling me about their dead siblings all the time. People like to take your tragedy and make it their own. Made me angry when Ed died but I guess… at least they’re empathising.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Clodagh said, sotto voce. “It’s not the first time that’s happened. Your family’s been making noises about me choosing charities and the like. There must be something I—oh, good, there’s my mum.”

  It seemed the whole Walsh clan had come out for the occasion. There were hundreds of them, all descending in a wave of decibels and hairspray to hug Clodagh and himself. He wasn’t even entirely sure which one was Clodagh’s mum. All the women were fake-tanned and dressed in the same kind of outfit of tight dress and high heels, and they all had the same ironed, bleached hair and the sort of make-up Clodagh had explained was meant to shape and highlight the face but in reality kind of made them look… stripey.

  The staff who’d been babysitting them looked slightly shell-shocked.

  There were also dozens of children rushing around the place, two of the girls wearing Disney princess dresses and one of the boys dressed as Spiderman.

  “Jamie, this is my mum, Sharon Walsh. My sisters Whitney, Kylie, and Charlene, and my brothers Scott and Tony. The kids are…” She looked around helplessly. Two of them were fighting over an iPad. One had got hold of a marker and was scribbling on the wall. “Well, they’re all here. I think.”

  She took a deep breath and linked her arm with his as if they were soldiers forming a shield wall.

  “Everyone, this is my fiancé, Jamie.”

  An awful lot of eyes stared back at him. Then Sharon—the one in the pink dress with the blingy necklace—hissed, “Curtsey,” and they did some variation of it. The younger brother, Tony, swept an elaborate kind of courtly bow.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Jamie said politely. “Clodagh’s told me so much about you.”

  “Only good stuff, I hope!”

  “Of course,” Jamie lied. He cast about for something else to say, but there was no need. Clodagh was fallen upon and dragged away from him by her left hand.

  “Oh my God look at that ring! Is that like a hundred carats?”

  “Is it a real emerald?”

  “Can I try it on?”

  “Yeah ‘cos my mate Megan, she’s got one like that only hers is fake, obvs.”

  “Hey mate, ain’t it suppose to be three months salary?” said one of the boys. “How much d’you make?”

  “State secret,” Jamie said. The ring had been made from an emerald in the royal collection, with diamonds from Annemarie’s family mine. He’d paid close attention to the rings she liked and didn’t, and carefully designed this one to suit her tastes. She’d professed herself delighted with it, although she had added that it was so impressive her family would probably assume it was fake.

  “We’re the royal family,” he’d told her, “we don’t do fakes.”

  Glancing around the room, he could see what she meant. Jamie wasn’t much interested in fashion but he knew good workmanship when he saw it, and if that handbag was real Chanel and those diamonds were real then he was the Queen of Sheba.

  Clodagh shot him a desperate look, and he reached for her arm, pulling her back out of the clutches of her family. Crab bucket.

  “Ah, I believe there was a presentation?” he said.

  There was always a presentation. This time it was a long-service award. He and Clodagh smiled and posed for pictures, and then inevitably her family wanted pictures too.

  At least they’ll brighten the place up, he thought as they bickered and fought for position.

  All right, so they were loud, and they were brassy, and there had been some serious lapses of judgement when it came to a couple of outfit choices and the appropriate amount of perfume to wear, but at least they were genuine. Everyone in Jamie’s family was so terrified of expressing an opinion or having a personality that sometimes he had trouble telling some of them apart.

  Clodagh’s mother tried to get them to go for a drink afterwards—“I mean you met in a pub, yeah?” but Clodagh invented an excuse to leave. They were on their way back to the car when Sharon slowed and faltered, staring off ahead.

  “Mum?”

  They all turned to look where she was looking. Jamie could see hospital staff and his own security team, although he didn’t recognise that one guy in a suit behind Geraint…

  Just as he was about to hustle Clodagh out of the way of the stranger, her mother said, “Oh my God, it’s you.” Her face went drip white under her make-up.

  The PPOs weren’t doing anything. Who was this guy? Was he dangerous?

  “Sir, perhaps we should go somewhere private?” said Geraint.

  Jamie glanced at Clodagh, who looked as puzzled as he felt. And then she looked at her mother, and the stranger, and he saw realisation dawn.

  “A friend sent me this on Facebook,” said the stranger, who had introduced himself as Kingston Clarke. He was a tall black man of around fifty, broad-shouldered, smartly dressed in what Clodagh could now tell was a very good suit, and he had a head of gloriously incongruous dreadlocks that fell halfway down his back.

  He showed them a photo on his tablet. It was of a party some time in the mid-eighties by the style of clothes and hair, and it was full of slightly drunk-looking people with beer cans and cigarettes in hand. Some of the cigarettes, on closer inspection, were probably spliffs.

  “That’s the photo I sent the paper,” Clodagh’s mum said. “They asked about your dad and I said I didn’t know but I thought it had been at this party.”

  The photo had done the rounds ever since Sharon first sold the story. They all peered at it anyway as it was displayed there in its digital glory, on the conference table they’d returned to. Her siblings and the kids were milling about outside. Clodagh didn’t need them all here for this. It was just her mum and Kingston, Jamie and Geraint. The chief PPO had vouched personally for Kingston.

  Clodagh made herself look at the photo she’d been avoiding for two months. Yes, there was her mum in the middle of the photo, done up like Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, and there was a bunch of other girls and guys. They were all white.

  “None of those people are my dad,” she said. She felt like a wire someone had wound so tight it trembled. She knew where this was going.

  “That guy there,” Kingston pointed to a man on the right of the photo, “is my friend David. He recognised the picture and sent it to a bunch of us who were all at uni together. There’s four of us in that picture. I might have been the one taking it.” He shrugged. “It was thirty-two years ago.”

  “Probably thirty-three now,” said Clodagh. It had been her birthday in that bleak, dark period after she’d left Jamie. She hadn’t celebrated it. “That
must have been… what, June? July?”

  “July, 1985. I’d finished my first year at UCL and I was going off to Jamaica for the summer to see my family. I was born in England,” he explained, in his South London accent, “my parents came over with the Windrush generation. Anyway. Dave sent me the picture, jokingly I think, and I realised I recognised that girl. And I did some maths, and… well.”

  “Well,” said Clodagh dumbly.

  “I mean I might be way off, but… anyway, one of my summer jobs at uni was nightclub security with a guy who’d gone on to do personal protection.” He glanced at Geraint, who gave a slight nod. “So I got into contact. Long shot, but I remembered that girl. You, Sharon.”

  He looked up at Clodagh’s mum, who’d been uncharacteristically silent.

  “We,” she cleared her throat and started again. “We’d gone up to London for the night. Met some guys in a pub. Went on to a student party. Thought we was well fine. There was a guy… I remembered ‘cos I’d never been with a black feller before. Smooth Operator was playing, d’you remember?”

  He clearly didn’t, but he said, “Hence Sharday?”

  “Yeah.” Sharon fell silent again. “I didn’t know, you see… I didn’t know how to get back in touch with you. If it even was yours. ‘Cos I had to… um, I mean I…”

  “She didn’t know what colour I’d come out,” said Clodagh. “By then it was a bit too late and you were…” she looked him over, an outwardly respectable man, “away.”

  “I’d have been back in the country by then,” said Kingston. “In my second year.”

  “Second year of what?” Clodagh asked bluntly, and he looked surprised.

  “My degree. PPE. I teach it now, at SOAS.”

  Clodagh and her mum stared at him.

  “But I thought you was a drug dealer,” Sharon blurted. “You said you was going away. I thought you was going to jail.”

  “Jail?” Kingston looked shocked. “No! I’ve never been to jail. One parking ticket to my name, I swear. Why did you think I was a drug dealer?”

  There was a sticky silence.