Not Your Cinderella

by Kate Johnson

  When I was fifteen my mum signed us up for a TV show. It was a docusoap. They were all the rage at the time. This one was sold to us—to her—as a real look at the lives of people living on council estates. She thought it would be even-handed and balanced, that it might show us in a positive light, because why would TV try to hurt her? Of course back then we didn’t know about editing and bias. We didn’t know they’d deliberately look for drama, stitch bits of footage together to tell the story they wanted to, write a narrative and weave us into it. And the story they wanted was about a lazy, workshy family of chavs who weren’t going to get jobs when they could get benefits and free council flats.

  They must have been over the moon when they found my mum. Her name was even Sharon, for Christ’s sake. Six kids by four fathers, one of whom she said was probably in jail—that’s my dad, because she had some vague idea he dealt drugs, which of course is a racist assumption and of course that was duly noted and torn apart by the press.

  Oh yes, the press. Of course, they bloody loved it. We were a symbol of Broken Britain. We were the family everyone loved to hate. We were single mothers and graffiti’d tower blocks and benefits cheats and kids with gold earrings. We were barely human.

  And do you want to know the coup de grace? The icing on the cake? The YouTube clip that will never die? Well, that would be when the oldest daughter of Britain’s Worst Family bursts into tears and tells her mother she’s pregnant.

  Yep. Fifteen years old, a quick shag in a nightclub, throwing up in the mornings, trip to the pharmacy for a Clear Blue test, and that was my life down the toilet.

  My nan had thundered fire and brimstone about abortion being a sin and how dead babies crawled on the floors of hell for all eternity, and it wasn’t that I believed her but I didn’t not believe her, either, if you know what I mean. Mum thought I should keep it. I tried to get hold of laddo but he was on remand by then, although apparently a social worker did manage to talk to him at one point and he said he didn’t give a shit what I did about the kid, so that was nice.

  Having done most of the raising of my siblings I didn’t particularly want to be anyone’s actual mother, especially not that soon. So I decided to give it for adoption. Everyone thought I’d bottle it as soon as it was born, but I told the nurse to take it away so I didn’t have to see it. I’m not sure my willpower would have been strong enough. Mum later said it was a shame I’d never seen him, so I guess it was a boy.

  I don’t know where he went. I hope he’s loved and wanted. I try not to think about him. He’s not mine, not really. They said you can go on a register so when the kid is old enough he can decide whether to find you or not, but I didn’t want to do that. Clean break seemed best.

  Oh, and I haven’t told you the best bit yet. They were filming in the hospital. Mum screamed at them not to, but apparently she hadn’t read the contract very thoroughly because they did anyway, and it was broadcast. The whole world saw the child I never did.

  I’m told it’s still on YouTube. Look it up.

  So there you go, that’s why I’m leaving. Well, I’ll have left by the time you read this. You do see why, don’t you? Big brain like yours, it won’t take you long to get it. Even if your family accepted me with open arms, can you imagine the press? Have you ever seen piranhas in a feeding frenzy? I imagine it’d be something like that. It was bad enough the first time, when I was a nobody.

  I won’t take you down with me. I won’t hurt you like that, or the people you love.

  I do love you though. I wasn’t going to tell you that, but there it is, I’ve written it now. I love you, and I’m sorry.

  Goodbye.

  Sharday Clodagh Walsh.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Royalgossip.com: Engagement imminent, say palace insiders.

  It’s no secret that Prince Jamie has been spending a lot of time with his oldest friend, Lady Olivia Altringham. According to her friends she’s even staying with him at his home in Cambridge. We expect an announcement any day now…

  Clodagh hadn’t really considered herself to have a lot of friends in Cambridge, but the number of people who asked her if she was all right after she left Jamie was kind of heartening. Oz and Marte at the pub immediately noticed something was wrong, and Ruchi asked in concerned tones what had happened.

  On the other hand, not being able to tell them only made her feel worse.

  Her new housemates, Becca and her girlfriend Heather, only needed to hear ‘I just broke up with my boyfriend’ to offer endless sympathy. Becca studied accounting at Anglia Ruskin and Heather was a student nurse, and both were very helpful when it came to university applications and course credits. They were a quiet and obviously contented couple who invited Clodagh to binge watch Netflix with them and talked aimlessly about adopting a rescue dog one day. Their house had a small garden, off-street parking for Becca’s car and a downstairs loo in addition to the shared bathroom. The bus into town left from the end of the road.

  Six months ago, Clodagh would have been overjoyed to move in. Now, she just felt… desolate.

  She spent the first week terrified Jamie would storm into the pub and confront her. The first time she saw Zheng and Ruchi come in she nearly ran away to hide in the cellar. But Jamie had obviously made some excuse not to come, and continued to do so. In snippets from the news and the front pages of the papers she saw that he was undertaking his usual charity work, some of it in place of his brother who was taking time off to spend with the new baby.

  God damn the man for being so… decent.

  He flew to Africa to visit a conservation trust he was patron of. He was photographed holding his new nephew. He attended the Badminton Horse Trial, the Royal Windsor Horse show, the Chelsea Flower show and all the other events of the Season he’d told her he didn’t give two figs about. He smiled, and Clodagh didn’t look closely enough to see if it was genuine or not.

  The papers were sure he was about to propose to Lady Olivia, who after all had been seen in Cambridge a lot lately and, according to someone called Melissa Featherstonehaugh, was pretty much living with him. Clodagh was torn between her own knowledge that this wasn’t likely to be true, and her miserable expectation that it was.

  Then, one rainy Wednesday afternoon when not much was happening, a slender woman in a beautiful coat walked into the pub, shaking out her umbrella, and ordered a gin and tonic from Clodagh.

  “Lady Olivia.”

  Olivia brushed her immaculate hair back from her collar and said, “Please don’t stand on ceremony with me, Clodagh. I thought we were friends.”

  Clodagh paused with the bottle of tonic in her hand, closed her eyes for a second, and said, “Please don’t play the wounded party with me, Olivia. You’re his friend, not mine.”

  She poured the drink, accepted a too-large note in payment and fixed her attention on the silent TV in the other bar.

  “He told me what happened.”

  “Did he.”

  “He showed me your letter.”

  Giving birth had been easy, really, compared to what she’d been told. All the horror stories about three day labours and perineal tearing and breech births, and her baby had been born with no fuss a couple of hours after she arrived at the hospital.

  It was afterwards that the real pain started, and it hadn’t been physical. Clodgh had spent days in bed, staring at nothing, doing nothing, trying to feel nothing. She’d been offered counselling, and pills, and pamphlets, and it had been the only time in her life when her mother had seemed genuinely concerned for her health.

  Giving up Jamie had hurt even more.

  “Well then,” she said, the TV screen blurring before her eyes.

  “It must have been very hard.”

  “Hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Clodagh said, her throat feeling squeezed.

  “Perhaps you could get in touch?”

  Every time her phone buzzed her heart exploded. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “He’ll be…
what, fifteen, sixteen, now? Reaching his majority—”

  Clodagh turned to look at her. “What? Oh, you mean… no. I don’t want to hear from him either. That’s… that’s a part of my life that is over. Sealed and done with. Just like… our mutual friend.”

  Right then Paulie came over for a refill and Olivia fell silent, hanging up her beautiful coat and hitching herself elegantly onto a barstool. She waited until they were alone again before she spoke.

  “He loves you.”

  I know. “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “What do you mean, why not? Don’t you think it’s hard enough as it is?” Clodagh dropped her voice so it wouldn’t carry. “I love him. All right? I have never loved anyone like that before and I never will again and it makes no bloody difference because we can’t be together. There’s no amount of wishful thinking or fairytales that can change any of it. Do you understand? It won’t ever work.”

  Olivia looked down at her drink. She stirred it once or twice.

  “What if it could?”

  “Don’t be cruel. You and I both know it’s never going to happen. The tiniest whiff of a scandal and I’d be packed off to God knows where—”

  “You know them that well, do you?”

  “And that’d be a picnic compared to what the press would say, and social media, my God. They’d be after that poor kid, you know. A relentless tabloid crusade to ruin his life as well as mine. They’d hunt down his father, even better if he’s still in jail. They’d have my family hauled up like circus freaks, let’s laugh at the chavs, ten points if she says ‘innit’. Those bloody clips would be aired ad infinitum. We’d be memes, and gifs, and punchlines. And my father, remember how we don’t even know his name? Bet that’d come out and there’s another life to ruin.”

  Olivia was silent.

  “You think I didn’t think of all this?” Clodagh said softly. “You think I haven’t seen it all, up here? I’ve been in that media storm before, and that was before Facebook and Twitter and everyone and their grandfathers airing opinions online. And there wasn’t a royal involved. There wasn’t another family to tear down with us.”

  “They’ve weathered worse,” Olivia said.

  “Really? Yeah, you’re probably right. But I don’t want to be something to be weathered,” Clodagh said. She glanced over to see the regulars watching from their corner, and forced a smile for them. “Now if you don’t mind, I have work to do.”

  She made work for herself, collecting glasses and stacking the dishwasher and cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned, all the while aware of Lady Olivia’s eyes on her.

  Eventually, after making very slow work of her drink, the other woman stood up. She was taller than Clodagh, but that might have been her heels. Her hair was glossy and shiny on this damp day that had made Clodagh’s frizz. She was so slim, and so pretty, her skin like porcelain and her eyes Delft blue.

  She was the kind of woman Jamie should be marrying. She’d look wonderful in photographs and she’d know which fork to use at state banquets and she’d be endlessly polite and sympathetic at charity events.

  “I think you were right,” said Lady Olivia as she shrugged into her beautiful coat. “I think you are a coward.”

  And then she was gone, and it was just Clodagh and the pub and the rain.

  “And then we have the centenary of the capture of Kirkuk, sir, on 7th May,” said Peaseman. “Now. Plans to travel to Iraq were shelved some time ago, and it is intended instead to have a small ceremony at the Imperial War Museum instead.”

  “Fine,” said Jamie.

  “There are planned celebrations in Helsinki for the centenary of the end of the Finnish Civil War,” said Peaseman. “Originally Princess Victoria had intended to go, but her health currently prohibits it.”

  “Shame,” said Jamie. It was raining outside. He could hear the soft patter of it on the window of his Kensington Palace office.

  “Yes… Clarence House is considering an advisory note to the press,” said Peaseman. “She has had to cancel a lot of appointments lately.”

  Jamie dragged his consciousness back into the room. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Peaseman looked startled. He glanced at his aide, who shrugged. “Sir… the miscarriages. I thought… were you not informed?”

  “Miscarriages? Plural?”

  “Yes. In November and earlier this month. She called it a stomach bug at the time, I believe. Have you not spoken to her?”

  Jamie hadn’t. He’d been so absorbed in his love bubble with Clodagh he hadn’t even noticed his sister’s distress. And now he was so absorbed with his own self-pity he still hadn’t paid attention.

  “No.” Ugh, he was a worm. “And no, obviously I didn’t read the memo. I’ve been… preoccupied.”

  Peaseman gave his aide a look that sent him from the room. “Sir. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this. The family has noticed. The public have noticed.”

  “Oh hell. Have they?”

  “Yes, sir. I had intended to wait until either you or your father informed me, but… should I begin drafting a press release?”

  “Press release?” Oh yeah, he could see it. Prince James of Wales announces he is officially broken hearted because the woman he loves believes herself unsuitable for him and doesn’t want to be torn apart by the press like a fox to the hounds…

  “Perhaps a photocall, sir? A walk in the park, or a casual engagement. There is…” he flipped through his iPad, “a garden party for the children of soldiers who have died during armed combat next week, if you’d like to pencil it in?”

  “Sure,” said Jamie absently. The busier the better. If he attended every engagement Peaseman suggested, he was forced to fit his studies into what downtime he had left, in the backs of cars and in antechambers and green rooms, over meals eaten by himself in his empty house, in bed when he couldn’t sleep. If he was studying he wasn’t thinking.

  Vincent complained he’d lost weight. Jamie found he’d rather lost interest in cooking when it was only for himself.

  “Excellent,” said Peaseman, looking pleased. “I shall inform His Highness. Now, about the visit from the Ghanaian ambassador…”

  Olivia kept on at him to get rid of ‘that smelly old boot’ Clodagh had left behind, and he supposed he should probably take it back to the hospital, but it was the only thing he had of her. Her clothes and toiletries and books had all gone, and now Lenka had been round changing sheets and washing towels nothing even smelled like Clodagh any more.

  The boot stayed, but Jamie spent less and less time in the Cambridge house. The knowledge she was so close by and so out of reach was unbearable.

  He’d been mostly able to avoid his family, Ed and Annemarie busy with the baby and Victoria absent for reasons he’d now been informed of. His parents had been taking up some of the slack and it hadn’t been hard to avoid them. Because he could put on a brave face for the cameras but in private it was very hard to do anything but sit around and cry.

  He’d even looked up that shitty program, just so he could see her again. It wasn’t available in its entirety but the clips on YouTube, those refused to die. Clodagh’s mother, barely more than the age Jamie was now, blonde hair yanked back in a Croydon facelift, smoking and boasting how she’d been able to afford a Playstation for the boys this year, unaware that the producers would add in a voiceover about how much of her benefits that would cost. He watched clips of children from toddlers to teenage years, fighting and bickering, the girls in make-up and clothes too grown-up for them, the boys posturing in front of cars they were too young to drive.

  Clodagh’s mother, Sharon, explaining that her kids had gold hoops in their ears to protect them from evil because that was a Romany tradition from her husband. The voiceover helpfully explained that she’d never been married to Duke, whose travelling community had been evicted from four different sites before he died of lung cancer eight years previously. This particular nugget was shar
ed over footage of Sharon Walsh and her friends sharing a cigarette.

  And then Clodagh. Heartbreakingly young, almost unrecognisable with her hair in tight braids, all stilettos and Puffa jackets and frosted lipgloss and bravado, mouthing off in a try-hard ‘tough on the streets, innit blud’ patois. He watched the clip where she told her mother about the pregnancy test, and the shouting and screaming that ensued, the slammed doors, the tears, the hugs, the ‘you can’t tell me what to do!’, the visits from the social worker.

  He didn’t watch the clip of the baby being taken away from her. He was appalled it had ever been screened.

  A week later, at a garden party full of overexcited children who either didn’t know or weren’t aware that they were supposed to be in mourning for a parent, he followed Olivia around in a daze and smiled and made appropriate comments.

  At least he assumed they were appropriate. If he was honest, he could say and do most of this on such an autopilot he might as well create a robot of himself.

  Hah, that was a thought. Maybe he should tell Dr Kenyon he wanted to change his subject to robotics—

  “Jamie, smile darling,” said Olivia from the corner of her mouth, and he did, switching it on like a light as they were presented with an adorable little poppet who had hair just like Clodagh’s. His smile froze, his throat closing over. The camera snapped away happily.

  He didn’t pay much attention to the papers, but when Peaseman brought them the next day Jamie noticed there was a picture of himself and Olivia with the little girl on the front page of… actually, quite a lot of the papers. In fact most of them.

  “At his first official engagement with his girlfriend, Lady Olivia Altringham, Prince Jamie was unable to hide a tear as he met little Kiana Okorie, whose father died in Helmand Province,” ran the caption on a broadsheet.

  “What?” said Jamie.

  “It’s official!” screamed a tabloid.