Courtney screamed and screamed and screamed.
The whole neighbourhood should have heard - except there were no neighbours in the posh part of Cheshire that Sharon had shrewdly made her home.
“Courtney, shut it! You’re coming to the doctor’s. Wipe that snot off your frock. It cost enough and I don’t want it ruined.”
There was a tip-tapping across the marble floor; her pair of Dobermanns trotted into the bright foyer to see what the fuss was about. Two soft pointy noses pressed into the nine-year-old’s pink flounces. Four warm brown eyes gazed anxiously at the child’s swollen face and the dogs licked the salt tears as they fell.
“I won’t go! I won’t go! I want my Daddy!”
“We don’t need a Daddy, do we? Get your coat on, Courtney. Oh go away you stupid animals. Where are my keys?”
Daddy hadn’t been around for five blissful years. Sharon had engineered a very lucrative divorce from her multi-millionaire footballer when Courtney was too small to notice, and booted him out of the family home. The scandal barely touched her; she posed for the paparazzi, employed a hack to sell her story to the red-tops, and basked in the glory of being the Wronged Wife. At last she was free to live as she had always deserved to live.
The mansion was transformed. In came the stylists and out went last year’s furnishings, all the cooking and cleaning left to a submissive Latvian au pair. The BMW was traded in for a personalised gold Range Rover Sport; Bentley and Bailey got diamond collars. The gardener was sacked and the entire outdoor space turned into covered pools, jacuzzi, sauna and solarium, dazzling - like every room in the house, her extensive, expensive wardrobe and her child - with sequins and Swarovski crystals. She was rich enough now to bung anything too last year straight into the incinerator; no need any more for the special weekly trips to the Nearly New or the Oxfam shop.
Sharon’s social life went stratospheric; she moved from selfies with her new celebrity friends to tours of her property on YouTube and prime-time lifestyle interviews on satellite. Page Three was offered - and accepted. Her ambition now was to appear on ‘Through the Keyhole’ (in HD), to be embraced by the viewing public as a star in her own right, universally admired for her looks and her impeccable taste.
Motherhood however had not been on the agenda; that was his fault. But Sharon was damned if he was taking anything that was rightfully hers, and many costly solicitors later the child her bewildered husband had longed for was ruled to remain in her care, with barely a yearly visit to the cluttered flat that was now perforce his home.
No. For Courtney there would be the best of everything - this palace to live in, designer outfits, new toys every day, a TV room in a separate wing, private governess, weekly riding lessons near Wilmslow in spite of hay-fever and fear ... and Irish dancing. Oh, the dancing! So many competitions to enter! So many shining cups and glowing rosettes to be won! Every few months Sharon drove her little princess to be fitted for a new dance dress so she would stand out among the competitors just as she, Sharon, would outshine every other mother in the audience. Her favourite colours were vivid pink and turquoise; the dress-maker soon realised there was little point in straying from the usual colour scheme - or sewing for anyone else. She was well paid. It was certainly a challenge to persuade the same gaudy fabrics into a fresh and dazzling configuration several times a year, often at short notice when she was running out of customers’ bling.
Courtney hated these fittings, hated like poison the constricting underwear that sweated and chafed in the car, hated the colours, the flounces, the fancy shoes. Hated above all the wig, the obligatory wig of massive brassy curls, and longed, on dancing days, to rip the thing off and hurl it at the stupid judges. Arms pinned by your sides, stomach churning, feet throbbing, face scraped by the bouncing fake hair - every Feis was a nightmare.
And now here was a new and utterly unanticipated nightmare. Sharon was tapping her Jimmy Choos in the portico, jangling her platinum keyring and saying the unthinkable, the un-sayable -
“Courtney, you know we have to get those things off.”
And once that was done he would be just like poor Bentley and Bailey and would never, ever be a man.
He ran. He pushed past his mother with all his might, heard her crack her head on the marble floor, and the shrieks of pain and rage, and ran, and ran, and ran, yelling his own rage and his misery at the naked statues, the endless drive, the lion gateposts; he fled, permed locks blowing in his teeth, ripping the frills of fuschia polyester from his waist, tearing away magenta sleeves. Freed, he ran in his pants and vest till he reached the village and the limits of his endurance. And he ran straight into the arms of a man in a skirt.
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“Sharon?”
No response.
“Sharon? There’s someone to see you.”
She didn’t want to see anybody. Her head hurt. Her limbs hurt. Everything hurt and she could barely move to find the tiniest bit more comfort in the big white hospital bed.
“Do you need a sip of water?”
She whispered “No” without opening her eyes. She had forgotten what it was like to eat. Everything keeping her alive was oozing down a drip; the drip stand felt like a part of her it had been so long.
“I need to adjust your medication now, Sharon. You will be more comfortable in a minute. Maybe then you will feel ready for your visitor.” The nurse busied herself with the IV and a replacement patch.
She did feel easier; the pains subsided as she felt her mind distancing from the sounds and objects around her. They had wheeled her into a side ward after the surgery, which had taken most of a night. Had she talked to her doctor earlier there would have been only a single tumour instead of the rampaging metastases that could only be held in check for a few more months.
“Bloody silly vain female,” her exhausted surgeon had muttered furiously to his colleagues as they stripped off their scrubs. “In total denial. Too worried about her looks to have her breasts checked. She must have been in pain for the best part of a year.”
She had found the lumps eighteen years after the trauma of losing Courtney. The fall had twisted her right ankle in its four-inch leopard-print sandal and she couldn’t follow her fleeing child. There was no-one to hear her shouts; the mansion had no land-line; her Diamond Rose iPhone was in the new Louis Vuitton bag in her dressing room and the battery was flat. Her daughter simply vanished, and no effort of police, P.I. or media cunning elicited any news. Sharon’s life contracted to a dizzying round of glitterati, fashionable (and futile) psychics, binge shopping, beauty spas, high-profile charity gigs and as time went on, a top-of-the-range boob job.
It may have been the implants that started all the trouble, her GP suggested, too late in the day. Tossing the luxurious mane of salon-tinted hair that was so soon to take leave of her scalp, she totally refused to accept the notion, dismissing it out of hand.
“That’s only his *** opinion. What does he know?”
“Sharon.”
She opened her eyes just enough to see the patient nurse bending over her, and someone else by her side. She didn’t recognise the visitor in the dark floor-length dress.
“Father has come to see you, Sharon; to give you some spiritual comfort. Remember you asked for a priest yesterday?”
She didn’t remember. How long had she been here?
“Am I dying?” It was the weakest, most terrified of whispers.
“You had your surgery, Sharon; you have been in ICU for eleven days, and we are all doing everything we can for you. Let Father Courtney sit with you for a little while and talk to you.” The nurse swept blue-flowered curtains around the bed and withdrew.
Father Courtney. Why did the name bring a surge of emotion? What was stirring in her memory? Why, under all the heavy sedation did something unforgiven in her soul reach out desperately to cross a life-long divide, and why did she want - need - more than anything else in the world at this moment the very best thing of all ... for this tall, crop-haired, somehow familiar man in his sober cassock to put his hands on her and bring her peace through the final sacrament?
“Hallo mother,” said Father.
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