Description
Megan Shepard was not looking forward to Christmas. Now divorced, all
she had to look forward to was spending Christmas in Derbyshire, with her sixty
four year old, bisexual, hippie mother, and a scrawny little sapling tree,
overdressed with cheap decorations from the pound shop. However, her friends
had other ideas, like taking her to Pinkie’s Night Club, their old stomping
ground as teenagers. This brought back memories of rah-rah skirts, fishnets,
and legwarmers dancing to Madonna, until the DJ played The Power of Love,
whereupon Richie King would take her hand and lead her to the dance floor.
Seeing Richie leaning against the bar in his unforgettable Danny Zucko pose,
she knows the right thing to do would be to walk in the opposite direction, yet
finds herself walking straight to him, and taking the advice of her
unconventional mother. Swept off her feet to the winter wonderland of
Manchester’s Christmas Market, romantic walks in the snow of the Derbyshire
Peak District, and fireside dinners, she has to wonder if Richie really
changed, or has he something to hide?
Excerpt:
Angel of Kindness
Joanne Rawson
Switching on the coffee machine, I waited until the dark brown liquid slowly
trickled into the jug, before looking out of my mother’s kitchen window. All
the other houses on this quiet Derbyshire cul-de-sac had turned into an
explosion of life and colour, with decorated windows, ready for the forthcoming
Christmas festivities. Customarily, by now my house in Leightonstone East
London would be fully dressed with lights, tinsel, and foliage. A large tree
chosen with great care and attention would take pride of place in the living
room. The house would smell of cinnamon and spices from endless nights after
arriving home from my job at the advertising agency, I would play corny
Christmas songs filling me full of Christmas cheer and spirit, while cooking
puddings, mince pies and biscuits that we would still be eating well into the
New Year. I haven’t a clue why. It wasn’t as if we had a house full of
children, in fact, children had never been on my agenda; well, hardly
surprising, if you knew my background.
My mother, Lois, had me while she was studying art in Paris. She returned home
to Derbyshire just long enough to pop me out and leave me with my grandparents,
then fled back to her ménage a trios—a sculptor and his artist wife, my
mother’s lesbian lover. Three years later, she returned only to scamper away
again, after eighteen months, to live in a commune. So the whole cycle started
again, until my grandparents grew old and my mother was forced to return to
Derbyshire.
Looking at the garden, there was no plastic Santa Claus, no lights in the
conifer tree, not even a wreath hung on the door. Instead of the large
spectacular tree, hidden in the corner of mum’s living room, skulked a scrawny
little sapling that still looked overdressed with cheap decorations from the
pound shop; this Christmas, everything looked bare, unimaginative, and dowdy, a
mirror image as to how my life felt at this moment in time. Here I was, Megan
Shepherd, forty- six, spending Christmas with her sixty-four year old, bisexual
mother.
Come on! Surely, my feelings were justified. For sixteen years, I thought I had
had the perfect marriage to Ian, a history lecturer at the local college. How
wrong I had been.
