Personally, I Blame my Fairy Godmother. Claudia Carroll

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       Chapter Three

      I should fill you in a bit. Relations between me and my stepfamily are as follows: they can’t abide the sight of me and for my part…just when I think I’ve come to the very bottom of their meanness, turns out there’s a whole underground garage of mean to discover as well.

      First up there’s Maggie; eldest stepsister, thirty-three years of age and still living at home. Honest to God, if you handed this one a winning lottery ticket in the morning, she’d still whinge and moan about having to drive all the way into town to collect the oversized novelty cheque. A woman with all the charm of an undertaker and the allure of a corpse, her philosophy of life can be summarised thus: ambition leads to expectation which inevitably leads to failure which ultimately leads to disappointment, so the best thing you can possibly do with yourself is not try. Just get up, go to work, come home, then spend all your free time, nights, weekends, bank holidays, the whole shebang, crashed out on the sofa in front of the telly, with the remote control balanced on your belly. Low expectations = a happy life.

      Don’t ask me how she does it, but the woman actually manages to radiate sourness. In fact, as a teenager, I used to reckon that the ninth circle of hell would be like a fortnight in Lanzarote compared with a bare ten minutes in Maggie’s company. And that the only reason she didn’t actually worship the devil was because she didn’t need to; more than likely, he worshipped her.

      Oh, and just as an aside, in all my years, I’ve only ever seen her wearing one of two things; either a polyester navy suit for work or else a succession of slobby tracksuits for maximum comfort while watching TV. Which for some reason, permanently seem to have egg stains on them, but I digress.

      She works for the Inland Revenue as a tax commissioner; probably the only career I can think of where a horrible personality like hers would be a bonus. In fact, I was hauled in last year for a ‘random’ tax audit; all deeply unpleasant and I’d nearly take my oath that she had something to do with it. Wouldn’t put it past her. Be exactly the kind of thing she’d do just for the laugh.

      I also happen to know for a fact that behind my back she calls me Cinderella Rockefeller, which is absolutely fine by me. Behind her back, I call her Queen Kong. Then there’s Sharon, thirty-two years of age and also still living at home. Works as a ‘Food Preparation and Hygiene Manager’ at Smiley Burger (don’t ask). Honestly, it’s like the pair of them just settled down without bothering to find anyone to actually settle down with. Like, God forbid, actual boyfriends. The best way to describe Sharon is that she’s PRO Coronation Street/eating TV microwave dinners straight off the plastic tray and ANTI exercise/non-smokers/ anyone who dares speak to her during her favourite soaps. For this girl, every day is a bad hair day. Plus her weight problem is so permanently out of hand that I often think she must be terrified to go near water, in case she’s clobbered by a bottle of champagne and officially launched by the Minister for the Marine. Nor, I might add, are any of the tensions in that house helped by my stepmother Joan, who refers to the pair of them as ‘the elder disappointment’ and ‘the younger disappointment’. To their faces.

      I don’t even blame Dad for remarrying and allowing a whole new stepfamily to torpedo into our lives; I knew how desperately lonely he was, how much he missed Mum and how worried he was about me growing up without a stable female presence at home. When Mum died I was too young to remember her and for years didn’t fully understand the enormity of her loss. Even now, I find it hard to accept; come on, dead of ovarian cancer at the age of thirty-eight? But back then, as a scraped-faced, grubby tomboy, permanently up a tree, all I knew was that suddenly it was me and Dad against the world. And, in my childish, innocent way, I thought he and I were rubbing along just fine; we were happy, we were holding it together. OK, so maybe a ten-year-old shouldn’t necessarily be cooking spaghetti hoops on toast for her dad’s dinner five nights a week, or doing all the cleaning while all her pals were out on the road playing, but it didn’t bother me. I’d have done anything to make Dad happy and stop him from missing Mum. I can even see what attracted him to Joan, to begin with at least. Years later, he told me it was a combination of aching loneliness and heartbreak at seeing a little child desperately struggling СКАЧАТЬ