I Should Be So Lucky Read Online Free Page B

just … just bloody
typical
of you,’ Kate had fumed the day after the charity gala. ‘You just march in and take what you want like a spoiled … Oh, never mind. It’ll all come to nothing anyway.’ Except it hadn’t. Not then, anyway.
    But it wasn’t press intrusion that had driven Viola and Rachel to leave their home and take refuge in Naomi’s flat after Rhys’s death. The photographers hanging around on the pavement lost interest immediately after the funeral. That same little coterie of Rhys’s few but lunatic-level fans, however, had turned up to watch the funeral party leave the house and then seemed to hang on and around for ages after (‘What are they here for? In case he comes back as, like, a
ghost
?’ Rachel had asked), appearing regularly to decorate the magnolia tree by the gate with fronds of fabric that quickly became damply filthy in the suburban winter rain. They made a shrine, pinning photos of him to the fence, tied flowers to the gate and, when Viola slid out and removed their tributes after a couple of days’ grace, they turned nasty, posting spiteful, hurtful, anonymous notes through the letter box telling Viola his death was all her fault: if he was out driving too fast in the icy early hours, he must have been desperate to get away from home, and from her. The ‘B’ of Bell Cottage had been changed to an ‘H’.
    Neither she nor Rachel could cope with this kind of persecution, so she’d packed up and stored their possessions, put her much-loved home up for rent and moved into Naomi’s flat. But last night … the Land Rover had taken her past the house. No lights were on; there was no sign of life from the tenant and her lovely little house looked lonely and abandoned. She fancied that maybe it missed her and Rachel – they’d had the place a long time, since way before Rhys, from back when she and Marco were first together. Also, although the car flashed past quickly and the only illumination was the pale orangey light from the street lamp, there didn’t seem to be any tacky Rhys memorabilia anywhere obviously in sight, not so much as a faded rose crumbling to desiccation on the fence. Either his admirers had gone off to get themselves a life (at last), or they were honing their shrine-making skills at the home of some other luckless dead celebrity. The tenant’s lease would be up soon. It was, Viola felt in her bones, time to go home. It was just going to be a matter of finding the right moment to tell Naomi.
    The working hours were good and pretty flexible and the pupils were a lively and ever-surprising bunch, even if the pay wasn’t great. Viola told herself this every time she drove in through the ornate iron gates of the tall Georgian house that was the Medworth and Gibson Tutorial College (
never
to be called a crammer, according to Sandra Partridge, the principal, so of course it always was). Thanks to the tenant’s rent, she could just about afford for this work to be part-time, which had mattered a lot over these last long months since Rhys’s death, when she’d felt dismal and low and overwhelmed by so much time-consuming admin that had needed to be sorted. At Med and Gib, as it was known, she worked haphazard hours teaching English Lit to a client base made up of the rich and spoilt, but mostly rather sweet and needy, teenage dispossessed, trying to stuff their heads with enough exam-technique information to make up for the fact they’d been expelled from school, dozed away time on drugs and drink or generally spent months skiving.
    Viola parked her Polo in the staff spaces behind the building and stepped out into the dusty sunshine, deliberately avoiding looking across to the area by the kitchen bins from where the sound of male teenage giggling could be heard. She took a quick glance at the car’s new tyre, admiring how clean and smart it looked compared with the others, like someone with scuffed trainers trying on a lovely new shoe. One front wing of the car