Did You Just Call Me A Fairy?

El fussed with her hair and checked her makeup for the twentieth time whilst her mind roamed back over her former life with increasing regret. Being rich, famous and envied did have advantages but happiness wasn’t one of them. She had the feeling that to be happy, living as she did now, you had to have been born to it and thus ignorant of what you were missing. Where before she had had friends, real friends, now she had toadies, sycophants and ‘confidantes’. The paparazzi were a constant hazard and she couldn’t let her guard down for a second. Bodyguards were fast becoming part of the furniture and it was this casual acceptance of ‘lowly people’ as part of the furniture that she resented most. It was the working people that she identified most with, having been a working girl herself until her whirlwind, and eventually very public, romance.

The paparazzi were expected, everyone in the country knew that fame attracted the newshounds like flies to a lump of shit. Having it brought home at 7a.m. as you left for work and having to face a barrage of flashbulbs and questions because of whom you dated was both a daunting experience and exhilarating, at least at first it was. The exhilaration lasted until the first photographer scaled her walls and was found in her dustbin rooting for the dirt that so marred many public lives. What wasn’t expected were the judgemental looks, the snide asides and the backstabbing society of court and the upper echelons of high society. If she had considered her two sisters as bitches of the first water, this notion was quoshed once the glittery facade of the Sloane rangers, the ‘it’ girls and the hooray Henrys was pierced and she saw what lay beneath.

The differences between her old life and her new one were severe. You had men who were arrogant in the working classes because they knew they looked good and the pubs had been filled with women who acted as if they had stepped out of Page 3 of the Sun newspaper and that their shit didn’t stink like the rest of us. Here, in the rarefied air of the elite, they were arrogant because it was expected of them and because the fact that one of their ancestors who had once hacked his way through enough flesh to depopulate half a county had been rewarded with a title and land for his ‘service to the crown’

She envied the Big Brother contestants because although, like her, they had courted their moment of fame, for them it was unlikely to last long after they left the show. Even with the cameras rolling 24/7 they still didn’t have as little privacy as she did. She knew that her history had been examined in great detail, her fertility had been tested and her loyalty had been scrutinised with a microscope. Having a child wasn’t a bonus of marriage now, it was a duty and a service to the country. She had never felt more like an object, even when being leered at by men in the clubs and pubs. She wasn’t a person anymore, she was an institution.

Being a public figure meant that she had to be decorous and modest. This had turned out to be an advantage in disguise as the pressure had been severe as the entries scored in red in the secret diaries of her skin testified. Public evidence of self-cutting would have had her carried off into a private healing clinic and a publicity campaign suggesting an accident started. Bikinis were no longer an option because of her ‘problem’ and finding somewhere to mark became an exercise in ingenuity.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if her Prince had loved her past the initial summer or if an old flame had not recaptured his heart. She didn’t know how many flings he had had but she had heard the rumours and the stories. Who he took with him on his public engagements was telling. Of course it was ‘whom’ nowadays as her grammar and etiquette coach insisted. The word ‘like’ had to be used in its original context and not as an affectation or a padding word as was favoured by the young nowadays. Contact with her former friends and acquaintances was now more formal than being in church and an increasingly rarer event. Who could blame them for being intimidated by the establishment and the pomp and grandeur, they still had to go back to real life afterwards, a luxury she would have given a body-part for.

El had always been of a philosophical bent and believed you had to lie in the bed you had made but this was a bed where you couldn’t get out once you were in. The lady-in-waiting signalled her to let her know she was required and she adjusted her tiara before rising and making her way to the balcony. She plastered a smile on her face and reflected that her step-mother and her daughters would, most likely, be in the guest pavilion in the palace grounds below and doing their level best to fit in and not seem to be eating lemons and seething with anger and envy.

Looking back, blagging her way into the debutante’s ball had been easy, although the hire of a limo and clothes had taken almost all she had possessed. The look on the sister’s faces had made the venture worthwhile in itself and the fact that she had got a date and they didn’t made the night complete. Of course, she had left quite early as limo hire after midnight doubled in price and walking through the capital in a ball gown would have been to invite disaster in the form of, at best, robbery and more likely rape. If she had known the truth she would have obeyed her step-mother and stayed away.

The fact that she had been targeted by the Prince was let slip by a footman when he thought she couldn’t hear. She hadn’t believed it at first but the evidence had all added up and she realised it was all true. It was far, far too late now and she blamed the eldest of the sisters the most. Letting slip her old childhood nickname to the Prince had awakened his sense of irony and fitness.
She had had a brief fling with an equerry in revenge and his posting to a war-zone had seemed to come with bewildering speed. The bright sunshine bothered her but, blissfully, meant that she couldn’t see the cheering crowds and had merely to wave a ‘royal’ hand. Sunglasses would have been a blessing but quite inappropriate for a state occasion. She had had the required ‘heirs’ but, mercifully, they were too young to attend such a large and daunting occasion and she’d look in on them later.

Her smile broadened and her stomach fluttered as she considered her evenings meeting with the son of a very rich businessman. He was handsome, attentive and honest, qualities that were rare in her strata and the glint in his eye was a promise of excitement to come. That he wasn’t intimidated by her position was all to the good.
At that moment the mood was broken as a cloud passed in front of the sun and, looking down she caught sight of her stepmother’s hat, a completely over-the-top confection that managed to be both gaudy and ridiculous at the same time. The bulky shape by her side could only be the body of the miserable, spiteful and childish bitch that was her eldest daughter.

“Miserable bitch” El thought savagely remembering the day when her ‘new’ mother had made her clean out the oh-so-fashionable coal fire as a punishment. Ginnie, the eldest of the sisters, had struck with a speed that was amazing for her. ‘Cindery Ella’ had seemed vaguely amusing at the time but now it mocked and haunted her.
“Damned Fairy stories” she thought as she turned, with the inbred pack of judgemental ingrates, and entered the palace once more.