Katy Carter Wants a Hero Read Free Page B

with a friend for a Hampstead house. And there she’s stayed ever since, tending her herb garden and growing ever more eccentric.
    The times I spent living with Jewell were among the happiest of my childhood, and I was always devastated when my parents reclaimed me. It was so reassuringly normal to go to the local school and bring back A3 sheets dripping with poster paint for Jewell to stick up in the kitchen, rather than being praised in a rather random fashion by whichever of my mad parents was least stoned. It was nice to go for tea with girls called Camilla and Emily and not have to worry about inviting them back to my parents’ chaotic house. How could I ever have invited friends home?
They
all lived in neat and tidy semis with colour televisions and fitted carpets. We had a crumbling barn conversion swarming with cats and dogs, where there was no television of any kind and where carpets were an unknown quantity. At my friends’ houses we ate fish fingers and chips; at mine we took pot luck with whatever my mother wanted to conjure up on the erratic Aga. And how could I explain to other children that my parents were hippies and still lived life as though it was the Seventies? At home it was easier not to have friends at all, but at Jewell’s I could totally reinvent myself, and I loved being an anonymous schoolgirl rather than Katy Carter from that strange family at Tillers’ Barn.
    James St Ellis lived next door to Jewell and his life was a thing of amazement to me. Every day he came home from prep school for an hour of homework followed by an hour of music practice before he escaped into the garden. We spent summers building dens and climbing trees, or at least what summer he did have before his parents dragged him off to the South of France or to summer school. We made up stories, dared each other to eat insects and once we even ran away to the end of the road. James loved to come into Jewell’s kitchen and eat sausages and chips at the old pine table and, if we were really lucky, Fab lollies from the freezer. But Holly and I were never invited back to his house, and if his mother ever caught us playing in his garden she’d shoo us home with a curled top lip and wrinkled nose. Not that James cared. He’d rather have been at Jewell’s anyway. He spent hours making a hole in the fence so that he could squeeze into our garden, and didn’t seem to care that he had splinters in his hands for a whole summer.
    Then, one Christmas holiday, James didn’t want to play any more. He’d started at Winchester that autumn and had more exciting friends to hang out with. Our dens fell down, the gardener mended the hole in the fence and it was as though James had never existed. Sometimes we’d glimpse him, taller and more aloof, getting out of his parents’ car or sitting on the terrace with a friend, but he didn’t deign to speak. And that was fine, because at this point my parents decided to move and James was the least of our problems. Holly and I were dragged to Totnes, and for the next few years were shunted between Devon and London like two sulky parcels. James’s parents split up, the house next to Jewell was sold and our playmate was forgotten. Holly buried herself in textbooks and I discovered Mills and Boon novels, hoarding them and reading each tattered copy over and over again until my world was full of mysterious sheikhs, strong brooding tycoons and granite-jawed millionaires. One day I just knew I’d find a romantic hero of my very own who’d be captivated by my (ginger) beauty and tamed by his love for me. He’d rescue me from my crazy family and sweep me away to a world of glamour and passion, and we’d live happily every after. Mills and Boon had promised; didn’t this happen to every heroine, from humble chambermaids to feisty slave girls? All I had to do was sit tight and wait my turn. Sooner or later my hero would come along and sweep me off my feet.
    Except he didn’t.
    In fact all my handsome