Free Cecelia Ahern Short Stories by Cecelia Ahern Page A

myself each time, for I’d end up doing more harm than good for the little one I was protecting. Mummy’s pet, they would chant then. No, I tried to stay well out of it and watched them instead with the eyes in the back of my head, hurting for them more than they could ever hurt, feeling tested more than they were testing one another. I still do now. Over forty years old, the lot of them, their tongues sometimes dripping with more venom than ever before. Old enough to know better, the more years they have, the more childish those words from their mouths sound.
    They’re teasing Greg now about his behaviour at my seventieth-birthday party. He was up dancing on that floor all night, mostly on his own, inhaling helium from the heart-shaped balloons they’d arranged for me, and singing the Bee Gees. More was that performance a ‘Tragedy’ than the song, for his enjoyment will be a source of embarrassment for the rest of his life.
    A surprise seventieth. Now there’s an oxymoron: never was there a day I knew was on the horizon more than that one. It’s not a number that creeps up and shouts boo! Life does slip by, it’s true, but I’m not so unobservant as not to notice or so numb as not to feel seventy years in this life. But a surprise seventieth-birthday
party—
now
that
was a shock. Have you ever heard anything like it? That was a great big boo! in my ear. Had my hearing aid been switched off I’d still have heard it. Lucky my seventy-year-old heart didn’t fail me when I was besieged as I entered the room. A few drinks with Betty and Frank, my you-know-what. Betty had barely been out of her bed for a month. Oh, but it was the best excuse Fred could think of to get me down to that pub. If it wasn’t for the state of his prostate, I’d have thought he had a little someone on the side. On the phone for an entire month before that party, he’d leave the room every time I walked in. Late at night I’d hear him whispering down the phone, and there’s me thinking he was organizing the new patiofurniture from the magazine I’d left open on the table. But no, when they all jumped out at me from the dark, throwing streamers in my face and shouting, the surprise was on me. A moment I’ll never forget, and nor will they, for they’re still talking about it as my mind wanders.
    ‘I seem to recall not being alone on that dance floor, thank you very much,’ Greg defended himself. ‘Mum joined me for the moonwalk and we have the video footage to prove it.’
    Ah, yes, we did. We’d had fun watching that at Christmas and every single Christmas since. They don’t drop a joke, my boys. Fred looks at me and smiles, remembering it all.
    ‘Hear what they’re saying about you, Mum?’ my daughter Louise calls out, and there are laughs all around.
    I hear you, I hear you, I chuckle. Fred looks at me adoringly. Never stopped loving me for a moment. A second or two maybe, but never more than that.
    ‘Well you didn’t acquire your dance skills from Mum,’ Brendan shouts. Ah, Brendan. Always defending me. Even when I know I’m wrong.
    ‘A wonder on the dance floor,’ Fred says softly and takes my hand in his.
    Oh, a wonder we were, from the bunny-hop to ballroom, the chicken dance to the cha-cha, the jig to the jive, we did them all. I dragged him to a dance class in the local community school one night forty years ago and since then he’d been dragging me around the dance floor every chance he got.
    ‘Never did get the handle on the tango,’ Fred says. No, we never did. Though we tried, and that’s what counts. Failed at a few things, me and him, but got through it all together, stronger at the end of it all.
    ‘They really were Fred and Ginger,’ George adds, and there are murmurs of agreement.
    ‘Why ginger?’ Sarah, my seven-year-old granddaughter, asks.
    I laugh. All I am to her now is her grey-haired granny but to everyone else … I look around for someone else to answer the question for me.
    ‘Oh, your