Loss had been the initial kernel of motivation. Then guilt. A need to make up for the fact she’d not noticed her brother’s increasingly rapid descent into alcoholism. They’d led separate lives. He was a late-night raconteur at whatever pub sold the cheapest booze. She was an early morning splash of sunshine for a predominantly female audience setting about their ‘ordinary lives’ in ‘ordinary Britain’. Would she have behaved differently if she’d been raised to think of herself as a benevolent queen of her own destiny?
She squelched the thoughts. What’s done was done. The only thing she had control of was her future. ‘So, what was this idea of yours?’
‘The visits to the riders.’ Fola leant in again, his chest against her calf.
She scrunched up her face and tried not to breathe in. ‘Sorry?’
‘In and out, Katherine,’ Fola laughed, drawing his hand up and down the line of his chest. ‘In and out.’
She blushed.
Good god. Perhaps she would’ve been wiser going with a female trainer.
He sat back on his heels again. ‘Left leg out, right knee across.’ He pressed down on her shin and thigh with his hands. ‘I think you should come to school with me.’
She gulped in a deep breath, trying to process what he was saying whilst ignoring the wild fireworks display going hell for leather in her more intimate regions as his hand swept from her buttock to her knee.
‘How do you mean? School?’ she asked in a high-pitched voice she’d not heard from herself before.
‘I thought it could be interesting if you did a segment on me and my kids …’ she smiled. He always called the boys he trained in football ‘his kids’. ‘… people might be more generous.’
‘Oh?’
‘Most of these boys could do with help from a charity like LifeTime.’ Fola released his hold and sat back so she could switch legs again.
He wasn’t wrong there. They were the sort of schools that totted up the type of statistics people liked to ignore until, of course, the problem had become ‘an epidemic’. Knife crime. Drugs. Poverty. Abuse.
She bit back the instinct to say it sounded a bit too ‘BBC’ for them. That was how the producers dismissed things as too boring, or too intellectual or too earnest for their target audience of ‘busy people wanting a bit of lift rather than a reminder of just how miserable real life actually was’. They didn’t need reminders. They lived it. Oh, that’s a tad BeeBeeCeeeee, don’t you think, Kath? Why don’t we drum up something a bit more fun for the viewer, yeah?
A fire that had nothing to do with how damn sexy Fola made her feel lit within her.
This ride was for her brother. Her sweet, funny, kid brother who died of alcoholism after serving his country as a soldier for ten years of his adult life, left to mire in the stew of his own, screwed up, PTSD-stricken psyche when they not so gently suggested he hang up his machine gun and find something else to do. He didn’t have anything else. Know anything else. He was a servant to crown and country and had been left to wander round the Midlands with no marketable skills beyond being a class-A sniper. There wasn’t much call for snipers in the Black Country. Not yet anyway.
She could already hear the ‘no, ta, loves’ ring out from round the pitch table at the studio.
She tried to picture herself in an ermine robe and a crown. Not a huge one, something modest. What would Queen Kath do if the chance came to her to do something real? Something that might be out of her comfort zone, but could, with a bit of grist, make a genuine difference in one solitary person’s life. She was too late to help her brother. But maybe, just maybe, if she put her pride to the side, humbled herself, she could help someone else’s.
‘Let’s do it.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
‘Such an unusual name. Raven.’ Sue’s mother finished off a bit of roast potato then asked, ‘Do they actually have ravens in Pakistan?’
It was all Sue could do not to crawl under Katie’s immaculately laid French Oak slab dining room table. What was her family doing? Acting like they’d never spoken to someone of colour before? Mortifying. And, frankly, surprising. Raven was every bit as English as Sue was. Apart from the grandparents who’d come from India, of course, but Raven was a walking, talking, English person. A very brave one, too. She didn’t know if she would’ve agreed to come along to a Sunday lunch at a house full of people she’d never met before. If the roles had been reversed, Sue probably would’ve hidden in her room and read magazines or snuck downstairs even though she’d been told she had free run of the place and watched a bit of Sunday afternoon telly only to sneak back up before anyone got home. Gary had always been the more social of the two of them.
Perhaps, she was missing her own family and thought being at Sunday lunch would be nice. Or, more likely, Raven didn’t like being in the house on her own. What with … things.
Either way, Sue was ever so pleased she’d agreed to come. This was her first proper Sunday lunch without Gary beside her to cushion the effects of two to three hours in close proximity with her family.
‘It’s India, actually. My ethnic heritage is Indian.’
‘Oh,’ her mother said as if she’d just been told there was an entirely new continent out there she hadn’t realised existed. ‘So do they have ravens? The Indians?’
Her mother really wasn’t letting this go.
‘Yes, just like England. But, it’s a nickname really. My given name is Sunita.’
Her mother chewed on that for a bit then gave the flat-lipped nod. ‘I can see why you went for something a bit more conventional in the end.’
What? Sue and Raven shot one another confused looks. How had Raven gone from being at the unusual end of
