When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister (best books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

Teresa knows. Not long now and she’ll be headed to prison to start her sentence. On the TV they’re doing a montage of clips from the past season, her voice heard over the footage of her bouncing, playing daughters: “I had a normal life and now I’m in this nightmare.” Prison is just weeks away but she sits there on the sofa with quiet dignity in a gold, floor-length, fishtail gown, shimmering like a mermaid on the Jersey Shore.

The gold eye shadow above her long, fake lashes brings out a bronzy green in her eyes I’ve never noticed before. Joe, her husband, sits on a stool behind her, stoic, burly, uncomfortable in his suit, the shape of his arms visible through the expensive gabardine. He is not a man who can be contained in a suit. He is a man who made grave mistakes. It’s unclear how much Teresa understood about the fraud but it’s clear that she trusted him. She signed whatever he said to sign, and now she’ll pay for it. She’ll pay, for loving him and trusting him blindly and being a loyal wife, with a year of her life. A year of her children’s lives that she won’t see. But she shows no bitterness and betrays no anger. She stands by her man.

They’re two people on the precipice and it’s hard to know if they’ll be holding hands when they make the jump. Who knows what it’s like between them when the camera isn’t rolling. What I know for sure, though, is that she will at least reach for him as they fall even when he tries to pull away. She will reach for him until the very end, when he lets her go. The camera closes in on her face and she says, “Oh my God,” in a low voice, to no one and to the whole world and to herself. The conversation goes on around her but the camera catches her exhaustion, her disbelief at what is about to happen. Her gold dress, an expensive, flashy, empty shell. “Oh my God,” she says, and the pain is so real, so intimate. I have to look away.

We’re falling now, Harry. And you think you’re reaching for me but I think you’re letting me go. And I’m reaching for you too, but our hands don’t fit together like they used to.

London, May 2014

I’m at this party dressed as a nun and drinking a glass of wine. I’m a nun because Harry is the Pope and he got me this outfit so that I’d match him. Of all the things we could have worn he went hardcore Catholic. I think he just wanted to wear the big hat.

The guy next to me is a giant French baguette and he’s standing with a woman in a suit and a messy blond toupee. Boris Johnson. “I like your costume,” I say to the bread, trying to be sociable.

“Oh, thanks. I’m English, you see, and my wife is French,” he says before Boris breaks in.

“Yes, and so I am dressed as English and he is dressed as France!” she says with her pretty accent.

I nod and smile, thinking that What the fuck are you talking about? is probably not the right thing to say to these nice people.

It doesn’t matter because I’m quickly saved by Livvie, the hostess, dressed in a skin-tight matador outfit, standing on her coffee table and yelling, “Shots! Shots! Drink!” Two girls wearing different versions of Björk’s swan dress, you know, for Iceland, walk around with trays giving everyone shots in little plastic cups. We’re supposed to drink whenever the people on TV sing in their native language.

Everyone turns to the huge screen and the volume goes up on the pretty blonde rapping in Polish wearing a sexy version of her national dress—an embroidered blouse, short, floral mini, corset belt, red beads, high boots, hair in braids wrapped around her head. The name of her song is “We Are Slavic.” As she yelps away two barefoot, buxom peasant versions of her perform household chores at the front of the stage—one suggestively rubs clothes on a washboard while the other pornographically churns butter. Then she breaks into the English part of her song: “Cream and butter taste so good, we will prepare for you delicious food.” The crowd goes wild on screen and in this living room. I take my shot.

I’m not drunk enough for this.

We’re at a Eurovision Song Contest party. Eurovision is an annual singing competition where every European country sends an entry. It’s like a combination of the Olympic opening ceremony and the Miss Universe pageant and RuPaul’s Drag Race and American Idol and SexyDanceTimeNight in the basement of that Russian nightclub I went to once in Brighton Beach. There’s pyrotechnics and flashing lights, thousands of people in the audience waving every flag of Europe. And randomly Australia and Israel, which are also contestants. They sing every genre of music, most of it in bad English. Then all the countries vote. And I guess people all over Europe have parties and get wasted and watch it. Which is why I’m here like an asshole in this nun outfit next to this loaf of bread drinking a glass of wine.

A text from Sharon:

Jeej, you OK? You going out tonight? How’s it going?

She’s checking on me. We’ve lived here for only four weeks so she’s just making sure we’re alright. And we are. I am. I mean, I will be. This party, for example. Not really my scene but Livvie is one of Harry’s really old friends and she was so happy to see him. Everyone is glad he’s back in London. So I just nod and smile and take everything as a learning experience. Like tonight, now I know what people mean when they say something is Euro.

I walk over to the Pope, who’s talking to Kurt, a massive man with startling blue eyes