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183 pages

English

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The Telephone Box Twins know exactly what they are going to do with their newly found fame.The winners of the latest series of X Factor don't want to date a succession of lingerie models, or be snapped by the paparazzi leaving night clubs in the early hours, or even have a Christmas number one. They want just one simple thing... to find the women who cruelly abandoned them 25 years ago.They intend to use the media to get what they want. What they don't realize is that the media can break as quickly as it makes. The media circus that follows the two young men leaves a tsunami of destruction behind. "I love my book. It has made me laugh and cry and I hope that readers will feel the same about it" DC Glavin

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Publié par	eBookPartnership.com
Date de parution	19 décembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783010073
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Telephone Box Twins By DC Glavin
© 2012 DC Glavin
Dc Glavin has asserted her rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by eBookPartnership.com
First published in eBook format in 2012
ISBN: 978-1-78301-007-3
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Contents
PART 1
ELLE-MAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART 2
SYLVIE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART 3
FLORA
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
AFTER
PART 1
1979 – Before
It was not the smack of the pebble hitting the window that woke Martha Tunney but the glass cracking straight after. She had been dreaming of babies, she could even hear their cries. She sat up with a start, first confused by the realness of her dream and then by the interruption. She rubbed at her arms, it was winter and the heat offered by the radiators had long faded. She heard the cries again and shook her head.
‘Did you hear that?’
Her voice was soft with sleep and failed to stir her husband, Donald.
Her bare feet hit the floor and a shiver snaked from her heels to her spine. She grabbed the knitted shawl from the corner of the headboard and wrapped it around her shoulders. The window misted under her breath but the fresh crack on the glass did not blur; it ran vertically along the pane from a splintered web in the top right corner, down to the bottom. Gently she touched it; the glass was broken straight through.
‘What did it?’
The Christmas lights were switched off and the street was dark but for the bulb shining out from the old red telephone box. A movement inside caught her eye. Something small was in there. She squinted, trying to see more.
‘But it’s too cold out there,’ she murmured.
She heard another cry. This was not a trick of the mind, this was real she was sure of it, there was a baby in the phone box. A baby!
The snow numbed her feet and hurried her along the path. The gate latch was fiddly. She glared up at the bedroom window, why didn’t you fix this?
A creaking hinge broke the silence, Donald looked down at her.
‘Martha, what are you doing? Can you hear me?’ He clapped his hands. ‘Wake up. You’ll freeze out there.’
She ignored him and pulled the handle hard. In front of her on the floor was a cardboard box, inside it a blanket moved. She stepped closer ready to rescue the baby and coo a hello but as she peered in, her breath caught.
‘Oh my,’ she said instead.
The skin she saw was red, the eyes were tightly shut and the legs and arms kicked and punched against the cold. One raspy cry was quickly chased away by another.
‘There’s two of you,’ she gasped.
The twins bleated an angry confirmation and she scooped them up into her arms and out of the cold.
ELLE-MAY
Chapter 1.
I found the velvet curtains in a battered cardboard box in the loft. They reek and are hideous to look at, garish golden swirls frame the edges and the once red fabric is now a dull and dirty orange. Stupidly I decide to shake them. The smell of wet dog fills the room and dust swirls in the sunlight before snowing down on me. I would dearly love to bag them up and throw them away but we have no option, they are going up, they have to.
There are no curtain rings so Aunt Flora hunts around in the odds and sods drawer and digs out some garden twine. She says we have to act quickly when we get into the front room. She will use a broom to pin the curtains in place, while I will loop the twine through the eyelets and onto the rail. I nod to show I am ready and then I follow her inside.
I am too short to reach the rail so I pull over a chair to use as a step, it rattles as I move onto tiptoes.
‘Don’t you dare fall and hurt yourself,’ my Aunt Flora says and I think she is being kind until she adds, ‘It’s the last thing I need.’
She grasps the chair-back and I feel the legs touchdown. I refuse to thank her.
As I work I can hear them talking and laughing outside on the drive. There are so many of them that it’s a stream of noise rather than words, a buzzing like static on the airwaves. A loud laugh shoots out and I jump, feeling an idiot straight away. I laugh at my reaction to show it’s no big deal and to stop her looking at me like that.
‘At least they aren’t hammering on the door anymore,’ Aunt Flora moans.
Tell me about it, I nod in agreement.
The banging had seemed to go on for hours. Rat-a-tat-tat, over and over they hammered on the door. Sylvie, my other aunt, started crying when she heard it. Flora sent her upstairs for a lie down and told me we would deal with her later. Sylvie is a born worrier, not exactly the perfect person to have around in a crisis of this magnitude.
I triple knot the twine and jump down to survey my work. The curtains just about serve their purpose but they sag terribly. Moths have feasted well on the fabric leaving little holes all over it, when the sun bursts through the clouds small dots of light scattergun across the Persian rug and my feet. I tell my aunt that they look okay and she says I am a terrible liar, I smile in response. In the kitchen we tape a bed sheet over the window. It is lime green and gives a sickly olive tinge to the room, I feel like a pea in a very uncomfortable pod. It’s been decided to leave the hall window as it is. The glass is thick and frosted, we are safe there, the cameras and journalists cannot see in.
My Aunt Sylvie and Aunt Flora have lived together for years and have a comfortable routine. When I came along it was made clear I should slot in without complaint. I did not argue, Aunt Flora is at best strong willed and at worst ferocious. My aunts are as different as wood and water. I always think of Sylvie as pale and I don’t just mean her skin, I mean the whole of her. She can pass unnoticed in a room and make someone jump when she finally speaks up. She is willowy and her long, silver-blond hair makes her watery blue eyes seem even paler still. She is not very practical and mum used to say how lucky Sylvie’s short but well chosen marriage had been as she could not make money any other way. I used to think that was mean but I see now that mum was right.
Aunt Flora is not a sociable person, this year she turns 50 and has made it clear there will be no party. She likes Newsnight and the Archers, as far as she’s concerned everything else can take a running jump. It’s a good week for her if she has managed to keep to herself and avoid unnecessary conversation but Aunt Flora could not fade into the background even if she painted her skin the same colour as the walls. If there are decisions to be made, Aunt Flora is the kind of person who takes control and makes them. I rarely argue with her choices, it’s easier to put up and shut up. She has small grey eyes that look at you in a way that makes you feel naked, some days I think she can see through my skin and right into my soul, those are the days when I think nice thoughts. To be kind I would describe her as compact and more interested in cleanliness than appearance. She never styles her grey hair, just lets it grow long and scrapes it back into a plait or a bun. Make-up never graces her face and her clothes are practical, always jeans or dungarees, shirts and sturdy boots. She always tells me off for preening about like a peacock in front of the mirror. I think up good, stinging replies but I never say them out loud. When she was a teenager, Aunt Flora fractured her skull in a car accident, afterwards she could speak Spanish. For a while the medical word was in thrall but she didn’t like the attention and refused the therapies on offer. Now she uses her injury to her advantage and scrapes out a living by translating boring documents and books. When she’s not huddled over her desk with her reading glasses on and fountain pen in hand, she’s outside working in the garden and she is at her happiest then, you might even see her smile. Sylvie hates it out there, the bugs bother her, the sun burns her and the heat draws sweat patches out on her clothes. See they are opposites and I don’t think they would be friends if they were not sisters. My mum always used to roll her eyes when they bickered and say,
‘See, I’m the watch-face between two straps!’
I guess they’ve learnt to like each other over the passing years, they must have, there’s no watch-face any more.
Our problems started around this time yesterday when Sylvie was hurrying back from the store. As per usual she was late, this time for a lunch date with her ‘friend’ Bernard Collins and as per usual she was far too busy worrying about being late to notice anything around her. There were two men by the driveway and it was only when they called out to her that she saw them. They asked if she was Sylvie Puddick and she nodded. It was then that she caught sight of the camera strung around the taller man’s neck