Life's Changed A short story by Charles Roberts

 

She couldn’t tell how long the storm had raged now, but the dark clouds were still skidding across the sky and the rain coming down in sheets with a strong wind blowing from the west.  Suddenly the sky was lit up by a flash of lightning which hit a large tree in the middle of the field, then the crack of thunder was almost deafening.  She’d walked across polished marble floors, climbed fancy oak stairways, worn designer gowns worth thousands of pounds and jewellery costing millions, but here she was sheltering in a disused barn in the middle of a field with mud squelching up between her toes and wearing worn out men’s trousers and an old military coat which was a size too big for her.  Her hair, once styled by the best stylist in the world hung limp, wet, and unkempt; she wore no makeup, those days were long gone.

In her youth she could turn heads wherever she went, wealthy men would fight just to be with her, to walk down the street with her on their arm.  Now they wouldn’t even look at her, she was still beautiful, but with age, the beauty of youth had gone to be replaced by the beauty of age.  She smiled as she remembered the multi million pound yachts she had been on; how Maître D’s in the poshest, and most expensive of restaurants would fall over themselves to find her a table and serve her.  Now she would go into the back alleys to look in the waste bins for a meal.

How did I end up here, she thought, what happened to the life I used to have; she knew of course that it all ended in the penthouse suite in the Beverly Hilton Hotel.  He was a billionaire and thought that he could buy anything he wanted, but she had said no and he wasn’t used to that, if he couldn’t buy what he wanted then he would take it, but she wasn’t playing his game so in the early hours of the morning as he tried to take her there was a shot in the dark and she ran and didn’t stop until she reached England and the safety of the country she knew, she felt safe in, she had been born in; then she took to the streets and effectively disappeared from the planet.

No one would find her among the hundreds, no thousands of the homeless as they wandered from town to town looking for food and shelter.  One or two said that she reminded them of someone they had once seen in the newspaper or a magazine, but as she aged they became less and less.  Out here in her favourite place, a place she remembered from her childhood, she felt safe, there was no one to recognise her from her younger self.  She looked out from the old barn at the rain still coming down in sheets and the river flowing quickly beyond and she smiled to herself.  Out here she could be herself and use her real name, in her youth she had used her great grandmother’s maiden name.  All her main bank accounts were in her real name so that she couldn’t be traced.

It had started off when the paparazzi started following her and snapping her every move, so she became someone else and when she needed to disappear, on would go the wig, the glasses and false teeth so that she looked totally different and could walk the streets incognito, plus she had one shoe with a shorter heal than the other so that she’d walk with a slight limp.  She had had to learn the hard way, but it had worked for so many years.

She’d started all that when she was eighteen.  That’s how she managed to escape from the States when she thought that the police were looking for her, and made her way out of London after landing at Heathrow and the place was crawling with armed police.  She also dressed in simple clothes she could buy from charity shops.

Now she was making her way to her cottage, as she called it; it was a converted barn in the middle of nowhere where she could relax and be herself, for a while anyway.  There was a car in the garage and fresh clothes plus a hot bath whenever she wanted one.  And a fantastic view down the valley with the river running near the cottage with Trout swimming in a pool near-by.