One Christmas Eve by Shari Low

Author:Shari Low [Low, Shari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

4 P.M. – 6 P.M.

13

EVE

Christmas Eve 2023

‘Well, would you look at you two gorgeous specimens of womanhood,’ Loretta roared down the phone, making Eve smile with her gregarious greeting and contagious enthusiasm. After her gran, her Aunt Loretta was probably her favourite person on the planet. Not that she’d tell her mother that, of course. Or Gabby or Sonny either. But she had a feeling that even if she did, they’d probably feel the same, because if there was a prize for injecting joy and laughter into every scenario and sentence, Loretta would win it.

‘Aunt Loretta, we miss you! How are the fine gentlemen of Benidorm coping with your presence. Bet they’re falling at your feet.’

‘The pavements are littered with the bodies of my many admirers,’ Loretta joked right back. ‘It looks like a zombie apocalypse has befallen us.’

Eve’s laughter made the phone shake, and she adjusted it again so both her and her gran were in the view of the FaceTime camera.

Loretta’s face filled the rest of the screen and Eve thought, as always, how beautiful her aunt was. At seventy-one, she could pass for a woman at least ten years younger and she swore that it was down to ‘good laughs, great sex, a positive attitude and spending no time with anyone who didn’t bring you joy’. Which pretty much summed up why she’d been through four husbands and was currently auditioning for her fifth. It was also why music fans over the last five decades had a place in their heart for her.

The much-told story of her discovery was the stuff of legend. She’d been a teenage orphan, cared for by her older sister, who’d made it clear she expected Loretta to stick at school and get some good qualifications. However, young Loretta had defied her sister’s wishes and was working part-time in a hairdressing salon. It was there, one Christmas Eve in the latter years of the swinging sixties, when the batteries on the radio had died and she’d volunteered to take over the musical entertainment in the salon. She’d been belting out ‘She Loves Me’, while giving a male client a blow-dry after a blonde dye job, when the gent had asked her to stop, given her his business card, and told her he was a music producer who’d like her to audition for a band. A month later, sixteen-year-old Loretta McLean was the lead singer of the Lilac Waves (everyone thought it was some clever psychedelic reference, but it was actually inspired by all the little old dears who came in for their purple toner and their shampoo and set every week) and they were in a studio recording their first album.

They’d been huge in the seventies, billed as the British version of Fleetwood Mac, and they’d ridden that bus all the way to new romantic, eighties obscurity. Since then, after a ten-year stint as a square on Blankety Blank, Loretta had been a fan favourite on the pub and club touring circuit, and she’d spread her wings to warmer climates when her arthritis had started bothering her knees.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.