But it turned out she was wrong about that. There was rock bottom… and then there were the untold depths of misery lurking beneath it.
Just a few short days after her mother’s funeral, a letter from the landlord arrived in the post. In clipped, official language, it informed her that as the tenant had deceased, the landlord would now seek new tenants and that any relatives of the deceased tenant must vacate the property.
As she read the letter, Courtney was gripped by cold panic along with a weary dread. The idea of searching for a new place to live, just days after her mother’s funeral and with the grief still raw, left her reeling.
A phone call to the letting agent who handled the property only confirmed what Courtney had already worked out for herself—she couldn’t afford to rent the house by herself. Quite how her mother had managed it before Courtney began contributing to the household finances remained a mystery. Even if Courtney searched for housemates to split the rent with her, the landlord was putting the price up anyway, pushing it beyond anything she could ever imagine being able to afford.
A quick discussion with the letting agent only proved there was nothing on their books she could afford at all. She foundrooms to rent in shared properties, but the owners lost all enthusiasm once they realised Courtney was pregnant and would soon have a crying baby to look after in the property. Other options she found were dirty or grubby, or in unsafe areas, or came with other tenants who gave Courtney the creeps.
Her friends commiserated, and a few even offered her their sofas to sleep on for a night or two, but it wasn’t a long-term solution. With a baby on the way, Courtney needed somewhere to live that didn’t involve sofa-surfing and relying on the goodwill of friends who had their own lives and their own problems to deal with.
In the end, she had no choice but to seek help from the council’s housing service. The case worker she was assigned found temporary accommodation in a bedsit that would prevent Courtney becoming homeless while a more suitable property was found. As an expectant mother, Courtney was assured she’d take priority, but the case worker also explained that with the pressures faced by the social housing sector, it might take time to find somewhere else for her to live.
The bedsit, on a run-down street near Southampton city centre, was noisy and dirty and unpleasant—but with no other choice, Courtney moved in.
It took a huge effort to empty the house she’d shared with her mother of all their belongings, even with help from friends. There were only a few days to clear the rooms before the landlord took possession, and Courtney worked long into the evenings while juggling her job to get it all done. They hadn’t owned much that was valuable, and the furniture they did have was old and worn, but with no space at the bedsit for any of her possessions beyond the basics, Courtney made the hard decision to spend some of her dwindling cash on a storage unit.
The money she’d been saving to pay for all the things her baby would need when she arrived had already been decimatedin order to pay for her mother’s funeral. Despite keeping the costs to a minimum and hating herself for having to be so frugal, the costs for the coffin and the funeral service and the cremation had still been eye-watering. In the blink of an eye, the two thousand pounds Courtney had worked so hard to save was reduced to little more than a few hundred.
Spending what was left on a storage unit for furniture and non-essentials and keepsakes struck her as ludicrous. But when she finally got her own place to live, she’d need all those things eventually—kitchen items, towels and linens, a decent bed, a sofa to sit on. Crazy though it was to spend money on storing the items, it seemed crazier to sell off or donate the items to charity, only to have to buy everything all over again when money would surely be even tighter than it was right now.
And so Courtney moved most of the possessions and furniture from the house she’d shared with her mother into storage and then moved herself into the bedsit.
Her first days living in the small, grubby room were hard and lonely. Knowing her precious belongings were safely tucked away in a storage unit, waiting for better times to come, kept Courtney’s spirits up and helped her focus on the future. When grief threatened to overwhelm her, she turned her mind to her day-to-day tasks at work and to dealing with the endless benefit forms she was now filling out and which would, together, just about keep her head above water financially—well, at least until the baby came.
And she turned her mind, too, to the unexpected newspaper clippings she’d found amongst her mother’s belongings while clearing out the house—clippings that revealed shocking information about her father that Courtney had never known…
As the child of a single mother who loved her fiercely, Courtney never thought much about the absence of a father from her life when she was younger. All she knew was that her father had died in a car crash when Courtney was little more than a toddler, and that her parents had no longer been in a relationship when Courtney was born, but Sharon didn’t have much to say about Steven Austin beyond this. The older she got, the more Courtney wondered why her mother never spoke of him, and why she was always the one to prompt her with questions.
A thoughtful and kind child, she assumed her father’s death in a car accident had been a terrible blow for her mother and that it hurt Sharon to talk about it, even if the two of them hadn’t been together anymore. Perhaps Sharon had pined for a reconciliation that never came?
The actual truth of the situation emerged once Courtney was in her teenage years and going through a difficult rebellious streak. Demanding to know more about her tragically killed father, and what he was like and what sort of man he’d been, it infuriated her when Sharon kept her responses vague. In a fit of temper one night, Courtney accused her mother of being cruel by refusing to tell her more about her father, and said she’d start searching online for the answers her mother refused to provide.
Courtney remembered how Sharon’s face had paled at this threat. The explanation that followed helped her understand exactly why.
Steven Austin, it turned out, was not the fallen hero of Courtney’s imagination, a man taken tragically too young. Instead, he was a low-level criminal and drug user who’d spent years in and out of prison for burglary and drug possession. Buthe was a charmer, too, and a man disposed to regular flashes of optimism about his future and his alleged desire to turn his life around.
Sharon explained how she’d met him while working behind the bar in a pub. Steven came across as a fun and lively guy and easily charmed Sharon into going out with him. For a few weeks, Steven was a regular at the pub, chatting with her while she served customers, and treating her to takeaway Chinese food at the end of her long evening shifts, the two of them sharing kung po chicken and noodles at midnight before slipping into bed together.
Courtney was mesmerised by the story and by the sweet romance of their brief affair. Sharon, too, had been enthralled, just a young woman in her twenties having a lovely fling with a man who made her laugh with his funny jokes and made her heart flip with his charming smile.
But all wasn’t what it seemed. After a few weeks together, Steven seemed to change. The easy humour that had lured Sharon in to begin with was suddenly in short supply, and whenever they were together, she couldn’t help but notice the cagey look in his eyes, his strange restlessness, his odd moods.
They’d once seen each other almost daily, but Steven stopped visiting the pub where Sharon worked and stopped dropping by her flat. Phone calls and messages dwindled to nothing. Hurt and confused, Sharon thought it was a cowardly way to break up with someone. They might only have been together for a few short weeks, but if Steven had changed his mind about their relationship, he could at least have had the good grace to tell her to her face.
Then, in the space of only a couple of days, Sharon learned two stunning facts.
Number one, she was pregnant.
Number two, Steven hadn’t just wandered out of her life—he’d been recalled to prison after breaching the terms of his early release licence.
Sharon had known nothing about Steven having spent time in prison. The news, delivered in passing by a regular at the pub where she worked, came as a complete bolt from the blue. When she further learned that he’d been arrested on suspicion of theft and found to be in possession of drugs—crack cocaine, no less—Sharon couldn’t have been more stunned.
Steven Austin, it turned out, had a history of low-level crime and drug convictions, stealing to pay for his habit and getting involved in any number of dodgy activities in order to earn a bit of cash. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a brush with the law, or spent time in prison, and then resolved to turn things around, according to the pub regular who told Sharon what was going on.
She only wished the pub regular had said something sooner. She would never have got involved with someone who’d just come out of prison, and who had a long criminal record. The idea of it appalled her.
But their brief affair hadn’t exactly been anyone else’s business. Few of the pub regulars likely even knew they were seeing one another. It had only been a casual bit of fun, anyway.
