The Full Legacy (4 page)

So, as I sat there by Corinne’s side, feeling her life draining away, I told myself that it was my fault, that I should have let her go, set her free, long before it came to that. That maybe, if I had, she would still be alive, and we could have still been friends. I could have lived with that, but I couldn’t believe she was finally running out on me for good. Affairs or not, I’d never doubted that she loved me until then. In death she utterly betrayed me. There were no second, third or fourth chances then – no reconciliations – no chance of our love transforming into something else - nothing.

After she’d gone, I fell into this terrible blankness inside.... this awful feeling that life was all about going through the motions. You eat and sleep and go to work like everybody else. People say how well you’re doing and you smile and bleed inside and nobody knows. Then every so often somebody like Kay asks ‘It wasn’t about Corinne was it?’ and you feel ridiculously guilty that it wasn’t this time.... Just for once, you were thinking about someone else.

I think I’ll go see my mum this afternoon,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ Kay had taken possession of her newspaper and was already miles away. ‘Give her my love, won’t you? Tell her I missed her at Pride.’

She smiled vaguely and rubbed my arm as I went past her to get dressed.

At times like this, in the midst of our easy domesticity, I could almost forget that Kay was the woman Corinne had been coming home from on the night that she died.

Mum

Most of my friends knew my mum because it had always been a point of honour with her to come to Gay Pride marches with us when she could. Her ‘PROUD PARENT’ placard had become quite a rallying point, not only for a handful of sympathetic mums and dads, but also for a whole load of wistful people whose parents hated them for being gay. Being so positive, she’d become a kind of adoptive mum to lots of my friends, and she bore her role with great good humour, even when it came complete with midnight phone calls from some of the more neurotic ones.

This year she hadn’t made it to the march. Her heart was with us, but her body was in Bolton on a provincial tour of ‘Doctor in the Farce’, a comedy about a lonely GP joining an amateur dramatic society full of hypochondriacs. Mum had landed both the female lead (a prima donna of immense proportions), and the leading man – Sinclair St Claire, a fairly successful actor who she was convinced I’d recognise from a long running series of TV commercials. For once, it looked as if she might have picked a winner with Sinclair. He had a private income big enough to match his name, and he was taking her for tea at The Ritz in an hour.

‘But don’t rush off darling. Come talk to me while I have my bath. It’s
such
a long time since I’ve seen you.’

It never had been easy to say ‘no’ to my mother. I put the lid down on the loo and sat on the fluffy pink cover, vaguely embarrassed despite my job, at the sight of her huge bosoms bobbing like twin white islands in a sea of orange flower foam. She was on a roll of enthusiasm. The production had been a great success and she hoped the company would work together again.

‘Three curtain calls,’ she smiled, hugging herself with satisfaction. ‘And rave reviews in the local press. Anyway, that’s enough about me. How’s
your
work going my love?’

‘Okay.’ I shrugged, sweating a bit in the steam.

‘For goodness sake Gillian, would it kill you to be enthusiastic for a change?’

I felt bad instantly. ‘Sorry,’ I said.

The problem was I couldn’t help it. I was terrified that if I cared about anything, I’d lose it. ‘It’s going well,’ I said, trying for a more upbeat tone. ‘And I think I might have met someone who...’

Mum wasn’t listening, she’d remembered something.

‘My God, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve just remembered. I went to see Psychic Betty last week... I meant to phone you about it.’

My heart sank. Psychic Betty (as opposed to Big Butch Betty, who was a completely different friend of my mother’s) was a throw-back to one of the darker periods of my childhood. She was a fierce, birdlike spiritualist who had ‘prophetic’ dreams of such overwhelming vagueness she’d earned a reputation for 100% accuracy. Right now the last thing I needed was gloomy predictions from dodgy fortune tellers. I still felt weird all round, come to think of it – heavy. It didn’t feel at all like my usual mildly depressed state, I reckoned I must be premenstrual.

‘She said I must warn you,’ said Mum melodramatically.

‘Warn
me
?’ A cold feeling prickled down my spine.

‘Yes. There’s a dark woman coming into your life.’

Strangely, I didn’t instantly think of Turner.

‘An accident will bring her to your attention.’

Now
I did.

‘She bears the shadow of death.’

In my mind’s eye, unbidden, the shadow stirred. I shook my head.

‘Come on Mum,’ I said. ‘You know how I feel about all that bloody psychic stuff.’

Threatened is how I felt about it. Ever since I’d discovered that my imaginary childhood friends weren’t quite the same as the other kids’.

‘Well darling, I wish you’d take it more seriously.... your father would have said...’

Oh, great, now we were onto my bloody father!

‘My Dad was a fraud, Mum. He preyed on vulnerable women....’

She heard the unspoken ‘including you’ and her eyes clouded for a moment.

‘Well, maybe,’ she said, lathering herself vigorously and reaching for a pink disposable lady-razor to shave her legs. I could see she’d pushed the image of Dad out of her mind and replaced him with a happier vision of her new love, Sinclair. ‘But please, steer clear of accident prone brunettes, just for me.... And... I know you hate doing it, but you wouldn’t light up a fag for me, would you? Oh thanks darling, you
are
an angel... They’re in my handbag in the living room.’

How to describe my mum?

I suppose in a lot of people’s eyes, she’s a bit of a joke. Fifty five next birthday and still chasing her dreams. Mum always wanted to be a West End star and she always wanted a man to love her, but somehow she never got her big break either way. There were things that looked promising; a few minor triumphs in rep productions; some men (including my father) who said all the right things and delivered worse than nothing. At one time she even had fantasies about Hollywood, but they were just fantasies. Looking back, I’m sure having me in tow must always have counted against her. Pregnant and married (in that order) by the time most kids nowadays would be doing their ‘A’ Levels, and pretty much on her own with me from her early twenties, it must have been hard for her juggling childcare, especially after my granny died. She got a few lucky breaks early on... minor roles that looked good on her c.v. But as she got older, she spent more and more time ‘resting’ and less and less time acting. The men got fewer too... And yet here she was, up to her neck in film-star suds, about to meet her latest Prince Charming, and she’d never stopped dreaming. That alone made her special to me, and there was a whole lot more to her than that. Sure, she’d been a strange mother in many ways; leaving me on my own with a very odd assortment of baby sitters – a bit of an embarrassment when she turned up at the school gates, usually late, in her kaftans and silk scarves from the charity shop - always hard up - looked down on by the neighbours for her succession of boyfriends after my father was taken away - but always there for me in her own way...
always.

When I was a kid, mum used to tell me the most amazing bedtime stories. Not the usual stuff, but variations on King Lear and Macbeth and Hamlet...

‘Then suddenly, a magic fairy appeared and with one wave of her wand she brought them all back to life and they all lived happily ever after.’

The first time I saw Hamlet I thought the magic fairy had missed her cue – thought the curtain going down at the end was just a joke – could have raged with shock and disappointment when I realised that this was a different version of the story to the one my mother told... Then the curtain rose, and there were the actors – my mum a resurrected (if slightly miscast) Ophelia – all smiling and bowing and holding hands and basking in the applause, and I knew that in my mum’s world there really
was
a magic fairy of sorts, and by her way of looking at things, she’d never told me anything but the truth.

Monday

Monday morning, I felt exhausted. I
did
have my period, and I’d had the dreams again all night.

My eyes felt pickled as I tried to focus on my desk diary.

‘It’s going to be a busy week,’ commented Michelle, putting a mug of black coffee in front of me. ‘And
you
look like you’ve had a busy weekend!’

‘I’m not sure I’m well,’ I said, clutching my head.

‘Well, you’ve probably had too much to drink and not enough sleep.
And
you don’t eat properly. It’s bound to catch up with you in the end, you know.’

This was Michelle’s standard response. She’d always had a funny, unsympathetic way of showing that she cared about me.

Still, I guess everybody has their little foibles and she was a good friend for all that. Red hot with the clients; she was the make-up and hairstyling end of the partnership and there was no way at all that I could ever have done it without her.

We went back a long way, Michelle and me – getting to know each other at the auditions for the school pantomime one year and never looking back since then.

To this day, I don’t know what possessed me to respond to the call for auditions pinned to the school notice board. But if there was any kind of fate involved in it, I guess it must have been about meeting Michelle. It wasn’t like she would ever have been the kind of girl I’d have dared to talk to on any other day. And she didn’t even give me a second glance as she slid along the row of interlocked chairs at the back of the school hall and sat down next to me. I glanced surreptitiously at her as she sat down. Her skirt could only just have passed the tape measure test and her tie was tugged down below the open top button of her regulation white polyester blouse. I’d seen her around school, of course. She was a year older than me, petite and pretty with long dark wavy hair, not a big achiever academically, but great at hockey and massively popular with boys and girls alike. Up this close, she smelt faintly of ‘Sure’ deodorant and ‘Vosene’. I thought she was lovely and instantly found myself blushing, relieved that she wasn’t actually likely to notice me at all.

We’d all been given numbers as we came into the hall and now Mrs Papadopolos, the Deputy Head Mistress, was calling us out in turn to go up the stairs at the side of the stage and read chunks of Oscar Wilde for a panel comprising Miss White (Drama and English), Mr Osanga (Music) and Mrs Murphy (Art). Michelle and I were a very long way down the list and I’d already heard her muttering a couple of sardonic comments under her breath when we both got the giggles simultaneously about the way Jeremy Butcher intoned ‘A haaandBAG!’ and found that the more we tried, the more we couldn’t stop.

 After that, Michelle’s witticisms were delivered as asides to me, and by the end of the audition we were firm friends. She was cast as The Sleeping Beauty... a part that involved lying very still on a velvet covered pile of packing crates for most of the show, but with the thrill of being kissed by David Ingram in the final scene for three nights running.

I was given the part of The Oak Tree in the Magic Forest. As the daughter of an actress, people might have imagined that I wouldn’t suffer from stage fright, but I did – horribly - even when I was completely unrecognisable in the depths of a brown and green tree costume that made me look like someone stranded in a Disney Film on an SAS mission gone wrong. I remembered my line every night:
‘Maybe we’ll have one at our Wood Green Branch.’
But my throat seemed determined to strangle the words as I formed them and nobody beyond the first row could hear a word I said. After that, I vowed I would never venture into amateur dramatics again, but I was always secretly grateful to that production of Sleeping Beauty for bringing my best friend into my life.

Michelle also credited it with meeting the love of her life. Twenty two years and three kids later, she knew all about covering stretch marks, eye bags and saggy tummies, and she could silence a yowl from a toddler with one icy look, but put her together with David still, and within an instant they’d be holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes like smitten teenagers, all cynicism forgotten, as much in love as they ever were.

I owed a lot to the pair of them, and not only because they’d helped me survive Corinne’s death. My studio was at the back of Michelle’s hair and beauty salon. We had a good High Street location and we’d been lucky enough to get the business established before the recession really hit the South.

Today, I stared hazily after Michelle as she disappeared through the white louvre doors and into the salon, wondering, not for the first time, if the doors had been a mistake and whether, maybe, we should think about getting something more sturdy. The current ones protected me from Michelle’s tiny army of stylists and their boyfriend problems, but not always from the smell of perming lotion and the rowdier bits of ‘Steve Wright in the Afternoon’. I wondered vaguely if I should go into B&Q and price up some new ones. Then I wondered why I was making a problem in my head out of something that didn’t generally bother me at all.

The real problem was that I should have been feeling good, and I wasn’t. Deep in my heart something nasty was stirring and it didn’t feel like it belonged to me. I sprawled back in my swivel chair and hugged the coffee mug to my chest, feeling lousy. Even the arum lilies Michelle had brought in didn’t smell good. She’d arranged them in a tall black vase on my reception desk. They looked great... really classy. But their scent felt heavy in my lungs. It reminded me, for some reason I couldn’t quite place, of the smell of death.