The Full Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page A

cassette player. They weren’t our songs. The tape had stopped midway through ‘The Air that I Breathe’. I played it when I got home, shuddering with grief, and I knew that it must have been the last thing she heard before they reached through the window and turned off the engine to cut her out of the wreckage.
    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