The Full Legacy Read Online Free PDF

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