The Full Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page B

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