Page 87 of Before You Say Goodbye

At sixteen, she’d returned home from shopping one day with her mother and walked in on Aaron having sex with a pretty eighteen-year-old on the family sofa. He’d told them he was leaving them there and then. Katherine had never got over it.

Autumn studied her mother now, her face framed by the smoke they were creating with their sucks and blows. There was a scruffiness to the way she inhaled her cigarettes. Autumn chided herself in her mind. There was no real difference between smoking roll-ups on a porch in the southern countryside and puffing away in the kitchen of a council house twenty miles from Newcastle, but she couldn’t help but feel that the act, when indulged here, reeked of boredom and desperation. Katherine had not taken care of herself and looked much older than she was. She had given her children her thick brown hair and green eyes. Years of smoking had blackened her teeth and she’d had fine lines around her mouth and across her cheeks for as long as Autumn could remember. The several brown sunspots on her face were the result of a love of tanning booths.

“I was beautiful once, but age catches up with everyone,” she’d often told Autumn. “You wait. You’re gonna look like me one day.”

Autumn was self-aware enough to know that flippant comments like this, spewed at her on a fairly frequent basis from the tender age of five, had contributed to her unhealthy relationship with her own body.

Katherine caught her staring, and Autumn turned her face away and nudged her sister.

“Tell me about your life, Lilly.”

“No.” Her sister shook her head. “Boring. Tell me about yours. About Bowie and New York. Tell me about this love affair.”

Autumn felt a sudden rush of affection for her sister and reached out to take her hand, a gentle gesture she’d grown accustomed to performing, without a second thought, with Bowie’s family. Lilly flinched noticeably at her touch, but didn’t pull her hand away. She felt cold to Autumn.

“Can we put the heating on?” Autumn asked her mother.

“No,” Katherine answered abruptly. Autumn was not surprised by her answer. It had always been the same. Katherine didn’t need to elaborate. They couldn’t afford to keep the house warm and Autumn knew that.

“I bet your boy’s folks never worried about putting their heating on.” Lilly laughed lightly, drawing her hand away.

“No.” Autumn shook her head. “They didn’t. But the house was big and it was still cold all the time.”

“Got any photos?” Lilly inquired. “Of the house? Or your bloke?”

Autumn felt immediately on edge, but nodded her head. Katherine, Lilly and Pam scooted towards her until they were all surrounding Autumn. She took out her phone, skimming through hundreds of photographs she had taken of the best and worst summer she’d ever had. It was painful to look back on happier times, but she couldn’t seem to stop. Seeing Bowie’s face hurt her heart. She’d wiped him from her screensaver on the dayhe’d died so that she wasn’t tempted to stare at his picture, and subtly avoided looking for too long at Marley, who, in her grief, looked more like Bowie to her now than he had even on the evening they’d met.

“He’s so handsome, Autumn,” Lilly said. “God, they look alike too, don’t they? The brothers, I mean. I can’t believe they’re not identical.”

“Yeah.” Autumn nodded. “They’re very much alike, especially in photographs. It was much easier to tell them apart in real life.”

“That must have been hard work.” Katherine laughed. “Making sure you didn’t take the wrong one to bed.”

Unbidden, the mental image of Marley’s face forged its way into her mind, his lips slightly parted, his head thrown back in ecstasy. She closed her eyes and shook her head to erase his features from her thoughts. When she summoned the nerve to look up at them, they were all watching her, their faces tinged with suspicion.

“I bet loads of women want to bed them together,” Katherine said. Autumn smiled in spite of herself, remembering with fondness their frivolity on the night they’d discussed the very same thing, the night they should have been at the ball. The night she and Marley had . . .

“Mam, that’s gross.” Lilly frowned.

“’I wouldn’t kick either of them out of bed, together or separately!” Katherine laughed, louder than was necessary. Autumn winced through a smile and lit another cigarette.

“Was he good?” Pam asked. “This Bowie bloke? In bed?”

“I’m not sure that’s a very appropriate question,” Autumn replied, trying, in vain, to keep her voice even so as not to start an upset. Autumn didn’t know Pam, and the woman had barely said a word to her all afternoon. Still, she wasn’t entirely surprised by this stranger’s nosiness. On this estate, everythingwas everyone’s business, especially when it came to who was sleeping with who. They hopped in and out of each other’s beds with a frequency that would make even Bluebell blush.

“I bet he was shit.” Katherine took a cigarette. “Posh boys always are. They don’t have to work as hard to keep their women. Not women like us, anyway.”

‘Women like us?’ Autumn was suddenly incensed. She had been doing well to keep a lid on her reactions to their ignorant questions and lack of compassion, but she felt herself seethe in response to her mother’s statement before she could stop herself. Could it be that her mother still thought that Autumn was anything like her? Katherine was uncaring, cold and self-righteous. She rarely thought of anybody but herself. Yes, poverty may have played a part in making her the person she’d become, but Autumn had been raised on the same streets, in almost identical circumstances, and she would never have said something so spiteful to someone who was grieving. Katherine’s casual nastiness made Autumn feel about as irate as she’d ever felt.

“I’m nothing like you,” Autumn said. Her words were cold and harsh. Her mother’s eyes narrowed in a way that used to make Autumn feel afraid.

“You’ll always be like us, my love. You can run as far as you like, but you’ll always be an estate girl at heart.”

Autumn willed herself to remember who she really was inside. To remind herself she was the woman she’d been becoming for more than a decade. She would never go out of her way to make someone else feel upset because of the way she was feeling about herself or her own life. She would never want anyone to feel she was indifferent to their presence. She hoped nobody would ever be afraid to tell her how she’d made them feel. She never wanted anybody to feel lonely when she was in the room. She wanted people around her to know she caredabout the things they had to say. She was nothing like them. Not at all.

“You’ve always thought you were too good for us, Autumn,” Katherine continued in a bitter tone. “We’ve never been enough for you. Well, it stops right now, do you hear? You don’t get to come back here, expecting tea and fucking sympathy because your precious posh boyfriend went and died on you and left you with nothing. You act like you’re better than we are, with your fancy American shoes and the way you always look down your nose at us. I’m tired of it.”

Pam snickered nastily in support of her friend. Autumn, biting back tears, poured herself another glass of wine in silence — it was her fourth, if she had been counting correctly. It had been a mistake to come back here. She felt vulnerable enough already and could have protected herself from walking into this living nightmare. She felt like a fool. And yet, somehow, deep down, she recognised that she also felt lucky; she had been one boyfriend away from being stuck here herself. She mightn’t have developed such a hard shell, mightn’t have become so fucking determined to get away from them all. It might’ve been so easy to have fallen in love with the youngest lad of a family of six and become stranded here, on these streets, like everyone else. If things had been different for Autumn and she had wound up stuck at home, she was in no doubt that she’d have felt the same way as her mother by now: jealous of the privileged, ashamed in private, but ludicrously proud in public, full of bravado that she was happy to be a poor, uneducated northern lass. She too would have been convinced that someone with Autumn’s affiliations was trying to be somebody she was not. Autumn could see, all too clearly, in her mind’s eye, how her mother saw her. She thought she was a snob.

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