Page 86 of Before You Say Goodbye

Autumn folded up the piece of paper she was reading from and took a step towards Bowie’s coffin, running her quivering hands along its smooth sides in the same way she used to caress his face. She kissed the burnished oak that hid from view the only man she had ever loved.

“Goodbye, my love,” she said. “And thank you for everything.”

Chapter 16

Before she flew home, partly from a desire to escape the Whittle home and partly out of an ill-advised need to make a connection, Autumn called her mother, Katherine, to let her know she was on her way to visit. Could her mother pick her up from the train station, she asked. Katherine thought for several minutes and eventually told her no, she couldn’t. She always spent her Friday afternoons drinking wine with her friend, Pam, and there was no way she could let a mate down. Autumn had no idea who Pam was, but, apparently, she had been there for her mother through some fairly recent difficult times. Katherine told Autumn she’d have to get a taxi.

Autumn called her sister.

“I’ll do it for a tenner for petrol?” Lilly said. Autumn agreed. A taxi would’ve been cheaper, but her sister was unemployed, and Autumn suddenly felt eager to see them. She valued family ties differently now. She wasn’t sure how long she would stay, but promised herself she’d hold them both in her arms and tell them they were important to her, regardless of the outcome.

She ran to her sister’s car as soon as she saw it pulling into the dreary grey car park. It was the same electric-blue Renault Clio they’d shared when they were teenagers. Her mum and Pam were in the back. Autumn reached impatiently to open the door and readied herself to greet them, but Lilly pulled the car playfully forward. Autumn sighed and shook her head, smiling and jogging heartily after it. She grabbed the door handle, hauling it open before Lilly could pull away again. Katherine and Pam cackled loudly in the back seat. Autumn felt ridiculed, but she shook the feeling off. She knew she was being oversensitive. If Bluebell or Maddie had joked in such a way, she’d have found it funny, so she forced herself to laugh along with them, blowing a kiss to her mother and pecking her sister on the cheek.Their familiar voices, the smell of the washing powder they had always used and the lingering whiff of her mother’s hairspray overwhelmed Autumn’s senses and made her feel nervous.

She’d spent most of her time on the train debating whether she should tell them about what she’d been through. She decided that she wouldn’t, but, when her sister asked her how she was, she found herself blurting the whole sorry tale to them. It felt good, and she realised that she’d needed someone to talk to who was not a Whittle. Since the funeral, speaking with his family about Bowie had been extremely distressing.

The women in the car gasped and made sympathetic noises as she told them about Bowie, how she’d met him, and what had happened to him. She waited for them to ask her why she hadn’t called them when she’d first flown back to England, but they didn’t. She was both relieved and a little disappointed. When she ran out of words, there was silence. She wasn’t sure if they were absorbing what she’d said, or if they’d stopped listening, just didn’t care, or were waiting for her to continue. Her mother broke the silence.

“Did he leave you any money?”

“Mum!” Autumn was aghast.

“We pronounce it ‘Mam’ here,” Katherine said pointedly. She’d never been able to bear anything other than the northeastern pronunciation of her title. “This boy of yours was from a posh family, wasn’t he? You said they lived down south and your accent has changed. You sound posher.”

Autumn shook her head, but didn’t say anything to deny the Whittles’ wealth. Subdued, she asked her mother to stop it, self-consciously dropping the ‘t’ at the end of her sentence, as she had as a child, in the hope that it might appease her. She hadn’t noticed until now how diluted her accent had become. She was still distinguishable as northern and the Whittle men had teased her relentlessly about how she pronounced certain words,particularly ‘moor, ‘year’ and ‘purple’, but there was no denying that the way she spoke was quite noticeably less northern than it had been.

“And you said he was a fancy musical bigwig in New York. He didn’t leave you anything?”

“No.” She shook her head. “He didn’t.”

She didn’t bother to go into the fact that she had no need for Bowie’s money. They’d have known if they’d ever bothered to follow her career. Nor did she elaborate on the details of Bowie’s estate. It was none of their business. He’d left everything he had to his mother besides one lump sum he’d ringfenced for Maddie, with the stipulation she should use it to help her buy a home. Autumn had told Maddie herself, at Bowie’s request.

“Bowie wanted you never to feel you might have to give up your work being a social-care-working hero because you couldn’t make ends meet,” she’d said.

If Maddie had refused to allow him his wishes, and, true to form, she had objected vehemently to accepting anything — Bowie had arranged for his money to be kept in trust for any children she might have, or released to her later in life if she changed her mind. Maddie had been overwhelmed by her brother’s wishes.

“I told him once that I might not return to care work because of the money being so bad,” Maddie had told Autumn, struggling to process her guilt. “I didn’t really mean it. I would never want to do anything else.”

“Bowie would’ve wanted you to have the money anyway,” Autumn said. Marley nodded his agreement. Autumn and Maddie shared a sad smile. Marley nodded again, drawing in a jittery breath and accepting his sister’s hand when she reached to squeeze his. He could not force an expression across his frozen face, but he knew how important it was that he reassured Maddie, and Autumn was grateful that he could summon thestrength from somewhere. They were all aware that Bowie’s gesture was only in part about Maddie being able to continue as a care worker. Without Maddie stockpiling a cocktail of his meds for months to help release him from his pain, he’d have suffered for far longer, or risked an even bleaker outcome by trying, and potentially failing, to take his own life. Bowie was sending Maddie his thanks by taking away her worries for the future and, in doing so, releasing her from the dependence on her parents she found so difficult to bear.

Emma attempted to split the remainder of Bowie’s savings equally between everyone else, but they resisted, encouraging her to give his money to charity instead. Bowie cared deeply for others and it seemed like the right thing to do. They suggested a list of causes to Emma one rainy afternoon, and she agreed to split the money between an organisation helping young people with lymphoma, a charity that brought music to disadvantaged youths, and a vegan animal sanctuary, in Bowie’s memory.

“Can we stop at a corner shop?” Autumn asked her sister now, winding down her window and biting back tears. “I need cigarettes and wine.”

* * *

They sat themselves around the blue plastic table in her mother’s sea-blue kitchen and each lit a cigarette. Katherine eyed her eldest daughter critically.

“I thought you’d given up,” she said acerbically.

Autumn sighed. “I’ve been through a lot, Mam.”

“Huh! You don’t know you’re born,” Katherine muttered.

It was fair to say that Autumn’s mother hadn’t had the easiest time. Autumn’s grandmother had been a teenager when she’d given birth to Katherine on the bathroom floor and, in very different times, the family had been publicly shunned. Katherine had been raised on the very same housing estate where she’draised Autumn, and where she still lived. She’d never met her father, nor even knew who he was. The man her mother had gone on to marry had been violent and he’d tried to molest Katherine several times throughout the years. Autumn’s family had seen history repeat itself, as so many families did, in all the wrong ways. When Katherine and her mother had confronted her stepfather together, there had been an altercation involving a knife. Katherine had left home and moved in with her boyfriend, Autumn’s father, and his family. She’d become pregnant with Autumn’s sister, Summer, at fourteen, but the baby had died as a result of complications in labour. Autumn had been born a year later. They’d lived with her father’s family until she was eight and, although her memories of that time were not very clear, she seemed to remember that her mother had seemed constantly scared.

On the day they’d moved out, her mother had shown her happily to her brand-new bedroom in a little two-up, two-down with a box room, a few streets away, before telling her that her father would not be joining them. Mummy’s friend, Aaron, who’d lived next door to Autumn’s father’s family, would be moving in instead. Autumn had never liked Aaron. He shouted all the time and he’d never said hello to her. She’d seen him fight with her father, and, in spite of her dad’s disinterest in her, her irrationally intense love for him had made her a fiercely loyal child. She’d stayed that way until the day he’d refused to save her from sexual assault. As it turned out, Aaron’s shouty and violent nature in the early days had been a prelude. He’d gone on to start hitting her mother, then her.

On Autumn’s thirteenth birthday, Aaron had given her a lager and lime laced with ecstasy to drink and then her first kiss. He’d pressed her against the wall in the hallway before she could stop him and shoved his groin against hers. Autumn had hit out at him and pushed him away. The next day, she’d overheardhim telling her mother that he was worried that Autumn might accuse him of doing something he shouldn’t have. Autumn had listened to her mother telling him not to worry, that her eldest daughter was an attention-seeker and she wouldn’t ever believe anything she had to say about Aaron ‘in a million years’. Autumn had known then that Aaron had meant to harm her, safe in the knowledge that even her own mother wouldn’t believe her. She’d spent the next three years making sure they were never alone together, often going to bed with boys she’d barely liked just to avoid being home alone with him. For a long time, she’d traded hand jobs for a safe place to sleep.

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