Another Life Altogether (18 page)

“Yes, I did.”

“Well, there’s some women might not consider that such a bad thing, you know.”

“How can you say that?” My mother was outraged, grinding her heels into Mabel’s green-and-orange carpet. “It’s … it’s … well, it’s disgusting.

He was standing right there. Not a stitch on him. Not a bloody stitch.”

“Yes, well,” Mabel said, hitching up the straps on her sundress and looking away from my mother. “That’ll be Frank.”

“Frank?”

Mabel nodded. “He was the bloke I went out with last night, the one I—”

“I always knew you had loose morals, our Mabel. But this …”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ev, calm down.” Mabel rolled her eyes. “It’s not like you’ve not seen anything like that before. I mean, I’m sure Mike—”

“Don’t you bring my married life into this. At least I respect myself. At least I don’t cheapen myself like other members of this family. What with you frolicking with every bloke left, right, and center, and now my mother gallivanting around with some Australian gigolo.”

“Look, Ev, I know you’re upset that Mam’s getting married, that she’s staying in Australia—”

“That’s nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with it at all. Suffice it to say, if you choose to have men wandering about your house in the altogether—well, that’s your affair. But I don’t have to stay here and put up with it. Come on, Mike, we’re leaving.”

“Leaving?” my father asked, looking up from the television with an expression so startled it was as if he’d abruptly been brought out of a trance.

“Yes, leaving. Come on, girls. Let’s go.”

“But we only just got here,” my father protested, giving my mother, then Mabel, then me a distressed look.

“And now it’s time to go,” my mother responded, already making her way out the living-room door.

“But the match isn’t over. Can’t we just stay for the end of the match?” He rose reluctantly from his seat, all the time gazing at the television screen, where the two wrestlers were now taking turns flinging
each other from one side of the ring to the other, bouncing back and forth against the ropes. As they did so, each roared at the top of his lungs and shook his head like some kind of demented animal. “Hope we see you again soon, Mabel,” my father said when he had finally reached the door after backing his way out of the living room, eyes fixed on the hyperactive performance on the television. “You must come and pay us a visit.”

“Maybe. But I think I’ll wait until she’s calmed down a bit,” Mabel answered, indicating my mother, who was pacing back and forth across the front garden like an overwound toy soldier. “And, judging by the state she’s got herself in, that might be a while.”

I
DIDN’T SEE MUCH OF TRACEY DURING THE NEXT FEW DAYS, TURNING
her down several times when she telephoned and asked me to meet her in the village. I even said no when she suggested we spend the afternoon at her house, despite the opportunity this presented of basking in the comfortable normality of her household, and the thrill that came over me when I considered the possibility of seeing Amanda again. Even in the face of these temptations, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my mother alone. Immediately following our visit to Mabel’s, her mood had plummeted. She had taken to her bed and stayed there, refusing to rouse herself when I went into her room to try to coax her out of bed. “I might never see my own mother again,” she sobbed, buried under blankets. “I’ve got nothing to look forward to. Nothing.”

I felt I had no choice other than to stay at home and make sure she didn’t do anything foolish. While I watched over her, I sought refuge in the books I’d sneaked out of the mobile library. Since my initial foray, I’d perfected my skills at sneaking books from the adult section, making sure I put on a particularly baggy item of clothing before running down the driveway to the van. I didn’t feel too guilty about deceiving the librarian because she didn’t seem to notice the absence of any of the
items I took, and I always sneaked them back onto the shelves within the regulation lending period of two weeks.

When the mobile library arrived that week, however, I was a little disturbed to find that I’d almost exhausted the potentially interesting titles in the adult section. After finding only one volume there that even vaguely interested me, I waited to check out the little stack of children’s titles I always took out to avoid arousing the librarian’s suspicion. As I stood there, I found myself eyeing the slush pile of titles she didn’t approve of that had been sent by the staff at the main library. I hadn’t heard of any of the authors, but two of the titles on the top of the pile looked particularly interesting:
Sons and Lovers
and
Brave New World
. So when the librarian dropped her date stamp and bent awkwardly behind the checkout counter to pick it up, I took the opportunity to grab the two books and stuff them down the front of my anorak. After I got them home, I was thrilled to find that I enjoyed these books, and to realize that if I could continue to poach from the librarian’s slush pile the horizons of my reading would broaden significantly.

Despite the distraction offered by my new reading, however, I was becoming increasingly concerned about my mother. The only time she got out of bed was to go to the toilet, and five days after we’d visited Mabel the only thing she had eaten was a packet of cream crackers and a bowl of Heinz cream of mushroom soup. Otherwise, she’d refused to eat, and I was beginning to wonder whether she might have decided to starve herself to death, wasting away so that I’d barely be able to distinguish the outline of her body from the ripples and ridges in the blankets, and she’d end up being carried out of the house again on a stretcher, this time a bundle of loose skin over jutting-out bones.

It was distressing, too, that my father seemed unconcerned. “Oh, she’ll pull herself out of it,” he said, slapping on another coat of paint in the hallway. “She’s just sulking after she got the news about her mother. But she’ll get over that soon enough.” Then he turned up the radio so he could listen to the cricket match.

Maybe he was right, maybe this was just a minor hiccup in my
mother’s recovery; maybe she’d get back to landscaping the back garden once she’d got over her initial shock. But, really, I never knew with my mother. What I did know, though, was that if she didn’t have any food she wasn’t going to get better. And though I might not be able to control her mood, I might be able to persuade her to eat.

“Mum,” I said, entering her room soon after my father had left for work. “Are you awake, Mum?” The curtains were closed and I found myself immersed in a grainy semidarkness, able to make out my mother’s undulating form beneath the bedclothes only after I’d been standing there for several seconds. She lay on her side, facing me, silent, unmoving. “Come on, Mum,” I said. “It’s time you got up.” I could make out her features now; they looked pale and smooth as paper in the dim light. Her eyes were closed, the lashes unflickering, her mouth without tension. I knew she wasn’t asleep; her breathing was too shallow. “Come on, Mum,” I said again, running my hand over her hair. I’d expected it to be soft, but it was crisp and springy with matted-in lacquer, a hard sheen-repelling touch. I stood up and walked over to the window. “Wakey, wakey,” I said, pulling back the curtains, dazzling myself with the bright morning light.

“Bloody hell, Jesse,” my mother said, pulling the bedclothes over her head. “Shut those curtains. You’ll send me blind.”

“It’s time you got up,” I declared. “You can’t spend the rest of your life in bed.”

“Who says I can’t?” she snapped, her voice stifled by the bedclothes. “It’s my life, I’ll do as I bloody well please.”

“You’ll end up with bedsores,” I said. This was true—I’d read about it in an article in one of my mother’s
Woman’s Realm
magazines about a woman who was in a coma for eight years before she woke up. “And your legs will stop working.” This was also true, or at least I thought it was. I seemed to recall reading how they had to keep moving the woman’s legs or the muscles would turn to jiggly slabs of fat.

“I don’t care,” my mother said, hiking the blankets farther over her head.

“Of course you care. If you can’t walk, I’ll have to push you around in a wheelchair. And you won’t be able to work on the garden anymore.”

“Hmmph …” She pulled the covers down, so that I could see one eye peering at me. “I don’t have the energy to take care of a garden. I don’t have the energy for anything.”

This was my opening. “Well, if you got some food inside you, Mum, don’t you think you’d feel much better?”

Her eye stared at me, unmoving, glassy, like a marble.

“And I was just thinking that if I went and got you some of your favorites—you know, made you some cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and bought you a packet of Mr. Kipling cream cakes …”

“Mr. Kipling’s?” She shifted her head, so that I could see both of her eyes now. They seemed to hold a slight glimmer.

“Yes, Mr. Kipling’s. You know how they always cheer you up.” I beamed, hoping to shift some of the jaunty hopefulness in my words into her.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, letting out a long, hefty sigh. “To be honest with you, love, I’m not sure there’s anything that could cheer me up right now. It’ll take more than a packet of Mr. Kipling’s.”

“I could get you the vanilla slices or, if you like, the chocolate éclairs.” I could feel my cheeriness slipping.

“Well … I suppose I could …” My mother raised herself onto the pillow and I felt my hope rise with her.

“So what do you want, then, vanilla slices or chocolate éclairs?” I pumped the enthusiasm back into my voice.

“I’ll have the vanilla slices,” she said, pushing the blankets from her chest to reveal her yellow flannel nightdress and her bare arms, still tan from spending all that time out in the garden. “No, I tell you what, why don’t you get the slices and the chocolate éclairs. After all, I haven’t had a decent meal in days.”

Ten minutes later, having raided the sparse contents of my piggy bank, I was out the door and on my way to retrieve my mother’s
beloved cakes. Of course, I couldn’t go to the Midham Co-op. I’d have to go to the next nearest Co-op, two miles away in Reatton-on-Sea.

I pulled my bicycle out of the garden shed and set out. It was a beautiful day, warm and breezy, the sky pale blue, the clouds huge snow-white cumulus that patterned the fields with fat, ever-shifting shadows. As I cycled along the winding, narrow road that led to the coast, I felt exhilarated by the wind and the sun on my face, the steady pumping of my legs against the pedals. I was almost able to leave my worries behind as I breathed deep and hard, took in the smells—earth and grass and the drifting perfume of summer flowers and, when I was almost there, the briny ripe smell of the sea. And then I saw it, a line of dark blue horizon against the paler sky. I pedaled faster as I came to a slight hill, huffing upward and then, after reaching its crest, freewheeling downward until I reached my destination.

Despite its name, the buildings that made up the village of Reatton-on-Sea weren’t right on the coast, and I was a little disappointed to realize that, so far back from the cliffs, it wouldn’t be Reatton-in-Sea anytime soon. It was, though, a little more lively than Midham. The village’s little high street curved away from the main road in a meandering S, and, in addition to the Co-op, there was a pub, a launderette, a post office, a bank, a butcher’s, a greengrocer’s, and a couple of poky little shops that sold seaside souvenirs. Next to the Co-op was a dingy-looking amusement arcade, with a row of flashing bulbs above its shabby marquee.

I bought my two packets of Mr. Kipling cakes without incident, pocketed my treasured Co-op stamps (despite being banned from the Midham Co-op, I was still collecting them, taking care to make sure that my father handed them over to me after each of his shopping trips), and headed back along the high street on my bike. I had planned to go back home immediately to deliver my mother’s cakes, but as I reached the junction with the main road I found myself irresistibly drawn toward the cliffs and the place where the land met the sea.

By the Reatton cliffs, the asphalt of the road became a sandy path
down to the beach, and right beside it stood the Holiday Haven Caravan Park, identified as such by a big painted sign. Below, there was a wide swath of sandy beach, dotted with holidaymakers who lay sunbathing on bright blankets and striped deck chairs; at the shoreline, the little figures of children bounced in the frothy white of the unfurling waves. I pulled to a halt next to the Holiday Haven entrance, climbed off my bike, and leaned it against the sign. The caravan park must have suffered some serious erosion, because the cliff there looked as if a huge voracious monster had taken bites out of it, with big clumps of dark clay spilling like crumbs down those jaw-shaped indentations to the beach. All the caravans were a good hundred yards away from the cliff edge, except for one, a particularly old and weathered-looking specimen, its sides patterned with rust. It was sited on its own narrow peninsula, within less than thirty feet or so of the tumbling cliff edge. I imagined myself within its thin metal walls on a stormy night, a cold east wind bawling outside, the waves roaring hungrily below. What would it be like, I wondered, to be inside that caravan if it was pulled down into the swirling cold water of the North Sea?