Another Life Altogether (2 page)

“Ooh, I wouldn’t go in there if I were you, lovey,” she said, placing one of her gnarly-knuckled hands on my shoulder. “Not something a girl of your age needs to see.” Her narrowed eyes met mine. A wave of sighs and moans rose behind me. “Quite distressing.” She pursed her lips and shook her head slowly, then turned expectantly toward the surrounding neighbors. “Anyone got a ciggy?” she inquired. There was an immediate flutter of hands and, almost simultaneously, three women
reached over and held up cigarettes. “I’ll take the Rothmans,” she announced, snatching the longest cigarette from the hand that held it, popping it between her lips, and leaning forward as another hand reached out with a flame. She inhaled deeply before she blew the smoke into my face.

“What’s going on? What’s happening?” I tried to push past her.

“Just a little … accident. Nothing you need worry yourself about. Now, why don’t you come over to my house, lovey, and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”

From deep inside the house I could hear the rumble of male voices, the clatter of metal against metal, and empty radio static. “Let me in,” I said, tears welling up in my eyes. They spilled down my face and made everything around me a blur of color and noise. I fumbled blindly against the broad body that blocked my way, my hands pressing into the armor beneath the baggy dress: metal clasps, corset stays, the rigid cups of Mrs. Brockett’s bra. I was lost in the smell of cigarette smoke, laundry detergent, and cat piss. I began to strike out with my fists.

“All right, all right,” she said, standing aside. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

AS I LEFT MORNING
registration and made toward my first lesson, I was relieved to see Jimmy Crandall skulk off in the opposite direction, his battered leather satchel hanging low on his hip and thudding against his side as he walked. But the girls who had crowded around me at the news of my mother’s good fortune left me, too, drifting down the corridor in twos and threes. Wearing strappy platform shoes, they sauntered arm in arm, as if they needed one another to hold themselves up. Julie Fraser, always at the center, was oblivious to me now, her perfect blond hair reflecting the harsh corridor lights. I watched her with a yearning so enormous that it felt like a hole in my chest. As I glanced down at the sensible brown shoes my mother had bought me from the Littlewoods catalog, I imagined crashing into Julie and all her whispering,
laughing friends to leave them splayed and breathless on the cold, dirty floor.

The rest of that day I was left to spend my time, as usual, with the other social outcasts: Patsy Lancey, who had twelve brothers and sisters and whose overwashed gray socks hung elasticless around her ankles and who everybody said had fleas; Janine Trotter, who had a mentally retarded sister and whose father had moved in with the seventeen-year-old girl who worked behind the counter at the newsagent’s; and Gillian Gilman, who had acne and was fat and whom everyone, even her older brothers, called “the whale.” Every day, we sat together in lessons and at school dinners, sneering at the popular kids and feigning interest in what we each had to say. We all knew we were in one another’s company only because no one else wanted us, that if any of those other cliques had invited us to join them we would have abandoned one another in a second. When Gillian Gilman asked me if it was true that my mother had won a competition and was off on a world cruise, I told her to shut her big, fat mouth and mind her own business. She wasn’t anyone I needed to impress.

When the final school bell rang, I knew I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to walk down our street trying to ignore the twitching net curtains in the front windows of all the houses or Mrs. Brockett smoking and tossing her cigarette ends into our garden as she kept vigil by her front door. Nor did I want to enter our cold and empty house. So I made my way instead to the public library, a place I visited often during the after-school hours.

The library was one of those old Victorian buildings in which even the whispered hisses of the librarian echoed against the high ceilings. It was always too hot, filled with the musty smell of aging paper and the force of suppressed coughs. The bookshelves were visited largely by pensioners—women with frosted hair and shopping bags, men who blinked behind big-framed National Health glasses and wore clothes that seemed too big. The newspaper and magazine section was inhabited by unemployed men with folded, gray faces who, despite the grimaces
of the librarian, drummed their nicotine-yellow fingers against the tables, as if the library were merely a waiting room and they were impatient to get on with the real purpose of their visit in some better place beyond.

I loved the library. I loved it for its spacious quiet, the way it was possible to discern each step and shuffle and sigh against that soothing backdrop of calm. No one would yell or scream or cry there, and if they ever dared I knew that the tight-lipped wrath of the librarian would come crashing down on them, as heavy and as crushing as the weight of all those books. I loved it because it was a refuge from school, a place where I had only to navigate my way around the ingenious precision of the Dewey decimal system rather than complex and cruel social hierarchies. But most of all I loved the library because that vigorously imposed silence implied an awe of something far bigger than me, than all of us. It showed the deepest regard not for our need to talk or belch or scream—not for the silly chatter of little children, the gossip of older women, or anyone’s gasping need for a cigarette—but for those stacks and stacks of books and the words and worlds that lay inside them.

That afternoon, I claimed a desk in the reference section, having planned to do the homework Mr. Cuthbertson had given us—a series of questions about the tidal patterns of the River Humber. Instead, I pulled out the
Reader’s Digest World Atlas
. I thumbed through its thick pages and found myself tracing the route for my mother’s cruise ship. After chugging cheerfully away from Hull Docks, I decided, she had sailed into the North Sea, around the fat-bellied coast of East Anglia, past the Thames, and into the English Channel. Soon, she’d be making her way around the coasts of France, Portugal, and northern Spain. She’d stop in Calais, where she’d do a bit of shopping and, like all the English people who went there, load up on cheap French wine, perfume, and crunchy baguettes. Then she’d find herself exploring the coast of Southern Europe and taking in the entire Mediterranean. I recognized the names of places like Barcelona, Marseilles, Nice, Monte Carlo, the islands of Corsica and Crete, the cities of Athens, Venice,
and Rome. Undoubtedly, she’d meet millionaires and high-stakes gamblers, racing-car drivers, fashion models, and perhaps even get to see the Pope make a speech from a balcony in Vatican City. Then, exhausted by the excitement, she’d venture back into the Atlantic, where her journey would continue. She’d travel all the way around Africa, India, Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, China, Japan. Then on to the Americas: Canada, the United States, and all those South American cities with mysterious, multisyllabic names—Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Tierra del Fuego. And perhaps then she might go on to the South Pole after all, leaving Cape Horn to sail past giant icebergs toward the massive continent of Antarctica.

When I arrived home, I found my father in the living room, sunk in his armchair, hidden behind his copy of the Hull
Daily Mail
. I knew he had been to see my mother earlier, and for a moment I wanted to ask him how she was and if they were taking care of her. But that might mean he’d ask me if I wanted to go and visit her at the hospital, and, more than anything, I did not.

“Make us a cup of tea, can you, love?” My father spoke from behind his newspaper. “News is on in a sec, don’t want to miss it.”

The BBC News was the highlight of my father’s day. Normally, he arrived home from work just a few minutes before it came on. He’d walk through the house, discarding his overcoat and suit jacket on the coat stand in the hall, battling the tight knot of his tie as he entered the living room. Then he’d turn on the television, drop into his armchair, and unlace his shiny black shoes, filling the room with his ripe, sweaty-feet smell. Sometimes he might sigh, turn to me, and say, “All right, Jesse, love?” But most days he just sat there silently as the BBC globe spun around and around, and that urgent, official-sounding music came on. Then, almost as soon as the newsreader began talking, my father would begin to yell, rolling his eyes and gesticulating, swearing and bouncing on the noisy, worn-out springs of his chair. “Stupid bosses’ lackey!” he’d shout at Richard Baker as he talked about another miners’ strike or the Watergate scandal. Sometimes he’d throw a shoe toward
the screen when he was particularly annoyed at the BBC’s account of events, or when one of the Conservative politicians he hated most came on. But usually he reserved the full force of his vitriol for those end-of-news feel-good items about the royal family—Prince Charles playing polo, the Queen Mother visiting a children’s hospital, Princess Margaret opening a new shopping center. “Bloody useless parasite!” he’d shout, wagging his finger at the screen while the Queen Mum, in pastel pink and pearls, smiled benevolently and waved to an adoring crowd. “Should go out and get a real job instead of living shamelessly off the rest of us. Come the revolution, we’ll make her clean toilets. That’ll wipe that bloody condescending look off her face.”

That evening, the headline was an IRA bomb in London, and my father was unusually subdued by the pictures of the burning skeleton of a building, the stricken faces of the bleeding survivors, the dazed ambulance men. “What’ll that do to solve anybody’s problems?” he said quietly as he shifted in his chair.

While my father sipped his tea and watched the rest of the news, I turned to the back page of the newspaper to find out what was on television that night. “Dad,” I said when the news was over and I knew he could be interrupted. “There’s a documentary on BBC Two about Spain at eight o’clock. Is it all right if we watch it?”

“Don’t see why not,” he said.

And so that night I embarked upon the research that would enable me to write letters from my mother to me. I sat in front of the television with a notebook scribbling down what I thought were pertinent pieces of information, like the population of Barcelona, the date Gaudi first began construction of his strange gingerbread castle of a cathedral, the number of matadors injured each year in the bull ring, a few relevant words of Spanish—señora, peso, pension, General Franco.

I liked the idea of my mother visiting Spain. It was where Julie Fraser had been for her holiday last year. She’d returned to school with her hair sun-bleached and her skin turned a deep, reddish tan. In lessons, I sat as close to her as I could, eavesdropping as she extolled
the “sexy Spanish waiters” and the all-night discos. “The women go topless on the beaches there, you know,” she said, giggling and peeling another piece of flaking, sunburned skin from her arm.

As I listened, I’d found myself imagining what it might be like to lie on some sunny Spanish beach next to Julie. We’d be best friends so comfortable with each other that we’d take off our tops so we wouldn’t have to worry about tan lines. Later, to cool off, we’d run into the warm blue water, where we’d swim and splash until we tired ourselves out.

“What the bloody hell are you staring at?” Julie had said when she caught me watching her tell her friends, yet again, how she’d been served fried octopus one night for dinner and it was the most disgusting thing she’d ever eaten in her life.

“Nothing,” I’d replied, pitching my gaze toward the geography textbook on my desk. For the rest of the lesson, while I attempted to reproduce a diagram of the East Yorkshire water table, I pondered the unfairness of a world in which Julie Fraser got to fly to the Costa del Sol for two weeks while the only holiday my family had taken was to a caravan park in Bridlington. There, our days had been punctuated by pulling out and putting away the narrow bed on which I slept that ingeniously converted into the dining table, and searching for ways to occupy our time in that confined, Formica-filled space as the rain poured down in sheets outside. While my father and I had tried to make the best of things by playing Snakes and Ladders, Ludo, and Monopoly, my mother had spent her time cleaning the caravan from top to bottom. She scrubbed around the tiny stainless-steel sink with a toothbrush, scoured the pots and pans with a Brillo pad, and mopped and re-mopped the kitchen floor with water she’d boiled on the foldaway stove. My father and I found ourselves soaked in the scents of Ajax, Pine-Sol, and bleach, and were finally driven out to the amusement arcade when my mother decided that she needed to take the furniture apart. “I bet it’s been years since anybody’s thought to take a scrubbing brush down there,” she said, tossing the cushions over her shoulder. “At
least the people who come here after us won’t have to feel like they’re spending their holidays in a cesspool of somebody else’s filth.”

I thought my mother might rather like Spain. It rarely rained, and since she was traveling on a cruise ship there’d be plenty of people to do all the cleaning. She wouldn’t have to spend her time worrying about dirt and germs. Instead, she could happily sit on deck, taking in the Mediterranean sun and admiring the beautiful coastline. She’d disembark on the southern coast, where she’d take a day trip to see the Alhambra, and when she reached Barcelona she could spend her time in the Gaudi park, contemplating the mosaic sculptures, or sitting at a café by the harbor watching ships come in from all over the world.

“The Spanish people are remarkably friendly,” I wrote in my mother’s letter to me. “Like most Southern Europeans, they are deeply religious. But they don’t let this get in the way of enjoying themselves. For example, the bullfights—like the one I went to yesterday—are very festive. Despite all the blood, everyone seems to have a very good time.”

I stayed up very late finishing that letter, writing and rewriting until it was as thrilling as I thought I could make it, until my mother’s visit to Spain made Julie Fraser’s holiday seem as exciting as a rainy week in Bridlington, until I was sure that no one, not even Jimmy Crandall, would dare to question my family’s good luck.