Another Life Altogether (10 page)

“Now, you watch your language, young lady,” my father warned.

“Yes, you bloody well watch your language,” my mother echoed, apparently triumphant that she had got my father so easily on her side.

I could feel the heat of tears behind my eyes, the wetness in my throat, the mad thrumming of my heart in my chest. “I don’t care,” I said. And then, to emphasize my point, “I don’t sodding well care. I’m sick of it. Sick of everything. And you,” I said, pointing at my mother again. “If you want me to treat you like my mother, maybe you should start acting like one. If not, maybe you should go back to the loony bin, where you belong.”

For several seconds, neither of my parents said anything, and all of us were hurled into a taut silence. I looked at their faces, which were utterly still, as if they had been slammed against thick panes of glass. No one moved. No one said anything. I felt an icy dread spread from my stomach throughout my body. Then the newsreader said chirpily, “And now on to news at home,” and the spell was broken. My father blinked, my mother’s lips started to twist and tighten. I tried to imagine myself shrinking.

“Did you hear that?” she screamed. “Did you bloody well hear that?”

My father sighed and pushed himself out of his armchair. He walked toward me.

“You’d better teach her a bloody lesson!” my mother yelled.

“Don’t you ever talk to your mother like that,” he said, his tone so dull and flat that I could barely hear him above the sounds of the television. And then he hit me. A single, hard slap across my cheek that sent me reeling backward into the wall. I saw light and crimson. I tasted the stickiness of my own saliva. I felt the sting of skin hitting skin, the slam of my backbone against the wall. “Now get upstairs, before I give you a damn good hiding,” he said, already making his way back to his chair.

“I’M GOING OUT.”
It was early the next morning and I’d been standing in the hallway, waiting for my father to come out of the bathroom. He’d emerged in a cloud of thick white steam. “I’m not looking after her all the time.” I gave a disdainful nod toward the door of my parents’ bedroom, where my mother was still sleeping. “It’s just not fair,” I concluded, folding my arms and pressing them hard against my chest.

“I know, love. I know.” He put a hand up to his damp, flushed cheek—the same gesture I had made after he had hit me the previous evening. The movement made my fury at him burn all over again.

“I don’t care if she ends up in the hospital. I don’t care if she goes away for the rest of her life. Why couldn’t they just have kept her there?” If she’d stayed in Delapole, the doctors and nurses would have to watch her. I could get on with my life without having to worry all the time. I could have kept on imagining for myself a breezy world-cruising mother.

“Now, love, don’t go talking that way.” He looked nervously toward the bedroom door. “I know you don’t mean it.”

Perhaps I didn’t, but I was no longer sure. Right then, I would have done anything to live alone with my father, with his quiet predictability. The few times he’d hit me, it had been only at my mother’s prompting. “That child needs to be taught a lesson,” she’d say, and then my father would dutifully deliver the blow.

“Look,” he said, “why don’t you let me get dressed and I’ll come downstairs in a minute. We can have a little chat before I leave.”

“All right,” I said, determined not to be talked out of my decision. I couldn’t bear even one more day confined there with my mother. Besides, ever since I’d met up with Amanda, I’d been itching to get out and see if I could bump into her again.

“That’s better,” he said. “Be a good girl and go and make a pot of tea, can you?”

He opened the bathroom door again, and I found myself immersed in steam, the lathery smells of soap and shaving lotion. I stood for a moment, my eyes closed, breathing them in, caught in a sudden stream of memory, remembering how, when I was small, I loved to watch my father shave. It was like witnessing a special, one-person ceremony, and I’d try every morning to wake up early enough so that I could follow him into the bathroom, sit down on the closed lid of the toilet, and take the whole thing in. I couldn’t wake early enough every day, but when I did I’d feel an elated, nervous excitement as I tugged on my father’s paisley-patterned pajamas. “Can I watch, Daddy?” I’d say.

“‘Course you can, pet,” he’d reply, closing the door behind me, sealing us together in those scents.

There was something about the measured precision it took, his moving the razor through the soapy white foam, skin held taut and still as he cut the shadow of bristly whiskers from his face. On weekends, when he had more time in the morning, he’d let me stand beside him on a stool that he took from my mother’s dressing table. He’d lift me there, and I’d stare at my own reflection as he soaped up my face with his soft-bristled shaving brush. He’d give me an old razor, with the blade removed, and together we’d watch ourselves in the mirror and shave. “There you go,” he’d say, after I’d rinsed my face in warm water and patted my cheeks with his Old Spice aftershave. “Nice and smooth and ready to kiss your mummy.” And then we’d rub our cheeks together, soft skin against soft skin.

THE NEWSREADER ANNOUNCED
that a bomb in Belfast had killed two British soldiers, another thousand steelworkers were to be laid off, and the miners were threatening to go on strike again.

“What’s the world coming to, eh?” my father asked, shaking his head, pressing the rim of his teacup to his lips.

I nodded and sighed, as if I felt equally world-weary. I wanted to
care more about industrial strife and the war in Northern Ireland, but all I really cared about was what was happening in our house. “I’m going out today, Dad,” I said.

“I know, love. I know you can’t watch your mother all the time. It’s not right, not for a girl your age. But, Jesse …”

“What?”

“Just try not to aggravate her.”

“I never try to aggravate her. She just gets aggravated.”

“You know how easily she gets upset. Just try not to bother her, okay?”

“Okay,” I said flatly. “I’ll try.”

“Thanks, love.”

“Dad,” I said, looking at him timidly.

“What?” He glanced at his watch. I could tell he was ready to leave, already eager to be out the door and have done with our conversation. “Are you going to repair the house?”

He grimaced. “I already told you I’m going to fix it. Who do you think I am, bloody Superman?”

“No, it’s just that—”

“I know, I know. The place is a bloody pigsty.” He checked his watch again, put his teacup on the counter, and began adjusting the knot of his tie. “Look, if you promise to be good, not to bother your mother and not cause any trouble, I’ll start work on the house again. How’s that sound?”

“All right,” I said, smiling.

“Good. Well, I’m glad we can at least agree on something. So no talking back, none of your cleverness. You understand me?”

“Yes, Dad. I understand.”

FOR ONCE, IT WAS
sunny, the sky a pale blue, patterned by smudges of white cloud, their shadows shifting across the ground, changing the colors of the fields as they moved. Everything tasted clear and damp,
and the air was filled with a ripe, earthy smell. It made me want to breathe deep, as if I could take the freshness of the morning inside me and push out all the stale air I’d inhaled inside the house.

It was a fifteen-minute walk into the village. When I got there, I walked purposefully past the short string of shops—the Co-op, the launderette, and the newsagent’s on the corner—and past a series of little streets—Buttercup Close, Daffodil Gardens, and, finally, Marigold Court—that made up the Primrose Housing Estate. Each of them was lined with neat semidetached houses, almost exactly like the house I had fantasized for my own family, with orange bricks and tidy squares of lawn in the front. Some of them even had pansies in the borders; others had evenly spaced rosebushes drooping with the weight of redolent blooms. Marigold Court was a cul-de-sac at the edge of the estate, and the houses at the end of the street backed onto a grassy field.

It was just after ten o’clock, and the street was completely quiet. As I walked slowly along the pavement, I examined each house to see if it might hold a clue that would tell me if Amanda lived there. But each of them was essentially identical, the only differences being the color of the front doors, the pattern of the net curtains, and the length of the grass on the front lawns.

I began to feel foolish for having come here. What had I been expecting, that Amanda would see me and spring gleefully through her front door to greet me? She probably wouldn’t recognize me, anyway. She was too old and too pretty to be interested in making friends with someone like me. Besides, she lived here, in this neat little haven, while I occupied a ridiculous shambles that would never be repaired.

“You looking for something?”

I almost bumped into the girl before I noticed her. She stood, arms crossed over her chest, bony hip stuck out at an angle, eyebrows raised in truculent expectation of an answer.

“I, er, I just moved here. I’m just looking around.”

“Hmmph,” she snorted, eyebrows still raised. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She had big cheeks, a small mouth, a
perky little nose, and long-lashed brown eyes—a combination of features that left her in the uncertain territory between plain and pretty. “I was exploring.”

“What, like Christopher Columbus?” Her tone was sharp.

“No.” I shook my head. “I was just trying to get the lay of the land.”

“Lay of the land?”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. I’m not stupid, you know.”

“I know. I didn’t mean to—”

“You moved into Johnson’s house, didn’t you?”

“Johnson’s house?”

“Yeah, Johnson’s house—the one that’s falling down, on the main road out of the village. Geoffrey Johnson used to live there.”

“He did?” My curiosity about the previous occupant of our house overcame my nervousness. “Did he die there?” I asked, imagining him an old man expiring in one of our bedrooms, leaving behind the disheveled chaos.

“No. He used to own the fish-and-chip shop in Reatton. But then he bought a villa in Marbella. Been living there the last five years.”

“Oh.” Somehow the idea that the previous owner of our house had escaped to the heat and sunshine of Spain seemed particularly unfair.

“That place has been empty since he left. Nobody wanted to buy it. Until you moved in, that is.”

“Oh,” I said again. It was no wonder the house was in such disrepair. And if no one else wanted it, everyone in the village must have thought my father was a fool for buying it. We’d been here just a month and already we were probably a local laughingstock. So much for making a new start.

“Want a piece of chewy?” she asked after digging about in one of the appliquéd pockets of her wide-flared trousers and pulling out a packet of Wrigley’s spearmint gum.

“Thanks,” I said. I watched her take a piece, rip open the foil and
paper packaging, toss it onto the ground, and pop the sliver of gum into her mouth. I did the same.

“So, what’s your name?” she asked, chewing open-mouthed so that I could see the gum rolling over her teeth as she spoke.

“Jesse. Jesse Bennett.”

“My name’s Tracey Grasby. But my friends call me Trace.” She said this in a tone that conveyed that I was definitely not to consider myself in this category. She snapped her gum a couple of times, then walked a few steps over to the fence in front of the nearest house and perched herself there. “Where did you move from, anyway?” she asked, resting her feet, in shiny black sandals with thick platform soles, on the lowest rail of the fence. Her feet were bare under the sandals, and her toenails were painted pink. I looked down at my own feet, housed in a pair of ragged white plimsolls, my ankle socks sagging listlessly, as if wilted by the sudden summer heat.

“We moved from Hull,” I said.

“Really? We lived in Goole before we moved here. I didn’t like it there much. But it’s worse here. It’s really boring.” She gave me a derisive look that suggested that, despite the fact that I was new to the village, I should still be considered part of its unrelenting tedium. “We moved here three years ago, when my dad got a job in Bleakwick. Want to watch out for my dad. Says we’ve got to keep up the area, don’t want strangers lurking about. He’s liable to call the coppers on you. Either that or he’ll knock you for six.”

“I wasn’t lurking about, I was—”

“Getting the lay of the land. I heard you the first time.”

I felt myself blush again. As soon as I could reasonably extract myself from this conversation, I decided, I would go straight back home. I didn’t care if I had to spend every day of the summer with my mother; it would certainly be preferable to being under the scrutiny of this girl.

“Anyway, how old are you?” she asked.

“Thirteen.”

“Big for thirteen, aren’t you?”

“I’m tall for my age,” I said. Everyone commented on it. My mother, especially, was always complaining about how I just kept on growing. “Got the same big bones as our Mabel,” she’d say as she searched fruitlessly in the sale racks for something that would fit me. Then, gesturing toward my slightly mounded chest, she’d add, “At least we can thank God you’re not taking after her in the bust department. You don’t want to be stuck carrying those things around with you for the rest of your life,” as if Mabel’s breasts were two overladen shopping bags that she’d surely choose to put down if only she had enough sense.