Another Life Altogether (45 page)

We were in our English lesson and Dizzy, Malcolm, and a few other students had been engaged in an animated discussion about the most recent book Ms. Hastings had assigned us:
To Kill a Mockingbird
. I’d enjoyed the book and I was interested in the discussion, listening attentively as Malcolm talked about how he thought Atticus Finch was a hero for going against all the other small-minded people in his town to defend the black man who had been accused of rape. Sitting next to me, Tracey yelled across the room to interrupt him. “Oh, for God’s sake,
shut your gob, you stupid bloody nancy boy! Nobody cares what you think, you little poof!”

“Shut up yourself,” Malcolm said, waving his hand at her.

Tracey laughed and gave a limp-wristed flap of her hand in imitation of him. “Hah! Look at the state of you, you nasty little queer.”

Her laugh fell from her face, however, as Ms. Hastings, in a few sweeping strides, marched across the classroom to stand next to her desk. “What did you just say, Tracey?” she asked in the quiet voice she reserved for the moments when she was most angry.

“Nothing, Ms. Hastings.” Tracey dropped her eyes to make a study of her desk.

“Really?” Ms. Hastings folded her arms and looked at Tracey steadily. “Because that’s not what I heard.”

“I didn’t say anything, Ms. Hastings,” Tracey said, still not looking away from her desk.

“I see. So I must be delusional, then, is that it?”

“What?” Tracey looked up, a perplexed frown on her face. A ripple of stifled giggles rolled across the room.

“Are you suggesting I’m hearing voices in my head, Tracey?” The giggles grew louder, but stopped abruptly when Ms. Hastings swept the room with her eyes.

“No, Ms. Hastings.”

“Good. Because I know what I heard, which was you insulting a fellow pupil in the most offensive manner.”

“I only called him a poof and—” This time the giggles erupted into a ragged wave of laughter.

“I know exactly what you called him, Tracey,” Ms. Hastings said. “I think we’ve established that there’s nothing wrong with my hearing. And if anyone else thinks there’s anything funny about using those words they can join you every afternoon next week in detention.” She lifted a single eyebrow and looked around the room. All the laughter ceased.

“Detention? Every day?” Tracey looked at Ms. Hastings with an expression of horror. “But Ms. Hastings, I—”

“Detention, a week of it,” Ms. Hastings said firmly. “And I do not want to hear those words cross your lips again.”

“No, Ms. Hastings,” Tracey muttered. Her features compressed into a picture of simmering rage, she dropped her eyes to her desk again.

Ms. Hastings returned to the front of the classroom, placed her hands on her hips, and sighed heavily. “I am very disappointed to see any of you using these sorts of words as insults,” she said gravely. “Making fun of someone because they’re different, or because you think they’re different, is hurtful and cruel and very, very wrong. I would have hoped that from our reading you’d already learned this, but I see that some people are slower than others.” One of the boys raised his hand. “Yes, Andrew?”

“But being a homo, that’s not the same as being black like the man in the book. Being a homo is … well, it’s perverted.” He turned his lips downward in an expression of disgust.

“The term, Andrew, is homosexual. And it’s a natural part of the human condition.”

I leaned forward in my seat. While Tracey grumbled beside me, I wanted to make sure I could hear every word Ms. Hastings said. “Homosexuality,” she continued, “has certainly been around for a long time, and in some societies—like ancient Greece, for example—it was considered quite normal. All those famous Greek philosophers and thinkers, a lot of them were homosexuals. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle—”

“Who the hell were they?” a boy shouted from the back.

“They were some of the most influential men of Western culture. And it wasn’t just men who were homosexual.” At this, I felt a bolt of excited interest rush through me. “One of the most talented women poets in ancient Greece was also gay. Sappho. She lived on the island of Lesbos.” At this, a few sniggers rippled around the classroom. Beside me, Tracey snorted. But I wasn’t paying any attention to Tracey at all. She could have disappeared into thin air as far as I was concerned.

“There have also been many, many writers and famous people since then who’ve been gay,” Ms. Hastings continued. “Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Alexander the Great, to name just a few. In fact, homosexuals have often been some of the most influential and talented people in society.”

“But why are they like that?” another boy yelled.

With a musical jingle from her colorful bangles, Ms. Hastings folded her arms in front of her and pressed her face into a thoughtful frown. “Well, no one really knows what makes some people homosexual. There are many different theories but no definite answer. Homosexuality could be the result of social forces or it could be the result of biology. All we do know is that it occurs in humans, in every society, and during every time in history. Estimates are that about one in ten people are homosexual.” She looked around the room. “Yes, that means among the thirty of you here it is likely that three of you are gay.”

At this, everyone began looking around, and a few of the boys began pointing fingers at one another, whispering, “It’s you, it’s you,” under their breath. I looked about, afraid to discover any of those fingers pointing in my direction; I was immensely relieved to see that they were not.

Ms. Hastings sat on her desk. “Okay, okay, enough of that. Clearly, you are not getting what I am trying to say, which is, Tracey,” she said, raising her eyebrows and looking pointedly over at Tracey, “that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being gay. It is a normal part of human nature, and it certainly should not be used as an insult against anyone.” Ms. Hastings paused, looking more solemn now. “I for one do not want to hear it being used in such a fashion in my classroom again. And, if I do, I will give the guilty party a weeklong detention, just like Tracey here. Any questions?” No one spoke. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get back to our discussion of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Malcolm, could you continue the point you were making before you were so rudely interrupted?”

Malcolm nodded. “What I was saying was that people like Atticus Finch, people who stand up for other people’s rights, no matter what
they look like or where they come from or how much everybody else hates them—well, those people are heroes.” He looked around the classroom, daring anyone to contradict him.

“Excellent point, Malcolm,” Ms. Hastings beamed. “Anyone else have any thoughts on that?”

I might have ventured to say something myself, but I was far too distracted as I tried to recall every word that Ms. Hastings had just said and to fathom the implications of those words. If being gay wasn’t perverted, as Frank and everyone at school seemed to think—if it was, as Ms. Hastings asserted, “natural” and “normal”—I wondered what that meant for me. And if my feelings about Amanda did mean that I was gay, then, according to Ms. Hastings I wasn’t alone.

I was still preoccupied with these thoughts when the lesson ended and we straggled out of the classroom and into the corridor. Consequently, I wasn’t paying much attention to Tracey at all. It was impossible, of course, not to notice that she was very unhappy about the prospect of detention for all of next week, since she’d mumbled complaints about it throughout the remainder of the lesson. But I hadn’t realized how angry she was until I looked up to see her, a few feet away from me in the corridor, jostling against Malcolm.

“You fucking little poofter,” she said, sticking her finger into his face. “Getting me into trouble like that. Well, I’m not going to put up with it. A whole fucking week of detention. That’s your fucking fault, that is.”

“It’s your own fault,” Malcolm said, swiping her hand away. “You should keep your big mouth shut for a change.”

“Oh, is that right?” Tracey said. “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

“Get lost,” Malcolm said, trying to push past her. “You don’t scare me, Tracey Grasby.”

Tracey shoved herself into him. “Well, you’d better be scared. You bloody well better be!” And with that she spun on her heels and stalked off down the corridor, her whole body rigid with rage.

THE NEXT MORNING
when I entered the chaos of the kitchen to make some breakfast, I looked out the window to see my mother in the back garden. Although there were a couple of workmen coming to the house later, she’d already begun putting up the massive marquee tent alone, swinging an enormous sledgehammer to sink the metal tent stakes into the ground. Each blow she landed made the glass in the kitchen window shiver in its frame. She looked a strange sight through the quivering glass, partly because she had an odd technique for using the hammer that involved making little jumps every time she delivered a blow, and partly because her face, neck, and arms (exposed because she’d stripped down to her white cotton vest for the task) were a very unsettling color.

When I’d returned home the previous afternoon, I’d found her in the bathroom, a bottle of Tanfastic in her hand. “This’ll make your grandma think twice,” she’d said as she smoothed the gelatinous beige cream over her face and arms. “I’ll tell her we’ve had such good weather this spring that I’ve been sitting out in the garden getting a tan.” She let out a high yodeling laugh, as if she were telling herself an enormously funny joke. “If she sees me like this, who knows, maybe she’ll change her mind about staying in Australia.”

The bottle had said, “Get all the tan without all the trouble. Achieve a natural-looking glow without sitting in the sun for hours. You’ll be the envy of all your friends!” However, “natural-looking” was one thing my mother was not, and I doubted that friends, relatives, or enemies would envy the way she appeared. Almost as soon as she applied the Tanfastic, it turned her skin a rather disturbingly bright and very streaky orange. Fortunately, my mother didn’t realize how very bizarre she looked. In fact, she seemed quite satisfied with the results, declaring, as she admired her reflection in the bathroom mirror, “I can’t wait to see the look on your grandma’s face when she gets here and sees this.” Neither could I.

As I stood by the window sipping a cup of tea and eating a few stale chocolate digestives and watching my mother work, I took in the transformation of the garden. It really was quite spectacular. What had been a virtual jungle of thistles, bramble bushes, and overgrown shrubs less than a year ago had become a wide green lawn with a complicated pond and fountain at its center. The surrounding trees—except for the dead and dying elms—were clothed in leaves, lush with burgeoning life. One side of the garden was bordered completely by a hawthorn hedge, and though my mother hadn’t planted it, she had cleared the garden so that it was now possible to see the blossom there that had begun blooming in late April. Creamy white against the dark hawthorn leaves, it filled the air with a sweet, heady aroma that made me want to close my eyes and breathe deeply whenever I caught its scent. The lawn itself was bisected by a stone path and surrounded on all sides by neat little borders filled with flowers that included, much to my delight, bright-faced little pansies, as well as white and pink alyssums, yellow primroses, and golden marigolds. She’d even planted rosebushes, which had started to develop slim little buds that I knew would open into fat, fragrant blooms as soon as summer came. The pond, finished only a couple of weeks before, was now filled, and the fountain at its center—an enormous fake-marble affair sporting chubby-cheeked little cherubs with fig leafs on their groins—merrily spilled water over its three wedding cake–like layers. A week earlier, my father had purchased a dozen huge goldfish at a pet shop in Hull, bringing them home in several buckets he’d put in the boot of his car. Although the water had slopped about as my father drove the curvy road home and half of it had ended up in the boot rather than in the buckets, the fish had miraculously survived. Now, in the pond, they wove serenely between clumps of slimy green weed, their big convex eyes staring sideways, bodies flashing as they moved.

As I finished my tea, I thought of going into the garden to look at the fishpond before I went to school. But with my mother out there wielding her sledgehammer it was hard to imagine that even the fish
felt protected as she slammed those stakes into the shuddering ground. So, instead, I put on my coat, lifted the strap of my satchel over my shoulder, and headed out the door.

When I arrived at the bus stop, Tracey was already there and, much to my relief, in a considerably better mood than she’d been in the previous day. Apparently, she and Greg had patched things up the night before.

“I gave him a right good telling off for smoking with that slag Margery Pearson.” She was splayed across the bench, her elbow resting on its wooden arm, her head propped on her palm. I sat down beside her and dropped my satchel, which was overstuffed and very heavy, since I’d begun lugging all my letters around. “He promised me he’d never do it again. Said he doesn’t like her anyway. He was just cadging a cig off her, that’s all. Anyway, I made him drive me home and we rode right by Margery Pearson’s bus on the way back. With a bit of luck, she’ll have seen him with me and she’ll know to keep her greasy hands off him from now on.”