Another Life Altogether (15 page)

W
E PICKED UP TRACEY OUTSIDE HER HOUSE EARLY THE FOLLOWING
afternoon. She was wearing a pair of short-shorts, her big black platform sandals, and a tight red tube top. As she walked down the path toward our car, my mother muttered, “See, Jesse, at least I’m not the type of mother that would let you out of the house dressed like
that.”

I wasn’t sure that Mrs. Grasby was particularly thrilled about Tracey’s choice of outfit, either; she hadn’t exactly seemed like the kind of mother who would sanction such revealing clothes. But from our visit the other day I’d got the impression that Tracey’s mother was fighting a losing battle in controlling certain aspects of Tracey’s behavior, and that Tracey took particular delight in defying her. Still, as I looked down at the nondescript cotton trousers and shapeless T-shirt I was wearing, I wished that I had the courage to dress in outfits that would make my mother scream.

“Extremely nice to meet you, Tracey,” my mother said, peering through her window as Tracey drew near. She talked in her put-on posh voice, the one she always used to impress strangers and whenever she picked up the telephone. I found it excruciating. Fortunately, she could never keep it up for long and three sentences into any conversation she usually reverted to her normal accent.

“Yeah, thanks for inviting me.” Tracey pulled a smile and opened the car door. She clambered in beside me, arranging then rearranging her bare legs on the sticky vinyl of the backseat. As our car pulled away, I searched for signs of Amanda, but she was nowhere to be seen.

We turned onto the main road, and Tracey leaned toward my mother. “So I bet it’s a relief not be infectious anymore, Mrs. Bennett.” She spoke into my mother’s stiff mound of hair, which occupied most of the space directly in front of her.

“What did you say, dear?” my mother asked, cocking her head slightly.

I shot Tracey a fierce, wide-eyed look, pushing my lips tight together in an effort to silently communicate that it was critical that she drop this line of conversation right away. Tracey, however, was oblivious. “I said, it’s good that you’re not infectious anymore.”

My mother shifted around in her seat. “Infectious?” It was hard to gauge her expression. She had donned her sunglasses for this outing, the lenses reflecting back distorted round images of whatever she was looking at.

“Yeah,” Tracey said, ignoring my elbow dig to her side. “Jesse said you had the shingles. She said you’ve been quite poorly.”

“Did she now?” my mother said, turning toward me so that I could see a tubby, squat version of myself in her glasses, leaning as far into the corner of the backseat as possible. My father gave my mother a nervous glance. When he turned his attention back to the road, he let out a long, weighty sigh.

“Yeah, she said you’ve been poorly for what, a couple of months, right, Jesse?” Tracey looked from my mother to me. I said nothing. My mother continued to cast her silent, shaded scowl in my direction. “When I told my mum you had the shingles,” Tracey continued, “she said a friend of hers had it and was off work for months. Caused her all sorts of problems, she said.” Tracey’s ability to remain completely unaware of the frosty atmosphere that had filled the inside of the car was astounding. I quite envied her this talent.

“Well, Tracey,” my mother responded in an icily cheery voice, “you can tell your mother and anyone else that Jesse has broadcast the news of my illness to that I’m feeling all better now. And as for you, miss,” she said, stabbing an index finger in my direction. “I’ll be talking to you later.” And with that she spun around to stare solidly in front of her, as still as a statue until we pulled up, half an hour later, outside Granddad’s house.

GRANDDAD BENNETT WAS A
retired trawlerman who’d spent thirty years going out on deep-sea fishing boats for three weeks at a time to trawl for cod. He had a raw, gravelly voice and a face that looked as if it had seen the kind of weather that was common off Iceland, with skin as gnarled as old leather, lines worn by salt and gales and one-hundred-foot waves. “He must have raked in a fortune over the years,” my mother had said. “Earned good money on them fishing boats back then, they did. But the stupid sod drank and gambled it all away. Sent your poor grandma Bennett to an early grave.” I’d never met Grandma Bennett; she died two weeks after my parents were married. Their wedding photographs contained the last pictures of her—a dumpy, frizzy-haired woman with a tight-lipped smile that stretched like an inked-in line across her face. From these photographs, I surmised that she was as pleased about my father’s marriage to my mother as Granddad Bennett was.

When we arrived, we found Granddad sitting in his cramped living room, ensconced in the winged armchair that stood a little more than arm’s length from the television. He wore a white shirt, open to show sprouts of gray chest hair poking through the holes of his string vest, and red braces that bowed outward over his expansive belly and held his baggy trousers high above his waist. We had traipsed single file down the narrow hallway of his two-up, two-down terraced house, not bothering to knock before we let ourselves in, because Granddad wouldn’t have heard us anyway, since he was rather deaf. He had been
in the navy during the war, and his left ear was damaged when his ship hit a mine and sank. In recent years, his disability had worsened considerably, but he refused to wear a hearing aid. Whenever someone suggested that he might benefit from one, he’d respond, “That water was cold enough to freeze the bollocks off a brass monkey, and I managed to survive eight hours in it. I’ve lived through worse things than you can imagine. So I’m not about to start wearing some prissy bloody hearing aid.” I failed to see the logic of this argument. I did suspect, however, that he enjoyed being able to tune in and out of any surrounding conversation and sometimes rather liked making people repeat three or four times what they were saying to him.

“Hello, Dad,” my father said, bellowing loud enough to be heard above the blaring television. “Just thought we’d stop round for a visit, see how you’re getting on.”

“I’m all right,” Granddad bellowed back. “You’ve got no reason to worry about me. I’m watching the sports.” He waved us vaguely toward the settee and the other armchair across the room. “It’s a right good match, this.” He picked up the roll-up cigarette that lay in the ashtray balanced on the arm of his chair, took a long, audible drag, and turned back to the television, where a shifting pile of black and red–jerseyed men were scrambling and kicking at one another in what appeared to have started out as a rugby scrum.

“So who’s winning, then?” my father yelled, taking a seat in the second armchair. My mother, Tracey, and I sat down on the settee, our bodies pressed unwillingly together on the uncomfortable and uneven cushions.

“Eh?” Granddad said, looking quizzically over at my father.

“I said, who’s winning?” As he shouted across the living room, my mother closed her eyes, pursed her lips, and shook her head.

“They are,” Granddad answered. “But don’t you worry,” he said, giving us all a reassuring nod. “We’re going to catch up soon.”

I was far from clear who the “we” in this particular match might be. England, perhaps? Yorkshire? Hull Kingston Rovers? When I noticed
the vague expression on my father’s face, I realized that he was probably just as clueless. He’d never been much of a rugby fan. I spent several frustrating minutes trying to work out exactly who the opposing teams were, but with no scores announced and the commentator speaking in unintelligible rugby-related jargon, I was having no success. Tracey seemed indifferent to the game itself, but she kept leaning into me and making remarks about how good-looking some of the players were, what firm legs they had, and how she wouldn’t mind finding herself in the middle of one of their scrums. I studied the players she admired, trying to create within myself a similar enthusiasm for their mud-streaked muscled bodies, but as much as I tried it just wouldn’t come.

Aside from Tracey’s animated whispered commentary, no one spoke until, during a break in the action, my mother yelled toward Granddad, “This is Jesse’s friend, Tracey!”

“What?” Granddad said, frowning.

“This is Jesse’s friend, Tracey!” she yelled again, this time even louder.

Granddad let his gaze slide slowly up Tracey’s legs and torso. “Aye, I didn’t think I’d seen her before,” he said, his eyes finally resting on her face. “But I thought she might be one of your lot. I mean, it’s hard to keep track of them, isn’t it? Half the family flitting off to Australia, the rest of them in and out of the nick.” He flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette, pulled a smile, and turned back to the television.

I felt my mother’s body stiffen next to me, her knuckles pressed white into the settee cushions. She glowered at my father, who seemed suddenly intensely interested in the sufferings of an injured rugby player. Tracey crossed, uncrossed, and recrossed her legs. Even she, it appeared, had noticed the discomfort of this interaction.

“Right, then,” my mother said. “I’ll make a pot of tea, then, shall I?”

“Ooh, that’d be lovely,” Granddad said. “Nice of you to offer, Evelyn. And there’s some tinned salmon in the pantry. A plate of sandwiches would be nice, don’t you think?”

My mother swept wordlessly out of the room, slamming the door
behind her and then clattering and banging around in the kitchen with what was considerably more fervor than was required to make a pot of tea and a plate of tinned salmon sandwiches.

Tracey looked curiously around the cramped and cluttered little room. “Who’s that?” she asked, gesturing toward the numerous framed photographs arranged on the mantelpiece, along the sideboard, and on top of the television. Almost all of them showed the same person, as a baby, a child, and a teenager. In many of them he was pictured kicking, holding, or heading a football.

“My uncle Brian,” I responded. “He’s dead.”

Brian was my father’s only brother, older than my father by a little more than three years. I had never met him, but I’d heard about him often enough. He died before I was born, on his eighteenth birthday. After downing several pints at the local pub, to celebrate his attainment of legal drinking age, he’d stepped into the road and been killed by a passing delivery van, driven by an off-duty grocer’s assistant who was somewhat under the influence himself. I had taken for granted being surrounded by images of this dead uncle in Granddad’s house, but now that Tracey had pointed out his omnipresence I saw it with a stranger’s eyes and realized that it was a little odd. I scanned for any pictures of other family members and found only two: a smiling portrait of my grandmother and a small picture of my father and mother holding me as a baby. We occupied the far end of the sideboard, in a particularly shadowy corner of the room.

Tracey stood up and went over to the mantel. “Was he a football star or something?” she asked.

“What did you say?” Granddad said, turning toward her when he noticed her picking up one of the several trophies and medals that interspersed the photographs.

“She asked if Uncle Brian was a football star!” I yelled.

“Oh, yes, he was going to be,” Granddad answered, nodding vigorously at Tracey. “No doubt about that. He was a genius at football, was
that lad. A bloody genius. Could have been as good as Bobby Charlton. Could have played for England in the World Cup.”

“You don’t know that, Dad,” my father said, keeping his gaze fixed on the television screen.

“Of course I do. I saw our Brian play. He was a natural. More moves on that playing field than Fred Astaire has on the dance floor. Two days after he died, he was supposed to try out for professional.”

“For Hull City,” my father added scornfully but not quite loud enough for Granddad to hear. The local football team wasn’t exactly known for its stunning achievements. In recent years Hull had been lucky to avoid demotion to the Third Division. Even their most loyal of fans had started to become embarrassed about sporting the amberand-black of the Hull City colors.

“Everyone said he had talent,” Granddad continued. “If he’d lived, he’d have been making millions, just like that Kevin Keegan and the like. But, even though he died young, at least he achieved something.”

My father groaned, rolled his eyes, then spoke, this time loud enough for Granddad to hear. “He died rolling out the pub, drunk as a bloody skunk. I’d hardly call that an achievement, would you? And, besides, it wasn’t as if he was destined for a career as a rocket scientist, is it? I mean, all he could do was play football, for Christ’s sake.” He pronounced the word “football” with such utter derision, it was as if he’d declared that my late uncle Brian had nothing more than a talent for cleaning sewers. My father had always regarded the game with particular disdain and would begin to fume if he so much as heard the theme music for
Match of the Day
.

“Don’t you talk about your brother like that,” Granddad said, leaning forward in his chair and gesturing toward my father with a newly rolled unlit cigarette. “Your mother would turn over in her grave to hear you say such a thing, she really would. Broke her heart, losing Brian like that.” He turned to the television. The room was once again filled with the cheers of the rugby crowd and the babble of the commentator.

“He was right good-looking, wasn’t he?” Tracey said, picking up one of the photographs, a close-up of Uncle Brian kneeling with a football in his hands and smiling broadly into the camera. His hair was combed back, with a wave overhanging his forehead. His eyes were narrow, like my father’s, and his cheeks dimpled in the same way. But it was true—the combination of his features made him handsome, while my father’s made him merely ordinary, and Brian looked cheerier, somehow more at ease, his toothy grin filling the picture with its confident brilliance. Tracey stared into the photograph dreamily, as if it were a picture of David Cassidy and not my long-dead uncle Brian she was holding.

“Oh, yes, he was definitely the looker of the family was our Brian,” Granddad said. “And he had all the get-up-and-go.”