Another Life Altogether (24 page)

As I continued, I felt my embarrassment at my words fall away. It started to feel good, cleansing almost, to get it all out there on the page. Though I knew it was terribly wrong to want to kiss another girl, when I wrote about wanting to take Stan Heaphy’s place, to wrap my arms around Amanda, it made me feel calm, less troubled, as if putting my desires in writing took the shamefulness out of them, transformed them into sentences made up of nothing more than words.

When I finished my letter, signing it “All my love, Jesse,” it was several pages long and the time was after ten o’clock. I tore the pages carefully out of the notebook, folded them, and looked around the room. For a moment, I considered hiding them under my mattress, but I decided that might not be such a good place. Despite my mother’s current apathy, there was always a chance she’d find some new frenzied energy
and take it upon herself to clean the bedrooms from top to bottom, single-handedly turning the mattresses on all the beds. After giving it a few minutes’ consideration, I took one of the books down from my bookshelf, pressed the letter inside its pages, and put it back on the shelf. Though in a sudden fit of housework my mother might dust off my books, she was very unlikely to look inside. Then, my confession made and hidden away, I changed into my pajamas, climbed into bed, and promptly fell asleep.

I
USUALLY GOT A CHANCE TO TALK TO AMANDA IN THE MORNING AT
the bus stop, but she never took the bus home with us after school. She would stand outside the school gates with Stan and ride back to Midham on his motorbike. They argued frequently, but just as frequently they engaged in long snogging sessions, eyes closed, mouths squished together and moving as if they were chewing on each other. During the first couple of weeks of school, Tracey and I watched them from the school car park until our bus arrived, Tracey huffing and mumbling under her breath about how Stan was far too good for Amanda, how she hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he moved on to some other, better girl. I said nothing, guiltily imagining myself there instead of Stan, Amanda in my arms.

Within a short time, however, Tracey got over her fixation on Stan Heaphy when she developed a crush on Gregory Loomis, one of the boys who regularly hung out with Stan by the school gates. Greg was a lanky fifth-year who tottered around school on platform shoes sporting a feathered haircut, wispy sideburns, and flares so wide he could have held a disco inside his trousers. He had a precociously hairy chest, which he attempted to reveal at any opportunity by walking around school with his tie loosened and his shirt undone even when the rest of
the Liston Comprehensive student body had donned pullovers to keep off the deepening October chill. “Don’t you think he’s bloody gorgeous?” Tracey oozed each time we passed him in the corridor (an event that happened with great frequency after she obtained a copy of his timetable and began dragging me and the Debbies on circuitous detours to our lessons so that our movements would coincide with his). I thought he had decent enough looks, but I wasn’t convinced that he had much in the way of personality, since the only thing he seemed capable of talking about was his favorite football team, Liverpool; he became positively fanatic when the subject of their star player, Kevin Keegan, came up. It wasn’t long, however, before Tracey became an avid Liverpool fan herself, replacing the pictures of David Cassidy she’d pasted on the front of her exercise books with photographs of Kevin Keegan and his teammates.

There were times, during the first few weeks of school, when I had to admit I found the endless conversations about Greg Loomis and Kevin Keegan a little tedious, and the Debbies’ endless choruses of “Bye Bye Baby,” and “Shang-A-Lang” were starting to convince me that I could quite easily grow to hate all the members of the Bay City Rollers equally. But these things were, after all, the things that girls were supposed to talk about, and if I wanted to keep my friends, putting up with this seemed like a small price to pay. I felt similarly about letting Tracey and the Debbies copy most of my homework and, when the teacher wasn’t looking, the work I did in class. Most of the time, we all got B’s and C’s—a considerable improvement for the four of them, since, they told me, they used to get mostly C’s and D’s. Before my mother was taken to Delapole, I’d almost always got A’s, but that seemed an age away.

The only lesson in which I might have wanted to do better in was English. I kept hoping that Tracey and the Debbies would warm to Ms. Hastings, but they never did, complaining before, during, and after her lessons about what a “bloody hippie weirdo” she was. Though I didn’t say so, I thought she was a breath of fresh air, and I loved to watch her
stride down the corridors. With her big boots, bright clothes, and the constant jangle of her jewelry, she made the rest of us in our dull school uniforms look washed-out and dim. The other teachers, too, in their conservative tweeds and sensible shoes, all looked faded beside her. Her lessons were also far more interesting than any others, involving avid discussions in which Malcolm, Dizzy, and a handful of others talked about what motivated a particular character or the writer of the book. Sometimes I felt a brief ache to jump in and say what I thought, but I stayed silent. And when, outside in the corridor, the other girls shoved against Dizzy and ran off with her glasses, or the boys tripped up Malcolm, laughing at him as he stumbled, and called him a “clumsy little queer,” I was glad that I’d stayed sheltered within my little group of friends, that I hadn’t drawn any attention to myself.

After school, because I wasn’t working particularly hard on my homework, I had quite a lot of free time. So, while my mother spent her evenings sleeping or curled up silently in bed, and my father sat alone ranting at the television, I sat in my bedroom filling first one and then a second notebook with letters to Amanda. Soon, I had so many that it became more difficult to hide them between the pages of my books. So instead I retrieved an empty Teatime Assortment biscuit tin from the kitchen, shook out the remaining crumbs, and placed my letters inside. Then I pulled out all the old toys, shoes, and the boxes of Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders that covered the bottom of my wardrobe, put the box of letters there, and piled all those other things on top.

My early letters talked mostly about how wonderful it had been to see Amanda that morning at the bus stop, recalled the short conversations we sometimes had, and included long paragraphs in which I tried to convince her that Stan Heaphy was utterly undeserving of her attention. But as I continued to write, my letters began to change course into imagined days I might spend with her, and soon I found myself writing letters to Amanda that barely touched upon reality, stories that were, instead, long, delicious fantasies of the life we might have if we
ran away together or lived in another time or place. The first of these were inspired by an episode of
Star Trek
.

Star Trek
was one of my favorite programs. Fortunately, my father liked it, too, and over the years we’d developed our own little ritual in preparation for watching it. Just before
Star Trek
started at eight o’clock, we’d make a fresh pot of tea and set out a plate of biscuits on the coffee table. Then, even in the summer when it was still light outside, we’d close the living-room curtains so we could shut out the mundane world of the present and immerse ourselves in a future where people wore bright-colored stretchy pantsuits and traveled faster than the speed of light. “Space, the final frontier,” my father and I would both chorus along with Captain James T. Kirk against a background of swirly, space-age music, as we shuffled to get more comfortable in our respective seats. The only parts of
Star Trek
I had never liked were the scenes where some dazzled female alien with bouffant hair and sparkly eye shadow fell into the arms of Captain Kirk and demanded to be taught how we humans show affection. My father equally disdained these scenes, muttering, “Bloody Americans, always got to get some sex in somewhere.”

On that particular Monday, however, I was all attention as Captain Kirk and his latest alien love interest snogged. Instead of itching for the scene to be over, I watched intently as I imagined myself as James T. Kirk and Amanda as the female alien who fell into my arms. In fact, the fantasy became so vivid that when my father turned to me with some disparaging comment about Americans and their vulgar sensibilities, I found myself avoiding his eyes, worried that he’d be able to tell what I was thinking just by looking at me. As soon as the episode was over, I charged upstairs to my bedroom, where I took out my notebook and began a letter to Amanda in which I suggested that we might become space travelers together. I’d be Captain Jesse T. Bennett, commander of the spaceship, while Lieutenant Amanda Grasby would be my second in command.

I wrote my
Star Trek
–inspired letters for quite a while. They were full of all kinds of dangers—flesh-eating plants, toxic gases, hostile shape-shifting aliens. Despite these terrible hazards, I’d always manage to save Lieutenant Grasby, and she, of course, would always thank me by throwing herself into my arms and landing a grateful kiss on my lips. Then, one Saturday night, I stayed up late to watch a Vincent Price horror film and started writing letters that involved haunted castles, marauding peasants, and wicked counts determined to spread terror throughout the land. In these letters, I became the vampire- and ghost-hunting hero who prevented the triumph of whichever evildoer was threatening to take over the land, while also rescuing the beautiful Amanda, who had been taken captive and, without my intervention, faced a fate as one of the living dead.

Immersed in these letters, I found that my life at home became far more tolerable, an inconvenient backdrop to the adventures I took myself on every night. And even though it was still agonizing to see Amanda climb onto the back of Stan Heaphy’s motorbike every afternoon, on the bus ride home I comforted myself with the thought that later I could create stories in which Amanda and I always ended up together, where even space aliens and vampires couldn’t keep us apart.

ON THE FIRST SATURDAY
of the half-term holiday, Auntie Mabel rang early. “How’s your mother?” she asked after inquiring about my new school and the progress of my father’s renovations.

“She’s all right.”

“All right?” Mabel said dubiously. “What’s that supposed to mean, eh, Jesse? Let’s face it, when was the last time our Evelyn was all right?”

“She’s sleeping a lot,” I said. Above me, my parents’ snoring reverberated through the ceiling. It was like listening to the grumbling melodies of two steam locomotives as they chuffed slowly along parallel railway tracks.

Mabel was, of course, correct. My mother wasn’t all right. She
wasn’t anywhere approaching all right. For the past several weeks she hadn’t stirred out of her terrible inertia, barely got dressed, and bathed so infrequently that even from a distance I could make out her sour and musky smell. And though she hadn’t mentioned Delapole or made reference to any plans to do herself in, she’d started going on at length about how maybe she should buy a ticket and fly off to Australia, where, even if being with her mother didn’t cheer her up, at least the change in the climate would.

Sometimes I tried to talk to her, sitting beside her on the settee, taking her hand, and telling her how nice it would be if she started working on the garden, how the exercise and the fresh air would do her good. “It’s too wet and too bloody cold,” she’d say, pulling her hand away. “And, anyway, it’ll be winter soon and everything in the garden will be dead.” Then she’d go on to tell me how it would be summer soon in Australia, and there would be lovely weather in Sydney and how her mother and “that bloody Australian gigolo” would celebrate Christmas with a barbecue on the beach.

“Well, listen,” Mabel continued, the sound of her lighting a cigarette and taking a sighing drag audible over the telephone. “You tell Evelyn to get herself up and out of bed, because I’m coming over.”

“You are?” I was delighted. I’d been missing Mabel terribly, longing for her to stride in and brighten up our dull and ugly house. If anyone could talk my mother out of this bad patch, it was Mabel. “What time will you be here?” I asked.

“Oh, tell your mam and dad I’ll be there around one o’clock. And I’m bringing someone with me.”

“Who?”

“My new fella, Frank.”

“Frank?” I repeated, hoping this wasn’t the same Frank who had startled my mother in Mabel’s bathroom.

“Oh, don’t you worry now, Jesse,” Mabel said. “I’ll make sure he puts some clothes on before he comes along.”

When Mabel arrived that afternoon with Frank in tow, both my
parents were a little surprised. I’d decided, after my mother’s disastrous first encounter with Frank, that perhaps it was best that I didn’t mention Mabel’s intention to bring him. That way, my mother might have a little more of a positive attitude toward her sister’s approaching visit and my father wouldn’t be left anxiously awaiting another social catastrophe in the making. The prospect of seeing her sister had miraculously propelled my mother out of bed. She’d even managed to take a bath, get dressed, do her hair, and put on some makeup. When she went to answer their knock, she looked as full of fearsome energy as she had when she’d been swinging that scythe around the garden to clear the weeds a couple of months before. As I watched her pull open the door with rediscovered vigor, I let myself hope that perhaps Mabel could inject some liveliness into her that would last beyond the brief few hours of this visit.