Another Life Altogether (27 page)

M
ABEL’S VISIT HAD NO POSITIVE IMPACT ON MY MOTHER’S MOOD.
During the following weeks, she rarely left her bedroom, and, as the days became shorter and the leaves turned a glorious array of gold, crimson, orange, and a hundred shades in between, she did not even look out her window to notice the change in the seasons. When the clocks went back at the end of October, plunging the days into a lingering gray dusk soon after four o’clock, it made no difference to her, since she rarely got out of bed. And when the weather became cold, frost leaving a glimmering layer of white over everything in the mornings, she simply piled more blankets on her side of the bed, eventually lying under a stack so heavy and thick that I wondered that it didn’t suffocate her.

My father continued his indifference to my mother’s decline, although, after giving Frank a tour of all his half-finished projects, he did take a renewed interest in repairing the house, throwing himself into it with an enthusiasm I had never witnessed in him before. He stayed up late into the night stripping the wallpaper in the living room, patching cracks in the ceiling, painting the walls, and installing new light fixtures. His weekends were fully occupied, too—ripping out frayed and rotted carpet, putting down new floorboards, replacing the dry rot-riddled
window frames outside. It was as if, with my mother’s failure to leave her bed, he was trying to evoke her old ferocity, as if he had decided that if he couldn’t force her to get back to her former, frantic self, he would imitate it.

While I still spent most of my evenings writing letters to Amanda, the highlight of my days came before school started, at the bus stop in Midham, when I could actually spend some time in her company. I looked forward to this with such fervor that just the thought of it was the thing that propelled me out of bed. And the hope of talking with her meant that I usually got to the bus stop far too early, always several minutes before everyone else. I waited in blistering winds that tore the leaves from the trees and scattered them in swirling piles while my coat whipped about my body, or on days when fog shrouded the fields and made the whole world bone-deep cold and impossibly still. When it rained, I stood under an umbrella, watching the leaping dance of raindrops on the street, letting the damp seep into my skin. But none of this mattered when Amanda appeared, and those few minutes that I got to spend with her filled me with a heat that, no matter how cold and inhospitable the weather, I carried with me for the rest of the day.

One morning in mid-November, when the sky was a stunning cloudless blue and the ground was silvered with frost, Amanda appeared at the bus stop earlier than usual, so that I had the luxury of a full fifteen minutes to talk with her before the bus arrived to sweep us off.

“Hiya, Jesse,” she said as she approached. Though she smiled at me warmly, she looked a little ragged, tired, and not quite as immaculately groomed as she usually was.

“Hiya,” I said, light-limbed at the sight of her. I was particularly pleased because, apart from one of the younger boys who preoccupied himself with smashing his heels into all the iced-over puddles at the side of the road, there was no one else at the bus stop yet. Usually, Tracey was already there by the time Amanda showed up, and I was always aware of her standing somewhere close, making disgruntled huffs
and muttered comments while I spoke with her sister. Most of the time, I ignored her. Though I followed Tracey around faithfully at school, this was the one time in my day when I didn’t care what she thought.

“It’s a lovely day.” Amanda let out a wistful sigh and looked out beyond the trees across the street from us to the fields surrounding the village. Those that were fallow were covered in a sheen of white, but a nearby grassy meadow sparkled as the sun, lurking just above the horizon, caught on the frosted blades of grass as if they were jewels. “Cold, but pretty,” she said, shivering as she pushed her gloved hands into the pockets of her coat and shuffled closer to me.

“Yes,” I said, breathing in the scent of her perfume, sweet and almost overpowering against the stark, odorless cold.

“So, what lessons have you got today?” She knocked her hip against mine.

“Maths, history, English, and PE,” I recited. By now I knew my timetable by heart.

“You’ve got that Ms. Hastings for English, don’t you? I don’t have lessons with her, but I’ve heard Tracey moaning about her, complaining she’s a hippie and all that. What do you think of her?”

“She’s all right,” I said, trying my best to sound noncommittal. I didn’t want Amanda to think I liked a weirdo.

Amanda laughed. “Well, she might have got right up our Tracey’s nose, but she seems like a bloody breath of fresh air, you ask me.”

“You think so?” I was surprised to hear her say this, and more than a little pleased. Maybe it wasn’t such a dreadful thing after all to like a female teacher with big boots, shorn hair, and hippie clothes.

“Yeah. God, I wish I had her instead of Mr. Forrest. You should hear him, Jesse. Just the sound of his voice is enough to put me to sleep. And he’s always complaining about something. Come to think of it, he sounds a bit like our Tracey.” She laughed. “The only thing I haven’t heard her complain about is that idiot Greg Loomis.”

I smiled. “She does go on about him a bit, doesn’t she?”

Amanda rolled her eyes. “Non-bloody-stop. It’s Greg this, Greg that, Greg the other. Honestly, sometimes I don’t think she speaks one sentence without the word ‘Greg’ in it. She drives me mad. I expect she drives you a bit mad as well.”

“Sometimes,” I admitted. “The worst thing is having to follow him around school all day, though.” I told Amanda about Tracey dragging me and the Debbies in search of Greg as he traveled from lesson to lesson.

Amanda barked out a laugh. “Bloody hell, she’s got it worse than I thought. And you, Jesse Bennett, have got the patience of a saint.” She pulled her hand out of her pocket and ruffled my hair. Her touch sent an immediate bolt of heat charging through my body. “So, how’s your dad’s house repairs coming along, then?”

I had told Amanda about my father’s efforts to repair the house. I had also confessed my frustration with his sporadic interest in this activity. “He’s finished the hallway, done the living room, and painted all the windows,” I said. “He’s working on the kitchen now.”

“That’s great.”

“I suppose so, but I don’t think our house will ever be as nice as yours.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, pulling her lips into a tight, flat line, “there’s a lot of things more important than appearances, Jesse.”

She said this with such heaviness that I was tempted to ask her if anything was bothering her. But the next moment she tugged her mouth into a smile. “So, Stan’s taking me for a trip on his bike this weekend,” she said, shuffling against me again. The weight of her body against mine made me want to lean all the way into her, so that there would be no space or cold air separating us at all. “Guess where we’re going.”

“Where?” I asked, trying to sound enthusiastic. “We’re going to Sheffield, to a Black Sabbath concert.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. All that head-banging music’s not my cup of tea, either. But it’ll be great to get away. Of course,” she said, lowering her voice and looking warily down the street, “I haven’t told my dad. He doesn’t like me having a boyfriend. Doesn’t like me doing anything, really.” She shrugged. “He thinks I’m staying at a friend’s house this weekend. So does Tracey. Don’t tell her, will you, Jesse? She’ll only go and tell tales to my dad. And then there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell her,” I said, feeling torn between pleasure at having Amanda confide in me and jealousy at the thought of Amanda clinging tightly to Stan along all those miles of road to Sheffield.

“To tell you the truth, Jesse, I’m really only going so I can get out of the house. I need to …”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.” She took a breath and seemed to push something from her thoughts. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Is it Stan?” I asked. “Have you been arguing?”

“No,” she said. “It’s not him. Mind you, he has been getting on my nerves.”

“He has?” I tried not to sound too gleeful.

“Yeah. Frankly, sometimes he acts almost as full of himself as that bonehead Greg Loomis. And he’s dead stupid on his bike sometimes. Scared me to death the other day, he did. He was driving me home from school, and he overtook this car on a bend and there was this lorry coming right at us. He almost had to swerve off the road to miss it. God, Jesse, I tell you, I thought I was going to wet myself I was so frightened.”

“Maybe you should take the bus home,” I suggested.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Though sometimes, to tell you the truth, I have a good mind to give him the shove.”

“The shove?” I had the sudden image of Amanda standing on a roadside with Stan, pushing him into the path of a speeding lorry.

“You know, pack him in. Break up.”

“Really?” It was almost impossible to contain my delight now.

“Yeah,” she said, gazing up toward the jagged silhouette of an elm tree that had been stripped bare not by the changing seasons but by Dutch elm disease. It had stood there, overlooking the bus stop and the high street, a sad skeleton among its verdant companions all summer. Now, though, it blended perfectly into the winter landscape, stark against the yellow light of the ascending sun.

“So why don’t you? Why don’t you give him the shove?”

“It’s complicated and, well, I suppose it’s because I love him.”

“Oh,” I said, my voice suddenly thin. “Well, then, of course you can’t give him the shove.” I turned to look at the disease-ravaged tree, noticing the way its smaller branches reached like knotty fingers pointing to the vast blue sky.

“Of course, you’re probably still too young, Jesse, to understand love and all that.”

“No, I’m not,” I said quietly, still staring at the tree, because I didn’t dare to look at Amanda.

I felt her turn to study me, and for a moment I was afraid that she might tease me or, as Tracey or the Debbies would have done if I’d said such a thing to them, interrogate me about which boy at school I was infatuated with. Instead, Amanda reached out and placed her hand gently on my arm. “Yeah,” she said, “you’re right. You are old enough.”

As she touched me, I felt as if I could melt forever in that moment. And I wondered if, despite her declaration of love for Stan, there was a chance that Amanda might soon come to realize that he wasn’t the person she deserved. Realizing this, she would also see that I was the only one who truly loved her and, filled with this knowledge, she would have to love me in return. And though we’d have to keep our love secret, because no one else would understand it, the two of us would know that there was nothing terrible about the way we felt. While I had to hide my love from her, it was a terrible, shameful secret. But if Amanda returned my feelings I’d have no reason to be ashamed.

DURING THE LAST WEEK
of term, there was a Christmas pantomime, a carol service, and Mr. Davies held a party for his class on the final afternoon. But the social event that elicited the most excited anticipation from Tracey and the Debbies was the disco that would be held on the Saturday before Christmas in the Reatton-on-Sea church hall. Hosted by Reverend Mullins, the vicar of Reatton—who was apparently rather more in touch with current youth culture than his counterpart in Midham—it was an annual event that attracted teenagers from miles around.

I’d been to a couple of school-run discos when I was at Knox Vale—a Halloween party and the Christmas dance—and found them excruciating. While the teachers seemed to think they were giving us an enormous treat, I would far rather have spent all afternoon drawing cross sections of the Humber estuary for Mr. Cuthbertson, memorizing vocabulary for Mr. Knighton, or even playing hockey on the frozen playing field than being herded with two hundred and fifty other students into the dimly lit assembly hall where Gary Glitter, singing “I’m the Leader of the Gang,” blared from a couple of speakers on the stage. Standing with the other social rejects in the darkest corner we could find, I’d made myself queasy on fizzy drinks and salted peanuts while I watched the other girls dance in ritualistic circles, all moving in the same rhythm, making the same gestures, following one another’s steps. I’d hated those girls, but I’d hated myself more for longing so hard for inclusion in their tight, satisfied little groups. But now, though I still anticipated the Reatton disco with trepidation, the sea change in my social standing meant that I didn’t have to await it with utter dread. Besides, after Tracey told me that she and her family were leaving the next day to spend the entire Christmas holidays with her grandparents, who lived in Cleethorpes, I realized that the disco would be the last time I’d be able to see Amanda for a while.

In preparation for this pivotal event, I’d managed to talk my father
into buying me a pair of orange bell-bottoms and a yellow-and-beige shirt that I ordered from the Littlewoods catalog that Mabel had left with us during her last visit. On the model in the catalog, of course, the vivid colors and lustrously smooth polyester had looked stunning, and I’d imagined transforming myself into a similarly bold and stylish girl who didn’t mind standing out in a crowd. When the clothes arrived, however, the effect was a little less impressive and I couldn’t help feeling that their oversized buttons, billowing lines, and glaring brightness only declared my desperation to fit in. Nevertheless, the evening of the disco, I put on my new outfit and my least hideous pair of shoes and readied myself to leave.