Another Life Altogether (28 page)

When I walked into our newly decorated living room to announce my departure, I was surprised to see my mother sitting in her dressing gown in one of the armchairs, her legs draped over the side of the chair, slippers dangling from her toes. There was a powdery ring of icing sugar around her mouth, evidence that she had joined my father in finishing off the plate of leftover mince pies he’d brought home that evening from the Christmas party at his job. It had been quite a while since I’d seen her under the living room’s bright lights, and for the first time I noticed how astonishingly thin and pale she’d become. Her skin had a grayish tinge and seemed pressed tight over her bones, so that her eyes, nose, and chin seemed bigger, more prominent, while her legs, sticking out from under her dressing gown, appeared impossibly white and etched in pale blue veins.

“We got a Christmas card from your grandma today,” she said, waving a card at me. It held a picture of a group of beaming children building a snowman. I wondered if my father had used news of this correspondence from Australia to coax my mother out of bed.

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Yes, well, it’s also signed by that bloody Australian gigolo of hers. Look at this,” my mother said, opening the card and flapping it at me again. “‘All our love,’ it says, ‘Mam and Bill.’ Like he thinks he’s part of
the bloody family now.” She let go of the card and it fluttered to the floor. “I mean, who the heck does he think he is?”

“It’s only a card, Mum. He’s only trying to—”

“And where do you think you’re going, madam?” she interrupted, giving my new outfit a once-over and again making me doubt the wisdom of my purchase.

“I’m going to a disco,” I said calmly, not wanting to aggravate her. If she felt like it, she could easily decide to make me stay at home.

“You’re going to a disco?” she repeated, her tone so appalled anyone would have thought I’d just announced that I was planning to attend a get-together of the local Hells Angels. It infuriated me that she could spend literally weeks hidden away in her bedroom with no clue about my daily whereabouts and now, barely out of bed and still in her nightclothes, she was playing the part of a conscientious parent concerned about my moral welfare. “Does your father know?” she asked, implying that if he did he’d put a stop to this outrageous plan.

My father didn’t seem to hear her. He was chewing on a mince pie and watching
Look North
, the local news program that always followed the BBC News.

“Yes,” I said. “He’s picking me up after.” Tracey and I planned to walk the two miles to Reatton, but, since the disco didn’t end until half past ten and I didn’t fancy walking back on a freezing December night, I’d recruited my father to give us a lift home.

“Is he now?” My mother looked to my father for confirmation. As she did so, the
Look North
announcer introduced a report on “a surprise royal visit to South Yorkshire,” and my father leaned eagerly toward the television. The screen was filled with the stark silhouette of the gear at a coal mine’s pithead, and then the dazed and grinning face of Prince Charles.

“That’s it, that’s what they should do!” my father yelled, spitting mince-pie crumbs across the carpet and pointing at Prince Charles. “They should send him to work down the bloody mine. That’d bloody
teach him.” His words were noticeably slurred, and I deduced that there had been more than just a few mince pies consumed at his work’s party.

“Dad,” I said loudly, hoping to get his attention before he inevitably got into another anti-royalist rant.

“What?”

“Tell Mum you’re picking me up after the disco tonight.”

“I am?” he said, looking at me, perplexed, before turning back to the television.

“Yes. You’re supposed to come and get me. You said you’d take Tracey home as well. Remember?” I gave him a beseeching look.

“Oh, right, yes.” Barely taking his eyes off the screen, he reached over and picked up another mince pie. “God, look at him, the bloody tosspot,” he said as Prince Charles walked along a line of hard-faced miners’ wives, stopping occasionally to shake a hand and exchange a few words.

“At half past ten. You’re to pick us up in Reatton, outside the church hall.” I pronounced the words in the kind of slow yell that people generally reserved for foreigners, the deaf, and the senile.

“I know, I know. I’ll be there,” he said.

“See,” I said, turning toward my mother. “I told you he was picking me up.”

I fully expected her to put some obstacle in my way, to perhaps assert that it just wasn’t appropriate for me to go to a late-night event where there’d be loud music and boys, or to suggest that I was bound to catch my death if I ventured out on such a cold night. I was tensed up and ready to do battle. But I didn’t have to bother, since she seemed suddenly to have lost any energy for belligerence or pronouncements, or, in fact, anything at all. Instead, she shrugged and pressed herself deeper into her chair, so that, in her newly angular body, her legs dangling over the arm of the chair, I imagined her folding all the way into herself until she disappeared. And though I was relieved that I could escape the house without having to fight my way out, as I looked at my
mother I felt afraid. Instead of killing herself, I wondered, could a person just shrink and crumple until she became nothing, until her traits and quirks wasted along with her body, until one day you realized that she had faded away?

I walked over to my mother, leaned down toward her, and kissed her on the cheek. “Bye, Mum. See you later,” I said, letting myself take in the texture of her skin against my lips and her pungent body smells. At least for now, she was still solidly herself.

I thought about going over to kiss my father, too. But, as the
Look North
reporter waxed lyrical about how “so near to Christmas, the gift of a royal visit has lifted everyone’s spirits in this little mining town,” and my father hurled his mince pie toward the television screen so that it landed with a
splat
right in Prince Charles’s face, I decided it was best to leave him alone to his seasonal enjoyment.

R
EVEREND MULLINS WAS ONE OF THOSE TRENDY VICARS, THE KIND
I’d seen only on television. He wore his dog collar under a wrinkled corduroy jacket and atop a pair of carefully pressed jeans, and bore a fixed, beatific smile that made him look, in the words of several of the kids at the disco, “a bit retarded.” He wandered around, enthusiastically greeting the teenagers under his supervision, slapping backs, nudging ribs, patting shoulders, and infusing his conversation with liberal use of words like “cool” and “wow.” He was like a new kid at school, so desperate to impress that he was oblivious to the disdainful looks and mumbled insults he managed to provoke everywhere he went.

When Tracey and I finally arrived at the Reatton church hall, our ten-pence admission in hand, he greeted us with a painfully sincere smile, told us how wonderful it was to see young people turn out for a church event, and said how very much he hoped we’d make it to the Sunday service and the special teenagers’ Sunday school class afterward. “And maybe you two young ladies will consider coming on the trip to Lincoln Cathedral in January,” he added. “It has some amazing stained glass, and the choir is simply wonderful.”

“Right, I bet it is,” Tracey said, looking in my direction and rolling her eyes. I made a similarly scornful expression. From down the corridor,
we could hear the thump-thump-thump of the disco music. Neither of us wanted to stay here at the door making polite conversation with the vicar.

“Oh, yes, they’re very cool,” he continued earnestly. “Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of joining a choir yourselves, but I’m putting one together here in Reatton and I’m sure you two young ladies have angelic voices….”

Tracey gave another impatient roll of her eyes, then interrupted. “Look, Vicar,” she said as she crossed her legs and began shuffling about noisily in her immense platform shoes. “I’ve got to take a piss something rotten. And if I don’t get to the toilet right now, I swear I’m gonna wet myself. So, if you don’t mind—”

“Oh, no, by all means, you should …” he stuttered, his face turning a startling shade of crimson. “Erm … it’s down the hallway, through the cloakroom door, and then to your left.”

“I hope I can make it,” Tracey said, jigging about even more and pressing her legs together so tight that it looked as if her knees might buckle under her.

I concentrated on trying to stop myself from giggling, pressing my lips together and my face into fierce contortions until, thankfully, Tracey grabbed my arm and pulled me down the corridor after her. As soon as we plunged through the cloakroom door, she relaxed her needing-to-pee stance and spat out a loud wide-mouthed laugh. I laughed along with her.

“God, what a wanker,” she declared. “Who the hell does that bloody vicar think he is? Jesus bloody Christ himself?”

“He’s a fucking poofter, that’s what he is.” It was Stan Heaphy. He leaned lazily against the cloakroom wall, gesturing with a lighted cigarette under a big, hand-lettered sign that read, “No Smoking, Please!” In his other hand he held a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label whiskey. He tipped the bottle to his mouth, his Adam’s apple moving visibly in his throat as he
glug-glugged
the liquid down.

“You think so, Stan?” asked Greg Loomis. He stood among a group
of boys assembled around Stan. He was dressed in a billowy orange shirt undone almost to his navel, a pair of trousers with an enormous, multibuttoned waistband, and platform shoes that made his legs look disconcertingly long. Upon catching sight of this paragon of male style, Tracey took a sharp breath and issued an elbow to my side.

I ignored her and instead looked about urgently to see if Amanda was there. Unfortunately, all I could see aside from the throng of boys surrounding Stan was a single empty bench in the middle of the room and the open door to the girls’ toilet beyond. Clearly, Amanda was elsewhere. Upon realizing this, my first instinct was to drape my coat on the nearest hanger and leave the cloakroom to Stan and his little gang, but when I turned toward Tracey to see her gazing at Greg with the most pathetically adoring expression on her face, I realized it was unlikely we’d depart the cloakroom soon.

“Tell them poofs a fucking mile off, you can,” Stan declared, lazily wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his leather jacket before handing the bottle to Greg.

“Really? You think so, Stan?” Greg asked again. He grabbed the bottle and took an enthusiastic swig, screwing his face up and almost choking as he swallowed it down, prompting several of the boys around him to laugh. Tracey turned to scowl at them.

“Only a fucking poofter would want to be a vicar,” Stan pontificated, sucking on his cigarette and then forcing the smoke out through his turned-down mouth. “I mean, who else would want to ponce around in a white dress on Sundays? What do you think he’s recruiting a choir for? So he can slip it to one of the choirboys afterward, that’s why. You want to fucking watch him. Turn your back on him and he’ll stick it up your arse in a second.” He made a sweeping gesture with his cigarette and launched it toward the buttocks of a pudgy-faced younger boy. The boy had entered the cloakroom a few moments earlier and, his back to Stan, was hanging his coat on one of the hooks on the wall. The cigarette end landed against his backside, sending out a small shower of sparks and ash. Everyone around him burst into fits of bellowing laughter.
I didn’t know his name, but I recognized him from school. He was a first-year, and I’d sometimes seen him eating at the same table as Malcolm and Dizzy in the dining hall.

“Bloody hell!” the boy yelled as he leaped away, dancing around the cloakroom while he brushed frantically at the seat of his pants. Stan, Greg, and the rest of their friends roared, doubling over and slapping one another on the back as they watched. Next to me, Tracey giggled, digging me with her elbow again as the boy tried to look over his shoulder to assess the state of his rear end. Though I was determined not to find anything that Stan Heaphy did amusing, I couldn’t help laughing. After all, the boy looked ludicrous, leaping around like a character in a slapstick comedy.

“Christ almighty,” the boy said when he’d managed to ascertain that his trousers weren’t on fire. “What the hell did you have to do that for? These are brand-new bloody trousers. If you’ve scorched them, my mam will kill me.”

His trousers, with their unfaded fabric and perfect creases, did look new. But the rest of his clothes—frayed denim jacket, shrunken sweater, and scuffed shoes—looked sad and worn. He didn’t look as if he came from the kind of family that could afford to replace clothes easily. I felt a fierce pang of guilt for having joined in his humiliation at the hands of Stan.

“Just trying to teach you a lesson, Ken, that’s all,” Stan said, stepping over to where the cigarette still burned on the floor and grinding it under one of his black Dr. Martens boots. “It’s for your own good. Got to keep an eye out for those poofter types. Can’t turn your back for a second. I mean, not with a delicious chubby little arse like yours.” There was another ripple of laughter. This time I did not join in.