Another Life Altogether (32 page)

Without a thought, I ran to them. I found Amanda lying on her back, arms splayed, crucifixion style, legs tucked up toward her body. “Are you all right? Are you all right?” I called, frantic. I leaned down, my breath clouding the air between us. I looked into her face under the big bulb of her helmet and saw that her eyes were wide and still. She said nothing and seemed not to be breathing.

Then she groaned, thumping one of her outstretched fists against the snow. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “What a bloody idiot.” Then she struggled to push herself up from the ground. I reached out to help her, but she seemed oblivious and so, still leaning over her, I was almost bashed in the head by her helmet as she abruptly sat up. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I was walking home. My dad forgot to pick me up.”

“Oh.” She sat with her legs splayed out in front of her, like a doll set upright in the snow.

“Are you all right?” I asked again.

“Me?” She looked along the length of her arms, body, and legs, slowly examining herself. “Yeah, I think so. Can you give me a hand?”

“Are you sure you can get up?” I was concerned. She had landed with considerable force.

“Yeah, come on, Jesse.” She reached out and I took her gloved hands and pulled her upward. She winced but made it to her feet. “Thanks,” she said, swaying unsteadily before gaining her balance. She brushed the snow from her coat and took a couple of shaky steps forward.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

She paused, sighed, and then moved forward again. “Yeah, I’m okay. Where’s Stan?” I pointed to where he lay, a few feet away. I followed her as she stumbled toward him. He, too, had been flung from the bike to lie on his back and was staring wide-eyed at the sky. As I looked
down on him, I felt a little quiver of excitement at the thought that he might be dead.

“Are you all right, Stan?” Amanda asked, wavering back and forth a little as she stood over him.

I was disappointed to see him manage a lolling nod. “You sure?”

He nodded again. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Get up, then, show me.” She gestured with both hands, urging him up.

He rolled with great effort onto his side and from there struggled to his feet. He looked a little dazed, blinking fast and glancing around as if to get his bearings. When he finally seemed to get himself oriented, he looked down and, seeing snow clinging to his trousers, stamped his feet to shake it off. As he did so, he noticed a tear in his trousers. His skin was grazed beneath, but he wasn’t badly hurt. “Aw, look, my best trousers. Fucking ruined, they are.”

“Christ, Stan, is that all you care about? Your bloody trousers? We’re lucky we’re still walking. I can’t believe you, I really can’t.”

“Where’s my bike?” he asked, ignoring Amanda’s outrage to stagger about in the snow, looking for signs of his motorbike.

“Over there,” I said, pointing toward the ditch beyond. Once it had discarded its riders, the bike had continued its long, leaning skid, finally stopping when it fell into one of the ditches at the side of the fields. In the winter, those ditches were always full. His bike had doubtless plunged through the thin layer of ice there and was now immersed in green and murky water.

Wordlessly, Stan lumbered through the snow-covered grass to peer over the side of the ditch. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get it out tonight,” he called to Amanda.

“Really? And there was me all ready to go and fish it out for you,” Amanda responded as she battled clumsily to undo her helmet.

Stan turned toward her. “Well, tomorrow we could—”

“Tomorrow you can fuck off. And the next day. And the day after
that.” Having finally undone the buckle of the helmet, she pulled it off. “I told you I wanted to go straight home. It’s too bloody cold and too bloody icy to be driving around. But did you listen to me?”

“Oh, come on, don’t be daft, I—”

“Daft?” Her voice was thin and shrill in the freezing emptiness of the night. “You’ve got the nerve to call me daft. Don’t you realize you could have got us killed? You’re an idiot. A stupid bloody idiot. And I don’t want to waste my time with a bloody idiot. I’m finished with you, Stan. That’s it.”

I was elated. She’d finally given him the shove.

“But, Mandy—”

“And if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. Do not call me Mandy.”

“But—” Stan looked at her, open-mouthed.

“Here,” Amanda interrupted, lifting the helmet above her head in both hands, holding it up in the air for a moment, and then throwing it with all her might at Stan. He clearly hadn’t expected this, and when it reached him it hit him full in the chest, knocking him down again. He sat on the ground, stunned.

He looked pathetic. I felt a little guilty that I had so recently wished him dead. “What the fuck are you staring at, you stupid cow?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” I said, my guilt immediately gone.

“Oh, shut up, Stan. She’s not done any harm, which is more than I can say for you,” Amanda barked. She backed away a couple of steps, turned unsteadily, and then lurched toward the road. “Come on, Jesse,” she said. “Let’s leave him to his fucking motorbike. I don’t know about you, but I want to get home.”

Amanda said nothing as we made our way toward Midham. Her anger seemed to puff out in the big clouds of her breath, and every now and then she let out a long, exasperated sigh. She looked so indignant that I imagined her untouched by the shock of the accident. It wasn’t until she stopped to take off her gloves, pull out her packet of cigarettes,
and tried to strike a light that I realized how shaken up she actually was. Even the cigarette in her lips was shaking, and her hands quivered so much that she couldn’t get the flame to stay in one place. “It’s the cold,” she said, trying once again to put the flame to the cigarette end. It was freezing, all my muscles seemed to ache, and my fingers and toes were burning with it. But I knew that it wasn’t the cold that was making Amanda shiver. “Jesse, do you think you could do it for me?” She handed me the box of matches and the cigarette. “I really need a smoke, I really do.”

I put the cigarette to my lips and Amanda pressed herself close, shielding me from the bitter wind that had started to blow, burning any exposed skin, freezing our faces still. I started to shake myself, and with the stiffness in my hands it was difficult to get the match alight. After a couple of failed attempts, I managed to strike it, hold it to the cigarette end, and breathe its end orange and alive. It was my first cigarette and, in the fashion of all first-time smokers, I began coughing so fiercely that I thought my lungs would seize up. I was afraid that Amanda would laugh at me, but she didn’t. Instead, she took the cigarette from my grasp, put it hungrily to her lips, and rubbed her palm soothingly over my back. “I’m sorry, Jesse,” she said between big, urgent drags. “I shouldn’t have made you do that. It’s bad enough that I’ve got this dirty habit, never mind encouraging you to pick it up.”

“It’s all right,” I said when my coughing fit was done. “I don’t mind, I really don’t.” It was true. At that moment, I would have done anything for Amanda. If she had asked me to throw myself into the path of the next oncoming car, I probably would have. I was so thrilled to be with her, nothing else mattered. Nothing. “I’m glad I was around when you fell off the bike. I mean, I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself and have no one there. Well, I suppose Stan was there—”

“Stan? Stan is history.”

I tried not to smile, but it was impossible. I’d never been so happy. She turned, put her arm through mine, and we began to walk home again. We were moving in unison now, as I timed my steps to match
hers. She walked slowly, a little clumsily. I wasn’t sure if she was bruised from the accident or this was the effect of all that whiskey she’d drunk at the disco. But all that mattered was that she was there, holding on to me. Even through my coat I could feel the heat of her against my side. I wished that it was ten miles rather than two from Reatton to Midham, so that we could walk together for hours along a winding road in the dark.

When we reached the village high street, she pulled me toward the enormous Christmas tree that stood in front of the Co-op. Its lights were still on, illuminating the thick night with yellow, red, orange, and green.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. She drew in a deep breath through her nose. “And the smell—I love that smell. Always makes me want to be in the middle of a pine forest. I’ve never been in a forest.” She looked at me and pulled a soft and slightly crooked smile. She still wore her silver crown of tinsel, though now it sat askew, pulled down over her tangled and unruly hair. Still, with the lights of the tree behind her and the glaze of snow over everything, I saw her as an angel, smiling down at me, pulling me into her beatific light. “Have you ever been in a forest, Jesse?”

“No,” I said, though I had written about riding through a forest with Amanda in one of my letters, when we’d been fleeing vampires together.

“I think it would be nice.” She looked up at the tree and then at me. “You go home that way, don’t you, Jesse?” She pointed to where the high street veered away from the village.

“Yes, but I can walk you home if you like.” I did not want to leave her. I really could have stayed there with her all night. The accident had made her seem so vulnerable, fragile—the way I’d imagined her in so many of my letters, needing me to take care of her, rescue her, make sure she was safe. “I’d feel better if I walked you home,” I said.

She laughed. “It’s all right, Jesse. I’m a big girl, I can find my way back. And me getting home this late—well … there’s going to be
bloody hell to pay. I wouldn’t want you to get stuck in the middle of that.”

“But it’s not your fault, you—”

“Yeah, well, you try telling my dad that.” She pressed her lips together and sighed. Then she smiled again. “Anyway, it’s nice of you to offer. More than Stan would ever do. Bloody wanker. Mind you, that’s all most lads are, you know, wankers. Most men are, when I come to think of it. But you—” She took off one of her gloves and raised her hand, impossibly cold, to my face and pressed it against my equally frozen cheek. “You’re nice. Really nice.” Her words were drawn out, limp. She looked into my face, smiling. Then she leaned toward me, sending me reeling in the swirling scent of her cigarette-and-whiskey breath before she landed a soft, wet kiss on my mouth.

“J
INGLE BELLS, JINGLE BELLS, JINGLE ALL THE WAY.” MY FATHER DANCED
into the kitchen on Christmas morning wearing his brown wool dressing gown, paisley patterned pajamas, and red slippers. His hair, usually carefully combed in a vain attempt to cover his ever-expanding bald patch, hung in loose, jagged strands over his right ear. “Oh what fun it is to ride on a one-horse open sleigh, hey!” He stuck his hip outward and his hand into the air. Clearly, he was in good spirits and determined to inject our Christmas celebrations with an appropriate degree of cheer. I was considerably less jolly as I stood at the sink peeling what felt like an infinite quantity of potatoes. We were having them roasted and mashed to go with Christmas dinner. Mabel, Frank, and Granddad Bennett would be joining us, and I was preparing two five-pound bags to make sure there would be enough. “Merry Christmas, love,” my father said, stopping to plant a kiss on the crown of my head before dancing over to the cooker. “By heck, I could kill for a cup of tea. My mouth feels like the inside of a bloody birdcage. And, speaking of birds, how’s that turkey coming along, eh?”

The previous evening, while my mother had lain lifeless on the settee watching
Val Doonican’s Christmas Show
, my father and I had prepared the stuffing for the oversized bird, gratefully following the instructions
from the recipe for roast turkey that Auntie Mabel had clipped out of a December issue of
Woman’s Weekly
and sent to us with the Christmas card signed by her and Frank. At seven o’clock that morning, my alarm had gone off and I’d got up to stuff the bird and hoist it into the oven. Now the turkey was roasting away in its massive roasting pan and I was basting it every half hour.

“It smells great,” my father said, dreamily sniffing the air as he filled the kettle with water. “When you grow up, you’ll make some man a lovely wife, Jesse.”

“I’ve told you before,” I snapped. “I am not getting married.”

He laughed. “That’s probably your best plan, love.” Leaning over the gas burner, he turned it on, struck a match, and leaped back when it burst into a ball of blue flame. “Bloody hell, another damn thing to fix,” he muttered, shaken as he brushed a few singed strands of hair that had been hanging perilously close to the gas burner back over his ear. “Anyway,” he said, putting the kettle over the flame and then searching the kitchen counter for the tea caddy. “You ask me, marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Certainly not the riding-into-the-sunset-happily-ever-after rubbish they make out, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

He laughed again, but there was a sadness to it that made me wonder how many times he had regretted marrying my mother. I wondered also whether, given the chance now, my father would still choose to have me. But I knew the answer. My father’s ideal life would consist of a quiet house, an armchair, a television and a newspaper, and regularly but anonymously delivered cups of tea. If things went well, he’d get to watch the downfall and then humiliation of the royal family on the BBC. In that little cocoon, there wouldn’t be any room for a daughter who demanded his attention, who wanted more than he could possibly give. After all, he had so easily forgotten me the other night at the disco, and if Amanda and Stan hadn’t had that accident I would have been left to walk home completely alone in the dark.