Another Life Altogether (36 page)

My mother was still wearing the ridiculous dress she’d donned for Christmas dinner, but she had taken off her stockings and, her bare feet planted on the floorboards, she was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, a bottle of aspirin in one hand, a bottle of something the doctors at Delapole had prescribed for her in the other. They were both empty.
She had tipped their contents into the valley that her dress formed between her legs and was frowning down at them, a bright pile of tiny yellow and white disks, as if trying to determine how many pills she held. I guessed there were at least a hundred.

“Where did you get those tablets, Mum?” I asked, moving to perch on the side of the bathtub close to her. I shivered as I felt the hard cold of the enamel against my palms.

She ignored me and continued to stare down at her cache of pills.

“Mum,” I said, more insistently, “where did you get them?” I had no idea where my father had been hiding my mother’s medicines. All I knew was that he’d stashed them away and had been dispensing them to her. My mother must have scoured the house to find them. I imagined how she must have waited for my father and me to depart before she leaped out of bed to search for them. The thought made me furious.

“What are you doing?” I demanded. “What are you doing, sitting here like this in the middle of the night?”

“Your father’s gone,” she said, defeated.

My anger evaporated. I felt my father’s absence like a cavern inside me. “He’ll be back, Mum,” I said. “Really, he’ll be back. I think he just needed to get a break.” I didn’t believe it myself, but I felt the urgency of making her believe it.

“You think so?” She looked up. Under the harsh, unshaded bulb of the bathroom, her face looked colorless, almost gray. There were big dark circles under her eyes and, for the first time, I noticed the fine pattern of lines fanning out from beneath her eyes, like tiny channels carved by water across rock. She looked older, as if age had washed over her in the night. It made me aware of my mother’s utter vulnerability. She could never, no matter how hard I wanted it or willed it, rise above the capricious tides of her moods. I was the one who had to hold her up.

I looked down at the pills, which were bright and shiny; small children
would want to put them into their mouths. And, for a moment, I could see their attraction. All those innocent little tablets could take my mother into oblivion. She wouldn’t have to flail and fight. And I could let her go, a lost swimmer falling through my arms, going under. I wouldn’t have to try to save her anymore.

“I didn’t mean to spoil your Christmas, you know, love,” she said, her bleary eyes beseeching me.

“I know, Mum. I know.” I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with air the way someone might before diving underwater, holding it in me, before I let it out in a steady sigh. Then I reached over and took the two empty pill bottles from her hands, brushing her fingers; they were icy cold. I placed the bottles on the floor.

I stood up and began looking around the bathroom. Behind the sink, I spotted one of the buckets that we had used to catch the leaks. I pulled it out and took it over to my mother. “Stand up,” I commanded, tugging her up from the toilet so that the pills spilled into the bucket as I held it next to her. They fell like the sound of a downpour. A few missed the bucket and bounced over the floor, dancing brightly until they rolled into the cracks between the floorboards or settled silently against the bath and the sink. I bent down and began picking them up, tossing them into the bucket until I could find no more. Then I took my mother by the sleeve. “Come on, Mum,” I said. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

After I had accompanied my mother to her bedroom, I went back to the bathroom, took the bucket of pills into my bedroom, tipped them into a pillowcase, and stuffed the pillowcase into the bottom of my dirty-laundry basket, the same place I’d hidden the whiskey I’d brought back from the disco a few days earlier. Then I undressed, put on my pajamas, and went back into my mother’s room. I climbed into bed with her, pushing myself against her and wrapping my arm across her shoulder. Her whole body was cold, and her feet—curled up beneath her so she lay next to me pressed into the shape of a shrunken
S—were like little slabs of ice. But after a while we both began to warm, and eventually my mother fell into soft, steady breaths and then rhythmic snores, before I, too, drifted into sleep.

I woke to such familiar smells—my parents’ musky blankets, the scent of their room (a blend of my mother’s makeup and hair lacquer, my father’s aftershave, and the polish on their chest of drawers)—that I had the sensation of having fallen back into my early childhood, when I was three or four years old and I’d climb into my parents’ bed in the morning, squirm between them, and listen to their snuffles and groans as they folded themselves around me until I fell into a warm and delicious sleep. But then I opened my eyes and the recollections of the previous day’s events came to me, and I wished that I could have stayed in that moment of memory. My mother, I was relieved to see, was still sleeping, but when I got up and peeked through the curtains there was no sign of my father’s car.

For the rest of the day I watched television, feeling increasingly stupefied as I sat in front of the gas fire, snacking on the remnants of our Christmas dinner and staring at the Boxing Day programming, indifferent to everything I watched. When the telephone rang, I picked it up hoping that it was my father calling to tell us that he was coming back, but it was only Mabel, asking me how my mother was. I didn’t tell her about the pills; I didn’t want to ruin Mabel’s Boxing Day as well as her Christmas, and though I would have liked, more than anything, for her to come over and take care of me, I knew that if she did she would bring Frank with her. The cut on my hand still hurt, reminding me of his brittle anger. I knew I’d be thrilled when he went the way of all Mabel’s other boyfriends and she moved on to someone else.

Early in the afternoon, I coaxed my mother out of bed and got her to take a bath. She obeyed me like an automaton, moving about wordlessly. Once she was dressed, I had her come downstairs, where I made her a plate of leftovers and told her to eat it. She picked up a knife and fork and began pushing mouthfuls of food into her mouth, chewing so lethargically and swallowing with such effort that it was as if I were
forcing her to eat poison—though, given her interest in taking all those tablets, perhaps she would have eaten poison more eagerly.

I wondered what I was going to do if my father didn’t return. Should I call my mother’s doctor and tell him what had happened? And if I did, would they take my mother off to Delapole again? And if they did that, what would happen to me? Would my father come back and take care of me, or had he simply had enough of everything and gone off to find a place that would give him solitude and peace? If it weren’t for Frank, I’d want to go and live with Auntie Mabel, but with him around I’d need to go somewhere else. Maybe I’d be sent to live with Granddad, which, in some ways, wouldn’t be so bad. After all, as long as I delivered his tea and regular plates of sandwiches he probably wouldn’t bother me very much. Or perhaps I could ask to be sent to Australia, where I could live with Grandma and her fiancé in all that sun and heat. Or maybe I’d get sent to live with a foster family who lived in a neat little house on a neat little street? I found myself wondering if Tracey and Amanda’s parents might take me in.

For a while, I managed to buoy myself up as I thought about these possibilities, but then, as darkness began to ease over the dull gray sky outside, I felt my optimism deflate. It was ridiculous for me to think that anyone would really want me. The other night, I’d been ignored by Tracey at the disco, and my father had forgotten me and left me to walk home alone in the snow. Yesterday, if he had wanted, he could have taken me with him, but he didn’t care about me enough for that. He’d left me with my mother so that he could become someone like Frank—a man who carried a photograph of his children in his wallet, looking at their picture with fondness when he was no longer burdened by them every day. I would become a smiling face, frozen in a remembered moment, so that he could think of me as happy when, really, I was miserable and raw.

All of this seemed too much to bear until I thought again of how I had walked home with Amanda and how, beneath the warm lights of the village Christmas tree, she had placed that kiss on my lips. And I
realized then that Amanda had not left me. In fact, she had given me something to hold on to, a piece of certainty in this baffling and desolate world. I knew that this meant that Amanda must like me, must really care for me—and, in a way, that wasn’t so different from the way I cared for her. Girls didn’t kiss girls unless, like those housewives on the problem page, they had different kinds of feelings for them.

I saw all the ways that Amanda had signaled this to me—how, that first time we’d met, she’d invited me to stand close to her under her umbrella, and how, the second time we saw each other, she’d asked me to smooth suntan lotion over her skin. How she’d defended me when everyone had teased me, how she’d confided in me at the bus stop about all her difficulties with Stan. How she’d pulled me up to dance with her at the disco, and how she’d leaned so close to me I’d felt her breath against my ear. It seemed no coincidence that, immediately after breaking up with Stan, she had kissed me. Clearly, she had been trying to tell me something. Clearly, she knew how I felt about her and she felt something similar in return. At the thought of all this, my hope rose, no longer held down in the terrible reality of this day.

IT WAS LATE WHEN
I heard a car growl up the driveway. I ran over to the window, and as I saw my father pull up in front of the house I wanted to wave, bang on the window, shout in excitement. But I didn’t. After all, he might just be coming back for his things. I turned and took a seat beside my mother, who had been making a study of her lap. “Dad’s here,” I said. She looked up, her eyes showing a slight glimmer, and then she turned expectantly toward the door.

He entered, his clothes rumpled and clearly slept in, his pullover stretched out and saggy at the elbows. His hair was windblown, exposing his bald patch. While the skin under his eyes was dark and saggy, his face had a waxy tinge.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said after lowering himself into his armchair.
“I’ve been thinking a lot. And I’ve decided that things can’t go on like this.”

I looked at him steadily, my stomach a knot, knowing that he was about to announce his permanent departure, that he was going to leave my mother and me alone. It was all I could do to stop myself jumping up and throwing myself on the floor in front of him, pleading, “Take me with you, take me with you. Don’t leave me here with her.” Instead, I gripped the edges of the settee cushion with both hands.

“I think things call for drastic measures,” he continued.

I felt hot, woozy. I thought I might be sick.

“So,” my father said, looking at my mother and sweeping a wayward strand of hair from his face. “I’ve had a word with your Ted, Evelyn. He’s getting out of the nick in the middle of February, and when he does he’s coming to live here.”

“And where are you going, Dad?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm while panic rose in me in swirling, frantic waves.

“Me?” he asked.

“Yes. Where will you go when you leave us?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’re not?”

“No,” he said with a shrug. “Just needed to get away for a bit to get a chance to think. And while I was thinking, well”—his lips extended into a smile—“I realized that if Ted came to stay he could keep your mam company, cheer her up, help her out, while we could help him get on his feet. Seems like it’s an arrangement that could benefit all of us and—”

Unable to control myself any longer, I pushed myself from the settee and launched myself across the room toward him, landing against his chest with a thud and wrapping my arms around his neck.

“Bloody hell, Jesse, what on earth’s got into you?” I heard his words echoing through his chest as I pressed my cheek there, and then, when he put an arm around me and sat there wordless, I could hear the unwavering rhythm of his heart.

THE NEXT MORNING,
I was woken at six o’clock by the sound of furniture scraping over floorboards. When I got up to investigate, I discovered my mother in the spare bedroom at the front of the house, dragging an old armchair into the middle of the room, where she had already piled boxes, cartons, and other miscellaneous items. “What are you doing, Mum?” I asked, bleary-eyed under the glare of the unshaded bulb that hung from the flaking ceiling.

“Decorating,” she said. “If we leave it to your father, it’s going to take forever. And I’ll not have our Ted thinking that we live in a pigsty. It’s bad enough him having to be in prison. Last thing he needs is to get out and find himself in a dump like this.” She swung an arm to indicate the chaos around her. “Now, that would be depressing.”

“Are you all right, Mum?”

“All right? Of course I’m all right,” she said, setting the chair beside an ancient lamp with a moth-eaten shade. “I’ve never felt better in my life.”