Another Life Altogether (38 page)

T
HE SATURDAY THAT UNCLE TED WAS DUE TO ARRIVE, I’D ASKED MY
father to take me along to pick him up, imagining myself pacing outside a shadowy, turreted prison, waiting for the enormous gates to swing open and for Ted to walk out, blinking in the unfamiliar daytime brilliance. It turned out, though, that Ted had actually been released a couple of days before he was to come to our house and my father would pick him up at the Hull railway station after visiting Granddad Bennett for a couple of hours. Since this prospect seemed a lot less exciting, I decided to stay at home. There, however, as my mother rushed around the house putting last-minute touches to her decorating, I began to think that watching wrestling matches with Granddad and my father would have been a lot more relaxing.

In the last few weeks, she’d completed her work on the spare room and, after refurbishing her and my father’s bedroom and painting it in rather alarming shades of pink and yellow, she’d required me to move out of my bedroom so that she could do it up as well. Retrieving my biscuit tin filled with my letters and my mother’s pills and the whiskey bottle from my laundry basket and secreting them behind the settee, I’d spent a week and a half sleeping in the living room while she did up my room. After replacing some of the floorboards and a substantial
part of the ceiling, she’d finished by covering my bedroom walls in a paisley-patterned wallpaper of purple, orange, and cream that she’d acquired in the going-out-of-business sale of a hardware shop in Hull several years earlier. While we waited for my father to return with Ted, she hung a pair of matching purple paisley curtains at my window.

“No wonder they went of out business,” I said as my mother stood back to admire her handiwork and I surveyed the nightmare of swirls that had become my bedroom walls.

“Don’t be so bloody ungrateful,” she snapped. “There’s children in Africa would kill for a bedroom as nice as this.”

“And as soon as they got it they’d redecorate,” I mumbled as she pushed past me into the hall.

Later that afternoon, Mabel and Frank arrived. It was the first time they’d visited since Christmas. My mother had insisted that they join us to welcome Ted home and help give him the positive new start he needed. As they followed my mother into the kitchen, they both seemed in especially cheerful moods.

“Not planning to chuck that on my trousers, are you, Evelyn?” Frank joked as my mother set the kettle on the cooker to boil.

“I told Frank we should get him a pair of asbestos underpants when he comes over here,” Mabel added, nudging Frank and laughing. “That way, at least his manhood will be safe.”

My mother spun around. “If you don’t mind, Mabel, I’d prefer it if you didn’t make distasteful jokes while you’re in my house. I really don’t want Jesse exposed to that kind of talk. Besides, we should set a better tone for our Ted.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Evelyn,” Mabel scoffed. “Ted’s coming home from prison, not a tour of the Commonwealth with the bloody Queen. I can’t imagine he’ll be shocked by anything Frank or me have got to say…. Or maybe by one thing,” she said, exchanging a brief look with Frank. My mother caught the exchange between them and regarded them with a narrow-eyed frown. “Anyway, Jesse hears far worse than that at school every day.”

“Oh, aye,” Frank said, nodding. “Teenagers these days get up to larks we never even dreamed of when we were young. Don’t they, Jesse, love?”

“I’m going upstairs, I’ve got homework to do,” I said, ignoring Frank and looking instead at my mother and Mabel. “I’ll come down when Uncle Ted gets here.”

I did, in fact, have quite a lot of homework to do—several pages of geometry that Tracey and the Debbies were depending on me to complete so they could copy it before our maths lesson on Monday, and an essay on the War of the Roses for Miss Nutall. Neither of these activities, however, seemed particularly appealing. Instead, I decided to write a letter to Amanda.

It had been several weeks since I’d written to her. After that morning when she showed me the locket that Stan had given her, I hadn’t written to her once; I hadn’t even spoken to her at the bus stop very much. I couldn’t bear to. I had revealed how I felt about her and she had thought me absurd, laughable, repellent. And though she remained friendly enough, just the knowledge that she had been horrified by my effort to kiss her made me shrink away. I longed for that brief period of euphoria when I’d managed to convince myself that Amanda shared my feelings. But I was alone with all my perverted yearnings for another girl. I was confused, bereft, and left without even a fantasy to cling to. This time, in my letter, I couldn’t write out any more of my ridiculous stories; I simply wanted to tell her how I felt.

“Dear Amanda,” I began, “I wish I could send this letter to you. Actually, I wish I could talk to you about how I feel, but if I did you would probably hate me and call me all sorts of horrible names. The thing is, I am really confused about almost everything. The only thing that I am certain of is that I love you. But I know that loving you is wrong and that if anybody found out they would say I was a lesbian. I don’t even know if that is true. I just know that when you kissed me that night after the disco it was the most wonderful moment in my life and if I could stop time, the way they did in a
Star Trek
episode once, I would
stop it at the exact second that we stood next to the village Christmas tree and you kissed me, and I would stay there forever. So I’m glad that you did it, and I’m glad that you danced with me at the disco, because that was really wonderful as well. But sometimes I wish that you hadn’t done any of those things. Sometimes I even feel really mad at you for making me think that maybe you liked me. I suppose that doesn’t matter now, because I know that you think my loving you is a horrible thing. I have never been more miserable in my life, Amanda. Even when they took my mum off to Delapole, I don’t think I felt as bad as this….”

The knob on my bedroom door turned, the door burst open, and I jumped in shock. It was Frank. “Oh, hello, Jesse, love,” he said, pulling his thin lips into an arcing smirk.

“Don’t you know to knock?” I demanded, slamming shut my notebook and scrambling to sit up. I wanted to sound confident, outraged. Instead, my voice came out thin and uncertain.

“Didn’t know you were in here, did I? Your mam was telling me and Mabel about how she’d decorated the bedrooms and I thought I’d come up and take a look.” He took a few steps into the room and gave the wallpaper an appraising look. “Got interesting tastes has your mam,” he said, cocking an eyebrow. “Or maybe all them squiggles remind her of the state of her brain. I hope it doesn’t end up driving you nuts as well.”

I looked at him without comment, teeth clenched, willing him to leave and desperately aware of all those words I’d just written in my notebook—my most heartfelt confessions spelled out on the page.

“Oh, come on, now, you’re not still mad with me about what happened at Christmas, are you, love?” He moved closer.

Instinctively, I ran a finger over the place where my hand had been cut. It had healed over, but there was still a perceptible ridge in my skin. “I’ve got homework to do,” I said.

“Quite the conscientious student, aren’t you?” he said, coming closer still. Now, as he stood in the light that came in through the window,
I could see his expression—the wrinkled tightness around his eyes, the scornful camber of his lips.

“Not really.” I willed him to stop his steady approach. But he didn’t. Instead, he arrived at the bed and lowered himself to sit beside me. The mattress sank under his weight, and I felt myself tilted so that my body fell in his direction. I pulled myself away and tried to push my notebook farther from him to the corner of the bed.

“Sorry to say, I wasn’t much of a student when I was a lad,” he said, sighing. “And when I did read it was mostly comics. Superman was my favorite. You ever like Superman?”

I shook my head, watching him warily as I breathed in his sweat, cigarette, and aftershave smells.

“So what you writing, then?”

“Nothing,” I said, pulling the notebook to me and pressing it against my chest.

“Oh,” he said, his mouth turning upward in a knowing smile. “One of them teenage diaries, is it? Tell it all your private secrets, do you?”

“No,” I said as I felt the blush rise in my cheeks. “It’s just homework.”

“Anything you want to share with your uncle Frank?”

“Actually, I’d like you to leave now,” I said. “I’ve got to finish my homework.”

Frank pulled his thin lips downward, mimicking an expression of disappointment. “Not much of a hostess, are you, love? And here’s me just trying to get to know my little niece.”

“I’m not your niece. And you’re not my uncle.”

“Will be soon,” he said, grinning.

“What do you mean?” I asked softly.

“Mabel and me, we’re getting married.”

“Oh.” I was stunned. Surely this couldn’t be true. Mabel would never get married, and certainly not to Frank. He must be lying.

Frank laughed sourly. “You’re supposed to say ‘Congratulations!’ Supposed to say ‘Welcome to the family, Uncle Frank.’ Actually, if you
were really going to be as polite and nice to me as you should, you’d give me a kiss.” He patted his hand against his whiskery cheek. “Right here.”

I backed away until I felt the cold solidity of the wall against my back.

Frank threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, love. I won’t make you. But you might want to change your attitude. I mean, with me going to be your uncle—well, we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other in the future. You should write that in your little diary. ‘Saturday, the fifteenth of February’”—he mimicked writing in the air with his hand—” ‘found out that Frank is going to marry my auntie Mabel. Oh, what happy news!’ See,“he said, dropping his hand to his lap and staring steadily at me. “That’s the kind of welcome I’m looking for. Instead of all this ruddy rudeness and antagonism from your bloody nutcase of a mother.”

“She can’t help it if she doesn’t like you,” I said, looking at him steadily.

“Well, that’s a shame. Because she’s going to have to get used to me. I’m going to be part of the family now.” With a grunt, he pushed himself off the bed so that he stood looking down at me. “You should probably write that down in your diary as well,” he said, eyeing the notebook I was still clutching to my chest.

After Frank left, I sat on my bed for a long time holding my notebook. I sat still as his footsteps descended the stairs and as I heard his voice below, in the kitchen, a husky rumble against Mabel’s and my mother’s higher, lighter tones. Finally, assured that he wouldn’t return, I completed my letter to Amanda. This time it didn’t go on for pages and pages. This time it was short and to the point. I simply asked her why, on that cold night, she had placed her lips on mine to send my hopes soaring, then let them crash into a ditch like Stan Heaphy’s motorbike, leaving me floundering, helpless, unable to brush myself off and get up.

When I was finished, I tore the letter from my notebook. Then I pulled my biscuit tin from the wardrobe, lifted the lid, and added it to
my bundle. For a moment, I felt myself wanting to retrieve a box of matches from the kitchen so that I could set a little bonfire in the biscuit tin and burn all those letters. It seemed the kind of romantic gesture unrequited love demanded, and I felt a desperate desire to burn all those feelings from me, to see them ignite, flare, turn to smoke and flames. Having the letters there, hidden in my bedroom, was concrete evidence of a terrible flaw that I never wanted anyone else to find. But they were also evidence of the love I still felt. And, despite everything, I couldn’t let that go. So I put the lid on the tin and put it back in its usual hiding place, but as soon as I did that I knew that I’d written the last of my letters to Amanda. I might still think of her constantly, I might still wish that she returned my feelings, but I would not write to her again.

IN ALL THE YEARS
I’d known Ted, he’d never arrived at our house empty-handed. Usually, his gifts seemed extravagant—a gold watch for my father, a set of pearl earrings for my mother, a leather coat for me. Within a short while, however, we usually discovered that there was something not quite right about these items—the gold on my father’s watch started peeling off to reveal a dull gray metal underneath, the pearl earrings turned mottled pink when my mother got them wet, and on the first day I’d worn my leather coat Mrs. Brockett had taken great pleasure in pointing out that it was, in fact, made of plastic. At other times, Ted brought us things that seemed more practical—a carton of six dozen lightbulbs, twenty-four tins of Mr. Sheen furniture polish, a five-gallon bucket of white paint. Soon after his departure, however, we’d invariably discover that there was something wrong with this merchandise. Only about a third of the lightbulbs had actually worked, most of the Mr. Sheen lost its aerosol propellant so quickly that we got only one or two pathetic streams of polish from each tin before they proved useless, and, upon opening the white paint we’d found it full of little gray lumps.

“Well, what do you expect when everything he gets has fallen off the back of a lorry?” Auntie Mabel said anytime my mother complained about Ted’s latest offerings.

When I was younger, before I understood the meaning of this phrase, I’d imagined Ted coming upon the items he brought us in the middle of the road after they’d fallen from an overladen lorry or van. Later, even after I’d learned that Auntie Mabel was referring to the illicit ways in which Ted acquired almost everything that came into his possession, the image still stuck. Though, rather than thinking of Ted serendipitously coming upon his merchandise, I began to visualize him chasing down vehicles in the streets, or grabbing boxes and cartons out of the rear doors of lorries as they waited for the traffic lights to change. There was something about this image that seemed to sum Ted up in my mind—a dodging pilferer who was just as likely to get sideswiped by an enormous juggernaut as he was to get away with anything worthwhile.

This time when Ted arrived, he swaggered into the hallway wearing an enormous grin and what looked like a giant, sleeping animal over his shoulder.