Another Life Altogether (44 page)

“Somebody else?” My mother lifted her foot from the pedal again and the machine stopped. “Somebody else?” Her voice was high, far more ear-piercing than the sewing machine. “What do you mean, get somebody else?”

As she yelled, I noticed how disheveled she appeared. Her clothes were unwashed, food-splattered and rumpled, her hair stood out in matted greasy lumps. But it was her expression that disturbed me most. Her face was pale and drawn and, except for the dark shadows beneath her eyes, almost without color, while her eyes seemed immensely big and bright. They were filled with such a ferocious energy that, as I regarded her, she made me think of a trapped animal, desperate and possessed by fear.

“I was only trying to help, Ev,” my father said, putting his hands out in front of him as if he were trying to stave my mother off.

“Help? Help?” she shrieked. “Do I look like I need bloody help? Are you saying I can’t manage this on my own?”

“No, but …” My father had started to back away toward the door. I was planning on following him just as soon as I’d finished spreading the jam on my toast.

“Well, then, leave me to get on with this!” she screamed, slamming a fist down on the kitchen table then springing to her feet. “Unless you want me to end up in bloody Delapole again.”

At this, my father flinched and staggered backward, dazed, like a man who had just taken a blow to the chest.

I looked at him, at the overwhelming weariness in his face. Then I looked at my mother, at the way her eyes blazed like tiny infernos, as if there was a fire raging in her head.

“Get out!” my mother yelled. “Both of you!”

“Come on, love,” my father said to me softly. “Let’s go see if there’s anything on the telly and get out of your mother’s way.”

I WAS WORRIED
about my mother, but I was also worried about myself. At least when I’d been writing my letters to Amanda they’d offered me a place I could go to when everything else seemed so awful.

I hadn’t even been able to sneak anything interesting from the mobile library to distract me while my mother had been visiting it regularly herself. She and the librarian spent ages at the little checkout desk chatting about weddings, gardening tips, and the terrible state of the world, and since the slush pile was right there, behind the librarian, it was far more difficult to grab something from that stack without being seen. In the final weeks leading up to the wedding, however, my mother stopped visiting the little van, declaring that she now knew everything she needed to know about planning a wedding and, once Mabel and Frank’s ceremony was over, she planned to write a book about it herself.

Once I was able to steal more interesting titles from the slush pile again, my life became a little more bearable. A week before the wedding, I saw a book there that I absolutely had to have. I had been pretending to browse and had pulled down a couple of random books before approaching the checkout desk to get a closer look at the slush pile when I saw there, at the very top of the forbidden volumes, a book with the title
Modern Homosexuality
, in bold red letters along its spine. I felt a bolt of burning interest surge through me, and as the librarian lifted her date stamp to check out the titles I had taken from the children’s shelves I knew that I had to get my hands on that book.

“Erm, excuse me,” I said, coughing.

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if you have any books by Beatrix Potter. I couldn’t see anything on the shelf.”

“Couldn’t see anything on the shelf?” The librarian looked at me, aghast. “Of course, we have books by Beatrix Potter.”

“Well, I couldn’t see anything and I thought—”

“Here, let me show you,” she said, dropping her date stamp and marching over to the children’s shelves.

While she began pulling out various volumes of Beatrix Potter stories, I reached behind the counter and grabbed the book that I wanted. By the time the librarian returned with copies of
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
, and
The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck
, I had
Modern Homosexuality
securely stuffed under my anorak. As soon as I got to the house, I ran upstairs into my bedroom, sat down on my bed, opened the book, buried my face in its pages, and started to read.

I’d never even seen a book before with the word “homosexuality” in its title and, now that I had, I was expecting it to offer definitive answers to all my tormenting questions, all those questions I had about what my feelings for Amanda actually meant. What I was really hoping for was something along the lines of the quizzes in
Woman’s Weekly
. “Is your husband lying to you? Are you a good communicator? What’s your personality type? Answer the questions below, rate your answers, and find out!” I wanted to write down my answers to the pertinent questions, run down a list at the bottom of the page, and discover what I really was. All A’s: Yes, you’re definitely a homosexual and there’s nothing you can do about it. B’s: Probably, but there’s still time to change. C’s: Probably not, it’s just a phase you’re going through and you’ll get over it soon. D’s: Definitely not, stop worrying and get on with your life!

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be that simple. First, the book was written in dense, unfamiliar jargon. Second, for the first two chapters it talked almost exclusively about rats, which I didn’t find at all relevant to my quandary. And third, when it did finally get to talking about humans, it was all about men, something that left me wondering if women
could actually be homosexual at all or if it was something that manifested only in the male of the species. Despite those housewives in the problem pages, perhaps I was a terrible oddity after all.

It was probably because I was so absorbed in the book that I didn’t hear a vehicle pull up outside the house. It was also why I didn’t hear the front door open, the footsteps on the stairs and along the hallway, and probably why I didn’t hear someone turn the knob on the door of my room.

“Modern Homosexuality
, eh? I tell you, times have certainly changed since I was a lad.”

I looked up to see Frank standing in the open doorway. “It’s for homework,” I blurted, dropping the book into my lap.

“That right?” he asked, a grin blooming across his bony face.

“Yes.” My voice sounded far away. My heart was hammering in my chest.

“So you’re not one of them queers, then?”

I shook my head. This time, I found I couldn’t even speak.

“Good job, that. Because, you know, there really is nothing more terrible for a parent to find out than their kid’s a pervert. If I ever found out either of my little ones was queer—well, I think I’d rather kill ’em. I know it sounds harsh, but really, it’s a parent’s worst nightmare, that is. And your mam, her being so fragile, I can’t imagine she’d take news like that very well at all.”

I tried to meet his eyes, but I couldn’t. Instead, I looked down at the dense text in the pages of the book.

“So,” Frank said, “you seen your uncle Ted? I came up here looking for him. He’s supposed to be out job hunting with me.”

“He’s sleeping,” I said.

Frank laughed. “Should do well on the night shift, Ted, don’t you think? I mean, he certainly has no trouble sleeping during the day.”

“You’re not helping him get a job, are you?” I had closed the book and pushed it away from me, to the far side of my bed. Somehow, distancing myself from it like that gave me courage and allowed the anger
I felt at Frank to flare alive. “You’re doing something else. Something you shouldn’t. Something Mabel wouldn’t like.”

Frank’s features became stiff. He took a couple more steps into my room. “It’s none of your bloody business what Ted and me are doing, you hear me? None of your business at all. And if you say one word to upset Mabel, one bloody word, I’ll make you sorry.” He let his eyes flicker down to my feet and then he slid them slowly over my body until they finally rested on my face. “More sorry than you have ever been. Understand me?”

“Yes,” I replied quietly.

“Good. Glad to hear it. Now, why don’t you get back to your reading? You looked real wrapped up in it before I disturbed you.” He nodded at the book. “A shame you’ve gone and lost your place.”

As soon as I heard Frank and Ted leave the house and drive toward the road, I dived into my wardrobe and retrieved the biscuit tin I’d hidden there. Again, I considered burning the letters, but again I just couldn’t bring myself to destroy them. I also knew that I couldn’t keep them there at the bottom of my wardrobe any longer. Frank was an ever more frequent visitor now. If he wandered into my bedroom when I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t put it past him to rifle through my things. I didn’t want him to find the whiskey or the pills that I’d put in my laundry basket, of course, but if he did I could live with the consequences of that. What I wouldn’t be able to live through, however, was his reading my letters. I had to prevent that happening at all costs. So I went downstairs and retrieved a large brown paper bag from the kitchen and placed all of my letters inside. Then I stuffed the bag into my school satchel, determined that, from now on, I would keep it with me at all times.

I
RETURNED
MODERN HOMOSEXUALITY
TO THE LIBRARIAN’S SLUSH PILE
the following week, which was the week of Mabel and Frank’s wedding. The ceremony, to be held that Saturday afternoon, was supposed to have been led by the vicar of Midham, but two weeks earlier someone had broken into the Midham church, made off with the silver collection plate and the candlesticks, and vandalized the altar by spray-painting
STATUS QUO FOREVER
! on the church’s massive oak table. The vicar, no more knowledgeable about popular heavy-metal bands now than he had been after the Black Sabbath fan defaced his church, apparently thought this was some sort of political statement and stormed into the monthly meeting of the local Young Conservatives Club to make several ugly accusations about its stunned members. Shortly after this, we were told that the vicar had been placed on indefinite leave by the bishop and sent off to recuperate in a rest home in Whitby. For a few days, this seemed to leave the entire wedding in jeopardy, sending my mother into a terrifying conniption and the house into complete anarchy, until Reverend Mullins stepped in and agreed to take the vicar of Midham’s place.

On the Tuesday evening before the wedding, my mother made me do a final fitting of my bridesmaid’s dress. I stood in the kitchen, surrounded
by piles of boxes, stacks of folding chairs, and teetering mountains of plates, cups, glasses, and dishes on almost every surface.

“For God’s sake, Jesse, breathe in, can’t you?” she said as she tugged at the zip in the back of the dress and I felt it press against my sides.

“I
am
breathing in,” I protested.

“Well, breathe in more.” She tugged again, but the zip got stuck at my waist.

“I can’t.”

“You’ve gone and bloody grown again, haven’t you?” she said, looking over my shoulder to peer at me in the full-length mirror she’d placed in the corner by the door.

“I don’t know,” I said glumly, staring at my grotesque reflection. The dress, hideous under even the best of circumstances, looked absolutely awful on me. Next to the wan pink satin, my face looked sallow, and my hair seemed completely without shine. My mother was right—I must have grown, since she’d made the dress for me almost three months ago; my body seemed about to burst the seams. I reminded myself of one of the raw pink Tuggles sausages that Frank continued to bring over on a regular basis, all unruly mottled flesh pressing against its tight skin.

“Well, I haven’t got time to take the dress out,” my mother declared. “And, to be honest with you, I don’t know that there’s enough give for that in the seams. But I think if we can get rid of that flab on your stomach, that should do the trick.” She slapped a hand against my abdomen and I looked down at my belly, the sheeny fabric wrinkled and misshapen over its bulge.

“I’ll have to phone our Mabel and tell her to go and buy you a girdle,” my mother said.

I turned on her, pulling myself out of her grip. “I am not wearing a girdle!” I felt close to tears. Having to wear this dress was humiliating enough. I was not going to wear one of those ridiculous items of under-wear—that was more than I could bear.

“Yes, you are, young lady!” she screamed. “You’ll do as I bloody
well say! I’ve worked my sodding socks off for this wedding. And, come hell or high water, it’s going to be our Mabel’s perfect day. If you or anybody else ruins it, there’ll be hell to pay. I’ve put my lifeblood into it, do you hear?” She held her arms out toward me, her palms turned upward, as she looked down at her wrists. The scars were healed over and far fainter now but still vivid against her pale and veiny skin.

AT SCHOOL THE FOLLOWING
afternoon, Tracey was in a horrible mood after hearing that Greg Loomis had been observed sharing a cigarette with a fourth-year girl, Margery Pearson, in the bike sheds during break. Margery was known throughout the school for her willingness to flash her extraordinarily large breasts in return for a couple of bites of a Mars Bar or a few drags on a cigarette, so Tracey considered herself justifiably irked. She was frustrated, too, because Margery was one of the most ruthless girl fighters in the school, leaving anyone foolish enough to challenge her with black eyes, missing teeth, and noticeable bald spots where she’d yanked out whole handfuls of hair. So while Tracey wasn’t about to get into a confrontation with Margery, she stomped around the school corridors, barked angrily at the Debbies and me in response to any question, and seemed quite determined to take out her anger on someone before the day was out. It was Malcolm Clements who ended up getting the brunt of it.