Another Life Altogether (50 page)

It was her dismissive tone that infuriated me, sparking an anger that turned, in a single second, into a firestorm. And with it came a realization: Of everyone I had struck out at in the past couple of days—Stan, Greg, Tracey, Malcolm—there was no one that I wanted to hurt more than my mother.

“Nothing is going to be fine!” I yelled. “Nothing! The weather, the tent, the whole bloody wedding—it’s all a disaster. All of it!”

“Now, now, Jesse,” my father said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “No need for that. No need to upset your mum.”

I batted him away. “No need to upset her?” My voice held a howl far stronger than the wind’s. “No need to upset her?” I repeated. “What about me?” I yelled. “Why doesn’t anyone care about upsetting me?” For a moment I stared at my father, my eyes an outraged accusation. He returned my look, blinking, as if a blinding light had been directed into his eyes. I dared him to speak, but he said nothing, and then I spun around to face my mother. “You!” I shouted, fueled by the delicious energy that coursed through me. “You are the biggest disaster of all.”

I took a couple of steps toward her, standing so close now that I could see the pale area of her pores where the Tanfastic hadn’t penetrated, a stripe of dark hair next to her ear where she’d failed to get the bleach all the way to the roots. I stood so close that our bodies were
touching. Her breasts, unyielding in the pointy bra she wore under her yellow dress, pressed against my barely curved chest.

“You want to know a secret, Mum?” I asked, lowering my voice so it was just above a whisper, so that, against the backdrop of yowling wind, she’d be the only one to hear. My mother frowned, her eyes vague and distant, as she moved her head up and down in a jerky little nod. I leaned closer to her and spoke into her ear. “When they took you out of the house on that stretcher,” I said, “I wished that you’d really killed yourself.” I pushed out the words with a soft viciousness, enjoying the way they rolled, like the lines of a song, so easily off my tongue. “I still wish it now,” I said.

It was true, it was there inside me. It was complete and utter certainty. I wished they’d taken her off in that ambulance and never brought her back. Or, more accurately, I wished that Mrs. Brockett had never found her, that she’d been left to bleed slowly into the bath, and that I’d discovered her there when I came home from school, drained of life, made soft and wrinkled by the bloody water.

I pulled away slightly to look into her face, exhilarated. And then I let the words out slowly. “It would make me really happy if you were dead.”

For a moment, my mother’s expression flared with indignation. She took a couple of steps back, balled her hands into fists, and lifted them to her chest, like a boxer preparing to deliver a blow. But, in the next moment, she dropped them again, so that her arms flopped loose at her sides and her face fell slack. Then she staggered backward a few steps on her teetering heels before turning away from me to walk slowly down the hall.

WE DID OUR BEST
to rescue the tent. Mabel, my father, and I battling the gale to reach the back garden, then struggling across the waterlogged lawn as the rain hit our faces like needles and the gale howled like something alive. But the huge marquee, broken free from several of
its stakes now, reared and bucked like a liberated wild animal; it was like trying to pin a roaring elephant down. We could hardly hear one another; our voices were blown from us and drowned.

“It’s no good!” Mabel yelled, a few inches away from me, as the rope she’d been able to grab jerked away from her hand.

“I know!” I yelled back. Then both of us fought our way over to my father, who was clinging to the front flap of the tent and looked as if he might be tugged away and into the air at any moment.

“Come on, Mike!” Mabel shouted, pulling at him so that he loosened his grip and the fabric flew upward. “The bloody wedding’s off!”

We’d been working in the pale yellow light that shone from the windows of the house. As I turned and began making my way back to the house, I saw my mother watching us from the kitchen window. The next moment, all the lights went out and I was plunged into darkness.

I stood there, wavering in the wind, as I tried to get used to the dark. But the seconds went by, and in the stinging rain I could make out nothing but shadow outlines. The entire world seemed to have turned into looming silhouettes. From somewhere, rippling on the wind, I heard Mabel’s and my father’s voices. They were both calling out my name. I realized that I didn’t want to go to them, that I wanted to stay there, shivering and sodden, alone. I imagined the water seeping ever deeper into me, so that it would wash me clean, all the way down to my bones.

“Jesse!” It was my father. He had stumbled into me.

“Is that Jesse?” Mabel yelled. She was holding on to my father.

They both grabbed me and tried to pull me onward. I resisted.

“For God’s sake, Jesse!” Mabel cried. “We need to get inside!”

I let her tug me forward, joining her and my father to struggle toward the house.

It took us a long time to find our way to the door. But finally we got there, and as soon as my father turned the door handle the wind caught the door and flung it wide, into the hall. The three of us stumbled inside, breathing hard, and then turned round to grapple with the door,
shoving against it until we were finally able to close it with an enormous, resounding slam. We fell against it, panting and dripping, our backs resting on the wood. It was then that I saw a pale flickering light coming from the kitchen, and a moment later that I heard the heavy thuds, the sound of metal striking something hollow and dull. The noise reverberated through the house half a dozen times, followed by the sound of wood splitting, a bright and aching yawn.

“What the bloody hell …?” my father said, a dark shadow beside me. He pushed himself off and began walking down the hall. Mabel stayed behind, still panting, apparently winded, while I followed, pressing my palm against the cold, flat surface of the wall as I tried to guide myself through the darkness. As the banging continued, I felt it shudder through the wall and into my hand. It was as if the entire house were being beaten in a series of violent, body-crushing blows.

When my father reached the living-room doorway, I heard him knock into something, let out a little bark of pain, then stumble onward again. When I reached the obstacle he had encountered, I realized it was the living-room door, hanging half off its hinges, leaning into the hall. I let out a sharp gasp and continued on after my father. He halted a few seconds later outside the kitchen, and I joined him there to peer into the room.

It was the candle I noticed first, upright in a saucer in the middle of the table. Its flame flickering slightly, it gave out a pale illumination that made the room all soft-edged shadows and blocks of darkness against the shuddering light. Everything else was indistinct except my mother, her jaw clenched and her eyes gleaming buttons of conviction as she swung her sledgehammer up, grunted, and then smashed it against the kitchen wall.

“Jesus Christ almighty!” my father whispered, his words coming out like the slow hiss of a leaking tire. Then the hammer hit the wall with an enormous thump, and there was the sound of plaster tumbling in fragments; it made me think of teeth falling from a cartoon character’s mouth.

As we stood in the kitchen doorway I turned to look at my father, but all I could make out were the hollows of his eyes. Then he took a breath and stepped past me, into the kitchen. “Evelyn,” he said as she swung the hammer over her shoulder. “Evelyn,” he repeated, this time louder as he tripped on something. In the tangle of his feet I thought I made out the outline of a broken chair. “Stop!” he shouted as my mother, a flat silhouette, began to lift the hammer above her. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage?” His voice was loud, but pleading, like a child’s.

She turned to him. I saw her arms twitch slightly, as if she were about to swing the hammer at him. Then she let it go so that it dropped behind her and fell to the floor.

I
SPENT THAT NIGHT WITH MABEL AND MY FATHER AMONG THE BATTERED
remains of the living room. None of us wanted to spend the night alone. I sat on our now legless armchair, my legs stretched out on the floor in front of me, while my father slept on the tilting settee and Mabel paced back and forth across the littered floor. When she wasn’t smoking, she gripped the diamond engagement ring on her finger, twisting it nervously round and round.

“Oh, God, Jesse, I can’t believe this is happening. It’s like one of them bleeming disaster films, is this. But I tell you, I can take canceling the wedding. I can even take our Evelyn acting like a one-woman demolition crew. But I’m worried to death about Frank and Ted being out in this.” She swept an arm toward the window and the cacophony of the still raging storm. “They could be off in a ditch somewhere. They could be injured. Oh, God, they could be …” She sobbed, then added softly, “I just wish we could phone the police.”

We had discovered that the telephone was dead when my father tried to ring my mother’s doctor, though what advice the doctor might have offered in the wake of her fit of destruction I did not know. When he hadn’t been able to reach the doctor, my father had searched out a bottle of her pills, given her a couple with a glass of water, and made her
swallow them down. Then he and Mabel had taken her upstairs to her bedroom, where she’d rapidly fallen asleep. After walking through the house with a torch to survey the full extent of the damage my mother had carried out, my father had collapsed in a defeated bundle onto the settee. When he finally fell asleep, he slept fitfully, letting out little murmurs and grumbles as his limbs jerked and his features twitched.

“I’m sure Frank and Uncle Ted are fine, Auntie Mabel,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “Maybe they stopped off somewhere to get out of the weather.”

“I hope you’re right, Jesse,” Mabel said. “I really do. But I’ve got this awful feeling. I just know something terrible has happened.” She pressed a fist into her stomach. “I can feel it, right here, in my guts.”

I WAS JERKED OUT
of sleep by the sound of loud banging, and for a moment I thought my mother must have found her sledgehammer again. But then, as I opened my eyes, I realized that it wasn’t the noise of a hammer that had woken me; there was someone banging on the front door. I pushed myself out of the broken armchair.

It was no longer dark. Light seeped through the curtains, so that the room was cast in a silvery pall. My father still lay sleeping on the settee, his mouth open, his breath coming out in snuffled gasps. Mabel was flopped into the other armchair, her head thrown back, her arms draped limp over the chair’s sides. As the pounding on the door continued, she groaned, her eyelids flickered, and then she suddenly opened her eyes wide. The next moment, she was on her feet.

“It must be Frank and Ted,” she said. “Oh, thank God! They must have forgotten to take a key.” She marched across the room, pausing for a moment to check her reflection in the mirror above the mantel, now hanging at an angle, a massive crack across its middle. She cupped her cheeks in her hands, groaned again, then patted her hair. “Crikey,” she said. “I look like I’ve been through a bleeming war.” Then she added, mumbling, “Feel like I’ve been through one as well.”

I followed her out into the hallway, hanging back as she raced to the door.

“Where the heck have you—” she began as she opened the door. Apparently shocked at what she saw there, she took a step back. The door swung wide, and I saw two policemen standing on our front step. One was tall, with a jutting chin and an enormous swell of a belly that pressed against the shiny buttons of his midnight-blue uniform. The other was thin and much younger, his conical helmet too big, so that it hid a good part of his smooth-skinned face and made me think of a bucket turned upside down onto his head.

“Are you … Mrs. Bennett?” the tall policeman asked, pausing as he consulted the notebook he held. He had a deep, authoritative voice, the sort that seemed appropriate for a representative of the local constabulary.

“No … she’s … she’s in bed. I’m Mabel Pearson,” Mabel said, her voice shaky as she pressed her hand against the wall.

The tall policeman looked grave. The younger one shuffled about, his expression invisible as he made a study of his feet. “Well, Mrs. Pearson—”

“It’s Miss … Miss Pearson,” Mabel said.

I moved along the hallway to stand next to her.

“Well, I’m afraid, Miss Pearson, that we’ve got a bit of bad news.”

“Oh, God,” Mabel gasped. “I knew it. I just knew it. What is it? What happened? Has there been an accident? Are they both … are they dead?”

The two policemen exchanged looks.

“Erm … If you’re referring to”—the tall man looked at his notebook again—“Mr. Edward Pearson and Mr. Frank Shipton, no, Miss Pearson, they’re not dead. They’re fine. But I’m sorry to say that they’ve been arrested.”

“Arrested?” Mabel’s voice rose close to a shriek. “For what?”