Another Life Altogether (51 page)

He looked down at his notebook. “Stealing. And I’m afraid there may be a charge of conspiracy to defraud.”

“Oh, God,” she said, grappling with her cigarette packet. “I’ll kill our bloody Ted, I will. Dragging poor Frank into trouble.” She pulled out a cigarette, waving it about, unlit, as she spoke. “So, what’s he been stealing? What’s he been defrauding?”

“It’s both of them that’s being charged, Miss Pearson,” the policeman said solemnly. “They’ve been stealing Tuggles sausages.”

AS SOON AS THE
police were gone, I left Mabel smoking and pacing the hallway, ran upstairs to my bedroom, gathered up a few things, and put them into a duffel bag that I slung across my shoulder. Then I galloped down the stairs again, launched myself past Mabel, and out the front door.

It was a different world now. The storm had transformed everything. The hedgerows were battered and the fields beaten. The wheat, silvered with rain, lay flat like the fur of a damp animal. The road was pocked with wide, shimmering puddles and strewn with debris—ragged leaves, broken branches. Huge shape-shifting clouds, dense and gray at their bottoms, rolled across the sky. Next to where our driveway opened out into the road, a tree had fallen, blocking one lane of the narrow little thoroughfare. It was one of the dead elms, stark and bare, a felled corpse sent sprawling. As I made my way around it, I noticed, in the fine fingers of its upper branches, a pink serviette splayed on the ground, tattered, streaked with dirt, and darkly wet.

I walked purposefully, breathing in the cool, stark air. The wind, far less powerful than during the night, but still strong, was coming off the coast. As I moved against it, I felt myself pushing into a force that was so much larger than me, urging it to welcome me into its arms. And while my body moved forward, I let my thoughts skim over the bedraggled landscape. After such destruction, it seemed a miracle that the world remained intact, resilient. I only wished that I could say the same of myself. Instead, I felt undone.

I had tried so hard. Tried to make a new life for myself, tried to fit
in. Tried to take care of my mother, to rein in her maniacal energy, to keep her afloat. I had tried, too, to love someone. And, finally, when pushed to it, I had even tried to stop brutality and bullying, to stand up, to speak out. I’d failed in all of it. Instead of making myself loved and popular and normal, I’d become the worst thing there was. At school, I was a “lezzie,” a “homo,” a “pervert,” but at home I was something even more dreadful. I had said the cruelest thing I could think of to my mother. I had told her that I wished that she were dead. And I’d told her knowing full well the state she’d worked herself into over Mabel’s wedding. I might as well have lifted that sledgehammer and smashed the walls and doors and furniture myself.

IT WAS STILL EARLY
when I reached Reatton-on-Sea. The little high street was empty, the shops still closed, the only movement the squeaky flapping of a dislodged metal sign above the amusement arcade. I saw no one on the road that led to the cliff edge. The only sounds were the wind and the roar of the waves. The sea was a strip of slate gray, widening as I came closer, and flecked with white ruffles, like shreds of lace. I didn’t see the dramatic change in the shape of the cliffs until I was almost at the end of the road. It was only then that I noticed that the jutting little peninsula at the edge of the caravan park was no longer there. Where that tongue of cliff had stuck out, there was nothing more than air. Malcolm’s battered caravan was gone.

My duffel bag bounced hard against my back and its stringy strap bit into my shoulder as I ran past the entrance of Holiday Haven. I sped across the sodden grass, splashing through puddles, sliding over greasy mud, until I stopped as close as I dared get to the cliff edge, to the place where that peninsula had been. Then I craned my head to peer over the rim, to see where the sea had ripped the land away. The clay, dark and moist, seemed poured downward, like suddenly frozen liquid. At the bottom, it was held in the tumultuous caress of the waves.

The sight finally made me certain, tipped me, too, over the edge. As
I gazed down at the place where Malcolm and his family must have plunged to in the middle of the night, I knew what I had to do. I had come looking for him, I now realized, hoping that there might be at least one person who could understand me, who could keep me attached to this place. But he was gone now. Sucked down, sucked under by the insatiable waves.

As the high tide swirled below and gnawed eagerly at the base of the cliff, I thought about Mr. Cuthbertson’s stories in my geography lessons, of whole towns and villages pulled under, of ports and people washed away. There were ancient graveyards in the silt and mud off the East Yorkshire coast. A sea full of bodies. I was sad that Malcolm had to drown there, but it seemed a fitting place to end.

I stepped back from the cliff and pulled the duffel bag from my shoulder. Then I tugged back the string fastening its mouth and tipped its contents onto the wet ground—a pillowcase holding a hundred little pills and a whiskey bottle containing a couple of inches of bright, coppery liquid.

It didn’t take long to push it all into me. A handful of pills, a stinging mouthful of the whiskey, another handful of the pills. I did it so fast that by the time I was done I didn’t feel the effects of any of it, just the raw and glorious burn of the whiskey all the way from my lips down my throat and into my stomach.

I began walking. Back along the cliff, gazing at the turbulent water, until I reached the path that led to the beach. As I made my way down, my limbs began to feel stretched out, loose. The noise of the waves became deafening, a percussion orchestra in my ears. And then a bright stretch of sky opened up on the horizon. It glistened across the silvered water, dazzling. I kept blinking. My eyes, now heavy and aching, couldn’t bear all that light. But I kept plodding downward until I reached the bottom, and a little patch of sand not quite covered by the tide. For a moment—or perhaps for a long, long time—I stood there, watching the waves sweep onto the sand, over and across one another, like crescendos of music, or rising and falling floods of hope. Then, as I
felt dizziness start to overtake me, I kicked off my shoes, and in my stocking feet I stumbled over the wet sand and into the water, its cold fingers welcoming me, pulling me into a startling embrace.

I waded deeper, into history, into memories, toward swallowed land and drowned villages, inundated lives. I waded into stories about myself. The chubby-cheeked three-year-old my mother had talked about, thrilled to run away from her into the churning waters of the North Sea. It occurred to me then that I’d always been determined to run toward a dazzling, distant horizon. As the water clasped me to it, I decided that this was the one thing I loved about myself.

A wave came in, fast and tumbling, and I was underwater, limbs flailing, clothes flapping, sagging, dragging me downward. I gasped for air and took in choked-down mouthfuls of salt water. I felt my lungs burn, I felt my stomach lurch, I felt a shuddering convulsion. Then, buoyed up and pushed above the surface, I took in a breath.

Then I opened my eyes and saw Malcolm’s ghost swim over to greet me. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him. And, even though I fought him, I was happy to see him. It was nice, I realized, to finally find a friend.

“A
M I IN DELAPOLE?”

An old lady was hovering over me. Veiny-faced and smiling. She took my hand. The room behind her was creamy, gloss-painted. At my feet I could see the grim metal frame of a hospital bed.

“You’re safe now, lovey.” She had a voice that was scratchy and vaguely familiar. She smelled of eau de cologne and washing detergent. She had wrinkly tan skin and white, almost invisible eyebrows, and the palest blue eyes I’d ever seen.

“I didn’t drown?”

She shook her head and squeezed my fingers. “No, love. You’re still with us.” I saw a tear roll down her cheek, and I thought of the taste of salt water. I felt my stomach rise then lurch back, like a wave.

“Who are you?” I asked. She looked too old to be a nurse, and besides, she was wearing a flowery dress and big button earrings that covered her earlobes. There was a brooch pinned to her chest, a cluster of bright-colored feathers and little pearls.

While another tear rolled down her face, she let out a soft laugh. “Me? I’m your grandma, darling. I’ve come back from Australia. Looks like you could have used me a lot earlier. Still, better late than never, eh?”

She sniffed and I examined her face more closely, thinking back to all those photographs she’d sent us from Australia. But she didn’t look familiar, and I could discern no family resemblance in her face. Except for her deep tan, she looked just like any other old lady, with permed white hair and a lined and saggy neck.

“You came for Mabel’s wedding,” I said. “It was supposed to happen….” I realized that I had no idea what day it was, whether I’d lain in this bed for a few hours or been here unconscious for days. I tried to push myself up off my hard little pillow to get a better view of the room. But my limbs felt pathetically weak, without substance, and every inch of my body ached. I could lift myself high enough only to see a long row of beds and the window, tall and many-paned, next to the bed opposite mine.

“No need to worry yourself, love,” Grandma said. She smoothed back the hair at the side of my face. “You just lie down and rest.”

I fell back onto my pillow and looked at the distant white ceiling.

I WOKE AGAIN TO
the sound of rain, an insistent metallic patter, the beginning of a storm on a caravan’s roof. I opened my eyes and was surprised to see openness instead of a cramped interior. When I turned my head, I saw an old lady knitting something in pastel pink, the
click-click-click
of the needles just like falling rain. For a moment, I wondered if she was making wedding serviettes. Then I remembered that the wedding was off.

“Are you my grandma?” I asked, faintly recalling a previous conversation.

“That’s right, darling,” she said, looking over at me and dropping the knitting into her lap.

“Oh,” I said, glad that I could at least remember this while everything else seemed a shifting blur. “How did I get here?”

“In an ambulance, love. From Reatton, from the beach.”

“But who? How?” I was confused. I knew that I had stepped into
waves, that I had been pulled under, toward all those buildings and bodies consumed by the sea. “I thought I … I saw a ghost. I saw Malcolm. He was taking me with him … he—”

“Malcolm? Is that the stringy lad that lives at the caravan park?”

I nodded as I remembered the cliff devoured by the sea and the blank place where his caravan had stood.

“Well, I don’t know about any ghost, darling,” Grandma said. “But Malcolm was the one who pulled you out. He said you put up such a struggle that he thought he might not be able to bring you in. He was worried that you both might drown. But you let him help you, eventually. I suppose with all them pills and what-not you’d taken, you didn’t have that much fight left.”

“He saved me?”

“That’s right, love. He saved you.”

“So he’s alive?”

“Well, he was last time I saw him.” She squinted at a tiny-faced gold watch on her wrist. “About an hour ago, at about half past five. Poor little thing, he was ever so worried about you. He wanted to come to see you. But the nurses wouldn’t let him. It’s only family members allowed right now. But, as much as his dad wanted him to go home, he wouldn’t leave until he knew for certain that you were going to be fine.”

“Oh,” I said, remembering how I’d thrashed and kicked and gulped in all that seawater, how I’d known, as I felt Malcolm’s ghost dragging me under with him, that I really didn’t want to die.

I FOUND I RATHER
liked being in the hospital. The nurses were very nice to me, smiling and speaking softly; they pressed warm fingers to my wrist to take my pulse and tucked my covers tight so I felt swaddled, like a baby, in my bed. And though she was only vaguely familiar, it was reassuring to have Grandma Pearson sitting at my bedside, a solid presence that I kept coming back to as I drifted in and out of sleep. I was also pleased when I found out that I wasn’t in Delapole but in Bleakwick
General Hospital. Most of all, I liked that, exiled there, I was capable of lying back and keeping my mind completely blank.

“Oh, Jesse, I finally managed to get here when you’re awake. It’s such a relief to see you, love.”

It was morning. Or at least I thought it was. The light from the window was bluish; I could hear the distant clatter of teacups, the busy slap of shoes on hard, tiled floors. Mabel came into view at the foot of my bed. Her sheeny hair and vivid makeup were dazzling against the colorlessness of the room. She hurried to the side of my bed, looming over me to wrap her arms around my shoulders.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Mabel, you’ll stifle the lass,” Grandma said, her voice muffled by Mabel’s springy flesh. I hadn’t realized she was still there, at my bedside. I wondered if she’d been there all night.