Another Life Altogether (52 page)

Mabel eased her grip and let me drop onto the pillow. “I’m sorry, love. It’s just that you gave me the biggest scare of my entire life. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you. Awake. Alive.” She punctuated these words by slapping at the bare V of her chest above her plunging neckline a couple of times. “You don’t look well, but at least you’re with us. Thank God.” She began rummaging about in her huge, shiny handbag.

“You can’t smoke here, Mabel,” Grandma said.

Mabel rolled her eyes, dropped her bag to the floor with a thud, and sank into the chair next to Grandma’s. “Probably just as well,” she said. “I’ve smoked four bleeming packets in the last twenty-four hours. Maybe it’s time I gave up smoking. What do you think, Jesse? Might as well give up my two bad habits at the same time—cigarettes and men.”

“But you’re getting married—”

“Married? Oh, no, I don’t think so, love. The wedding’s off. Permanently. I’m not marrying a liar and a thief. The coppers are still investigating, but turns out Frank wasn’t helping our Ted get a job at all. He was driving over to your house with that bleeming van filled up to the brim with Tuggles sausages. Apparently, they were delivering to butchers and grocers from Reatton-on-Sea all the way up to Flamborough.
No wonder they were driving about until all hours.” She shook her head slowly and pursed her lips into a glossy knot.

“One thing I’ll say about Teddy is that he’s always been enterprising,” Grandma said, her scratchy voice coming out in a soft, roiling laugh.

“Enterprising and about as thick as two short planks,” Mabel huffed. “Not the best combination. But turns out that Frank was the bleeming criminal genius behind this one. He’d got one of the Tuggles managers to help him by cooking the books. You know, so they wouldn’t be able to keep track of all them missing sausages. He recruited Ted for his criminal contacts. That way, he was able to find all the shops and suppliers that’d take the sausages cheap, no questions asked. Unfortunately for them, Ted thought he’d got himself a good contact at the Midham Co-op. Some woman he’d become friendly with while he was staying at your house. Knowing our Ted, I’m sure he thought he had her charmed. But when he offered her some stolen sausages she went straight to the cops and turned him in.”

I wondered if the woman who turned Ted in had been Mrs. Franklin, the woman who’d banned me. If it was, I was sure my entire family would never be allowed to shop at the Midham Co-op again.

“Such a shame Teddy’s got to go back to prison,” Grandma said. “I was hoping I’d get to see him without having to pay a visit to Bradford jail.”

“Yes, well,” Mabel said, “despite Ted’s record, Frank’s likely to get the longer sentence. The coppers know that Frank’s the one that organized everything. So Ted will probably get just a few months. But if Frank’s found guilty he’ll be in for three or four years.” She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she looked over at me. “I should have listened to you all along, Jesse. I’ve had it with men. People can think what they like, but I’ve decided to call myself a Ms.”

MY FATHER ARRIVED
just after Mabel left. When I saw him, I felt a little jolt of excitement, and then, remembering what I had done and
everything that had happened, I felt the urge to press my face into my pillow, as if by doing so I could hide away.

“Jesse! Oh, Jesse. It’s so good to see you awake.” He leaned over and kissed me, soft as a whisper, on my cheek. Then, just as he seemed about to pull back, he plunged himself against me. I was muffled in my father’s sweaty smell and the wooly scratch of his pullover. As he held me, I felt jerky sobs move through his chest.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said when he finally pulled back.

“Sorry?” He was red-eyed, ragged, and rumpled. His pullover was stretched out and lopsided. The long strands of his hair hung loose, while his bald patch shone like a pale polished apple under the glaring hospital lights.

“I didn’t mean to—” I felt my own tears rise. I was no longer a blank mind registering nothing. Regret and sadness and aching guilt flooded through me.

“I know, love,” my father said. “I know. But, Jesse, love, I thought we’d lost you. Please,” he said, his eyes big watery saucers, “don’t ever do anything like that again.”

“I won’t,” I promised.

“Good. Because if you did I know I’d never forgive myself. I’d know it was because I let you down. And you have to realize, Jesse, that though I might not show it sometimes, I … well, I love you, Jesse, I really do.”

For the first time since I’d found myself in that hospital bed, I filled my lungs with a long, deep breath. Though the air was thick and stale and tasted of bleached sheets and disinfectant, I was glad to pull it into me all the same.

My father took the seat next to Grandma, who was knitting again.

“Where’s Mum?” I asked. It was the question that had been on my mind ever since I’d first woken.

My father eyed Grandma. She returned his look, raising her almost invisible eyebrows, then gave a subtle nod.

“Well …” My father brushed his palms over his thighs, hard, as if he
were trying to smooth the map of creases out of his trousers or to wipe something sticky from his hands. “That’s why I couldn’t stay here with you, love. That’s why your Grandma’s been here. I’ve … Well, your mum had to go back to Delapole, Jesse.”

“She didn’t …? She didn’t try to …?” I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. I knew if she had tried to kill herself again, then I had propelled her to it. I was the one who had wished her dead.

My father shook his head. “No, love. She didn’t do anything like that. It’s just … Well, Jesse, love, your mum has an illness. There’s something wrong inside her head. She has to get treated by the doctors. The way they might treat someone who’s got a bad heart or a broken leg. So she’s going to stay there, in the hospital, for quite a while.”

“Will she be cured when she comes home, then?” I asked. I felt myself clinging to a thread of hope. A lifeline thrown to someone drowning.

Grandma dropped her knitting into her lap and rested her hand on my wrist. “Your mum has the kind of illness that they can’t really cure, darling. Not now, not yet. But they think they can help her, give her medicines that will make her a lot better, able to cope more easily with life.” She leaned closer to me, holding me steady in her pale blue eyes. “She wasn’t always like this, you know, darling. When she was much younger, she was just a normal lass. She might have been a little more moody than Ted or Mabel, but most of the time she was like anyone else. So you have to understand, love, that the person she is right now, it’s not really Evelyn. It’s like a storm that happens inside her head. It’s like the weather. There’s nothing that you can do or say to stop it. And there’s no point in trying. You’re just a lass—a bairn, really. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. You’ve got other things you need to think about.”

I lay silent, letting these words sink into me. After a few moments, I tilted my head toward my father. “Is Malcolm all right?” I asked.

“He’s fine,” my father said.

Then I asked him how it had happened, how it was that while Malcolm’s
caravan had been pulled down the cliff side, Malcolm was still alive. My father explained that, unlike my family, Malcolm’s had been regularly checking the weather forecast. When Malcolm’s father heard there was such a big storm coming in, he’d moved their caravan far back from the cliff, among the other caravans there. Though the storm had kept them awake all night, they’d been safe.

When Malcolm went outside that morning, he’d seen me walking along the cliff, unsteady on my feet. He’d called to me and, when I didn’t seem to hear, had followed me. He was there, on the cliff, looking down on me as I stood on the beach. When he saw me stagger into the water, he ran down the path and went after me, into the waves.

“You were very lucky, Jesse,” my father concluded. “All the seawater that you drank made you vomit up a lot of those pills. It took quite a while for them to get an ambulance all the way out to Reatton. Even if you hadn’t drowned, you could easily have ended up dead. Of course, it’s Malcolm you’ve got to thank for everything. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he’s a brave little bugger, that lad.”

TWO DAYS LATER,
my father brought Malcolm to see me. I was feeling much better by then, and when they arrived I was sitting, propped against fluffed-up pillows, absently leafing through the
Woman’s Weekly
Mabel had left behind. My first instinct was to dive beneath my covers or to tell Grandma, still knitting at my bedside, that I didn’t want any visitors. Instead, I sat frozen in embarrassment as he loped across the shiny tiled floor.

“Here’s the little hero,” my father announced as he reached my bedside. His chest was thrown out and he was smiling so broadly that his dimples looked like two little handles in his cheeks. Next to him, Malcolm was silent.

“Hiya,” I said, pressing myself against the pillows, shuffling down in my bed.

“Hiya,” Malcolm said. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right.” I shrugged and let my eyes fall to the
Woman’s Weekly
in my lap.

“Is that all you’ve got to say to this young man, Jesse?” my father said. “I know you’re still a bit out of sorts, love, but, come on, now. I mean, he did save your life.”

“Thank you,” I mumbled, unable to lift my gaze. I was, in fact, unbearably grateful, but I was also swathed in shame—not only at all the ways in which I’d stood by and let Malcolm be mistreated, even calling him a poof myself, but also at the fact that he’d found me drunk, drugged, and delusional and had to pull me out of the sea. While he’d been strong and able to withstand everything, I had been pathetically weak.

“Oh, come on, Jesse,” my father said. “You can do better than that. This lad here”—he patted Malcolm’s shoulder—“well, he could have drowned trying to help you. But he didn’t think about himself for a second. You need to tell him—”

“It’s all right, Mr. Bennett,” Malcolm interrupted. “When I helped Jesse, I was really only returning a favor.”

I looked up.

“What do you mean?” my father asked.

“There was a group of bullies at school,” Malcolm said. “They were going to beat me up. It was Jesse that stood up to them. She helped me escape. She fought them off.”

“She did?”

Malcolm nodded and looked at me, smiling. “Yeah, see, when I went in that water after her, really, I was only repaying a friend.”

A
FTER A STAY OF SEVERAL DAYS IN THE HOSPITAL, I’D RETURNED
home to a place that was completely different. Though there were still holes in the walls from my mother’s fit with the sledgehammer and some of the furniture had been clumsily nailed back together, all other evidence of her tempestuous presence was gone. In the mornings I slept late, until after my father had left for work. When I came downstairs, Grandma was cooking breakfast while her fiancé, Bill—an almost bald and jowly seventy-year-old who looked about as un-gigolo-like as I could imagine—filled out the crossword in the previous evening’s Hull
Daily Mail
. Our days were spent in a quiet routine punctuated by washing dishes, cleaning, and cooking. In the afternoons, we’d drink tea and listen to the play on Radio 4. If there was a cricket match, Bill would turn on the television to watch it, Grandma would pull out her knitting, and I’d get out a book. In the evenings, when my father came home, he and Bill would repair the various holes and cracks in the walls. Upstairs, I’d lie on my bed reading until I fell asleep. A couple of times a week, Malcolm and Dizzy would come over and we’d sit together in the kitchen, or, if the weather was nice, we’d go into the garden and talk until the long June evenings descended into dark. There were no highs, no lows, no screaming fits or pits of hopeless desperation.
But during all this time the dread of returning to Liston Comprehensive hung there, a lurking menace in my mind. I could imagine it all so clearly—the trail of titters I’d leave behind me as I walked through the playground, the snarled comments in the corridors, the gangs of vicious, angry girls. I could clearly hear the choruses of “lezzie” and “loony” as I pushed my way through jostling crowds in the cloakrooms. Even the teachers would look at me with sneering pity—the pathetic case who’d written secret love letters to an older girl student, and who’d tried to kill herself when she was found out.

Finally, after I’d been at home for three weeks, my father told me that I had to return to school. “But I can’t,” I protested, unable to imagine leaving the refuge of our house. “I can’t go back.”

“You’ve got to, Jesse,” he said. “You’ve got no choice. The doctor only wrote you a sick note for three weeks, love. If you don’t go back, they’ll be sending the truant officer out.”

I WALKED ALONG
the road into the village as if I were walking to my own funeral. For the first time since I’d woken at the hospital, I wondered if it might have been better if I had drowned. When I rounded the corner onto the high street, there was already a group gathered at the bus stop. I saw Tracey staring eagerly at me. The boys hovered around her, all elbows and knees, shoving and sputtering as they watched my approach.