Another Life Altogether (6 page)

“I thought you were dead,” I said. “I was listening for your heartbeat.”

“Dead, eh? Yes, well, I might as well be.” She flopped back onto the bed again and pulled the blankets all the way over her head.

After that, it became a regular occurrence to arrive home and find the house dark, the syrupy thick melodies of those Radio 2 songs emanating from upstairs, my mother, lying weighted under heavy blankets, still as a corpse in her frigid room. I got the impression she spent most of her days like that, and it wasn’t long before she stopped bothering to get up in the mornings to see my father off to work and me off to school. She sometimes got out of bed, trudging down the stairs in her yellow flannelette nightgown, dark circles under her eyes, her hair sculpted in strange and angular shapes. She never said much during these visits while my father made nervous jokes about his terrible cooking. I’d sit in a corner of the kitchen, noticing how my mother seemed each day more removed, her gestures more loose and weary. My father could barely get her to respond to his questions, never mind laugh at his jokes. She regarded us both with distant, apathetic looks, as if our voices were nothing more than the background music that came constantly from the radio in her bedroom.

It was Mabel who was finally able to coax my mother out of this utter listlessness. She arrived one evening while my father was hunched over the cooker, stirring obsessively at a pan of Heinz baked beans with pork sausages. He’d burned our previous two meals beyond any redemption,
and as a result we’d dined on toast and marmalade; tonight he seemed desperate to make dinner without mishap. Mabel swept into the kitchen in a choking vapor of perfume and cigarette smoke, dropped her massive handbag onto the kitchen table, and took in the chaos.

“This will never do, will it?” she said, looking at me. “Your mam in bed, your dad cooking the dinner, and this house a right bloody mess? I mean, what kind of life is this for a lass your age, eh? She’s a right moody one, our Evelyn. One minute right as rain, the next minute a face on her as long as a wet weekend.” She sighed, pushing a stream of thick blue smoke out of her nostrils. “Anyway, I’m having none of this.” She strode across the room to drop her cigarette into the sink. It hit the enamel surface with a hiss. “What she needs is a night on the town. Something to cheer her up. Like it or not, she’s coming out with me. I’m taking her to bingo.”

My father looked at her dubiously. “You and whose army?” he asked, battling a packet of Wonderloaf to place two slices under the grill. “She doesn’t even get herself dressed these days, never mind out of the house. You’ll be lucky to get two words out of her.”

“Come hell or high water, and whether she likes it or not, that woman is coming with me to bingo.”

Indeed, about an hour later and much to my and my father’s amazement, Mabel appeared downstairs with my mother, who was dressed and apparently ready to go out. I had grown so used to seeing her in her nightclothes that it was strange to see her in a dress and high heels, and even stranger to see her pale cheeks striped with rosy blush, her lips glossy pink, and her eyelids tinted bright green. She reminded me of one of the cardboard cutout dolls I sometimes played with—flat and flimsy, their features painted too big and impossibly bright.

“What do you think?” Mabel asked, nodding proudly toward my mother. “Looks human for a change, doesn’t she?”

My father seemed slightly bewildered, as if he’d seen a ghost. “She looks very nice. Yes, you look very nice, Evelyn.”

“Right, then, Ev, get your coat on. We don’t want to miss the first game, now do we?” Mabel grabbed my mother’s arm and tugged her toward the hallway.

I was asleep by the time they returned, but when I got up the next morning I was astonished to find my mother in the kitchen, cooking a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, black pudding, and fried bread. The windows were opaque with steam, and she scurried around setting knives and forks on the table, humming along as Tom Jones belted out, “Why, why, why, Delilah?” on the radio.

“Oh, hello, love,” she said, flashing me a bright smile. “Are you hungry?”

I nodded.

“Well, sit yourself down, then. We’re having a celebration breakfast.” I took a seat at the table. “So, don’t you want to know what we’re celebrating?” she asked, putting a loaded plate in front of me.

“Why?” I asked, picking up my fork and pushing a piece of black pudding into my mouth.

“Because …” She pressed her palms together against her chest. “Because I won!” She swung her arms wide. “I won at the bingo. Twenty-three pounds three shillings and sixpence. Now, what do you think about that?” She wore a look of expectant delight.

“Is that a lot of money?” I asked, dipping a corner of fried bread into my egg yolk and watching mesmerized as the liquid yellow oozed across the plate.

“Of course it is,” she answered irritably. “It’s more than your father brings home in his pay packet, let’s put it that way. And if I can win that in one night, who knows what I can do if I go more often. Our Mabel says they have a weekly jackpot on Friday nights. Ten thousand quid. Now, just think what we could do with that much money.”

And so began my mother’s bingo craze. Each morning before leaving for school, I’d sit at the kitchen table as she gave me a blow-by-blow account of the previous night’s events. As she spoke, I felt as if I were there experiencing that unspeakable excitement as the bingo caller announced,
“Two little ducks, twenty-two,” and my mother leaped up screaming, “House! House!” and the covetous eyes of all the other women in the Astoria Bingo Hall were turned on her. She told me of her defeats, too. “I was that close, I mean that close,” she said, holding out her thumb and forefinger, the smallest of space between them. “All I needed was that old bugger to call out legs eleven and that national jackpot would’ve been mine. Next time,” she said, pushing clenched fists into her apron pockets, a fiery glint in her eye. “Next time I just know I’m going to win. You can count on that, Jesse.”

She seemed so convinced that it was just a matter of time before she won the national jackpot that I began to fantasize about what we could do with that ten-thousand-pound prize. Walking to school in the rain, I’d daydream about the luxurious holidays we’d take or the brand-new car my father would chauffeur us around in. On weekends, I’d spend whole afternoons leafing through the old Littlewoods catalog that Auntie Mabel had given me, picking out clothes and furniture, keeping a running total of how much I was spending so I knew exactly what that amount of money could buy.

Unfortunately, however, it wasn’t a triumphant jackpot win that brought an end to my mother’s bingo obsession. After talking with Mrs. Brockett one morning, my father discovered that my mother had taken to playing three or four cards at every game, an expensive habit through which she’d managed to completely deplete my parents’ Post Office savings account, and had taken to using a large chunk of the housekeeping money—which accounted for the rather skimpy dinners that had recently made an unwelcome reappearance in our household.

Much to my disappointment, the bingo (and our chance at attaining instant wealth) ended. I found myself again trudging without any distraction through gray blustery streets, and instead of compiling lists of what we might buy from the Littlewoods catalog I browsed for hours at a time through the women’s underwear section, inexplicably fascinated by those coy models in their pointy bras, paneled corsets, and silky black knickers. My mother was less easily diverted. At first, she
tried to convince my father that she could tone down her obsession and go only once a week to try for the national jackpot on Friday nights. But soon she began trying to sneak out to the bingo hall on other nights, only to be pursued by my father. For a while, it was almost routine for them to have an enormous, screaming fight in the middle of the street, much to the amusement of the neighbors. “Beats bloody
Coronation Street,”
I heard Mrs. Brockett comment over the other side of her wall to our next-door-but-one neighbor. “Ought to start their own soap opera, that family.”

Finally, my mother was defeated. But instead of taking up another hobby, as my father had been suggesting, she simply stopped doing anything at all, sinking almost immediately into another of her bad patches, far longer and worse than the last.

PERHAPS THERE WAS
method in my father’s madness, after all. Maybe my mother, unable to bear the decrepitude of our new home in Midham, would spring into action and throw herself into its restoration. But, as I looked up at a crack in the ceiling that ran through the plaster like a deep river, opening into a wide delta that ended above the fireplace, I couldn’t help thinking he was taking a rather dubious gamble. “Why didn’t you buy a new house?” I asked.

As soon as my father announced our move, I’d begun hoping for a brand-new brick semidetached house with a neat square of lawn in the front and borders filled with pansies in the back. I’d seen pictures of such houses on television, and traveled past rows upon rows of them when we’d driven through the outskirts of Hull. I was convinced that a house like that would solve all our problems. I could come home from school and enter the basking warmth of central heating and double glazing to be greeted by my mother, who, just like the women on the Fairy Snow adverts, would be calm and smiling and made happy by a clean wash and a sparkling home.

“This is new,” my father said, smiling so wide that his dimples
showed. They made him look like a little boy, and I wished I could be swept up in his enthusiasm. “It’s new to us,” he added. “And what we don’t like we can change. It will give all of us a whole new start.”

“Yes,” I said dully, thinking that at least with a different school to go to I might have a chance to make some friends. I’d have no history. No one would know that my mother had been in the nuthouse or that I’d made up stupid stories to try to hide that fact. And I wouldn’t have to crave the approval of Julie Fraser or any of her stupid friends ever again.

THE BAD PATCH
after the bingo had lasted several months but finally came to an end when my mother began watching
The Galloping Gourmet
and discovered a sudden passion for cordon-bleu cooking. She spent entire mornings scouring the shops for the appropriate ingredients (veal was something there had never been much demand for at our local butcher’s, and the grocer hadn’t even heard of some of the things the recipes called for) and entire afternoons in a flurry of flour and steam preparing the evening’s meal. At night, in bed, she sat propped against her pillow reading recipe books. The
Galloping Gourmet
program itself was a period during which absolute silence was demanded in our household, as my mother pulled her chair to within four feet of the television, scribbling notes and sighing at the Galloping Gourmet’s momentous culinary achievements.

For a few weeks, my father and I were treated almost every evening to meals like Coq au Vin, Rôti de Porc Boulangère, and Boeuf à la Mode. I quite enjoyed it, especially since my mother also insisted on “creating the appropriate atmosphere,” with a red gingham tablecloth, candles, and French accordion music playing on the record player in the other room. She even made me teach her a few phrases that I had recently learned in my first year of French at school, like
merci beaucoup, c’est très bien
, and
ça c’est bon
, which she insisted on repeating throughout the meals, regardless of whether they actually made any sense at the time, and with a French accent even worse than that of any of my fellow
students. Mabel, when she came over one night, was delighted at the whole scene, oohing and aahing at the paper serviettes, the white chef’s hat my mother wore as she cooked, the packet of French cigarettes my mother had bought her as a treat, and the bottle of white wine she placed on the table before we began.

“I love a bit of good plonk with my food, I really do,” Mabel said, gulping back half her glass of wine before lifting it into the air and declaring,
“Ooh là là
, here’s to a little bit of France right here in Hull.”

My father, on the other hand, was rather irritated by the whole thing and seemed to have little desire to consume meals whose names he could not pronounce, never mind understand.

“Jesus Christ, Evelyn. Whatever happened to good, plain English food?” he complained one night at the sight of a whole small bird and a pile of haricots verts in cream sauce on his plate. “I mean, what on earth is this, anyway, underage chicken? What’s wrong with a nice steak and kidney pudding, a few Brussels sprouts and some chips?”

My mother’s response was swift and to the point. She picked up the plate she had just placed in front of my father, screamed, “Nobody ever appreciates me! Nobody!” and hurled it at the wall. The plate shattered, the bird thumped to the floor, and the haricots verts in their cream sauce stuck to the wall for a moment before oozing slowly downward, eventually forming a puddle on the linoleum. “You’ll send me to Delapole, you two!” she yelled, giving me a furious look that seemed to indicate that she regarded me as the instigator of my father’s complaint.

“I like your French food, Mum,” I said, lifting my knife and fork, as if I were desperate to sink my teeth into the small bird, which I, like my father, speculated was a prematurely butchered chicken. But it was too late. She leaned over me, grabbed my plate, and spun round to throw that, too, at the wall.

After that, another bad patch. That was followed, several months later, by a brief but very intense interest in dressmaking (I got a whole new, ill-fitting, and rather bizarre wardrobe), then macramé (until every available space in the house was covered in multicolored throws,
blankets, tablecloths, and antimacassars), candle making, quilting, upholstery, rug making, amateur dramatics, and, finally, a stint organizing jumble sales for the Young Wives Club until, for some reason that she never revealed to my father and me, she was asked to step down. And, in between all these things, there were, of course, the bad patches.

“I THINK I’LL TRY
and fix that roof tomorrow,” my father said, scraping the last baked beans from the tin and spooning them into his mouth. “First things first, after all.”