Another Life Altogether (7 page)

I only hoped my father was up to it. He’d never been particularly good with heights and wouldn’t even take me on the big wheel at Hull Fair because he said it made him dizzy. I had a difficult time imagining him scrambling over the steep slate roof, but I didn’t want to be too negative, so I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.

“And you’ll have to do your part, our Jesse.”

“Me?” I was thrilled, visualizing myself scrabbling over the tiles beside him, looking out over the fields like I was on top of the world.

“Yes—I need you to keep an eye on your mother for me while I’m busy. We wouldn’t want her to … well, we’ve seen enough problems already without another little episode, if you know what I mean.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “I can’t stop her from doing anything.” I felt the panic rising.

My father reached over and patted me on the head. “Just look out for her, that’s all. I mean, it’ll not be for long, love. You’ll see, she’ll soon be right as rain.”

“She will?” More than anything, I wanted to believe him.

F
OR A WEEK OR SO, I SAT AROUND THE HOUSE TRYING TO FOLLOW MY
father’s instructions and watch over my mother. I wanted to help him, but just the idea of it made me feel overwhelmed. What was I supposed to do? Keep her away from the kitchen knives? Guard the door so she couldn’t run out and throw herself under the wheels of one of the stray vehicles that passed by our house? There seemed to be so many ways that she could try to kill herself if she wanted. I looked at an electrical cord and wondered if she could use it to hang herself from the banister, took a bottle of Domestos from under the kitchen sink and imagined her swigging it back, the thick, bleachy liquid making the same
glug-glug-glug
sound when it went down her throat as it did when I poured it into the sink. I looked at my father’s hammer and wondered if it was possible to beat yourself to death, picked up one of my mother’s scarves and wondered if you could strangle yourself. Almost everything around me became a potential instrument of death.

Thankfully, she remained relatively unperturbed, and I wondered if the little yellow pills my father now rationed out to her each day were responsible for this unfamiliar calm. My mother complained that it was treating her like a child to give her medicine to her in small, daily doses. But my father just responded to these protests with “Doctor’s orders,
Evelyn, doctor’s orders.” I got the impression that he’d been given strict instructions not to let my mother near any large amount of medication. It was probably for this same reason, I’d deduced, that just before my mother’s return an ancient bottle of aspirin and a dusty bottle of cough syrup had been removed from the medicine cabinet and my father had stopped leaving his razor blades in the bathroom.

One Thursday, a little over a week after the move, I spent the morning watching television, creeping upstairs periodically to sneak into my parents’ bedroom, standing over my sleeping mother and holding my own breath until I could detect the slow and steady rise of hers. The fourth time I found myself there, I heard the loud and repeated toot of a horn. It was coming from just outside the house. Afraid that it would wake my mother and she’d find me there, I tiptoed quickly down the stairs. As the horn sounded again, I opened the front door and saw that a large blue van had pulled into our driveway and a woman was leaning out the window on the driver’s side. “I’m not stopping here all day, you know!” she yelled. “If you want to join up, you’d better get yourself over here sharp.”

I was about to ask her what it was that I was supposed to be joining when I saw the words
COUNTY LIBRARY
painted on the side of the van. I was relieved to realize that though Midham might not have much going for it, it did have a mobile library.

I bolted out the door. When I reached the back door of the van, the woman opened it up, popped out a set of metal stairs, and I walked inside.

“New here, aren’t you?” she said as she looked me up and down. She was a solid woman, shapeless as a tree trunk, in a sturdy green wool dress. Her face was broad, with big jowly lines around her mouth and a deep frown etched between her eyebrows. Her hair was blue-black, the kind of color that only comes out of a bottle; it gave her skin a grayish tinge, as if she hadn’t seen daylight in a while, and somehow made me feel as if, upon stepping into the mobile library, I’d entered into a fiercely guarded lair. “I heard there was some new people moving in,”
she said. “You’d be surprised how much I find out here in this little van. Go all over this side of the district, I do.” I frowned, wondering if somehow she had already picked up some choice snippets about my family. My father would be thrilled. “So, like a good read, do you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Reading, that’s a good quality in children. Beats all that rock and roll—all that nonsense about free love and drugs. All these layabouts you get on the dole. Far as I’m concerned”—she wagged a stern finger in my direction—“you can blame most of the evils of this world on a lack of reading. If more kids these days read instead of watching the box and getting all kinds of rubbish in their heads, the world would be a much better place. Oh, no, you wouldn’t find young girls unmarried and having babies if they’d been reading instead of messing about with some boy, now would you?”

I nodded in agreement. She did, after all, have a point.

“Now, you want to sign up then, do you? Want to take out some books?”

“Yes, please,” I said, eyeing the shelves that lined the van.

“Oh, good, a child with some manners finally. I can’t tell you how many kids these days don’t know the meaning of ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Get you a long way in the world, do those words. Here.” She pushed a form toward me. “Fill out this and you can pick five books. Keep them out no more than a fortnight. I usually come round once a week.”

I filled out the form and handed it back to her. She looked it over and pointed me toward the bookshelves. “Don’t take all day about it, mind. I’ve got to be at the Reatton church hall by twelve. They’ve got the pensioners coming for a browse and a cup of tea with the vicar. They’re a demanding lot, them pensioners. And they’ll be a bit put out today, since the Bleakwick Young Wives Club already took out half my Agatha Christies.” She shook her head slowly to amplify the gravity of this occurrence. “I keep telling them over at the main library to get in
more Agatha Christies. But listen to me, do they? Of course they don’t. After all, they’ve all got their fancy degrees from some fancy university. And me—well, I’m just a lowly nobody with nothing but a few O levels and a love of literature.”

I tried to pull an expression that showed deep sympathy for her plight.

“I keep trying to tell them that mysteries and romance is what goes down best with the folk round here. But what is it they send me?” She paused and seemed to expect an answer. I was about to try to give her one when she continued. “Rubbish, that’s what. Well, of course they wouldn’t call it rubbish, would they? But what these hoity-toity types at main think is a good book is not what interests the Reatton Derby and Joan Club, is it? And you should see some of the stuff they send me.” She wrinkled her nose and lowered her voice. “Well, suffice to say it’s not suitable subject matter for the young wives or the pensioners. I prefer to keep it off the shelves.” She began to whisper. “Back there.” She indicated a stack of books immediately behind her. “That’s what I call my slush pile. And slush it is, I can tell you.”

I leaned over the desk, trying to make out some of the titles on the spines of the stack of books. The librarian waved me away. “Like I said, not suitable material. Now you’d better get yourself something picked out. I’ve not got all day.”

There were a lot of books—the tightly packed shelves lined the van from floor to ceiling—but when I began looking at the titles I couldn’t see much that appealed to me. The children’s section, labeled as such in big, handwritten letters, was full of the Ladybird books that I’d stopped reading when I was seven, a lot of children’s novels on religious themes—
He Loves Us When We’re Good, Jesus and the Snowman, The Twelve Happy Disciples
—a few other books with uninspiring titles, and picture books for toddlers. The adult section, similarly labeled, contained dozens of romance novels—
He Swept Her Away, A Distant Affair, Search for Passion
—the kind of titles I often found stacked haphazardly on Auntie Mabel’s bedside table, and that I secretly skimmed through to find the
parts where the heroes and heroines tussled on four-poster beds amid satin sheets, tousled hair, and torn bodices. Many of the remaining books seemed to be Westerns and mysteries. I wasn’t interested in cowboy stories and though I’d read a few Agatha Christie novels and found them engaging, they weren’t among my favorites. Besides, I thought it best not to reduce the mystery inventory even further and provoke a riot among the pensioners.

“Get a move on, love,” the librarian commanded.

I bent down to scan the lower shelves and saw a few titles of more interest.

“Come on, come on, I can’t wait forever.” The librarian tapped her wristwatch.

I pulled out a copy of
Jane Eyre
and made my way to the little checkout counter.

“I’ll take this,” I said, handing the book to the librarian, who stood with her date stamp ready in her hand.

She opened the front page, ready to stamp the card in there, when she noticed the title. “Ooh, I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think so at all.”

I looked at her, perplexed.

“You got this in the adult section, didn’t you?” she said with gravity. “You have to be over sixteen to take books out of the adult section.”

“It’s for my mother,” I responded. “She’s got a very bad illness. She’s too poorly to come out of the house.”

The woman shook her head solemnly. “Look, I don’t care what’s up with your mother, love. Rules are rules. Besides, the Brontës were considered pornographic in the nineteenth century, you know.”

Pornographic? It didn’t seem that way in the film my mother and I watched. If the book was pornographic, I definitely wanted to read it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, smiling. “I’ll put it back and pick out something else.” I held out my hand. The librarian kept a tight hold on the book. “I remember exactly where I got it.” I pointed to the shelf from which
I’d taken the book. “And I know all about the Dewey decimal system,” I added brightly.

This seemed to convince her, and she handed it over.

I stepped back to the shelf, bent down with book in hand, turned my head to see that the librarian was no longer looking at me, and stuffed it under my sweater. I stepped over to the children’s section, pulled down a couple of random titles, and took them over to her desk, where she stamped the date on their cards, put the cards into her little file box, and said goodbye.

BY THE TIME
my father returned that evening, I was more than a hundred pages into
Jane Eyre
, and if there was anything pornographic in it, it had certainly escaped my attention. I wasn’t disappointed, though, because it was a really good story. The awful tragedy of Jane losing the only friend she had in the world left me brushing tears from my eyes, and next to her terrible experiences in that awful school my own difficulties seemed quite small.

“I’m off to the launderette,” my father announced as he shrugged off his jacket. “We need to get some of this stuff dry.” He gestured toward the sweaters, trousers, and shirts that had been left strewn over every item of furniture. We hadn’t been able to hang the washing outside because it had rained relentlessly ever since we moved in.

I dropped my book. “Can I come?” I began jogging around the living room, grabbing damp clothes in handfuls.

My father frowned over at my mother. “Well, I don’t know … I mean, your mam could probably use your company and …”

“I’m sick of looking at that bloody face of hers; it’s as long as the Mersey Tunnel,” my mother said, waving a limp arm toward me. “A girl her age should get herself outside.”

“But it’s raining.” I pointed at the window, where water drizzled down the glass in thick streams.

“Anybody would think you’d melt.” Suddenly animated, she stabbed the air with the pen she’d been using to fill out the
Woman’s Realm
crossword puzzle. “Honestly, all you need to do is put a bloody raincoat on and go out there and play. When I was your age …”

I rolled my eyes. Anything either of my parents prefaced with those words was bound to irritate me. They had both spent their early childhoods in the war, a time they recollected as a period of idyllic deprivation. The way they told it, every child would benefit from a good dose of air raids, severe food rationing, and the immediate prospect of a German invasion.

“When you were my age,” I interrupted, “you didn’t get moved into the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.”

“The trouble with you is you’re spoiled.” My mother rolled up her
Woman’s Realm
and threw it in my direction. It fluttered, pages splayed, at my feet. “Take her with you, for God’s sake, Mike.”