Another Life Altogether (9 page)

I didn’t mind at all about the rain, but I wanted her to remain there, standing next to me, to tell the boyfriend, Stan, to go to see the film by himself. I glowered over at the car, wishing it would pull away without Amanda.

“Tell you what,” she said. “Let’s tell your dad to hurry up so you don’t get too wet.” Before I could say anything, she grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the shopwindow. Inside, under the fluorescent lights, I could see my father standing at the checkout stand. “Is that him?” Amanda asked.

“Yes,” I said flatly.

“God, he’s dead slow, isn’t he?” she said.

She was right. He was packing his purchases into a carrier bag, taking each item and deliberately placing it in the bag before reaching for the next. The faces of the women behind him in the queue were taut with impatience. The cashier held out his change and a sheet of Co-op stamps, but he hadn’t noticed. She looked at the other women and rolled her eyes.

“Hey,” Amanda called. “Hurry up.” She rapped hard on the window. Everyone in the shop turned to squint in our direction. “I said, hurry up.” She knocked on the window again. My father frowned and peered toward us. Amanda laughed and knocked again. “Come on, slowcoach, get moving, can’t you? It’s raining cats and dogs out here, and this poor lass is going to catch her death.”

Everyone inside stared at us. My father grimaced, looking from me to Amanda and back to me. It was obvious that he couldn’t understand what she was saying, but what he clearly understood was that he’d been shown up in public for a second time that evening. He turned to the women in the queue. Their mouths were pressed into outraged little O’s. My father appeared to mutter some kind of apology, while they all scowled and shook their heads sorrowfully. There was no doubt about it. I was going to be in terrible trouble when I got home. Still, instead of trying to restrain Amanda I felt liberated by her laughter. Behind the glass barrier of the shopwindow, everything seemed too bright, filled
with adults who were eager to judge, and whose world seemed as confined as that little village shop. Outside, in the cool evening, the rain spattering off the pavement and soaking everything, where sensations were real and nothing was protected, this was the place I wanted to be.

“Oh, my God,” Amanda said. “Look at them. Anybody would think they’d never seen someone knock on a window before. Boneheads.” Then she rapped on the window again. “Come on, get a move on,” she said, wagging a finger toward my father. “If you leave her out here much longer, her feet are going to go moldy.” She giggled.

“I’ll grow mushrooms on my toes,” I added, laughing a little myself.

“You’ll have fungus feet,” Amanda said, turning from the window to grin at me.

I wrinkled up my nose and then pointed toward the checkout lady, who was now standing, hands on hips, her angular face creased into a simmering frown. “Yeah, but at least I won’t have a fungus face like her,” I said.

At this Amanda let out a sudden gale of laughter, amusement rippling across her features, leaving her limbs loose and causing the umbrella to veer at broad angles above us. She laughed hard, a convulsion of sound that crinkled the edges of her eyes and left her mouth open, gasping, as she placed a hand on my shoulder. I watched her, for a moment stunned by the delight on her face and the fact that I had put it there. I had never made anyone laugh like that before. It warmed me, flowed through me. I began to laugh myself, leaning into Amanda so that, as I laughed, I found myself gulping her damp leather, smoke, and perfume smells.

“Oh, my God,” Amanda said when she had regained her composure. “You are bloody hilarious.” She slapped my shoulder with the hand she had placed there. “Hilarious,” she repeated. I stood there grinning as she tried to recover her breath.

Just then a car horn sounded from across the street. I looked over to see her boyfriend roll down the window of the waiting Cortina, lean out, and yell, “For fuck’s sake, Mandy, get a bloody move on!” I couldn’t
see him well because of the rain, but I imagined him spotty-faced and ugly.

“Christ, if I’ve told him once I’ve told him a thousand times. I don’t like being called Mandy.” Then, turning toward him, she shouted, “All right, Stan, I’ll be over in a minute!”

“We’re gonna miss the flick if you don’t get your fucking fat arse over here soon,” he shot back.

I expected Amanda to yell back angrily. Instead, she gave a resigned little shrug. “Men,” she said, taking in the boy in the car and my father, behind the window, still gathering his shopping, in a single, sweeping look. I nodded, as if I agreed with this assessment. But, really, I didn’t understand why she would ever have to put up with someone who talked to her like that. That stupid boyfriend of hers should be grateful that a girl as beautiful as Amanda would even give him the time of day.

“Look, I’ve got to go,” Amanda said. “But it looks like your slowcoach dad is just about ready to leave.” She pointed at my father, who stood next to his packed carrier bag carefully mulling over the change that the checkout woman had put into his palm. A couple of the other customers were still glaring in our direction. Stan hit the horn again. “Bloody hell, I’ve a good mind to make him wait longer. That’d show him,” she said. “Only thing is, I don’t want to miss the film.” She pulled a wide grin and shrugged. “Bye, then.”

“Yes, bye!” I called as I watched her run across to the Cortina, her boots slapping against the street. They made spattering explosions of water as they hit the shiny black tarmac.

She closed her umbrella and climbed into the car. Within seconds, the car squealed away. As they passed, Amanda rolled down the window and waved. “I hope I didn’t get you in too much trouble!” she yelled, her voice fading in a long arc of sound as they sped down the street.

“I don’t care,” I called back. And, really, I didn’t.

A
MONTH AFTER THE MOVE, WE WERE IN THE MIDST OF A SUMMER
that brought almost as much rain as it did sunshine. Although my father had managed to complete several makeshift repairs, there was still a bucket on the stairway and a leak from the bathroom ceiling into the bathtub. He seemed to have lost all enthusiasm for his planned renovations, probably because my mother, contrary to his hopes, had failed to find an interest that would propel her back to life. Almost every night he muttered about how he’d soon get round to fixing something, but instead he spent most of his time hidden behind the Hull
Daily Mail
or yelling at the BBC News. He even yelled about the epidemic of Dutch elm disease, the blight that was killing off millions of elm trees all over Britain and, I realized, explained the dead or dying trees I had noticed patterning the landscape around Midham.

If my mother happened to be in the room, she nodded vigorously at my father’s outbursts. But most of the time she was off somewhere else, pacing the bare boards of the upstairs bedrooms or wandering the back garden in the rain. I tried to keep track of her movements, but it wasn’t always easy. Often, I’d simply sit on the settee in the living room, anxious and afraid, knowing that I really had no idea how to stop her trying
to kill herself or being taken off to Delapole again. Finally, tired of worrying, I decided to focus on something I could control.

“Mum, we’ve got to start unpacking,” I announced one weekday afternoon. After searching the house, I’d finally found her in the bathroom, peering into the mirror above the sink as she plucked her eyebrows and ate a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

“I don’t see why,” she said, her breath clouding the mirror as she leaned toward it, tweezers in one hand, sandwich in the other. As I watched her, I wondered if it was possible to inflict any significant self-injury with a pair of eyebrow tweezers. “What do we need to unpack for?”

We were hardly more moved in than on the day we’d arrived. There were boxes everywhere, in leaning piles against the walls or stacked haphazardly in the middle of almost every room. Nothing had been labeled, and it was impossible to find anything. I felt too overwhelmed to try to unpack while also trying to take care of my mother, but if I got her to help me I could do both things at once, and perhaps forcing her into some activity would improve her mood.

“We’ve been here long enough,” I said, trying not to wince as she yanked out another hair. “It’s time we settled in.”

“Well, I never wanted to move here in the first place. It was all your father’s idea.” She turned around and took a huge bite of her sandwich. Brown chunks of Branston Pickle dropped onto the floor.

“Come on, Mum. If we do it together, it’ll be much quicker. What do you think?”

“Oh, all right.”

I was delighted. I hadn’t expected her to be so amenable. Unfortunately, my excitement didn’t last very long, since I soon realized that my mother’s idea of unpacking involved carrying each item—a book, a cup, or one of the menagerie of glass animals she had made a shortlived but nevertheless exhaustive hobby of collecting—singly to its designated place. I had never seen anyone move so slowly. By the end of
the day, when I had managed to empty more than half a dozen boxes, my mother had unpacked one. “Make us a cup of tea, could you, love?” she said, dropping into one of the armchairs shortly before my father was due to return home from work. “I’m jiggered.”

The following day, she refused to help at all, saying that all the work she did the previous day had strained her back. She lay on the settee watching television, and when I started to unpack another box, pulling plates and cups from scrunched-up newspaper, she protested that I was giving her a headache by making so much noise.

“I don’t think my nerves can take all that clattering about,” she said, pressing her hands against her temples. “I’ll end up in bloody Delapole if you carry on doing that.”

I had no choice other than to stop.

Now, in addition to worrying about my mother, I began to worry that we would spend the rest of our lives living out of boxes, scrambling every night to find the colander to drain the water from my overboiled potatoes (I was the only one doing the cooking) or eating with plastic knives and forks because we still couldn’t locate the cutlery. I imagined never finding my Scrabble or books or felt-tip pens ever again, never having enough underwear because most of it was still packed, and having to watch over my mother until I finally became old enough to legally leave home.

That evening, I tried to talk with my father about it when he sat down in front of the television after work. But when I broached the matter he wasn’t concerned. “Children are starving in Africa,” he said, pointing to the pictures on the news of emaciated babies, their stomachs bloated like overinflated balloons. “At least you’ve got three square meals and a roof over your head.”

“That’s right,” said my mother, appearing in the doorway so suddenly that she made both me and my father jump. “We had to live on rations when we were kids. The first time I saw chocolate, I was ten years old. You should think yourself fortunate, shouldn’t she, Mike?”

“Yes, she should,” my father muttered.

“You kids don’t know how lucky you are these days.” She was standing in the middle of the room now, wagging her finger at me and looking far more animated than she had in ages. I wasn’t sure whether to take this as a good sign. “Bloody spoiled, you are,” she said, moving toward me, stabbing her index finger into my chest.

I stepped backward and tried to shrug her off. “Stop it,” I said. “I wasn’t even talking to you in the first place; I was talking to Dad.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, you little bugger!” she yelled, outraged.

“Why the hell not?” I was surprised at my response, the words spilling out like untamed thoughts. “I’m the one who’s trying to keep some bloody order around here. I’m the one who’s trying to get us moved in. While you”—I pointed at her—“all you do is sit around and complain.”

“I’ve told you!” my mother shrieked, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “Don’t use that bloody tone with me! I am still your mother, you know! Tell her, Mike, tell her I’m still her mother.”

He was still watching the news, where Princess Anne, looking crisp and concerned in a nicely pressed safari suit, moved between crowds of big-eyed starving mothers and babies. He seemed so absorbed in these images that it was as if he were simultaneously inhabiting a place far away, a place where people talked in hushed BBC tones and even dying was reported on stiffly, without emotion.

“Mike!” My mother yelled so loud that it made the windows shudder. “Can you sodding well tell her!”

“Bloody bitch,” my father said. For a moment, it wasn’t clear whom this comment was directed at. My mother’s lips tightened and she eyed him nervously. But then he added, “Bloody stuck-up bitch,” and we realized he meant Princess Anne. Then he turned toward us. “Yes, she’s still your mother,” he muttered. My mother, her mouth pushed into a tight little bud, gave me a satisfied nod.

I found myself wondering if there had been some doubt about this
matter, as if recent events should have been reason to question this biological fact that I had so often wished myself able to undo. “Of course she’s still my bloody mother,” I said.