Another Life Altogether_ A Novel

Chapter THIRTEEN



I USUALLY GOT A CHANCE TO TALK TO AMANDA IN THE MORNING AT the bus stop, but she never took the bus home with us after school. She would stand outside the school gates with Stan and ride back to Midham on his motorbike. They argued frequently, but just as frequently they engaged in long snogging sessions, eyes closed, mouths squished together and moving as if they were chewing on each other. During the first couple of weeks of school, Tracey and I watched them from the school car park until our bus arrived, Tracey huffing and mumbling under her breath about how Stan was far too good for Amanda, how she hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he moved on to some other, better girl. I said nothing, guiltily imagining myself there instead of Stan, Amanda in my arms.
Within a short time, however, Tracey got over her fixation on Stan Heaphy when she developed a crush on Gregory Loomis, one of the boys who regularly hung out with Stan by the school gates. Greg was a lanky fifth-year who tottered around school on platform shoes sporting a feathered haircut, wispy sideburns, and flares so wide he could have held a disco inside his trousers. He had a precociously hairy chest, which he attempted to reveal at any opportunity by walking around school with his tie loosened and his shirt undone even when the rest of the Liston Comprehensive student body had donned pullovers to keep off the deepening October chill. “Don’t you think he’s bloody gorgeous?” Tracey oozed each time we passed him in the corridor (an event that happened with great frequency after she obtained a copy of his timetable and began dragging me and the Debbies on circuitous detours to our lessons so that our movements would coincide with his). I thought he had decent enough looks, but I wasn’t convinced that he had much in the way of personality, since the only thing he seemed capable of talking about was his favorite football team, Liverpool; he became positively fanatic when the subject of their star player, Kevin Keegan, came up. It wasn’t long, however, before Tracey became an avid Liverpool fan herself, replacing the pictures of David Cassidy she’d pasted on the front of her exercise books with photographs of Kevin Keegan and his teammates.
There were times, during the first few weeks of school, when I had to admit I found the endless conversations about Greg Loomis and Kevin Keegan a little tedious, and the Debbies’ endless choruses of “Bye Bye Baby,” and “Shang-A-Lang” were starting to convince me that I could quite easily grow to hate all the members of the Bay City Rollers equally. But these things were, after all, the things that girls were supposed to talk about, and if I wanted to keep my friends, putting up with this seemed like a small price to pay. I felt similarly about letting Tracey and the Debbies copy most of my homework and, when the teacher wasn’t looking, the work I did in class. Most of the time, we all got B’s and C’s—a considerable improvement for the four of them, since, they told me, they used to get mostly C’s and D’s. Before my mother was taken to Delapole, I’d almost always got A’s, but that seemed an age away.
The only lesson in which I might have wanted to do better in was English. I kept hoping that Tracey and the Debbies would warm to Ms. Hastings, but they never did, complaining before, during, and after her lessons about what a “bloody hippie weirdo” she was. Though I didn’t say so, I thought she was a breath of fresh air, and I loved to watch her stride down the corridors. With her big boots, bright clothes, and the constant jangle of her jewelry, she made the rest of us in our dull school uniforms look washed-out and dim. The other teachers, too, in their conservative tweeds and sensible shoes, all looked faded beside her. Her lessons were also far more interesting than any others, involving avid discussions in which Malcolm, Dizzy, and a handful of others talked about what motivated a particular character or the writer of the book. Sometimes I felt a brief ache to jump in and say what I thought, but I stayed silent. And when, outside in the corridor, the other girls shoved against Dizzy and ran off with her glasses, or the boys tripped up Malcolm, laughing at him as he stumbled, and called him a “clumsy little queer,” I was glad that I’d stayed sheltered within my little group of friends, that I hadn’t drawn any attention to myself.
After school, because I wasn’t working particularly hard on my homework, I had quite a lot of free time. So, while my mother spent her evenings sleeping or curled up silently in bed, and my father sat alone ranting at the television, I sat in my bedroom filling first one and then a second notebook with letters to Amanda. Soon, I had so many that it became more difficult to hide them between the pages of my books. So instead I retrieved an empty Teatime Assortment biscuit tin from the kitchen, shook out the remaining crumbs, and placed my letters inside. Then I pulled out all the old toys, shoes, and the boxes of Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders that covered the bottom of my wardrobe, put the box of letters there, and piled all those other things on top.
My early letters talked mostly about how wonderful it had been to see Amanda that morning at the bus stop, recalled the short conversations we sometimes had, and included long paragraphs in which I tried to convince her that Stan Heaphy was utterly undeserving of her attention. But as I continued to write, my letters began to change course into imagined days I might spend with her, and soon I found myself writing letters to Amanda that barely touched upon reality, stories that were, instead, long, delicious fantasies of the life we might have if we ran away together or lived in another time or place. The first of these were inspired by an episode of Star Trek.
Star Trek was one of my favorite programs. Fortunately, my father liked it, too, and over the years we’d developed our own little ritual in preparation for watching it. Just before Star Trek started at eight o’clock, we’d make a fresh pot of tea and set out a plate of biscuits on the coffee table. Then, even in the summer when it was still light outside, we’d close the living-room curtains so we could shut out the mundane world of the present and immerse ourselves in a future where people wore bright-colored stretchy pantsuits and traveled faster than the speed of light. “Space, the final frontier,” my father and I would both chorus along with Captain James T. Kirk against a background of swirly, space-age music, as we shuffled to get more comfortable in our respective seats. The only parts of Star Trek I had never liked were the scenes where some dazzled female alien with bouffant hair and sparkly eye shadow fell into the arms of Captain Kirk and demanded to be taught how we humans show affection. My father equally disdained these scenes, muttering, “Bloody Americans, always got to get some sex in somewhere.”
On that particular Monday, however, I was all attention as Captain Kirk and his latest alien love interest snogged. Instead of itching for the scene to be over, I watched intently as I imagined myself as James T. Kirk and Amanda as the female alien who fell into my arms. In fact, the fantasy became so vivid that when my father turned to me with some disparaging comment about Americans and their vulgar sensibilities, I found myself avoiding his eyes, worried that he’d be able to tell what I was thinking just by looking at me. As soon as the episode was over, I charged upstairs to my bedroom, where I took out my notebook and began a letter to Amanda in which I suggested that we might become space travelers together. I’d be Captain Jesse T. Bennett, commander of the spaceship, while Lieutenant Amanda Grasby would be my second in command.
I wrote my Star Trek–inspired letters for quite a while. They were full of all kinds of dangers—flesh-eating plants, toxic gases, hostile shape-shifting aliens. Despite these terrible hazards, I’d always manage to save Lieutenant Grasby, and she, of course, would always thank me by throwing herself into my arms and landing a grateful kiss on my lips. Then, one Saturday night, I stayed up late to watch a Vincent Price horror film and started writing letters that involved haunted castles, marauding peasants, and wicked counts determined to spread terror throughout the land. In these letters, I became the vampire- and ghost-hunting hero who prevented the triumph of whichever evildoer was threatening to take over the land, while also rescuing the beautiful Amanda, who had been taken captive and, without my intervention, faced a fate as one of the living dead.
Immersed in these letters, I found that my life at home became far more tolerable, an inconvenient backdrop to the adventures I took myself on every night. And even though it was still agonizing to see Amanda climb onto the back of Stan Heaphy’s motorbike every afternoon, on the bus ride home I comforted myself with the thought that later I could create stories in which Amanda and I always ended up together, where even space aliens and vampires couldn’t keep us apart.
ON THE FIRST SATURDAY of the half-term holiday, Auntie Mabel rang early. “How’s your mother?” she asked after inquiring about my new school and the progress of my father’s renovations.
“She’s all right.”
“All right?” Mabel said dubiously. “What’s that supposed to mean, eh, Jesse? Let’s face it, when was the last time our Evelyn was all right?”
“She’s sleeping a lot,” I said. Above me, my parents’ snoring reverberated through the ceiling. It was like listening to the grumbling melodies of two steam locomotives as they chuffed slowly along parallel railway tracks.
Mabel was, of course, correct. My mother wasn’t all right. She wasn’t anywhere approaching all right. For the past several weeks she hadn’t stirred out of her terrible inertia, barely got dressed, and bathed so infrequently that even from a distance I could make out her sour and musky smell. And though she hadn’t mentioned Delapole or made reference to any plans to do herself in, she’d started going on at length about how maybe she should buy a ticket and fly off to Australia, where, even if being with her mother didn’t cheer her up, at least the change in the climate would.
Sometimes I tried to talk to her, sitting beside her on the settee, taking her hand, and telling her how nice it would be if she started working on the garden, how the exercise and the fresh air would do her good. “It’s too wet and too bloody cold,” she’d say, pulling her hand away. “And, anyway, it’ll be winter soon and everything in the garden will be dead.” Then she’d go on to tell me how it would be summer soon in Australia, and there would be lovely weather in Sydney and how her mother and “that bloody Australian gigolo” would celebrate Christmas with a barbecue on the beach.
“Well, listen,” Mabel continued, the sound of her lighting a cigarette and taking a sighing drag audible over the telephone. “You tell Evelyn to get herself up and out of bed, because I’m coming over.”
“You are?” I was delighted. I’d been missing Mabel terribly, longing for her to stride in and brighten up our dull and ugly house. If anyone could talk my mother out of this bad patch, it was Mabel. “What time will you be here?” I asked.
“Oh, tell your mam and dad I’ll be there around one o’clock. And I’m bringing someone with me.”
“Who?”
“My new fella, Frank.”
“Frank?” I repeated, hoping this wasn’t the same Frank who had startled my mother in Mabel’s bathroom.
“Oh, don’t you worry now, Jesse,” Mabel said. “I’ll make sure he puts some clothes on before he comes along.”
When Mabel arrived that afternoon with Frank in tow, both my parents were a little surprised. I’d decided, after my mother’s disastrous first encounter with Frank, that perhaps it was best that I didn’t mention Mabel’s intention to bring him. That way, my mother might have a little more of a positive attitude toward her sister’s approaching visit and my father wouldn’t be left anxiously awaiting another social catastrophe in the making. The prospect of seeing her sister had miraculously propelled my mother out of bed. She’d even managed to take a bath, get dressed, do her hair, and put on some makeup. When she went to answer their knock, she looked as full of fearsome energy as she had when she’d been swinging that scythe around the garden to clear the weeds a couple of months before. As I watched her pull open the door with rediscovered vigor, I let myself hope that perhaps Mabel could inject some liveliness into her that would last beyond the brief few hours of this visit.
“Evelyn, this is Frank,” Mabel said, smiling cautiously at my mother. “Frank, this is Evelyn. I know the two of you have met before, but I thought a more formal introduction might be appropriate.”
Frank looked a little older than Mabel. He had jet-black hair, graying just slightly at the temples, and a craggy, narrow face with generous lips, dark bushy eyebrows, and a small, cherublike nose. It was an interesting combination of features that was not entirely unattractive. The same, however, could not be said of his clothing. He wore a pair of bottle-green polyester flares that were far too long, sagged over his thin hips, folded over his ankles, and almost hid his shiny Winklepicker shoes. He carried a matching jacket over his shoulder, and his big-collared, big-cuffed shirt, billowing across his insubstantial chest, was bright green satin. As he stood next to Mabel, shifting his weight from foot to foot, I wondered what he looked like when my mother stumbled upon him naked. All I could imagine, however, was a man in green underwear with the green, scrawny body of a stick insect.
Frank seemed to be doing his best to look apologetic in front of my mother, but I could tell from the glint in his gray eyes that he was thinking back on their first encounter with amusement. “Nice to meet you, Evelyn,” he said, and pushed a solid, wide hand toward my mother. He was holding a large paper-wrapped package.
My mother regarded Frank, then the package, frostily. “What’s that?” she said, narrowing her eyes and taking a couple of steps back, as if Frank were proffering a hand grenade.
“It’s a peace offering, like,” Frank replied.
“A peace offering?” My mother looked down the long, straight line of her nose at Frank and then at Mabel. “There a war going on around here that I don’t know about?” I could already tell that she was intent on directing her renewed energy in a furious belligerence toward Frank. She must have been storing up her anger ever since she stormed out of Mabel’s house.
Mabel smiled. “It’s to make up for that little … misunderstanding we had. I know the two of you got off on the wrong foot and I thought—”
“So, this is your idea, then?”
Mabel began rifling through her handbag. “No, Evelyn. It was Frank’s idea. He thought you’d appreciate a little gift, that’s all.” She retrieved a packet of cigarettes.
My mother frowned, thoughtful for a moment, and then extended her hand toward Frank. “Well, in that case, thanks very much.” She took the package and pressed it to her chest. I breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps things would go better than I’d thought. “It’s been quite a while since anyone’s been so thoughtful as to get me a present,” she said, giving me a sideways but nevertheless pointed look.
“Open it then,” I urged her. I imagined a pretty pearl necklace, a pair of gold earrings, a flowing silk scarf—the kinds of things I might buy my mother if it occurred to me to get her anything besides the talcum powder and bath crystals I always ordered for her out of Mabel’s Avon catalog for Christmas and birthdays.
“All right, all right,” my mother said. “Ooh, I wonder what it could be.” She didn’t have to wonder long, however, for having deftly torn back the paper in only a matter of seconds, she found herself holding a large mound of mottled pink sausages.
“Best pork sausages you’ll find in the whole of Yorkshire,” Frank announced. He had a deep, throaty voice—the kind men get from smoking too many cigarettes, the kind that makes them sound careworn and wrung out by life. “And probably the best you’ll find in the whole country, if I’m not mistaken. There’s three pounds there. That should last you a while.”
My mother regarded the sausages with the expression of a person who had just been handed a package of someone else’s vomit. When she looked up at Frank and Mabel, her expression remained unchanged.
“Frank’s right,” said Mabel, an unlit cigarette now dangling from her lips as she scrambled about in her bag again, presumably to locate her lighter. “Best sausages you’ll find anywhere in the world. And Frank should know. That’s where he works—Tuggles Sausage Factory. Been there for seventeen years now, haven’t you, Frank?”
Frank nodded, his face a picture of saddened confusion as he met my mother’s disdainful expression.
“I see,” my mother said flatly, lowering her eyes toward the sausages again. “So, this is how you spend your days, then, Frank? Making sausages?”
“Aye, like Mabel says, I’ve been there seventeen years.”
“Yes, well, I’ve never been much of a pork person myself,” my mother said, folding the paper back around the package as if she could no longer bear the sight of all that raw, pink meat. “Beef is much more my cup of tea. You could have asked Mabel and she would have told you that. I’ve always had a preference for beef.” She shook her head slowly, as if to say that had Frank only had the sense to bring along a package of beef sausages, this whole sorry interaction would have gone perfectly.
“I like pork sausages,” I said, desperate to rescue the only visit we’d had at our new home from complete disaster. “And so does my dad. We’ll eat them, won’t we, Dad?” I looked over at my father, who was lurking behind my mother and me in the hallway. He gave a noncommittal shrug.
My mother handed the package to me. “Yes, well, you’d better put them in the fridge then, hadn’t you? If it’s not stored properly, you can get all kinds of diseases from pork. That’s why them Muslims and Jews won’t touch it. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to end up with tapeworm.”
“Oh, there’s no chance of you getting anything like that,” Frank said solemnly. “Use the best sanitary practices, we do.”
“I’m not taking any chances, thank you very much,” my mother said. “Jesse and Mike can eat pork, but I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
“You’ve eaten it plenty of times before,” I chimed. Indeed, next to Mr. Kipling cream cakes, pork pies were one of my mother’s favorite foods. She loved to eat them in thin slices, buried under shiny mounds of Branston Pickle and mustard, leaving brown and yellow stains around her mouth. It didn’t surprise me, however, that she conveniently seemed to have forgotten this particular passion. I felt sorry for Frank. Though he might keep us in meat products for the rest of our lives, he would never be forgiven his faux pas in Mabel’s bathroom. If Mabel had any compassion, she’d never have raised his hopes in the first place.
“Well,” my mother said, turning away from the doorway, “I suppose you want something to eat. I’m sorry, but I just haven’t had a chance to make it to the shops this week.” She sighed as if she’d had one of those excessively busy weeks that hadn’t included a spare moment to get some shopping done. “I think we might have some custard creams in the biscuit tin….”
“Oh, that’s fine. We’re not hungry,” Mabel said, the unlit cigarette still in her mouth as she followed my mother down the hall. Frank, his hands pushed into the pockets of his big green trousers, tagged along behind next to my father. “We got something to eat on the way. Frank drove me over, you know.”
“Aye, that’s right,” Frank called toward my mother. “Came over in the Tuggles delivery van, we did. Let me use it outside of work hours, they do. And quite a ride it was. More curves on them there roads than on your Mabel!” He let out a loud raspy laugh.
At this, my mother turned on her heels, gave Auntie Mabel a sour look, and muttered, “Pick up the village idiot on your way, did you, Mabel?”
Mabel looked at Frank, exasperated. He swallowed his laugh and shrugged. “Just trying to lighten things up a bit,” he said, looking toward me and my father. I gave him a wan, apologetic smile, thinking that someone, at least, should let him know not to waste his energy. My father looked steadily at his own feet.
When we reached the kitchen, Mabel removed the still unlit cigarette from her mouth, grabbed me, wrapped me in a tight hug, and placed a greasy lipstick kiss on my cheek. “By heck, Jesse, I’ll swear you get bigger every time I see you. I bet you grow out of your clothes like nobody’s business.”
“You can say that again,” my mother said sternly as she filled the kettle. “You ask me, it’s a bit abnormal. When we were younger, we never grew like that.”
“Aye, well, kids these days, they’re a lot different,” said Frank. “My kids—”
My mother turned around abruptly. “You’ve got kids?” She waited for Frank’s nod of affirmation, then turned to scowl at Mabel.
“For God’s sake, keep your hair on, Evelyn,” Mabel said, sighing. “He’s divorced. His kids live with his ex-wife, don’t they, Frank?”
“Aye, nine and eleven, they are. Want to see a picture?” He gave my mother a hopeful smile, pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, and rummaged around until he found a creased photograph. He handed it to her. Eyebrows raised, lips pursed tight and small, she gave the photograph a cursory glance before passing it to my father.
“Hmmph,” she said. “I expect those poor little things must really miss their daddy. It’s awful, what happens to children of divorce.” She looked meaningfully over at Mabel, who, once again, popped the cigarette back into her mouth and began scouring her handbag for her cigarette lighter.
“Nice photo,” my father said, handing the picture back to Frank. My mother let out a snort.
For a moment, Frank held it in the flat of his hand. He was gazing at the photograph the way someone might if he were trying to read the lines in his palm, hoping to discern some hidden meaning from the deeply familiar.
“Can I see?” I asked, reaching for the photograph.
“Here,” he said, handing it to me.
It showed two dark-haired children, a boy and a girl. They were sitting on a beach, building a tilting, clumsy sandcastle, squinting and smiling as they looked toward the camera. The girl had two of her front teeth missing and a solid, pudgy body. She wore a canary-yellow swim-suit, and her hair was tied in two long, stringy plaits that hung limply over her chest. The boy, a little older, had Frank’s same skin-and-bones build. In the picture, as if immensely proud of his sandcastle, he was puffing out his chest to show the rigid arc of each of his ribs pressed against his pallid skin. “What are their names?” I asked.
“The girl’s Karen,” Frank said. “And the boy’s Bobby. Bit of a goodlooker, just like his dad, don’t you think?”
“You wish!” Mabel laughed.
I had never known a man to carry a photograph of his children around in his wallet. All the men I knew, like my father, left it to their wives to put their holiday snaps in albums or place the photographs that were taken annually at school in frames and set them on the sideboard. Children were something they left at home when they went out into the world, part of the domestic burden they shed as soon as they stepped out the front door. I wondered if once men got divorced and were freed of their children as a daily responsibility, they began carrying pictures of them around like some distant memento of the past. Was it easier to be proud of them, to love them, I wondered, if you didn’t have to see them every day?
“They look nice,” I said, still studying Frank’s children, the way the sea shimmered so blue behind them and the sand glinted as it reflected back the sun. They looked happy in the picture, and I wondered if they continued to be, now that their parents were apart.
“Interested in Do-It-Yourself, Frank?” my father asked chirpily. “Fancy a look at some of my handiwork? I’ve been doing quite a lot of repairs.”
“Aye, that’d be nice, Mike,” Frank answered, giving my father a grateful look as they both beat an exit into the hall.
When the kettle boiled, my mother set out a plate of the biscuits that had been languishing in a tin in the back of the pantry since we moved in. I, for one, didn’t plan on eating any—they looked crumbly and stale.
Mabel searched about in her handbag again, finally looking up with a sigh. “I don’t know what the heck I’ve done with my lighter, and I’m gasping for a ciggy. You got any matches in here?” she asked, looking around the kitchen.
“Just run out,” my mother said stonily. “And, anyway, didn’t I tell you to give that dirty habit up?”
Mabel ignored her, turning to me. “Jesse, be a love would you and go and ask Frank to let me borrow his lighter?”
“All right, Auntie Mabel,” I said, and went out into the hallway, where my father and Frank had apparently graduated from discussing my father’s talents as a handyman to more personal things. I stood in the shadows by the kitchen door, reluctant to interrupt and a little curious to find out more about Frank.
“So, you work at Tuggles, then, Frank?” my father said. “They make good sausages, do Tuggles.”
“Aye,” Frank said. “Like I said, been there seventeen years.”
“So you must like it, then?”
“It’s all right,” Frank said, stuffing his hands into his trouser pockets. “It’s a job. Though I have to say, with paying the ex-wife and the kids’ maintenance, well, there’s not much left over. With two incomes coming in, mind, I wouldn’t be so bad off.”
“You thinking about getting another job as well?” my father asked, surprised.
“Bloody hell, no. One’s enough for me, thank you very much. But, well, Mabel makes a decent bit of cash with all that makeup and Tupperware she flogs. And she’s got a right nice little house on that new estate. I mean, if we pooled our resources … Right now I’m stuck in a poky little bedsit over a betting shop on Holderness Road. It’s handy if I want to make a flutter on the horses, but not much of a home. And, anyway, what do we men know about making somewhere feel like home, eh?” He gave a raspy little laugh. “Need a woman to take care of that kind of thing. A man my age, I wasn’t meant to live by myself. I can’t cook, not much for cleaning, and I bloody hate doing my own washing.”
“Yes, well,” my father said, scratching the back of his neck and looking thoughtful. “I’m not sure there’s anyone really likes cleaning and washing, Frank. Evelyn, well, when she gets in the mood she can be like a flipping tornado going through the house. But I don’t think she’d ever tell you she likes doing housework. She did get into a bit of a cooking phase for a while, mind you. She seemed to like that.” He lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “Made all this bloody French food. Can’t say I really cared for it.”
“Don’t blame you,” Frank said. “Me, I prefer a nice plate of meat, gravy, and potatoes. Thankfully, that’s what Mabel makes best.”
“So, Frank, how come it didn’t work out with your ex-wife, then? I mean, divorce—that’s a serious step.” Though my father might be a little less vocal than my mother in his judgments, he’d never approved of divorce.
“To be honest with you, Mike,” Frank said, “my ex, she was a bit of a bitch. Always complaining that I was going to the pub with my mates too much, spending too much on the horses, not giving her enough money to make ends meet. Nag, nag, nag.” He flapped his thumb and fingers open and shut to imitate a chattering jaw. “Finally, I just got sick of it. I miss the kids sometimes, but I can’t say I miss motormouth one bit. That’s what I used to call her, motormouth—and a few other things besides.”
I thought of those two children smiling proudly at the camera, and of how photographs never showed more than one captured moment—how, after that picture had been taken, the tide would inevitably have come in and washed away their sandcastle, and how, at the end of that day, they’d have changed out of their swimming costumes and been driven home by Frank. I thought about how they’d have sat behind bedroom walls listening to their parents argue, and I wondered if they’d been relieved when their father walked out on them, or if they still kept hoping that he would come back.
“In contrast to my ex,” Frank continued, “Mabel’s a bloody breath of fresh air. She’s more easygoing, knows how to have a laugh. And, like I said, she’s got a nice setup there on the estate and I could use a bit of home cooking.”
“Yes, well,” my father ventured, “Mabel’s always been quite an independent type, you know. I’m not sure she—”
“Oh, Mabel knows what’s good for her,” Frank interrupted. “When it comes down to it, every woman wants a man around the house.”
“No, they don’t,” I said, moving out of the shadows.
“Aye, well, you tell that to your husband, love,” Frank said, his voice half laugh, half growl. “When you get married—”
“I’m not getting married,” I interjected. “I’m not going to be the servant of some lazy man who can’t be bothered to do his own washing and cleaning.” I had no doubt, also, that while Frank might have aspirations to settle down and be waited on in Mabel’s little council house, she would send him on his way soon enough. As my mother said, Mabel went through men the way other women went through nylon stockings.
For a moment, Frank held my gaze, the slow burn of indignation in his eyes. “Got yourself quite a little firebrand here, don’t you, Mike? Sent out to spy on us by the women in the kitchen, were you?”
“Mabel told me to ask Frank for his lighter,” I explained, turning to my father.
“See, Mike,” Frank said, laughing. “Women, they always need a man for something.”
“YOU KNOW, IT’S LOVELY out here, it really is.”
I’d returned to the kitchen. After lighting her cigarette and taking a couple of long, hungry drags, Mabel stood by the window, looking out over my mother’s abandoned garden. In the churned-up soil, the thistles and other weeds had started to grow back, the bright yellow heads of dandelions peering through a thickening carpet of green.
“All them trees, all this nature,” Mabel continued. “And you could have a lovely garden out there if you get back to it, Ev. I mean, you’ve got so much space here. Me, I look outside and all I see is concrete and that eighty-year-old bloke across the street who likes to stand in his window in nothing but his Y-fronts. Bloody old pervert. Not a pretty sight, I’ll tell you that. But you, well, you’ve got it all here, haven’t you? You could get yourself out—maybe you could take your driving test again and …” Mabel frowned for a moment, apparently remembering the outcome of my mother’s last failed driving test. “Or maybe you could get yourself a bike,” she added brightly. “You know, cycle out on them lovely roads. Go into the village, do a bit of shopping. And let’s face it, Ev, you’ve got your work cut out for you here, haven’t you?” She gestured around the kitchen, still desperately in need of renovation. “I don’t see how you could possibly get bored.”
“Well, I am,” my mother said, dropping her teacup into the saucer with a clatter.
“Jesse’s not bored, are you, love?” Mabel said, gesturing me over to her with her cigarette. I walked to her side and she put an arm around my shoulder, pressing me into her soft, springy flesh.
“No, I like it,” I said.
“And did you make some friends?”
“Yes. I made a few. But my best friend is Tracey.”
“Oh, that’s that skinny lass that you brought over to my house, right?”
I nodded.
“See, Evelyn,” Mabel said. “If Jesse here can adjust, I’m sure you can.”
My mother sat back and folded her arms across her chest. “You know, I haven’t heard one word from our mother since she phoned you about getting married. Not one bloody word.”
“Well, I’m sure she—” Mabel began.
My mother slammed her hand down on the table, making the cups and saucers there dance noisily over its surface. “I just don’t understand how a woman could treat her daughter like that, I really don’t. Flitting off to another country, leaving her to fend for herself.” She pondered this for a moment, then looked over at me, watery-eyed. “Don’t you worry, love, I’d never leave you in the lurch like that.”
Mabel sighed. My head against her, I could hear her breath as it moved through her chest. I pressed closer into her, into the warmth beneath her clothes. If my parents ever divorced, I thought, perhaps Auntie Mabel would take me in. We could live in her little council house, laughing together at the neighbor in his underpants. Unlike Frank, I wouldn’t expect to be waited on. I’d even help out with Mabel’s Tupperware and Avon makeup parties if it meant she’d let me stay.
“But Jesse’s only a kid,” Mabel responded. “You were a married woman when Mam left. And she left me as well, you know. I miss her, of course. But you’ve got to decide to get on with your life—”
“But that’s not the point, is it?” My mother thumped the kitchen table again. “You’re not like me, Mabel. You know that. Nobody understands what I go through. Nobody. Not Mike, not all those bloody doctors, not even my own sister or my own mother. You should try being me sometimes. I bet you couldn’t stand it for a day.” She paused for a moment. Beside me, Mabel took a couple of tense puffs on her cigarette. “Come to think of it,” my mother continued, “our Ted is better off than me.”
“What are you talking about, Ev? You’re just being daft now.” Mabel waved away the smoke in front of her as if she were trying to wave away my mother’s words.
“No, I’m not. At least he gets out every once in a while. Gets a bit of freedom. But me, my prison’s in here.” My mother jabbed her forehead with her index finger. “On the inside. I can’t help the way I feel, you know. I can’t. People are always saying cheer up, or pull yourself together, or other such bloody rubbish. They smile at you and tell you how it’d be so much better if you did this or you did that. Hah! That’s a bloody joke, that is!” Her voice was getting louder and her features seemed twisted, as if she were pulling something hard and painful from deep inside herself. “Get yourself a hobby, they say. Then, when I do get myself a hobby, find something I want to do, they tell me to calm down, take it easy, don’t get so overwrought. And you know what’s so ridiculous about all this?” She was yelling now. “Do you? Do you?”
Beside me, I felt Mabel shake her head.
My mother stood up, her chair scraping the floor with a shriek. “There’s not a damn thing I can do about any of it! That’s what! I mean, don’t you think I’d change the way I am if I could?” Her hands gripped the edges of the table now, her eyes wild and teary. I stepped away from Mabel, feeling the urge to go to my mother, to put my arms around her shoulders, to try to ease her sadness and her anger, as if by touching her I could let it soak into myself. But it was hopeless; she had said so herself. Her moods were as inevitable as the tides that ate away cliffs and knocked over sandcastles. I remained by the kitchen counter.
“I know, Ev, I’m sure it must be hard,” said Mabel, her voice a syrupy calm. “But I’m sure you’d feel better if you got back to your gardening.”
“I don’t give a toss about that bloody garden. I don’t give a toss about anything right now.” She dropped back into her chair.
“Oh, Evelyn,” Mabel said. “Honestly, I don’t know what to say. And comparing yourself to Ted, well that makes no sense to me. I mean, you’re out here with all this space and countryside and he’s stuck in some poky little cell. Mind you, he’ll be out soon enough. He wrote to me last week, said they’re releasing him early next year. Cheeky bugger, wanted to know if he could come and stay with me. Fat chance of that! Hey, did I tell you what he did last time I let him kip at my house, Jesse?” She took an eager puff on her cigarette, then gestured toward me with it. “I made the mistake of saying I’d help him get on his feet. Well, the telly went on the blink, so he goes out and gets me another one. I was pleased as punch, I was. Pleased, that is, until Mrs. Waverly from down the street comes in to borrow a cup of sugar, sees my new telly, and tells me that it’s the one she’d had nicked from her house just the week before. Of course, it had been our Ted.” She shook her head. “Took months before I could hold up my head on my street again. You’re nothing like our Ted, Evelyn. Not one jot. He’s got real problems. You—well, you’ve got a nice house and a lovely family. You couldn’t really want much more than that.” She beamed at my mother, but my mother simply stared into her empty teacup. Mabel stubbed out her cigarette. “So, what do you think of Frank, then? Bit of all right, don’t you think?”
“How should I know?” my mother said, pouring herself another cup of tea.
“Well, I mean, you did see him in the altogether, didn’t you?” Mabel said. “You’d have as good an idea as anybody.”
“I’d rather not be reminded about that, if you don’t mind,” my mother said dully.
“Sorry.” Mabel looked at me and pulled a guilty smile.
“Not all that glitters is gold, you know,” my mother said with a sudden spark of energy, pulling the spoon from the sugar bowl and pointing it ominously at Mabel.
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?”
“I’d have thought you’d know full well. Let’s face it, you’ve kissed a lot of frogs and you’ve not found yourself a prince yet, have you?”
“To be honest with you, Ev,” Mabel said, “I gave up on finding a prince long ago. These days, I’d settle for a decent-looking frog.” I felt tempted to make a joke about Frank resembling a frog in his green suit and shirt, but I didn’t want to hurt Mabel’s feelings. And I certainly didn’t want to give my mother any more ammunition to hurl at her.
“Yes, well,” my mother said, gesturing toward the hallway, from which we could hear the reverberating bass of my father’s and Frank’s voices. “You certainly haven’t picked Prince Charming this time. I’ve never heard a story about a prince that works in a sausage factory, who’s divorced, and has abandoned his poor little kiddies.” She dumped a couple of spoonfuls of sugar into her tea and began stirring it so vigorously that I thought she might break the cup.
I expected Mabel to make some sharp and funny comeback, to repel my mother with a loud, strident joke. Instead, she took another cigarette out, lit it, and took a thoughtful drag. “You know, you might be right, Evelyn,” she said, her words enfolded in smoke. “But as you’ve said yourself, I’m not getting any younger. And, despite my Platex Eighteen-Hour Girdle and Cross Your Heart Bra”—she planted a hand on one of her breasts—“things are heading more south than north these days. So, while I’ve got a little bit of spring in my step—and in a few other places—I’d better play my hand. Otherwise, I’ll be all washed up and this”—she jiggled her breast with the hand that still rested there—“won’t do me one bit of good.”
I felt my stomach lurch. I hated the defeated tone in her voice, the way it suggested that she was going to have to settle for something far less than she’d hoped for. I sidled back up to her and wrapped my arms around her broad waist, hoping that by pressing myself against her I could will her to remain herself. “You don’t need a Prince Charming, Auntie Mabel,” I said. “You don’t need any man. You could call yourself Ms., like my teacher Ms. Hastings. She thinks if you get married you just become some man’s property.”
Mabel laughed softly. “Crikey, the things they teach them at school these days! Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me to burn my flipping bra, Jesse. I can just see myself walking into the Snail and Whippet on a Saturday night with my boobs down to my knees. Ooh, I’d be the talk of the town, I would.”
“I wouldn’t care about what other people said about you, Auntie Mabel. I’d love you if you didn’t have a man and you didn’t wear a bra.” I clasped my arms tighter around Mabel’s waist, as if the fierceness of my grip on her could seep all the way through the thick armor of her underwear, down into her flesh. I had the dreadful feeling of something slipping away from me, something I needed to hold on to to keep me afloat.
“Bleeming heck, Jesse, you’re going to squeeze me to bloody death if you carry on like that!” Mabel said. “I can hardly breathe.”