Chapter FOURTEEN
MABEL’S VISIT HAD NO POSITIVE IMPACT ON MY MOTHER’S MOOD. During the following weeks, she rarely left her bedroom, and, as the days became shorter and the leaves turned a glorious array of gold, crimson, orange, and a hundred shades in between, she did not even look out her window to notice the change in the seasons. When the clocks went back at the end of October, plunging the days into a lingering gray dusk soon after four o’clock, it made no difference to her, since she rarely got out of bed. And when the weather became cold, frost leaving a glimmering layer of white over everything in the mornings, she simply piled more blankets on her side of the bed, eventually lying under a stack so heavy and thick that I wondered that it didn’t suffocate her.
My father continued his indifference to my mother’s decline, although, after giving Frank a tour of all his half-finished projects, he did take a renewed interest in repairing the house, throwing himself into it with an enthusiasm I had never witnessed in him before. He stayed up late into the night stripping the wallpaper in the living room, patching cracks in the ceiling, painting the walls, and installing new light fixtures. His weekends were fully occupied, too—ripping out frayed and rotted carpet, putting down new floorboards, replacing the dry rot-riddled window frames outside. It was as if, with my mother’s failure to leave her bed, he was trying to evoke her old ferocity, as if he had decided that if he couldn’t force her to get back to her former, frantic self, he would imitate it.
While I still spent most of my evenings writing letters to Amanda, the highlight of my days came before school started, at the bus stop in Midham, when I could actually spend some time in her company. I looked forward to this with such fervor that just the thought of it was the thing that propelled me out of bed. And the hope of talking with her meant that I usually got to the bus stop far too early, always several minutes before everyone else. I waited in blistering winds that tore the leaves from the trees and scattered them in swirling piles while my coat whipped about my body, or on days when fog shrouded the fields and made the whole world bone-deep cold and impossibly still. When it rained, I stood under an umbrella, watching the leaping dance of raindrops on the street, letting the damp seep into my skin. But none of this mattered when Amanda appeared, and those few minutes that I got to spend with her filled me with a heat that, no matter how cold and inhospitable the weather, I carried with me for the rest of the day.
One morning in mid-November, when the sky was a stunning cloudless blue and the ground was silvered with frost, Amanda appeared at the bus stop earlier than usual, so that I had the luxury of a full fifteen minutes to talk with her before the bus arrived to sweep us off.
“Hiya, Jesse,” she said as she approached. Though she smiled at me warmly, she looked a little ragged, tired, and not quite as immaculately groomed as she usually was.
“Hiya,” I said, light-limbed at the sight of her. I was particularly pleased because, apart from one of the younger boys who preoccupied himself with smashing his heels into all the iced-over puddles at the side of the road, there was no one else at the bus stop yet. Usually, Tracey was already there by the time Amanda showed up, and I was always aware of her standing somewhere close, making disgruntled huffs and muttered comments while I spoke with her sister. Most of the time, I ignored her. Though I followed Tracey around faithfully at school, this was the one time in my day when I didn’t care what she thought.
“It’s a lovely day.” Amanda let out a wistful sigh and looked out beyond the trees across the street from us to the fields surrounding the village. Those that were fallow were covered in a sheen of white, but a nearby grassy meadow sparkled as the sun, lurking just above the horizon, caught on the frosted blades of grass as if they were jewels. “Cold, but pretty,” she said, shivering as she pushed her gloved hands into the pockets of her coat and shuffled closer to me.
“Yes,” I said, breathing in the scent of her perfume, sweet and almost overpowering against the stark, odorless cold.
“So, what lessons have you got today?” She knocked her hip against mine.
“Maths, history, English, and PE,” I recited. By now I knew my timetable by heart.
“You’ve got that Ms. Hastings for English, don’t you? I don’t have lessons with her, but I’ve heard Tracey moaning about her, complaining she’s a hippie and all that. What do you think of her?”
“She’s all right,” I said, trying my best to sound noncommittal. I didn’t want Amanda to think I liked a weirdo.
Amanda laughed. “Well, she might have got right up our Tracey’s nose, but she seems like a bloody breath of fresh air, you ask me.”
“You think so?” I was surprised to hear her say this, and more than a little pleased. Maybe it wasn’t such a dreadful thing after all to like a female teacher with big boots, shorn hair, and hippie clothes.
“Yeah. God, I wish I had her instead of Mr. Forrest. You should hear him, Jesse. Just the sound of his voice is enough to put me to sleep. And he’s always complaining about something. Come to think of it, he sounds a bit like our Tracey.” She laughed. “The only thing I haven’t heard her complain about is that idiot Greg Loomis.”
I smiled. “She does go on about him a bit, doesn’t she?”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “Non-bloody-stop. It’s Greg this, Greg that, Greg the other. Honestly, sometimes I don’t think she speaks one sentence without the word ‘Greg’ in it. She drives me mad. I expect she drives you a bit mad as well.”
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “The worst thing is having to follow him around school all day, though.” I told Amanda about Tracey dragging me and the Debbies in search of Greg as he traveled from lesson to lesson.
Amanda barked out a laugh. “Bloody hell, she’s got it worse than I thought. And you, Jesse Bennett, have got the patience of a saint.” She pulled her hand out of her pocket and ruffled my hair. Her touch sent an immediate bolt of heat charging through my body. “So, how’s your dad’s house repairs coming along, then?”
I had told Amanda about my father’s efforts to repair the house. I had also confessed my frustration with his sporadic interest in this activity. “He’s finished the hallway, done the living room, and painted all the windows,” I said. “He’s working on the kitchen now.”
“That’s great.”
“I suppose so, but I don’t think our house will ever be as nice as yours.”
“Yeah, well,” she said, pulling her lips into a tight, flat line, “there’s a lot of things more important than appearances, Jesse.”
She said this with such heaviness that I was tempted to ask her if anything was bothering her. But the next moment she tugged her mouth into a smile. “So, Stan’s taking me for a trip on his bike this weekend,” she said, shuffling against me again. The weight of her body against mine made me want to lean all the way into her, so that there would be no space or cold air separating us at all. “Guess where we’re going.”
“Where?” I asked, trying to sound enthusiastic. “We’re going to Sheffield, to a Black Sabbath concert.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. All that head-banging music’s not my cup of tea, either. But it’ll be great to get away. Of course,” she said, lowering her voice and looking warily down the street, “I haven’t told my dad. He doesn’t like me having a boyfriend. Doesn’t like me doing anything, really.” She shrugged. “He thinks I’m staying at a friend’s house this weekend. So does Tracey. Don’t tell her, will you, Jesse? She’ll only go and tell tales to my dad. And then there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell her,” I said, feeling torn between pleasure at having Amanda confide in me and jealousy at the thought of Amanda clinging tightly to Stan along all those miles of road to Sheffield.
“To tell you the truth, Jesse, I’m really only going so I can get out of the house. I need to …”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.” She took a breath and seemed to push something from her thoughts. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Is it Stan?” I asked. “Have you been arguing?”
“No,” she said. “It’s not him. Mind you, he has been getting on my nerves.”
“He has?” I tried not to sound too gleeful.
“Yeah. Frankly, sometimes he acts almost as full of himself as that bonehead Greg Loomis. And he’s dead stupid on his bike sometimes. Scared me to death the other day, he did. He was driving me home from school, and he overtook this car on a bend and there was this lorry coming right at us. He almost had to swerve off the road to miss it. God, Jesse, I tell you, I thought I was going to wet myself I was so frightened.”
“Maybe you should take the bus home,” I suggested.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Though sometimes, to tell you the truth, I have a good mind to give him the shove.”
“The shove?” I had the sudden image of Amanda standing on a roadside with Stan, pushing him into the path of a speeding lorry.
“You know, pack him in. Break up.”
“Really?” It was almost impossible to contain my delight now.
“Yeah,” she said, gazing up toward the jagged silhouette of an elm tree that had been stripped bare not by the changing seasons but by Dutch elm disease. It had stood there, overlooking the bus stop and the high street, a sad skeleton among its verdant companions all summer. Now, though, it blended perfectly into the winter landscape, stark against the yellow light of the ascending sun.
“So why don’t you? Why don’t you give him the shove?”
“It’s complicated and, well, I suppose it’s because I love him.”
“Oh,” I said, my voice suddenly thin. “Well, then, of course you can’t give him the shove.” I turned to look at the disease-ravaged tree, noticing the way its smaller branches reached like knotty fingers pointing to the vast blue sky.
“Of course, you’re probably still too young, Jesse, to understand love and all that.”
“No, I’m not,” I said quietly, still staring at the tree, because I didn’t dare to look at Amanda.
I felt her turn to study me, and for a moment I was afraid that she might tease me or, as Tracey or the Debbies would have done if I’d said such a thing to them, interrogate me about which boy at school I was infatuated with. Instead, Amanda reached out and placed her hand gently on my arm. “Yeah,” she said, “you’re right. You are old enough.”
As she touched me, I felt as if I could melt forever in that moment. And I wondered if, despite her declaration of love for Stan, there was a chance that Amanda might soon come to realize that he wasn’t the person she deserved. Realizing this, she would also see that I was the only one who truly loved her and, filled with this knowledge, she would have to love me in return. And though we’d have to keep our love secret, because no one else would understand it, the two of us would know that there was nothing terrible about the way we felt. While I had to hide my love from her, it was a terrible, shameful secret. But if Amanda returned my feelings I’d have no reason to be ashamed.
DURING THE LAST WEEK of term, there was a Christmas pantomime, a carol service, and Mr. Davies held a party for his class on the final afternoon. But the social event that elicited the most excited anticipation from Tracey and the Debbies was the disco that would be held on the Saturday before Christmas in the Reatton-on-Sea church hall. Hosted by Reverend Mullins, the vicar of Reatton—who was apparently rather more in touch with current youth culture than his counterpart in Midham—it was an annual event that attracted teenagers from miles around.
I’d been to a couple of school-run discos when I was at Knox Vale—a Halloween party and the Christmas dance—and found them excruciating. While the teachers seemed to think they were giving us an enormous treat, I would far rather have spent all afternoon drawing cross sections of the Humber estuary for Mr. Cuthbertson, memorizing vocabulary for Mr. Knighton, or even playing hockey on the frozen playing field than being herded with two hundred and fifty other students into the dimly lit assembly hall where Gary Glitter, singing “I’m the Leader of the Gang,” blared from a couple of speakers on the stage. Standing with the other social rejects in the darkest corner we could find, I’d made myself queasy on fizzy drinks and salted peanuts while I watched the other girls dance in ritualistic circles, all moving in the same rhythm, making the same gestures, following one another’s steps. I’d hated those girls, but I’d hated myself more for longing so hard for inclusion in their tight, satisfied little groups. But now, though I still anticipated the Reatton disco with trepidation, the sea change in my social standing meant that I didn’t have to await it with utter dread. Besides, after Tracey told me that she and her family were leaving the next day to spend the entire Christmas holidays with her grandparents, who lived in Cleethorpes, I realized that the disco would be the last time I’d be able to see Amanda for a while.
In preparation for this pivotal event, I’d managed to talk my father into buying me a pair of orange bell-bottoms and a yellow-and-beige shirt that I ordered from the Littlewoods catalog that Mabel had left with us during her last visit. On the model in the catalog, of course, the vivid colors and lustrously smooth polyester had looked stunning, and I’d imagined transforming myself into a similarly bold and stylish girl who didn’t mind standing out in a crowd. When the clothes arrived, however, the effect was a little less impressive and I couldn’t help feeling that their oversized buttons, billowing lines, and glaring brightness only declared my desperation to fit in. Nevertheless, the evening of the disco, I put on my new outfit and my least hideous pair of shoes and readied myself to leave.
When I walked into our newly decorated living room to announce my departure, I was surprised to see my mother sitting in her dressing gown in one of the armchairs, her legs draped over the side of the chair, slippers dangling from her toes. There was a powdery ring of icing sugar around her mouth, evidence that she had joined my father in finishing off the plate of leftover mince pies he’d brought home that evening from the Christmas party at his job. It had been quite a while since I’d seen her under the living room’s bright lights, and for the first time I noticed how astonishingly thin and pale she’d become. Her skin had a grayish tinge and seemed pressed tight over her bones, so that her eyes, nose, and chin seemed bigger, more prominent, while her legs, sticking out from under her dressing gown, appeared impossibly white and etched in pale blue veins.
“We got a Christmas card from your grandma today,” she said, waving a card at me. It held a picture of a group of beaming children building a snowman. I wondered if my father had used news of this correspondence from Australia to coax my mother out of bed.
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Yes, well, it’s also signed by that bloody Australian gigolo of hers. Look at this,” my mother said, opening the card and flapping it at me again. “‘All our love,’ it says, ‘Mam and Bill.’ Like he thinks he’s part of the bloody family now.” She let go of the card and it fluttered to the floor. “I mean, who the heck does he think he is?”
“It’s only a card, Mum. He’s only trying to—”
“And where do you think you’re going, madam?” she interrupted, giving my new outfit a once-over and again making me doubt the wisdom of my purchase.
“I’m going to a disco,” I said calmly, not wanting to aggravate her. If she felt like it, she could easily decide to make me stay at home.
“You’re going to a disco?” she repeated, her tone so appalled anyone would have thought I’d just announced that I was planning to attend a get-together of the local Hells Angels. It infuriated me that she could spend literally weeks hidden away in her bedroom with no clue about my daily whereabouts and now, barely out of bed and still in her nightclothes, she was playing the part of a conscientious parent concerned about my moral welfare. “Does your father know?” she asked, implying that if he did he’d put a stop to this outrageous plan.
My father didn’t seem to hear her. He was chewing on a mince pie and watching Look North, the local news program that always followed the BBC News.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s picking me up after.” Tracey and I planned to walk the two miles to Reatton, but, since the disco didn’t end until half past ten and I didn’t fancy walking back on a freezing December night, I’d recruited my father to give us a lift home.
“Is he now?” My mother looked to my father for confirmation. As she did so, the Look North announcer introduced a report on “a surprise royal visit to South Yorkshire,” and my father leaned eagerly toward the television. The screen was filled with the stark silhouette of the gear at a coal mine’s pithead, and then the dazed and grinning face of Prince Charles.
“That’s it, that’s what they should do!” my father yelled, spitting mince-pie crumbs across the carpet and pointing at Prince Charles. “They should send him to work down the bloody mine. That’d bloody teach him.” His words were noticeably slurred, and I deduced that there had been more than just a few mince pies consumed at his work’s party.
“Dad,” I said loudly, hoping to get his attention before he inevitably got into another anti-royalist rant.
“What?”
“Tell Mum you’re picking me up after the disco tonight.”
“I am?” he said, looking at me, perplexed, before turning back to the television.
“Yes. You’re supposed to come and get me. You said you’d take Tracey home as well. Remember?” I gave him a beseeching look.
“Oh, right, yes.” Barely taking his eyes off the screen, he reached over and picked up another mince pie. “God, look at him, the bloody tosspot,” he said as Prince Charles walked along a line of hard-faced miners’ wives, stopping occasionally to shake a hand and exchange a few words.
“At half past ten. You’re to pick us up in Reatton, outside the church hall.” I pronounced the words in the kind of slow yell that people generally reserved for foreigners, the deaf, and the senile.
“I know, I know. I’ll be there,” he said.
“See,” I said, turning toward my mother. “I told you he was picking me up.”
I fully expected her to put some obstacle in my way, to perhaps assert that it just wasn’t appropriate for me to go to a late-night event where there’d be loud music and boys, or to suggest that I was bound to catch my death if I ventured out on such a cold night. I was tensed up and ready to do battle. But I didn’t have to bother, since she seemed suddenly to have lost any energy for belligerence or pronouncements, or, in fact, anything at all. Instead, she shrugged and pressed herself deeper into her chair, so that, in her newly angular body, her legs dangling over the arm of the chair, I imagined her folding all the way into herself until she disappeared. And though I was relieved that I could escape the house without having to fight my way out, as I looked at my mother I felt afraid. Instead of killing herself, I wondered, could a person just shrink and crumple until she became nothing, until her traits and quirks wasted along with her body, until one day you realized that she had faded away?
I walked over to my mother, leaned down toward her, and kissed her on the cheek. “Bye, Mum. See you later,” I said, letting myself take in the texture of her skin against my lips and her pungent body smells. At least for now, she was still solidly herself.
I thought about going over to kiss my father, too. But, as the Look North reporter waxed lyrical about how “so near to Christmas, the gift of a royal visit has lifted everyone’s spirits in this little mining town,” and my father hurled his mince pie toward the television screen so that it landed with a splat right in Prince Charles’s face, I decided it was best to leave him alone to his seasonal enjoyment.