Another Life Altogether_ A Novel

Chapter TWENTY



THE SATURDAY THAT UNCLE TED WAS DUE TO ARRIVE, I’D ASKED MY father to take me along to pick him up, imagining myself pacing outside a shadowy, turreted prison, waiting for the enormous gates to swing open and for Ted to walk out, blinking in the unfamiliar daytime brilliance. It turned out, though, that Ted had actually been released a couple of days before he was to come to our house and my father would pick him up at the Hull railway station after visiting Granddad Bennett for a couple of hours. Since this prospect seemed a lot less exciting, I decided to stay at home. There, however, as my mother rushed around the house putting last-minute touches to her decorating, I began to think that watching wrestling matches with Granddad and my father would have been a lot more relaxing.
In the last few weeks, she’d completed her work on the spare room and, after refurbishing her and my father’s bedroom and painting it in rather alarming shades of pink and yellow, she’d required me to move out of my bedroom so that she could do it up as well. Retrieving my biscuit tin filled with my letters and my mother’s pills and the whiskey bottle from my laundry basket and secreting them behind the settee, I’d spent a week and a half sleeping in the living room while she did up my room. After replacing some of the floorboards and a substantial part of the ceiling, she’d finished by covering my bedroom walls in a paisley-patterned wallpaper of purple, orange, and cream that she’d acquired in the going-out-of-business sale of a hardware shop in Hull several years earlier. While we waited for my father to return with Ted, she hung a pair of matching purple paisley curtains at my window.
“No wonder they went of out business,” I said as my mother stood back to admire her handiwork and I surveyed the nightmare of swirls that had become my bedroom walls.
“Don’t be so bloody ungrateful,” she snapped. “There’s children in Africa would kill for a bedroom as nice as this.”
“And as soon as they got it they’d redecorate,” I mumbled as she pushed past me into the hall.
Later that afternoon, Mabel and Frank arrived. It was the first time they’d visited since Christmas. My mother had insisted that they join us to welcome Ted home and help give him the positive new start he needed. As they followed my mother into the kitchen, they both seemed in especially cheerful moods.
“Not planning to chuck that on my trousers, are you, Evelyn?” Frank joked as my mother set the kettle on the cooker to boil.
“I told Frank we should get him a pair of asbestos underpants when he comes over here,” Mabel added, nudging Frank and laughing. “That way, at least his manhood will be safe.”
My mother spun around. “If you don’t mind, Mabel, I’d prefer it if you didn’t make distasteful jokes while you’re in my house. I really don’t want Jesse exposed to that kind of talk. Besides, we should set a better tone for our Ted.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Evelyn,” Mabel scoffed. “Ted’s coming home from prison, not a tour of the Commonwealth with the bloody Queen. I can’t imagine he’ll be shocked by anything Frank or me have got to say…. Or maybe by one thing,” she said, exchanging a brief look with Frank. My mother caught the exchange between them and regarded them with a narrow-eyed frown. “Anyway, Jesse hears far worse than that at school every day.”
“Oh, aye,” Frank said, nodding. “Teenagers these days get up to larks we never even dreamed of when we were young. Don’t they, Jesse, love?”
“I’m going upstairs, I’ve got homework to do,” I said, ignoring Frank and looking instead at my mother and Mabel. “I’ll come down when Uncle Ted gets here.”
I did, in fact, have quite a lot of homework to do—several pages of geometry that Tracey and the Debbies were depending on me to complete so they could copy it before our maths lesson on Monday, and an essay on the War of the Roses for Miss Nutall. Neither of these activities, however, seemed particularly appealing. Instead, I decided to write a letter to Amanda.
It had been several weeks since I’d written to her. After that morning when she showed me the locket that Stan had given her, I hadn’t written to her once; I hadn’t even spoken to her at the bus stop very much. I couldn’t bear to. I had revealed how I felt about her and she had thought me absurd, laughable, repellent. And though she remained friendly enough, just the knowledge that she had been horrified by my effort to kiss her made me shrink away. I longed for that brief period of euphoria when I’d managed to convince myself that Amanda shared my feelings. But I was alone with all my perverted yearnings for another girl. I was confused, bereft, and left without even a fantasy to cling to. This time, in my letter, I couldn’t write out any more of my ridiculous stories; I simply wanted to tell her how I felt.
“Dear Amanda,” I began, “I wish I could send this letter to you. Actually, I wish I could talk to you about how I feel, but if I did you would probably hate me and call me all sorts of horrible names. The thing is, I am really confused about almost everything. The only thing that I am certain of is that I love you. But I know that loving you is wrong and that if anybody found out they would say I was a lesbian. I don’t even know if that is true. I just know that when you kissed me that night after the disco it was the most wonderful moment in my life and if I could stop time, the way they did in a Star Trek episode once, I would stop it at the exact second that we stood next to the village Christmas tree and you kissed me, and I would stay there forever. So I’m glad that you did it, and I’m glad that you danced with me at the disco, because that was really wonderful as well. But sometimes I wish that you hadn’t done any of those things. Sometimes I even feel really mad at you for making me think that maybe you liked me. I suppose that doesn’t matter now, because I know that you think my loving you is a horrible thing. I have never been more miserable in my life, Amanda. Even when they took my mum off to Delapole, I don’t think I felt as bad as this….”
The knob on my bedroom door turned, the door burst open, and I jumped in shock. It was Frank. “Oh, hello, Jesse, love,” he said, pulling his thin lips into an arcing smirk.
“Don’t you know to knock?” I demanded, slamming shut my notebook and scrambling to sit up. I wanted to sound confident, outraged. Instead, my voice came out thin and uncertain.
“Didn’t know you were in here, did I? Your mam was telling me and Mabel about how she’d decorated the bedrooms and I thought I’d come up and take a look.” He took a few steps into the room and gave the wallpaper an appraising look. “Got interesting tastes has your mam,” he said, cocking an eyebrow. “Or maybe all them squiggles remind her of the state of her brain. I hope it doesn’t end up driving you nuts as well.”
I looked at him without comment, teeth clenched, willing him to leave and desperately aware of all those words I’d just written in my notebook—my most heartfelt confessions spelled out on the page.
“Oh, come on, now, you’re not still mad with me about what happened at Christmas, are you, love?” He moved closer.
Instinctively, I ran a finger over the place where my hand had been cut. It had healed over, but there was still a perceptible ridge in my skin. “I’ve got homework to do,” I said.
“Quite the conscientious student, aren’t you?” he said, coming closer still. Now, as he stood in the light that came in through the window, I could see his expression—the wrinkled tightness around his eyes, the scornful camber of his lips.
“Not really.” I willed him to stop his steady approach. But he didn’t. Instead, he arrived at the bed and lowered himself to sit beside me. The mattress sank under his weight, and I felt myself tilted so that my body fell in his direction. I pulled myself away and tried to push my notebook farther from him to the corner of the bed.
“Sorry to say, I wasn’t much of a student when I was a lad,” he said, sighing. “And when I did read it was mostly comics. Superman was my favorite. You ever like Superman?”
I shook my head, watching him warily as I breathed in his sweat, cigarette, and aftershave smells.
“So what you writing, then?”
“Nothing,” I said, pulling the notebook to me and pressing it against my chest.
“Oh,” he said, his mouth turning upward in a knowing smile. “One of them teenage diaries, is it? Tell it all your private secrets, do you?”
“No,” I said as I felt the blush rise in my cheeks. “It’s just homework.”
“Anything you want to share with your uncle Frank?”
“Actually, I’d like you to leave now,” I said. “I’ve got to finish my homework.”
Frank pulled his thin lips downward, mimicking an expression of disappointment. “Not much of a hostess, are you, love? And here’s me just trying to get to know my little niece.”
“I’m not your niece. And you’re not my uncle.”
“Will be soon,” he said, grinning.
“What do you mean?” I asked softly.
“Mabel and me, we’re getting married.”
“Oh.” I was stunned. Surely this couldn’t be true. Mabel would never get married, and certainly not to Frank. He must be lying.
Frank laughed sourly. “You’re supposed to say ‘Congratulations!’ Supposed to say ‘Welcome to the family, Uncle Frank.’ Actually, if you were really going to be as polite and nice to me as you should, you’d give me a kiss.” He patted his hand against his whiskery cheek. “Right here.”
I backed away until I felt the cold solidity of the wall against my back.
Frank threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, love. I won’t make you. But you might want to change your attitude. I mean, with me going to be your uncle—well, we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other in the future. You should write that in your little diary. ‘Saturday, the fifteenth of February’”—he mimicked writing in the air with his hand—” ‘found out that Frank is going to marry my auntie Mabel. Oh, what happy news!’ See,“he said, dropping his hand to his lap and staring steadily at me. “That’s the kind of welcome I’m looking for. Instead of all this ruddy rudeness and antagonism from your bloody nutcase of a mother.”
“She can’t help it if she doesn’t like you,” I said, looking at him steadily.
“Well, that’s a shame. Because she’s going to have to get used to me. I’m going to be part of the family now.” With a grunt, he pushed himself off the bed so that he stood looking down at me. “You should probably write that down in your diary as well,” he said, eyeing the notebook I was still clutching to my chest.
After Frank left, I sat on my bed for a long time holding my notebook. I sat still as his footsteps descended the stairs and as I heard his voice below, in the kitchen, a husky rumble against Mabel’s and my mother’s higher, lighter tones. Finally, assured that he wouldn’t return, I completed my letter to Amanda. This time it didn’t go on for pages and pages. This time it was short and to the point. I simply asked her why, on that cold night, she had placed her lips on mine to send my hopes soaring, then let them crash into a ditch like Stan Heaphy’s motorbike, leaving me floundering, helpless, unable to brush myself off and get up.
When I was finished, I tore the letter from my notebook. Then I pulled my biscuit tin from the wardrobe, lifted the lid, and added it to my bundle. For a moment, I felt myself wanting to retrieve a box of matches from the kitchen so that I could set a little bonfire in the biscuit tin and burn all those letters. It seemed the kind of romantic gesture unrequited love demanded, and I felt a desperate desire to burn all those feelings from me, to see them ignite, flare, turn to smoke and flames. Having the letters there, hidden in my bedroom, was concrete evidence of a terrible flaw that I never wanted anyone else to find. But they were also evidence of the love I still felt. And, despite everything, I couldn’t let that go. So I put the lid on the tin and put it back in its usual hiding place, but as soon as I did that I knew that I’d written the last of my letters to Amanda. I might still think of her constantly, I might still wish that she returned my feelings, but I would not write to her again.
IN ALL THE YEARS I’d known Ted, he’d never arrived at our house empty-handed. Usually, his gifts seemed extravagant—a gold watch for my father, a set of pearl earrings for my mother, a leather coat for me. Within a short while, however, we usually discovered that there was something not quite right about these items—the gold on my father’s watch started peeling off to reveal a dull gray metal underneath, the pearl earrings turned mottled pink when my mother got them wet, and on the first day I’d worn my leather coat Mrs. Brockett had taken great pleasure in pointing out that it was, in fact, made of plastic. At other times, Ted brought us things that seemed more practical—a carton of six dozen lightbulbs, twenty-four tins of Mr. Sheen furniture polish, a five-gallon bucket of white paint. Soon after his departure, however, we’d invariably discover that there was something wrong with this merchandise. Only about a third of the lightbulbs had actually worked, most of the Mr. Sheen lost its aerosol propellant so quickly that we got only one or two pathetic streams of polish from each tin before they proved useless, and, upon opening the white paint we’d found it full of little gray lumps.
“Well, what do you expect when everything he gets has fallen off the back of a lorry?” Auntie Mabel said anytime my mother complained about Ted’s latest offerings.
When I was younger, before I understood the meaning of this phrase, I’d imagined Ted coming upon the items he brought us in the middle of the road after they’d fallen from an overladen lorry or van. Later, even after I’d learned that Auntie Mabel was referring to the illicit ways in which Ted acquired almost everything that came into his possession, the image still stuck. Though, rather than thinking of Ted serendipitously coming upon his merchandise, I began to visualize him chasing down vehicles in the streets, or grabbing boxes and cartons out of the rear doors of lorries as they waited for the traffic lights to change. There was something about this image that seemed to sum Ted up in my mind—a dodging pilferer who was just as likely to get sideswiped by an enormous juggernaut as he was to get away with anything worthwhile.
This time when Ted arrived, he swaggered into the hallway wearing an enormous grin and what looked like a giant, sleeping animal over his shoulder.
“Uncle Ted!” I said, beaming as I opened the door to see him standing before me, wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“Hello, Jesse, love,” he said, sticking his cigarette between his lips, putting a big arm around me, and giving me a kiss on my cheek. Then he stepped back to regard me. “By heck, you’ve grown,” he said, the cigarette, propped in the corner of his mouth, jiggling about as he spoke. “What they’ve been feeding you round here, rocket fuel? That’d certainly make you shoot up, eh?” He took the cigarette from his lips and let out a deep bass laugh that shuddered through my chest and echoed down the hallway. As he laughed, I studied his face. He looked a lot older than I remembered him. He was still handsome and his blue eyes had that same mischievous glow, but his greased-back hair was graying at the temples and the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth had molded themselves more firmly into his face. He was fatter, too, so that while his face looked older it also seemed softer and slightly puffy, as if it had been filled with air and then deflated slightly—like the shrunken surface of an old party balloon.
“What’s that?” I asked, indicating the enormous swath of flecked brown fur slung over his shoulder.
“This? Oh, just a little something I picked up for your mam’s birthday.”
“But that was months ago.” My mother’s birthday was in November. We hadn’t had much of a celebration. Though I’d made a cake and my father had bought her a bunch of flowers, my mother had refused to come downstairs. Instead, she lay under her huge mound of blankets complaining that Grandma hadn’t sent her even a birthday card and that if a mother couldn’t remember her own daughter’s birthday, then the world was in a far worse state than she’d ever imagined and it certainly wasn’t worth getting out of bed.
“I know it was months ago,” Ted huffed. “But I was in the nick then, wasn’t I? So I thought I’d get her something now. It’s a coat. It’s real fox fur, you know. Here, feel it.” He pushed one of the folds of the coat toward me.
I brushed my hand over the fur. It was extraordinarily soft. “It feels nice,” I said. But then I pulled my hand away. “Don’t they trap and kill the foxes? Isn’t it really cruel?”
The subject had come up in one of my recent English lessons, and Ms. Hastings had said that it was ridiculous that animals should suffer so that people could wear their dead skins. She’d also told us that because she was against cruelty to animals she was a vegetarian, a revelation that Tracey and the Debbies found hilarious. Later in the corridor, when they’d joked about buying Ms. Hastings a bag of rabbit food, I’d said that, really, it wasn’t all that funny and that perhaps she had a point. Accompanied by a chorus of laughter from the Debbies, Tracey had responded that perhaps they should buy me a bag of rabbit food as well.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jesse,” Ted said. “Don’t you start. I’ve had your bloody dad lecturing me about fox hunting and the debauched upper classes ever since he picked me up. Though what that’s got to do with fur coats I’ve no bloody idea. Anyway, where’s your mam? I can’t wait to see her face when I hand her this.”
“She’s in the kitchen, having a cup of tea with Auntie Mabel and Frank—that’s Auntie Mabel’s boyfriend.”
Ted’s face dropped. “Oh, no,” he muttered. “Not our bloody Mabel. I was hoping to avoid her for at least a few days.” He exhaled a long stream of smoke, tossed the cigarette onto the path, and marched into the house. It was wet outside, and I watched the cigarette land on the path, fizzle, and die before I turned and scrambled after him.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Evelyn …” Ted’s tuneless voiced boomed down the hallway. When he reached the kitchen, he pushed open the door and concluded, “happy birthday to you.” He pulled the fox-fur coat from his shoulder and, holding it out to my mother, made a bowing gesture and announced, “Your carriage awaits, madam.”
“Ted!” My mother leaped from her chair and rushed across the room. “Oh, Ted,” she said, taking the coat from him, holding it against her cheek and nuzzling her face into it. “It’s gorgeous.”
“Here, why don’t you put it on?” Ted took the coat from my mother and eased it over her shoulders. My mother wriggled her arms into the sleeves and did a little twirl in the middle of the kitchen.
“Makes you look like a film star, Ev,” he said.
“You think so?” my mother asked breathily as she ran her hands over the coat.
“’Course I do.”
My mother pulled a troubled frown. “Is it real?”
“Real?” Ted looked put out. “Of course it’s bloody real. One hundred percent genuine bloody fox fur.”
At this, Mabel, who’d been sitting silently at the kitchen table with Frank, laughed. “More like one hundred percent squirrel fur, I should think,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Oh, and I suppose you’re an expert on fur coats, Mabel,” Ted said.
“No, but I’m an expert on you. And either there’s something wrong with that coat or there’s something very dodgy about its history. Where’d you get it from, anyway? Nicked it, did you?”
“Bloody hell, Mabel. Of course I didn’t nick it—”
“What, walk into the women’s department in Hammonds and buy it for Evelyn, then, did you?”
“Well, no … I mean, who can afford to get anything from Hammonds? Mate of mine sold it to me.”
“Oh, yeah, and this mate, where’d he get it from?”
“I don’t know—I expect he picked it up somewhere.”
“Oh,” said Mabel, making her eyes wide. “Picked it up somewhere, did he? Found it on the street, did he? Just happened upon it as he was walking along Hessle Road? ‘Oh, look,’ he says, ‘there’s a fur coat—I think I’ll take that home and sell it to my mate Ted.’” She laughed. “God, Ted, you think I was born yesterday?”
“No, Mabel,” Ted said, pausing to light a cigarette, “‘course I don’t think you were born yesterday. Let’s face it, you’re a bit too wrinkly for that.”
“Ooh, I’ll smack you, I really will,” Mabel said, shaking a fist in his direction.
“You’re only jealous.” My mother, who had been absorbed in running her hands over the coat’s smooth surface, piped up.
“What do you mean?” Mabel narrowed her eyes.
“I mean you’re jealous. If Ted turned up with a fox-fur coat for you, you wouldn’t say a word. But because he brought it for me—well, you can’t stand it, can you?”
“Rubbish,” Mabel huffed. “I’m just tired of him getting himself involved in all this malarkey. Receiving stolen property, burglary, petty theft. Christ! Surely you should know better by now.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mabel. I only brought our Ev a coat. It’s not like I showed up with the takings from the local Barclays Bank, is it?”
“Same thing, you ask me,” Mabel said. “I told Mike and Ev that I think they’re mad taking you in like this.”
“And I’m very grateful, I really am. And what better way to show my gratitude than by bringing Evelyn a nice present?”
“I’m warning you, Ted,” Mabel said, wagging a finger at him. “Evelyn and Mike have enough on their plate. And they’ve been generous enough to give you an opportunity to finally set yourself straight. You cause any trouble while you’re here and I swear, I will never, ever speak to you again.” She paused as if to let this last comment sink in. “I mean it, Ted, I really do.”
“Bloody hell, Mabel. I’ve not been here five minutes and you’re giving me a lecture.”
“And you’ve not been two days out of jail and you’re bringing home stolen property.”
“I don’t want you to go to prison again, Uncle Ted,” I said, going over to him and tugging on his arm. All this talk about Ted’s illicit activity was making me nervous. I wanted him to stay, but I also wanted him to stay out of trouble, and I certainly didn’t want his presence to jeopardize the sliver of stability we had in our home.
“Oh, don’t you worry, love,” Ted said, patting my hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Hah, that’s a laugh, that is. You carry on like this,” Mabel said, gesturing toward my mother in her fox-fur coat, “and as sure as the sky is blue and the grass is green you’ll be back in the nick before Easter.”
“Sky’s gray today,” said Ted. “Matter of fact, sky’s mostly gray in England.”
“Yes, well gray, blue, or pink, you’ll not be seeing much of it if you don’t change your ways.”
“You should take the coat back, Uncle Ted,” I said. “What?” Ted looked at me incredulously.
“You should take it back. That way, you won’t get into trouble and you won’t go back to jail.” I wanted the fur coat out of the house. With its lavish softness and rippling folds, it obviously didn’t belong here. My mother didn’t look like a film star when she wore it; she looked absurd. And, as Ms. Hastings had said, nobody needed to wear dead animals. “You should take it back, Uncle Ted,” I repeated.
My mother, pulled from the rapture of stroking her coat, snapped, “Shut up, Jesse.”
“No,” Mabel said, “Jesse’s right. He should take that coat back. And if he had any decency about him he wouldn’t have brought it here in the first place.”
“Oh, come on, now, Mabel,” Frank said, reaching out to place his hand on Mabel’s arm. Until now, he’d sat silent, watching the discussion attentively. “The lad’s only just stepped in the door. Give him a break. There’s no harm done. And Evelyn looks lovely in her new coat. Ted’s right, she does look like a film star.” At this, my mother beamed appreciatively at Frank, then turned to Mabel to give her a satisfied little nod. “Besides,” Frank continued, “you haven’t even introduced the two of us.”
“I’m sorry, Frank, love. You’re right.” Mabel looked at Ted and pulled a taut smile. “Ted, this is my fella, Frank. Frank, this is my brother, Ted.”
Frank rose and made his way across the kitchen. “Very nice to meet you, Ted,” he said. I stood beside Ted as Frank extended his hand.
Ted put his cigarette in his mouth and reached out. “Thanks for calling the dogs off,” he said, shaking Frank’s hand enthusiastically.
“Anytime, Ted,” Frank said, slapping him gently on the back. “But you know what women are like. They worry too much.” He smiled at Mabel and gave her a wink. Then he lowered his voice and adopted a more confidential tone. “Don’t you worry about Mabel. I’m sure you know what you’re doing. That’s a bloody nice coat. Must be worth a fortune. Expect you need some good contacts to be able to acquire quality merchandise like that.”
As Frank spoke, my father pushed his way into the kitchen. “Bloody hell, Ted,” he said breathlessly. “What the heck have you got in them cases of yours? Lead weights?”
“No, it’s just my stuff,” Ted began to explain. “I’d been storing it over at my mate’s house and—”
“Oh, Mike,” Mabel said, “don’t say he’s got you lugging his flipping luggage around for him? Ted, you lazy bugger, you should be doing that yourself. I hope you don’t think you’re going to carry on like this, do you? Because the sooner you get yourself off your lazy backside and—”
“Oh, come on, love, give the lad a break,” Frank said. “He’s only just got home. And Mike doesn’t mind carrying Ted’s luggage in, do you, Mike?”
“Well,” my father said, dropping into one of the empty chairs at the kitchen table, “to be honest, it would have been nice if—”
“Let’s face it, you’ve got to help family out when they need you,” Frank interrupted. “Family is, after all, the most important thing we’ve got. Speaking of family,” Frank said, adopting a grandiose tone, “Mabel and I have got an announcement to make, haven’t we, Mabel?”
“Yes, yes we have.” Mabel patted her hair and beamed around the kitchen.
I realized then that what Frank had told me upstairs earlier was true. He and Mabel were getting married.
“What sort of announcement?” my mother asked, her eyes moving suspiciously between Mabel and Frank.
“Well—” Frank began, puffing out his scrawny chest.
“They’re getting married,” I said flatly. I felt a moment of intense satisfaction as Frank’s chest deflated and his face rumpled in annoyance. There was something immensely pleasurable about taking the wind out of his sails like that. Still, it didn’t change the fact that I’d have to put up with his poisonous presence on a long-term basis. One thing I did know for certain, though: I would never call him “Uncle Frank.”
“Married?” my mother said, pulling her coat protectively around her. “You’re getting married?” She sounded stung.
“Yes, Evelyn, we’re getting married,” Mabel said, taking out a cigarette and searching around for her lighter.
“By heck,” Ted said, grinning broadly. “That’s a ruddy turnup for the books. Our Mabel getting married, who’d have thought it?” He slapped Frank across the back, the impact of his hand sounding a hollow thud and making Frank stagger forward several steps across the kitchen. “Congratulations, Frank! That’s champion, that is. Just hope you don’t live to regret it.” He bellowed out a laugh.
Mabel looked at him through narrowed eyes.
“Only joking, Mabel,” Ted said, lifting his hands as if in surrender. “Really, I think it’s smashing news. About time someone had the courage to make an honest woman of you.”
“Yes, congratulations, Frank, Mabel,” my father said. “That’s terrific news, isn’t it, Evelyn?”
Everyone turned toward her, and for a long moment the room seemed airless, still and filled with expectation. I watched my mother, half hoping that she would start screaming at Frank, yell at him that she didn’t want a brother-in-law who wandered naked around her sister’s house, who brought her ridiculous gifts of sausages, who was a shameless degenerate who had divorced his wife and abandoned his children. Though it was a slim hope, maybe my mother’s dismissal of him might make Mabel see some sense. On the other hand, if my mother became as upset by Mabel’s impending marriage as she had by Grandma’s, then it could send her back to languishing in bed, or worse. Barely breathing, I waited for her reaction.
Swaddled in her massive fox-fur coat, for once my mother’s physical presence seemed to match her emotional impact on the room. “Married?” she said again.
“That’s right,” Mabel said, striking a light and putting the flame to her cigarette. She took a drag, puffed out the smoke, and looked steadily at my mother. “Married,” she said firmly.
“When?” my mother asked.
“Well, we were thinking May,” Mabel said hesitantly. “I see,” my mother said, still sounding dubious. Then a startling change of expression came across her face. Her furrowed brow lifted and her lips turned upward in a jubilant smile. “That’s just fantastic!” she declared. “I’m really chuffed for you, Mabel, I am.”
Mabel looked at my mother skeptically. “You are?”
“Of course I am. I’m thrilled. And a wedding—well, weddings are always wonderful. Of course,” she said, striking a sudden sour note, “I wasn’t even told about my own mother’s wedding. Haven’t even got an invitation yet.”
“Well, Ev, I don’t think they’ve set a date, I think—” Mabel started to explain.
My mother cut her off. “Not to worry about that. Mam might be marrying some too-big-for-his-boots furniture salesman in sunny Australia, but we are going to throw you the biggest, most wonderful wedding this family has ever seen. We’ll show that Australian gigolo. And you know what?”
“What?” Mabel and Frank said simultaneously as they cast worried glances at each other.
“We’re going to do it right here.” She pointed out the kitchen window toward the garden. “We’ll rent one of them big marquee tents for the reception, and we can do the ceremony on the lawn, and—”
“What lawn?” Ted asked. After she’d abandoned it in late summer, the garden had become colonized by weeds again. But now, in the middle of February, it was a barren patch of uneven shiny wet mud.
“We’d sort of been planning to get married in church, Evelyn,” Mabel said.
“Oh, you can’t get married in church, not with Frank being divorced—no, that wouldn’t be right. Besides, just think of how lovely it would be to have your wedding here. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll do the food, I’ll get you some lovely flowers, I’ll make the clothes. And I’ll do all that landscaping I’d been planning last year. It’ll be the best wedding you could ever imagine. And you’ll have to invite Mam, won’t you, Mabel? I mean, she’ll have to come home for her oldest daughter’s wedding.”
“Well, I’ll invite her, Ev,” Mabel said, “but it’s a long way and I’m not sure—”
“Oh, don’t be daft, of course she’ll come. It’s an important family event. And Jesse will be your chief bridesmaid.”
“No, I won’t.” I had no interest in being anyone’s bridesmaid, and I certainly wasn’t going to participate in Frank and Mabel’s wedding.
“Oh, yes you will, young lady,” my mother said. “I’ve got this lovely pattern for a bridesmaid’s dress, Mabel. I got it back when I did all that dressmaking a few years ago. Ooh, you should see it, all ruffles and pleats. Even Jesse could manage to look nice in something like that.”
I imagined myself, a big, poufy bundle of satin and chiffon and pastel high heels, stumbling after Mabel, trying to hold her wedding train above the sticky mud of our back garden. After the ceremony, I’d be jostled between men in ill-fitting suits and women in outfits as ridiculous as my own while the photographs were taken. Despite the photographer’s commands to say “cheese,” I wouldn’t smile. Instead, I’d seethe silently in my itchy underwear and tights, the solemn witness that everyone’s eyes went to when they perused the wedding album years later.
“I don’t believe in marriage,” I said. “It makes women into men’s property.” I wanted to tell Mabel all the reasons that she should dislike Frank—about the things he’d said, how he’d cut my hand in the kitchen, how he was probably only marrying her for her little council house and her regular income. But I knew there would be no point. Mabel wouldn’t listen to me. Nobody would listen to me. In the same way that Amanda didn’t see the cruel and bullying Stan Heaphy I saw, no one in my family saw the Frank that I saw. Even Ted, who had just arrived a few minutes ago, seemed to like him. My mother had hated him, but now that he was going to marry Mabel even her opinion had changed. “Maybe you shouldn’t get married, Auntie Mabel,” I said.
“What, and continue living in sin? I don’t think so,” my mother said. “Mabel, you’re doing the right thing getting wed.”
“Yes, but I’m not sure about doing it in your garden, Evelyn. I mean, Ted’s right—it’s a bit bare out there right now.”
“Oh, don’t you worry. I can buy some turf and get a lawn laid in a week.”
“Yes,” Mabel said, “but it would be ever such a lot of trouble and expense. Don’t you think, Frank?”
“Actually, I think it’s a grand idea,” Frank said. “And it might help save us a few bob in the end.” He turned to my mother. “Mabel was wanting to rent out the Snug Room in the Snail and Whippet for the reception. I nearly had a heart attack when I heard how much they charge, and, frankly, I don’t think there’s room for all the guests we want to invite. The bloody church charges an arm and a leg as well. We can’t afford all that. With Evelyn helping us, it’ll make it a bit cheaper. And maybe Ted could help us out with one or two things, he—”
Ted beamed and opened his mouth as if to say something, but Mabel spoke sooner. “He’ll do no such thing,” she snapped. “If I find out he’s had anything to do with supplying so much as the confetti, I’m calling the wedding off.”
“All right,” Frank said. “If you feel that strongly about it—”
“I do. But I suppose if Evelyn wants to help with the wedding then—”
“Great!” My mother clapped her hands together. “I’m going to start right away. While the weather’s still bad, we can work on the dresses. Jesse,” she said, swinging around to look at me, the coat rippling around her. “You can help me get my sewing machine out and we can measure you up for that bridesmaid’s dress.”
“I’m not going to be a bridesmaid,” I said. “You can’t make me.” I felt close to tears. I held them back, but they were hot and stinging behind my eyes. My throat felt dry and my chest constricted. I had a vision of myself ripping that poofy pink dress into shreds.
“Yes, I can. And I will,” she said, waving a furry arm in my direction. “You’ll do as you’re told. And you’ll like it.”
“Oh, come on, lovey,” Frank said. “Don’t be silly. Can’t you do this one thing for your auntie Mabel and uncle Frank?”
“You’re not my bloody uncle. And I’m not going to be in your stupid bloody wedding.”
“Oh, Jesse,” Mabel said, looking hurt. “I know you’re not keen on dressing up as a bridesmaid, love, but there’s no need to—”
As Mabel spoke, my mother stalked across the room. When she reached me, she pushed her face into mine so that only a couple of inches separated us. “If you weren’t so big,” she said, flooding my senses with her hot, slightly sour breath, “I’d put you across my knee and give you a damn good hiding. As it is, I’ve a good mind to get your father to tan your backside. Instead, I’m going to let you apologize to Frank and Mabel.”
I moved my eyes from my mother’s icy glare and swept the room to see all those other adults looking at me: Ted, a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot; my father, his lips pressed together so that his mouth was nothing more than a colorless line above his dimpled chin; Auntie Mabel, her head tilted sideways, her forehead rippled with confusion; and Frank, an angled smile stretching across his satisfied mouth. They were nothing more than a solid wall of incomprehension. None of them knew me. None of them even cared to know.
“I hate you all,” I said, taking them all in with a sweeping look before I turned to storm out of the room.