Chapter TWENTY-FIVE
I GOT OFF THE BUS IN REATTON HIGH STREET. “JESSE, WHY DON’T YOU come to the caravan?” Malcolm said, pushing his way through the other kids on the pavement to reach me. “When my dad gets back, he can give you a lift home.”
I shook my head. I felt dull, dazed; there was a hollow dread pushing from my stomach into my chest. “I’m going home,” I said, turning and striding toward where the road veered off to Midham.
Malcolm jogged after me. “He won’t be long, Jesse. You’ll probably get home sooner if you wait for him. And I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit—well, I’m still a bit shaken up.”
His face was flushed, mottled red, his clothes rumpled where Tracey had grabbed and pulled at them, his hair messy and snarled. His eyes were wild and watery. But it wasn’t fear that held him now; he was flying high on the thrill of victory. I felt a surge of anger at him for still being able to occupy that place.
I said nothing. I kept on walking. The wind, brisk and cold, pushed my hair back from my face and sent grit into my eyes.
“Slow down, Jesse,” Malcolm said as he strained to keep up with my rapid march. “You don’t need to leave. It’d be nice if you stayed. We could look at some of my library books. I’ve this really good one right now about London….” He touched my arm.
“Get off me!” I yelled, swinging my arm away as I spun around to face him. “Just because I helped you it doesn’t mean I want to be your friend, you stupid little poof!” I stood there watching as his expression changed from concerned to confused, then to bemused and stung. I stared at him, daring him to say something. When he stayed silent, I turned on my heels and marched off down the road.
I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH that night. This was partly because of my mother, who had decided that the outfit she’d made for herself for Mabel’s wedding—a beige-colored smock that looked more like a sack than a dress—didn’t do enough to show off her newly acquired fake tan. So she’d pulled out a bolt of bright yellow Crimplene from her stash of dressmaking supplies and at ten o’clock that evening had begun pinning out the tissue-paper pattern pieces for a sleeveless frock and a matching bolero jacket. At midnight, Ted arrived home after another excursion with Frank. I heard him slam the front door behind him, trudge up the stairs, then sing tunelessly in the bathroom until he flushed the toilet and marched off to bed. By one in the morning, my mother had started assembling her new outfit, the sewing machine roaring below. Had the house been completely silent, however, I probably would have found it impossible to drop off.
My mind roared almost as wildly as my mother’s sewing machine. First, of course, there were the thoughts of my abandoned satchel. When I wasn’t silently berating myself for putting all my letters to Amanda in it, I was raging at myself for leaving it behind. Then I would wonder where it was, and who might have it. For seconds, my mind would soar on the hope that a stranger had found it, that he or she would leave it securely buckled, and simply hand it in to the school secretary the next day. Then my thoughts would take a flailing dive, as I was sure that Stan Heaphy had found it and that he’d spent the entire evening amusing himself by reading every one of my letters. And then—and this was the most terrible thought of all—I’d imagine him showing the letters to Amanda, and how, then, she would really hate me. She might be able to brush away what it meant when I’d tried to kiss her, but she couldn’t ignore all those terrible confessions on the page.
I knew the satchel had been retrieved by someone, because as soon as I returned home from Reatton I’d made my father drive up to Liston Comprehensive to see if we could find it. Though he’d complained all the way there that he was missing a “damn good documentary about Tricky Dick and that bloody Watergate what-have-you,” he actually helped me search for the satchel along the grass verge outside the school. It was nowhere to be seen.
As I lay in bed, when my thoughts weren’t taken up with the whereabouts of my satchel, I was thinking how foolish I’d been to write those letters in the first place, and how, more than ever, I wished I’d simply been able to erase my feelings about Amanda from my mind. And, when I wasn’t thinking that, I was mulling over what an idiot I’d been to clobber Stan and kick Tracey for the sake of one of the most loathed pariahs in the school.
Now that bright euphoria I’d felt as the bus pulled away from the gates simply felt like another symptom of my idiocy. I hadn’t been brave; I’d only been stupid. I tossed and turned for hours, until my mother finally finished her sewing and light began seeping, wan and gray, through my curtains. I considered getting up, but, finally exhausted, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew I opened my eyes to see that the clock on my bedside table said a quarter past eight. In my tumult the previous night, I’d forgotten to set the alarm; I’d slept in and I’d missed my bus.
“Dad, Dad,” I said, scurrying into the kitchen, still in my pajamas. “Can you give me a lift to school?”
Amid the chaos of the wedding preparations and the leftovers from my mother’s late-night sewing, he had cleared a little scrap of space for himself at the kitchen table. He was reading the previous day’s Hull Daily Mail, a teacup and a plate of toast set before him. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jesse,” he groaned from behind the paper. “I’m not looking for that bloody satchel again. If we didn’t find it last night, we won’t find it this morning. Besides, I’ve got to get to work.” He crunched the newspaper down in front of him. “Somebody’s got to make a living round here, you know.” He looked at the ceiling, in the direction of Uncle Ted’s snores.
“But, Dad, I need a lift, I—”
“And I can’t be late, because your mother wants me home early tonight,” he continued, ignoring my pleading look. “Says she needs me to help her arrange the furniture in the tent. Honestly, I don’t know how many bloody people we’ve got coming to this thing. Must be a hundred and fifty at least. I think Mabel’s invited her entire bloody bingo club. And Frank seems to have more of a tribe than a family.”
I tried again to interrupt him. “Dad, I—”
But he kept on going. Apparently, he felt the need to get it off his chest. “Honestly, it looks more like a bloody circus than a wedding out there.” He nodded toward the window and the huge billowing marquee that covered almost half the lawn. “Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me if your mother rented out a couple of performing elephants, a gang of clowns, and a troupe of trapeze artists. Heck, maybe we’ll even have a ten-bloody-cannon salute when the bride and groom make their vows. To be honest, I’m just glad it’s Frank and not me that’s having to pay for all of it. I know she’s always a bit over the top when she does things, but this”—he took a slow, sweeping look around the room—“it takes the bloody biscuit, does this. Honestly, I don’t know why I bothered doing up this kitchen—you can’t see any of it for all the bloody crap she’s put everywhere.” He sighed. “But at least the hall and the living room still look nice, eh? Your mam might have got done all the bedrooms, but I did a nice job of the downstairs.” He smiled, but it quickly faded and he let out a long-suffering sigh, his shoulders sinking so that he seemed to melt into his chair. “I know your mam has poured her heart and soul into this wedding. And, frankly, I’m a bit nervous about the whole bloody thing. For both our sakes, Jesse,” he said, looking at me, anguish gripping his features, “I just hope everything goes all right. Otherwise …” His eyes drifted to the window, through which we could see my mother, her face a brighter and streakier orange after apparently applying another treatment of Tanfastic, staggering under a stack of metal folding chairs as she carried them across the lawn. “Well, let’s just say I’ll be glad when tomorrow is over and things can get back to normal again.”
“Dad,” I said, ignoring the temptation to grab my father by the shoulders, shake him, and demand when, exactly, he thought things had ever been normal in our house. “I really need a lift to school. I’ve missed my bus. Please, will you take me?”
He shook out his paper, swept the pages together, then folded it in half and slapped it down on the table. “I suppose so. But you’d better get back upstairs and get yourself dressed. I haven’t got all day, you know.”
I DID NOT WANT to go to school. It was, in fact, the last place I wanted to be that morning. Were it not for my desperation to retrieve my satchel and my letters, I would happily have hidden under my blankets. Like my mother in one of her bad patches, I could easily have spent my day in bed. But I was driven now by a desperate urgency, and as I dressed, then launched myself downstairs to follow my father out the door, I felt that I was on a mission to save myself.
Though the fact that I was late for school made me more anxious, I was relieved that I didn’t have to face Tracey at the bus stop and could sweep instead along the winding road to Liston Comprehensive in the safety of my father’s car. It was a cool morning, and, though it was sunny, a brisk breeze had painted high clouds in delicate brushstrokes against an otherwise startling blue sky. I leaned my head against the car window and looked at the vivid landscape while I let the tart tones of the BBC radio announcers wash over me, along with my father’s occasional snorts and mumbled responses. There were reports of war and protests, bombs and riots, strikes and strife. Listening, I was struck by the realization that these were not just stories of distant places; they were the actual facts of people’s lives. For a moment, my anguish for myself melded with all the anguish found elsewhere, so that it seemed that I held that roiling world inside me, all those struggles to survive. It made me think of my mother—of her flailing desperation, the way she so often seemed on the verge of going under, and then how she’d somehow tap that fiery well of energy she held within her to soar upward, like a bird discovering its wings. In those glorious times, when she was pouring herself into some project or hobby, she did not care what anyone else might think of her; the only world she lived in was her own. As the car sped along the road and my dread churned at the prospect of my feelings for Amanda being discovered, for the first time that I could remember I found myself envying my mother. Consumed with the preparations for the wedding, she might be delirious, ridiculous, and completely distracted, but she was absolutely herself.
“See you tonight, then, Jesse,” my father said as he pulled up outside the school.
The exterior was quiet, and, apart from a couple of other stragglers plodding toward the main entrance, there was no one else around. As soon as I walked inside, however, I entered another world.
By the notice board outside the cloakrooms there was a huge milling crowd. At least four deep, they pressed against one another in a scramble to see some new notice that was apparently pinned up there. Despite my urgency to find my satchel, everyone seemed so excited that I felt myself drawn to find out what all the fuss was about.
As I approached, I saw a girl from my class standing on the edge of the crowd. When I caught her eyes, they widened and she sputtered a giggle into her hand. Within moments I heard the whispers, spreading around me as if those voices were a ripple and I was a stone dropped into a pond. Then, as I stepped closer, the crowd quieted and began to part. I walked through the silence, past the grinning faces, all those shoes shuffling to make way.
I knew what was coming, the same way I had known that something dreadful had happened to my mother when we lived in Hull and I found that gathering of neighbors outside our house. In that awful hush, pregnant with held breaths and stifled laughs, it was a certainty that gripped me, a fist clenched around my heart. I was moving again, steadily, toward disaster, unable to turn around or stop.
“Lezzie!” Tracey said the word before I had made my way past the assembled group. “Lezzie!” she yelled again, standing triumphant in front of the notice board as I looked at the several sheets of paper pinned up there. “Lezzie!” she screamed as I looked at the familiar writing on those pages. I took in only the words “Dear Amanda,” then I spun around and hurled my way back through the jostling, jeering crowd.