Another Life Altogether_ A Novel

Chapter EIGHT



WE PICKED UP TRACEY OUTSIDE HER HOUSE EARLY THE FOLLOWING afternoon. She was wearing a pair of short-shorts, her big black platform sandals, and a tight red tube top. As she walked down the path toward our car, my mother muttered, “See, Jesse, at least I’m not the type of mother that would let you out of the house dressed like that.”
I wasn’t sure that Mrs. Grasby was particularly thrilled about Tracey’s choice of outfit, either; she hadn’t exactly seemed like the kind of mother who would sanction such revealing clothes. But from our visit the other day I’d got the impression that Tracey’s mother was fighting a losing battle in controlling certain aspects of Tracey’s behavior, and that Tracey took particular delight in defying her. Still, as I looked down at the nondescript cotton trousers and shapeless T-shirt I was wearing, I wished that I had the courage to dress in outfits that would make my mother scream.
“Extremely nice to meet you, Tracey,” my mother said, peering through her window as Tracey drew near. She talked in her put-on posh voice, the one she always used to impress strangers and whenever she picked up the telephone. I found it excruciating. Fortunately, she could never keep it up for long and three sentences into any conversation she usually reverted to her normal accent.
“Yeah, thanks for inviting me.” Tracey pulled a smile and opened the car door. She clambered in beside me, arranging then rearranging her bare legs on the sticky vinyl of the backseat. As our car pulled away, I searched for signs of Amanda, but she was nowhere to be seen.
We turned onto the main road, and Tracey leaned toward my mother. “So I bet it’s a relief not be infectious anymore, Mrs. Bennett.” She spoke into my mother’s stiff mound of hair, which occupied most of the space directly in front of her.
“What did you say, dear?” my mother asked, cocking her head slightly.
I shot Tracey a fierce, wide-eyed look, pushing my lips tight together in an effort to silently communicate that it was critical that she drop this line of conversation right away. Tracey, however, was oblivious. “I said, it’s good that you’re not infectious anymore.”
My mother shifted around in her seat. “Infectious?” It was hard to gauge her expression. She had donned her sunglasses for this outing, the lenses reflecting back distorted round images of whatever she was looking at.
“Yeah,” Tracey said, ignoring my elbow dig to her side. “Jesse said you had the shingles. She said you’ve been quite poorly.”
“Did she now?” my mother said, turning toward me so that I could see a tubby, squat version of myself in her glasses, leaning as far into the corner of the backseat as possible. My father gave my mother a nervous glance. When he turned his attention back to the road, he let out a long, weighty sigh.
“Yeah, she said you’ve been poorly for what, a couple of months, right, Jesse?” Tracey looked from my mother to me. I said nothing. My mother continued to cast her silent, shaded scowl in my direction. “When I told my mum you had the shingles,” Tracey continued, “she said a friend of hers had it and was off work for months. Caused her all sorts of problems, she said.” Tracey’s ability to remain completely unaware of the frosty atmosphere that had filled the inside of the car was astounding. I quite envied her this talent.
“Well, Tracey,” my mother responded in an icily cheery voice, “you can tell your mother and anyone else that Jesse has broadcast the news of my illness to that I’m feeling all better now. And as for you, miss,” she said, stabbing an index finger in my direction. “I’ll be talking to you later.” And with that she spun around to stare solidly in front of her, as still as a statue until we pulled up, half an hour later, outside Granddad’s house.
GRANDDAD BENNETT WAS A retired trawlerman who’d spent thirty years going out on deep-sea fishing boats for three weeks at a time to trawl for cod. He had a raw, gravelly voice and a face that looked as if it had seen the kind of weather that was common off Iceland, with skin as gnarled as old leather, lines worn by salt and gales and one-hundred-foot waves. “He must have raked in a fortune over the years,” my mother had said. “Earned good money on them fishing boats back then, they did. But the stupid sod drank and gambled it all away. Sent your poor grandma Bennett to an early grave.” I’d never met Grandma Bennett; she died two weeks after my parents were married. Their wedding photographs contained the last pictures of her—a dumpy, frizzy-haired woman with a tight-lipped smile that stretched like an inked-in line across her face. From these photographs, I surmised that she was as pleased about my father’s marriage to my mother as Granddad Bennett was.
When we arrived, we found Granddad sitting in his cramped living room, ensconced in the winged armchair that stood a little more than arm’s length from the television. He wore a white shirt, open to show sprouts of gray chest hair poking through the holes of his string vest, and red braces that bowed outward over his expansive belly and held his baggy trousers high above his waist. We had traipsed single file down the narrow hallway of his two-up, two-down terraced house, not bothering to knock before we let ourselves in, because Granddad wouldn’t have heard us anyway, since he was rather deaf. He had been in the navy during the war, and his left ear was damaged when his ship hit a mine and sank. In recent years, his disability had worsened considerably, but he refused to wear a hearing aid. Whenever someone suggested that he might benefit from one, he’d respond, “That water was cold enough to freeze the bollocks off a brass monkey, and I managed to survive eight hours in it. I’ve lived through worse things than you can imagine. So I’m not about to start wearing some prissy bloody hearing aid.” I failed to see the logic of this argument. I did suspect, however, that he enjoyed being able to tune in and out of any surrounding conversation and sometimes rather liked making people repeat three or four times what they were saying to him.
“Hello, Dad,” my father said, bellowing loud enough to be heard above the blaring television. “Just thought we’d stop round for a visit, see how you’re getting on.”
“I’m all right,” Granddad bellowed back. “You’ve got no reason to worry about me. I’m watching the sports.” He waved us vaguely toward the settee and the other armchair across the room. “It’s a right good match, this.” He picked up the roll-up cigarette that lay in the ashtray balanced on the arm of his chair, took a long, audible drag, and turned back to the television, where a shifting pile of black and red–jerseyed men were scrambling and kicking at one another in what appeared to have started out as a rugby scrum.
“So who’s winning, then?” my father yelled, taking a seat in the second armchair. My mother, Tracey, and I sat down on the settee, our bodies pressed unwillingly together on the uncomfortable and uneven cushions.
“Eh?” Granddad said, looking quizzically over at my father.
“I said, who’s winning?” As he shouted across the living room, my mother closed her eyes, pursed her lips, and shook her head.
“They are,” Granddad answered. “But don’t you worry,” he said, giving us all a reassuring nod. “We’re going to catch up soon.”
I was far from clear who the “we” in this particular match might be. England, perhaps? Yorkshire? Hull Kingston Rovers? When I noticed the vague expression on my father’s face, I realized that he was probably just as clueless. He’d never been much of a rugby fan. I spent several frustrating minutes trying to work out exactly who the opposing teams were, but with no scores announced and the commentator speaking in unintelligible rugby-related jargon, I was having no success. Tracey seemed indifferent to the game itself, but she kept leaning into me and making remarks about how good-looking some of the players were, what firm legs they had, and how she wouldn’t mind finding herself in the middle of one of their scrums. I studied the players she admired, trying to create within myself a similar enthusiasm for their mud-streaked muscled bodies, but as much as I tried it just wouldn’t come.
Aside from Tracey’s animated whispered commentary, no one spoke until, during a break in the action, my mother yelled toward Granddad, “This is Jesse’s friend, Tracey!”
“What?” Granddad said, frowning.
“This is Jesse’s friend, Tracey!” she yelled again, this time even louder.
Granddad let his gaze slide slowly up Tracey’s legs and torso. “Aye, I didn’t think I’d seen her before,” he said, his eyes finally resting on her face. “But I thought she might be one of your lot. I mean, it’s hard to keep track of them, isn’t it? Half the family flitting off to Australia, the rest of them in and out of the nick.” He flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette, pulled a smile, and turned back to the television.
I felt my mother’s body stiffen next to me, her knuckles pressed white into the settee cushions. She glowered at my father, who seemed suddenly intensely interested in the sufferings of an injured rugby player. Tracey crossed, uncrossed, and recrossed her legs. Even she, it appeared, had noticed the discomfort of this interaction.
“Right, then,” my mother said. “I’ll make a pot of tea, then, shall I?”
“Ooh, that’d be lovely,” Granddad said. “Nice of you to offer, Evelyn. And there’s some tinned salmon in the pantry. A plate of sandwiches would be nice, don’t you think?”
My mother swept wordlessly out of the room, slamming the door behind her and then clattering and banging around in the kitchen with what was considerably more fervor than was required to make a pot of tea and a plate of tinned salmon sandwiches.
Tracey looked curiously around the cramped and cluttered little room. “Who’s that?” she asked, gesturing toward the numerous framed photographs arranged on the mantelpiece, along the sideboard, and on top of the television. Almost all of them showed the same person, as a baby, a child, and a teenager. In many of them he was pictured kicking, holding, or heading a football.
“My uncle Brian,” I responded. “He’s dead.”
Brian was my father’s only brother, older than my father by a little more than three years. I had never met him, but I’d heard about him often enough. He died before I was born, on his eighteenth birthday. After downing several pints at the local pub, to celebrate his attainment of legal drinking age, he’d stepped into the road and been killed by a passing delivery van, driven by an off-duty grocer’s assistant who was somewhat under the influence himself. I had taken for granted being surrounded by images of this dead uncle in Granddad’s house, but now that Tracey had pointed out his omnipresence I saw it with a stranger’s eyes and realized that it was a little odd. I scanned for any pictures of other family members and found only two: a smiling portrait of my grandmother and a small picture of my father and mother holding me as a baby. We occupied the far end of the sideboard, in a particularly shadowy corner of the room.
Tracey stood up and went over to the mantel. “Was he a football star or something?” she asked.
“What did you say?” Granddad said, turning toward her when he noticed her picking up one of the several trophies and medals that interspersed the photographs.
“She asked if Uncle Brian was a football star!” I yelled.
“Oh, yes, he was going to be,” Granddad answered, nodding vigorously at Tracey. “No doubt about that. He was a genius at football, was that lad. A bloody genius. Could have been as good as Bobby Charlton. Could have played for England in the World Cup.”
“You don’t know that, Dad,” my father said, keeping his gaze fixed on the television screen.
“Of course I do. I saw our Brian play. He was a natural. More moves on that playing field than Fred Astaire has on the dance floor. Two days after he died, he was supposed to try out for professional.”
“For Hull City,” my father added scornfully but not quite loud enough for Granddad to hear. The local football team wasn’t exactly known for its stunning achievements. In recent years Hull had been lucky to avoid demotion to the Third Division. Even their most loyal of fans had started to become embarrassed about sporting the amberand-black of the Hull City colors.
“Everyone said he had talent,” Granddad continued. “If he’d lived, he’d have been making millions, just like that Kevin Keegan and the like. But, even though he died young, at least he achieved something.”
My father groaned, rolled his eyes, then spoke, this time loud enough for Granddad to hear. “He died rolling out the pub, drunk as a bloody skunk. I’d hardly call that an achievement, would you? And, besides, it wasn’t as if he was destined for a career as a rocket scientist, is it? I mean, all he could do was play football, for Christ’s sake.” He pronounced the word “football” with such utter derision, it was as if he’d declared that my late uncle Brian had nothing more than a talent for cleaning sewers. My father had always regarded the game with particular disdain and would begin to fume if he so much as heard the theme music for Match of the Day.
“Don’t you talk about your brother like that,” Granddad said, leaning forward in his chair and gesturing toward my father with a newly rolled unlit cigarette. “Your mother would turn over in her grave to hear you say such a thing, she really would. Broke her heart, losing Brian like that.” He turned to the television. The room was once again filled with the cheers of the rugby crowd and the babble of the commentator.
“He was right good-looking, wasn’t he?” Tracey said, picking up one of the photographs, a close-up of Uncle Brian kneeling with a football in his hands and smiling broadly into the camera. His hair was combed back, with a wave overhanging his forehead. His eyes were narrow, like my father’s, and his cheeks dimpled in the same way. But it was true—the combination of his features made him handsome, while my father’s made him merely ordinary, and Brian looked cheerier, somehow more at ease, his toothy grin filling the picture with its confident brilliance. Tracey stared into the photograph dreamily, as if it were a picture of David Cassidy and not my long-dead uncle Brian she was holding.
“Oh, yes, he was definitely the looker of the family was our Brian,” Granddad said. “And he had all the get-up-and-go.”
My father shifted in his chair and muttered something under his breath. I wanted Tracey to sit down, to stop mulling over the photographs and trophies, to leave my dead uncle alone on the mantel. But she continued to pick up and examine the trophies. “They’re a bit dusty, you know,” she said, running her finger over a large silver cup and then indicating the patch of gray dirt on her fingertip. “It’d be nice to clean them up, don’t you think? Honor his memory.”
My father closed his eyes and sighed.
Granddad, on the other hand, seemed delighted at the idea. “Aye, you’re right about that, young lady. They do need polishing up. Your mam used to do it once a week,” he said, turning to my father. “But me, I’m no good with things like that. Maybe I’ll ask Evelyn to do it for me. What do you think?”
“You can ask her,” my father answered dubiously. A resounding bang followed by several smaller crashing noises emanated from the kitchen.
“Maybe I’ll wait,” Granddad said, pushing back the top of his brass lighter, striking the flint with a flick of his thumb and lighting his cigarette. “I just hope that’s not the best china she’s messing about with.”
“I’ll do it,” Tracey said. “I’ll give them a dusting. And I know how to polish things. I watch my mum polish her and my dad’s ballroom-dancing trophies all the time.”
“That would be champion, would that,” Granddad said.
“No, Tracey, it’s all right. Just leave it,” I said. I saw the annoyance on my father’s face, the way that all this talk of his dead brother seemed to upset him, make him sink further into himself.
“No, I want to,” Tracey insisted. “I think it’s important.”
“You’re a good lass,” Granddad said. “It’s a pity it takes a stranger to take care of the lad’s memory, it really is. There’s a tin of polish and a duster somewhere in one of them cupboards in the kitchen. Ask Evelyn. She’ll help you find it.”
Half an hour later, the room was filled with the caustic smell of Brasso, Uncle Brian’s trophies were sparkling, and the rugby match had ended. When the final scores were announced, I finally realized that we had been watching England playing New Zealand. And, as seemed the norm for almost every international sport, England had lost.
“No wonder this country’s such a mess,” Granddad declared. “Wasn’t so long ago those people were living in our colonies. Now they’re beating us at the sport we bloody well invented. I don’t know what this country’s coming to. If you ask me, it all started to go down the drain when we ended national service. Well, that and letting all those Pakistanis and West Indians in.” He puffed on his cigarette for a few seconds, then, as an afterthought, added, “At least they don’t play rugby.”
“But they’re damned good cricket players,” my father said.
“Yes, well,” said Granddad, stabbing the air with his cigarette. “That proves my point then, doesn’t it?”
“What point?” I asked.
“That we should keep England for the English,” he responded. “None of this colored immigration. None of this racial mixing. They’re sneaking in everywhere these days.”
My father heaved a sigh. This was a theme that Granddad revisited almost every time we saw him.
“Watering down the English culture, they are,” Granddad continued. “And that’s what made England great, you know. The culture. There’s only one Shakespeare. Only one Winston Churchill. Only one …” He cast about for a few seconds, frowning and taking a puff of his cigarette. “Only one Tom Jones.” He gave a satisfied nod.
“Tom Jones is Welsh,” I said.
Granddad shrugged. “Aye, well, British, though, isn’t he?”
“And he’s got a lovely voice,” my mother said. “But that’s what they say about the Welsh, isn’t it? They might have a bit of a funny accent, but they don’t half know how to sing.”
Granddad let out a loud dismissive snort.
“We read Shakespeare at school,” Tracey said. “It was dead boring.”
“Yes, well, I’ve never read him myself,” Granddad admitted. “All those to bes and not to bes, all that wherefore art thou Romeo rubbish. It’s a bit much, really.” He paused to take a loud, long sip of his tea, wiping his lips with the back of his hand before going on. “But it’s the English have made the biggest contribution to world literature, there’s no denying that. I mean, England’s produced all the world’s best poets. I mean, there’s … Wordsworth … Keats, and that bloke—you know, the one they have as the poet laureate, the one that writes poems for the Queen’s birthday. It’s not as if them West Indians have produced any great writers.”
“How do you know?” I asked, guessing that Granddad was even less qualified to make pronouncements about foreign literature than of his native tongue.
“Yes, how would you know?” my mother echoed, leaning toward Granddad in an effort to ensure that he heard this particular question quite clearly. “I mean, you already said yourself you’re not much of a reader.” She gave a triumphant nod.
“You know, you’re right about that, Evelyn,” Granddad said, turning toward her slowly, a smile itching at the edges of his pale lips. “But then I don’t have the time. Not like some people. I mean, if I managed to get myself put in the nuthouse for a couple of months, then I’d have plenty of time to catch up on my reading.” He looked at Tracey, smiling wider now. “Yes, that’d give me enough time to get through the entire works of Shakespeare, don’t you think?”
“Well, I suppose so …” Tracey began, looking a little confused as she eyed my mother, then me.
I began pulling at a loose thread in one of the settee cushions. As I felt the heat of Tracey’s questioning eyes on me, I tugged hard and a wide patch of the cushion’s fabric began to work loose. I feared that our friendship would unravel as easily as that thread. Within seconds, Tracey would learn the awful truth about my mother and she’d run screaming from the house. I wanted to do something to stop it, but I felt paralyzed. Instead, I watched the stitching on the settee come undone and waited for the inevitable.
“I don’t think people in nuthouses are allowed to read,” Tracey said matter-of-factly as she turned back to Granddad. “I mean, don’t they lock them up in straitjackets and padded cells? I saw one on the telly once, and it looked a bit like a prison, it—”
“Right, then,” my mother declared, springing up so abruptly that Tracey and I knocked against each other at the other end of the settee. “I think we’d better be leaving. Come on, Mike, we’ve got to get over to Mabel’s now. Jesse, you and your friend get yourselves ready. I’m off outside. I think I need a breath of fresh air. Bye, now, Dad,” she said, the words falling behind her as she strode down the hall.
Tracey gave me a bewildered look. I shrugged and stood up.
“Shame you’ve got to go,” Granddad said, rising from his chair. I thought he was getting up to wish us goodbye, but instead he walked over to the television and switched the channel to the wrestling and went back to his armchair. “This should be a good match,” he said, waving his big weathered hand toward the screen.
IF THE ATMOSPHERE in the car had been chilly before we arrived at Granddad’s, it was positively frozen when we left. My father, true to form, seemed determined to pretend that everything was fine, while my mother fumed silently. If she’d been a cartoon character, there would have been steam coming out of her ears.
“Right, then, let’s get off to Mabel’s then, shall we?” my father said cheerily, turning the key in the ignition and putting the car into gear. “I bet she’s going to be pleased to see us.” He beamed toward me and Tracey in the mirror. “Do you want to pick up a cake or something on the way, Evelyn?” he asked, smiling at my mother now.
“No,” she answered stonily.
“But I thought you wanted to get Mabel a cake,” my father said. “You know your Mabel likes a nice bit of cake.” I sat directly behind him, pressing my knees into his seat and willing him to shut up.
My mother turned to him. “Are you deaf?” She had put her sunglasses on for the car journey, but she took them off now, widening her eyes at him expectantly. “Don’t tell me you’ve inherited that from your father as well? I said”—she began speaking very slowly and very loudly—“I don’t want to get a cake, and that means I don’t want to get a cake. Understand?”
“For God’s sake, Evelyn, I was just trying to be helpful.”
“Well, don’t bloody bother.” She looked out the window, paused for a moment, and then swung around to look at me in the backseat. “And you, Jesse, make sure you behave yourself when we’re at our Mabel’s, can you? I’m sick of this family showing me up.”
“I didn’t do anything! Don’t go blaming me just because Granddad upset you.”
“Too clever for your own good, that’s what you are,” she said, turning toward the front and putting her sunglasses back on.
“But I didn’t do anything,” I repeated. Neither of my parents responded.
It took us twenty minutes to get to Auntie Mabel’s house—twenty minutes of stiff, angry silence that was beginning to take its toll even on Tracey. As we clambered out of the car, she whispered to me, “Did I say something wrong at your granddad’s house?”
“No,” I said, desperately hoping that this excursion wouldn’t put an end to our friendship, though at that moment I wouldn’t have blamed her for demanding to be driven back to Midham and declaring that she never wanted anything to do with my family again. I only wished I had that option.
“Well, it’s just that I don’t think your mam likes me very much.”
“It’s all right, she doesn’t like anyone,” I said, hoping that she might find at least a little comfort in this, and then adding, in a tone that sounded more desperate than I had intended, “But I like you. And I really, really want you to be my friend.”
“EVELYN, MIKE, JESSE! By heck, this is a lovely surprise.” Despite her exclamation, Auntie Mabel didn’t exactly sound thrilled to see us standing on her doorstep. In fact, she looked somewhat perturbed—perturbed and a little disheveled. It was very out of character. Mabel was the kind of woman whose very first actions of the day (after lighting a cigarette) were to remove her hairnet and curlers, tease and shape her hair, and apply her makeup. In all the years I’d known her, I’d never seen her without eyebrow pencil and mascara, her hair vigorously styled, her body pressed into a Playtex Cross Your Heart Bra and Eighteen-Hour Girdle, her tamed curves straining against the seams of a tight dress. Now here she was at half past three in the afternoon, her hair flattened against her head, wearing a red nylon dressing gown and last night’s faded makeup. In fact, her eyebrow pencil and mascara had come off almost completely and I was struck by how amazingly small her eyes appeared without their usual adornment.
“Did you just get out of bed?” my mother asked accusingly, apparently forgetting that she was in the habit of rising well after the noon hour herself.
“Well, how was I supposed to know you were coming round? What, don’t they have phones where you moved to? I mean, couldn’t you have given me a ring?” Mabel put her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown and leaned her shoulder into the doorjamb. In the bright sunshine, her shrunken eyes narrowed to flickering slits as she peered beyond her tiny square of yard to the massive concrete edifices of the tower blocks beyond.
Mabel had moved to her new council estate only a year before. The city had grand plans for slum clearance, and forced from the terrace house, almost identical to Granddad’s, that she’d occupied for as long as I could remember, she’d packed up her things and settled into this box-shaped little home. She didn’t care for it much, but she counted herself lucky, since a past relationship with one of the men in charge of the relocation plans had meant she’d been able to avoid moving into one of those immense buildings that now blocked her view of the sky.
“We wanted to surprise you,” my mother replied. “And, besides, you haven’t exactly been ringing night and day yourself. I don’t remember the last time I heard from you.”
Mabel gave a guilty shrug. “I know, I know. I’ve been a bit busy recently, what with one thing and another. You know how things can be, Ev.”
“Well, are you going to invite us in, then?” my mother demanded. “Or are you going to leave your own sister standing on your doorstep?”
Mabel shot a look over her shoulder down the hallway, then turned back to us, sighing. “You’re right. I’m terrible, aren’t I? Come on, come in.” She gestured us into the house. “Ooh, it is lovely to see you, our Jesse,” she said, pulling me toward her as I stepped into the hall. She kissed me on the cheek and pressed me into her shoulder. “And is this a friend of yours, then?” she asked, releasing me and gesturing toward Tracey.
“This is Tracey,” I said.
“You’re a bonny lass,” Mabel said. “But you could do with a bit of meat on them bones, love.” She reached out and gently pinched one of Tracey’s skinny arms. “See, hardly anything on you. Come on, I’ll give you something to fatten you up a bit. But first I need a minute to put my face on and make myself decent.”
While Mabel went upstairs, my mother went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. My father slunk off into the living room, where he turned on the television and commenced watching the wrestling. Tracey and I followed him, sat down on the settee, and began leafing through the copies of Woman’s Weekly that Mabel kept in a stack on her coffee table. We turned to the “problem pages” in the back.
Most of the problem-page letters were filled with words like “menopause,” “ovaries,” “infertility,” questions about bodily functions that seemed dull, and a little disgusting, older women’s problems that we knew didn’t apply to us. The ones we searched for were about sex. Some actually used the occasional “penis,” “vagina,” and “sexual intercourse,” and when Tracey or I came upon one of these forbidden words we nudged each other and read the letters in furtive, giggling whispers.
“Hey, listen to this one,” Tracey said, jabbing me with an elbow. “‘Dear Jill, I have a very difficult and embarrassing problem to share with you. But I have decided to write because, quite frankly, I really don’t know what else to do. There’s a woman who moved into the house two doors away from mine about a year ago. In the last few months we’ve become very close friends. She understands me in a way my husband doesn’t. Recently, I’ve begun thinking about her all the time—and not just as a friend, if you understand what I mean.’” Tracey barked out a laugh before pressing her hand to her mouth and sniggering into her palm.
I laughed, too, but it was cautious, soft-edged, and went no further than my throat. “Let me see,” I said, leaning over Tracey’s shoulder, wanting to read the words for myself.
“No.” She pushed me away and continued reading. “‘Last week, when I told her how I felt, she responded by kissing me.’” She burst into a fit of uncontrollable giggles.
I watched, irritated by her laughter, uneasy but not quite sure why. “Go on,” I said, nudging her. “Finish the letter.”
Tracey sputtered out another laugh before taking a deep breath and continuing with difficulty. “‘I just don’t know what to do. My husband and I don’t have a bad marriage, and we have two delightful young children. But I just can’t stop thinking about my friend. Do you think I’m a lesbian?’” At this, Tracey began to laugh so loudly that even my father looked at us for a moment, frowning, shrugging, and then turning away.
I wasn’t laughing nearly as hard as Tracey, and after a few moments I stopped to mull over the letter. I’d heard the word “lesbian” before, yelled at girls in the school corridors, girls who were unpopular, girls like me that none of the boys liked. And sometimes, when two girls walked arm in arm across the playground or played with each other’s hair in the classroom, boys would goad them with “lesby-friends, lesby-friends,” as if touching each other somehow tainted them, as if that was the worst thing they could be. I knew lesbians were girls who didn’t like boys, that they liked girls instead, but up until that moment I’d never really thought that they actually existed.
“What does the answer say?” I asked, trying to tug the magazine from Tracey. I wanted to read the response. Would the woman be told to put a stop to her thoughts, to stop seeing her friend? Would she be told that her impulses were unnatural, that she needed to confess them to a doctor or a priest?
“No,” Tracey said, tugging back. “I’ll read it.”
“You can’t, you’re laughing too much.” She was doubled up, tears streaming down her face. I could feel my irritation turning to anger. It really wasn’t that funny.
“No, I can, just give me a minute.” She took a deep breath and wiped away her tears in an effort to compose herself. “‘Dear Confused,’” she began. Then, looking solemn, she dropped the magazine to her lap. “Yeah, she is confused, all right. Confused and bloody queer. Can you imagine that, kissing a woman?” She slapped the page and contorted her face into an expression of disgust. “Yuck. She needs to be put away. It’s repulsive.”
I nodded, a quick, soft bob of my head.
“Revolting,” Tracey added. “Sick, sick, sick.”
I felt my chest tighten and my stomach knot up, as if my torso were a rag being twisted and squeezed. “Let’s read what the answer says,” I said, making a grab for the magazine.
“What are you two up to?” My mother entered the living room carrying a tray loaded with teacups, saucers, and a plate of fairy cakes.
Tracey and I scrambled to close the pile of magazines we had strewn across the settee and tossed them onto the coffee table. “Nothing. You want a hand with that tray, Mum?” I leaped up and took the tray from her while Tracey straightened up the pile of magazines.
“Thank you, darling,” my mother said as I began placing cups in their saucers. Then, looking at my father, she commented acidly, “Nice to see someone around here can manage to lift a finger to help.”
My father didn’t pay her any attention. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, watching as one of the wrestlers sat astride the chest of his opponent and the referee pointed down at them and counted steadily to ten. “One-a, two-a, three-a, four-a …”
“Well, you can stop watching this bloody rubbish for a start,” my mother declared, marching over to the television and turning it off. The wrestlers flickered, then disappeared to a white dot in the middle of the screen.
“Aw, bloody hell, Evelyn,” my father protested. “I was watching that.” He thrust himself backward into his chair, expelling air from his mouth like a punctured tire.
“Well, you’re not now, are you?” my mother replied, standing defiantly in front of the television, hands on her hips. “Show some respect, can’t you? We’re visitors.”
“God,” he huffed. “Anybody would think we’d dropped in on the lord mayor or something. It’s only your Mabel.”
“Oh, that’s it, is it? My family not good enough for you?” She folded her arms across her chest now. “It’s all right when your father treats me like rubbish, isn’t it?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Evelyn.”
“Don’t you ‘for God’s sake’ me,” she said, waving her index finger toward him. “I know you think you’re better than me. But you’re not, you know. Despite what that sodding father of yours has to say, you’re not.” Her voice began to break, and I was afraid that she was going to burst into tears in front of Tracey. “And I don’t care if he’s on his bloody deathbed next time we’re supposed to go round. I’m never going to visit that nasty old bugger again.”
“Mum,” I said, desperate not to let things deteriorate any further. “Why don’t I pour you a nice cup of tea? You don’t want to get upset in front of Auntie Mabel, do you? It’d be a shame to spoil your time here. I mean, you haven’t seen her in ages.”
Much to my relief, she gasped a couple of deep breaths and took a seat on the settee next to Tracey and me. “Thanks, darling,” she said as I handed her a cup of tea. Then, turning to Tracey, she said, “I only hope you’re as nice to your mother, Tracey, as Jesse is to me. She’s a saint sometimes, she really is.”
A few minutes later, Mabel made her entrance. Reeking of hair spray and perfume, she wore a fluorescent orange sundress, her makeup now carefully applied, her hair a big shiny brown helmet on her head. On her feet she wore a pair of red wedge-heeled slippers decorated with fluffy pompons. “Here I am, back to the land of the living,” she beamed. “Ooh, pour us a cuppa, would you, Jesse, love?”
“Here you are, Auntie Mabel,” I said, handing her a cup of tea just the way she liked it—the cup almost half filled with milk, three heaping spoonfuls of sugar stirred into it.
“You’ve made me a very happy woman, darling, you really have,” she said, after taking her first sip and sinking back into the armchair. “Now all I need is a fag and I’ll be able to die in peace.” She jostled a cigarette out of the packet of Benson & Hedges she had been carrying and popped it into her mouth.
“Yes, well, you might not die so peaceful if you end up with lung cancer,” my mother muttered grimly.
“Anybody ever tell you you’re a right bloody killjoy, Evelyn?” Mabel asked, lighting the cigarette, throwing her head back, and blowing a column of blue smoke toward the ceiling.
“My uncle Desmond died of a heart attack,” chirped Tracey, leaning forward to take a fairy cake. “My dad said it was because he smoked. I was only little when it happened. He was thirty-four,” she said, biting into the sponge so that her words came out thick and crumbs sputtered from her mouth.
“Oh, that’s terrible. And so young,” my mother said, shaking her head sympathetically, then turning to Mabel. “See, I told you, if you don’t watch it you’ll be popping your clogs before you see the other side of forty. And let’s face it, Mabel, that’s not that long off for you, now, is it?”
“If I’d known you were going to come round and cheer me up like this, I wouldn’t have bothered opening the door.”
“Pardon me, I was only trying to help you improve your health,” my mother said haughtily.
“Well, don’t bloody bother.” Mabel took a long drag of her cigarette and exhaled, loudly. “I mean, everybody’s got to have some pleasures in life. Even you, Evelyn.”
My mother huffed and wrapped her arms tightly around her chest, taking a sudden interest in the slightly askew print of a buxom parlor maid above the mantel, the puppy calendar behind the television, the velvet painting of Blackpool Tower above Mabel’s head.
“Did you make these fairy cakes?” Tracey asked, stuffing another one into her mouth, chewing as she spoke. “They’re very nice, Mrs….” Her voice trailed off as she realized that no one had briefed her on how to correctly address Auntie Mabel.
Mabel opened her mouth to respond, but my mother interjected. “Mabel doesn’t bake,” she said derisively, as if she spent hours each week in the kitchen virtuously turning out delicious homemade delicacies. “Doesn’t cook, either. And she’s not a Mrs. She’s a Miss. A spinster, really, right, Mabel?”
Mabel responded by shaking her head slowly and taking another drag on her cigarette. I sank lower into the settee while Tracey, still apparently unperturbed by any of the tensions around her, munched on another fairy cake. I was relieved that she seemed so unaffected. If our friendship could survive this particular family outing, there really was a chance that she’d stay friends with me for a lot longer.
“For a skinny lass, you can’t half put those things away,” Mabel commented. “Or maybe you store it all in them shoes of yours, eh?” She laughed, gesturing toward the towering platform heels on Tracey’s sandals. “What do you think, Ev, maybe I should get myself a pair? Now, that’d be a lark, staggering around in them!”
“You’d look like mutton dressed as lamb,” my mother said flatly.
Mabel said nothing. We sat in silence for a few moments, the only sound Tracey’s chewing. Finally, my father, who had been making a concentrated study of his feet for the past few minutes, shifted in his armchair. “Mind if I put the wrestling on, Mabel?” he asked.
“No, no, you go ahead, Mike,” she answered. “To tell you the truth, I don’t mind watching the wrestling myself. Don’t mind doing it every now and again, either,” she added, waggling her eyebrows. Tracey and I laughed along with her, but my mother, who was now busy glaring daggers over at my father, ignored her comments. “Oh, come on, Ev,” Mabel said. “Cheer up, for God’s sake. You look as miserable as sin. What have you been doing to her out there in the country, Mike?”
“What?” My father had already turned on the television and slumped back into his chair. He was staring intently at the screen, where a man wearing a black mask and built like a small tank was body slamming his opponent, a rather more slender gentleman dressed in Union Jack shorts. The crowd around the ring was booing and hissing frantically.
“Oh, never mind,” Mabel said, waving him away. Then to my mother, “Men, they’re all the same. Put them in front of a telly and they go into a trance. They’re like kids really, aren’t they? But at least it keeps them quiet for a while. Leaves us girls to have a conversation by ourselves, eh?” She beamed hopefully at my mother. “So, how are you keeping out there, then, Ev?” she asked, crushing her cigarette in one of the half-dozen ashtrays that ornamented the room. “Like it, do you?”
My mother shrugged. “Could be worse, I suppose.”
“Dad’s decorating the house and Mum’s doing the garden, aren’t you, Mum?” I said. “You should come out and visit us, Auntie Mabel. We could have you over for tea.”
“Ooh, I don’t know, darling. I’m not used to traveling that far. It was bad enough when they moved me out of my old house and onto this bloody estate. Felt like they’d sent me to the end of the world, it did. I’d be even more out of my element visiting you in the country. I’d probably go into shock seeing all them trees and fields.”
“It’s really not that far,” I said.
“We’ll see, love,” she answered. “We’ll see.” She paused for a moment, then her face lit up. “Oh, Ev, I almost forgot. I’ve got a right bit of news for you, I have. Actually, I suppose it’s more than a bit of news. This’ll knock your socks off, will this.”
“What?” my mother asked, frowning.
“Well, I only found out yesterday myself. And I was going to ring you, but I was on my way out when I got the news and then, well, as you probably guessed, I had a bit of a night on the town last night. So, what with one thing and another, it’s probably just as well you dropped round, because given the state of my head today I might’ve forgotten to ring you.”
“What?” my mother said impatiently. “What’s the news?”
“It’s Mam. She phoned me from Australia. She’s getting married! To that fella Bill she’s been hanging about with. Used to own a factory or something like that. According to Mam, he’s loaded with money. Hey, Evelyn, do you think he’ll pay our tickets over to Australia for the wedding?”
“Married? She’s getting married?”
“That’s what she said. They haven’t set a date yet. But they’re going to do it next year, in the summer, probably—which is their winter for some reason, though I have to say I’ve never been able to work that one out.”
“Why did she ring you?” my mother asked. “I mean, if she’s getting married, then the least she could do is tell both her daughters.”
“I don’t know, Ev. Maybe she didn’t have your new number.”
“I sent it to her. Wrote it plain as day for her in one of my letters.”
“It’s expensive to make those overseas calls, you know, Ev. And she did tell me to pass the good news on to you as soon as I could. It’s my fault I didn’t ring you yesterday. But, like I said, I was on my way out and I—”
“That’s not the point,” my mother interrupted. “She should have told me. She should have told me that she’s hitching herself to a bloke over there. That she’s planning on stopping in Australia, that she’s never coming back. To England. To her home. To her family!” And, with that, my mother leaped up from the settee and made a hurried exit from the room.
We heard her as she scurried up the stairs, apparently making her way to the bathroom. Then we heard a loud scream and her thundering steps as she turned tail and ran downstairs again, this time moving so fast that it sounded as if she stumbled several times before finally making it to the ground floor.
“Ooh, heck,” Mabel said, rapidly firing up another cigarette before my mother burst into the room.
“Mabel!” My mother was white as a sheet, her eyes as wide as saucers.
“What, Ev?” Mabel asked, attempting to look coy. “Something wrong?”
“I found a naked man in your bathroom.”
Tracey and I turned to each other, hiding gleeful expressions behind our hands. A smile tugged at Mabel’s lips, but she managed to suppress it. “You did?” she asked with exaggerated innocence.
“Yes, I did.”
“Well, there’s some women might not consider that such a bad thing, you know.”
“How can you say that?” My mother was outraged, grinding her heels into Mabel’s green-and-orange carpet. “It’s … it’s … well, it’s disgusting.
He was standing right there. Not a stitch on him. Not a bloody stitch.”
“Yes, well,” Mabel said, hitching up the straps on her sundress and looking away from my mother. “That’ll be Frank.”
“Frank?”
Mabel nodded. “He was the bloke I went out with last night, the one I—”
“I always knew you had loose morals, our Mabel. But this …”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ev, calm down.” Mabel rolled her eyes. “It’s not like you’ve not seen anything like that before. I mean, I’m sure Mike—”
“Don’t you bring my married life into this. At least I respect myself. At least I don’t cheapen myself like other members of this family. What with you frolicking with every bloke left, right, and center, and now my mother gallivanting around with some Australian gigolo.”
“Look, Ev, I know you’re upset that Mam’s getting married, that she’s staying in Australia—”
“That’s nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with it at all. Suffice it to say, if you choose to have men wandering about your house in the altogether—well, that’s your affair. But I don’t have to stay here and put up with it. Come on, Mike, we’re leaving.”
“Leaving?” my father asked, looking up from the television with an expression so startled it was as if he’d abruptly been brought out of a trance.
“Yes, leaving. Come on, girls. Let’s go.”
“But we only just got here,” my father protested, giving my mother, then Mabel, then me a distressed look.
“And now it’s time to go,” my mother responded, already making her way out the living-room door.
“But the match isn’t over. Can’t we just stay for the end of the match?” He rose reluctantly from his seat, all the time gazing at the television screen, where the two wrestlers were now taking turns flinging each other from one side of the ring to the other, bouncing back and forth against the ropes. As they did so, each roared at the top of his lungs and shook his head like some kind of demented animal. “Hope we see you again soon, Mabel,” my father said when he had finally reached the door after backing his way out of the living room, eyes fixed on the hyperactive performance on the television. “You must come and pay us a visit.”
“Maybe. But I think I’ll wait until she’s calmed down a bit,” Mabel answered, indicating my mother, who was pacing back and forth across the front garden like an overwound toy soldier. “And, judging by the state she’s got herself in, that might be a while.”