Another Life Altogether (5 page)

We didn’t go to the seaside much. But when we did, despite the interminable trek my mother always insisted upon in order to find the
“right” spot for us to sit in, despite her complaints about other people’s loud radios, snogging teenagers, the way the sand got into everything, and the tide that came in too fast, I liked it: the smell of seaweed and brine, salt crusting my skin, sand easing its way between my fingers and toes, and the sound of the waves, arcing and falling like long reluctant breaths.

The first time my parents took me to the seaside, I was three years old. My mother often told how, as soon as we arrived on the beach, I’d broken free of her arms and run, fully clothed, right into the waves. “You were a little madam, you were,” she’d say, tutting her disapproval each time she told the story. “Didn’t take a blind bit of notice when I shouted at you. Oh, no, you were determined to run into that water, no matter what I had to say.”

I didn’t remember this incident, but I loved the idea of it, loved to think of myself as a chubby-legged toddler, racing away from my yelling mother to plunge into the cold waters of the North Sea.

“W
ELCOME TO THE BACK END OF BLOODY BEYOND,” MY MOTHER
announced, stepping down from the removal van and swinging her arm listlessly across the vista of bright fields and dark hedgerows that stretched all the way to the horizon. “Welcome to the rest of my pathetic bloody life.” For the first time in weeks, she was dressed—in a wrinkled gabardine mac and pearly blue stilettos, and carrying a matching blue handbag. She’d covered her hair with a silk headscarf decorated with pictures of ships and anchors. It made me think about the world-cruising mother I’d invented and I wanted to pull it off.

“It’s not that bad, Mum,” I said without conviction as I squinted toward the ugly brick house that was to become our new home, its crumbling façade stained green with moss, its window frames peeling paint like dead skin. I turned back toward the fields. “I mean, the air’s fresh.” I took a deep breath to emphasize my point and noticed the whiff of manure tingling my nostrils.

My mother wrinkled up her nose and folded her arms across her chest.

“And there’s lots of space.” I indicated the broad landscape, as level and uncreased as a giant map laid before us, its only vertical features the occasional trees that stretched defiantly above the flat ground. Most
were green, lush with bright summer leaves, but some were bare, their dark branches stretching upward like charred and twisted bones.

“Yes, I’ll not argue with you about that,” she said, pursing her lips and looking longingly at the thread of gray road on which we had just arrived.

“Well, it could be worse….”

“You should go into advertising, you Jesse. That’s the best slogan I’ve heard in years. ‘It could be worse.’ That would sell a lot of bananas, now wouldn’t it?”

I looked into her frowning face, searching desperately for something to say that would soothe her. I took a breath, opened my mouth in anticipation of finding the right phrase, but I could think of nothing.

“So, what do you think?” My father was beaming as he emerged from the other side of the van, where he’d been providing instructions to the removal men. As he approached us, the two men had begun unloading our things, noisily rolling my father’s battered armchair down the ramp toward the front door. I watched flecks of its stuffing fall onto the path and float, like huge, asymmetrical snowflakes, across the weed-ridden garden to catch on the rangy stalks of purple-blooming thistles.

“What do you think I think?” my mother said, opening her handbag, fumbling about for a few seconds, then pulling out her sunglasses and promptly putting them on. Since there was no sun in sight and the clouds overhead were so dark and threatening that I worried we might not get our furniture inside before it began to pour, I suspected that she might be trying to make a point.

“Oh, come on, Evelyn. Don’t be a wet blanket. I mean, what a beautiful view, eh?” His voice was jolly, as expansive as the landscape. “And we’re only a few minutes from the village.”

“Sorry,” my mother said. “I’m afraid I didn’t see a village. I must have blinked when we drove through it.”

We had driven through the village of Midham a few minutes before arriving at the house, and though it wasn’t quite as tiny as my mother
made it out to be, it was hardly a bustling center of activity. There was a little main street that, on one side, held an old stone church, a post office, a handful of shops, and two shabby pubs; the other side looked out across open fields. The street was narrow enough that, as we’d driven through in the removal van, the couple of cars we encountered coming in the opposite direction had had to pull over to let us pass.

My father turned to me. “What about you, Jesse, do like it?” His features were animated with hopefulness, his smile a buoyant question pressed across his face.

I stood between them, my needy father and my irate mother, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, looking at each of them and then up at the ominous sky. Finally, I shrugged. “It’s all right,” I said, turning to walk toward the house, hoping for shelter before the imminent storm.

NOT LONG AFTER
the removal men started carrying our things out of the van, the skies opened up and the rain poured, promptly revealing several holes in the steep, slate-tiled roof of our new home. While my father and I ran around frantically trying to locate enough buckets, bowls, and any other containers available to catch all the water that drip-dripped, drizzled, or simply flowed into the house, the two men worked at a leisurely pace, apparently unfazed by the rain that glided off their greased-down hair and soaked almost every item of furniture we owned. That evening, my father and I sat on our damp settee eating cold baked beans out of a tin that we planned to use afterward to capture what we hoped was one last leak discovered in the upstairs bathroom. Meanwhile, my mother, having spent the past half hour drying her side of the mattress with the hair dryer, had gone to bed.

“Now, I know there’s a few things to be fixed here, Jesse,” my father said, exhibiting a remarkable gift for understatement. “But nothing I can’t handle, mind you.” I watched an orange streak of tomato sauce roll down his chin as he leaned forward to pick up one of a stack of new
handyman books he had laid in front of him on the floor. “Look,” he said, flipping open the shiny cover and leafing through the untouched pages. “They explain everything in here. I’ll be done in no time.”

I wished I shared his confidence. The house was a shambles. Aside from the leaking roof, there were the broken sashes on the windows, drooping ceilings, wallpaper that hung off the walls in strips, rusted, dripping taps in the kitchen, and lights that flickered whenever someone walked across the room. The whole place smelled of mold and old people, and when I’d first walked inside I wondered if the previous owners had died there. I imagined them buried beneath the uneven floorboards, dead eyes staring upward between the wide gaps.

My father flipped happily through
House Repairs Made Simple
, telling me how he was going to rip out this, repoint that, take out walls, add walls, and generally transform the place into a palace of Formica and fake wood paneling. Since he didn’t exactly have a track record with this sort of thing, I found myself more than a little skeptical. Apparently, though, he didn’t plan to do things by himself.

“You never know,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Maybe your mother will rise to the challenge. I mean, she’s quite a handywoman when she gets herself going. Remember what a transformation she did of our old place?”

How could I forget? My mother had discovered do-it-yourself right around the time I entered primary school, after she’d watched a television program that showed how to frame your favorite print. Once she’d managed to put van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
in an oversized wooden frame and hang it above the mantel in the living room, there seemed to be no stopping her. She began staying up all night to regrout the bathroom, assemble a shed from a kit in the backyard, or put down new green-and-black linoleum in the kitchen. My father had spent weeks sleeping in a nylon sleeping bag on the living-room settee while she overhauled the bedrooms. I stayed up to help her, partly because I couldn’t fall asleep while she played the same two records—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”—all
through the night, and partly because I loved slapping on the wallpaper paste. In my first two years of school, it wasn’t uncommon for my mother to spend weeks at a time working through the night to put up sliding glass doors in the living room or install a new fitted kitchen. It also wasn’t uncommon for me to fall asleep in the middle of lessons, and I was almost put in the remedial class because my teacher, Mrs. Sparks, seemed to think this indicated that I might be, as she put it, “a little on the slow side.” Fortunately, by the time I entered the third year my mother had completed her renovations. I was able to get a good night’s sleep, and my performance at school improved.

My mother, on the other hand, went through what she and my father came to refer to as one of her “bad patches.” With no more home improvements to work on, she seemed to lose all sense of purpose. It was a strange and dramatic transformation. One week she was hauling child-size stones from the local gardening shop so that she could make the patch of lawn in front of our house into a Japanese rock garden; the next she was spending hours at a time sitting at the kitchen table, staring into space. The only thing she seemed to care about was listening to the Jimmy Young and Terry Wogan shows on Radio 2. The house reverberated with the djs’ bouncy voices and the Engelbert Humperdinck, Val Doonican, and Andy Williams songs they played throughout the day. It was around this time that she first began mentioning the possibility of being taken off to Delapole.

I remembered vividly the first afternoon I came home from school to find the house cold and still. It was January, the sky was filled with inky clouds, and dusk had already fallen. I had trudged home in my duffle coat and Wellington boots through snow that lay trampled and dirty on the pavements and was starting to freeze over into a layer of gray ice. A group of older boys had pelted me with snowballs that were hard as stones, and the back of my head was still aching from one that had hit me there. I had been crying, as much from anger and humiliation as from the pain, and the tears stung my cold cheeks with sudden heat.

“Mum,” I called as I pushed my way through the front door and into a hall that was almost as cold as the air outside and far darker than the premature evening sky. “Mum.” My voice echoed through the house. It felt hollow and unoccupied, and it was hard to imagine that this was the same place in which I had gobbled down hot porridge that morning while my father slurped his tea and my mother methodically scraped burned toast over the sink. I walked to the foot of the stairs and noticed the chatter of the radio coming from one of the upstairs bedrooms, the cheery announcer, and then the smooth gurgling of a Perry Como song. “Moon River, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style some day….” I trudged cautiously up the stairs, stumbling on the uneven carpet, feeling my way along the banister with my fingers. When I reached my parents’ bedroom, the door was closed. I pushed it open and stepped inside. The curtains were pulled shut. I could barely see anything. For a few moments I stood still, the satiny voice of Perry Como filling the emptiness. Then, as my eyes got used to the dark, I was able to make out the outline of my mother’s body in the bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin and her head resting on a single, flat pillow.

“Mum,” I said, venturing toward her. “Mum, are you all right? Are you feeling poorly?” She said nothing, nor did she move. Her face was a perfect mask of stillness. “Mum?” I said again, my voice shaky. I wondered if she was sleeping, but I couldn’t imagine her being able to do so with the radio right there on the bedside table so close to her head. My anxiety blossomed into panic, and I had an overwhelming fear that she had somehow died since I had left her that morning. “Mum,” I said, leaning over to shake her shoulder beneath the blankets. “Mum. Wake up.” Her body felt loose, without will or substance under my grip. “Mum.” Tears were running down my cheeks now, burning against skin that was still raw from when I had cried earlier on the way home. Still, she didn’t respond. And then I remembered the film I had watched the other night, the one my mother had sobbed and sniffled at when the heroine collapsed and the doctor put his head against her chest, listened
for her heartbeat, then pulled away shaking his head. I wiped my eyes on the scratchy woolen sleeve of my duffle coat and clambered onto the bed. Then I leaned over her, pressing my ear against the blankets that covered her chest. I couldn’t hear anything, so I pressed my head harder against her.

“For God’s sake, get off me, can’t you?” Suddenly she sat up, shoving me away and pushing me to the floor. I landed, dazed, my legs splayed out in front of me. I sat there for a moment before scrambling to lift my head and peer over the bed.