Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,107
ingratitude and shoved it into the fridge. My father opened the bottles and offered Mabel, Frank, and my mother a drink.
“I’m not sure Mum should have anything,” I said softly as my father took the top off the Harveys Bristol Cream. I’d read the label on the bottle of pills he administered to her. There, along with the dosage instructions, it said very clearly: “Not to be taken with alcohol!”
“Don’t be daft, Jesse.” My father waved me away.
“But it says on her pills—” I said as I looked at my mother, who, having already torn the cellophane off the box of Milk Tray, had popped two chocolates into her mouth and was chewing loudly.
“It’s Christmas—everybody deserves a drink at Christmas,” my father said grandly.
“Oh, aye, you can say that again, Mike,” Frank agreed. “Nowt like a nice bit of booze to get the celebration started.”
I stood by silently watching as my father poured out a glass of sherry for Mabel and then for my mother. “Merry Christmas, everybody!” he toasted. The four of them lifted their glasses into the air, clinked them noisily together, then pressed them to their lips. Mabel, Frank, and my father took two or three fast little sips, while my mother swallowed the entire contents of her glass in one decisive gulp.
“I’ll have another one of them, Mike,” she declared, slamming her glass down on the kitchen table with all the gusto of a cowboy in a Wild West saloon. Playing the part of the cowed bartender, my father obediently filled her glass.
As soon as she’d taken a few sips of her sherry, Mabel commandeered the kitchen. “You’ve done a grand job, our Jesse,” she said, peering into the oven at the sizzling turkey. “But I’ll take over from here. It’s a real woman’s touch you want with your Christmas dinner, right, Frank?”
“Oh, aye,” said Frank, nodding sagely. “And, believe me, Mabel is definitely a real woman, one hundred percent.” He nudged my father and wiggled his eyebrows. My father responded with an awkward laugh.
I turned and made a prompt retreat to the living room. There, I curled up on the settee and examined the book that Mabel had brought me: The Girl’s Book of Heroines, a volume that was a little young for me, perhaps, but as I flipped through the pages I found it was filled with fascinating stories. Against the drone of my father’s commentary in the hall and on the stairs as he gave Frank another tour of the house, providing updates on his latest do-it-yourself accomplishments, I reveled in stories of the Virgin Queen, who never married despite being pursued by suitors far and wide; Saint Joan, who dressed in men’s clothing so that she could fight a war but was burned as a witch afterward; and Lady Jane Grey, queen for a mere nine days until she was deposed by Mary Tudor and sent off to the Tower of London to have her head chopped off.
Looking at the illustration of the tragic and beautiful Lady Jane Grey made me think of Amanda and what had been almost constantly on my mind since the night of the Reatton disco—the kiss that she had placed on my lips before we parted in the village. It wasn’t a long kiss, not like those lock-lipped, endless smooches that the girls and boys had been giving one another at the disco earlier. Nor was it like those open-mouthed kisses that the heroes of Sunday afternoon films planted on the lips of struggling and then suddenly limp-limbed women. And it wasn’t like the swirling kisses that Captain Kirk gave those female aliens. But that kiss by the village Christmas tree was the longest and softest kiss I had ever had. Not the fierce dry peck of my great-aunt June or the whiskery rub of my father or the oily lipstick smear that Auntie Mabel greeted me with. This had been my first real kiss. Tender, lingering, so that I could still conjure up that sensation of the unexpected softness of Amanda’s lips, the astonishing warmth of her mouth against mine in that freezing night.
Afterward, I had been unable to meet Amanda’s eyes, afraid of what she might see there. I longed for her to say something, a comment that might make it real. But when all she said was “Well, see you then, Jesse,” and turned to walk away, I wondered if I had imagined it. I stood a long time there in the snow and