Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,122

lips into the curve of a smile.

“Yeah.” She nodded vaguely. “Yeah,” she repeated, this time more brightly. “He felt really, really bad about the accident. So after he got his bike fixed he rode all the way down to Cleethorpes to see me.”

“That’s nice. It’s a long way down to Cleethorpes,” I said, my voice too loud and oddly boisterous.

“He said he was ever so sorry, and then he gave me the locket and begged me to take him back. He must have spent a lot of money on it.” She took the box holding the locket from my hand. “Shame I can’t wear it, really.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I don’t want my dad to see it. He’d go bloody nuts.”

“Why?”

She sighed. “He’s always on at me, anyway. But this, well, he wouldn’t approve of a lad giving me something like that.”

“Oh, but you should wear it. And if the chain’s long enough you can just hide it under your blouse.” I was stunned, even as I spoke, at what I was saying. It was as if my words had stopped being my own. But now I had to stuff all my feelings deep inside me, prove to Amanda that what she had glimpsed of me really wasn’t there.

“You think so?”

“If you like, I’ll help you put it on.”

Amanda hesitated, tilting her head and looking at me, as if trying to discern something in my face.

“Really,” I said. “It’s no trouble.”

“It is a bit fiddly, Jesse,” she said, her tone cautious. “Maybe you should leave it.”

“No, really, you should wear it.” I was determined to do this. It was a test I had set myself. “I’ll just take my gloves off—that’ll make it easier.” I removed my gloves and stuffed them into my pockets while Amanda, apparently convinced now, took the locket from the box. She handed it to me.

It was cold and surprisingly weightless in my palm. For a moment, I had the urge to close my fist around it, pull my arm back, and hurl the stupid locket into the air, across the high street, and through the bare branches of the trees into the fields beyond. I imagined myself doing this and then turning to look at Amanda, fire burning in my eyes. Then I’d tell her that I didn’t care if it meant that I was a lezzie but I loved her and she was a fool for not realizing that my love meant so much more than Stan’s.

I didn’t throw the locket away, though. Instead, I unclasped the chain, reached up, and put it around Amanda’s neck. When I’d fastened the locket, she pulled back. “Oh, I forgot to show you,” she said, struggling for a moment and then popping the locket open. Inside, there was a little heart-shaped picture of Stan Heaphy. He grinned out at me from that place on Amanda’s chest.

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