Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,125
air with his hand—” ‘found out that Frank is going to marry my auntie Mabel. Oh, what happy news!’ See,“he said, dropping his hand to his lap and staring steadily at me. “That’s the kind of welcome I’m looking for. Instead of all this ruddy rudeness and antagonism from your bloody nutcase of a mother.”
“She can’t help it if she doesn’t like you,” I said, looking at him steadily.
“Well, that’s a shame. Because she’s going to have to get used to me. I’m going to be part of the family now.” With a grunt, he pushed himself off the bed so that he stood looking down at me. “You should probably write that down in your diary as well,” he said, eyeing the notebook I was still clutching to my chest.
After Frank left, I sat on my bed for a long time holding my notebook. I sat still as his footsteps descended the stairs and as I heard his voice below, in the kitchen, a husky rumble against Mabel’s and my mother’s higher, lighter tones. Finally, assured that he wouldn’t return, I completed my letter to Amanda. This time it didn’t go on for pages and pages. This time it was short and to the point. I simply asked her why, on that cold night, she had placed her lips on mine to send my hopes soaring, then let them crash into a ditch like Stan Heaphy’s motorbike, leaving me floundering, helpless, unable to brush myself off and get up.
When I was finished, I tore the letter from my notebook. Then I pulled my biscuit tin from the wardrobe, lifted the lid, and added it to my bundle. For a moment, I felt myself wanting to retrieve a box of matches from the kitchen so that I could set a little bonfire in the biscuit tin and burn all those letters. It seemed the kind of romantic gesture unrequited love demanded, and I felt a desperate desire to burn all those feelings from me, to see them ignite, flare, turn to smoke and flames. Having the letters there, hidden in my bedroom, was concrete evidence of a terrible flaw that I never wanted anyone else to find. But they were also evidence of the love I still felt. And, despite everything, I couldn’t let that go. So I put the lid on the tin and put it back in its usual hiding place, but as soon as I did that I knew that I’d written the last of my letters to Amanda. I might still think of her constantly, I might still wish that she returned my feelings, but I would not write to her again.
IN ALL THE YEARS I’d known Ted, he’d never arrived at our house empty-handed. Usually, his gifts seemed extravagant—a gold watch for my father, a set of pearl earrings for my mother, a leather coat for me. Within a short while, however, we usually discovered that there was something not quite right about these items—the gold on my father’s watch started peeling off to reveal a dull gray metal underneath, the pearl earrings turned mottled pink when my mother got them wet, and on the first day I’d worn my leather coat Mrs. Brockett had taken great pleasure in pointing out that it was, in fact, made of plastic. At other times, Ted brought us things that seemed more practical—a carton of six dozen lightbulbs, twenty-four tins of Mr. Sheen furniture polish, a five-gallon bucket of white paint. Soon after his departure, however, we’d invariably discover that there was something wrong with this merchandise. Only about a third of the lightbulbs had actually worked, most of the Mr. Sheen lost its aerosol propellant so quickly that we got only one or two pathetic streams of polish from each tin before they proved useless, and, upon opening the white paint we’d found it full of little gray lumps.
“Well, what do you expect when everything he gets has fallen off the back of a lorry?” Auntie Mabel said anytime my mother complained about Ted’s latest offerings.
When I was younger, before I understood the meaning of this phrase, I’d imagined Ted coming upon the items he brought us in the middle of the road after they’d fallen from an overladen lorry or van. Later, even after I’d learned that Auntie Mabel was referring to the illicit ways in which Ted acquired almost everything that came into his possession, the image still stuck. Though, rather than thinking of Ted