Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,126

serendipitously coming upon his merchandise, I began to visualize him chasing down vehicles in the streets, or grabbing boxes and cartons out of the rear doors of lorries as they waited for the traffic lights to change. There was something about this image that seemed to sum Ted up in my mind—a dodging pilferer who was just as likely to get sideswiped by an enormous juggernaut as he was to get away with anything worthwhile.

This time when Ted arrived, he swaggered into the hallway wearing an enormous grin and what looked like a giant, sleeping animal over his shoulder.

“Uncle Ted!” I said, beaming as I opened the door to see him standing before me, wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“Hello, Jesse, love,” he said, sticking his cigarette between his lips, putting a big arm around me, and giving me a kiss on my cheek. Then he stepped back to regard me. “By heck, you’ve grown,” he said, the cigarette, propped in the corner of his mouth, jiggling about as he spoke. “What they’ve been feeding you round here, rocket fuel? That’d certainly make you shoot up, eh?” He took the cigarette from his lips and let out a deep bass laugh that shuddered through my chest and echoed down the hallway. As he laughed, I studied his face. He looked a lot older than I remembered him. He was still handsome and his blue eyes had that same mischievous glow, but his greased-back hair was graying at the temples and the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth had molded themselves more firmly into his face. He was fatter, too, so that while his face looked older it also seemed softer and slightly puffy, as if it had been filled with air and then deflated slightly—like the shrunken surface of an old party balloon.

“What’s that?” I asked, indicating the enormous swath of flecked brown fur slung over his shoulder.

“This? Oh, just a little something I picked up for your mam’s birthday.”

“But that was months ago.” My mother’s birthday was in November. We hadn’t had much of a celebration. Though I’d made a cake and my father had bought her a bunch of flowers, my mother had refused to come downstairs. Instead, she lay under her huge mound of blankets complaining that Grandma hadn’t sent her even a birthday card and that if a mother couldn’t remember her own daughter’s birthday, then the world was in a far worse state than she’d ever imagined and it certainly wasn’t worth getting out of bed.

“I know it was months ago,” Ted huffed. “But I was in the nick then, wasn’t I? So I thought I’d get her something now. It’s a coat. It’s real fox fur, you know. Here, feel it.” He pushed one of the folds of the coat toward me.

I brushed my hand over the fur. It was extraordinarily soft. “It feels nice,” I said. But then I pulled my hand away. “Don’t they trap and kill the foxes? Isn’t it really cruel?”

The subject had come up in one of my recent English lessons, and Ms. Hastings had said that it was ridiculous that animals should suffer so that people could wear their dead skins. She’d also told us that because she was against cruelty to animals she was a vegetarian, a revelation that Tracey and the Debbies found hilarious. Later in the corridor, when they’d joked about buying Ms. Hastings a bag of rabbit food, I’d said that, really, it wasn’t all that funny and that perhaps she had a point. Accompanied by a chorus of laughter from the Debbies, Tracey had responded that perhaps they should buy me a bag of rabbit food as well.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jesse,” Ted said. “Don’t you start. I’ve had your bloody dad lecturing me about fox hunting and the debauched upper classes ever since he picked me up. Though what that’s got to do with fur coats I’ve no bloody idea. Anyway, where’s your mam? I can’t wait to see her face when I hand her this.”

“She’s in the kitchen, having a cup of tea with Auntie Mabel and Frank—that’s Auntie Mabel’s boyfriend.”

Ted’s face dropped. “Oh, no,” he muttered. “Not our bloody Mabel. I was hoping to avoid her for at least a few days.” He exhaled a long stream of smoke, tossed the cigarette onto the path, and marched into the house. It was wet outside, and I watched the cigarette land on the path, fizzle, and die before I