Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,13

can’t,” my mother snapped. “Now, why don’t you get them glasses packed while me and Mabel finish off our teas.”

AFTER I LEARNED ABOUT our move, I went to the library to find out some information on Midham, since all my father had been able to tell us about the place we would soon call home was that it had two pubs and a newsagent’s shop, critical services as far as he was concerned. There was nothing about Midham in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and it didn’t even merit a speck in the Reader’s Digest Atlas. When I’d asked the librarian if she could help me, she’d steered me toward a slim book on East Yorkshire history which noted that there had been a small Roman settlement there and that Midham had been listed as a thriving market town in the Domesday Book. And that was it. For almost nine hundred years, apparently, nothing worth mentioning had taken place there. Even when I finally turned to the Royal Automobile Association Road Atlas, I found that the village was nothing more than a tiny black dot alongside a thin strand of road. Its only redeeming feature, as far as I could tell, was that it was two miles from the coast. Not close enough to fall into the sea—at least for a few centuries—but close enough that I thought my father would easily be able to drive us for a day out at the beach.

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.

CHAPTER THREE

“WELCOME 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