Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,143
of you!”
“Come on, love,” my father said to me softly. “Let’s go see if there’s anything on the telly and get out of your mother’s way.”
I WAS WORRIED about my mother, but I was also worried about myself. At least when I’d been writing my letters to Amanda they’d offered me a place I could go to when everything else seemed so awful.
I hadn’t even been able to sneak anything interesting from the mobile library to distract me while my mother had been visiting it regularly herself. She and the librarian spent ages at the little checkout desk chatting about weddings, gardening tips, and the terrible state of the world, and since the slush pile was right there, behind the librarian, it was far more difficult to grab something from that stack without being seen. In the final weeks leading up to the wedding, however, my mother stopped visiting the little van, declaring that she now knew everything she needed to know about planning a wedding and, once Mabel and Frank’s ceremony was over, she planned to write a book about it herself.
Once I was able to steal more interesting titles from the slush pile again, my life became a little more bearable. A week before the wedding, I saw a book there that I absolutely had to have. I had been pretending to browse and had pulled down a couple of random books before approaching the checkout desk to get a closer look at the slush pile when I saw there, at the very top of the forbidden volumes, a book with the title Modern Homosexuality, in bold red letters along its spine. I felt a bolt of burning interest surge through me, and as the librarian lifted her date stamp to check out the titles I had taken from the children’s shelves I knew that I had to get my hands on that book.
“Erm, excuse me,” I said, coughing.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if you have any books by Beatrix Potter. I couldn’t see anything on the shelf.”
“Couldn’t see anything on the shelf?” The librarian looked at me, aghast. “Of course, we have books by Beatrix Potter.”
“Well, I couldn’t see anything and I thought—”
“Here, let me show you,” she said, dropping her date stamp and marching over to the children’s shelves.
While she began pulling out various volumes of Beatrix Potter stories, I reached behind the counter and grabbed the book that I wanted. By the time the librarian returned with copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, and The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, I had Modern Homosexuality securely stuffed under my anorak. As soon as I got to the house, I ran upstairs into my bedroom, sat down on my bed, opened the book, buried my face in its pages, and started to read.
I’d never even seen a book before with the word “homosexuality” in its title and, now that I had, I was expecting it to offer definitive answers to all my tormenting questions, all those questions I had about what my feelings for Amanda actually meant. What I was really hoping for was something along the lines of the quizzes in Woman’s Weekly. “Is your husband lying to you? Are you a good communicator? What’s your personality type? Answer the questions below, rate your answers, and find out!” I wanted to write down my answers to the pertinent questions, run down a list at the bottom of the page, and discover what I really was. All A’s: Yes, you’re definitely a homosexual and there’s nothing you can do about it. B’s: Probably, but there’s still time to change. C’s: Probably not, it’s just a phase you’re going through and you’ll get over it soon. D’s: Definitely not, stop worrying and get on with your life!
Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be that simple. First, the book was written in dense, unfamiliar jargon. Second, for the first two chapters it talked almost exclusively about rats, which I didn’t find at all relevant to my quandary. And third, when it did finally get to talking about humans, it was all about men, something that left me wondering if women could actually be homosexual at all or if it was something that manifested only in the male of the species. Despite those housewives in the problem pages, perhaps I was a terrible oddity after all.
It was probably because I was so absorbed in the book that I didn’t hear a vehicle pull up outside the house. It