Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,148
her face, neck, and arms (exposed because she’d stripped down to her white cotton vest for the task) were a very unsettling color.
When I’d returned home the previous afternoon, I’d found her in the bathroom, a bottle of Tanfastic in her hand. “This’ll make your grandma think twice,” she’d said as she smoothed the gelatinous beige cream over her face and arms. “I’ll tell her we’ve had such good weather this spring that I’ve been sitting out in the garden getting a tan.” She let out a high yodeling laugh, as if she were telling herself an enormously funny joke. “If she sees me like this, who knows, maybe she’ll change her mind about staying in Australia.”
The bottle had said, “Get all the tan without all the trouble. Achieve a natural-looking glow without sitting in the sun for hours. You’ll be the envy of all your friends!” However, “natural-looking” was one thing my mother was not, and I doubted that friends, relatives, or enemies would envy the way she appeared. Almost as soon as she applied the Tanfastic, it turned her skin a rather disturbingly bright and very streaky orange. Fortunately, my mother didn’t realize how very bizarre she looked. In fact, she seemed quite satisfied with the results, declaring, as she admired her reflection in the bathroom mirror, “I can’t wait to see the look on your grandma’s face when she gets here and sees this.” Neither could I.
As I stood by the window sipping a cup of tea and eating a few stale chocolate digestives and watching my mother work, I took in the transformation of the garden. It really was quite spectacular. What had been a virtual jungle of thistles, bramble bushes, and overgrown shrubs less than a year ago had become a wide green lawn with a complicated pond and fountain at its center. The surrounding trees—except for the dead and dying elms—were clothed in leaves, lush with burgeoning life. One side of the garden was bordered completely by a hawthorn hedge, and though my mother hadn’t planted it, she had cleared the garden so that it was now possible to see the blossom there that had begun blooming in late April. Creamy white against the dark hawthorn leaves, it filled the air with a sweet, heady aroma that made me want to close my eyes and breathe deeply whenever I caught its scent. The lawn itself was bisected by a stone path and surrounded on all sides by neat little borders filled with flowers that included, much to my delight, bright-faced little pansies, as well as white and pink alyssums, yellow primroses, and golden marigolds. She’d even planted rosebushes, which had started to develop slim little buds that I knew would open into fat, fragrant blooms as soon as summer came. The pond, finished only a couple of weeks before, was now filled, and the fountain at its center—an enormous fake-marble affair sporting chubby-cheeked little cherubs with fig leafs on their groins—merrily spilled water over its three wedding cake–like layers. A week earlier, my father had purchased a dozen huge goldfish at a pet shop in Hull, bringing them home in several buckets he’d put in the boot of his car. Although the water had slopped about as my father drove the curvy road home and half of it had ended up in the boot rather than in the buckets, the fish had miraculously survived. Now, in the pond, they wove serenely between clumps of slimy green weed, their big convex eyes staring sideways, bodies flashing as they moved.
As I finished my tea, I thought of going into the garden to look at the fishpond before I went to school. But with my mother out there wielding her sledgehammer it was hard to imagine that even the fish felt protected as she slammed those stakes into the shuddering ground. So, instead, I put on my coat, lifted the strap of my satchel over my shoulder, and headed out the door.
When I arrived at the bus stop, Tracey was already there and, much to my relief, in a considerably better mood than she’d been in the previous day. Apparently, she and Greg had patched things up the night before.
“I gave him a right good telling off for smoking with that slag Margery Pearson.” She was splayed across the bench, her elbow resting on its wooden arm, her head propped on her palm. I sat down beside her and dropped my satchel, which was overstuffed and very