Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,15

floorboards, dead eyes staring upward between the wide gaps.

My father flipped happily through House Repairs Made Simple, telling me how he was going to rip out this, repoint that, take out walls, add walls, and generally transform the place into a palace of Formica and fake wood paneling. Since he didn’t exactly have a track record with this sort of thing, I found myself more than a little skeptical. Apparently, though, he didn’t plan to do things by himself.

“You never know,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Maybe your mother will rise to the challenge. I mean, she’s quite a handywoman when she gets herself going. Remember what a transformation she did of our old place?”

How could I forget? My mother had discovered do-it-yourself right around the time I entered primary school, after she’d watched a television program that showed how to frame your favorite print. Once she’d managed to put van Gogh’s Sunflowers in an oversized wooden frame and hang it above the mantel in the living room, there seemed to be no stopping her. She began staying up all night to regrout the bathroom, assemble a shed from a kit in the backyard, or put down new green-and-black linoleum in the kitchen. My father had spent weeks sleeping in a nylon sleeping bag on the living-room settee while she overhauled the bedrooms. I stayed up to help her, partly because I couldn’t fall asleep while she played the same two records—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”—all through the night, and partly because I loved slapping on the wallpaper paste. In my first two years of school, it wasn’t uncommon for my mother to spend weeks at a time working through the night to put up sliding glass doors in the living room or install a new fitted kitchen. It also wasn’t uncommon for me to fall asleep in the middle of lessons, and I was almost put in the remedial class because my teacher, Mrs. Sparks, seemed to think this indicated that I might be, as she put it, “a little on the slow side.” Fortunately, by the time I entered the third year my mother had completed her renovations. I was able to get a good night’s sleep, and my performance at school improved.

My mother, on the other hand, went through what she and my father came to refer to as one of her “bad patches.” With no more home improvements to work on, she seemed to lose all sense of purpose. It was a strange and dramatic transformation. One week she was hauling child-size stones from the local gardening shop so that she could make the patch of lawn in front of our house into a Japanese rock garden; the next she was spending hours at a time sitting at the kitchen table, staring into space. The only thing she seemed to care about was listening to the Jimmy Young and Terry Wogan shows on Radio 2. The house reverberated with the djs’ bouncy voices and the Engelbert Humperdinck, Val Doonican, and Andy Williams songs they played throughout the day. It was around this time that she first began mentioning the possibility of being taken off to Delapole.

I remembered vividly the first afternoon I came home from school to find the house cold and still. It was January, the sky was filled with inky clouds, and dusk had already fallen. I had trudged home in my duffle coat and Wellington boots through snow that lay trampled and dirty on the pavements and was starting to freeze over into a layer of gray ice. A group of older boys had pelted me with snowballs that were hard as stones, and the back of my head was still aching from one that had hit me there. I had been crying, as much from anger and humiliation as from the pain, and the tears stung my cold cheeks with sudden heat.

“Mum,” I called as I pushed my way through the front door and into a hall that was almost as cold as the air outside and far darker than the premature evening sky. “Mum.” My voice echoed through the house. It felt hollow and unoccupied, and it was hard to imagine that this was the same place in which I had gobbled down hot porridge that morning while my father slurped his tea and my mother methodically scraped burned toast over the sink. I walked to the foot of the stairs and noticed the