Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,156

one in the morning, my mother had started assembling her new outfit, the sewing machine roaring below. Had the house been completely silent, however, I probably would have found it impossible to drop off.

My mind roared almost as wildly as my mother’s sewing machine. First, of course, there were the thoughts of my abandoned satchel. When I wasn’t silently berating myself for putting all my letters to Amanda in it, I was raging at myself for leaving it behind. Then I would wonder where it was, and who might have it. For seconds, my mind would soar on the hope that a stranger had found it, that he or she would leave it securely buckled, and simply hand it in to the school secretary the next day. Then my thoughts would take a flailing dive, as I was sure that Stan Heaphy had found it and that he’d spent the entire evening amusing himself by reading every one of my letters. And then—and this was the most terrible thought of all—I’d imagine him showing the letters to Amanda, and how, then, she would really hate me. She might be able to brush away what it meant when I’d tried to kiss her, but she couldn’t ignore all those terrible confessions on the page.

I knew the satchel had been retrieved by someone, because as soon as I returned home from Reatton I’d made my father drive up to Liston Comprehensive to see if we could find it. Though he’d complained all the way there that he was missing a “damn good documentary about Tricky Dick and that bloody Watergate what-have-you,” he actually helped me search for the satchel along the grass verge outside the school. It was nowhere to be seen.

As I lay in bed, when my thoughts weren’t taken up with the whereabouts of my satchel, I was thinking how foolish I’d been to write those letters in the first place, and how, more than ever, I wished I’d simply been able to erase my feelings about Amanda from my mind. And, when I wasn’t thinking that, I was mulling over what an idiot I’d been to clobber Stan and kick Tracey for the sake of one of the most loathed pariahs in the school.

Now that bright euphoria I’d felt as the bus pulled away from the gates simply felt like another symptom of my idiocy. I hadn’t been brave; I’d only been stupid. I tossed and turned for hours, until my mother finally finished her sewing and light began seeping, wan and gray, through my curtains. I considered getting up, but, finally exhausted, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew I opened my eyes to see that the clock on my bedside table said a quarter past eight. In my tumult the previous night, I’d forgotten to set the alarm; I’d slept in and I’d missed my bus.

“Dad, Dad,” I said, scurrying into the kitchen, still in my pajamas. “Can you give me a lift to school?”

Amid the chaos of the wedding preparations and the leftovers from my mother’s late-night sewing, he had cleared a little scrap of space for himself at the kitchen table. He was reading the previous day’s Hull Daily Mail, a teacup and a plate of toast set before him. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jesse,” he groaned from behind the paper. “I’m not looking for that bloody satchel again. If we didn’t find it last night, we won’t find it this morning. Besides, I’ve got to get to work.” He crunched the newspaper down in front of him. “Somebody’s got to make a living round here, you know.” He looked at the ceiling, in the direction of Uncle Ted’s snores.

“But, Dad, I need a lift, I—”

“And I can’t be late, because your mother wants me home early tonight,” he continued, ignoring my pleading look. “Says she needs me to help her arrange the furniture in the tent. Honestly, I don’t know how many bloody people we’ve got coming to this thing. Must be a hundred and fifty at least. I think Mabel’s invited her entire bloody bingo club. And Frank seems to have more of a tribe than a family.”

I tried again to interrupt him. “Dad, I—”

But he kept on going. Apparently, he felt the need to get it off his chest. “Honestly, it looks more like a bloody circus than a wedding out there.” He nodded toward the window and the huge billowing marquee that covered almost half the lawn.