Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,163

to her ear where she’d failed to get the bleach all the way to the roots. I stood so close that our bodies were touching. Her breasts, unyielding in the pointy bra she wore under her yellow dress, pressed against my barely curved chest.

“You want to know a secret, Mum?” I asked, lowering my voice so it was just above a whisper, so that, against the backdrop of yowling wind, she’d be the only one to hear. My mother frowned, her eyes vague and distant, as she moved her head up and down in a jerky little nod. I leaned closer to her and spoke into her ear. “When they took you out of the house on that stretcher,” I said, “I wished that you’d really killed yourself.” I pushed out the words with a soft viciousness, enjoying the way they rolled, like the lines of a song, so easily off my tongue. “I still wish it now,” I said.

It was true, it was there inside me. It was complete and utter certainty. I wished they’d taken her off in that ambulance and never brought her back. Or, more accurately, I wished that Mrs. Brockett had never found her, that she’d been left to bleed slowly into the bath, and that I’d discovered her there when I came home from school, drained of life, made soft and wrinkled by the bloody water.

I pulled away slightly to look into her face, exhilarated. And then I let the words out slowly. “It would make me really happy if you were dead.”

For a moment, my mother’s expression flared with indignation. She took a couple of steps back, balled her hands into fists, and lifted them to her chest, like a boxer preparing to deliver a blow. But, in the next moment, she dropped them again, so that her arms flopped loose at her sides and her face fell slack. Then she staggered backward a few steps on her teetering heels before turning away from me to walk slowly down the hall.

WE DID OUR BEST to rescue the tent. Mabel, my father, and I battling the gale to reach the back garden, then struggling across the waterlogged lawn as the rain hit our faces like needles and the gale howled like something alive. But the huge marquee, broken free from several of its stakes now, reared and bucked like a liberated wild animal; it was like trying to pin a roaring elephant down. We could hardly hear one another; our voices were blown from us and drowned.

“It’s no good!” Mabel yelled, a few inches away from me, as the rope she’d been able to grab jerked away from her hand.

“I know!” I yelled back. Then both of us fought our way over to my father, who was clinging to the front flap of the tent and looked as if he might be tugged away and into the air at any moment.

“Come on, Mike!” Mabel shouted, pulling at him so that he loosened his grip and the fabric flew upward. “The bloody wedding’s off!”

We’d been working in the pale yellow light that shone from the windows of the house. As I turned and began making my way back to the house, I saw my mother watching us from the kitchen window. The next moment, all the lights went out and I was plunged into darkness.

I stood there, wavering in the wind, as I tried to get used to the dark. But the seconds went by, and in the stinging rain I could make out nothing but shadow outlines. The entire world seemed to have turned into looming silhouettes. From somewhere, rippling on the wind, I heard Mabel’s and my father’s voices. They were both calling out my name. I realized that I didn’t want to go to them, that I wanted to stay there, shivering and sodden, alone. I imagined the water seeping ever deeper into me, so that it would wash me clean, all the way down to my bones.

“Jesse!” It was my father. He had stumbled into me.

“Is that Jesse?” Mabel yelled. She was holding on to my father.

They both grabbed me and tried to pull me onward. I resisted.

“For God’s sake, Jesse!” Mabel cried. “We need to get inside!”

I let her tug me forward, joining her and my father to struggle toward the house.

It took us a long time to find our way to the door. But finally we got there, and as soon as my father turned the door handle the