Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,166

been stealing? What’s he been defrauding?”

“It’s both of them that’s being charged, Miss Pearson,” the policeman said solemnly. “They’ve been stealing Tuggles sausages.”

AS SOON AS THE police were gone, I left Mabel smoking and pacing the hallway, ran upstairs to my bedroom, gathered up a few things, and put them into a duffel bag that I slung across my shoulder. Then I galloped down the stairs again, launched myself past Mabel, and out the front door.

It was a different world now. The storm had transformed everything. The hedgerows were battered and the fields beaten. The wheat, silvered with rain, lay flat like the fur of a damp animal. The road was pocked with wide, shimmering puddles and strewn with debris—ragged leaves, broken branches. Huge shape-shifting clouds, dense and gray at their bottoms, rolled across the sky. Next to where our driveway opened out into the road, a tree had fallen, blocking one lane of the narrow little thoroughfare. It was one of the dead elms, stark and bare, a felled corpse sent sprawling. As I made my way around it, I noticed, in the fine fingers of its upper branches, a pink serviette splayed on the ground, tattered, streaked with dirt, and darkly wet.

I walked purposefully, breathing in the cool, stark air. The wind, far less powerful than during the night, but still strong, was coming off the coast. As I moved against it, I felt myself pushing into a force that was so much larger than me, urging it to welcome me into its arms. And while my body moved forward, I let my thoughts skim over the bedraggled landscape. After such destruction, it seemed a miracle that the world remained intact, resilient. I only wished that I could say the same of myself. Instead, I felt undone.

I had tried so hard. Tried to make a new life for myself, tried to fit in. Tried to take care of my mother, to rein in her maniacal energy, to keep her afloat. I had tried, too, to love someone. And, finally, when pushed to it, I had even tried to stop brutality and bullying, to stand up, to speak out. I’d failed in all of it. Instead of making myself loved and popular and normal, I’d become the worst thing there was. At school, I was a “lezzie,” a “homo,” a “pervert,” but at home I was something even more dreadful. I had said the cruelest thing I could think of to my mother. I had told her that I wished that she were dead. And I’d told her knowing full well the state she’d worked herself into over Mabel’s wedding. I might as well have lifted that sledgehammer and smashed the walls and doors and furniture myself.

IT WAS STILL EARLY when I reached Reatton-on-Sea. The little high street was empty, the shops still closed, the only movement the squeaky flapping of a dislodged metal sign above the amusement arcade. I saw no one on the road that led to the cliff edge. The only sounds were the wind and the roar of the waves. The sea was a strip of slate gray, widening as I came closer, and flecked with white ruffles, like shreds of lace. I didn’t see the dramatic change in the shape of the cliffs until I was almost at the end of the road. It was only then that I noticed that the jutting little peninsula at the edge of the caravan park was no longer there. Where that tongue of cliff had stuck out, there was nothing more than air. Malcolm’s battered caravan was gone.

My duffel bag bounced hard against my back and its stringy strap bit into my shoulder as I ran past the entrance of Holiday Haven. I sped across the sodden grass, splashing through puddles, sliding over greasy mud, until I stopped as close as I dared get to the cliff edge, to the place where that peninsula had been. Then I craned my head to peer over the rim, to see where the sea had ripped the land away. The clay, dark and moist, seemed poured downward, like suddenly frozen liquid. At the bottom, it was held in the tumultuous caress of the waves.

The sight finally made me certain, tipped me, too, over the edge. As I gazed down at the place where Malcolm and his family must have plunged to in the middle of the night, I knew what I had to do. I had come looking for him,