Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,168

another tear rolled down her face, she let out a soft laugh. “Me? I’m your grandma, darling. I’ve come back from Australia. Looks like you could have used me a lot earlier. Still, better late than never, eh?”

She sniffed and I examined her face more closely, thinking back to all those photographs she’d sent us from Australia. But she didn’t look familiar, and I could discern no family resemblance in her face. Except for her deep tan, she looked just like any other old lady, with permed white hair and a lined and saggy neck.

“You came for Mabel’s wedding,” I said. “It was supposed to happen….” I realized that I had no idea what day it was, whether I’d lain in this bed for a few hours or been here unconscious for days. I tried to push myself up off my hard little pillow to get a better view of the room. But my limbs felt pathetically weak, without substance, and every inch of my body ached. I could lift myself high enough only to see a long row of beds and the window, tall and many-paned, next to the bed opposite mine.

“No need to worry yourself, love,” Grandma said. She smoothed back the hair at the side of my face. “You just lie down and rest.”

I fell back onto my pillow and looked at the distant white ceiling.

I WOKE AGAIN TO the sound of rain, an insistent metallic patter, the beginning of a storm on a caravan’s roof. I opened my eyes and was surprised to see openness instead of a cramped interior. When I turned my head, I saw an old lady knitting something in pastel pink, the click-click-click of the needles just like falling rain. For a moment, I wondered if she was making wedding serviettes. Then I remembered that the wedding was off.

“Are you my grandma?” I asked, faintly recalling a previous conversation.

“That’s right, darling,” she said, looking over at me and dropping the knitting into her lap.

“Oh,” I said, glad that I could at least remember this while everything else seemed a shifting blur. “How did I get here?”

“In an ambulance, love. From Reatton, from the beach.”

“But who? How?” I was confused. I knew that I had stepped into waves, that I had been pulled under, toward all those buildings and bodies consumed by the sea. “I thought I … I saw a ghost. I saw Malcolm. He was taking me with him … he—”

“Malcolm? Is that the stringy lad that lives at the caravan park?”

I nodded as I remembered the cliff devoured by the sea and the blank place where his caravan had stood.

“Well, I don’t know about any ghost, darling,” Grandma said. “But Malcolm was the one who pulled you out. He said you put up such a struggle that he thought he might not be able to bring you in. He was worried that you both might drown. But you let him help you, eventually. I suppose with all them pills and what-not you’d taken, you didn’t have that much fight left.”

“He saved me?”

“That’s right, love. He saved you.”

“So he’s alive?”

“Well, he was last time I saw him.” She squinted at a tiny-faced gold watch on her wrist. “About an hour ago, at about half past five. Poor little thing, he was ever so worried about you. He wanted to come to see you. But the nurses wouldn’t let him. It’s only family members allowed right now. But, as much as his dad wanted him to go home, he wouldn’t leave until he knew for certain that you were going to be fine.”

“Oh,” I said, remembering how I’d thrashed and kicked and gulped in all that seawater, how I’d known, as I felt Malcolm’s ghost dragging me under with him, that I really didn’t want to die.

I FOUND I RATHER liked being in the hospital. The nurses were very nice to me, smiling and speaking softly; they pressed warm fingers to my wrist to take my pulse and tucked my covers tight so I felt swaddled, like a baby, in my bed. And though she was only vaguely familiar, it was reassuring to have Grandma Pearson sitting at my bedside, a solid presence that I kept coming back to as I drifted in and out of sleep. I was also pleased when I found out that I wasn’t in Delapole but in Bleakwick General Hospital. Most of all, I liked that, exiled there, I was capable of lying back and keeping my