Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,172

and we’d sit together in the kitchen, or, if the weather was nice, we’d go into the garden and talk until the long June evenings descended into dark. There were no highs, no lows, no screaming fits or pits of hopeless desperation. But during all this time the dread of returning to Liston Comprehensive hung there, a lurking menace in my mind. I could imagine it all so clearly—the trail of titters I’d leave behind me as I walked through the playground, the snarled comments in the corridors, the gangs of vicious, angry girls. I could clearly hear the choruses of “lezzie” and “loony” as I pushed my way through jostling crowds in the cloakrooms. Even the teachers would look at me with sneering pity—the pathetic case who’d written secret love letters to an older girl student, and who’d tried to kill herself when she was found out.

Finally, after I’d been at home for three weeks, my father told me that I had to return to school. “But I can’t,” I protested, unable to imagine leaving the refuge of our house. “I can’t go back.”

“You’ve got to, Jesse,” he said. “You’ve got no choice. The doctor only wrote you a sick note for three weeks, love. If you don’t go back, they’ll be sending the truant officer out.”

I WALKED ALONG the road into the village as if I were walking to my own funeral. For the first time since I’d woken at the hospital, I wondered if it might have been better if I had drowned. When I rounded the corner onto the high street, there was already a group gathered at the bus stop. I saw Tracey staring eagerly at me. The boys hovered around her, all elbows and knees, shoving and sputtering as they watched my approach.

“Hello, lezzie girl,” Tracey called when I was still several feet away. “Didn’t think we’d see you again. Heard you’d tried to walk on water. What, think you’re some kind of bloody saint? Too bad you didn’t realize that lezzies sink!”

The boys around her laughed, and one of them started chanting, “Saint Lezzie, Saint Lezzie.”

I’d been hoping that Dizzy would be at the bus stop, but more than anything I was also hoping to see Amanda. I’d been hoping to see her almost as soon as I woke at the hospital, hoping she’d show up among my little string of visitors. When Mabel swept into the ward, I’d peer around her, wanting to see Amanda in her wake. And when my father arrived I looked past him, wishing more than anything that she had tagged along. Even when Malcolm came to see me a second time, whisked into the ward by one of the silky-voiced nurses, I thought how perfect it would have been if Amanda accompanied him and I could lie there, basking in the attention of my newfound friend and the girl I still loved. After I’d been discharged, though I was soothed by the uneventful routine of my days, I kept looking out the window, yearning with an impossible ferocity for Amanda to appear at the end of our driveway and wave cheerily to me as she made her way to the house.

If she had come to see me, I’d know that she forgave me for writing all those things about her in my letters, that she cared that I had tried to drown myself, that, even if she didn’t return my feelings, she was glad that I was still alive. But, as the days and then weeks went by and I did not see her, I began to realize that perhaps she really did hate me for what I’d done. It was this I feared more than anything. When they came to visit, I wanted to ask Malcolm and Dizzy if they’d seen her, if she’d asked after me, but I couldn’t bring myself even to say her name. Now, as I approached our old meeting place, I felt hopeful once again. Even if she’d decided she hated me, I knew she would never be as cruel as Tracey.

“Looking for your little lezzie girlfriend, are you?” Tracey asked, apparently catching me glance toward the end of the street.

I’d been avoiding her eyes, but now I looked straight at her. She was simmering, energized. Her pupils shone like gleaming coals.

“‘Dear Amanda,’” she began, making her voice all soft and squeaky as she imitated writing in the air. “‘I love you soooo much. You are soooo wonderful. And sooo beautiful.