Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,173

Let me ride up on my big white horse and rescue your big fat beautiful arse….’” She turned to the boys and cackled. Then she put her hands on her hips and whipped back to face me. “Too bad you’re not going to see her again, isn’t it?”

I frowned. What was she talking about?

“Yeah, bet you didn’t know that, did you?” She flicked back her ponytail with a toss of her head. “Hah! So much for all your loveydovey-lezzie letters. She’s cleared off with Stan.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s left home. Buggered off. Gone.”

Surely Tracey was lying. It would be just like her to want to see me suffer at the thought of Amanda running off with Stan Heaphy. “I don’t believe you,” I said.

Tracey shrugged. “Believe what you want. See if I care. I’m sorry she broke your little lezzie heart, but what I’m saying’s true. She went on a school trip but she sneaked off, met up with Stan. Cleared off with him, she did. Left a note for the teacher, and another for my mum.”

I thought back to that enormous buckled suitcase Amanda had hauled to the bus stop, how she’d seemed so intense when she said goodbye to me before getting on the bus.

“I’m bloody glad she’s gone. She’s sixteen—she doesn’t need anybody’s permission. And, you ask me, she’d better not come back. If she does, my dad will give her a bloody good belting again. She never got on with him anyway, was always aggravating him. She thought she was badly done to, but you ask me, she deserved every bloody smack she got.”

As I looked at Tracey, her face jubilant and flaming, I remembered the first time I’d met her, standing in front of that neat little house among all those other neat little houses, the rows of identical windows, the brightly painted doors. I thought of Tracey’s mother in her apron, the smell of fresh-baked cakes, the glamorous photographs on the wall. And I thought of Amanda telling me there were a lot of things more important than appearances.

“Where did they go?” I asked.

“Timbuktu, for all I care.”

I imagined Amanda clinging to Stan on his motorbike, her enormous suitcase strapped on the back as they raced along an unwavering straight thread of narrow road. I imagined her helmetless, her bright blond hair streaming behind her, her chin leaning on Stan’s shoulder as she stared, unblinking, into the future, into what lay ahead. And I imagined myself standing at the roadside, watching as they became ever distant, until they disappeared into the landscape, until they were just a tiny speck against the asphalt’s gray.

“What, you going to cry now your lezzie friend has left you?” Tracey sneered. “Or maybe you should jump off a cliff, try to drown yourself again?”

Beside her, the boys continued giggling and shoving, but now I saw that they were only noise. And Tracey, though she could puff herself up until she was enormous and frightening, really, she was like a balloon expanding. I realized then that we were all like that, our skin only a thin membrane of protection for all the secrets we held inside.

I took a couple of steps toward her, so that I was only inches from her face. “Shut your face, Tracey,” I said. “I’m sick and tired of listening to the bloody rubbish that comes out of your big mouth.” Then I pushed past her and the little bevy of boys, to take a seat on the bench while I waited for the bus to arrive.

I SAT NEXT TO Dizzy on the bus and in most of my lessons. During break time and at school dinner, we met up with Malcolm, and the three of us sat together. It wasn’t easy to continue our conversations amid the laughter and whispers and occasional paper pellets, the insults tossed down corridors and echoing against the classroom walls. But somehow we managed it. And though the day passed with glacial slowness, the last lesson of the day came around.

“Are you all right, Jesse?” Malcolm asked me as we made our way to English, the only lesson that the two of us shared.

“I don’t know,” I said as I heard a group of third-year girls giggling behind us and a chant of “lesby-friend, lesby-friend” coming from a couple of boys peering out of an open classroom door.

It wasn’t just the taunting. It was the stunning knowledge that Amanda was gone, and that while I’d been writing letters filled with