Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,18
Next time,” she said, pushing clenched fists into her apron pockets, a fiery glint in her eye. “Next time I just know I’m going to win. You can count on that, Jesse.”
She seemed so convinced that it was just a matter of time before she won the national jackpot that I began to fantasize about what we could do with that ten-thousand-pound prize. Walking to school in the rain, I’d daydream about the luxurious holidays we’d take or the brand-new car my father would chauffeur us around in. On weekends, I’d spend whole afternoons leafing through the old Littlewoods catalog that Auntie Mabel had given me, picking out clothes and furniture, keeping a running total of how much I was spending so I knew exactly what that amount of money could buy.
Unfortunately, however, it wasn’t a triumphant jackpot win that brought an end to my mother’s bingo obsession. After talking with Mrs. Brockett one morning, my father discovered that my mother had taken to playing three or four cards at every game, an expensive habit through which she’d managed to completely deplete my parents’ Post Office savings account, and had taken to using a large chunk of the housekeeping money—which accounted for the rather skimpy dinners that had recently made an unwelcome reappearance in our household.
Much to my disappointment, the bingo (and our chance at attaining instant wealth) ended. I found myself again trudging without any distraction through gray blustery streets, and instead of compiling lists of what we might buy from the Littlewoods catalog I browsed for hours at a time through the women’s underwear section, inexplicably fascinated by those coy models in their pointy bras, paneled corsets, and silky black knickers. My mother was less easily diverted. At first, she tried to convince my father that she could tone down her obsession and go only once a week to try for the national jackpot on Friday nights. But soon she began trying to sneak out to the bingo hall on other nights, only to be pursued by my father. For a while, it was almost routine for them to have an enormous, screaming fight in the middle of the street, much to the amusement of the neighbors. “Beats bloody Coronation Street,” I heard Mrs. Brockett comment over the other side of her wall to our next-door-but-one neighbor. “Ought to start their own soap opera, that family.”
Finally, my mother was defeated. But instead of taking up another hobby, as my father had been suggesting, she simply stopped doing anything at all, sinking almost immediately into another of her bad patches, far longer and worse than the last.
PERHAPS THERE WAS method in my father’s madness, after all. Maybe my mother, unable to bear the decrepitude of our new home in Midham, would spring into action and throw herself into its restoration. But, as I looked up at a crack in the ceiling that ran through the plaster like a deep river, opening into a wide delta that ended above the fireplace, I couldn’t help thinking he was taking a rather dubious gamble. “Why didn’t you buy a new house?” I asked.
As soon as my father announced our move, I’d begun hoping for a brand-new brick semidetached house with a neat square of lawn in the front and borders filled with pansies in the back. I’d seen pictures of such houses on television, and traveled past rows upon rows of them when we’d driven through the outskirts of Hull. I was convinced that a house like that would solve all our problems. I could come home from school and enter the basking warmth of central heating and double glazing to be greeted by my mother, who, just like the women on the Fairy Snow adverts, would be calm and smiling and made happy by a clean wash and a sparkling home.
“This is new,” my father said, smiling so wide that his dimples showed. They made him look like a little boy, and I wished I could be swept up in his enthusiasm. “It’s new to us,” he added. “And what we don’t like we can change. It will give all of us a whole new start.”
“Yes,” I said dully, thinking that at least with a different school to go to I might have a chance to make some friends. I’d have no history. No one would know that my mother had been in the nuthouse or that I’d made up stupid stories to try to hide that fact. And I wouldn’t