Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,28

boots slapping against the street. They made spattering explosions of water as they hit the shiny black tarmac.

She closed her umbrella and climbed into the car. Within seconds, the car squealed away. As they passed, Amanda rolled down the window and waved. “I hope I didn’t get you in too much trouble!” she yelled, her voice fading in a long arc of sound as they sped down the street.

“I don’t care,” I called back. And, really, I didn’t.

CHAPTER FIVE

A MONTH AFTER THE MOVE, WE WERE IN THE MIDST OF A SUMMER that brought almost as much rain as it did sunshine. Although my father had managed to complete several makeshift repairs, there was still a bucket on the stairway and a leak from the bathroom ceiling into the bathtub. He seemed to have lost all enthusiasm for his planned renovations, probably because my mother, contrary to his hopes, had failed to find an interest that would propel her back to life. Almost every night he muttered about how he’d soon get round to fixing something, but instead he spent most of his time hidden behind the Hull Daily Mail or yelling at the BBC News. He even yelled about the epidemic of Dutch elm disease, the blight that was killing off millions of elm trees all over Britain and, I realized, explained the dead or dying trees I had noticed patterning the landscape around Midham.

If my mother happened to be in the room, she nodded vigorously at my father’s outbursts. But most of the time she was off somewhere else, pacing the bare boards of the upstairs bedrooms or wandering the back garden in the rain. I tried to keep track of her movements, but it wasn’t always easy. Often, I’d simply sit on the settee in the living room, anxious and afraid, knowing that I really had no idea how to stop her trying to kill herself or being taken off to Delapole again. Finally, tired of worrying, I decided to focus on something I could control.

“Mum, we’ve got to start unpacking,” I announced one weekday afternoon. After searching the house, I’d finally found her in the bathroom, peering into the mirror above the sink as she plucked her eyebrows and ate a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

“I don’t see why,” she said, her breath clouding the mirror as she leaned toward it, tweezers in one hand, sandwich in the other. As I watched her, I wondered if it was possible to inflict any significant self-injury with a pair of eyebrow tweezers. “What do we need to unpack for?”

We were hardly more moved in than on the day we’d arrived. There were boxes everywhere, in leaning piles against the walls or stacked haphazardly in the middle of almost every room. Nothing had been labeled, and it was impossible to find anything. I felt too overwhelmed to try to unpack while also trying to take care of my mother, but if I got her to help me I could do both things at once, and perhaps forcing her into some activity would improve her mood.

“We’ve been here long enough,” I said, trying not to wince as she yanked out another hair. “It’s time we settled in.”

“Well, I never wanted to move here in the first place. It was all your father’s idea.” She turned around and took a huge bite of her sandwich. Brown chunks of Branston Pickle dropped onto the floor.

“Come on, Mum. If we do it together, it’ll be much quicker. What do you think?”

“Oh, all right.”

I was delighted. I hadn’t expected her to be so amenable. Unfortunately, my excitement didn’t last very long, since I soon realized that my mother’s idea of unpacking involved carrying each item—a book, a cup, or one of the menagerie of glass animals she had made a shortlived but nevertheless exhaustive hobby of collecting—singly to its designated place. I had never seen anyone move so slowly. By the end of the day, when I had managed to empty more than half a dozen boxes, my mother had unpacked one. “Make us a cup of tea, could you, love?” she said, dropping into one of the armchairs shortly before my father was due to return home from work. “I’m jiggered.”

The following day, she refused to help at all, saying that all the work she did the previous day had strained her back. She lay on the settee watching television, and when I started to unpack another box, pulling plates and cups from scrunched-up newspaper, she protested