Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,30

one. If not, maybe you should go back to the loony bin, where you belong.”

For several seconds, neither of my parents said anything, and all of us were hurled into a taut silence. I looked at their faces, which were utterly still, as if they had been slammed against thick panes of glass. No one moved. No one said anything. I felt an icy dread spread from my stomach throughout my body. Then the newsreader said chirpily, “And now on to news at home,” and the spell was broken. My father blinked, my mother’s lips started to twist and tighten. I tried to imagine myself shrinking.

“Did you hear that?” she screamed. “Did you bloody well hear that?”

My father sighed and pushed himself out of his armchair. He walked toward me.

“You’d better teach her a bloody lesson!” my mother yelled.

“Don’t you ever talk to your mother like that,” he said, his tone so dull and flat that I could barely hear him above the sounds of the television. And then he hit me. A single, hard slap across my cheek that sent me reeling backward into the wall. I saw light and crimson. I tasted the stickiness of my own saliva. I felt the sting of skin hitting skin, the slam of my backbone against the wall. “Now get upstairs, before I give you a damn good hiding,” he said, already making his way back to his chair.

“I’M GOING OUT.” It was early the next morning and I’d been standing in the hallway, waiting for my father to come out of the bathroom. He’d emerged in a cloud of thick white steam. “I’m not looking after her all the time.” I gave a disdainful nod toward the door of my parents’ bedroom, where my mother was still sleeping. “It’s just not fair,” I concluded, folding my arms and pressing them hard against my chest.

“I know, love. I know.” He put a hand up to his damp, flushed cheek—the same gesture I had made after he had hit me the previous evening. The movement made my fury at him burn all over again.

“I don’t care if she ends up in the hospital. I don’t care if she goes away for the rest of her life. Why couldn’t they just have kept her there?” If she’d stayed in Delapole, the doctors and nurses would have to watch her. I could get on with my life without having to worry all the time. I could have kept on imagining for myself a breezy world-cruising mother.

“Now, love, don’t go talking that way.” He looked nervously toward the bedroom door. “I know you don’t mean it.”

Perhaps I didn’t, but I was no longer sure. Right then, I would have done anything to live alone with my father, with his quiet predictability. The few times he’d hit me, it had been only at my mother’s prompting. “That child needs to be taught a lesson,” she’d say, and then my father would dutifully deliver the blow.

“Look,” he said, “why don’t you let me get dressed and I’ll come downstairs in a minute. We can have a little chat before I leave.”

“All right,” I said, determined not to be talked out of my decision. I couldn’t bear even one more day confined there with my mother. Besides, ever since I’d met up with Amanda, I’d been itching to get out and see if I could bump into her again.

“That’s better,” he said. “Be a good girl and go and make a pot of tea, can you?”

He opened the bathroom door again, and I found myself immersed in steam, the lathery smells of soap and shaving lotion. I stood for a moment, my eyes closed, breathing them in, caught in a sudden stream of memory, remembering how, when I was small, I loved to watch my father shave. It was like witnessing a special, one-person ceremony, and I’d try every morning to wake up early enough so that I could follow him into the bathroom, sit down on the closed lid of the toilet, and take the whole thing in. I couldn’t wake early enough every day, but when I did I’d feel an elated, nervous excitement as I tugged on my father’s paisley-patterned pajamas. “Can I watch, Daddy?” I’d say.

“‘Course you can, pet,” he’d reply, closing the door behind me, sealing us together in those scents.

There was something about the measured precision it took, his moving the razor through the soapy white foam, skin held taut and still as