Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,47
trawlerman who’d spent thirty years going out on deep-sea fishing boats for three weeks at a time to trawl for cod. He had a raw, gravelly voice and a face that looked as if it had seen the kind of weather that was common off Iceland, with skin as gnarled as old leather, lines worn by salt and gales and one-hundred-foot waves. “He must have raked in a fortune over the years,” my mother had said. “Earned good money on them fishing boats back then, they did. But the stupid sod drank and gambled it all away. Sent your poor grandma Bennett to an early grave.” I’d never met Grandma Bennett; she died two weeks after my parents were married. Their wedding photographs contained the last pictures of her—a dumpy, frizzy-haired woman with a tight-lipped smile that stretched like an inked-in line across her face. From these photographs, I surmised that she was as pleased about my father’s marriage to my mother as Granddad Bennett was.
When we arrived, we found Granddad sitting in his cramped living room, ensconced in the winged armchair that stood a little more than arm’s length from the television. He wore a white shirt, open to show sprouts of gray chest hair poking through the holes of his string vest, and red braces that bowed outward over his expansive belly and held his baggy trousers high above his waist. We had traipsed single file down the narrow hallway of his two-up, two-down terraced house, not bothering to knock before we let ourselves in, because Granddad wouldn’t have heard us anyway, since he was rather deaf. He had been in the navy during the war, and his left ear was damaged when his ship hit a mine and sank. In recent years, his disability had worsened considerably, but he refused to wear a hearing aid. Whenever someone suggested that he might benefit from one, he’d respond, “That water was cold enough to freeze the bollocks off a brass monkey, and I managed to survive eight hours in it. I’ve lived through worse things than you can imagine. So I’m not about to start wearing some prissy bloody hearing aid.” I failed to see the logic of this argument. I did suspect, however, that he enjoyed being able to tune in and out of any surrounding conversation and sometimes rather liked making people repeat three or four times what they were saying to him.
“Hello, Dad,” my father said, bellowing loud enough to be heard above the blaring television. “Just thought we’d stop round for a visit, see how you’re getting on.”
“I’m all right,” Granddad bellowed back. “You’ve got no reason to worry about me. I’m watching the sports.” He waved us vaguely toward the settee and the other armchair across the room. “It’s a right good match, this.” He picked up the roll-up cigarette that lay in the ashtray balanced on the arm of his chair, took a long, audible drag, and turned back to the television, where a shifting pile of black and red–jerseyed men were scrambling and kicking at one another in what appeared to have started out as a rugby scrum.
“So who’s winning, then?” my father yelled, taking a seat in the second armchair. My mother, Tracey, and I sat down on the settee, our bodies pressed unwillingly together on the uncomfortable and uneven cushions.
“Eh?” Granddad said, looking quizzically over at my father.
“I said, who’s winning?” As he shouted across the living room, my mother closed her eyes, pursed her lips, and shook her head.
“They are,” Granddad answered. “But don’t you worry,” he said, giving us all a reassuring nod. “We’re going to catch up soon.”
I was far from clear who the “we” in this particular match might be. England, perhaps? Yorkshire? Hull Kingston Rovers? When I noticed the vague expression on my father’s face, I realized that he was probably just as clueless. He’d never been much of a rugby fan. I spent several frustrating minutes trying to work out exactly who the opposing teams were, but with no scores announced and the commentator speaking in unintelligible rugby-related jargon, I was having no success. Tracey seemed indifferent to the game itself, but she kept leaning into me and making remarks about how good-looking some of the players were, what firm legs they had, and how she wouldn’t mind finding herself in the middle of one of their scrums. I studied the players she admired, trying to create within myself a similar enthusiasm for their