Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,5

off the rest of us. Come the revolution, we’ll make her clean toilets. That’ll wipe that bloody condescending look off her face.”

That evening, the headline was an IRA bomb in London, and my father was unusually subdued by the pictures of the burning skeleton of a building, the stricken faces of the bleeding survivors, the dazed ambulance men. “What’ll that do to solve anybody’s problems?” he said quietly as he shifted in his chair.

While my father sipped his tea and watched the rest of the news, I turned to the back page of the newspaper to find out what was on television that night. “Dad,” I said when the news was over and I knew he could be interrupted. “There’s a documentary on BBC Two about Spain at eight o’clock. Is it all right if we watch it?”

“Don’t see why not,” he said.

And so that night I embarked upon the research that would enable me to write letters from my mother to me. I sat in front of the television with a notebook scribbling down what I thought were pertinent pieces of information, like the population of Barcelona, the date Gaudi first began construction of his strange gingerbread castle of a cathedral, the number of matadors injured each year in the bull ring, a few relevant words of Spanish—señora, peso, pension, General Franco.

I liked the idea of my mother visiting Spain. It was where Julie Fraser had been for her holiday last year. She’d returned to school with her hair sun-bleached and her skin turned a deep, reddish tan. In lessons, I sat as close to her as I could, eavesdropping as she extolled the “sexy Spanish waiters” and the all-night discos. “The women go topless on the beaches there, you know,” she said, giggling and peeling another piece of flaking, sunburned skin from her arm.

As I listened, I’d found myself imagining what it might be like to lie on some sunny Spanish beach next to Julie. We’d be best friends so comfortable with each other that we’d take off our tops so we wouldn’t have to worry about tan lines. Later, to cool off, we’d run into the warm blue water, where we’d swim and splash until we tired ourselves out.

“What the bloody hell are you staring at?” Julie had said when she caught me watching her tell her friends, yet again, how she’d been served fried octopus one night for dinner and it was the most disgusting thing she’d ever eaten in her life.

“Nothing,” I’d replied, pitching my gaze toward the geography textbook on my desk. For the rest of the lesson, while I attempted to reproduce a diagram of the East Yorkshire water table, I pondered the unfairness of a world in which Julie Fraser got to fly to the Costa del Sol for two weeks while the only holiday my family had taken was to a caravan park in Bridlington. There, our days had been punctuated by pulling out and putting away the narrow bed on which I slept that ingeniously converted into the dining table, and searching for ways to occupy our time in that confined, Formica-filled space as the rain poured down in sheets outside. While my father and I had tried to make the best of things by playing Snakes and Ladders, Ludo, and Monopoly, my mother had spent her time cleaning the caravan from top to bottom. She scrubbed around the tiny stainless-steel sink with a toothbrush, scoured the pots and pans with a Brillo pad, and mopped and re-mopped the kitchen floor with water she’d boiled on the foldaway stove. My father and I found ourselves soaked in the scents of Ajax, Pine-Sol, and bleach, and were finally driven out to the amusement arcade when my mother decided that she needed to take the furniture apart. “I bet it’s been years since anybody’s thought to take a scrubbing brush down there,” she said, tossing the cushions over her shoulder. “At least the people who come here after us won’t have to feel like they’re spending their holidays in a cesspool of somebody else’s filth.”

I thought my mother might rather like Spain. It rarely rained, and since she was traveling on a cruise ship there’d be plenty of people to do all the cleaning. She wouldn’t have to spend her time worrying about dirt and germs. Instead, she could happily sit on deck, taking in the Mediterranean sun and admiring the beautiful coastline. She’d disembark on the southern coast, where she’d take