Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,58

dazzling myself with the bright morning light.

“Bloody hell, Jesse,” my mother said, pulling the bedclothes over her head. “Shut those curtains. You’ll send me blind.”

“It’s time you got up,” I declared. “You can’t spend the rest of your life in bed.”

“Who says I can’t?” she snapped, her voice stifled by the bedclothes. “It’s my life, I’ll do as I bloody well please.”

“You’ll end up with bedsores,” I said. This was true—I’d read about it in an article in one of my mother’s Woman’s Realm magazines about a woman who was in a coma for eight years before she woke up. “And your legs will stop working.” This was also true, or at least I thought it was. I seemed to recall reading how they had to keep moving the woman’s legs or the muscles would turn to jiggly slabs of fat.

“I don’t care,” my mother said, hiking the blankets farther over her head.

“Of course you care. If you can’t walk, I’ll have to push you around in a wheelchair. And you won’t be able to work on the garden anymore.”

“Hmmph …” She pulled the covers down, so that I could see one eye peering at me. “I don’t have the energy to take care of a garden. I don’t have the energy for anything.”

This was my opening. “Well, if you got some food inside you, Mum, don’t you think you’d feel much better?”

Her eye stared at me, unmoving, glassy, like a marble.

“And I was just thinking that if I went and got you some of your favorites—you know, made you some cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and bought you a packet of Mr. Kipling cream cakes …”

“Mr. Kipling’s?” She shifted her head, so that I could see both of her eyes now. They seemed to hold a slight glimmer.

“Yes, Mr. Kipling’s. You know how they always cheer you up.” I beamed, hoping to shift some of the jaunty hopefulness in my words into her.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, letting out a long, hefty sigh. “To be honest with you, love, I’m not sure there’s anything that could cheer me up right now. It’ll take more than a packet of Mr. Kipling’s.”

“I could get you the vanilla slices or, if you like, the chocolate éclairs.” I could feel my cheeriness slipping.

“Well … I suppose I could …” My mother raised herself onto the pillow and I felt my hope rise with her.

“So what do you want, then, vanilla slices or chocolate éclairs?” I pumped the enthusiasm back into my voice.

“I’ll have the vanilla slices,” she said, pushing the blankets from her chest to reveal her yellow flannel nightdress and her bare arms, still tan from spending all that time out in the garden. “No, I tell you what, why don’t you get the slices and the chocolate éclairs. After all, I haven’t had a decent meal in days.”

Ten minutes later, having raided the sparse contents of my piggy bank, I was out the door and on my way to retrieve my mother’s beloved cakes. Of course, I couldn’t go to the Midham Co-op. I’d have to go to the next nearest Co-op, two miles away in Reatton-on-Sea.

I pulled my bicycle out of the garden shed and set out. It was a beautiful day, warm and breezy, the sky pale blue, the clouds huge snow-white cumulus that patterned the fields with fat, ever-shifting shadows. As I cycled along the winding, narrow road that led to the coast, I felt exhilarated by the wind and the sun on my face, the steady pumping of my legs against the pedals. I was almost able to leave my worries behind as I breathed deep and hard, took in the smells—earth and grass and the drifting perfume of summer flowers and, when I was almost there, the briny ripe smell of the sea. And then I saw it, a line of dark blue horizon against the paler sky. I pedaled faster as I came to a slight hill, huffing upward and then, after reaching its crest, freewheeling downward until I reached my destination.

Despite its name, the buildings that made up the village of Reatton-on-Sea weren’t right on the coast, and I was a little disappointed to realize that, so far back from the cliffs, it wouldn’t be Reatton-in-Sea anytime soon. It was, though, a little more lively than Midham. The village’s little high street curved away from the main road in a meandering S, and, in addition to the Co-op, there was a pub, a launderette, a post