Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,74
olds were dancing in a ring around a grinning, wide-eyed woman. My mother was watching Romper Room.
I walked over to her and dropped my satchel to the floor. It fell with a heavy thud. It was full of new exercise books, textbooks, my new timetable, and the year’s school dinner schedule. It contained a map of my life for the next ten months. I wanted to tell her about all of it. I wanted to talk to her about my day—Mr. Davies and his oversized stomach, Miss Nutall and her boring history lectures, my outstanding performance in maths, and, of course, the fascinating Ms. Hastings. But my mother didn’t care about any of this. She was more interested in watching children’s television.
“I made some new friends, Mum,” I persisted. “I had my school dinner with them, and we sat together in every lesson.” I wanted her to care, at least, that I was safe, that she didn’t need to worry about me the way I always needed to worry about her. But my mother said nothing. She lay across the settee, her face squished asymmetrical, pressed half flat against a cushion as she stared steadily at the jovial bustle on the television screen.
I stood over her, the solidity of my body blocking her view. “I said, I like my new school.”
Her lips parted slightly, she took in a breath, her eyelids quivered. Then she closed her eyes and exhaled. But she said nothing.
I felt the anger in me flare, like one of the brilliant fizzing fireworks set off on Bonfire Night. Dazzling, incandescent against the wintry darkness. “Say something!” I yelled. She opened her eyes, but still she remained silent. “Why can’t you even act like you bloody well care?”
I watched her face carefully, eager for her reaction, for a twitch of her lips, a jerk in the muscles under her eyes, a clenching fist, a hiss of fury as she rose to strike me. I wanted her to leap up, yell in my face, slap my arms and legs and cheeks, pull my hair until my scalp was burning. Then I could scream and cry and yell back. Pummel her flesh, feel the clash of my knuckles against her bone. Bruise her, mark her. Make her feel my anger instead of feeling nothing. Instead of lying there, dazed and utterly limp, a pathetic excuse for a mother.
But she didn’t jump up, nor did she hit me, nor did she yell. Instead, she turned her head, achingly slow, like the cogs in a flagging clockwork toy, until, after an age of waiting, her eyes finally met mine.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice a whisper in her throat. “I’m doing my best, love. I know you can’t tell. But, really, I am. And I’m sorry.”
The blistering conflagration inside me died, sputtering to nothing. It was as if I had been gearing up for a fight and my opponent had gone running down the road, out of sight. The least she could do was stand up to me, meet my anger with her own, let me have the satisfaction of battering myself against her.
I stared down at her. And I knew that the same loathing and disdain burned in my eyes that I had seen in the eyes of the children who had taunted me after she’d been taken to the hospital, who had mocked my pathetic lies about her cruise. “I don’t care if you’re sorry,” I said. “I don’t give a bloody damn.” I drew out the words, wrapping my lips and tongue around them, pushing all my energy into those long, wide sounds. I pulled back my foot, balancing one-legged for a moment as I imagined the hard, sharp toe of my shoe slamming into her cheek, knocking her head loose and unresisting against the cushions of the settee. Then, I let my foot fly, landing a fierce and almighty kick against my satchel. It skidded across the room, the unbuckled flap flying open and my new books and pens and pencils scattering over the floor like a body blown apart by an explosion. Then I turned on my heels and marched toward the door. When I looked back, my mother was staring at the television, expressionless again. I pulled open the door and let it slam behind me, hoping the shock of the noise penetrated her insides and took her breath away, the way a punch to her stomach would.