Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,75

I could hear the melodic rumble of the news announcer’s voice and then my father’s thunderous yells. As I sat there, my father’s voice reverberating through me, I understood his feelings of anger and futility, knowing that they were also my own. There was so much to rage at: the entire unfairness of the world. For my father it was the royal family and rampant inflation, factory closures, unemployment, the killing of innocent people in places like Northern Ireland and Vietnam. For me it was this ugly house, my mother’s utter inability to be the normal mother I longed for, and the fact that Amanda had spent her time after school snogging the awful Stan Heaphy.

But what was I expecting, really? My mother had never been the mother I wanted. And Amanda was far out of reach. Even if she decided tomorrow that she didn’t want to go out with Stan Heaphy, she’d doubtless take up with some other boy she’d kiss outside the school gates. She’d hardly start wanting to be my friend. She might like me enough to defend me from Tracey’s teasing, but she didn’t even want to sit with me on the bus ride to school. I was simply a girl she’d felt sorry for when she found me out in the rain and whose name she couldn’t remember, a girl she could order to rub suntan lotion over her back. It would make so much more sense if I could make myself stop thinking about her, if I could be infatuated with David Cassidy or one of the Bay City Rollers, if I could be like all the other girls. But clearly, and now more than ever, I knew that I was not.

I had finished my homework, doing my maths first because Tracey and the Debbies were relying on me to get the answers to them the next morning so they could copy them before the lesson later that day. And I had finished the assignment that Ms. Hastings set us, a story about ourselves, because, she’d told us, she wanted to know her students better. At first, when she’d told us about this homework, I’d been eager to get home and write about my interests in world exploration and all the fascinating things I’d discovered during my research on my mother’s cruise. But on the bus ride home, when I’d mentioned the assignment and Tracey declared that anyone who wanted Ms. Hastings to know them better was probably trying to be teacher’s pet, I’d lost my initial enthusiasm and had instead written a couple of careless pages about our move from Hull to Midham, a story that bored me even as I wrote it. Now I had nothing to do but brood.

Then I had an idea. I might not be able to tell Amanda how I felt. And she might not even care how I felt. But I could write her a letter. Of course, I would never actually give it to her. Like all that correspondence between me and my cruise-taking mother, it would remain un-sent. And, having learned my lesson about sharing those letters with other people, I would keep this letter completely to myself. But I wanted to write to her—I felt compelled to. I was so filled with bursting emotion and confusion that somehow I needed to get it out. So I found an empty notebook on the table beside my bed and began to write.

“Dear Amanda,” I wrote, “the first thing I want you to know is that you are the most beautiful person I have ever known. The second thing I want you to know is that Stan Heaphy might be good-looking but underneath he is ugly and you deserve someone much better than him. The third thing you should know is that even though I know this is probably wrong, I love you and I would do anything for you. In fact, from the moment I met you outside the Co-op on that rainy night, I loved you. I think you are the nicest person I ever met in my entire life.” I sat back, looked at those few sentences, and felt an immediate urge to cross them out. Once the words were on the page, they seemed ridiculous, and I knew anyone reading them would think so, too. But no one would ever read them. Ever. Whatever happened, I was determined to make sure of that.

And so I continued. I recalled our first meeting, telling her