Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,77
her exercise books with photographs of Kevin Keegan and his teammates.
There were times, during the first few weeks of school, when I had to admit I found the endless conversations about Greg Loomis and Kevin Keegan a little tedious, and the Debbies’ endless choruses of “Bye Bye Baby,” and “Shang-A-Lang” were starting to convince me that I could quite easily grow to hate all the members of the Bay City Rollers equally. But these things were, after all, the things that girls were supposed to talk about, and if I wanted to keep my friends, putting up with this seemed like a small price to pay. I felt similarly about letting Tracey and the Debbies copy most of my homework and, when the teacher wasn’t looking, the work I did in class. Most of the time, we all got B’s and C’s—a considerable improvement for the four of them, since, they told me, they used to get mostly C’s and D’s. Before my mother was taken to Delapole, I’d almost always got A’s, but that seemed an age away.
The only lesson in which I might have wanted to do better in was English. I kept hoping that Tracey and the Debbies would warm to Ms. Hastings, but they never did, complaining before, during, and after her lessons about what a “bloody hippie weirdo” she was. Though I didn’t say so, I thought she was a breath of fresh air, and I loved to watch her stride down the corridors. With her big boots, bright clothes, and the constant jangle of her jewelry, she made the rest of us in our dull school uniforms look washed-out and dim. The other teachers, too, in their conservative tweeds and sensible shoes, all looked faded beside her. Her lessons were also far more interesting than any others, involving avid discussions in which Malcolm, Dizzy, and a handful of others talked about what motivated a particular character or the writer of the book. Sometimes I felt a brief ache to jump in and say what I thought, but I stayed silent. And when, outside in the corridor, the other girls shoved against Dizzy and ran off with her glasses, or the boys tripped up Malcolm, laughing at him as he stumbled, and called him a “clumsy little queer,” I was glad that I’d stayed sheltered within my little group of friends, that I hadn’t drawn any attention to myself.
After school, because I wasn’t working particularly hard on my homework, I had quite a lot of free time. So, while my mother spent her evenings sleeping or curled up silently in bed, and my father sat alone ranting at the television, I sat in my bedroom filling first one and then a second notebook with letters to Amanda. Soon, I had so many that it became more difficult to hide them between the pages of my books. So instead I retrieved an empty Teatime Assortment biscuit tin from the kitchen, shook out the remaining crumbs, and placed my letters inside. Then I pulled out all the old toys, shoes, and the boxes of Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders that covered the bottom of my wardrobe, put the box of letters there, and piled all those other things on top.
My early letters talked mostly about how wonderful it had been to see Amanda that morning at the bus stop, recalled the short conversations we sometimes had, and included long paragraphs in which I tried to convince her that Stan Heaphy was utterly undeserving of her attention. But as I continued to write, my letters began to change course into imagined days I might spend with her, and soon I found myself writing letters to Amanda that barely touched upon reality, stories that were, instead, long, delicious fantasies of the life we might have if we ran away together or lived in another time or place. The first of these were inspired by an episode of Star Trek.
Star Trek was one of my favorite programs. Fortunately, my father liked it, too, and over the years we’d developed our own little ritual in preparation for watching it. Just before Star Trek started at eight o’clock, we’d make a fresh pot of tea and set out a plate of biscuits on the coffee table. Then, even in the summer when it was still light outside, we’d close the living-room curtains so we could shut out the mundane world of the present and immerse ourselves in a future where people wore