Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,78
bright-colored stretchy pantsuits and traveled faster than the speed of light. “Space, the final frontier,” my father and I would both chorus along with Captain James T. Kirk against a background of swirly, space-age music, as we shuffled to get more comfortable in our respective seats. The only parts of Star Trek I had never liked were the scenes where some dazzled female alien with bouffant hair and sparkly eye shadow fell into the arms of Captain Kirk and demanded to be taught how we humans show affection. My father equally disdained these scenes, muttering, “Bloody Americans, always got to get some sex in somewhere.”
On that particular Monday, however, I was all attention as Captain Kirk and his latest alien love interest snogged. Instead of itching for the scene to be over, I watched intently as I imagined myself as James T. Kirk and Amanda as the female alien who fell into my arms. In fact, the fantasy became so vivid that when my father turned to me with some disparaging comment about Americans and their vulgar sensibilities, I found myself avoiding his eyes, worried that he’d be able to tell what I was thinking just by looking at me. As soon as the episode was over, I charged upstairs to my bedroom, where I took out my notebook and began a letter to Amanda in which I suggested that we might become space travelers together. I’d be Captain Jesse T. Bennett, commander of the spaceship, while Lieutenant Amanda Grasby would be my second in command.
I wrote my Star Trek–inspired letters for quite a while. They were full of all kinds of dangers—flesh-eating plants, toxic gases, hostile shape-shifting aliens. Despite these terrible hazards, I’d always manage to save Lieutenant Grasby, and she, of course, would always thank me by throwing herself into my arms and landing a grateful kiss on my lips. Then, one Saturday night, I stayed up late to watch a Vincent Price horror film and started writing letters that involved haunted castles, marauding peasants, and wicked counts determined to spread terror throughout the land. In these letters, I became the vampire- and ghost-hunting hero who prevented the triumph of whichever evildoer was threatening to take over the land, while also rescuing the beautiful Amanda, who had been taken captive and, without my intervention, faced a fate as one of the living dead.
Immersed in these letters, I found that my life at home became far more tolerable, an inconvenient backdrop to the adventures I took myself on every night. And even though it was still agonizing to see Amanda climb onto the back of Stan Heaphy’s motorbike every afternoon, on the bus ride home I comforted myself with the thought that later I could create stories in which Amanda and I always ended up together, where even space aliens and vampires couldn’t keep us apart.
ON THE FIRST SATURDAY of the half-term holiday, Auntie Mabel rang early. “How’s your mother?” she asked after inquiring about my new school and the progress of my father’s renovations.
“She’s all right.”
“All right?” Mabel said dubiously. “What’s that supposed to mean, eh, Jesse? Let’s face it, when was the last time our Evelyn was all right?”
“She’s sleeping a lot,” I said. Above me, my parents’ snoring reverberated through the ceiling. It was like listening to the grumbling melodies of two steam locomotives as they chuffed slowly along parallel railway tracks.
Mabel was, of course, correct. My mother wasn’t all right. She wasn’t anywhere approaching all right. For the past several weeks she hadn’t stirred out of her terrible inertia, barely got dressed, and bathed so infrequently that even from a distance I could make out her sour and musky smell. And though she hadn’t mentioned Delapole or made reference to any plans to do herself in, she’d started going on at length about how maybe she should buy a ticket and fly off to Australia, where, even if being with her mother didn’t cheer her up, at least the change in the climate would.
Sometimes I tried to talk to her, sitting beside her on the settee, taking her hand, and telling her how nice it would be if she started working on the garden, how the exercise and the fresh air would do her good. “It’s too wet and too bloody cold,” she’d say, pulling her hand away. “And, anyway, it’ll be winter soon and everything in the garden will be dead.” Then she’d go on to tell me how it would be summer soon