Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,86
wear a bra.” I clasped my arms tighter around Mabel’s waist, as if the fierceness of my grip on her could seep all the way through the thick armor of her underwear, down into her flesh. I had the dreadful feeling of something slipping away from me, something I needed to hold on to to keep me afloat.
“Bleeming heck, Jesse, you’re going to squeeze me to bloody death if you carry on like that!” Mabel said. “I can hardly breathe.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MABEL’S VISIT HAD NO POSITIVE IMPACT ON MY MOTHER’S MOOD. During the following weeks, she rarely left her bedroom, and, as the days became shorter and the leaves turned a glorious array of gold, crimson, orange, and a hundred shades in between, she did not even look out her window to notice the change in the seasons. When the clocks went back at the end of October, plunging the days into a lingering gray dusk soon after four o’clock, it made no difference to her, since she rarely got out of bed. And when the weather became cold, frost leaving a glimmering layer of white over everything in the mornings, she simply piled more blankets on her side of the bed, eventually lying under a stack so heavy and thick that I wondered that it didn’t suffocate her.
My father continued his indifference to my mother’s decline, although, after giving Frank a tour of all his half-finished projects, he did take a renewed interest in repairing the house, throwing himself into it with an enthusiasm I had never witnessed in him before. He stayed up late into the night stripping the wallpaper in the living room, patching cracks in the ceiling, painting the walls, and installing new light fixtures. His weekends were fully occupied, too—ripping out frayed and rotted carpet, putting down new floorboards, replacing the dry rot-riddled window frames outside. It was as if, with my mother’s failure to leave her bed, he was trying to evoke her old ferocity, as if he had decided that if he couldn’t force her to get back to her former, frantic self, he would imitate it.
While I still spent most of my evenings writing letters to Amanda, the highlight of my days came before school started, at the bus stop in Midham, when I could actually spend some time in her company. I looked forward to this with such fervor that just the thought of it was the thing that propelled me out of bed. And the hope of talking with her meant that I usually got to the bus stop far too early, always several minutes before everyone else. I waited in blistering winds that tore the leaves from the trees and scattered them in swirling piles while my coat whipped about my body, or on days when fog shrouded the fields and made the whole world bone-deep cold and impossibly still. When it rained, I stood under an umbrella, watching the leaping dance of raindrops on the street, letting the damp seep into my skin. But none of this mattered when Amanda appeared, and those few minutes that I got to spend with her filled me with a heat that, no matter how cold and inhospitable the weather, I carried with me for the rest of the day.
One morning in mid-November, when the sky was a stunning cloudless blue and the ground was silvered with frost, Amanda appeared at the bus stop earlier than usual, so that I had the luxury of a full fifteen minutes to talk with her before the bus arrived to sweep us off.
“Hiya, Jesse,” she said as she approached. Though she smiled at me warmly, she looked a little ragged, tired, and not quite as immaculately groomed as she usually was.
“Hiya,” I said, light-limbed at the sight of her. I was particularly pleased because, apart from one of the younger boys who preoccupied himself with smashing his heels into all the iced-over puddles at the side of the road, there was no one else at the bus stop yet. Usually, Tracey was already there by the time Amanda showed up, and I was always aware of her standing somewhere close, making disgruntled huffs and muttered comments while I spoke with her sister. Most of the time, I ignored her. Though I followed Tracey around faithfully at school, this was the one time in my day when I didn’t care what she thought.
“It’s a lovely day.” Amanda let out a wistful sigh and looked out beyond the