Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,90

I planned to walk the two miles to Reatton, but, since the disco didn’t end until half past ten and I didn’t fancy walking back on a freezing December night, I’d recruited my father to give us a lift home.

“Is he now?” My mother looked to my father for confirmation. As she did so, the Look North announcer introduced a report on “a surprise royal visit to South Yorkshire,” and my father leaned eagerly toward the television. The screen was filled with the stark silhouette of the gear at a coal mine’s pithead, and then the dazed and grinning face of Prince Charles.

“That’s it, that’s what they should do!” my father yelled, spitting mince-pie crumbs across the carpet and pointing at Prince Charles. “They should send him to work down the bloody mine. That’d bloody teach him.” His words were noticeably slurred, and I deduced that there had been more than just a few mince pies consumed at his work’s party.

“Dad,” I said loudly, hoping to get his attention before he inevitably got into another anti-royalist rant.

“What?”

“Tell Mum you’re picking me up after the disco tonight.”

“I am?” he said, looking at me, perplexed, before turning back to the television.

“Yes. You’re supposed to come and get me. You said you’d take Tracey home as well. Remember?” I gave him a beseeching look.

“Oh, right, yes.” Barely taking his eyes off the screen, he reached over and picked up another mince pie. “God, look at him, the bloody tosspot,” he said as Prince Charles walked along a line of hard-faced miners’ wives, stopping occasionally to shake a hand and exchange a few words.

“At half past ten. You’re to pick us up in Reatton, outside the church hall.” I pronounced the words in the kind of slow yell that people generally reserved for foreigners, the deaf, and the senile.

“I know, I know. I’ll be there,” he said.

“See,” I said, turning toward my mother. “I told you he was picking me up.”

I fully expected her to put some obstacle in my way, to perhaps assert that it just wasn’t appropriate for me to go to a late-night event where there’d be loud music and boys, or to suggest that I was bound to catch my death if I ventured out on such a cold night. I was tensed up and ready to do battle. But I didn’t have to bother, since she seemed suddenly to have lost any energy for belligerence or pronouncements, or, in fact, anything at all. Instead, she shrugged and pressed herself deeper into her chair, so that, in her newly angular body, her legs dangling over the arm of the chair, I imagined her folding all the way into herself until she disappeared. And though I was relieved that I could escape the house without having to fight my way out, as I looked at my mother I felt afraid. Instead of killing herself, I wondered, could a person just shrink and crumple until she became nothing, until her traits and quirks wasted along with her body, until one day you realized that she had faded away?

I walked over to my mother, leaned down toward her, and kissed her on the cheek. “Bye, Mum. See you later,” I said, letting myself take in the texture of her skin against my lips and her pungent body smells. At least for now, she was still solidly herself.

I thought about going over to kiss my father, too. But, as the Look North reporter waxed lyrical about how “so near to Christmas, the gift of a royal visit has lifted everyone’s spirits in this little mining town,” and my father hurled his mince pie toward the television screen so that it landed with a splat right in Prince Charles’s face, I decided it was best to leave him alone to his seasonal enjoyment.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

REVEREND MULLINS WAS ONE OF THOSE TRENDY VICARS, THE KIND I’d seen only on television. He wore his dog collar under a wrinkled corduroy jacket and atop a pair of carefully pressed jeans, and bore a fixed, beatific smile that made him look, in the words of several of the kids at the disco, “a bit retarded.” He wandered around, enthusiastically greeting the teenagers under his supervision, slapping backs, nudging ribs, patting shoulders, and infusing his conversation with liberal use of words like “cool” and “wow.” He was like a new kid at school, so desperate to impress that he was oblivious to the disdainful looks and mumbled insults he managed to