Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,1

toss of my head, hoping to generate an air of confident indifference. Instead, I wafted myself with the blue chemical scent of Head & Shoulders shampoo and remembered sitting in a lukewarm bath the previous night, the same bath that only hours earlier had been filled with cold, blood-tinted water before I pulled the plug and scrubbed it clean with Ajax.

“To get to the South Pole,” I continued, brushing away the memory with my words, “you have to travel over miles and miles of ice.” For a moment, I imagined my mother, encased in a furry parka and bearskin boots, coursing across a gleaming white landscape on a dogsled. Like so many of those explorers before her, she would disappear into a stinging blizzard and never come back.

Jimmy Crandall shrugged. “Nobody I met ever won one of those stupid Corn Flakes competitions. They’re all a fucking fraud, if you ask me.” He flopped back into his chair and pulled it closer to his desk with a piercing scrape that made me wince.

“Well, my mother did,” I said, talking now to all the boys and girls, desperate to keep them around me, their bodies a protective nest that could somehow hold me high, above the ground, above the surging, bloody water that was threatening to wash it all away. “She’s going to write to me, you’ll see.” My voice was too loud, too bright. It cut through the air like hands ripping fabric. Mrs. Thompson, our form-room teacher, looked over at me, arched her black, penciled-in eyebrows, and pressed her lips into a rosy little knot. I acknowledged her look with a nod. When she had turned back to the stack of exercise books she was thumbing through, I propped myself up on my elbows, leaned forward, and reached over to Jimmy Crandall. I prodded hard at his shoulder. “You’re only jealous,” I said as he lurched forward under my hand. I spoke even louder now, as if I could pull Julie Fraser and her friends back to me with my voice. “You just wish your family could be as lucky as mine.”

PERHAPS IT SHOULDN’T have been a complete surprise to arrive home the day before to find my mother being taken away. After all, she had told us it might happen.

“One of these days, I’m going to end up in Delapole!” she’d yell, slamming doors, clattering plates. “You watch, they’ll cart me away in a bloody straitjacket, they will! And then you’ll be happy!”

Delapole was the mental hospital just outside Hull. It was named after a local family, the de la Poles, who, Mr. Cuthbertson told us when he’d strayed into one of his many monologues about our “rich local history,” had made their fortune as merchants during the Middle Ages. He hadn’t explained, however, why the local loony bin bore their name. My father had joked that all those posh families were so inbred that they had more than their share of nutcases, so it made sense that the place had been named after them. Of course, that was before my mother had fulfilled her own prophetic words and had been transported there courtesy of the National Health.

“I’ll end up in Delapole!” she’d scream, her voice like a yodel that shuddered against the windows and set the sherry glasses rattling in the china cabinet. “I’ll end up in Delapole, you mark my words!” she yelled when the car broke down or the milk boiled over or I spilled a glass of orange cordial across the kitchen table. As if each of these events were a calamity on the scale of the Titanic and it was my father or I who had just steered us slap-bang into the iceberg.

Even when I was very young, I’d realized that my mother had no sense of perspective. If anything went wrong, no matter how large or small, it constituted some ultimately threatening disaster. She might end up in the local mental institution as a consequence of my burning the house down because I hadn’t turned off the electric heater in my bedroom, but she might just as easily be committed if my father forgot to put the top back on the ketchup or I neglected to put my dirty knickers in the clothes basket. I knew her reactions made no sense, but her world was also my world, so when I was small I’d feel her panic as my own. I’d try to allay her hysteria with calming words or by rectifying the