Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,3

tears welling up in my eyes. They spilled down my face and made everything around me a blur of color and noise. I fumbled blindly against the broad body that blocked my way, my hands pressing into the armor beneath the baggy dress: metal clasps, corset stays, the rigid cups of Mrs. Brockett’s bra. I was lost in the smell of cigarette smoke, laundry detergent, and cat piss. I began to strike out with my fists.

“All right, all right,” she said, standing aside. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

AS I LEFT MORNING registration and made toward my first lesson, I was relieved to see Jimmy Crandall skulk off in the opposite direction, his battered leather satchel hanging low on his hip and thudding against his side as he walked. But the girls who had crowded around me at the news of my mother’s good fortune left me, too, drifting down the corridor in twos and threes. Wearing strappy platform shoes, they sauntered arm in arm, as if they needed one another to hold themselves up. Julie Fraser, always at the center, was oblivious to me now, her perfect blond hair reflecting the harsh corridor lights. I watched her with a yearning so enormous that it felt like a hole in my chest. As I glanced down at the sensible brown shoes my mother had bought me from the Littlewoods catalog, I imagined crashing into Julie and all her whispering, laughing friends to leave them splayed and breathless on the cold, dirty floor.

The rest of that day I was left to spend my time, as usual, with the other social outcasts: Patsy Lancey, who had twelve brothers and sisters and whose overwashed gray socks hung elasticless around her ankles and who everybody said had fleas; Janine Trotter, who had a mentally retarded sister and whose father had moved in with the seventeen-year-old girl who worked behind the counter at the newsagent’s; and Gillian Gilman, who had acne and was fat and whom everyone, even her older brothers, called “the whale.” Every day, we sat together in lessons and at school dinners, sneering at the popular kids and feigning interest in what we each had to say. We all knew we were in one another’s company only because no one else wanted us, that if any of those other cliques had invited us to join them we would have abandoned one another in a second. When Gillian Gilman asked me if it was true that my mother had won a competition and was off on a world cruise, I told her to shut her big, fat mouth and mind her own business. She wasn’t anyone I needed to impress.

When the final school bell rang, I knew I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to walk down our street trying to ignore the twitching net curtains in the front windows of all the houses or Mrs. Brockett smoking and tossing her cigarette ends into our garden as she kept vigil by her front door. Nor did I want to enter our cold and empty house. So I made my way instead to the public library, a place I visited often during the after-school hours.

The library was one of those old Victorian buildings in which even the whispered hisses of the librarian echoed against the high ceilings. It was always too hot, filled with the musty smell of aging paper and the force of suppressed coughs. The bookshelves were visited largely by pensioners—women with frosted hair and shopping bags, men who blinked behind big-framed National Health glasses and wore clothes that seemed too big. The newspaper and magazine section was inhabited by unemployed men with folded, gray faces who, despite the grimaces of the librarian, drummed their nicotine-yellow fingers against the tables, as if the library were merely a waiting room and they were impatient to get on with the real purpose of their visit in some better place beyond.

I loved the library. I loved it for its spacious quiet, the way it was possible to discern each step and shuffle and sigh against that soothing backdrop of calm. No one would yell or scream or cry there, and if they ever dared I knew that the tight-lipped wrath of the librarian would come crashing down on them, as heavy and as crushing as the weight of all those books. I loved it because it was a refuge from school, a place where I had only to navigate my way around