Elaine Beale - Another Life Altogether

T HE DAY AFTER MY MOTHER WAS ADMITTED TO THE MENTAL HOSPITAL, I told everyone at school that she had entered a competition on the back of a Corn Flakes box and won a cruise around the world.

How long will she be gone? asked Julie Fraser, who sat among the girls crowding eagerly around me during morning registration.

Months, I said. Months and months. I looked at her slightly sad, but mostly dreamy, as if I were already imagining my mother floating across a wide blue ocean to a life of adventure that none of us there could have.

Julie made her big brown eyes even bigger and ran the tip of her tongue over her glossed lips. God, shes lucky, she said, leaning closer to me.

Yes, I said, wondering how I might always make her look at me like that.

So which parts of the world is she going to? Jimmy Crandall craned his skinny neck across his desk.

My eyes left Julies as I let myself consider this for a moment, frowning as I tried to evoke the expression of someone struggling to recall a busy cruise-ship itineraryall those ports of call, day trips, deck-side activities, and dinners at the captains table. Im not sure, I answered, not wanting to be caught out by my uncertain grasp of geography. I knew, of course, that Britain was an island, and I had a relatively decent notion of the jumble of countries that made up Europe, but beyond that it was all a little blurred. I might have been better informed were it not for the fact that our geography teacher, Mr. Cuthbertson, had spent the entire year familiarizing us in great detail with the climatic influences, waterways, geologic history, and soil structure of our local landscape.

We lived on the banks of the River Humber, chilled by the damp air off the North Sea, on a plain scraped by glaciers that had left in their wake a land composed almost entirely of malleable and unstable boulder clay. East Yorkshire, Mr. Cuthbertson would announce during almost every lesson, his gaunt, gray features suddenly bright with pride, has one of the fastest-eroding coastlines in the entire world. It was as if this were an accomplishment for which we, the local inhabitants, somehow deserved credit, rather than an unhappy geologic accident that meant, even as he spoke, that the land he so loved was crumbling away by inches. Since this seemed to be the only really notable feature (geographic or otherwise) of the region I called home, by the age of thirteen, even though I had never traveled more than forty miles in any direction, I had come to regard it as one of the dullest places on the planet. So when Mr. Cuthbertson told us of villages falling into the North Sea, church spires poking above the water at low tide, and houses bought for a few pounds and change because the waves had begun eating into their back gardens, I often found myself wondering how long it would take for the sea to devour the twenty miles or so that now separated Hull, the city in which I lived, from that voracious tide.

What do you mean, youre not sure? Jimmy Crandall was challenging me now, his Adams apple bobbing against his pimply throat like a bird trapped under his skin. If my mam won a bloody cruise, Id know where she was off to.

Shes going everywhere. Its a world cruise, I said, rolling my eyes at all the girls around me the way Id seen them do so many times with one another when one of the boys said something stupid or insulting or in an obvious ploy for attention. Then I looked over at Julie Fraser, hoping to see my derision mirrored in her conspiratorial smile. Instead, I saw her glance slipping in Jimmy Crandalls direction. Inevitably, the attention of the other girls followed.

Oh, going everywhere, is she? What, like Belfast and Biafra? The North and South Pole? He grinned, then poked his shiny pink tongue between his lips, as if it were reaching out to taste the certainty of his victory.

The boys and the girls were all looking at me now, the stuffy classroom air filled with the school morning scents of soap, clean socks, and toothpaste-minty breath. All their eyes, even those still crusty with sleep, were intense, poised between suspicion and happy expectation.

You cant take a cruise to the South Pole, I said, swinging my hair back over my shoulder with a 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. Theyre 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. Shes going to write to me, youll 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. Youre 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 SHOULDNT 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, Im going to end up in Delapole! shed yell, slamming doors, clattering plates. You watch, theyll cart me away in a bloody straitjacket, they will! And then youll 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 hed strayed into one of his many monologues about our rich local history, had made their fortune as merchants during the Middle Ages. He hadnt 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.

Ill end up in Delapole! shed scream, her voice like a yodel that shuddered against the windows and set the sherry glasses rattling in the china cabinet. Ill 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