Another Life Altogether (25 page)

“Evelyn, this is Frank,” Mabel said, smiling cautiously at my mother. “Frank, this is Evelyn. I know the two of you have met before, but I thought a more formal introduction might be appropriate.”

Frank looked a little older than Mabel. He had jet-black hair, graying just slightly at the temples, and a craggy, narrow face with generous lips, dark bushy eyebrows, and a small, cherublike nose. It was an interesting combination of features that was not entirely unattractive. The same, however, could not be said of his clothing. He wore a pair of bottle-green polyester flares that were far too long, sagged over his thin hips, folded over his ankles, and almost hid his shiny Winklepicker shoes. He carried a matching jacket over his shoulder, and his big-collared, big-cuffed shirt, billowing across his insubstantial chest, was bright green satin. As he stood next to Mabel, shifting his weight from foot to foot, I wondered what he looked like when my mother stumbled upon him naked. All I could imagine, however, was a man in green underwear with the green, scrawny body of a stick insect.

Frank seemed to be doing his best to look apologetic in front of my mother, but I could tell from the glint in his gray eyes that he was thinking back on their first encounter with amusement. “Nice to meet
you, Evelyn,” he said, and pushed a solid, wide hand toward my mother. He was holding a large paper-wrapped package.

My mother regarded Frank, then the package, frostily. “What’s that?” she said, narrowing her eyes and taking a couple of steps back, as if Frank were proffering a hand grenade.

“It’s a peace offering, like,” Frank replied.

“A peace offering?” My mother looked down the long, straight line of her nose at Frank and then at Mabel. “There a war going on around here that I don’t know about?” I could already tell that she was intent on directing her renewed energy in a furious belligerence toward Frank. She must have been storing up her anger ever since she stormed out of Mabel’s house.

Mabel smiled. “It’s to make up for that little … misunderstanding we had. I know the two of you got off on the wrong foot and I thought—”

“So, this is
your
idea, then?”

Mabel began rifling through her handbag. “No, Evelyn. It was Frank’s idea. He thought you’d appreciate a little gift, that’s all.” She retrieved a packet of cigarettes.

My mother frowned, thoughtful for a moment, and then extended her hand toward Frank. “Well, in that case, thanks very much.” She took the package and pressed it to her chest. I breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps things would go better than I’d thought. “It’s been quite a while since anyone’s been so thoughtful as to get me a present,” she said, giving me a sideways but nevertheless pointed look.

“Open it then,” I urged her. I imagined a pretty pearl necklace, a pair of gold earrings, a flowing silk scarf—the kinds of things I might buy my mother if it occurred to me to get her anything besides the talcum powder and bath crystals I always ordered for her out of Mabel’s Avon catalog for Christmas and birthdays.

“All right, all right,” my mother said. “Ooh, I wonder what it could be.” She didn’t have to wonder long, however, for having deftly torn back the paper in only a matter of seconds, she found herself holding a large mound of mottled pink sausages.

“Best pork sausages you’ll find in the whole of Yorkshire,” Frank announced. He had a deep, throaty voice—the kind men get from smoking too many cigarettes, the kind that makes them sound careworn and wrung out by life. “And probably the best you’ll find in the whole country, if I’m not mistaken. There’s three pounds there. That should last you a while.”

My mother regarded the sausages with the expression of a person who had just been handed a package of someone else’s vomit. When she looked up at Frank and Mabel, her expression remained unchanged.

“Frank’s right,” said Mabel, an unlit cigarette now dangling from her lips as she scrambled about in her bag again, presumably to locate her lighter. “Best sausages you’ll find anywhere in the world. And Frank should know. That’s where he works—Tuggles Sausage Factory. Been there for seventeen years now, haven’t you, Frank?”

Frank nodded, his face a picture of saddened confusion as he met my mother’s disdainful expression.

“I see,” my mother said flatly, lowering her eyes toward the sausages again. “So, this is how you spend your days, then, Frank? Making sausages?”

“Aye, like Mabel says, I’ve been there seventeen years.”

“Yes, well, I’ve never been much of a pork person myself,” my mother said, folding the paper back around the package as if she could no longer bear the sight of all that raw, pink meat. “Beef is much more my cup of tea. You could have asked Mabel and she would have told you that. I’ve always had a preference for beef.” She shook her head slowly, as if to say that had Frank only had the sense to bring along a package of beef sausages, this whole sorry interaction would have gone perfectly.

“I like pork sausages,” I said, desperate to rescue the only visit we’d had at our new home from complete disaster. “And so does my dad. We’ll eat them, won’t we, Dad?” I looked over at my father, who was lurking behind my mother and me in the hallway. He gave a noncommittal shrug.

My mother handed the package to me. “Yes, well, you’d better put them in the fridge then, hadn’t you? If it’s not stored properly, you can get all kinds of diseases from pork. That’s why them Muslims and Jews won’t touch it. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to end up with tapeworm.”

“Oh, there’s no chance of you getting anything like that,” Frank said solemnly. “Use the best sanitary practices, we do.”

“I’m not taking any chances, thank you very much,” my mother said. “Jesse and Mike can eat pork, but I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ve eaten it plenty of times before,” I chimed. Indeed, next to Mr. Kipling cream cakes, pork pies were one of my mother’s favorite foods. She loved to eat them in thin slices, buried under shiny mounds of Branston Pickle and mustard, leaving brown and yellow stains around her mouth. It didn’t surprise me, however, that she conveniently seemed to have forgotten this particular passion. I felt sorry for Frank. Though he might keep us in meat products for the rest of our lives, he would never be forgiven his faux pas in Mabel’s bathroom. If Mabel had any compassion, she’d never have raised his hopes in the first place.

“Well,” my mother said, turning away from the doorway, “I suppose you want something to eat. I’m sorry, but I just haven’t had a chance to make it to the shops this week.” She sighed as if she’d had one of those excessively busy weeks that hadn’t included a spare moment to get some shopping done. “I think we might have some custard creams in the biscuit tin….”

“Oh, that’s fine. We’re not hungry,” Mabel said, the unlit cigarette still in her mouth as she followed my mother down the hall. Frank, his hands pushed into the pockets of his big green trousers, tagged along behind next to my father. “We got something to eat on the way. Frank drove me over, you know.”

“Aye, that’s right,” Frank called toward my mother. “Came over in the Tuggles delivery van, we did. Let me use it outside of work hours, they do. And quite a ride it was. More curves on them there roads than on your Mabel!” He let out a loud raspy laugh.

At this, my mother turned on her heels, gave Auntie Mabel a sour look, and muttered, “Pick up the village idiot on your way, did you, Mabel?”

Mabel looked at Frank, exasperated. He swallowed his laugh and shrugged. “Just trying to lighten things up a bit,” he said, looking toward me and my father. I gave him a wan, apologetic smile, thinking that someone, at least, should let him know not to waste his energy. My father looked steadily at his own feet.

When we reached the kitchen, Mabel removed the still unlit cigarette from her mouth, grabbed me, wrapped me in a tight hug, and placed a greasy lipstick kiss on my cheek. “By heck, Jesse, I’ll swear you get bigger every time I see you. I bet you grow out of your clothes like nobody’s business.”

“You can say that again,” my mother said sternly as she filled the kettle. “You ask me, it’s a bit abnormal. When we were younger, we never grew like that.”

“Aye, well, kids these days, they’re a lot different,” said Frank. “My kids—”

My mother turned around abruptly. “You’ve got kids?” She waited for Frank’s nod of affirmation, then turned to scowl at Mabel.

“For God’s sake, keep your hair on, Evelyn,” Mabel said, sighing. “He’s divorced. His kids live with his ex-wife, don’t they, Frank?”

“Aye, nine and eleven, they are. Want to see a picture?” He gave my mother a hopeful smile, pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, and rummaged around until he found a creased photograph. He handed it to her. Eyebrows raised, lips pursed tight and small, she gave the photograph a cursory glance before passing it to my father.

“Hmmph,” she said. “I expect those poor little things must really miss their daddy. It’s awful, what happens to children of divorce.” She looked meaningfully over at Mabel, who, once again, popped the cigarette back into her mouth and began scouring her handbag for her cigarette lighter.

“Nice photo,” my father said, handing the picture back to Frank. My mother let out a snort.

For a moment, Frank held it in the flat of his hand. He was gazing at the photograph the way someone might if he were trying to read the lines in his palm, hoping to discern some hidden meaning from the deeply familiar.

“Can I see?” I asked, reaching for the photograph.

“Here,” he said, handing it to me.

It showed two dark-haired children, a boy and a girl. They were sitting on a beach, building a tilting, clumsy sandcastle, squinting and smiling as they looked toward the camera. The girl had two of her front teeth missing and a solid, pudgy body. She wore a canary-yellow swim-suit, and her hair was tied in two long, stringy plaits that hung limply over her chest. The boy, a little older, had Frank’s same skin-and-bones build. In the picture, as if immensely proud of his sandcastle, he was puffing out his chest to show the rigid arc of each of his ribs pressed against his pallid skin. “What are their names?” I asked.

“The girl’s Karen,” Frank said. “And the boy’s Bobby. Bit of a goodlooker, just like his dad, don’t you think?”

“You wish!” Mabel laughed.

I had never known a man to carry a photograph of his children around in his wallet. All the men I knew, like my father, left it to their wives to put their holiday snaps in albums or place the photographs that were taken annually at school in frames and set them on the sideboard. Children were something they left at home when they went out into the world, part of the domestic burden they shed as soon as they stepped out the front door. I wondered if once men got divorced and were freed of their children as a daily responsibility, they began carrying pictures of them around like some distant memento of the past. Was it easier to be proud of them, to love them, I wondered, if you didn’t have to see them every day?

“They look nice,” I said, still studying Frank’s children, the way the
sea shimmered so blue behind them and the sand glinted as it reflected back the sun. They looked happy in the picture, and I wondered if they continued to be, now that their parents were apart.

“Interested in Do-It-Yourself, Frank?” my father asked chirpily. “Fancy a look at some of my handiwork? I’ve been doing quite a lot of repairs.”

“Aye, that’d be nice, Mike,” Frank answered, giving my father a grateful look as they both beat an exit into the hall.

When the kettle boiled, my mother set out a plate of the biscuits that had been languishing in a tin in the back of the pantry since we moved in. I, for one, didn’t plan on eating any—they looked crumbly and stale.

Mabel searched about in her handbag again, finally looking up with a sigh. “I don’t know what the heck I’ve done with my lighter, and I’m gasping for a ciggy. You got any matches in here?” she asked, looking around the kitchen.

“Just run out,” my mother said stonily. “And, anyway, didn’t I tell you to give that dirty habit up?”

Mabel ignored her, turning to me. “Jesse, be a love would you and go and ask Frank to let me borrow his lighter?”

“All right, Auntie Mabel,” I said, and went out into the hallway, where my father and Frank had apparently graduated from discussing my father’s talents as a handyman to more personal things. I stood in the shadows by the kitchen door, reluctant to interrupt and a little curious to find out more about Frank.

“So, you work at Tuggles, then, Frank?” my father said. “They make good sausages, do Tuggles.”

“Aye,” Frank said. “Like I said, been there seventeen years.”

“So you must like it, then?”

“It’s all right,” Frank said, stuffing his hands into his trouser pockets. “It’s a job. Though I have to say, with paying the ex-wife and the kids’ maintenance, well, there’s not much left over. With two incomes coming in, mind, I wouldn’t be so bad off.”

“You thinking about getting another job as well?” my father asked, surprised.

“Bloody hell, no. One’s enough for me, thank you very much. But, well, Mabel makes a decent bit of cash with all that makeup and Tupperware she flogs. And she’s got a right nice little house on that new estate. I mean, if we pooled our resources … Right now I’m stuck in a poky little bedsit over a betting shop on Holderness Road. It’s handy if I want to make a flutter on the horses, but not much of a home. And, anyway, what do we men know about making somewhere feel like home, eh?” He gave a raspy little laugh. “Need a woman to take care of that kind of thing. A man my age, I wasn’t meant to live by myself. I can’t cook, not much for cleaning, and I bloody hate doing my own washing.”

“Yes, well,” my father said, scratching the back of his neck and looking thoughtful. “I’m not sure there’s anyone really likes cleaning and washing, Frank. Evelyn, well, when she gets in the mood she can be like a flipping tornado going through the house. But I don’t think she’d ever tell you she likes doing housework. She did get into a bit of a cooking phase for a while, mind you. She seemed to like that.” He lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “Made all this bloody French food. Can’t say I really cared for it.”