Table Of ContentCHAPTER ONE
T
I told everyone at school that she had
HE DAY AFTER MY MOTHER WAS ADMITTED TO THE MENTAL HOSPITAL,
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, she’s 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 Julie’s 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
itinerary—all those ports of call, day trips, deck-side activities, and dinners at
the captain’s table. “I’m 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, you’re not sure?” Jimmy Crandall was challenging me
now, his Adam’s apple bobbing against his pimply throat like a bird trapped
under his skin. “If my mam won a bloody cruise, I’d know where she was off
to.”
“She’s going everywhere. It’s a world cruise,” I said, rolling my eyes at all the
girls around me the way I’d 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
Crandall’s 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 can’t 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. 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.”
have been a complete surprise to arrive home the day before to find
PERHAPS IT SHOULDN’T
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
problem—a six-year-old cooing, “It’s all right, Mum, it’s all right,” while
sweeping a pile of broken glass from the kitchen floor. As I grew older,
however, I learned that there was no comforting or calming my mother at these
moments. It was just something she had to go through, like a sneeze that has to
be sneezed or an itch that has to be scratched.
Despite all this, it had been a shock to find an ambulance parked outside our
house, its big wheels pushed over the curb, its light flashing like a huge bright,
blinking blue eye. And I had been a little taken aback to find the neighbors
gathered in our tiny front garden, nudging one another and whispering, as if they
were expecting the arrival of some popular television celebrity who’d decided to
drop by our house for a cup of tea and a chat. Indeed, the scene was almost
festive. The women smoked ravenously, sucking at their cigarettes with big,
audible gasps, while the children made wailing-siren noises as they ran up and
down our path. When they noticed my arrival and parted like the Red Sea for
Moses to let me reach my front door, the bitter taste of dread filled my mouth
and left my stomach churning, but I felt a strange thrill of power. Here I was, a
star in the middle of my own domestic disaster.
By the time I’d moved through the milling crowd outside our house and
reached the front door, however, my exhilaration was gone. Instead, I felt a
sickening dread in my stomach, a dread that only grew when our next-door
neighbor, Mrs. Brockett, stepped from the dark interior of our hallway onto our
threshold, sighing as she folded her arms across her chest. She wore a shapeless
cotton dress, opaque brown stockings, and a pair of men’s slippers. Her gray hair
was folded around a set of pink curlers. Never known for her cheery disposition,
Mrs. Brockett had a particularly grave look on her face.
In all the years we had lived in our terrace house on Marton Street, despite
many valiant attempts Mrs. Brockett had never managed to get inside. In an
unusual display of marital consensus, both my father and my mother hated her
vehemently, though for rather different reasons—my mother because she
regarded Mrs. Brockett as a relentless gossip who would “broadcast the contents
of my undies drawers to the entire street if she got the bloody opportunity,” my
father because she hung a picture of the Queen in her front window and my
father hated the Queen as passionately as he loved cricket. Mrs. Brockett was
equally disdained by the children of the street. She was known among us as Cat
Piss Lady because of the seventeen cats she kept inside her house and the
stinging, ammonia smell that clung to her everywhere she went. I’d even heard
some adults use the nickname to refer to her in whispered conversations in the
queue at the butcher’s or greengrocer’s. But, as far as I knew, no one had ever
dared to call her that to her face. Far more than the ambulance or the assembly of
neighbors in my front garden, the fact that it was Mrs. Brockett who greeted me
at my doorway signaled that there was something terribly wrong.
“Ooh, I wouldn’t go in there if I were you, lovey,” she said, placing one of her
gnarly-knuckled hands on my shoulder. “Not something a girl of your age needs
to see.” Her narrowed eyes met mine. A wave of sighs and moans rose behind
me. “Quite distressing.” She pursed her lips and shook her head slowly, then
turned expectantly toward the surrounding neighbors. “Anyone got a ciggy?” she
inquired. There was an immediate flutter of hands and, almost simultaneously,
three women reached over and held up cigarettes. “I’ll take the Rothmans,” she
announced, snatching the longest cigarette from the hand that held it, popping it
between her lips, and leaning forward as another hand reached out with a flame.
She inhaled deeply before she blew the smoke into my face.
“What’s going on? What’s happening?” I tried to push past her.
“Just a little … accident. Nothing you need worry yourself about. Now, why
don’t you come over to my house, lovey, and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”
From deep inside the house I could hear the rumble of male voices, the clatter
of metal against metal, and empty radio static. “Let me in,” I said, 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.”
registration and made toward my first lesson, I was relieved to see
AS I LEFT MORNING
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 the
ingenious precision of the Dewey decimal system rather than complex and cruel
social hierarchies. But most of all I loved the library because that vigorously
imposed silence implied an awe of something far bigger than me, than all of us.
It showed the deepest regard not for our need to talk or belch or scream—not for
the silly chatter of little children, the gossip of older women, or anyone’s
gasping need for a cigarette—but for those stacks and stacks of books and the
words and worlds that lay inside them.
That afternoon, I claimed a desk in the reference section, having planned to do
the homework Mr. Cuthbertson had given us—a series of questions about the
tidal patterns of the River Humber. Instead, I pulled out the Reader’s Digest
World Atlas. I thumbed through its thick pages and found myself tracing the
route for my mother’s cruise ship. After chugging cheerfully away from Hull
Docks, I decided, she had sailed into the North Sea, around the fat-bellied coast
of East Anglia, past the Thames, and into the English Channel. Soon, she’d be
making her way around the coasts of France, Portugal, and northern Spain.
She’d stop in Calais, where she’d do a bit of shopping and, like all the English
people who went there, load up on cheap French wine, perfume, and crunchy
baguettes. Then she’d find herself exploring the coast of Southern Europe and
taking in the entire Mediterranean. I recognized the names of places like
Barcelona, Marseilles, Nice, Monte Carlo, the islands of Corsica and Crete, the
cities of Athens, Venice, and Rome. Undoubtedly, she’d meet millionaires and
high-stakes gamblers, racing-car drivers, fashion models, and perhaps even get
to see the Pope make a speech from a balcony in Vatican City. Then, exhausted
by the excitement, she’d venture back into the Atlantic, where her journey would
continue. She’d travel all the way around Africa, India, Burma, Thailand, the
Philippines, China, Japan. Then on to the Americas: Canada, the United States,
and all those South American cities with mysterious, multisyllabic names—
Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Tierra del Fuego. And perhaps then she might go on
to the South Pole after all, leaving Cape Horn to sail past giant icebergs toward
the massive continent of Antarctica.
When I arrived home, I found my father in the living room, sunk in his
armchair, hidden behind his copy of the Hull Daily Mail. I knew he had been to
see my mother earlier, and for a moment I wanted to ask him how she was and if
they were taking care of her. But that might mean he’d ask me if I wanted to go
and visit her at the hospital, and, more than anything, I did not.
“Make us a cup of tea, can you, love?” My father spoke from behind his
newspaper. “News is on in a sec, don’t want to miss it.”
The BBC News was the highlight of my father’s day. Normally, he arrived
home from work just a few minutes before it came on. He’d walk through the
house, discarding his overcoat and suit jacket on the coat stand in the hall,
battling the tight knot of his tie as he entered the living room. Then he’d turn on
the television, drop into his armchair, and unlace his shiny black shoes, filling
the room with his ripe, sweaty-feet smell. Sometimes he might sigh, turn to me,
and say, “All right, Jesse, love?” But most days he just sat there silently as the
BBC globe spun around and around, and that urgent, official-sounding music
came on. Then, almost as soon as the newsreader began talking, my father would
begin to yell, rolling his eyes and gesticulating, swearing and bouncing on the
noisy, worn-out springs of his chair. “Stupid bosses’ lackey!” he’d shout at
Richard Baker as he talked about another miners’ strike or the Watergate
scandal. Sometimes he’d throw a shoe toward the screen when he was
particularly annoyed at the BBC’s account of events, or when one of the
Conservative politicians he hated most came on. But usually he reserved the full
force of his vitriol for those end-of-news feel-good items about the royal family
—Prince Charles playing polo, the Queen Mother visiting a children’s hospital,
Princess Margaret opening a new shopping center. “Bloody useless parasite!”
he’d shout, wagging his finger at the screen while the Queen Mum, in pastel
pink and pearls, smiled benevolently and waved to an adoring crowd. “Should
go out and get a real job instead of living shamelessly off the rest of us. Come
the revolution, we’ll make her clean toilets. That’ll wipe that bloody
condescending look off her face.”
