Another Life Altogether Read Free Page A

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 towardthe 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.”
    That evening, the headline was an IRA bomb in London, and my father was unusually subdued by the pictures of the burning skeleton of a building, the stricken faces of the bleeding survivors, the dazed ambulance men. “What’ll that do to solve anybody’s problems?” he said quietly as he shifted in his chair.
    While my father sipped his tea and watched the rest of the news, I turned to the back page of the newspaper to find out what was on television that night. “Dad,” I said when the news was over and I knew he could be interrupted. “There’s a documentary on BBC Two about Spain at eight o’clock. Is it all right if we watch it?”
    “Don’t see why not,” he said.
    And so that night I embarked upon the research that would enable me to write letters from my mother to me. I sat in front of the television with a notebook scribbling down what I thought were pertinent pieces of information, like the population of Barcelona, the date Gaudi first began construction of his strange gingerbread castle of a cathedral, the number of matadors injured each year in the bull ring, a few relevant words of Spanish—señora, peso, pension, General Franco.
    I liked the idea of my mother visiting Spain. It was where Julie Fraser had been for her holiday last year. She’d returned to school with her hair sun-bleached and her skin turned a deep, reddish tan. In lessons, I sat as close to her as I could, eavesdropping as she extolledthe “sexy Spanish waiters” and the all-night discos. “The women go topless on the beaches there, you know,” she said, giggling and peeling another piece of flaking, sunburned skin from her arm.
    As I listened, I’d found myself imagining what it might be like to lie on some sunny Spanish beach next to Julie. We’d be best friends so comfortable with each other that we’d take off our tops so we wouldn’t have to worry about tan lines. Later, to cool off, we’d run into the warm blue water, where we’d swim and splash until we tired ourselves out.
    “What the bloody hell are you staring at?” Julie had said when she caught me watching her tell her friends, yet again, how she’d been served fried octopus one night for dinner and it was the most disgusting thing