I nodded, satisfied with his answer. I could always tell when Sam was fibbing, and this wasn’t one of those times. It was silly even to think about it. Why on earth would Dad set fire to our house? He wouldn’t do that, no matter how angry he had been with Mum. Especially not with me in it. My dad loved me.
After hours of questioning, we were allowed to return to our B&B, with Alicia now wide awake and demanding her next feed.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked, as I scooped formula into her bottle.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Dad said, with confidence. He sounded almost proud of himself.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Everything always works out in the end. You’ll see.”
He picked up Alicia and bounced her on his knee. She looked up at him curiously, unused to his attention.
“It’s time for her milk,” I said, snatching her back. I carried her over to my bed and gave her her bottle. She pinched my hand as she suckled, drinking the milk ravenously until it was all gone.
Dad came over and sat beside us.
“I miss her so much,” he said, leaning his head on mine.
His head felt strangely heavy and quite annoying, given that I was already holding the baby.
“I need to give Alicia her bath now,” I said, pulling away.
I stood up and carried Alicia across the hall.
I thought I heard a sob as I shut the door behind me, but maybe it was the wind.
I hadn’t been back to school since the fire because I had Alicia to take care of. The B&B was out of the catchment area and Dad didn’t bother to enrol me at a new school. Sam had moved up to the Comprehensive by then, so nobody asked him about me.
I can’t say I missed the boring days of long division, or the muddy afternoons on the hockey pitch, but I missed having time to spend with my mates. Dawn came to visit sometimes, but I had little energy to feign interest in her news, or to play games with her as I used to. I had fallen down a rabbit hole, into the world of adults. My childhood had died in the fire, along with my mum.
Raising Alicia by myself was tough, and I was always tired. Day after day, I longed for Mum to come back and take care of us again. I expected to wake up and find that time had reset itself and that none of it had really happened. I was always disappointed.
Each night, I would pull out The Gingerbread Man and read it to Alicia before she fell asleep. I felt like Mum was watching us, from wherever she was, correcting me over my shoulder, if I got a word wrong. Sometimes Dad would look over and roll his eyes. He thought reading to babies was a waste of time.
The B&B never felt like home. We always knew that our room was borrowed and that nothing was really ours. It didn’t help that it was in a rough part of town. Our old neighbourhood wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but at least we knew everyone there. I didn’t feel safe here. I rarely went out unless Dad or Sam came with me. Especially, given that I had Alicia to care for. The nearest park was littered with bottles and condoms, and I knew that wasn’t right.
Alicia grew up quickly. Over the next few months, her eyes gradually darkened and her hair grew longer, like mine. I was excited by every new trick she learned, from lifting her head, to cooing and babbling. I wished I had a camera to record it all on, but Dad’s polaroid had been destroyed in the fire, along with everything else.
Some of the other B&B residents were kind to me, and tried to teach me the proper way to wash the nappies or cook a stew. I think they meant well, but sometimes I’d catch them looking at me with such pity in their eyes that it made me angry. I often stood in the doorway, rocking Alicia as the women congregated around the stove, talking in fast, excited voices. “Gasbagging,” Dad called it. Their group didn’t really include me, but I didn’t fit in with the other children, either. There were one or two who lived there at the same as us, but none I gelled with, and I missed the company of people who understood me. I still had Sam. But we were too much in each other’s pockets as it was.
When Alicia was eight months old, we were forced to move out of our B&B and into an even worse one.
“Watch yourselves,” Dad warned us. “Our neighbours are all crooks. They’ll rob us blind if we let them.”
“What have we got that’s worth stealing?” Sam asked.
I thought of my precious Gingerbread Man and placed it safely under my pillow.
The place was filthy, and there were mouse droppings in the cupboards. Dad laid down powerful spring-powered traps at night. It was grim to see their bodies, bloodied and twisted in the morning.
It wasn’t just the mice that bothered me. There were cockroaches as big as my thumb. I was frightened that they would scuttle over me and bite me while I slept. I worried about Alicia too. I couldn’t bear the thought that they might hurt her.
You have to watch her, I heard Mum say in my head. And I knew that she was right.
I would have done anything to protect her from harm.
“We should burn the place down,” Dad snarled to Richard, when he came to visit. Visitors were not allowed, but nobody paid any heed to the rules.
Richard gave Dad an odd look.
“Don’t even joke about it. You’d go straight to prison.”
Dad just grunted.
“Why can’t we come home with you?” I asked Richard.
“I’d love to have you. If only I had the room.”
“I could sleep in the bathtub. Or we could camp out in a tent in your garden.”
Richard laughed at that, as if I’d said something funny. But I was deadly serious.
The day Alicia started to crawl, it caught us all by surprise. Our room led out onto a balcony. Probably the best feature it had. We used that balcony for everything, from hanging the washing, to growing tomatoes, and mustard and cress. Any food we could get our hands on. Living on handouts was tough, and fresh vegetables were always in low supply.
We usually kept the balcony door closed, but that day, Dad had put out a crate of beer that he wanted to keep cool, and he hadn’t closed it properly after him. I don’t know where he’d got the beer, and I didn’t think to ask. I had Alicia to take care of. There were always dirty nappies to wash and there was only a butler sink and a bar of soap to clean them with. I’d wash them every morning and peg them out on the balcony to dry. They would hang there all day, fluttering like kites in the wind and rain.
I left Alicia playing with some toys and walked across the hall to put some potatoes in the oven. Another family was already using both shelves, but if I sliced the potatoes really small, I could fit them on the bottom. I hadn’t yet decided what we were going to have with them. It was a toss-up between baked beans, or some grated cheese which was past its sell by date.
I slid the potatoes in and walked back to our room.
“Hey, where’s Alicia?”
Dad was lying on the bed, drinking a can of beer. Sam was reading a comic book he’d got from the library. Something about spaceships and time travel.
They both looked at me blankly.
“I thought she was with you?” Dad said.
“Where is she?” I had left her right by the cot, hadn’t I?
“Someone’s taken her,” Sam said. He was up on his feet now. We darted out into the hallway, but there was no sign of her. She wasn’t in the kitchen, either.
“Alicia? Alicia?”
Sam and I ran door to door, checking with the other residents. We scoured the bathrooms and the kitchen again, then ran back to our room. Dad was exactly where we’d left him, lazing about on his bed. I wanted to punch him, he made me so angry. I checked under the table and under the beds, any place I could think of.
Then I heard a wail. Not a loud one, but a definite sound. More like a mew, than a cry. I ran out onto the balcony, and found Alicia trapped between the railings. Somehow, she had squeezed herself through them and got stuck. I thanked Christ the railings were there. I didn’t want to think about what might have happened if they weren’t.
> “Here, let me get you out,” Sam said, tugging gently. But she wouldn’t budge.
I moved in to help him, and the two of us tugged, with Alicia squealing indignantly the whole time. But the more we tugged, the harder it became.
“You stay with her, I’ll get a bowl of soapy water,” Sam said, “That’ll get her out.”
“Can’t you do something, Dad?” I asked, while I waited. But Dad didn’t move from the bed.
Sam came back, carrying a bucket and we soaped her up. She was howling loudly now, not liking the water at all.
“It’s no use - she’s properly stuck. Maybe we should call the fire brigade?”
“No,” said Dad, finally getting off his arse. If I’d known there was a magic password, I’d have said it much sooner. I grimaced as he grabbed Alicia by the neck and forced her tiny head back through the bars. We’d have been better off calling the fire brigade, like I’d said. Those guys had serious tools. They could have bent back the bars, rather than hurt the little mite, but Dad had to do it his way. He always did.
As soon as she was free, I grabbed Alicia and sat with her on my lap. I held her all afternoon, stroking her poor, injured head which looked as misshapen as it had been when she was born. The potatoes cooked on in the oven, and I didn’t pay them any heed until a dark cloud rose out of the kitchen. I sent Sam to deal with the charred remains of our dinner. If the social workers had called that afternoon, I would gladly have let them take us away from Dad. But I wouldn’t be separated from Alicia. Not for anything.
15
A week before Christmas, and almost a year after the fire, Uncle Richard drove us all back to Cold Bath Lane. I took one last look around our scummy room and didn’t feel the slightest sadness to be leaving. The dogs barked up a storm as we packed our meagre belongings into Richard’s van, which was bigger than Dad’s, and climbed in the back.
Dad and Richard talked business as we drove, but I couldn’t follow the conversation. There was always talk of money and jobs, but if there was so much cash being offered, I didn’t get why we had had to live in that awful place.
“We have to play the game,” was all Dad said.
I looked out the window, as we rounded the corner into Cold Bath Lane. I expected it to look more or less the same, despite the fire, but the house in front of us was very different to the old Georgian building we had known.
“That’s our house?”
I looked up and down the street, expecting it to have moved a few doors up or down, but of course it hadn’t.
“Ain’t she a beauty?” Dad said.
Sam and I gawped. Everything about our house looked new, from the neatly mown lawn to the bright red bricks. The upstairs windows were decorated with beautiful wooden shutters, with butterflies painted on them. Even the front door was different from the old one. There were no scrape marks where Dad had lost his key and tried to kick his way in, and the windows glistened with newness. I remembered Mum spending hours, cleaning the windows with old newspapers. No matter how much she cleaned them, she could never get rid of the soot that clung in the air. But these new windows – they were something else. They had fancy glass, none of it broken or taped over. It looked like the sort of place where posh people lived.
The houses either side had been rebuilt too, I noticed, and if you used your imagination, you could pretend that this was a well-to-do area. A place where you could play out in the street without teenagers nicking your ball, or stubbing their fags out on your doll’s head. A place where everyone said hello to each other, instead of hurling abuse and kicking their empty beer cans over the garden wall. A place where you could park your car, and expect to find it intact the next day, without someone keying it, or nicking the hubcaps.
“Are they really going to let us move back here?” I asked, admiring the new door.
“Of course, they are,” Dad said. “This is our home.”
I have wondered since what strings Dad pulled to get us back into that house, because I was right, it did look too good for us. Maybe the council were worried about being sued for health and safety violations in the aftermath of the fire. They never did get to the bottom of it. Or maybe someone owed Dad a favour. Whatever it was, I have no idea. But we were home.
It felt weird, entering this luxurious new house. We all took our shoes off and left them in the front porch before we stepped inside. The new kitchen gleamed, and I looked forward to cooking on a hob that didn’t go out every few minutes. And having a whole oven to myself. Some of the kinder mothers at the B&B had taught me a thing or two. I could now cook a couple of different curries, as well as Lebanese rice with saffron in it.
“You have to nick the saffron because it’s expensive,” the woman had told me, with a wink. I’d had no idea if she was joking or not.
“Look at the sofas!” Sam squealed.
The new, redesigned living room had not one, but two gorgeous sofas, in soft, comfortable fabrics. They looked like something out of a catalogue. Whereas before, we’d always had second-hand ones, passed on down to us when someone more fortunate decided they needed an upgrade. They were always missing a few springs and needed extra cushions in order to sit on them without getting a pain in the bum.
“They’re fab,” I agreed, but I didn’t join Sam in jumping on them to test their bounciness.
It was the upstairs I really wanted to see. Clutching Alicia, I bounded up the stairs to our new room. It was completely different to my old room, but when I stood at the window, I could see that the view was the same as it had been before and I remembered that fateful night, when I had knotted the sheets together to escape. I peered down, recalling the slipperiness of the pipes. I could still feel the rope burns on my arms.
My room was smaller than before, as it had been divided into two, to give Sam his own room. Mine had a cot squeezed into the corner, where my bookshelf had once stood. I felt a pang of sadness for my lost books. It was Mum who had encouraged me to read, whereas Dad thought it was a waste of time. I doubted he would be buying me any new books to replace them. I took The Gingerbread Man out of my bag and slid it under my pillow for safekeeping.
“This is where we’re going to sleep,” I told Alicia, placing her in the cot with her doll. I left the door open and stepped into the hallway. The room next to mine was the bathroom. I pushed the door open and peeked inside. I wanted to check all the blood was gone.
My stomach twisted as I walked inside. The bathtub was now a tasteful lemon yellow, with handles you could grip to help you get in and out. I touched the enamel and saw Mum lying pale and dozy in the water. Ribbons of smoke seeped under the door and tingled my nostrils. My throat closed up as I tasted the toxic fumes and felt the raw, burning pain on the back of my tongue.
“Dad! Dad! There’s smoke!”
Dad came running up the stairs, gasping for air at the top.
“Where?” he demanded. “I can’t smell nothing.”
“It was here,” I stammered. I breathed shallowly, careful not to swallow too much of the smoke, but the air was clear.
“It’s alright, Jody. We’ve got a state of the art smoke alarm,” Dad said, pointing up at the ceiling. “You don’t have to worry about fires no more. That thing’ll warn us before the spark is even lit.”
I laughed nervously, but I found it hard to believe that the smoke had all been in my head. It had seemed so real.
I went back into my room and rescued Alicia from her cot. She threw her arms around my neck and I carried her downstairs to the kitchen, where I was delighted to find a packet of biscuits.
“Where did these come from?”
“Richard left those for you,” Dad said, swiping one. “I told him they were too good for you kids.”
We settled back in somewhat happily. The house brought back a lot of memories for all of us, but we were determined to move onwards with our lives, and having a new improved house helped with that. Dad had not managed to get himself a full-time job to replace the one he had lost, but t
hat didn’t seem to matter. He earned bits here and there, working with Richard. In fact, there seemed to be a bit more money to go round than there had been before, not that I was allowed to ask about where the money came from.
At the beginning of each week, Dad would leave a couple of notes on the table for me to do the shopping with. There was always enough for the groceries, including Alicia’s milk and a bit left over for a few other necessities. It even stretched to a decent cut of meat from the butchers and the odd twenty pence to spend at the sweet shop. I remembered Mum slipping us money for sweets once in a while. The lemon sherbets had been her favourites, so I always bought some of those.
One Sunday, I attempted Yorkshire puds in the oven. They came out charred on the outside but refused to cook through in the middle.
“You burnt them,” Sam pointed out with delight. “Just like Mum used to.”
I actually think he meant it as a compliment. As in, they reminded him of Mum’s cooking, but Dad went berserk and cuffed him round the ear.
“You apologise!” he bellowed at Sam.
“I’m sorry,” Sam whimpered.
“It’s alright,” I said, and spooned some peas onto Alicia’s plate, like nothing had happened. Dad wouldn’t hear a word against Mum now she was dead. He spoke of her as if she had been Mother Theresa.
“When I grow up, I’m going to be a fireman,” Sam said, keen to change the subject.
“I want to be a nursery nurse.” I said. I leaned over to cut up Alicia’s meat.
“You can do anything you want to,” Dad said. It was about as close as I ever came to praise or recognition from him, and I glowed with pride.
Dad still held a lot of grudges. There was always someone who needed ‘sorting’, according to him. Their crime could be something as slight as looking at him the wrong way in the street.
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