Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  When my eyes bulged, my stepfather peeled back his palm and washed his hands before twisting the taps shut. Everything stood still in the bathroom. The mirror was steamed over, reflecting nothing.

  He took a flannel and wiped my face with a shaking hand.

  'Now then, go on downstairs to the party.'

  The party was still brimming with smoke and chatter and spilling drinks. Bubbling with wine, people asked me to twist for them. I pressed my back against the wall, smiling out of sore eyes.

  'I'm tired of dancing,' I told them. The music sounded flat and tinny. I stayed close to the wall.

  When people finally gathered their coats to leave, some of them were in tears. 'You'll be thousands of miles away,' the wine reminded them.

  'Good luck, love. Take care!' Car doors slammed. Aunties, uncles, friends - everyone we had ever knov^oi - chugged off down the street. At the corner, yellow indicators winked before the cars turned and were gone. I finished waving on the doorstep, then climbed the stairs to wash the tears and lipstick kisses from my face. Our bedroom light went out at eight o'clock, but I read by the light of the streedamp, then rehearsed my twelve and thirteen times tables, flustering to grasp the fourteens, until I fell asleep.

  'Wake up, Andy: it's today,' my mother whispered in my ear and I opened my eyes. Her face was lowered to the pillow, close to mine. My heart always speeded up at the scent of her face cream.

  'Shh! Let's not wake the others.' My mother planted a smoky kiss on my forehead and handed me my clothes for the trip: flared green corduroys and a red velour sweater that snuggled around my neck. Downstairs everything was still: a mug of coffee let off fine wisps of steam at the table; strewn around it lay old letters and love poems from me. The poems were full of birds and water and flowers and rainbows, the loveliest things I could think of, but really they were all about my mother.

  'I'm soning my papers out,' she told me. 'Some of them'll have to be thrown away.'

  'Not this one.' I picked out a makeshift envelope I had tried to seal with spittle. Inside, my love letter began. Dear Mummy, I love you more than God. It went on to insist that I loved my mother more than mashed potato, more even than Auntie Livia. The previous Sunday, when I had written it at the dining table, my stepfather had snapped, 'Don't be so soppy!' He had reached to rip the page out of my notebook, but let me finish it when my face threatened to crease up and fold.

  My mother read the letter again, laughing at the word 'georgeous', then slipped it into the hidden pouch of her wallet.

  'No!' she smiled. 'Not this one.'

  Then she slid her hands across the table and took up both of mine in her warm palms. Stroking my fists, she unfolded my long olive fingers against the laminated white of the table. We sat quiedy together, my mother tracing around each of my fingers, pausing at the knuckles, until the milk van came ratding botdes outside the window to break the spell.

  Our suitcases bulged at the locks.

  'All our worldly goods!' Our mother laughed. Later, while we waited for Auntie Pauline and Uncle Bill to drive us to the

  airport, she cried on the telephone, squeezing in a few more goodbyes to Gran.

  'I'll write, Mum.' Sobs came up from her chest. 'The minute we land I'll write to you,'

  I was glad when Auntie Pauline and Uncle Bill pulled up and our mother had to dry her eyes to face them; her tears made me feel dizzy and small.

  At the airport, our stepfather stood at the window with Sarah in his arms and Laurie by his side, watching the planes take off into the night. My mother and I sat at a red plastic table, sipping Coke in tall glasses through straws. She reached her hand across to squeeze mine tight, whispering: 'We can always come back, Andy, love - any time you say so, if you get frightened or homesick or anything.'

  Before then, it had not occurred to me to feel frightened or homesick or anything.

  I whispered back: 'I'll tell you. Mum, if I'm not happy.' Then I puckered my lips around my straw and sucked at my Coke until it was time to pass through the metal detectors and board the plane. An air hostess buckled me into my seat, and I sat looking out of the window, mulling over what my mother had said, over and over until the engines roared, my stomach shot up into my mouth, and Manchester dropped out of the picture.

  It was like being shut up in a spaceship with our stepfather, pressing our faces out at the world. Not in the clouds, where smiling air hostesses hovered under helmets of hair and made us suck mint after mint out of crinkling silver wrappers, while he sat strapped into his seat licking their legs with his eyes. Not in the clouds - but from the moment the plane nosed down, and our stepfather unbuckled his seatbelt, clutching the passport with all our names in his fist. He slipped the passport into his shirt pocket, and a look shimmered across his face, like a glass door sliding shut. No more Gran or aunties to keep their eye out or stick their oar in.

  Down a long tunnel, as cold as a fridge, Laurie reached to grip my mother's litde finger: 'My legs've gone fijnny.'

  'Move it.' Our stepfather grimaced behind the trolley frill of luggage.

  Suddenly, a sea of faces surged in front of us. One of them was Auntie Carla's; she came rushing out of the crowd with our cousins, Robin and Rosalie, followed by her new husband. Uncle Wayne. He was even taller and wider than our stepfather, whom he clapped on the back and called Partner.

  'Damned heatwave,' Uncle Wayne drawled when we came out into the glare to load into his truck. He bent to lift Laurie and me into the back with the suitcases. 'Sun musta knew you were comin" - he winked - 'put his hat on, special.'

  The air boiled in slow waves, making the air ripple up off the tarmac and the grown-ups' smiles slip and slide over their

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  faces. I wanted to ask my mother if she remembered that summer in Manchester when the ladybirds landed and landed on our arms, then crawled drunkenly through the hairs, sucking the sweet sweat. But her face was fixed over my head in a happy mask set to spoil if I tugged on it.

  While our stepfather swore, wrestling with suitcases, and our mother mopped up Sarah's tantrum. Auntie Carla slipped a jar of something weird into my hands.

  'For you and your Laurie.' It looked like golden glue oozing with light.

  'Honey!' Auntie Carla laughed. 'Out of a beehive.' She explained through her grin how the honeycomb had been ripped out of the beehive and squashed into the jar with the lid screwed down.

  'Oh.' Inside, at the heart of the honey, glistened a world of boxes that bees had spent their lives building out of the faces of flowers. I balanced on the back of the truck with the suitcases and Laurie, letting her stroke the glass but gripping the lid jealously in my fist, to keep the sweetness from spilling.

  Even afi:er dark, the air in Canada was warm and thick with smoky, rum-laced stories of the good life. Uncle Wayne's voice was music, murmuring sentences like songs, while crickets clicked and purred in the dark behind him. It was only when my sisters and I were sent in off the verandah and the door banged shut on the flowing night noise that I could imagine it all evaporating into one long airy promise, like Auntie Pauline had muttered - that aft:ernoon in Manchester, behind our stepfather's back, with the trunks already sealed up for shipping.

  No going back.

  When it came to the crunch, our mother now admitted to me, Auntie Carla and Uncle Wayne were our only hope.

  'The only souls we've got to rely on,' she sighed, when they

  invited us to make their bedroom our home. We had to sleep locked in as a family while Auntie Carla and Uncle Wayne squashed up in the living-room on the settee - the cream-coloured velvet one that Laurie and I had watched our cousins sprawl over in front of the television, while our stepfather scowled at us to keep the hell off, forcing us to sit cross-legged on the floor. I hid my face under the damp heat of the covers, my tummy sweating against Laurie's, until our stepfather's snores lulled frill in the dark and my muscles slipped out of their knots into sleep.

  While we were waiting to find a house of our ow
n, we kept our lives squeezed up against the walls in plastic leather holdalls too crammed to risk opening properly. Our mother unzipped just a corner, and whatever she pulled out we wore.

  'The buggers'll never shut back up,' she said when Laurie and I urged her to hunt out the twin red dresses whose halter necks would let the sun melt down our backs. She chipped her nails shoving stockings and dumb woollens back through the zip jaws.

  'This is bloody ridiculous!' We saw the half-moons spoiling and stopped clamouring for our favourite clothes.

  Some nights, afrer the whitest-hot days, our mother let other things spill out behind the bedroom door. She pulled us to her and buried her salty face in our hair, crooning horrible but delicious, It wasn 't meant to be like this, it wasn 't meant to be like this, until our stepfather sozzled in off^ the porch, and her eyes dried up.

  'Don't fret, Lol.' He patted her thigh and fell into bed, slurring, 'We've wads of cash. Have our own pad in no time.'

  Before the end of our first week, our stepfather had blown a wad of cash on a fat red Cadillac that he screeched us about in to see the sights. Laurie, Sarah and I clung to the back seat, watching years of Auntie Carla's dog-eared postcards spring to life, gulping pine and soil and sun-grilled grass as it smacked

  through the windows to fill our faces and set our hair screaming. Our mother sat in the front seat, her face dead under dark glasses, as mountains whizzed by.

  At night, she soaped the days off our faces with a warm flannel. We watched our stepfather and Uncle Wayne tuck into steak and white bread dipped in steaming gravy, while we chewed rubbery hot dogs out of tins. Our jaws cycled slowly, taking care not to scoff, until the men jerked back their chairs and left: the table to bite the heads off cigars. The doors slammed on our stepfather's red Cadillac, and they growled off in search of bars.

  Something fisted in my belly when Auntie Carla scraped off the plates, forking chunks of still-warm steak into the dog dish. Our mother helped her rinse blood and gravy off the plates, then they boiled up some milk and bowed their heads close at the table. Their perms mingled into a single frizzy bush as they whispered over two milky coffees. Whatever they had on their minds was drowned under the miraculous splash and whirr of Auntie Carla's new dishwasher. I stood next to it, Wishwish-wishwishwishwish, gobbling bits about jobs, big houses, bruises and the bloody fortune just blown on that damn car.

  A month of sunsets rolled by and we were still living out of holdalls up against the wall in Auntie Carla's bedroom. 'Just for the interim,' our mother kept saying.

  The day trips dried up.

  'Seen one mountain, seen 'em all.' Our stepfather shrugged when we begged him to take us shooting along the freeways again, where totem poles flashed past, tossing thrills across the back seat.

  Now he was busy chasing opportunities - fast money he heard of from strange men in bars.

  'See you later, doll.' He pecked our mother's cheek, revved up his car and was dust.

  I hung about my mother's chair, milking her for after-dinner kisses. When my stepfather was out she would give me her cheek - Ponds spiced with Craven A. She let me twist her newly permed curls in springy tubes around my thumb. But her smile snapped when I tried resting the tip of my litde finger in the fleshy groove where her eyebrows met.

  'Enough, Andy, love. Enough.' My mother dug her knuckles into the small of my back. 'Go on now and grab some fresh air. It's a whole new world out there.'

  I sulked with Laurie down the darkening road, blinking at the whisks of dust stirred up by cars speeding past us, heading for the horizon of ice-cream-tipped mountains. Occasionally the cars would have kids in them, kneeling on the back seat. Then Laurie and I would smile and wave like mad until the faces dissolved in the dusk. We were bursting to make friends, because the summer holidays had only just started and it would be ages before we went to a new school and met anyone our own age. Our cousins were prepared to watch TV with us, but, at eleven and thirteen, they were too old to play with us or even to be seen with us outside the house, since I was not yet ten and Laurie was only eight. We hung around them as long as we dared, letting their watery Canadian accents wash over us, soaking up new ways of saying things. Crisps were 'potato chips', tea was 'supper', 'pizza' was a squelchy, cheese-and-tomatoey thing that you ate by itself, with no vegetables on the plate. Robin and Rosalie couldn't believe that we had never seen, let alone eaten, a pizza before. We let them tease us

  about how much we didn't know, until their jibes began to turn nasty. Then we made ourselves scarce.

  My sister and I snailed along the road, inhaling heady grass smells, scouring the ditches for empty beer botdes. At the end was a shop - the liquor store - owned by a pudgy-faced man named Chad, who let us swap any botdes we found for what he called candy. 'Ready to trade?' he would ask us when we clinked into his store with our booty. There was nothing as good as the Arrow bars and Mojos and Refreshers that we used to get in England, and we knew better than to choose chocolate, since the stuff here tasted so odd it gave us the shivers. Usually Chad would press us to take liquorice laces. We had to smile into his jowly face knowing they would be wiry and stale. Sometimes, though, the weeds turned up enough botdes, brown-gold with red labels, to persuade him to hand over a box of Crackerjack. On the packet, a sailor boy billowed in blue over red writing: The more you eat, the more you want! That was true; but it made me feel lost, squabbling with my sister over shards of broken toffee and popcorn kernels in the bottom. We trundled back in silence, squinting against the dying light to spot more bottles glinting in the grass.

  It was like wearing cosy, invisible sleeves, with the sultry evening air pressing on our skin. But all the warmth drained away and the sky suddenly looked dark, as if it were frowning, when we ran into a posse of boys clutching sticks like rifles. Laurie and I shivered. These were not nice boys, like the ones we had been expecting to find in Canada, after seeing Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on TV.

  'Get your Ricking shoes off!' One of them jabbed his rifle stick into my chest.

  Laurie glanced up and down the dim road, thirsty for grown-ups. I agreed to take off my sandals if my litde sister didn't have to.

  'Get 'em off!' The smallest boy stood up to my nose, ketchup rusting in the corners of his lips. He winked at his beefier fi-iends, a crowd of horrible grins. Then he bent and thrust his stick into the grass before swooping it up to my face. On the end, a swollen worm was flailing, frantic to lay its belly down.

  'Grass snakes!' The boys sniggered.

  The snake's pale belly glowed in the last of the light. Then, with a mad writhe, it flew off^ the stick and dropped, wriggling invisible, into the grass.

  My toes gleamed, naked as slugs, in the weeds next to the ditch. I stood my ground, my throat clenched against crying as I spoke up: 'Give us my sandals.'

  'Give us my sandals, give us my sandals, give us my sandals!' The boys pounced on my Manchester voice, tossing it between them in a sick sing-song mixture of home and here.

  'Stuff you!' I lobbed my fiill-blown accent fi-om home. It had been getting wet around the edges, as if it were beginning to dissolve. Now the old words were flying out of my mouth as sweet as they were filthy. I came as near as I dared to swear words, then grabbed Laurie's hand to storm off, barefoot, along the gravel side of the road.

  Our mother would hit the roof, because the sandals had cost two dollars at K-Mart, but Auntie Carla might hum her car back along the ditch to rescue them from the dark before our stepfather got home.

  'English trash! English trash!' The sandals walloped our backs.

  We scooped them out of the dirt and ran full pelt.

  Our adventure put Laurie and me in the limelight for the night. We sat shining in front of our cousins, feeling as

  fascinating as television. Our fingers throbbed, clutching icy glasses of cherry Kool-Aid which sped pink and stinging into our mouths after scooting through rollercoaster straws.

  By midnight it was over. The house had clenched up, ten
se, all eyes on the telephone. Uncle Wayne and our stepfather had not staggered home at their usual hour.

  'Bloody fools!' Auntie Carla kept saying in a high, scratchy voice. 'Bloody fools! They could have been knifed, or shot even, the dives they end up in.'

  Our mother rasped a match to light one more cigarette, half closing her eyes at the first puff, then flicking her other wrist fast to snuff out the match's flame. She met the tip with a slow pucker, and her thoughts were her own.

  When gravel crunched in the drive, she stubbed out her smoke in the ashtray brimming with dead dimps. They came in laughing, my stepfather and Uncle Wayne, holding one another up in a stinking cloud of cigars and spirits. We scattered as they fell on to the settee, muddying the velvety cream.

  'Lolly, love—' Our stepfather gagged on his own tongue. His face kept twitching and twisting, trying to sort tears out of the drunken, queer laughing that had taken over his insides.

  'Lolly, love,' he got out, 'something. . .' Then his face let go and there was an avalanche of tears, worse than sick. We froze, fascinated.

  'Lol.' A bloodied hand groped for my mother's. 'It's me car. The Cadillac. Down the ditch, an accident - tell them, Wayne.'

  I saw my stepfather's wide, red Cadillac smashed in the murk of a ditch, back wheels dead in the air. A truck had come steaming round the bend - lights too low, no bloody horn - and there was nothing for it and that was that, one almighty swerve and they were lucky to get out alive, goddammit and sweet Jesus.

  Our mother boiled up some coffee and made our stepfadier sip like a baby to still the trembling and stop the tears. He moaned low into the mug, slurping, 'Lolly, Lolly, Lolly.'

  But you could see through the steam it was his smashed-up Cadillac he had in mind. ^

  The next night the men abandoned the dirty dishes like always, staggered back slit-eyed and singing like always. Before midnight this time, no blood. A whiff of disappointment streaked through the air when the door swung open on their songs. Our stepfather lurched in, deep pink from drinking, sagged on the velvet settee and yanked our mother into his lap to pass on the hard whisky promises Uncle Wayne had been making all night.