Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  'Wayne's found work for me, under the table, like.' He spoke with bright wet eyes. 'Few months is all it'll take me to get me act together, then we can think about building our own place, Wayne says. How about that, then?'

  His hair reeked of smoke and whisky, but our mother smiled straight into the face of our stepfather's dreams. If frowns wrecked her forehead she kept them well under her perm.

  'Smashing, love.' She stroked our stepfather's hair. His black curls sweated at the roots, limp from alcohol and the muggy midsummer night.

  'A pad of our own,' our stepfather sighed. 'How 'bout that, Andy, love?'

  It was bloodshot but rare, the smile my stepfather tossed me. I saw the Cadillac nearly killing him and thought of kissing his hands where they sprawled on his tired denim knees. The knuckles lay hairy and grooved, resting, I imagined, after a lifetime of hoisting sails and fixing cars. Under the nails lurked ancient oil stains and dirt out of nowhere.

  'We'll have a garden, won't we, Dad?'

  His fingers flexed, promising to pull a house out of the ground: ironed lawns and a white wooden fence all around.

  'Yes, love,' my mother whispered. Our stepfather had slipped into one of his drunken snoozes.

  'There'll be a huge garden,' she said, as he began to snore.

  There was a huge garden. A huge, leafy jewellery box sprouting yellow melons and golden squash. Pumpkins perched like swollen footballs, a crowd of strawberries crawling tendrils and pouting ruby kisses along the fence. Canada. Our eyes devoured it all, while our mother and stepfather retreated for a moment out of the sun. They had to leave Laurie and me on the verandah with Mr Singh, the owner, while they stepped inside to make their decision. In private.

  'We'll take it.' Our mother smiled hard, as if she had been slapped, when they came back out.

  'Very good,' the Indian man said, touching his turban. 'Very good.'

  Our stepfather shuffled green paper into the man's hand. It fluttered in the breeze. Rent.

  'Just a month for now, mind.' He frowned at the man's bright purple turban. 'We'll be buying our own place any day.'

  'Very good.' Mr Singh made a fist of the money. Then he waved it over the garden: 'This not included, you understand?'

  He left us on the verandah, held up on stilts, over the empire of firuity colour.

  Our stepfather borrowed Uncle Wayne's truck and led us around flea markets and garage sales on desperate quests for furniture. But we sloped home without the mirrors or pictures that might have made the walls seem more friendly. The

  curtains, from the cheap end of the rack, were a dull red-orange, like a rotten sunset. To ease our mother's migraines we had to pull the curtains tight and put up with the putrid orange light seeping through them. Otherwise, the sun shot straight in like a guillotine and it was headacRes all round, hot and hammering behind the eyes.

  'The heat here can be cruel,' our mother wrote to Gran on postcards of shiny mountains or pioneers smiling in front of forts. I could almost taste the beads of sweat glistening on her lips where she sucked the end of her pen. She scribbled the last of her love and rinsed a flannel ice-cold under the tap. I watched her dabbing against her temples and in the hollows of her neck, where the clavicles stood out proud and arched, like jewellery. Her bones were so fine people often ended up staring.

  Going to play her favourite record one morning, my mother found it curled up and melted on the turntable under the window.

  'Why didn't you pull the curtains?' She gave me a look and yanked them across so that the room swilled orange and my tummy turned over. I watched her cursing the sun and weeping over the shrivelled black disc. A woman used to sing, 'Don't cry for me, Argentina', teasing hairy tremors deep into the back of our necks. Our stepfather would skulk off and leave us to ourselves - my mother, my sisters and me, alone - in the music. Now the song was dead.

  Nobody had warned me about the wrong kind of sun. In England, it made you feel more alive, glimmering out from behind the clouds and then slipping back in before you'd had enough. In Canada, it made you think of dying.

  The moment I saw it shining to kill, I went to lie in the shade of the porch, resting my face on the cool stone steps. I closed my eyes, and the sun was a different yellow. Under my lids, the old, Manchester sky bulged ftill of purple clouds, like

  bruises, swinging in sooty circles over slate roofs and chimneys and concrete lamp-posts. There were horses in the clouds and strange faces, like God's. Like Gran's.

  Hauled out of the ditch and mended, the battered red Cadillac still clogged up the drive, its front end a mangled silver smile. I went inside where the house sat sweating behind its sour orange drapes. My stepfather slouched asleep in the only armchair. His head lolled back, baring his neck white where the sun never ventured.

  I held my breath to keep him like that.

  He had woken once, when I wandered into the dark orange room, and pulled me into his lap.

  'Here, Andy, give us a kiss.'

  I brushed my stepfather's bristly cheek and went to get out of the chair, when his denim knees gripped. Holding my head like a melon between his hands, he slid his tongue into my ear. A black shudder went through me, all down one side.

  'Now, you kiss me.' My stepfather turned his face away and pushed back greasy curls: 'In my ear.'

  My bony thighs were bruising between his knees; I stopped wriggling and looked into the ear.

  'No, Dad.' Hiding panic under a giggle. 'It's too hairy!'

  Nails scratched my face when my stepfather grabbed my hair, 'Come on, Andy, love.'

  'No!' My voice threatened to break out of its whisper, with all the clobbering inside: 'I've got to go and wake up Mum, Dad - Mum's asked me to wake her up.'

  The knees slackened and my stepfather shoved me off his lap, 'Go on, then.' Little bitch, he added under his breath -'Go on, then.'

  The clock, plastic gold, was ticking and echoing, ticking and echoing down the hall.

  I wanted to go to my mother. I knew she would be lying in her room with the covers fastened over her face. Our house was baking, baking, but still she hid under her heaviest blankets. She had to have her sleep. There had been fights -screaming and smashed ornaments - over money and booze and indolence.

  'Sheer bloody indolence!' our mother threw at our stepfather.

  To get to this hell-hole she had sacrificed her trusty blue Princess and the red terraced house our real father slaved for until the day he died. The house and the car and the fiirniture - the whole flaming shebang! - had not been shrunk into dirty green notes just to stuff his pockets and swell his potbelly with spirits by the bloody gallon. Our lives were fluttering in the wind, for Christ's sake, while he lazed good-for-nothing on his bastard backside all flicking day.

  'I wouldn't have to laze on me backside all fijcking day' -our stepfather gritted his teeth - 'if I were legal to work. I can't do a flying shit with no papers, can I?'

  Now he got so worked up his jaws unlocked and he broke out of his laze to lunge at our mother.

  'Nagging bitch!' He grabbed the collar of her housecoat in his knuckles, shaking and knocking hollow and hard, as if he might crack open her chestbone.

  'Peter!' Our mother's head whipped back like a doll's. 'Not in front of the girls!' She shrieked slightly, choking, but our stepfather's face was swelling. He kept up his strop.

  'Outside, girls,' our mother gasped. Her voice wobbled, but her eyes looked quite set: 'Outside!'

  We went outside while they got on with it indoors.

  'Wanna play frisbee?' the kids next door yelled from their yard.

  I shook my head. They had a paddling pool and a trampoline that we were dying to bounce on. But our

  stepfather would go mad if he caught us in someone else's yard; he was afraid we would go blabbing our mouths off, letting strangers know his business. We would have to wait for summer to end and school to begin before we could start chatting and getting friendly with them.

  For now, my sisters and I had
to sit on the verandah under the neighbours' stares, watching the sun slink down. Across the back way, two fat birds hung upside-down, dripping, on a pole. The man with the gammy leg liked to slip into his green jacket and drive off with his guns on a Saturday afternoon. When he got home, he trussed up his catch and slit the necks. Every Saturday night they came out, tied up by their toes, dripping in the dusk, while we tried not to notice.

  Just after dark, our stepfather would slam out and rev up his car to go drinking. Tyres screeched under him before his patched-up Cadillac clanged and sputtered down the drive. We crept back indoors for an evening of orange gloom. Our mother disappeared into her bedroom, where she shut herself in with her cuts and bruises. The knob clicked once and there was dead quiet behind the door. I boiled up the ketde, stirring mugs of sugary coffee to wheedle my way in.

  'Coffee, Mum.' My ears strained to make her breathe through the wood.

  Sometimes, a mufHed groan rose from the blankets. My mother was conscious and might let me in to grip one clammy hand while she sipped from the other, trembling one. More often, a murky silence seeped under the door and I had to balance the coffee back down the hall without spilling. The cup sat on the television, waiting for her, until a cold stink slithered out and we had to pour it down the drain.

  Laurie pestered me to do jigsaws on the carpet. To stifle our three-year-old sister's tantrums, we let her suck the bits of

  cardboard before scattering them in fistfuls over the floor: 'Make them fit!' I used to win Sarah's and Laurie's awe by grabbing at a glance how the shapes locked together into livid green landscapes and blue skies. But I shuddered each time a picture was on the verge of coming together: I had a secret horror of the holes where pieces had gone missing.

  Worry muscled and cramped in my calves, kneeling over the puzzles. I left my sisters and tiptoed back down the hall to my mother's door, where a sly twist of my kirby grip slid open the lock. Her face was buried under the blankets. I had to peel them slowly back, holding my hean down.

  No splits or gashes. All the bones where they should be.

  I let myself breathe. Around her eyes the skin puffed veiny blue with bursts of purple, then sagged, yellow-green and hollow, under the cheekbones. Her dimples were shadowy holes, carved deep into the cheeks.

  I bent to kiss the smell of my mother's messed-up face. It was comforting, when her sores made her look a bit like a stranger, to find the same old scents. Woody perfiime came from her hair, rich with hours of sipping coffee and huffing on cigarettes in her pink housecoat and green fur slippers.

  'Andy, love?' Her eyeballs shifted under bluish skin lids.

  I hovered - wake up, wake up, wake up — over the closed eyes.

  My mother's head lolled in the damp pillow. I bent closer to catch her murmurs, before they faded and slowed. She sank back into bruised sleep, and I let her be.

  When our mother was what she called recuperated, the door would creak open. The toilet flushed and gurgled. She flapped down the hall in her slippers to cook tea. In place of meat we had mashed potatoes. Stiff mountains with no milk and only the meanest idea of margarine to soften them up - not squishy

  and delicious like diey used to be in England, but dry, so that it was like eating sand. Ketchup would have worked wonders, but our mother declared it disgusting and bad for our health. She insisted on a smattering of frozen vegetables, to add colour and nutrition. Peas like pebbles and stony cubes of carrot hit the bottom of the pan in a bullety hail; after boiling they tasted of nothing but the tin insides of the saucepan. We trudged through our plates, chomping green balls and orange cubes.

  'Mommy, your face is ftmny.' When Sarah threatened to cry, our mother held her and let her stroke around the fragile features, so that she would be less afraid of them. She stood at the window, smoking and staring out over the garden swelling ripe in the dark. The Singhs never got round to plucking things before they burst. We saw melon after melon puking pink seeds through cracked bellies, while grapes blistered black on the vine.

  My mother stumped her cigarette and slipped the hot stub back in the pack for later - she liked to grind every last breath out of her cigarettes. Letting out a long, smoky-blue sigh, she drew her fingers over her face, then wound her sleeves up tight to do the dishes. I hovered close to her hip, wiping plates hot and lemony out of her hands, trying to swallow the bitter orange pill she made us suck on a Saturday, to be sure of our vitamins.

  When the phone rang, her face frowned painfiilly, and she fiimbled to kill the bubbles between her fingers.

  'Hello?' Nobody ever rang us in the evenings. People were too busy feasting in families over tea and television.

  It was a stranger at the other end, making our mother sing cheerftil, tight as a wire, down the line.

  'Yes, that's us,' she said, then folded into a chair to chat. Laurie and I stood by, riveted. We watched her shoulders melting, lines unravelling out of her forehead into the phone.

  'We'll be waiting.' Our mother laid the receiver in its cradle and plunged her elbows back into the bubbles. We knew better than to ask who had called. 'Curiosity killed the cat,' she would have tutted. It was bad manners to pry. Eventually she pulled out the plug and sent the suds burping* down the sink. She wrapped the dishcloth like a scarf around the hot tap's neck and twisted her wedding ring back on, over the swollen red knuckle.

  'Well, kiddlywinks' - she touched her face round the edges - 'we've somebody coming to see us. Tomorrow, first thing.'

  We went to bed with jam butties inside us instead of water. We had a name, too, to chew on. Auntie Penny, distant cousin of Great Auntie Agnes in Manchester. It's lovely, I wanted to tell my mother, when your stomach lets you lie down without that hole squelching fiill of water while you're trying to sleep.

  When we woke up, our mother was a new woman. She threw the curtains back wide and drew a slick of lipstick glossy across her mouth. Instead of her exhausted pink housecoat and green slippers, she came out in royal blue slacks, seams pressed sleek up her legs. We marvelled at curls springing out of their rollers, where yesterday her hair had been dead brown straw clinging to the skull.

  'You look absolutely gorgeous. Mum.' I admired the Precious Plum kisses her lips printed at the end of every cigarette and on the rim of her mug.

  She let Laurie, Sarah and me press our noses against the nets to look out for our visitor. We were glued to the glass when a wide silver bonnet purred up our drive.

  A lady's Cadillac.

  She stepped out glazed, her skin tanned: Auntie Penny.

  Gold earrings dangled money around her face. I kept my eyes on them, trying not to stare where her eyebrows had been

  plucked to death then pencilled back on, too high, in skinny wings of surprise.

  'You're all so pretty!' she laughed, though her eyes skated politely to avoid the colours bruising our mother's face.

  She was tall, and her knees made delicious cracking sounds when she stooped to give us kisses and biscuity stars baked out of gingerbread, dipped in pink icing. Where once I would have burned to wipe it away, I let the lipstick kiss linger, sticky, a pearl on my cheek.

  A untie Penny gave us ice-cream and barbecues and a garden jlI. growing wild - grass under our soles and pine trees to look up to. She wanted to be sure we made the most of the sun before it got tired and it was time for us to put on long trousers and start school. Her silver Cadillac whisked us to a white wooden house only a blink from the sea, with an outdoor pool that made our mother gasp: 'Azure!'

  Life was too short, Auntie Penny had discovered over the years, to be anything less than sweet.

  We stripped off and skinny-dipped in the blue, before sinking our teeth into beefburgers that burnt our eyes: smoked over charcoal, sizzling cheese, oozing spicy tomato relish out of sesame seed buns.

  'Litde gannets!' Auntie Penny laughed. My throat seized up in the sun.

  But he was miles away - we had left him buried, snoring, under the covers.

  She smiled over u
s. 'Tastes better with your vests off, doesn't it now?'

  Afterwards, Auntie Penny stuck us under her Power Shower and let us loose with her perftimed soaps in the bathroom ftill of mirrors and fancy bottles. I could have stayed in there forever, water pummelling my back, steam rising behind the swirled-glass door that you could lock, without a sound, from the inside.

  'It won't run out,' Auntie Penny insisted, when I worried about the water.

  At our house the tank never heated all the way, so the taps giirgled lukewarm before gushing out icy. The electricity cost a fortune, and we had to conserve all our hot water for dirty dishes and for our mother's long, silent soaks, locked in the bathroom with cotton wool and pink ointments after another bloody to-do.

  Auntie Penny pressed a white furry towel into my arms, and rubbed my toasted back.

  'Litde wings.' She traced my shoulder blades. 'Little wings, sticking out to fly.'

  'Get summat on,' our stepfather tutted, after his car growled up and he caught us spurting cherries and spitting bloody stones in our Fruit of the Loom knickers.

  My arms folded over the nipples, suddenly prickling.

  'No.' Auntie Penny spoke as if she were royal. 'It's good for them, a lick of sun on their backs.'

  Our stepfather's eyebrows met in the middle, but his mouth sat still.

  'Now, Peter, honey' - Auntie Penny's nails shimmered, bronze lacquer, against a green botde - 'what would you say to a beer with your burger?'

  Our stepfather left us bare-bellied under the sun, to run in white knickers through the sprinkler's rainbowed webs. But things were beginning to cloud over, and my mind was on my vest. The wildness was gone.