Under Auntie Penny's influence, our mother marvelled, her Pete was a reformed character. Instead of sponging up game
shows and days full of soaps, he heaved out of his armchair to face the mirror over the sink.
Time for a shave, methinks.' He slit his eyes and peered at himself, lost in the lather.
Laurie and I stood by his side, scrubbing our teeth in harmony, watching the razor in the mirror. Up his neck, it rasped. Slowly. Slowly again. Slowly, with never a nick.
He slapped his face when it came out of the foam, gleaming.
Our mother looked up from her lipstick.
'Street angel, house devil,' she muttered, without losing her pucker.
Our stepfather sped us like lightning to Auntie Penny's garden, where he could preside over the barbecue, talking money and motors with her rich but shrunken husband. Uncle Charlie was the shakier side of sixty, his hair white and his words few and slow. His skin made you think of apples rotting, but there was something pure trapped in his flossy hair. He and our stepfather stood across the garden, spearing steaks and making men's talk in the curling, meaty smoke. I kept my eye on them - swigging gold beer from green botdes, while the sun slid down - and wondered how long the barbecues would last.
Although he still smelt of smoke and men's spirits, our stepfather was not unpleasant to be near, now that Uncle Charlie had secured him work fixing the odd motor here and there. 'Soon adds up, the odd job does.' Every morning, instead of dozing the day away on the back verandah or brooding over the white peaks of the border, our stepfather got hilly dressed - covering his usually bare chest and pulling on socks and shoes - to go off to work while the sun was still struggling into its stride. At night he came home stained with engine oil that
my sisters and I helped him to scrub off at the kitchen sink. We squirted washing-up liquid along his arms and soaped up the hairs while he boasted about cash.
There was no crowding around the sink the night he came home grinning and pressed his oily palms over our mother's eyes.
'Outside, you.' He pushed her out on to the porch in her pinny. My sisters and I tripped over our heels behind them, to get to the front door and peek into the drive.
'A Pinto!' Our mother drew in her breath. 'A Pinto, Pete.' She found herself smiling at the sky-blue sports car gleaming, just for her, in the drive. 'You rum bugger, you! What in the devil's name are you like?'
We looked the other way while our stepfather put his face over our mother's, nuzzling her purply swellings where they were aching to die down.
'Lol, me love.' He kissed our mother as if we didn't exist.
Some nights, our stepfather swaggered home with iced doughnuts in boxes and passed pink sugared almonds and stray green notes into our mother's hands. Other nights, he staggered home empty-handed, carrying only sick whiffs of whisky and dirty, clinging smoke. If he had no engines to fix, he went prowling to kill the hours. On the rampage, our mother called it. Empty days brought him home sagging, though he might puff himself up on tales of wild cars and vile men toting guns in back alleys. On the most awful nights, he turned up in mad debt, having squandered a fistful of cash on a telly or a stereo or some other dodgy deal. We were torn between biting our lips for our mother and smiling for our stepfather when he tried to pass off his drunken disasters.
'Here, kids' - it could be anything from a bashed-up bike to a radio that nearly worked - 'I got this for you.'
Our mother ranted and wept, but there was no getting the cash back.
'We've sod all to eat, and you're still frittering it away!' She clenched her jaw. The sinews stood out like knives in her neck. 'What in Christ's name are you thinking of?'
'Shut it, Lol,' our stepfather slurred. 'Just shut your flamin' gob, why don't yer?'
One night, he lifted his hand as if he were going to give her a smack, then pulled it back and clenched it into a fist that he thrust against his own forehead, grinding the knuckles. Our mother wrenched his knuckles away from his head, then gave him a frinny, painftil-looking hug to steady him as he crumpled in her arms. She bit her lip and turned her face to one side, so that she didn't have to breathe in the fiimes from his mouth. Instead of blowing up, our stepfather cried and was sick, and our mother dragged him like a dead man down the hall to bed, while I helped her with the feet.
'Monsoons,' our mother gasped, when hulking black clouds came wheeling in off^ the Pacific to dump the ocean in silver sheets.
'I never thought I'd miss the rain,' I told my mother.
My sisters and I pressed our faces with hers at the window, watching the heavens ripple and explode.
'Me neither.' She let Laurie and me drag her out on to the verandah for one magnificent drench before our Sunday night bath.
It was a special bath this week. Our mother squirted in washing-up liquid, frothing bubbles around our shoulders to soften the blow.
School,
Because George Greenaway was what they called Progressive, the playground was dotted with children who were special: deaf or limping or smiling without seeing out of eyes spaced wide. Killing time before the bell, older kids gathered around the puny ones to make freaks of them in the crowd.
'How many toes do you have?' they asked, day after day. Or, 'What makes your face that way, huh?'
I stood silently on the edge of the circles, hoping not to be shown up as a freak before the bell rang.
In class it was impossible to be invisible. My voice turned heads.
'Cockney!' the older kids decided, ordering Laurie and me to sing after school like those kids in the Pink Floyd song. 'We don't need no education,' I sang in Cockney, without understanding, until the pock-faced Garth brought in his album to stick the cover under my nose: 'There you go, English!'
A bloody machine dragged in children at the top, grinding them up and oozing pink mincemeat out of a hole in the bottom.
'Gross!' I laughed and pushed the picture out of my face to leg it home with Laurie.
But at night, when I closed my eyes, there was the bloody machine: grinding slow circles, making bright pink mincemeat out of English schoolchildren.
It was all phone calls and kerftiffle and paradise flashing under our roof
And then it was gone, before you could stop it.
Every morning was the same, opening the door on the wet world outside and having to swallow - not sadness, but a hole where happiness had been - before stepping into the road. Gran had been there, under our roof, with Auntie Pauline and Uncle Bill and our cousins, Ben and Sasha and Becky. They
had come on a plane and slept in sleeping bags on the floor just to be with us. We had photographs to prove it. Mount Seymour and Mount Vernon, we had all visited: White Rock, Peace Arch Park, Fort Langley, Chilliwack. Our stepfather had insisted on taking everyone around 'his town', showing off corners of Vancouver that Laurie and I had no idea existed, including the planetarium where we saw shooting stars through 3-D glasses, and Chinatown - a world of tortured ducks, glistening and revolving in sad slow dances in all the windows. He had even paid to take us and our cousins panning for gold in a creek near Brittania Bay, rubbing our hair, not a glimmer of anger, when Laurie and I failed to scoop any nuggets. He bristled, embarrassed, every time it turned cloudy or rained; when the sun came out, his legs fell into a swagger of pride. In the evenings, he stoked up the barbecue on the back verandah, treated our mother as if she were a princess, and regaled Gran, Auntie Pauline and Uncle Bill with his plans to make it big in the building business. Shuddering at the fake North American accent he put on to dress up his ideas, I looked daggers at Laurie to keep her from giggling in front of the grown-ups and giving our stepfather away. We basked in the glow of his slapped-on smile while our mother snapped away with her Kodak instamatic.
As soon as he waved everyone off at the airport, our stepfather was at our mother's throat. Auntie Penny was off defying the wet weather and cruising the Caribbean with Uncle Charlie and his arthritis. The neighbours refused to see anything.
<
br /> 'Howdy!' They kept everything packed behind their eyes, in fat looks that I strained to weigh up.
The only person to share our mother's bruises was Auntie Carla, who had a face full of her own - something odd was
happening in her house, the huge one Uncle Wayne had built out of raw timber with his bare hands, to show the sheer size of his love. They sat like twins, sipping coffee, looking livid.
'Go and play, girls.' Our mother dismissed us upstairs with our cousins, while she and Auntie Carla whispered fast, gripping hands.
'Man, I hate my dad!' My cousin Rosalie backcombed furiously.
'Does he hit you?' I held my breath.
'Sure.' She hissed hairspray. 'My dad's a bastard.'
Though I could never pass it over my own lips, it was good to hear the word bastard.
'So's mine.' I slipped my cousin a kiss, just inside her wrist.
Three weeks later, Uncle Wayne was dead.
'Stone cold dead.' Our mother could not believe it. 'Of a brain tumour, so they say.'
Auntie Carla came to our house to heave through the days.
'I thought it was just the booze,' she sobbed, 'and his godawful temper. How was I to know?'
She wept through eyes still puffed blue-green in the wake of Uncle Wayne.
'Shh, love.' Our mother laid Auntie Carla's head on her bony chest, stroking her devastated perm. 'You weren't to know, Carla. Who could have known?'
I was desperate to ask someone about brain tumours.
'Do you get them from drinking?' I wanted to know. 'Are they catching?'
I thought of all those nights our stepfather had strolled off and rolled back, shoulder to shoulder, swaying and singing, with our dead Uncle Wayne. I caught myself in the mirror
and it was written all over my face - what I was thinking -ready to sell me down the river the minute I opened my mouth.
By the time Auntie Penny came back from the Caribbean, Auntie Carla had stopped whimpering, but our mother had taken to her bed with her own worries. Fights in the middle of the night made her too tired to get up during the day. She had even lost the urge to visit the fleamarket, where she used to love to go pouncing on bargains.
'I can't make it this week,' she mumbled from her pillow when the phone rang. I heard myself donated to Auntie Penny: 'Oh aye, our Andy would love that.'
When Auntie Penny picked me up in her silver Cadillac, I tried to flash things at her out of my eyes. My stepfather would kill me if I breathed a word, but I tried to let on, without words, what had been happening inside our house while she was away on a luxury liner.
'Okay, sweetie-pie?' Her eyes danced between me and the rear-view mirror. 'Everything okay?'
At Auntie Penny's it was just me and the TV: she cooked things up in the kitchen while Uncle Charlie lay in bed, looking to put some life in his bones. There was nothing I might do to help her - no dishes or polishing or sweeping up or anything.
'In this house we relax,' Auntie Penny declared. 'You just sit back and don't fret, till I call on you to appreciate my cool-a-nerry talents!'
With nothing to look out for over my shoulder, I let myself sink into the cushions and watch the screen. It was time, a gravelly voice echoed, to enter the Twilight Zone.
A skinny man in spectacles had an addiction to books: he had to read them all the time and his wife hated him for it. He would smuggle books into the bank where he worked, then hide during his lunchbreak in the vault with the gold. There, he could read to his heart's content, before real life took over and he had to go home to his wife nagging in the house. He was ugly and old and he wore glasses, but something put you on the skinny man's side.
He read and read in the vault with the gold, where nobody would think to disturb him, until one lunchtime a bomb hit the town while the skinny man was locked in with his book. When he finished his chapter and came out to face work, the whole town had been wiped out, including his wife. Despite all the rubble and everybody being dead, it was paradise, because he found doughnuts to eat and then stumbled upon the library - still standing, with majestic white stone pillars, crammed with books just waiting to be read. You could feel the music lifting you up, like the man, inside, thinking of all those books and no one to stop you.
The skinny man went dashing up the library steps. Then he tripped and the music changed. The screen zoomed in on his spectacles - smashed on the steps. He was groping for them, blind, when the picture faded and The End came up with the tune, which now sounded more scary than exciting.
I shifted among the cushions, feeling hot and nervous, as if I were guilty.
'What,' I asked Auntie Penny when she popped out of the kitchen, 'was the point of the bomb, then, blowing up his wife and everything, if his glasses were going to end up smashed?'
'Oh, that's just the way it goes on TV, honey.' Her mind was stuck on roast lamb.
It was between The Twilight Zone and Auntie Penny's antique dinner table that the sensation came over me.
I had to go home. I had to get home to my mother and Laurie and Sarah, all stuck in our house without me.
'It's asparagus, honey,' Auntie Penny smiled, when she saw my face chewing strangely.
'It's lovely,' I said, but I couldn't bring myself to swallow the third grassy finger.
Hiding it under my tongue, I looked at Auntie Penny and asked, 'Can I be excused?'
In the bathroom I let the mush out of my mouth and flushed it down the toilet. It was divine, the white-green taste under my tongue, but I had to spit it out. My mother and Laurie and Sarah, my stepfather and the insides of our house, had all seeped into my mouth and spoilt it.
Black stars crowded across the bathroom, blotting out the mirrors.
I called, 'Auntie Penny.'
It was like nothing before. Smashing and thudding yanked me out of sleep and I sat up in bed at the same time as Laurie. Something hot and edged ran up my spine.
'You bloody bastard!' our mother was screaming in the kitchen.
'Get out of the fiicking way!' We heard our stepfather shoving to get past her into the hall. 'Where is she, the stirring little bitch?'
Laurie reached for my hand in the dark.
'You keep away from them,' our mother was saying. It came out twisted, as if through locked teeth. Then a clattering metal smash and she screamed, 'Peter!'
We leapt out of bed and ran down the hall, blinking at so
much white electric Hght after the sleeping dark. In the kitchen, the table had been knocked flat on to its back, smashing dirty plates, oozing cold gravy with peas. Under the sink, he had wrestled the cutlery drawer off its runners and on to the floor. The silver lay skewed and glinting against the tiles.
'Dad!'
In his hand, our stepfather had the carving knife, shining, with its varnished wooden handle and the long silver blade edged fine for slicing beef. Our mother was standing against the wall, her back pressed into it as if it might swallow her up, away from the beef-knife hovering and gleaming along her cheek. Her eyes looked through the blade into our stepfather's.
'Put it down, Pete,' she said sofdy, over the trembling. 'Put it down, love.'
My stepfather shifted his eyes at me.
'You let that little bitch feed people a pack of lies about me.' He jerked the knife, pointing.
'This isn't about the girls, Pete.' Our mother's voice was like a lullaby. 'Let's put down the knife and talk about it, why don't we?'
Our stepfather was sweating.
'Get rid of the fucking kids, then.'
Thick, whitish drops welled, shivering, in his nostrils.
Laurie and I held hands in the hall, barefoot and glued to the carpet. Our eyes glanced to take in food spurted up the walls, plates smashed against the tiles, then went back to the blade.
'Back to bed, girls,' our mother whispered. 'Go on.' She slid steel into her voice when we failed to move. 'Back to sleep, the pair of you.'
We stood for a moment, swaying and saying nothing, then turned and padded
back in the dark to bed.
My stepfather forbade me from fainting outside our four walls, and put a flaming end to those luxury weekends - swanning off as if I was somebody in that silver Cadillac.
'Spoiled fucking brat!' He used his words as well as his hands to bring me down a peg or two.
Instead, Auntie Penny came to us, and our mother let her in whatever the state of her face. Although we tried not to get up our hopes, she was often there, complete with just-baked surprises, when Laurie and I loped home from school.
I became convinced I had psychic powers, predicting night after night which Cadillac would be waiting in the drive when Laurie and I came around the corner from school. I took the corner hard, concentrating over the pounding in my chest to conjure the right number plate. When it was silver we saw, our hearts rose up and ran; they weighed down with slow blood whenever it was the battered red.
Our stepfather would be in his armchair, glaring at the walls, cracking his knuckles into the quiet.
We weren't to waste precious electricity on mindless friggin' TV, and there was frost stabbing across the yard. So Laurie and I took to smuggling eggs out of the fridge as soon as we got home from school. When no one was looking, we took one and went to squat with the tools in the shed. Our twin winter anoraks kept us warm: zipped into sponge-filled blue
67
nylon, with snorkel hoods, pockets lined with a white fiir that was perfect for incubating eggs. We held hands in the windowless black, chanting the Lx)rd's Prayer and humming old hymns from England, to make the egg hatch. Then we had to smuggle our warm secret back into the fridge, before our mother got out of bed to cook tea. It was pot luck whether our egg would be picked out and cracked on the edge of the frying pan. We held our breath every time, until the shell broke out yolk into the sizzle, and not mangled bloody chick.
My sisters and I stuck mosdy to ourselves, since our mother and stepfather didn't like us to invite anyone into our house. We had lots of friends at school, and they all had a habit of visiting each other's houses, even staying over for pizza and pyjama parties that they would chatter about in the playground. Laurie and I sometimes felt a bit left out. But when it came to Halloween, our mother let us go out trick-or-treating just like everyone else. We waited by the front door, nearly suffocating in our plastic pull-on costumes. Laurie was a witch, under a cardboard pointed hat and a hooked rubber nose with warts; I was a skeleton, whose skull and bones were guaranteed to glow in the dark; Sarah was a pumpkin that we left behind the door when our friends finally gathered in the street and we took off in a gang of devils and witches, vampires and werewolves.
Once in a house on fire Page 6