Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  Finally, one morning, when we were alone folding the laundry, I couldn't help asking her,

  'Is that the only way to get back to England, Mum - in a plane?' I tried to stamp my voice flat, as if I was just wondering.

  'It's the only way I know of,' my mother said, without smiling. 'The only way, I'm afraid, so don't go getting your hopes up.'

  Breasts dropped out of my prayers, to make room for bigger stuffs,

  'If you're there, God,' I took to repeating under my breath, 'please get us home to England. Soon. Without You-know-who.'

  By the beginning of spring, Laurie and I had to accept that our stepfather was not about to drop dead from a brain tumour. Despite a sinking feehng, it dissolved the guilt we had been carrying, in case his outbursts were caused by an illness. We had hesitated over our hate.

  Now, when our stepfather went for our mother and we had to pant down the hall to call Auntie Penny and lock ourselves in, there were no doubts and no excuses.

  Laurie and I hid behind our bedroom door, rocking Sarah between us, singing into her ears - cramming them with lullabies to block out the thumps and screams. We swore at the grin on our clock, willing the Mickey Mouse hands to move it, to flicking well move it - to make Auntie Penny's car zoom, to get her into our house before it was too late.

  'Is there no way back without flying?' I worked up the courage to ask my mother again.

  We were alone, polishing the fireplace with baby oil. She put down her rag.

  'Not a word.' She lifted a ball of newspaper out of the hearth that cost too much to light. Wrapped in the faded news lay dangly diamond earrings, a ruby ring, and an old, old watch wrought in dull gold.

  'They're your Gran's,' she told me. 'She's said to sell them to get us all back.'

  A blue tissue letter was folded up in the chimney; my mother pulled it out to show me. From miles away, in gorgeous loopy writing, Gran was begging Mum to sell up and fly.

  'Can you. Mum?' I tried not to get my hopes up in front of her.

  'They were supposed to be heirlooms.' My mother sighed and looked at the jewellery in the murky print. 'They're all we've got.'

  'We can get more heirlooms, though, can't we?' I pressed my palm against hers. 'In England?'

  To keep her eye on the cost, our mother set the clockwork oven-timer ticking when she picked up the phone.

  'Hello? Mum?' She spoke loudly and quickly over the ticking to squeeze in all the details before the bell went off. The timer was set to ring in twelve minutes, and everything seemed sorted, when our stepfather sauntered in from his afternoon revels.

  'What the...?'

  Our mother went white on the phone. Our stepfather saw it all.

  'You scheming bitch!' He lunged at our mother and tore the phone cord out of the wall. The line to Gran hung dead in his hand, dripping bits of plaster.

  'Peter!' Our mother shielded her skull when our stepfather raised his fist.

  'No, Dad!' I ran to my mother and wrapped myself around her. Laurie and Sarah hurried to do the same. The four of us stood clinging to one another in front of our stepfather.

  'Christ!' he screamed. 'What are you trying to do to me? Out of the way, girls,' he told us, but we all three held on to our mother. I felt her ribs sticking out brittle where I had seen them kicked by a boot on the bathroom floor, late at night under fluorescent white light.

  'Move!' He grabbed the teapot, steaming full, off the table. It was fat and round, with a sharp ceramic spout curving out to pour. He held it up to throw.

  'Daddy!' Sarah began to cry and our stepfather's arm stiffened.

  'You bitch,' he said to our mother, very quietly. His pupils glowered and grew. 'You Ricking bitch.'

  He looked our mother deep in the eye, then brought the teapot and its spout crashing into his own temple. Blood and tea trickled down his face, oozing out of the hairline, past his ear, into his collar. Staring at our mother, he pulled back the teapot and smashed again, this time cracking off the spout, howling.

  My mother peeled my fingers from her arm and shoved me towards the back door, keeping her eyes on our stepfather.

  'Fetch the police,' her voice was hoarse. 'Run.'

  I pelted into the street in my socks, heading for the house on the end where the family with a pool table and a stuffed moose head lived. Their car was gone from the drive. I panted back the other way to the old couple who gave us white chocolate on weekends. The curtains were pulled tight. There was nothing for it but to knock on a stranger's door.

  I came back with a policeman and the man with the gammy leg, who had agreed to make the call.

  My stepfather was sitting on the kitchen floor, in all the exhausted chaos, holding his face in his hands, moaning. When the strange men came in from outside, he looked up and wiped his nose. Blood was beginning to crust in his hair.

  'That's my dad,' I explained.

  My mother moved out of the corner where she had been sheltering Laurie and Sarah, braced behind the table for his next move.

  'I'm sorry. Officer,' she said. 'I'm afraid we've wasted your time. We're working things out for ourselves.'

  'Well, folks, if you're sure. ..' I watched the two men turn and shuffle to get out of our house, clearing their throats and forgetting things fast.

  'Go call your Auntie Penny.' My mother gave me a dime. I ran back into the street, this time in my sandals.

  Auntie Penny and Uncle Charlie turned up with age sagging in the ripples of skin under their eyes. In front of them, our

  mother and stepfather looked Hke children, lost and dirty, with rips in their clothes and their hair sticking out.

  Auntie Penny shook her head at the bloody mess spewed across the kitchen and down my stepfather's face. Her gold earrings rocked. ^ »"

  'This has got to stop.'

  No words, only sniffling, came from our parents.

  'You can stay with us,' she told my mother. 'I'll help you and the girls till you get back to England, if that's really what you want.'

  'It is.' My hand grasped Auntie Penny's leathery one, loaded with sparkling rings.

  'It is,' my mother said, looking at my stepfather and his bleeding head. She moved to bathe it, but Auntie Penny caught her arm.

  'Help the girls pack, Lorraine.' She held my mother gently by the wrist. 'You've got to make up your mind what you're taking with you, and what you're leaving behind.'

  My mother said goodbye to our stepfather and her sky-blue Pinto. The heirlooms got us on to a Boeing 747 that seemed to hum in the sky for days, before it shuddered down in Manchester in the dead of night.

  Auntie Vera was ready and willing to put us up while we had nowhere else to go.

  'You's can all snuggle in my bed,' she declared at the airport. 'Like sardines!'

  A black cab sped us north to Bury, through sleeping streets, up the dark hill to her house. It was tucked in a stony row of brooding chimneys, next to the giant industrial ones that rose up like kings and queens on a chessboard, though most of them were destined to be demolished and would never puff again.

  Auntie Vera struck a Swan Vestas match and set her battered ketde wobbling over the blue hiss of the gas. It screamed its old tin whistle, as if we'd never flown away and then had to fly back fast, a world of cuts and bruises and mountains in between. The same stink of rotting rubber insides whiffed up when she filled the hot-water bottle, its mouth gasping and sputtering like an old man.

  'Nighty-night now.' She smothered us in talculm-powder kisses and gave us the botde with God-blesses, to batde the cold at the bottom of the king-sized bed. Between the marble sheets, I tried to kill shuddery thoughts of Grandad - lying with Auntie Vera, dying when his heart crashed - right there

  where we laid our heads on die pillow under the purple satin headboard.

  My mother, Laurie, Sarah and I huddled under the old blankets. Our feet mingled while our chests rose and fell, rose and slowly fell, in time. Blankets and blackness* After shattering nights on the other side of the sea, I s
lid into sleep, though I sometimes slipped off the edge and hit the icy linoleum, its ancient pattern muzzy with green ghosts.

  Sun slithered through the curtains. In my faded rainbow nightie, I tiptoed downstairs to help Auntie Vera get up the fire and to sit with her over her cup of tea.

  'First brew of the day.' She took a smacking sip. 'Sets you up royal.'

  Then she stuck her head fiill of blue curlers into the fireplace, kneeling on the cold hearth tiles to scrape out yesterday's cinders. I shivered and scrunched pages of the Daily Star into airy balls that wrinkled to black nothing the minute the flames tongued up.

  My mother came down to a glorious fire, crackling to roast the front room and its jungle of brass animals. Everything but the settee was swamped under porcelain, china, crystal and brass - smiling figurines, dogs, plaques and pearly vases. Although our mother declared they were ugly, Laurie and I agreed that there was something nice about the crowd of ornaments. They made you feel safe. Auntie Vera took her orange feather duster to them at dawn, rearranging them day in, day out, to face the milk man and gabbing ladies and the Reverend Father when she strong-armed him in for a bit of Battenberg cake. Also polished to high heaven, dark wooden crosses stood out on the walls: crucifixes off the market, drooping gold plastic Jesuses. Next to the telephone, a black leather-bound bible lay open with Christ's words in red ink, so

  you could spot His Truth at a glance. It put God in the room with all the knick-knacks.

  On Sundays, Auntie Vera fastened Laurie and me into the poppy-patterned frocks we. had nearly outgrown, and marched us uphill to let the neighbours know we were holy, no matter how often our mother had been married or where our devil of a stepfather had got to. She forced our arms into our dresses and zipped them tight up the back, while we pulled faces at the prospect of church ladies congregating in posh coats on the crest of the hill.

  'Lovely lasses!' The flowery headscarves clucked when Auntie Vera turned up with Laurie and me, looking right pretty in spite of our swarthy skin.

  'What divine litde faces.' They smiled through tight lips, shaking their heads to one side. 'You need the Lord, you do!' Then they muttered between themselves: 'Poor little blighters.'

  Inside, Laurie clutched my hand. We swayed between the pews while the preaching droned on. Only the Lord's Prayer sent a shiver down my spine, when we bowed our heads to whisper it over our sandals: Our Father^ Which art in heaveriy . . . Those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil. . . For ever and ever. Amen.

  Later, after a Sunday tea of boiled eggs and Vimto, I asked: 'What does God do for you. Auntie Vera?'

  She was bending to pull a rhubarb crumble from the oven, flashing the tops of her knee stockings.

  'The Lord looks after His own, Andy, love.' She stood up and wiped her brow over the steaming crumble.

  'I know,' I said. 'But what does He doV

  'He answers your every prayer.' She closed her eyes to send a smile into the ceiling.

  'All of them?' I asked.

  Auntie Vera fiddled to straighten the knot in her apron strings.

  'Eventually,' she said.

  Every morning, our mother set off to find a job and a house for us in the heart of Manchester.

  'It's a bugger of a bus ride into town,' she insisted, when Laurie and Sarah clung to her coat. 'I can't take you with me, loves.'

  We had to stay behind with Auntie Vera and the brass animals, fidgeting the day away. Sometimes she would take us up the hill to the market, where we strolled past stall-owners belting out sing-song prices, before we lugged home muddy vegetables and prize chunks of meat bleeding out of waxy paper. I begged for the honour of carrying the cabbage, heavy as a head in newspaper, between my hands. Back home, while Auntie Vera baked and Sarah napped, Laurie and I hunkered down in the back yard, tormenting red lacquer ladybirds with grass spears. We raced them like clockwork cars down the aisles of a broken cutlery tray, or trapped them in a drained Vimto bottle, then peered through the glass until they gave up fluttering and crashed on their backs. Clouds cleared. We dashed up the road to the cattle grid, where we balanced on muddy metal poles.

  'You'll break you's bloody necks!' Old people shook britde fists when they saw Laurie and me trembling to keep our balance, or when we let ourselves hurtle down the cobbled alleys on a single roller skate each.

  'Someone's definitely gawn to break they's neck.' They shook their heads as they puffed their way up the steep back alley, heaving string bags of tinned mandarins, cat food and

  minestrone soup. They had to stop and stop again, to put down their shopping and give their hearts a rest, while we raced past.

  It could be my neck. I closed my eyes for a moment, daring my bones to break.

  When we belted home for tea, we found our mother in front of the oven, easing her swollen feet out of blue shoes stained white with rain. She had trudged miles in her heels and put on her best voice, but still no job to show for it, and no house fit to be called a home.

  'What in God's name's got into you, Andy?' She sighed and bent to dab Dettol on my stinging knees, where the scabs would never get beyond the cornflake stage before I knocked them off into new bleeding. It was worse than a slap, the disgusted look my mother gave me when she was bone tired:

  'You'll be the death of me, you will, with all your bloody gallivanting.'

  It was decided I should go to my cousins' school for the last few weeks of term.

  'But it's nearly summer,' I protested. I had skulked past the school and seen rough, red faces burning through the railings at my brown skin and scabby knees.

  'I know, love,' my mother said. 'I know. But you've got to sit your Eleven-Plus exam - it's the law.'

  I slipped into my anorak and zipped it so it bit under the chin, the snorkel hood drawn tight around my face.

  'I won't be long,' I said. 'I'm just off for a bit of sherbert.'

  When I was out of sight of the house, I broke into a run and went flying along the cobbled streets that Auntie Vera told us never to go down. Where the posh people lived, with their wonderful fi-ont windows: gleaming nets with precious orna-

  ments in the middle of the sill, like a twisted crystal vase, glitter sparkling in the glass, or a miniature tree dotted with tiny oranges. In one window was a fox, caught and stuffed in the middle of a stroll, a walking stick in his paw and a round glass over one eye, spying out at you sideways.*

  Where there were no lights on, I lifted the flap of the letterbox to breathe in the scent of the strangers' house. You could smell the fancy wallpaper in their hall and all the braised lamb dinners they'd ever eaten, caught in the carpet. They had modern, gas fires down these streets, so there was none of that inky blue-black stink that took over Auntie Vera's kitchen when the coal man came. He would turn up during breakfast on Tuesdays, a full sack on his shoulder, green eyes darting out of a sooty face, looking for something - even after Auntie Vera had given him his money and the empty sack from last week. A bright green eye would wink right into mine, as if we shared a secret, in the middle of toast and marmalade.

  I lifted my last letterbox flap, inhaled another life, and ran back to tell my mother how tangy the sherbert had been.

  Monday came and I was left stranded inside the school gates. I squinted through the rain at Laurie and Sarah, holding hands with Auntie Vera, shrinking uphill to market.

  'Welcome Andrea Hawkins,' the teacher told the class, and the faces chimed, 'Welcome.'

  I sat down to do geometry but, after being top of the class without having to think twice in Canada, now I had to stare into the protractor, swallowing hard. My head throbbed where my mother had scraped my hair high into an elastic band. I saw sums swimming in a sea of blue squares.

  At last the bell rang. Chairs screeched; the class crumbled. We pelted out to race in zig-zags across the playground.

  'You're not from roundabouts, are you?' asked a freckle-faced boy. A circle gathered to ask questions about my queer Canadian accent
and the darkness of my skin.

  'Not a Paki are you?' They narrowed their no-colour eyes.

  'Course not,' I said, and a bunch of girls stuck out sandpaper hands to grab mine.

  'Good,' they said, "cos Pakis means germs.' They tore off across the tarmac, dragging me with them.

  By the end of the week I was a star. I streaked through the playground: running, running, until a skipping rope came up and my face went down and smashed into the ground. Peeling up off the tarmac without tears, I wore the e^y lumps on my forehead as trophies of my speed. I played hand tennis with myself, palms stinging to whack the ball against the school wall, until I was fast and fancy enough to face the others. On Friday the sun came out to shine on the hand tennis tournament. I went home with a red rose of Lancashire safety-pinned to my jumper, having won the tournament and the hand of a lad called Roddy, who liked girls who were like boys.

  In the living-room, Laurie was waiting for me to lie on my belly for Blue Peter and the cartoons. I missed our daytime television and the haunting half-whisde of The Clangers, hiding in moon craters, singing circles to each other through the big black - echoing, without words.

  'Here, Laurie.' I let my sister have the paper rose off my chest.

  Propping my chin in my hands, I tried to lose myself in Loony Tunes, while my legs throbbed against the carpet. The bones felt long, gawky and long, growing.

  Eleven, just turned. A real live lad had rubbed the warts on his palm against my own palm, behind the electricity generator in the back fields.

  I kept my eyes on the screen while my chest niggled and I felt something leaving me, draining out, like water dashing through my fingers to disappear, blinking, down the plughole.

  The next week I came home sporting a glorious bruise under my right eye.

  'What was it for?' my mother wanted to know when she got home.

  'Just this lad bullying,' I told her.

  She pulled me close to inspect the damage. Her eyes scrutinized the swelling without looking into mine. 'Litde swine!' she cursed the culprit. 'We'll have his guts for garters.'