The door groaned open on a plump woman, about the same age as our mother, with wiry, copper hair. A gang of marmalade-coloured cats arched against her shins, glaring at us with silver-black eyes. Her own eyes squinted through glasses as thick as milk bottles.
'Lolly!' she cried. 'And the little monkeys, no less!'
The woman folded us into her cardigan. 'You remember yer Auntie Jackie, don't you?'
Her skin was sticky as suet pudding and puffed up, as though someone pretty had been absorbed behind the glasses. I remembered her by smell.
'I know you,' I mumbled. 'You used to live next door to us on Thornton Road, with Uncle Dune and all those cats and kittens.'
'Din't we just!' Another kiss smacked me around the nose. 'We used to 'ave you little 'uns round all the time before your mam upped sticks to Canada, din't we, Lx)lly?'
'Aye. Spoiled 'em rotten, you did.' Our mother tutted to show how generous Auntie Jackie and Uncle Duncan had been, all those years ago, while the nursing home had swallowed her nights and written off her days. I remembered Saturday afternoons when I was seven: Laurie and me round at Auntie Jackie's house for fancy biscuits, spoiled by the cat-hairs that crept under our tongues and clung to our cardigans. We used to cradle the nibbled hearts of Jammy Dodgers in our fists, while the cats bristled and clawed and curled up to sleep in our laps. Basking in the orange glow of her electric fire, we would gaze at the telly - at Doctor Who and the Daleks, then Bruce Forsyth and all the prizes sliding by in front of our eyes - while the afternoon purred into Saturday night. The cats always sprang off our knees, snarling, as soon as our stepfather clacked on the knocker.
Now, standing in this strange, dingy doorway. Auntie Jackie lowered her lips at the corners: 'They've all popped it now, me
old moggies.' Then she let her mouth spring back into a grin: 'But we've an 'ouse chock-full of toms, so you'll not be lonely!'
The smell of chips, socks and fur bulged out of the hallway to usher us in.
On Friday night, our mother sighed home in her blue zip-up dress.
'Twen. Tee. Five.' She counted out notes from a brown packet, the best pan of her wages, and laid them on the mantelpiece under a fiery painting that glowed full of wild swans and naked, wet-looking men and women. Horizons, Auntie Jackie called it, when we asked her whether it was a picture of heaven or hell.
In exchange for our mother's money. Auntie Jackie let us live in her attic. 'As long as you like, Lolly, love.' She offered the dank room under the roof as if it were a favour from the heart. But I watched her fist rustle notes off the mantel, after my mother had chewed her lip to lay them out under the picture of fire and fiesh.
Grubbing around in her purse, our mother came up with pocket money to keep Laurie, Sarah and me out of her hair. On top of pennies for sweets, she sent us to buy a tennis ball and a rainbow box of chalk to go with the skipping ropes that Auntie Vera had given us, with handles that used to be bobbins, shuttling cotton in old mill-buildings. She lined us up after breakfast, to give out the rules about where was safe to play and where was bloody well not. Mosdy we stayed in the square opposite the house, watching grown-ups step in and out of the red telephone box - some laughing, some whispering, some shouting - while we kept our distance so that no one would think we were noseys. I hopscotched myself stupid
and skipped with Laurie and Sarah, until local kids crowded around. Then I bounced my ball against the wall in snazzy arcs, whistling, while my little sisters carried on with their hops, skips and jumps.
'Where you lot from, then?' Kids with sticky jumpers sized us up in our old-fashioned cardigans, swirly buttons fastened up to our necks. Our mother had scolded us into woollens that made our movements stiff, like robots: 'I'm not having you traipsing about looking poor,'
'We've just come from Rawtenstall.' I spoke for the three of us. 'And before that we lived in Vancouver - it's this place in a corner of Canada, across the Atlantic Ocean.'
We stood in the centre of the scruffy kids' circle, letting them mull over our cardies and Canada, giving them a go of our ropes with the bobbin handles. They squinted at our sharp 't's, the rasp of our aitches and the way that our 'g's rang at the end of words like having and singing and running, where theirs had fallen off.
'Think yer posh, don't yer?'
Running clear of the accusation, Laurie and I beat them at tag and spurted the odd loud 'Oi!' although we knew we would have to pay for it over the baked beans at tea-time. Our mother would let out an end-of-her-tether sigh at our shameless flaming antics, our screaming like banshees and acting proper common for all the world to witness.
Tucked up with my book on the settee, I could be free of my little sisters for half an hour before tea every day. I would study my mother's face over the pages, swallowing guilt at the cash she had stumped up the day she took me, just me, to John Menzies, where I picked out a prize for passing my Eleven-Plus exam. She stood over me with her snakeskin purse, while I lurked along the bookshelves, gripping my hands behind my
back. 'Go on, Andy, love!' Her smile never wavered, aldiough die cost mounted up - and up and up and up - as I slid out The Twins at Saint Clare's, the complete set by Enid Blyton, then hurried, clutching them against my chest, to the cash till.
I read them to death, one by one, then one by one again, dreaming of a boarding school brimming with brainy girls. I saw myself plucked up and plopped into Saint Clare's, in the light of my affinity for spelling and sums, but squirmed at the ruse I would have to pidl to get into such a school. Since I hadn't been blessed with rich parents, I would have to pretend that there were no parents at all. If you were an orphan, it seemed to me, pity would persuade people to spot your talents instead of your clothes and shoes, and no one would mind if you had no money.
'Can't we do anything about them?' I fought back tears in front of my mother when welts sprang up along my arms and burrowed, burning, into my neck. The fleas on Auntie Jackie's cats seemed to ignore everyone else, making a meal of me.
'What can we do?' My mother dabbed pink calamine lotion, chalky and cool, over the livid flea bites. 'They're your Auntie Jackie's pride and joy, those cats. And it won't be much longer now, Andy - don't be whingeing.'
As if to show just how soon we would find our own house, our mother slept on a spindly folding bed next to the mattress where Laurie and I huddled with our Sarah on the floor. It was magical, lying low, hearing her breathing above our heads. A slight squeak sang out when she turned over in the night, sighing. A car might glide by, shooting light through the crack in the curtains, up the wall in a wave. Otherwise silence pressed in, purple-black, coloured by crying. Our mother sobbed through her knuckles.
I wanted to cry too, to keep her company, but I had too
much grub grinning inside. Auntie Jackie packed us to bed full of pizzas and glistening vinegary chips: Auntie Vera thought fried food was wicked, but Auntie Jackie swore it was sacrilege to eat potatoes unless they'd been chopped into chunky fingers and plunged in bubbling gold lard.
During the day, while our mother was mopping up old folks, Auntie Jackie left us to our own devices and sprawled across her bed, posting After Eight mints into her mouth, sinking into paperbacks about blood-spattering crimes, eventually nodding off. Downstairs, Laurie and I built Lego dream homes and spaceships with Sarah, straining to keep her quiet when she started mithering and crying for our mother. I rocked my five-year-old sister in my lap, cooing and blowing into her eyes, tingling with pride and relief when her frown unfurled into sleep in the middle of the afternoon. Then I laid her on the settee, covered in one of Auntie Jackie's cat-hair cardies, and crept up to the attic with Laurie - for a fondle of the photographs that our mother had declared out of bounds.
We prised open the biscuit tin with Family Selection on the lid. At the bottom, in black-and-white, lay the only surviving photo of our real father: smiling out of his work anorak, more gorgeous than Elvis under a crest of glossy, brushed-back hair. Then there were the jagged colour polaroids
of Canada that our mother had taken the scissors to one night, afi:er a dose of rum and Coke and crying to Randy Crawford. One day I'll fly away. We watched our mother's face cream up, then curdle. Leave your love to yesterday. 'Bastard!' She sheared through the glare of every family snapshot. 'That's the bloody end of that buggerin' bloody shit.' Silver blades snipped. Our stepfather's face fell out of the picture.
'Nosey gits!' Auntie Jackie snorted, looking strangers smack in the eye when they stared at us as we wandered around Chorlton shopping precinct. But I caught our reflection when we stopped to gaze in the toy shop window. My sisters and me with our podgy Auntie Jackie - all curious sizes, and faces that didn't go together.
'We're not a proper family, are we?' I asked her on the way home through the rain.
'Yer what?' Her glasses steamed up against the drizzle. "What's all this "proper family" nonsense?' We watched her fiime. 'Your mam bloody well adores you three. Three gorgeous girls! That's a proper bloody family if you ask me.'
I thought of Auntie Jackie's creaking house, crawling with cats instead of babies, and kept my lips zipped.
After five twelve-hour shifts in a row, our mother would come home with a headache that squeezed all the prettiness out of her face. She glugged down aspirins and sat in front of the telly with Auntie Jackie, waiting for her jaws to stop grinding. Then she went upstairs with watery eyes to sleep.
Other evenings she came home and put on loud, jangly records like Earth, Wind and Fire, dancing around the living-room and laughing, prickling with energy that made me nervous. By bedtime she would have collapsed on the settee, moping over her umpteenth cigarette, murmuring about patching up our family, giving it a proper go.
'Bollocks!' Auntie Jackie was unimpressed by our mother's theory that Laurie, Sarah and I needed a father to watch over us. 'You need that bastard' - she had made our mother promise never to contact him again - 'like you need a hole in the head.'
Auntie Jackie rummaged through her eye shadows and showered her bosoms with scent out of a spray can labelled Seduce, before stepping out with Uncle Duncan one Saturday afternoon to lay bets and drink beer at the greyhound racetrack. ^
'I'll come back dripping in diamonds,' she winked at Laurie and me. 'I can feel it's my lucky day!'
We waved at them from the doorstep, watching them get on to the bus across the road. As soon as it turned the corner, our mother came inside and stood in front of the phone, looking at it and looking at it, finally picking it up. I knew, from the way her fingers hovered over the dial, whose name was going to come out after she had cleared her throat.
Our stepfather was waiting for us at the end of the road, where Laurie, Sarah and I clambered into the back of his van. We drove through streets we didn't recognize, before he pulled up outside spiky iron gates at the entrance to a park.
'Abracadabra!' He had brought smoky bacon crisps and Curly-Wurly bars to make a picnic on the grass.
He lugged something big and flat and oblong, wrapped in brown paper.
Before our mother could finish her crisps, he leaned forward to kiss her: 'Close your eyes, Lolly.'
Then he tore open the paper. My toes curled inside my sandals at the sight of a picture of a miserable clown, one big, blobby tear glistening on his cheek.
'Don't you like it?' Our stepfather's grin slid to the ground when our mother told him there was no way she could accept it.
'Jackie'll go bonkers,' she explained, 'if she finds out we've seen you.'
Our stepfather smiled a fijnny smile. Laurie, Sarah and I
watched chocolate melting between our fingers, unable to swallow our Curly-Wurlies. Suddenly he hurled down the picture and stomped on it so that the glass cracked. Then he grabbed our mother's arm and yanked her up oflF the grass, banging her against the nearest tree.
'Don't play with me, Lorraine!' He thumped her in the stomach and ribs. She held on to the tree trunk, gasping for breath.
I got up to run to my mother, but my stepfather moved towards Laurie and me and made us clear the smashed picture and our half-empty packets off the grass. His eyebrows gloomed over us as we piled back into the van: 'One word and you're dead, got it?'
When he dropped us at Auntie Jackie's, our mother lay down on the settee and closed her eyes. I wrapped a packet of frozen fish fingers inside a tea-towel which she let me glide over her ribs, while Laurie and Sarah held her hands. Then she sat up and made us put on smiles before Auntie Jackie and Uncle Duncan came home, tipsy, joking over the bad luck that had emptied their pockets at the racetrack. We watched our mother laughing along, hiding winces in the corners of her eyes.
Towards the end of summer, she took us to a jumble sale at the local church and hauled back a black bin-liner of wrinkled trousers, skirts, and jumpers woven with strangers' smells. Our mother set to with pins and needles, twinkling silver between her lips, tugging at waistbands and hems, scrubbing and ironing out other people to make the clothes our own.
By Monday morning, Laurie and Sarah had been buckled into tartan kilts with immaculate pleats, then toggled into duffle coats like a pair of Paddington Bears. They held hands
no
and looked at me (trapped in pink nylon flares) with the same torn expression across each of their faces: sorry for themselves because they were being sent to primary school; more sorry for me because I was still stuck at home, waiting to be assigned to a place at a Secondary Comprehensive. ,
'Keep your pecker up!' Auntie Jackie tickled me under the chin when I moped back from the primary school across Oswald Road, having watched my sisters dissolve behind the railings.
I held my breath each day in the dusty front room that had no light and was completely empty except for a hulking wardrobe whose feet were wooden paws. It had a keyhole and a long iron key that allowed me to climb in and lock it from the inside, where I dreamt of a lion-and-witch world like the one in the book they read on Jackanory. I tucked my legs under my chin, pressing my thumbs into my eye sockets to set colours bursting behind the lids. Showers of red arrows, yellow peacock eyes snowing, roses blooming and blooming blue -my thumbs rubbed rapid circles to keep the colours coming.
Whenever Auntie Jackie was lost in one of her daytime naps, I would sneak out the back door and wander around the streets, sometimes slipping into shops where the owners were nice and didn't hang up 'no children' signs to frighten you off.
A lady with a tiara of lacquered, silver curls hovered behind her cash register in the art shop.
'Well, if it isn't our Michelangela!' She cracked complicated jokes, whenever I swallowed my shyness and stepped inside. Although I couldn't quite grasp them, it was fabulous to be compared with beautiful things around the globe: Nefertiti I was christened one day; Venus Something-or-other the next. 'Take as long as you like, ducky.' She liked the look of my
clean face and cardigan: 'I know you're not one of them ruffians;
Posh music oozed from the walls, making you feel like you were in a film. I loitered among the shelves, and caressed my cheekbones with the dreamy tips of paint brushes - made of something silky called sable, squirrel hair or goat hair, even wolf hair from China, the labels said. Goosebumps teased my skin. Humming down aisles lined with white and silver tubes, my head swelled with the names, like a list of superstars.
Jaune Brilliant, Raw Sienna, Aureolin, Vandyke Brown, Viridian, Mars Violet.
Purple Madder Alizarin.
It would be a long time before I would be able to buy anything like proper paint. Lining up at the cash register, I counted over my coins to check that I had enough to pay for pipe cleaners, glue, and two tubes of glitter.
I strode back down the street a cowboy. Pink flares swishing, fists plunged in pockets, I nursed the pipe cleaners and vials of glitter like guns loaded in their holsters. I marched to Oswald Road School, pacing circles outside the gate until the home bells drilled the air and my sisters burst out from behind the railings with clusters of other kids. Jealousy coiled in my chest.
The
council had made a cock-up, my mother discovered, and had failed to assign me to a secondary school. She slammed down the phone: 'Clerical error!' It had all the dazzle of a car crash, none of the pain or broken bones. Yet, after ten days with no one of my own age to talk to, I was beginning to feel not quite real. No matter what you thought of school, it kept you in step with the rest of the world.
I stashed mopey feelings under my vest and whipped glitter out of my pocket to impress my sisters.
A mob of angels sprang to life on the mantelpiece: pipe cleaner halos perched over loo-roll tube bodies, wings of tissue doused in red and gold glitter.
'Divine,' our mother groaned, when they greeted her after work. »•
'Dragons.' Auntie Jackie squinted, when we held them in front of her specs. 'Dragons, I thought they were.'
Rain started spitting, then blasted the pavements in slick, dark sheets. I was kept off the streets by my dead-beat sandals, whose soles had worn through. Cutting floppy foot-shapes out of a plastic bag, I stuck them in the bottom of my shoes. But they crinkled and hissed and still let the damp sneak through, making my socks soggy and staining them blue. I pressed my face against the window pane, watching wind-bashed brollies shuffle past like birds with broken wings, spat out of the sky.
When they weren't weeping, the skies sulked. An inky gloom seeped across all the rooms. I snooped around the house, on the scent of something to read. Something to set my blood singing, instead of clotting around my heart, turning treacly in my toes. I flicked through our old Enid Blytons. The Sea of Adventure, The Island of Adventure, The Mountain, The Valley, The Castle, The River. Once upon a time, I would have killed to be locked in a room with nothing but Enid Blyton, and maybe a drink of milk. Now I wondered how Laurie could still be drawn in to such silly things. It was as if someone had come along and given the books a good shake until all the fizz had fallen out.
Once in a house on fire Page 10