Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  The good news was that Laurie had turned up somewhere at last, clutching the pink pearly bag that used to be mine, in which she had stashed a Penguin biscuit out of Auntie Jackie's secret tin, an emergency hoard of tuppenny pieces and a wad of Monopoly money.

  The bad news was that Laurie had run away to our bossy Great Auntie Agnes's house, down the old biddies' end of Thornton Road, the street we had been brought up on before Canada. That, my mother told Sarah and me, was where we were going to take our things and stay. From the way my litde sister gripped my hand, I could tell that she, too, was thinking of the wart that sprouted hairs on the side of Auntie Agnes's nose; it took all of your willpower not to shrink back when her face zoomed in for a kiss. Worse still was the deep, wrinkly dip between her bosoms: when Auntie Agnes trapped you in one of her hugs, talcum powder puffed out of the depths in choking clouds that made your eyes water.

  A taxi hurtled us through Rusholme. Sweet shops had transformed into alarm fitters, insurance brokers and showrooms tumbling second-hand fiirniture across the pavement. Only chippies were still chippies, promising the same old Frying Times. We swerved, and I found myself speeding down Thornton Road, feeling queasy while old windows whizzed by, the same but not the same. Outside 104, the woman we were convinced had poisoned her husband was still standing on her doorstep, spooning Weetabix and water out of a mug, mouthing off about the end of the world.

  At Auntie Agnes's, we found Laurie sitting in front of the telly, watching Emu attack Rod Hull. Squelching between her fingers, she held a crumpet, buttered but unbitten. It had been ruined by the slather of Marmite that Auntie Agnes swore was the key to eternal life. I helped my mother lug our bags upstairs, then came back down to face Marmite on toast. Sitting at a distance from my sister on the settee, I found

  myself feeling shy. I looked out of the corner of my eye at the person who had got up and marched across Manchester, through the fog that shrouded the streets while the rest of the world was asleep.

  lO

  Out of the frying pan' - our mother shook her head at the sight of our new bedroom, black bin-bags stapled across the window, walls scabbed with half-stripped paper -'into the flamin' fire.'

  In the corner of the room was a stash of paperbacks by a man called James Herbert. Slanting, red eyes pierced the bogeyman murk on one of the covers. Although they made my skin feel prickly and sort of dirty, I couldn't resist reading the books behind everyone's back. At night, Laurie, Sarah and I became sausage rolls, baked in musty sleeping bags on the bare floorboards. I nearly suffocated inside mine, toggling it up tight to shield the glow of a miniature torch whose batteries were losing their spirit. A penny of rusty light let me slurp words off the page, one by one, as if through a straw. I strained in my sweaty cocoon to work out why evil took root inside grown-ups, making them waste their lives in wicked ways.

  I came back from school carrying a prize, a posh pen with a silver barrel and a fine felt nib, which I had won by writing an essay on the theme of'my favourite place'. I thrilled at the feel of my new pen gliding on paper, but cringed when my essay went up on the wall at school for all to see.

  'My favourite place is in my mind. ..' Kids read the first line out loud in gormless voices, crossing their eyes.

  'In yer mind?' Lads tweaked die ends of my hair.

  They looked at me as if there was something loose inside my skull, while I stared back, suspecting the same about them. Then they josded me around, elbows jabbing my ribs, until I let every one of them have a go of my pen with its super-gliding nib.

  Although my family was living out of bags again, and we were camping on a strange new floor, everything was going smoothly enough at school. I had plenty of friends, nobody bullied me too much, and my marks impressed even Auntie Agnes, who had a good nosy when I brought my reports home for my mother to sign.

  But one day Mrs Chappell pulled me to one side and asked me to stay behind after class.

  'Is something the matter, dear?' She wanted to know why my handwriting had suddenly gone awry, scrawling this way and that. 'It gives me a headache just to look at it.'

  It gave me a headache too, trying to link something like sense out of the knots of ink.

  'We're in the middle of moving at home. Miss.' I offered a version of the truth. 'I've been a bit distracted.'

  Every evening after we finished our tea and slipped into our nighties, to save our daytime outfits from getting dirty, our stepfather would turn up and install himself on Auntie Agnes's settee. Like my sisters, I gave him smiles and kisses, but then disappeared to do my homework on the stairs where, I told my mother, it would be easier to think. I sat in the draught of the hall, shivering in my nightie, trying to concentrate. Forests and sea, we were asked to imagine, even the cheesy surface of the moon. My prize-pen dashed out descriptions, while my back tensed against the cold and my mind wandered through the glass door: our stepfather slouched with his hands behind his

  head, waiting for us to be swallowed into our sleeping bags so he could have our mother all to himself. I crouched on the stairs, scribbling at top speed, wondering when we would be bundled into the back of his van and driven off for another bash at the good life.

  Dark closed in against the school windows before four o'clock. Even when the lessons were boring, I dreaded leaving the cosy classroom to face the rain and wind at the end of the day. A lad with blond curls and a killer conker used to skulk around the school gates, waiting to walk me to the bus stop. The weather grew icy; the conker cracked; my head had been turned by mathematics and merit marks. Now there was no one to watch for at the gate, wondering which way he would walk home after the bus door sighed open.

  I leapt off at Princess Parkway, to wind my way through the cul-de-sacs and alleys of Ashton Estate, cutting every corner in the race to escape the bone-blasting cold.

  I hustled down the last alley on the estate, in the shadow of gigantic hedges.

  'Rrrrrr!' A knife leapt out of the dark, glinting for a split second under a dim yellow light. Behind it, a horrible smile slithered over the face of a man with gappy teeth and long hair.

  In spite of the freezing cold air, I felt tears of sweat dribbling under my arms. I wanted to scream, but the noise curled up in my throat while my breath fluttered out in frosty white feathers.

  The man looked at me and laughed and tucked his knife back inside his denim jacket. He slid his fists into the outside pockets and took off down the alley, chuckling to himself.

  When I got home, I rang and rang on Auntie Agnes's front door. My mother came out to give me what for, to send

  me round the back as usual so that I wouldn't muddy the carpet.

  'Christ!' Her face whitened when she saw mine.

  'It can't have been the Yorkshire Ripper.' I'slurped three cups of tea, sludgey with sugar, one after another. 'Anyway, if it had've been him' - I made the most of the affection oozing from my mother and sisters - 'I wouldn't be here, would I?'

  'In't that near where that poor lass got dragged down the entry and raped?' Auntie Agnes protested, when our mother insisted on moving us up the Moss Side end of Parkfield Street, into a two-bedroomed house, whose rent fell within her grasp because it was in a rough area and because the foundations happened to be collapsing.

  'It's about to topple!' Auntie Agnes looked triumphant when she discovered the extent of the subsidence. She was keen for us to stay with her a bit longer, so that she could keep up the pressure she had been putting on our mother, to persuade her to stop playing silly buggers - to go back to our stepfather and make a nice, happy family.

  'It'll do.' Our mother was determined to go it alone with her girls.

  A sort of seasickness, we all three felt, when we walked through our new front door. The floor sloped, nearly a foot lower at one end than the other, the subsidence was so deeply set in.

  'Don't worry, Mum.' Our spirits sagged at the prospect of no telly, but zinged back up when we were allowed to eat our tea in picnics, sitting cross-legged on a bl
anket in the middle of the floor, until we could afford more ftirniture. 'This is the biz!'

  We had been making our home in other people's bedrooms for neady a year, and we were happy just to have our own walls.

  The only shadow over our paradise was cast by the outside loo. To reach it after dark, you had to tie your nightie in a knot over the knees, then shove your feet into the stinky, man-sized wellies waiting by the back door. The light was broken, which was just as well, if you didn't want to watch the spiders that would be watching you. We gave ourselves cramp, holding on indoors, to avoid the smack of wind or rain, followed by the icy spank of the toilet seat. Running out of toilet tissue, we resorted to tearing strips from the Sun. There would be no more loo roll, no margarine and no milk, until the fortnight was up and the new dole cheque had come through to be cashed.

  Ktvap! Our mother's purse clasped shut on coppers. Instead of coffee or tea or orange squash, we had to be content with tap water - corporation champagne, she nicknamed it, with a bitter laugh.

  'God works in mysterious ways.' Gran counselled us to sit tight when money ran out.

  'Mysterious ways, my arse!' Our mother was not inclined to put much stock in God after the punches that had been thrown while we were at his mercy in Canada.

  Our stepfather's van pulled up, a three-piece cottage suite strapped to its roof The frame was made of varnished pine, with brown velour seating pads. Buckled into the passenger seat was a portable telly.

  'Ace!' We were willing to worship our stepfather, until the bashed box was plugged in. Black-and-white legs wavered across the top of the picture, walking on heads that had been

  cut off and left to gabble in the fizz at the bottom of the screen.

  Our mother must have known he was coming: a hock of ham had been stewing in a vat of split peas all afternoon, giving off a snotty pong that made our stepfather rub his hands and grin, while my sisters and I felt dur skins crawl. We sat at the laminated dinner bench that he had just assembled using a screwdriver and a few choice words. I kicked Laurie under the table, making sure that she laughed when our stepfather bothered to include us in his jokes. Jutting out of his breast pocket, three tubes of Smarties sat like keys, waiting to wheedle his way back in.

  Our stepfather soon shattered our mother's cosy idea of a family by hurling the pepper pot against the wall while we were wading through the liver and onions he loved. Our mother jumped up and smashed the salt pot to match. He stormed out, without pulling anything sugary out of his breast pocket to make us think sweet things about him.

  'She can't let him back in now!' Guilty gladness exploded in waves through Laurie and me as we snuggled down to sleep in our bunk beds.

  'I Will Survive'. Our mother fell back on Gloria Gaynor, spinning the disc that never tired of telling the man to go, to walk out the door.

  Bastard. BASTARD. BaStArD. Laurie and I clawed the word into the pink nylon strands of our bedroom carpet, letting it sit there for fantastic seconds, before ftirring it with our fingernails so that the letters remained only in our minds. Downstairs, our mother sank into a gloom of instant black coffee, with no telephone to reach out to friends, and no coins to conjure them up at the red box on the corner. She had already taken a slap or two from our stepfather. Litde ones

  that hardly seemed to hurt: she had put her palm over her cheek, as if to cherish the tingle. So our shoulderblades stiffened when she lifted the needle off 'I Will Survive' and veered into 'Midnight Train to Georgia', about the lady who goes miles and miles away to be with her man because she'd rather live in his world than live without him in her own. Deadening circles rang through the house. Around and around and around: we watched our mother's heart swelling and shrinking in spirals, while the needle skated from the edge to the centre. Her eyes glistened, wet and silvery, the moment the grooves ran out. She blinked hard, then lifted the needle: there was nowhere left to go, except back to the whirling edge.

  'Fuck!' My mother's hands shook as she hammered in hooks, to hang our stepfather's ship paintings up the stairway.

  'Hmm.' She adjusted the frames to make them seem straight in spite of the subsidence, then turned to me for a second opinion. 'How do they look?'

  Balancing on the steep stairs, I contemplated his ships, vast sails sealed behind green-tinted glass.

  'They make me feel wobbly,' I had to admit.

  'Me too.' She took a duster to the ship pictures, glaring at her reflection, caught in the polished glass.

  As soon as our stepfather moved in, they started arguing, especially at night, after my sisters and I had fallen sleep. All three of us would wake up and lie there, not daring to speak, though Sarah might sob in the dark. Laurie and I would creep out of bed to comfort our little sister - often the three of us would crowd together in her bed, finally nodding off when the noise died down.

  Our mother began to stay up all night, smoking. She

  crawled into bed in the morning, the minute our stepfather slid out, A faint whiff, like digestive biscuits, worked its way into our after-school corduroys when they didn't get around to being washed. Caught up in their own affairs, our parents left my sisters and me to play in the street after dark, watching white lads stroll by to swig lager outside Pandit's cotner shop, where they bullied the owner's son, tugging at his turban, until he let them have extra cans for free. After a lad off Heald Place Estate had loomed out of the entry - grinning over a sparrow in his fist, giving the neck a clicky twist - we rushed indoors, happy to put up with Coronation Street's fizzing and floating heads.

  Satsumas squirted a scent that meant Christmas. A tree went up, holding out baubles that shattered one after another, while a tangle of red and green lights sulked on and off and on. Our mother invested in a brick of marzipan, which she rolled out and moulded over a fruit cake baked for us by Gran. Icing would have spoiled it, my sisters and I assured her, when the big day dawned on the yellow mound.

  'You shouldn't have wasted your money.' Our mother wept and went upstairs, after tearing at tissue paper to discover the huddle of brass animals that we had clubbed together to buy, using the money she pressed on us on Fridays, meant for sweet pink shrimps and white chocolate mice.

  School cookery lessons made me glamorous at home. My mother grouched around in her purse for the fifteen pence that Mrs Bingham charged for ingredients. Bread-and-butter pudding, I brought home. Cheesy stuffed potatoes. I slipped in my sisters' esteem the night I turned up cradling a rhubarb crumble that looked like the real thing, but tasted of steel taps melted in sour pink goo.

  'Make us a pilchard buttie.' My stepfather showed me how to chivvy off the lid with the lethally sharp hook of the

  tin-opener, before peeling the spine out of the spHt fish. I learnt how to whisk it out in one go, tinkling the vertebrae clear of the flesh. But sometimes I couldn't catch all the hairlike bones.

  'You're bloody well out to choke me!' My stepfather winkled the pilchard ribs from between his teeth, and gave me a whack that left my cheeks and ears throbbing. 'Evil little swine!'

  I treasured the afterglow of a slap. It made me feel closer to my mother, buried in bed with a migraine that she blamed on coffee, rather than our stepfather's fists or the fingers that scrunched her lips into a tight, red flower, to stop them from spurting swear words and pleas and tears.

  'It's the middle of winter, Peter!' Our mother sometimes emerged from her days in bed feeling feisty. 'You can't seriously expect me to wear dark specs.'

  The sight of her stepping into the street with a spoiled face drove our stepfather bonkers.

  'Flauntin' it!' He dragged her back in, bolted the door and laid in some more.

  Eventually even Auntie Agnes turned against him and decided to wade in. Like a gift from above, our stepfather had landed himself in deep water. During his nights out, he had been amusing himself by pretending to be a plainclothes inspector. He flawed down ladies in cars, took their names and telephone numbers, then let them go with a caution about their dodgy driving. After
a word from Auntie Agnes, who was well in with the copper who caught him, he was let off with a caution too, if he promised to leave our mother and us alone.

  He packed his shirts and the collection of leather belts that had been waiting, he was fond of warning, to teach us a thing or two. Coiled like snakes with sharp buckle tongues, he stuffed them into a black bin bag, along with his jeans and

  stifF-necked jumpers. The ship paintings left spaces on the stairway wall where the hooks still stuck out, brass tacks staring like one-eyed spies.

  Our mother signed up to do shorthand and t)jping at the local community college.

  'It's for our ftiture,' she explained, when I was enlisted to help her to memorize the shorthand symbols.

  Dear Sirs, Yours sincerely, close of business, contract, gratefu.1, at your convenience, without delay. I stayed up long after bedtime had claimed Laurie and Sarah, whispering official-sounding words that my mother translated, like lightning, into dots, curls and swoops. I sensed something magical in the offing when midnight came and her cigarettes were still crowding the pack usually hollowed out by her flustery fingers, forever reaching to light up. Now she pressed a kiss into my forehead, flexed her knuckles, and folded a towel under the second-hand typewriter she had picked up for next to nothing because the 'e' and 'w' had died. Sinking into my pillow, I slipped off, lulled by the muffled chug of my mother's speed-typing, approaching sixty words a minute, like a distant express train.

  Pain in the back side. My mother squiggled shapes in blue biro that only she and I could understand. It made my heart beat faster, seeing the daring signs on the spiralbound pad right under my stepfather's nose. He had moved back in at the end of spring, with a solid-gold pledge that he would go to see a head doctor and visit a marriage guidance counsellor with our mother. At first she had told him where he could shove his piddling promises. But our stepfather wouldn't take no for an answer. He knocked and knocked on our door at all times of