Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  the day and night, breaking down, on his knees, begging to be let back in. Our mother kept up a grim face and seemed to be sticking to her guns.

  Once, in the middle of the night, she even woke me up and made me come downstairs;. My stepfather was standing at the bottom of the stairway in the hall, looking up at me with wrinkled, cried-out eyes.

  'Tell your dad we don't want him here.' My mother nudged me to speak when I just stood there, dumbstruck: 'He won't take my word for it, so you go on and tell him - we don't want him, do we?'

  I looked at my fingers, a puzzle of knuckles, trying to work out what to say.

  Is this a game? I wanted to ask my mother. My nightie felt flimsy and short. I would have given anything to be wearing my shoes.

  'It's not that we don't want you. Dad. . .' I lifted my eyes to meet his. My chest swirled fiill of fiinny feelings, like love, when I looked into his pink, snuffly face. Yet, at the same time, the pinkness reminded me of everything my stepfather could do when his face was bubbling with rage.

  Before I could gulp it back, the truth pinged off my tongue.

  'We don't want you,' I said. I took what I thought was a last look at my stepfather, before my mother sent me back up to bed.

  So my heart jumped, afi:er that, when I spotted a packet of Superkings - his favourite fags - on my mother's bedside cabinet. I had to get used to the sight of the black-and-gold boxes again, lying around, here and there.

  Our stepfather fell straight back into his old ways.

  When kids called for us to play out, we urged them to cross

  over the road where they would be less likely to hear the details of him letting off steam.

  'Jee-zus!' Older lads shook their heads over cans of lager, when our windows fairly ratded. No other comments were ever made. Our stepfather strode out to fill the doorstep every night, arms akimbo, legs spread wide, giving ftff knuckly stares that kept the street in its place.

  It was a relief when the Moss Side riots roared past our road. Things calmed down inside our house, as they heated up outside. Our stepfather was mesmerized by the fires and broken glass and the anger of the men in the streets. He let us climb out of bed to linger behind him in the doorway, goosebumps dancing along our arms at blokes whooping and smashing shop windows, lugging looted stereos and tellies, waving flaming torches that made their faces leap in the dark.

  Outside school, on the walls: NF, NF, NF, NF. No one seemed to know what NF meant.

  'National Front,' Miss Wykeham half enlightened us in our religious education lesson, after the letters turned up on her blackboard amid a shower of strange crosses. Some people had a stupid and narrow idea of Englishness, she stammered, before shifi:ing attention to the crosses like square flowers.

  'Swastikas.' Miss Wykeham stood in firont of them, demanding that the culprit step forward and rub them off. When nobody moved, she stormed out, leaving the air electric. She huffed back into the room a few minutes later with a stack of paperbacks.

  The Diary of Anne Frank.

  Hider, Nazis, Jews: a world of evil, including millions -absolutely millions - of dead bodies, lay behind the crosses that Miss Wykeham rubbed into a sinister swirl.

  I devoured the book in a single night, kneeling against our bedroom window, stealing foul pink light from the streetlamp. Turning to the picture on the cover, I gazed into the brave girl's face, looking for bits of myself there. I went hot when I discovered that a boy had peeked at her through a mirror behind his desk; Dudley Barnes did that to me during Geography, using a wing mirror wrenched off a car. At the end, I crawled into bed feeling hollow, unable to stop thinking about Anne Frank, creeping about the annexe with her family.

  Laurie and I made sheathes out of Sellotape and an empty packet of porridge oats to cover the four really sharp kitchen knives. Sarah insisted on colouring them all in with wax crayons. We slid the knives back into the cutlery drawer. Whereas nights used to be burst by baching and shouts, now there was a razor-edged silence that made me press both shoulderblades against the wall in bed. I let my heart clang out through my back, so that it wouldn't scare Sarah, curled up against my chest where she insisted on snuggling in order to sleep. When morning dawned, I slipped the sheathed knives out of the drawer and took them outside to bury them in the bin in the back yard.

  In spite of fights and sleepless nights, our mother had passed her first secretarial exam. Her second brought her home singing, flourishing a packet of custard creams and news of greater honours still. The night before her third and final test, which was to include an interview, she decided to iron her pleated caramel skirt after washing it with the rest of our clothes. We were in our nighties, stuffing everything else into the twin tub.

  'Just the job,' Laurie and I assured our mother, when she tried on the green jacket that Auntie Livia had been good enough to lend. 'A real, hve secretary, you look.'

  She draped the clean laundry over the airing rack in front of the fire, then set to with the iron to tame the pleats of her posh skirt. Laurie and Sarah were busy persua'ding the Rubik's cube back into one piece after another dismanding. Inhaling the scent of drying vests and knickers, I hunched over Flowers in the Attic, growing hot and bothered, wishing the mother in the book would forget about the inheritance money and just pack up and get her kids out before it was too late.

  My spine stiffened at the chug of our stepfather's van. Brakes grunted outside the door. He lurched in.

  'Happy Families, is it?' He pictured the four of us having a party, every time he pulled off in his van. 'Can't wait to see the back of me, can you?'

  Behind her iron and her caramel pleats, our mother stood her ground, instead of rushing to put the ketde on as usual, before helping him off with his shoes.

  'Oi!' Our stepfather swayed in the doorway, his breath reeking as if he had been munching metal. 'Oi, you! Bitch!'

  Sitting on the carpet, Sarah wound up the Fisher-Price toy telly that she sometimes cradled like a doll, although she was now six. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream - a boy floated along, snoozing under a straw hat - Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream.

  'Cunt!' Our stepfather smashed his boot into the screen.

  Sarah's lips churned, wondering whether it was safe to cry.

  Next he grabbed the iron out of our mother's hand. She gasped and wri^ed out from behind the ironing board. Smiling to himself, he pressed the iron on to the skirt and held it down, waiting, watching it hiss and puff, before peeling it back.

  'That's foiled yer, 'an't it?'

  An iron-shaped hole gaped in the pleats that had been destined to make our mother a secretary,

  'I'm taking that test, Peter.' Our mother straightened her shoulders, rising above the sight of the singed skirt. She had orange curlers in her hair, but she looked brave and beautifiil, her dark eyes on fire.

  'You can do what you like with your own fiiture,' she spoke in a low, vibrating voice, 'but you are not about to foul ours up.'

  'Oh, aye?' Our stepfather lunged into the kitchen, clanging among the cutlery. Unable to lay hands on a knife, he strode back into the living-room and went straight for our mother. Naked under her housecoat, her flesh flashed when he grabbed her and threw her against the wall. Sarah's head thudded against the dinner bench in the confiision.

  I screamed 'Dad!' when my mother's feet left the ground. Above his fists, both clamped around her neck, my mother's eyes seemed to go out. Veins bulged in her forehead. My teeth sank into the skin between his forefinger and thumb. My mother slid down the wall.

  'I'll kill you!' He thumped me across the side of the head, then picked me up by the hair and hurled me towards the fire, where I crashed into ceramic tiles.

  I looked up into his face. Behind him, my mother grabbed the tomato-shaped pot, cream crackers leaping out of the lid as she brought it down on his head. There was a sound of banging and smashing in the hall: as if I had conjured them up, four police officers ran into the room.

  Lauri
e had plunged into the street in bare feet and run through the dark in her nightie straight back to Auntie Agnes's. Two of the ofl&cers drove us there to pick her up, in a real police car.

  'D'you think she'll need stitches?' Several heads, all in their bedtime curlers, bent to inspect Laurie's shredded feet. A steady stream of old ladies came for a nosy, drawn to Auntie Agnes's house by the sight of a police car. My mother eased shards of glass out of Laurie's soles, then doused the gashes with Dettol. I held my sister's hand while she *vinced.

  'What the 'eck's that?' Auntie Flo pointed at the jumper shoved on over my nightie.

  'Christ tonight!' My mother lifted a thick snake of hair off my shoulder. She stroked the throbbing bald patch on my head. 'He's ripped it right out.'

  I looked at the hair, then at Laurie. We squirmed under the spodight of Auntie Agnes's cronies, watching us watch her colour TV: cops scooted about, setting off sirens, clutching guns in their praying fists.

  Helmets hovered about our front door. One of them seemed especially dedicated. We discovered Officer Parkes doing his duty indoors, whenever we got home from school. He cleared his throat and proceeded to take notes from our mother, whose fingers fiissed about her neck, still ripe with yellow-green strangle-marks.

  Standing to attention, he strapped his helmet back into position: 'All right?'

  'Mm-hmm.' I nodded with Laurie and Sarah, then ushered them upstairs to our bedroom. There was something about the policeman's eyes, as if our stepfather was watching us through them.

  After what our mother referred to as a misunderstanding. Officer Parkes withdrew his services. The blue rash around our door disappeared. More powerfril than the police, our mother's friend Auntie Tamara moved into a house down the next street, complete with daily visits from her brother, who was big and black and broken-nosed: there was no way our stepfather would dare to come knocking now Uncle Clifford was hanging around. Half-black and half-white. Auntie Tamara's skin shone as if she had been dipped in treacle. She used to work with our mother, before I was born, behind the deep fiyers at a local chippy. Now she was trying her luck at a more glamorous career, although we could never work out

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  what it was. She came round on her way out, late at night, locked in bangles and slinky clothes. Lighting up with our mother, she crossed her gleaming legs to cuss this guy and that, saving nicer words for the ones who came up with funk and soul records, along with quarts of rum, to express their appreciation of her sensual side. ♦

  'I'm not badly off, am I?' She held up her arm to admire a gold link bracelet, before swigging Bacardi with a splash of Coke and stubbing her cigarette: 'Can't complain.'

  Like a flower watered by Auntie Tamara, our mother grew glamorous. Laurie and I were amazed by the silkiness of dresses that could float off the back of a lorry.

  'You look like midnight,' I told her, when she slipped into the black satiny one, speckled with stars and sickle-shaped moons.

  Our faces danced every time someone tapped on our mended front door after dark. Swinging it open, our mother would hover on stiletto heels, casting a fabulous, lipsticked smile over instant aunties and uncles. All sorts of people were drawn to her - 'Bees to a honeypot,' Auntie Tamara smiled. Without our stepfather messing up her face and her moods, our mother could be herself. She fizzed full of life like she used to, widening her eyes as she laughed and joked, making people thirsty for a taste of her spirit.

  Bones of fried chicken lay in ashtrays when my sisters and I got up in the morning and ventured into the living-room, which had throbbed with music and voices the night before. We collected drained botdes and glasses to save our mother the trouble when she woke up and padded about, holding her head as if it might break, like an egg. On Saturday mornings, we helped her to clean the house, top to bottom, before she set to work on her hair, fi?dng it in curls across her crown, ready

  to do the rounds with her catalogue. She had been made an agent for Great Universal, leaving her secretarial dreams buried in the typewriter under her bed. It made me sad to think that she would never turn into a secretary, but I was as quick as my sisters to pounce on the catalogue. Long, rainy afternoons would slip by while we knelt, dreaming, over the glossy pages - Laurie and Sarah stuck on the pictures of toys at the back, while I was growing fascinated and slightly frightened by the world of clothes.

  *I Can See Clearly Now'. Our mother had a quiet smoke over her old Motown vinyls in the evening, before rushing out on the razz, leaving Laurie and Sarah in my hands, which was legal now that I was twelve. 'The Tracks of My Tears'... 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine'. . . 'You Keep Me Hangin' On'... We boosted up the volume, then fetched the cards that our mother and her mates played with - laying them across the floor, gambling Revels and fruit pastilles, making up the rules. Midnight came and went without bringing our mother back. We took out our tiredness on one another, before sliding the records back into their sleeves and dragging ourselves to bed.

  Our number finally came up on the waiting list at Moss-Care Housing Bureau. The house on Parkfield Street was scheduled to be demolished - our mother had tipped buckets of coins into the pay phone at the Bendix, calling the council to remind them - so it was about bloody time. A completely renovated, terraced house was now waiting for us.

  'Not enough room to swing a cat, of course.' Our mother explained that my sisters and I would have to squash up in bunk beds, sharing a tiny bedroom. But the house came complete with fitted kitchen and indoor loo, which seemed

  too good to be true. It was just around the corner, on Chilworth Street, parallel to Auntie Tamara's house on the next street along. She and our mother carried the wardrobe, the beds and settee, while Laurie and I lugged mattresses, pots, plates and clothes and Sarah clutched her Etch-a-Sketch and wax crayons. We stepped through the shiny red front door. Our hearts ballooned, while our heads clanged with the tang of untrodden, rubber-backed carpet and still-drying magnolia paint.

  Keen to keep the paintwork clean and the carpets fluffy, our mother dedicated herself to our new home with a passion. We relished the way she ordered us to take off^ our shoes the moment we clomped in from school. A wonderfril wall of rules went up, about where you could and flaming well couldn't eat biscuits, on which surfaces you were and were not allowed to rest your glass, where towels were to be hung after a bath, where clothes went when they were dirty. We slid into bed, scolded and cosy. Our mother stayed up all night, blasting the Jackson Five, gunning away on the Singer sewing machine lent to us by Gran. 'A, B, C ... 'My Girl'... 'Can You Feel It' ... 'Blame It On The Boogie' ... We awoke to the rhythms we had fallen asleep by, to find our windows draped in a blue that made the sky seem drab.

  Laurie, Sarah and I helped our mother tend her new jungle of ferns, wielding water pistols to spray tiny green teeth zipping along their fronds. When we got it wrong and her rubber plant drooped, its leaves choked by the fijrniture polish we had smeared on to encourage the shine, she ordered us to keep our flaming green fingers off^ the ivy and the yucca, the spider plants and the bony rose bushes planted in paint cans in the back yard.

  'Flippin' freaks of nature!' Our mother glowed with Auntie Livia, debating the source of the brains that were helping Laurie and me to gather school merits. 'I bet they get their nous from my side of the family, after all.' She arranged the badges - blue ones, red ones, then gold upon gold - on a crocheted doily on top of the TV. 'I might have gone far, given half a chance.'

  Because our new house had a proper aerial, the telly had finally stopped rippling. My sisters and I sat in a trance in front of Bewitched or The Beverley Hillbillies, then tore ourselves away from the box and gathered around the dinner bench to do our homework. Our mother bent over books with Sarah, helping her to catch up where she had fallen behind in our hairy moments.

  'What's GIST?' Laurie wondered why I had to fill out pink forms for science, after blasting through maths and English and sharing the most luxurious French words with her.

  'It stands for Girl
s in Science and Technology.' I recited what the lady had told me when she took me into the technician's lab for a special interview, away from the rest of the class. My mother listened at the sink, where she had got up to scrub vegetables, while I explained that I had been selected as part of an experiment to turn more girls into scientists.

  'Why d'you want to be one of those?' Laurie found it hard to appreciate anything but gymnastics - which made rosettes bloom on her chest - and ballet, which she was teaching herself out of a book that Gran bought her for her eleventh birthday.

  I was flattered by the extra attention at school, but I struggled to see the point of science myself 'I might want to be a doctor, mightn't I, Mum?' I flustered. 'Or an astronaut.'

  'What, like o^ Star TrekV Laurie tweaked her ears to make them pointed like Mr Spock's.

  I dived into the tables and diagrams on my pink sheets, while Sarah drew a space rocket on one of our mother's spare catalogue order forms.

  'Don't forget me,' she crayoned her heart out, 'when you go to work on the moon.'

  After tea, our mother stuffed our school socks into the special pan set aside for boiling them in bleachy water. They gurgled while she was busy with bleach of her own, dipping her fingertips in a bowl in her weekly war against nicotine stains. Once the nails were whiter-than-white, she was happy to take them out and play Scrabble.

  'Fetch the dictionary!' Our mother was a stickler, making us check every one of our dubious concoctions. We had to know how to use words properly, she insisted, if we hoped to get anywhere in life. She kept no other books in the house, but our battered old dictionary followed us wherever we went - we even used it for swearing the truth on, after our illustrated children's bible got lost.

  Bedtime took us by surprise. We kissed our mother goodnight, and left her listening to the Pointer Sisters' new album, which Auntie Tamara had taped for her. 'I'm So Excited'... 'I Need You'... 'Should I Do It?'... 'Slow Hand'... Sexy harmonies sent us to sleep, shivery with pleasure and pinpricks of worry, wondering what would happen if the songs stirred up longings too strong for her to ignore.