Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  'Absolutely brassic, we are.' Our mother composed the shopping list in perfect handwriting, on the back of an envelope from Norweb. It was like a poem, except that 'loaves' meant flimsy, thin-sliced white bread, 'margarine' meant watery, petrol-tasting stuff, and 'milk' came not in botdes or cartons

  but in boxes of powder that left lumps, no matter how long you whisked it in water with a fork. Fastening all the press studs on our anoraks, we braced ourselves against icy wind and rain. A mile-and-a-half's walk lay between us and Kwik Save on Dickenson Road. Four miles there and back, if you counted a detour to the freezer-food emporium, where pounds performed miracles for people even poorer than ourselves. Ladies with no stockings leaned into icy chests to pull out fish fingers and so-called beefburgers in bumper bags. Everybody knew that they shrivelled to a cardboardy pulp after the fat and water had melted under the grill, but at 69p a dozen nobody seemed to care.

  Tot it up for us, Andy.' My mother compared the amount in her purse with the figure I tugged out of the trolley, after adding the prices of packets and cans. We went through our cash-out routine, putting items back on the shelf to bring the total into line.

  'Right, how much is it now?'

  I subtracted a pot of jam, a jar of pickled onions and two packets of Rich Tea. My mother made a calculation in her own head, then put the jam next to the till to be checked out, bidding goodbye to the onions and biscuits, pursing her lips against our heartbroken looks.

  Laurie, Sarah and I were equally expert at prising the lid oflF the biscuit tin, without letting the metal twang. Filched by the three of us, ginger snaps disappeared within days. Our mother held a ginger biscuit trial, but no one knew a thing.

  'I don't even like them,' Laurie had the genius to announce.

  'Own up!' Our mother primed the rubber sole of her slipper, ready to wallop the thief

  Three confessions leapt out. Nobody's backside saw the

  slipper, but our mother smashed her fist against the table, shouting and swearing like a man.

  'You just don't give a toss, do you?' Her screeches cracked and broke down into tears. 'You're going to drive me over the brink!'

  Our mother would be nudged into a rage if we folded her underwear the wrong way in her drawer, or abandoned our muddy shoes in the hall, or left: a scummy halo around the bath. Slaps left us sobbing, more dismayed than hurt, until she claimed we were trying to kill her with guilt, and we throttled our fruity tears.

  *Yes, it's a cigarette!' She seethed in fi-ont of the telly, its screen seething back in her face. Steer clear, the wisps of smoke warned.

  The person who brought our mother out of herself was Auntie Bridie, a friend from the old days, whose troubles were so much worse.

  'Ma wee bairns.' Auntie Bridie groaned into the neck of the botde of Bell's she carried under her coat when she walked all the way from Wythenshawe to cry on our mother's shoulder around midnight.

  'You'll get them back.' Our mother pressed a glass into her hand, so that she wouldn't have to swig her whisky straight from the bottle.

  It wasn't going to be easy for Auntie Bridie to convince the social workers that she was a sober and responsible parent.

  'Why does she come round?' I couldn't help asking my mother, when she got out the disinfectant and sprayed air fi-eshener as soon as Auntie Bridie staggered back into the dark.

  She waft:ed the door back and forth, to shift a blend of

  whisky, sweat and pee: 'We're all the same in the eyes of God, Andrea.'

  'He must be a monster,' Laurie and I fretted, when our mother prepared herself for a date with a man she had met through Auntie Bridie and her husband, Humphrey. We shuddered to picture our mother on the arm of anyone remotely resembling Uncle Humph. Swelling fatter and fatter, his tattoos had ballooned and lost their colour, though blood had squirted out of the heart tattooed with another woman's name when Bridie's resentment had got the better of her and she stuck a fork into his podgy arm.

  'It's a wonder he didn't burst!' Uncle Humph had been sent home from hospital with a tetanus jab and a recommendation not to talk while he was eating, since it had proven so hazardous to his health.

  My mother instructed me to torture her with the spiky end of a fine-tooth comb, drawing lines across her scalp, yanking the hair in strands. Laurie sprayed the lengths with perm solution, then trapped them in tissue squares like Rizla papers.

  'Okay, stand back.' My elbows needed all the room they could get; it was a tricky operation, rolling the hair around the curler, tight, at the perfect angle. My mother would get into a horrible fluster if I didn't fix each one just so.

  'One down.' I trapped it in its plastic cage: 'Only fifty thousand to go.'

  Eventually her head was loaded with purple plastic bullets.

  We waited for an hour, poring over the catalogue, ready to rinse and release the curls as soon as our mother gave the word.

  A fox fur jacket now nestled about her neck: An old, gold Jag had started coming to take her out at night.

  'It's your knight in shining armour, Mum.' The car was back, purring to pick her up.

  'Is he coming in, this time?' We were dying to see the man that our mother took so much trouble to please.

  'Not this time.' She clasped her ankles in spiky heels, warned us not to open the door under any circumstances and vanished in a flurry of perfume and hair lacquer, sprayed like there was no tomorrow, leaving our nostrils and eyeballs stung.

  A new night unfolded inside the night, another inside that one, then another and another. I lay on the bottom bunk, seeing things in the wire links supporting the mattress above me, imagining it smashing down to print its diamond pattern on my face. At dawn, I fell into a sort of sleep.

  'Everything all right?' My mother tiptoed in at half-past seven, before Laurie and Sarah had woken up.

  'Everything's fine.' I put the kettle on. She sighed out of her stilettos and hung up her fur, giving it a loving stroke.

  We sat at the laminated table, sipping coffee with powdery milk.

  'Did you have a nice time, Mum?'

  'Mmm.' She yawned and gulped from her mug. 'It's the real thing, this time, Andy.' Cradling her chin in her hands: 'The real thing.'

  Mr Yarrow made everyone lay their left hand on the desk, to sketch a picture of it with the right. It felt weird, staring at your own hand and trying to draw it - a spooky self-portrait.

  'Are you really capturing it?' He floated around the room,

  spying over shoulders to check that artistic spirit was being poured properly on to the paper.

  'Beautiful.' I could smell coffee and Super Strong mints on his breath when he bent to inspect my drawing.

  'Thanks, Sir.' I fiddled with my eraser.

  'Absolutely beautiful.' I felt his breath on my neck as he leaned closer. 'And not just the drawing.'

  His bald spot gleamed when he bowed over the next sketch.

  In the old days, when she was struck by one of the awfiil turns that drained her and made her crawl into bed, I used to feel my mother slipping away from me. Her eyes would hollow out, so that I might feel lonely even while I was sitting with her and holding her hand. Now that she was happy, she was literally out of reach - always off with the new man. I couldn't talk to her about my uneasiness in the art room, the way the lab technician peered at me through the Bunsen burners during science, or what to do about lads who rubbed where they shouldn't when they shoved past in corridors. She smelt like a stranger when she popped home from the new man's flat.

  'Spodess!' Her eyes widened at the gleam of dusted paintwork around windows, doors and skirting boards. Inside cupboards, pans gave you back your reflection. Sarah had even polished the ends of food cans after peeling off the price stickers in a ceremony our mother always insisted upon. Every evening after baked beans on toast, Laurie and I scrubbed and wiped and swept to the beat of 'Under the Boardwalk' and 'Up on the Roof, playing the Drifters to death.

  'Wait till she comes home!' We egged each other on with
rags and brushes. 'She's bound to bring him in when she sees how gorgeous everything is.'

  We presented our mother with a sandwich of mashed banana, designed to make her melt, while keeping quiet about

  the vanilla slice that we had been so exciced to buy for her out of our pocket money, before giving in and slicing it into three.

  'Doesn't he have a phone?' We tried to hang on to her when she was ready to rush back out with a fresh set of clothes. We had washed everything in our twin tub, then lugged it down the road to do the drying at the Bendix - portholes swishing stockings, bras, secrets - before marching back home, where I ironed her blouses and trousers, concentrating to steam love into each crease.

  'We wouldn't call if you left the number,' I promised. 'ltd just be nice to have it, in case of an emergency.'

  'I've told you' - our mother refused to scribble any numbers - 'nip round your Auntie Tamara's if anything's the matter.'

  We had nipped round to Auntie Tamara's one night, a three-headed bat in our anoraks, flying through the alley connecting our street with hers. 'What's up?' She let us in to sit on the floor in front of the fire, in a jungle of strange men's legs. 'Is that all?' she laughed, when Laurie admitted we were lonely. We belted back through the pitch-black alley, sloshing a half-empty bottle of Coca-Cola, magicked out of Auntie Tamara's fridge.

  On school mornings, I would heat anoraks in front of the fire and zip Sarah into hers. I made a sandwich of two Rich Tea biscuits, with a glance of margarine and a sprinkle of sugar in between, and wrapped it in paper torn out of my English exercise book. Then I slipped it into Sarah's pocket and shut the door behind her and Laurie, before rushing to clear up the kitchen so that my mother would find it sparkling if she came home.

  Once, after washing the breakfast things, I was struggling to fold the rusty-hinged ironing board, when something inside

  me collapsed too. My bones ached, hollow, with no sleep stored up. The radio announced the time as nearly nine. I could see the looks on my teachers' faces if I crawled in late again, swallowing yawns, homework only half done. The pink promise of my GIST forms had paled. I had actually been put into detention after shooting pellets of chewed-up paper through the empty barrel of a Bic pen, letting them splat on the blackboard, then reftising to cower under the glare of the new science teacher. I spent the dinner hour in a store room with no windows, testing a mountain of batteries and bulbs to see whether they were dead. It was like being locked in a box with a stranger.

  Even books made me feel lonely now. At first, on days when something held me back from going to school, I would sit on my mother's rocking chair in the kitchen, creaking back and forth, devouring her Catherine Cookson romances or the slushy Danielle Steel stories Auntie Livia lent to her. But soon the pages began to shut me out: my eyes would skim over the words without connecting one to another, making me feel queasy, so that I gave up trying to lose myself in rocking and reading.

  On this rainy morning, I slid off my tie and put on my jumper, covering the uniform beneath. If my mother happened to turn up and find me, I could tell her I had been sent home from school. I was always contracting tonsillitis; she no longer fingered my glands when they swelled into plums, or made me open my mouth to inspect the gunk flowering in the arch of my throat. Picking coins out of the rinsed margarine tub where she left money for me to buy food, I grabbed two plastic bags and headed for Dickenson Road. A new Kwik Save had been built only two blocks away, on Withington Road, but something made me trudge a mile and a half through drizzling rain to the old one, followed by a mile and a half lugging the bags back. I had an urge to go and linger down the same aisles

  that my mother used to mooch along with us, wheeUng the trolley, pulling faces at prices, weighing our opinions as to the virtues of this brand of white bread over that.

  Dawdling by the window of the dusty records^and-books shop, a tide caught my eye. I sneaked five pence out of the shopping money.

  Growing: Girl to Woman. I got home and scoured the yellowed pages. My cheese on toast grew excited, hissing and spluttering under the grill.

  Clitoris. It looked and sounded like a flower. I peered at the diagram, read the instructions once more, then washed my hands in the kitchen sink.

  So that was the place that Judy Blume was referring to, when Deenie touched herself in the bath to cheer herself up. All the hours I had spent caressing the insides of my elbows, massaging the hollows between my toes and tickling behind my ears, in search of 'the place' that made you feel creamy. I wondered why anyone ever went to school, when you could stay at home and do that.

  'Mum.' I pulled her to one side the next time she turned up. 'I think I need a doctor.'

  Treacly emanations had ruined my knickers. My guts were an accordion, stretching, clamping, excruciating pleats. Hours of sin in the afternoon, churning delicious waves across my middle, launching tingles like electricity down to my toes, must have wrecked my waterworks.

  'But it was black,' I explained, when my mother suggested that the sticky stuff was blood. 'Thick and black; not like blood at all.'

  She inspected my clammy, green face and the rinsed, still

  rusty gusset of my knickers, then pulled a tampon out of her handbag: 'Welcome to the club.'

  Hips began to bud inside my jeans. Breasts throbbed under my vest. Shop fronts, glass doors, car windows, even the shiny sides of vans: I spent my thirteenth summer on the trail of my own reflection.

  'Watchit!' I bumped into the girl with the Human League haircut, whose fringe jagged over one eye so that, like me, she never saw where she was going. Wendy O'Malley. She lived in the house with a picture of the Pope in the window, on the corner of Chilworth Street.

  'Sorry.' I looked her in the eye not hidden under the hairsprayed flap.

  'S'all right.' The eye blinked. Like the lens of a camera, photographing my face and everything in it.

  She tottered into the park on white winklepickers, pausing to light a cigarette inside the gates.

  Why isn 't she at school? I wondered. My curiosity boomer-anged and hit me: Why am I not at school?

  I had never stopped to work it out. It was easier to carry on walking, no matter how lost and confused I felt. Industrial action had started it off: the teachers were so often on strike, I got into the habit of missing classes, skipping them even when they hadn't been cancelled. But there was something else -inside me, nothing to do with strikes or school - that pushed me to prowl strange pavements, even in heavy rain. I would spend hours and hours, following my feet, trying to get away from the nasty feeling of sadness, a live thing with claws, always lurking behind my back. Sometimes an ambulance would flash past, howling, and I would think of my mother. Mosdy I would just follow my feet until the rain came down

  too hard, soaking my head and driving me into some doorway to wait for it to finish smacking the pavements. I loitered to examine the rubble on Parkfield Street where our old house used to stand. The walls had crumpled under the swing of a bulldozer while neighbours clapped and cheered.

  My mother collared me one Saturday evening, while she was getting ready to go out.

  Tour Auntie Agnes says she spotted you down Kippax Street last week when you should've been at school.'

  'Really?' I looked mystified, before clouds cleared: 'It must've been the day I went to the dental hospital.' (I did make trips to the dental hospital now and then. One of my teeth was growing sideways out of the gum.)

  'You've not been wagging it, have you?'

  If my mother had looked me in the eye, I might have said yes. She could spade out the truth when she wanted to.

  'Interfering old cow, that Agnes.' My mother glanced at her watch, rushing to finish her hair. 'I knew she was just trying to stir it.'

  I gagged the part of me aching to sort things out, and let her get on with what made her happy.

  School holidays put a nice easy end to truanting. Our mother came home in the mornings and spent most of the day in the back yard, sprawled on a towel
to catch the sun, listening to Piccadilly Radio. Her feet jiggled to Chaka Khan and Cameo, fell limp for Bananarama and Fun Boy Three - a bunch of tone-deaf pansies, as far as she was concerned. 'Wherever I Lay My Hat (That's My Home)'. She smiled and mouthed the words when throaty Paul Young oozed out. Smeared in

  margarine, she roasted herself Hke a chicken, the oven timer set for fifteen minutes. Drring! Shifting into a new, painfijl-looking position, she spread her legs and arms so that there would be no pale patches at the end of the day. Laurie and I wondered at all the work it took to be a woman. We lay beside her, rolling over at exactly the same time, turning browner and browner by the hour. Our mother laughed and called us fingers of fiidge. Strangers in the street called us wogs.

  Autumn came and made the streets blustery. I went to school more often, finishing homework on the bus and during breaks, scooping merit marks to balance out demerits for bad attendance. At night, Laurie and Sarah played ping-pong at the youth club I was too old for. Waiting for them to come home, I peeled potatoes for tea. One spud each, boiled and mashed with a dash of margarine and an avalanche of salt.

  'Why can't we have chips, like Mum makes?' Sarah demanded. 'Why's it always toast or mashed potatoes?'

  So the next night, I tried doing chips.

  'This is the same as mashed potato,' Laurie moaned when I lifted the basket out of the deep fat fiyer and dumped pale, soggy chips on to our plates: 'Only ten million times greasier.'

  We scraped them into the bin and resorted to toast.

  But on the third night, everything went like a dream. The lard eased into liquid gold, its temper building up over the blast of blue flames. Just as it was seething, I dunked the chopped potatoes, daring them to spit in my face, I eased down the flame and stood over them, resisting the urge to lift the basket until they had all grown crispy coats. They came out glowing, as if they were lit up from inside.