Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  When Neil bought me a ring, I slipped it on to my right hand, well away from the marriage finger.

  'He's a soppy git!' Wendy saw fit to forgive, when he turned out to be so gooey. 'I like my blokes to be hard,' she declared, keeping her eye on the ring.

  Fourteen-carat gold, in the shape of a lucky horsehoe, it held the shyest diamond in the world.

  I let my mother believe I was in love with Neil Kirby. I let Neil Kirby believe the same. What I was really in love with -apart fi-om the ring and boxes of chocolates - was the world beneath his Manchester City quilt. My skin woke up when it touched his. The taste of his breath, the smell of his chest, emptied my head. Belly on fire, my muscles throbbed in time with my heart.

  'No.' My fingers caught his when they tu^ed at my knickers. There was a line I had no intention of crossing, though it was thrilling to hover along it.

  'You're killing me.' He nuzzled my neck. 'Don't you love me?'

  The knot of our legs tightened.

  No. I was devoted to my own creamy explosions. No.

  'Will you have any babies, miss?' Our chemistry teacher. Miss Gilman, was going to be married on Saturday. We took the

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  opportunity to avoid volumetric analysis by bombarding her with questions.

  'Don't do it, miss.' Joyce Harding spoke up: 'It kills.' Joyce was fourteen; her baby was more than a year old. Before now, none of us had known it existed. She had missed a lot of school, but, because Joyce was ugly and not funny, not one of us had stopped to wonder why. Our chemistry lesson was devoted to the bloody story of her labour.

  'It's the head that hurts the most.' Lads clowned around at the back of the lab, sniggering, while girls sat in a hush with Miss Gilman behind the glass apparatus. 'It can rip you right open, like. You - you have to - scream.'

  I blasted away on a trumpet with the boys in the brass section every Wednesday afternoon. The school orchestra was still booming in my chest when I got home for tea.

  'There's no way on God's good green earth' - my mother planted fists on hips when I lifi:ed the school trumpet out of its purple velvet case - 'that you are going to play that THING under this roof

  I went and sat on my bed, watching my fingers cancan through notes in silence, trusting that things would be different as soon as Dad came home.

  Afi:er the confinement of inmate blue, our dad went through a rainbow of his brightest shirts in his first week on the outside. Friends came round every night, popping corks, buzzing with news, dangling their latest schemes under his nose.

  Our mother made ominous noises, rasping her cigarette.

  'Nah, mate.' Dad put his arm around her, shaking his head at the lads: 'I'm touching nothing bent, me.'

  He knew his priorities. And his limitations. They had been drummed into him at Her Majesty's pleasure.

  'Rock the Boat'. Our dad struggled to keep everything above board. He had to sign on while he got his act together, and that made it illegal for him to work. But there were never enough jobs to allow him to come off the dole and go self-employed. The recession had bitten in; people hadn't the heart, let alone the readies, to improve their houses.

  'It's like me hands are still in cuffs.' He shook his wrists. Nervous about invoices, he was forced to turn down hefty contracts when they did crop up.

  'It's the bloody Higher-Ups,' our mother ranted, while Laurie and Sarah wondered who she meant. 'Just there to stop the litde people from making summat of themselves, they are.'

  Instead of oiling his tools and sawing planks in the back yard, our dad spent more and more time in front of the telly. We often came in from school to find him concentrating hard on cartoons. / coulda been a contender. He tried to joke, but we watched the light go out in his eyes when another fella's promise failed to blossom into a job. / coulda been somebody.

  A flurry of Rizla papers passed across our dad's lips. He rolled cigarette after cigarette, balancing them in log piles, before he smoked them one by one.

  'What's got into you?' our mother shrieked when his hands exploded in her face.

  The first slap seemed to hurt him as much as her. He winced and locked her in his arms, crooning ChristChristChrist until her elbows stopped chugging to escape.

  'That's not the answer,' our mother sobbed. Her nose dribbled on to his jumper, 'Don't you know I'm on your side?'

  The next time he hit her, it sparked an air of dismay rather than surprise. We froze after the whack, watching the fight that went on inside our dad, between the half of him that was sorry and wanted to drench our m'other in kisses, and the half that made him stand his ground.

  'Slut!' He sometimes sneered, snatching for reasons to hit her again. 'You dirty whore! What were you doing, eh, all them nights when I was inside?'

  Our mother shook her head, unable to believe her ears. 'Ask the kids what I was doing. Go on, ask them how much fiin it was waiting, with no money and no nothing. We put our lives on hold for you, you worthless shite.'

  Dad wavered, then stiffened: 'You make me sick.'

  Our mother let him get the rest of the slaps out of his system. She held her stinging cheeks.

  'You make yourself sick.'

  Trees let go of their leaves in the park behind school. I spent the dinner hour kicking through red and gold with Tamsyn Lee. Thrown together by the choir (since I had traded in the trumpet for something less troublesome), we were turning out to be soul mates. We hit the airy notes in harmony, collapsing under heavy ones meant for bigger chests.

  'So, then he gets sent to room loi.' Tamsyn was talking me through a story she thought I should read. 'It's all about Big Brother, you see.'

  She planned to work her way through what she called the classics, books that would help to make you middle-class. Being middle-class was something I could never dream of, especially since my dad had been sent to prison. I hadn't told

  Tamsyn about that. She was lovely, but she was so well turned out it made me nervous: her voice was clipped (she never dropped her aitches, her 't's practically stood to attention); she always looked nice and neat, with shiny, perfect hair that she had cut and styled at a hairdresser's; and she lived in a semidetached house in Didsbury with her mother and father, who had stayed married to one another all this time. I was afraid that she might not want to talk to me if she knew what my life was like at home. I thought it was best to keep quiet, too, about my mate Wendy and the whisky we used to swig from her dad's silver flask on Saturday nights, wincing at its metallic whack down our throats, before wobbling around the streets in pointed shoes, on the look-out for lads.

  Because this year was 1984, Tamsyn was reading a novel called Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. She told me so many details, I felt like I'd read it myself The story made me think about my dad and the way he and my mother felt spied on by the government, even behind closed doors at home. A great urge came over me to get hold of the book, to read it from cover to cover and understand everything in between. But I didn't dare touch it. It seemed to come from another world, a posh one, that I wasn't part of Instead I peered at the library book in Tamsyn's hands.

  If you want an image of the future - someone had pencilled stars in the margins - imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever.

  After swapping secrets about our bodies and the way we felt about boys, I began to hint to Tamsyn about what went on inside our house. Only the fists. I never mentioned the filthy words or the cowboy boots, kicking my mother in her back while she crouched like a mushroom on the floor.

  'It's because he loves us.' I resorted to my mother's logic

  when Tamsyn's eyebrows locked against my dad: 'It makes him feel helpless not to be able to make money. That's when he blows up.'

  Tamsyn looked disgusted. 'Why does your mum stay with him?'

  'She loves him' - I scrabbled for words'- 'as much as she hates him.'

  'What do you feel?' Tamsyn asked.

  My eyes wandered through bare branches to the sky.

  I saw his fists f
lying, before they faded in the blue of his eyes.

  'He's my dad.'

  After itching for weeks, Dad finally took his drill to the -ZVelectricity meter: he made a hole and slid a needle through it, to stop the wheel from whizzing. Shame broke out in the form of sweat, creeping along my hairline, making my face clammy, whenever I thought of the tiny, pin-sized hole. Mum and Dad were united against the man from Norweb. There were gallons of hot water for laundry and for bubbly baths that came up to your neck. But it left you feeling dirty, under the skin, where no soap or scrubbing could reach.

  After tea, based on bread, chips and baked beans, Mum and Dad would plant themselves in front of the TV with their new roll-up machine and a pouch of tobacco. They veered between Old Holborn and Golden Virginia, as if one or the other might change their luck, embarking on liquorice-flavoured Rizla papers when life seemed specially dull.

  'Ugh!' Dad grunted when Wish You Were Here flaunted white beaches, crystal water and cloudless skies. Our mother flamed at life's unfairness. Dad switched over for quiz shows. He bristled on the settee when the buzzer beat him to the answer he swore was on the tip of his tongue.

  Now that Neil Kirby had gone into the army and Wendy had a fiill-time boyfriend of her own, I had no reason to leave the house. Because Tamsyn lived miles away in Didsbury, and her parents wouldn't let her come to rough areas like Rush-

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  olme, I couldn't sec her after school. I huddled with Laurie and Sarah, knees tucked under chins, eyes on our mum and dad. Some nights they joked and kissed. Never a finger raised. They rolled and lit up, rolled and lit up, while we choked on the edge of it.

  Do not go gentle into that good night. . . Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  A wave of grieving anger rushed through me and crashed inside my forehead, when I dived into the Dylan Thomas poem I had to analyse for class. Because their words had forked no lightning . . . Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay ... Old age should bum and rage at close of day. Age, death and grief were the 'salient themes of the poem', it said in the back of the textbook anthology. But for me, the dying of the light had to do with being buried alive in your own smoky front room with your family, stuck together for ever and ever, in front of the TV.

  'Clear up that crap!' Dad hounded Laurie and me away from the kitchen table when we spread out our schoolbooks. The sight of them made his nostrils flare: 'Spoiled brats.'

  'It pains him to see you kids getting what he never had,' our mother reminded us, as though that ought to take the sting out of his slaps: 'Christ knows, he's had a hard life.'

  One night, when Terry had stormed out after a fight and our mother reftised to let him back in, his older brother Trev had come round to soften her with the tale of their childhood in Hulme. Their mam, he told us, used to dump plates of gravy and mash on their da's head, smack bang on his noggin.

  when he came home legless. Their da would sit there, saying nowt, gravy dribbling down his face. Next night, like, he'd be sure to beat the shit out of their mam. When their da finally buggered off, their mam turned on Terry, insisting he'd driven their da away. She'd clang his skull against the taps when she was washing his hair in the sink. Gave up cleaning and cooking, she did - always out sniffing after another fella, leaving the brothers to fend for themselves. Little Terry found a tapeworm in his undies when he was ten years old.

  'Why do we have to pay for what his mum and dad did all that time ago?' Laurie and I protested. The clanging against the taps made us want to cry, the thought of the tapeworm made us squirm, but the story didn't stop our ears from ringing after Dad's past had burst out in his hands.

  The buzz saw snarled and rattled. . . snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, . . . And nothing happened.

  My heart snarled and rattled too, sawing inside my chest, as I read the poem Mrs Chappell pointed to in the English textbook. 'Out, Out—', by Robert Frost.

  Then the saw leaped out at the boy's hand - the hand! -and he held it up with a ruejul laugh. He lay down and someone listened at his heart. Little — less - nothing! - and that ended it.

  I read the poem over and over, willing the boy to watch out, feeling shocked every time the saw caught his hand and the words left him dead at the end.

  'Now, then: rue.' Mrs Arnold chalked the word up on the board: 'What do we think that means?'

  Rue. I copied it into my exercise book and stared. Such a puny word, considering everything it sucked in.

  'Andrea?' Mrs Arnold picked on me when my frown of concentration gave me away.

  'Is it the ache you feel,' I mumbled, while my face burned, 'when you wish things could be rewound, even though you know it's too late, to make it all turn out differently?'

  My marks shot up in every subject, soaring through the seventies and eighties to tickle the nineties. Tamsyn wavered between admiration and resentment: 'How d'you do it?'

  After tea and doing the dishes, then any ironing or dusting Dad demanded, something beckoned me to lie on my tummy in front of the telly, with a book opened under my nose. I pored over one book at a time, so that he couldn't attack me for messing things up. Whatever the subject, I found I was fascinated: every page was an adventure, knowing I might, at any moment, cop a right load of flak from my dad.

  'In our house,' I told Tamsyn, 'homework makes you a rebel.'

  'Why can't you act like a proper family?' Our mother's blood pressure rose when one of us forgot to put on the right face for tea. 'Stop pushing your food round your plate!'

  'Misery guts,' Dad called Laurie, who let feelings seep into her eyes.

  My sister disappeared into our bedroom after tea, as soon as the dishes were finished. Pliis, pirouettes, arabesques. Her body brought mysterious words to life while the rest of us slouched in front of the TV, floorboards squeaking above our heads.

  'Shut that racket up!' Dad bellowed.

  The ceiling sulked, silent for a few seconds.

  Then it groaned again.

  Dad stormed upstairs: 'I'm trying to watch the ftickin' Krypton Factor^'

  An almighty slap and a thud. Sarah gulped and glanced at

  me.

  I looked at my mother, wrapped in her cigarette.

  'She brings it on herself, that one.' Our mother sided with Dad when he gave Laurie a hiding.

  Ajfter a modern dance competition at the Royal Northern Ballet, my sister had come home half an hour late, failing to look sorry. A streak of electricity in her silvery-blue leotard, she had amazed the judges. They could hardly believe that she had no formal training, apart from the odd lunch hour with her PE teacher, and had taught herself most of the moves out of an old picture book. A sense of excitement buzzed through me, too, when I stroked my sister's star-shaped medal and thought of the prize she had won: she was one of only six 12-year-olds in England who had been chosen to spend a week, all expenses paid, at a dance school in London.

  'You can forget that!' Dad decided that Laurie was getting above her station: 'Swanning in and out all hours, obsessed with this dancing malarky, treating our 'ouse like an 'otel.'

  When she opened her mouth to object, he hit her in the face and sent her to bed. This he repeated, as soon as she got in from school, every night for a week: 'You're going nowhere, Twinkletoes.'

  If Mum thought Dad's punishments were too harsh, she would sometimes try murmuring to wheedle him round. His face turned to stone; she backed off. Jiggling her eyebrows when he wasn't looking, she searched for ways to let us know she was on our side, really. Laurie and Sarah felt betrayed, but I thought I understood: when Dad was on the warpath against

  us kids, I told diem, it was downright dangerous for our mother to step in. What I suspected, but never said, was that the battle with us kids gave them precious time off from the war with each other.

  'Why does it have to be Them against Us,' Laurie asked, 'whenever it's not Him against Her?'


  'It's not like that, Laurie.' I often said things I didn't believe, in an effort to keep the peace.

  Fair. Unfair. Right. Wrong. Nothing mattered as much as keeping everyone's voices from rising or breaking out. Shouts led to fists, which could leap to knives in a flash.

  I kept my head down, reading or doing homework or losing myself in the sketchbook I brought home from school. Learning to make all the right noises, I tutted and sighed to agree with Mum and Dad, at the same time straining to cast Laurie's, Sarah's or my own behaviour in a better light. We were rarely able to do anything right. Selfish gobshites, we were, forever giving them grief

  'Yes, but.. .' I became fluent at agreeing, before wheeling in the other side of the story to save the day.

  I drew a brisding crouch of fur, fangs and eyes glinting: using a black biro on white cardboard, scratching away whenever the house was calm, I brought a black-and-white leopard to life.

  'Flamin' marvellous!' Dad clicked his tongue between his teeth and did a little whisde.

  He was happy to see me engrossed this way. 'Better than them poncy books you waste so much time on,' he muttered. 'Full of codswallop.' He never used to object when I dived into Stephen King and James Herbert and all the dirty horrors and thrillers I was once obsessed by. Now I had outgrown them,

  they gave me the wrong kind of shudders: they seemed cheap and flat and not terrifying at all. Instead I found myself drawn to musty old books that I came across at school, or fancy-cover classics that I discovered through Tamsyn. Far From the Madding Crowd, Selected Modem Verse, Great Expectations. They touched on deep, disturbing things too, but they lifted you up, towards a sort of light, instead of dragging you down into darkness. And the excitement stayed with you, even carried on growing, after you closed the book.