Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  Since the sight of the posh books made Dad sneer, I took to sticking them under my jumper and smuggling them out into the back yard: it was worth braving the cold and drizzling rain so that I could lose myself in the stories without being harassed by shadows over my shoulder. The books that really got my dad's goat were the red leatherbound ones that Tamsyn had given me for my fifteenth birthday, their titles standing out in gold letters: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. He had no idea what was inside them; he just hated the sight of my face after I pulled it out of the pages and went about feeling crammed with passion and a murky sense of something brewing. Some brilliant storm.

  A letter came for Laurie from the Royal Northern Ballet Company. Dad tore it to shreds.

  'Dad ...' Speaking up gave me goosebumps of terror.

  His eyes glittered: 'Cruising for a bruising?'

  I thought of Laurie, jailed in bed, and pushed the point.

  'Insurrection in the ranks! Mutiny on the Bounty!' He had a range of batdeship sayings to keep the house in order, eyes turning flinty - 'Noted and logged' - if anyone threatened to step out of line.

  Sometimes he skipped his jokes and went straight to the thwack across the back of the neck.

  My mother advised me to do myself and everyone else a favour: 'Keep it zipped.'

  But tears stung our mother's eyes when Dad turned on Sarah. ' *

  'She's got to learn, Lorraine.' He put my eight-year-old sister over his knee and made her scream. 'There's to be no thieving in this house.'

  Sarah had pilfered thirty pence from the jar filled to meet the gas bill. Instead of buying chocolate and eating the evidence, like Laurie and I had sometimes been tempted to do, she had turned the money into a packet of balloons which she had blown up, before trying to hide them under her bed.

  'It's the half-term holidays,' our mother pleaded when Sarah was sent to bed for a week. 'The poor little bugger'U go barmy.'

  Dad exploded the balloons with a fork, pulled the curtains tight and stripped the bedroom of every last book and game. Clutching his drill like a gun, he fixed a padlock on the outside of the door, to keep Sarah in and Laurie and me out.

  We went to bed early, to comfort our sister, although we were forbidden fi-om speaking to her. Sometimes she was asleep when we crept in. More ofi:en, she was awake, eyes glistening in the dark.

  'What's this?' I whispered, when I discovered a hard-backed book under her pillow while I was stroking her hair.

  Old Testament Psalms. The only thing not caught in the tornado that ripped through our room, taking the rest of our books and things with it.

  'I don't read it.' My litde sister spoke under her breath: 'I just like the feel of it under my head.'

  Stuff at home made my chest feel heavy and clogged, but running reminded me I was alive.

  Knees, heels, lungs. Knees, heels, lungs.

  Air razored my throat; my lungs felt as if they were bleeding. The only girl on the long-distance-running team, I escaped netball practice to push myself along the dirt track behind school. I was finally fi-ee of the terror of missing the net, of the whistle shrilling against me for eyeing the hoop too long.

  Mud under my feet, birds scattering into the sky, I ran for miles and miles - muscles burning as if my legs were on fire -to match the distances I covered in dreams.

  We woke up in Auntie Pauline's caravan, parked outside her back door.

  'Why can't we stay here?' Sarah spoke for the three of us, when we had swallowed our hot Ribena and it was time for Uncle Bill to drive us back to our house, where he had come to rescue us the night before. I had managed to call him and Auntie Pauline, grabbing the phone and dialling with desperate fingers.

  After smashing all the ornaments, Dad had grabbed the remains of a cut-glass decanter and waved the jagged edge like a dagger.

  'You think you're so hard!' our mother had taunted him, thrusting her face in line for a slash, while Sarah cried and Laurie and I begged them to stop. Our dad had seemed as relieved as everyone else when Uncle Bill's car screeched up outside.

  'We've got to go back and face the music, girls.' Our mother drained her coffee and fastened her cardigan.

  I stiffened my lips and blinked to keep my eyes nice and dry. I had to set an example for Laurie and be strong enough to comfort Sarah, who whimpered: 'Why?'

  A frightening sweetness filled the air when they kissed and made up.

  233

  'Sexual Healing'.. . 'Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing' . . . 'The First, The Last, My Everything'... It was all Marvin Gaye and Barry White and dancing with their hips glued together, like in the beginning.

  The fresh starts usually lasted a week and ended in smithereens. With no ornaments left, Dad would go straight for our mother's ribs and face. Laurie, Sarah and I caught the odd fistfijl of anger, when we dared to hang on to his arms to keep them from flailing at her. He was like a windmill in a hurricane, the night Uncle Al and his mates came to drag him away.

  'Rainie...' He waited until the middle of the night, when everyone had gone home and our lights had been turned out, before creeping back to tap on the letterbox.

  'Rainie, baby,' he moaned under the flap. 'You know I love you.

  'Let's not be silly, doll.' His whispers seeped through the door, while our mother sat on the stairs, smoking in the dark.

  'Go away.' Her voice eventually cracked into a shriek: 'Why don't you just go away and leave us in peace?'

  As soon as tears gurgled in our mother's throat, we knew she would let him back in.

  When my mother was sent to the hospital for a head X-ray, I went with her to hold her hand.

  I wanted to giggle: heart-shaped earrings dangled from her skull on the screen.

  'Thank Christ,' my mother sighed, when the doctor assured her there were no cracks. The deafiiess in her left ear would cure itself over time.

  I looked at the negative. All the bones were lit up.

  My mother was still staring, trying to see inside her own head, when the doctor flicked ofF the screen.

  'I had a sore throat,' I told Tamsyn, who wondered why I had missed school. " *

  She shot me a look: 'Again? Why are you keeping stuff from me.**' She stopped to face me in the park after dinner: 'Don't you trust me any more?'

  'Don't be crazy.' I met her eyes. 'I'd tell you everything,' I assured my best friend, 'if there was anything to tell.'

  On Sundays, Dad slept off die worst of the week before, then slithered out of bed and reached for his fishing rod. Laurie had friends to meet, our mother had an appointment with herself in the bath, but Sarah and I were keen to keep him company at Sale Water Park, knowing his mood would be fantastically calm once he was close to the water, making him more like his old self

  The three of us sat, cross-legged, on plastic bags laid against the damp grass.

  Hours of amazing silence on the edge of the lake, reflecting a lilac sky.

  'When will you catch one. Dad?' Sarah whispered, as the sun began to slide. We squinted to spot the orange nipple floating in the gloom.

  'Soon.' He kept his chin tucked in the collar of his leather bomber jacket, eyes cast over the lake, as if he could see everything underneath. 'Have no fear.'

  When a slick of silver turned up, writhing, on the end of his line. Dad held it in his hands like a baby. Gills fanned and collapsed, flapping for life. A terrified eye stared.

  'Gently does it.' His scarred fingertips and knuckles worked to pull the hook loose from the fish's gasping lips.

  'Till next time,' he murmured, and slipped it back in, with a flurry of silent, dark ripples.

  236

  'Will you never learn?' Our mother fretted when Dad decided to go into business with Uncle Max,

  Uncle Max was going to buy delapidated houses, Dad would renovate them, they'd split the profits as soon as they were sold.

  'What could be more simple?' He was already racking up his tools, ready to sweat his way to a fortune.

  'Only your brain' - our mo
ther was wise to Uncle Max's scams - 'if you believe any of that castles in the clouds shit.'

  Auntie Livia and Uncle Max had bought a huge house in Sale, afi:er opening a dingy second-hand-fiirniture shop behind the warehouses off Piccadilly Square. Making money out of scratched sideboards, wobbly tables and exhausted settees, they proceeded to fill their own house with beautifiil, solid fiirniture and antiques.

  'We'll have gear as smart as theirs, when I get going,' Dad assured himself as well as us: 'Just you wait and see.'

  Dad's promises heightened our awe of Auntie Livia and Uncle Max's house. My sisters and I went quiet at the sight of their leather Chesterfield, their four-poster bed, the mahogany dinner table that shone, untouched, while they ate off their knees in fi-ont of the telly. Bronze horses reared their hooves on either side of the marble fireplace. Above it hung a vast, gold-framed mirror, an oval pool that let you float in your own reflection when no one was looking.

  I was chuffed when Uncle Max offered to pay me ten pounds every Saturday for helping to pick up old cookers and fridges from smashed-up houses on bleak estates before scrubbing them to get rid of the filth. I rolled up my sleeves and worked through the smell, dreaming about the universe of clothes and shoes I would be able to move about in if I saved a few weeks' wages. Once they were clean, Uncle Max sold the

  fridges and cookers to tired-looking people who brought in government vouchers and scraps of cash, after which we delivered them to different houses on the same estates. At the end of the day, we locked up the delivery van and sighed into Uncle Max's Mercedes to cruise back to their house, where Mum and Dad would turn up with Laurie and Sarah for the evening.

  'Nice piece of metal, mate!' Dad whistled at Uncle Max's latest discovery, a bronze lampstand in the shape of a lady, nearly life-size, robes clinging to her breasts.

  'Aye.' Uncle Max stroked the curves. 'She's a beauty, all right.'

  'Aw, Liv!' Our mother clucked at the sight of the lampshade: a crown of pearly peach and pink shells. Auntie Livia let Sarah click the lamp off, to repeat the wonder of switching it on: 'Better than Blackpool 'luminations!'

  Uncle Max and Dad checked the football scores, then slid into double-breasted jackets with wide ties and disappeared in the Mercedes.

  My mother splashed more Bacardi into her Coke: 'What's up, Liv?'

  'Same as ever.' Auntie Livia chomped through the Lean Cuisine cauliflower cheese that was supposed to shrink her thighs: 'Gambling. Drink. Dodgy deals. Other women's fucking perfume.'

  She forced down the last of her cauliflower, got out her whisk and fluffed up a bowl of butterscotch Angel Delight, which she shoved into the fridge. Then she started on a Mars Bar, swallowing back tears: 'I found an earring, hooked in his jumper.'

  Auntie Livia was gorgeous, but Uncle Max didn't know it, so neither did she. While he was out chasing skirts, she spent hours cooped in the spare room, smothering her face under creams in front of a mirror framed by baby bulbs, torturing herself with hot wax to strip hairs off her legs, grilling herself

  on the sunbed. All the wives of Uncle Max's mates did the same: at night, the street was caressed by eerie white-blue lights, seeping out of upstairs windows, as if spaceships had landed inside. Itching to bitch about their husbands who were off playing with dice at the casino, they came round for Malibu nights at Auntie Livia's, glowing as* if they had run away together on a ladies-only holiday. Our mother felt pale and dowdy next to them.

  'They look like their own handbags,' Laurie and I insisted: 'Fancy, but leathery.' Our mother was beautifiil on the inside as well, we sweated to assure her, and that was something no money could buy.

  She was much happier with herself the next day, when she was on her knees in her threadbare housecoat, digging her handbrush into the stairs. Cleaning made her feel spiritual, especially on Sunday mornings.

  'Money,' she muttered into the carpet, 'is not the be-all and bloody end-all.'

  It was easy for our mother to look down her nose at money, now that Dad was bringing in enough to put meat on the table. We hesitated before tucking in, not knowing how long the juicy phase would last.

  'Ask no questions.' My mother's eyes flashed when I wondered where the cash came from for real mincemeat instead of the tasteless soya stuff.

  'How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You'. Dad was bellowing his old favourites in the bath, sprucing himself up for a bevvy with the boys. 'Too Busy Thinking About My Baby'.

  Our mother was ready now to overlook the odd dodgy deal. Our dad might be up to his old fandangos, but - unlike Uncle Max and the rest of them sharks - he wasn't messing around with other women. He hadn't smacked her in weeks. These

  days, when our dad raised his voice, it was to laugh at one of his own jokes.

  'Don't go getting too big for your boots,' our mother would say when Dad rubbed his hands over what he called funny money.

  Uncle Max had something up his sleeve. A deal to end all deals.

  Before they could hit the jackpot, the deal crashed. Auntie Livia's front window was shattered by a brick, Tipp-Exed to tell them to wotchit.

  'Back to the drawing-board, mate.' Uncle Max was sorry to let our dad down, after he'd invested his precious dosh: 'Some toes you don't step on.'

  Dad's Spanish guitar was a barometer, forecasting our ftiture and measuring the pressure inside our house: his baccy-tanned fingertips squeaked, plucked and pinged when things were on the up and up; strings moaned under his hammering thumbs when Fate had screwed him over yet again. He slumped on the settee, pumping smoke into the air, along with curses against God, the government and Uncle Fucking-Flaming Max. Occasionally, he let his bad luck get the better of him, and lashed out at our mother.

  He always cried afterwards. 'Rainie, me love. I'll make it up to you. Give me a chance.'

  As soon as his pockets were biJging again, he bombarded her with Chinese take-aways, sparkling wine and the Fenjal bath oil she adored. Our mother would accept his presents with shaky fingers, smiling hard.

  'Open it, open it!' We gathered around the box embossed H. Samuels the Jewellers, after things had gone beyond a slap. Our mother looked at the rose-shaped gold earrings in her palm, mulling over the promise in their petals. After a while,

  she slid them into her earlobes, blinking back tears while Dad nuzzled her face and hair, tracing a necklace of kisses from ear to ear.

  What Dad wanted, from the pit of his souf, was to build a house for us.

  'Using me own 'ands.' His eyes were always shining when he said it, with excitement or tears of frustration.

  Sometimes, instead of riffling through the Sun, trying to work out who was to blame, he would sit on the settee with his spirit level in his hands: an aluminium strip, painted yellow, with a glass bubble winking at its heart. Stains showed under our dad's arms when he lifted it in front of his tyts. Tilting, ever so slighdy tilting, he willed the bubble to rest in the right place, while the rest of us held our breath.

  For those couple of months, my own dream was to escape my anorak. If I could save enough from my Saturday job to buy a secondhand sheepskin jacket, then my life would begin. I would find the right boy; he would see that I was the right girl. One Saturday in March, Auntie Livia gave me a bonus for scrubbing extra cookers. I stepped into Affleck's Palace with twenty pounds, braving the stares of supercool kids with rings through their noses, and came out with the future on my back. Lads gawped at me on buses, men gaped through windscreens, leery ones slowing their cars to try their luck, while I smiled to myself and walked on by. Once, on the way to school, a bloke fell off his bike for staring.

  Still, I had bumped into only two boys since Neil Kirby, and both were dead ends. One was Neil's best friend, Steve: guilt made the first kiss delicious, but soured any after that. The other was a lad with fantastic cheekbones but dead eyes. I

  Z41

  never knew his name. He had been watching me, night after night in the park, where I went after school to hang around the swings with Laurie while Sa
rah, who was nearly nine, chatted to other primary school kids on the roundabouts. When The Addams Family fastened my sisters in front of the telly at home, I went to Piatt Fields by myself to gaze at couples clunking about in rowboats on the pond.

  The boy came up and fell in with my pace on the path: 'Gorgeous, you are.'

  We wandered on to the grass. I wobbled in the slingbacks I had inherited from my mother, heels sinking into the earth. He steered me to a tree.

  A weeping willow.

  His palm cupped my cheek. My heart fluttered and fell to my knickers.

  Then it clanged back up to my throat. His tongue was like steel.

  'Fuck!' He was pressing against me. Eyes glassy: 'Fuck!'

  He ftimbled with his jeans. The rip of a zip. Something hard and wet against my thigh.

  I tore away from the tree trunk, my hair snagging on bark. 'You don't even know who I am!'

  Not angry or sorry or suprised, he yanked up his zip: 'So what?'

  My mother unpicked the seams of her old moon-and-stars dress, and laid the parts on newspaper. She traced round them to make a pattern, which she pinned to stretches of white curtain lining. Chugging on the Singer sewing machine, she came up with my new dress, then stitched her own back into one piece.

  'It's for the theatre,' she told Dad, who wanted to know what all the ftiss was about.

  'They should be teaching you proper bloody English,' he grumbled, when I informed him diat the school were charging two pounds each for tickets to see Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, 'not all that ancient gobbledygook. That's not going to get you a job, is it?'

  'Wherefore are yer, Romeo?' he teased, wh^n I tried on my frothy white dress. A jackpot scoop on the one-armed bandits with Uncle Max had put him in a swaggering mood.

  'Here.' He uncrumpled a five-pound note from his pocket, and ruffled my hair: 'You can keep the change for popcorn!'