Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  The steepness of the upper gallery made me dizzy. I had to cling to red velvet, inching along the rows, trying not to look down at all the heads. As soon as I was in my seat, my neck hinged back to contemplate the white and gold ceiling.

  'Yawn, yawn!' Matthew Chappell was the son of the first-year English teacher. He was very shon: moaning about all the plays he had been forced to sit through at the theeyatah seemed to make him feel taller. Susannah and Charlotte, the posh girls whose parents were teachers and doctors, clustered either side of him in dark blue, cardboardy denims, stroking the creases ironed down their shins. The rest of the class, seething in their Sunday best, was a riot of swear words, crinkling sweet wrappers and giggles that crescendoed and clashed with hysterical shushes as the lights began to die.

  'Shakespeare. Stayawakespeare,' I whispered, when elbows nudged to point out the Deputy Head, dozing into his beard.

  The curtain stirred and slowly rose.

  A pool of light.

  My white dress shimmered in the dark.

  It was a tragedy: I knew it would have to end badly, no matter how beautifiil the lovers and their lines. But it was fascinating to follow the downfall - These violent delights have

  violent ends — to feel the rhythm of something wonderful going so horribly wrong.

  'Kiwi fruit,' Tamsyn's mother announced. I was trying not to stare at the cheesecake resting on a silver stand in the middle of the table. Fleshy green coins glistened around its edge.

  'It's delicious, Mrs Lee.' Wielding a spoon and fork, I acted as if I had eaten cheesecake plenty of times, never mind kiwi fruit.

  Tamsyn's mother and father had invited me to their house in Didsbury for tea, which they called dinner. It had been a torment to get through my lamb chop and peas without spilling. The tablecloth was white lace. Every crunch and gulp resounded in my head; no chatter cluttered the table. Tamsyn's parents spoke one at a time, in low, luxuriously slow voices. In a corner of the room lurked the television, its screen a black hole. In our house, Coronation Street would be booming out while knives and forks scraped and everyone chunnered a-mile-a-minute.

  'So, Andrea, what does your father do for a living?' Mr Lee leaned forward over the coffee, brewed in a glass pot after a screech of beans in the kitchen.

  Mrs Lee darted a look at Tamsyn, then cleared her throat: 'Milk or cream?'

  I glanced at Mrs Lee, wondering what Tamsyn had told her. It was a good job I hadn't blabbed more about my family. I looked down into my coffee cup as she poured in real cream.

  'My dad' - I watched it swirling under the silver spoon in my cup - 'is a builder.'

  Before Mr Lee could say anything else, Mrs Lee asked him in a tight voice: 'Are you playing golf this weekend, dear?'

  The talk swerved to caddies and tee-times and damned awkward holes.

  Upstairs, in her room, Tamsyn had a desk of her own, facing a huge bay window. She let me swivel in her Taney chair while she lay on her bed, sighing about boys, wondering which one on her list would turn out to be the better investment. Timothy had bought her a stuffed hippo, which she hugged under her chin while she talked.

  'But then, Martin lets me read my poetry to him.' She fingered the ear of the hippo.

  'You mean, you actually read your poems to other people?' The idea made me shudder: I wrote poems and stories, but I kept them pressed under a flap of carpet beneath my bed.

  'Course I do.' Tamsyn sat up and fiddled with her hair, admiring herself in the mirror on the door of her built-in wardrobes. 'What's the point of writing them, otherwise?'

  A poem was a box for your soul. That was the point. It was the place where you could save bits of your self, and shake out your darkest feelings, without worrying that people would think you were strange. While I was writing, I would forget myself and everyone else; poetry made me feel part of something noble and beautiful and bigger than me. But my poems were all about drowning, worlds inside mirrors, flesh, bone and blood, the gloopiness of time - things that other people might not understand. So I slid them under the carpet as soon as they were done, all the images and rhymes wrestled into place. By the time I had copied them out, I found I had memorized every line. Then they would surprise me by surging through me, like songs I knew by hean.

  'It's romantic, reading poems to a boy,' Tamsyn mused. 'You shoidd try it.'

  'Well, I've got no one to inflict my poems on if I wanted to.' I grinned to flash the brace fastened across my teeth. 'Not while this is in the way.'

  Every other Tuesday, at ten o'clock in the morning, I was tipped back in a black chair while Mr Fitzgerald the orthodontist peered into my mouth. He reached in with stainless-steel pincers to tighten the wire running through silver boxes cemented to my teeth. My head throbbed on the bus back to school, but the pain made me feel secure, forcing my teeth into line for the future while things remained crooked at home. One damp morning, after my appointment, a restless itch came over me, and I got on the bus into town instead of going back to school. I wandered through the underground market beneath the Arndale centre, gazing at calf-length leather boots with laces criss-crossed up the back. I wanted to remind myself that my feet would be in such things after a few more Saturdays scrubbing fridges and cookers for Auntie Livia and Uncle Max.

  'All right, doll?' Most of the stallkeepers were men. Holding up the boots I had my heart set on, they looked my legs up and down, winking, in the underground glow: 'Do you a deal?'

  I rushed back up to the pavement. Glad to be freshened by the drizzle, I clambered on to the bus, willing it to speed through the streets to school.

  In spite of my brace, which made me keep my lips sealed, teachers nicknamed me Smiler. Because my marks were famously high and my behaviour generally good, but for a bit of cheek, they did no more than tut or shake their heads in mock despair when I turned up at school wearing earrings in the shape of zips, my skirt rolled well above the knees, my

  fingernails painted black. I was at the top of the boys' list of girls with good legs and nice faces; I was seen as wacky, a bit wild, and was hardly ever bullied; I was in line for nine O levels. At school, I couldn't help but grin.

  At home, something ripped under my skin when I smiled, trying to pretend that everything was fine: Deadly moods lurked in a purple-white haze, smoke clinging to the curtains, turning stale overnight. Laurie and I threw the windows as wide as they would go each morning. We dumped hills of dimps and ash into the bin, and scoured cups whose insides had been tanned by coffee and tea. No matter how vigorously we shook the nets and beat the cushions, the air sagged, sick and tired. Days piled up in deafening silence as Mum and Dad refiised to talk to one another. Things grew more and more suffocating. Something was going to lift the roof

  Although she was now nine, Sarah took to crawling into my bed again.

  'It's the only place that lets me sleep, Andy.' She snuggled into my pillow.

  I stroked her white-blonde hair, focusing on the silky feel of it under my fingers.

  'Someone to Watch Over Me' - my sister liked me to croon her to sleep - 'Beautifiil Dreamer'. .. 'Swinging on a Star'. . .

  Our mother used to sing to us: 'Spread a Little Happiness' and 'Que Sera Sera'.

  Protecting Sarah and Laurie made me feel stronger, but also more lonely. I tried floating on my own reassurance, hypnotized by the chant that it would all be all right. It will all be all right. It'll all be all right. It cut me off not only from Laurie and Sarah - still young enough to fall for the lullaby - but from myself - stuck behind a brave face while things were crumbling inside.

  'Jee-zus! Not again!' Dad clipped me around the ear the second time I fell down our steep stairs.

  'But there's nothing to hold on to if you slip,' I reminded him. The banister rail had come oflF in his and our mother's hands when they were struggling on the stairs one night. One minute they had been shouting, the next they were shocked into hysterical laughter. Both noises echoed like planks of wood, clacking.

  The third time I sl
ipped, I landed on my tailbone and could hardly sit down for days.

  I never cried. Only before my periods, when my womb churned and I felt something monstrous in me. Once, I shut up the pain by sliding a needle through my earlobe, feeling the point pierce the flesh at the front, popping, sighing out the back. I slipped a small, silver hoop earring into the new hole. Whenever aches swelled in my guts or twisted my chest, I twiddled the silver ring.

  Another month, shivering and clutched by cramps, I became obsessed by my fingernails. The sight of the black varnish made me feel sick. I had no money for remover and cotton wool; I usually lacquered over the old layers when they started to chip.

  'What the hell are you doing?' My mother grabbed the potato peeler out of my hand when she found me sheering layers of black varnish off my nails.

  'I had to get rid of it,' I sobbed, when she sat me down at the kitchen table to find out what on earth had possessed me. 'I just wanted to slice it all off. Don't you ever feel like that?'

  'It's your hormones, Andrea.' My mother's eyes frosted over when I let myself melt in hot floods of tears. 'Why are you going on as if it's the end of the world?'

  While we were forced to act as if everything was normal, Laurie and I both dreamt that our teachers would guess what was happening in our house and find a way to pull us out of it, even if it involved the police. Our mother had forbidden us from saying anything to anyone in authority.

  *I couldn't put him back behind bars,' she Insisted to Auntie Livia, Auntie Pauline and anyone else who suggested the law was the answer. She was terrified of being lonely. Even when her face was pulpy with tender spots, our mother remained adamant: 'I couldn't live with that.'

  When it came to Parents' Evening, I was glad I had said nothing to make my teachers look down on Mum and Dad. Shame simmered in my veins, mingling with fiery pride, when I walked into the hall between them. Dad's neck was locked in a tie. My mother had applied a home perm; the curls were still coiled tight. She looked pretty but petrified.

  'You both look fantastic,' I insisted. But there was no way they were going to step across the hall to meet Tamsyn's mother and father or any of the teachers. It was as if I was the parent and they were naughty children, hiding from the grown-ups.

  'We weren't going to light up,' Dad whispered when I caught him and my mother rolling cigarettes behind a pillar in the hall: 'It's for when we get out of here.'

  Miss Craig strode up and thrust out her hand to shake Dad's.

  'Ahowd'yerdo?' He nearly choked over the aitch. The roll-up machine disappeared.

  Miss Craig held my mother's hand for longer, looking her in the eye.

  'I hope you realize what talent you've got on your hands.'

  She made it sound the opposite of a compHment. 'Andrea's a very gifted girl.'

  Miss Craig urged them to send me to a good sixth-form college, to see that I read the papers - the broadsheets, she explained in a condescending voice, such as the Guardian, the Independent, The Times, not the tabloids, like the Sun and the Mirror. Not even the Daily Express, she made clear, when my mother wondered. Above all, they must ensure that I did my homework in quiet and peacefiil surroundings.

  'Your daughter is university material,' she said, before moving off to shake more hands: 'It would be criminal to let her abilities go to waste.'

  'Snooty bitch!' Dad ground the gear stick into reverse, screeching out of the school car park. 'What've you been telling her, eh?'

  'Nothing, Dad,' I swore.

  'Miss Craig's always a bit high and mighty,' I tried to reassure my mother, who was still smarting from the snide tone and innuendoes. 'Everyone says so.'

  I sat between my parents in the cab of our truck, my heart jiggling along, secredy memorizing everything Miss Craig had said. I had a chance - we jolted over bumps in the road - I had a chance. To get somewhere.

  Though he had left school at fourteen, with not one qualification to his name. Dad made a point of exercising his grey matter every day by arguing with the headlines and editorial comments in the Sun, before moving on to the crossword, which, he was proud to admit, he always completed in record time. I woidd make him a cuppa, while he sweated over the puzzle. 'E-summat-A-F-summat-N-summat.' He would ponder a few seconds, caressing the barrel of his biro, before shoving all clues aside to squeeze in his own wild words. I

  watched him wipe his brow, fill the boxes with a flourish, then sit back, satisfied - 'There we go: ELAFENT!'

  When Dad had enjoyed his daily wresde with the crossword and fallen into a snooze, I crept upstairs and spread the posh papers over my bedroom floor, where I set to with the scissors, to cut out items that I would paste into a scrapbook, the way Miss Craig had suggested. The miners were on strike. Precisely why the dispute could not be resolved, I was still not sure. Somehow Libya slipped into the equation: Arthur Scargill visited Colonel Gadaffi for tea, which involved armaments, money, promises. Trying to untangle Ireland and the IRA was even more exasperating. I kept cutting and gluing, cutting and gluing, patching the world together.

  On days when our house felt jfrighteningly britde, it was consoling to go upstairs and turn the stuffed pages. Massacres and mangled bodies, explosions and mass drownings, gave me a terrible glow. It made me feel less alone, almost cosy, to see suffering splattered across the globe.

  'After Footloose, he took me to the Chicago Diner for icecream,' Tamsyn murmured.

  She and her new boyfi-iend, Timothy, had got a table right next to the window, where they shared a Knickerbocker Glory, complete with sparklers, she told me - lifting long spoons to each other's lips.

  'You don't need sparklers,' was my expert opinion, 'if it's The One.'

  After the initial burst of gladness that she had found someone who made her feel fiizzy, I began to be bashed by Tamsyn's happiness. TimothyTimothyTimothyTimothyTimothy. Ice-skating, bowling, the cinema. The Chicago Diner, where all the kids from Didsbury went, after they trailed out of the cinema, laughing and holding hands.

  'You should come with us.' Tamsyn encouraged me to join her and Timothy and PhiHp, his best friend, when they went to the pictures on Friday night. 'We can make a foursome.'

  'Don't be dense,' she laughed, when I told her I couldn't afford it: 'They'll pay for the tickets. That's what boys are for!'

  Although I walked past it every morning and afternoon, on the way to and from school, I had never actually been to the cinema. I stepped into the blue velvet foyer on Friday night with Tamsyn and the two boys, and breathed in a blast of sweaty, popcorn air. At last, I was someone who went to the pictures.

  Nightmare on Elm Street. Gripping the arms of my seat, I watched the girl on the screen spooning coffee granules into her mouth, glugging them down with Coke, clawing to stay awake. For me, nightmares were not frightening: they sorted out stuff in your head, flushing away grisly things that got in while you were awake. What I found terrifying was the idea of not being able to close your eyes and escape, by sinking into sleep, when something deadly was breathing down your neck. That, and Freddy Krueger's fingers: a screech and a flash of blades.

  'What did you think?' Philip asked when we came out.

  He had laid his hand over mine each time blood threatened to spurt.

  'Exhausting,' I laughed.

  'I didn't mean the film,' he murmured. He put on a low, serious voice that made me want to giggle, even as it filled me with dread.

  Tamsyn and Timothy were shuffling along in front, trying to kiss and walk at the same time.

  'Didn't you?' was all I could say. I was afraid that if I

  opened my mouth one more time, something mean would blurt out, about his chin and the way it jutted, or his round moony eyes, which struck me as stupid although he strained to make them seem deep. He looked trapped in his own face: stuck with an idea (which his features coul4r»'t live up to) that he was terribly handsome.

  I kept my mind on the film. It had been thrilling to be packed in the cinema with other people, all sweating and sharing the
same fear. It made me feel normal, just like everyone else, for an hour and a half: terror was something you put yourself through for fiin, rather than something dangerous and dirty that you swept under the carpet at home.

  Now I knew why people paid so much money to get into the pictures. But I wished that I hadn't had to rely on Philip for my ticket. My pride was starting to throb, setting off pangs that hurt my chest. Tamsyn had told me to think nothing of it, but something about the situation made me wince.

  'Thanks a lot,' I said to him - repeating myself when that didn't seem to be enough: 'Thanks.'

  I gasped when Philip's hands landed on my shoulders. His chin loomed: his mouth was coming down to mix with mine.

  'But...' He looked confused when I pushed him away, my lips clamped shut. 'You let me pay for you at the pictures!'

  Unsticking Tamsyn's face from Timothy's, I urged her to lend me some money until I got paid for cleaning cookers the next day.

  'There!' I shoved three fifty-pence pieces into the boy's palm, before storming home: 'You can't buy a kiss off me for one-pound-fifty.'

  The floppy collar of a green raincoat. A black jumper, worn through at the elbows. Brown curls, the odd one sticking out.

  Polished shoes. A shy smile. I caught glimpses of The One wherever I went: dawdling past men and boys in the street, eyeing them across the pond in the park, blushing to sit next to them on the bus. The only things missing were the eyes, which I was never able to picture.

  'What you hankering after, you?' Dad wondered why I wasted so much time lying on my bed, soggy teabags on my eyelids.

  'I'm not hankering,' I murmured. 'I'm waiting.' He didn't stop to ask what for. The teabags frightened him off.

  I thought I had discovered how to transform the painftil ache of wanting into the more pleasurable one of waiting. Taking tips from Auntie Livia's glossy magazines like Vogue and Elle and Cosmopolitan, I used refrigerated teabags to make my eyes sparkle; I was forever filing and lacquering my nails; locked in the bathroom, I cracked eggs on to my hair or rinsed it with vinegar, while Dad pounded to be let in for a pee. Hours were absorbed by photos of women curled up against satin, or running along beaches with steel-chested men: I calculated that I would be fatal to the opposite sex if only a mane of glorious hair were to cascade over my shoulders. I resolved to give up my habit of hacking at my hair with the kitchen scissors. To stimulate the follicles, I did headstands against the wall, balancing on my skull until I saw stars.