Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  'What's this?' Dad would be waiting, fuming and holding up a plate or a cup, some fatal trace of scum on its edge where Laurie or I had rushed to wash it before going out. We had to

  roll up our sleeves and scrub every single dish, plate, cup, fork, knife, spoon and pan again. Silence reigned, broken only by the clink and glug of pots in the sink. The slightest sigh, the merest murmur about unfairness, won you a whack on the back of the head.

  Dad sometimes consoled himself for his rotten past and unlucky present by splurging on treats from the chippy for himself and our mother, while Laurie, Sarah and I made do with toast.

  'Steak-and-kidney pud, with mushy peas, chips and gravy for Yours Truly.' He sent Laurie and me on expeditions all the way down Claremont Road to Charlie's Chippy, where they knew how to do good, old-fashioned gravy, which he claimed made it worth our long trudge. Counting out coins, he worked out the precise price in advance, so there would be no way for us sly buggers to pocket any change: 'Grab us some scampi and a nice piece of cod for your mam.'

  Sometimes, my sisters and I would be sent upstairs, where it was cold, while our mum and dad tucked into their take-away in the warm living-room. Other times, especially when Dad had gone off in a huff and come back, triumphant, with an Indian meal, he seemed keen for us to stay in the room full of exotic smells, watching him pull tin-foil treasures out of a brown paper bag. Laurie, Sarah and I woidd sit nearby, taking care not to stare while our mother tore into the Peshwari Naan that was her favourite. She looked guilty, breaking open the bread, her fingernails seeking out clusters of mashed almonds, pouncing on scalding sultanas. But not that guilty.

  While Mum and Dad were engrossed by each other and this or that treat, I slipped away to read more and more poems,

  huddled on my bed against the cold. It was like holding my breath underwater, immersing myself for as long as possible, until some yell or bang or even a burst of laughter broke in and ripped my eyes off the lines.

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

  Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

  Mum and Dad would screech to summon my sisters and me down to the living-room on nights when they were in the mood for a movie. They liked us to gather together, like a proper flaming family, after they had splashed out to rent a video from the corner shop. Tonight it was Poltergeist., which I had watched to death, years ago, when it was first released.

  'Is it okay if I read while it's on?' I whispered to my mother, who nodded. I was half a centimetre into Sons and Lovers, which Mrs Arnold had urged me to read, and suffered a kind of lovesickness if I had to put it down, even for a second. Life seemed harsh but glinting with promise for Paul Morel. I would give anything for coalmines or countryside or something romantic, to make my life as picturesque as his. Curled up on the living-room floor, I turned the pages as quiedy as possible. I kept my head down after the film began to roll, looking up only now and again, to catch the best flesh-crawling bits.

  'Oi, you!' Dad disturbed me for the third time in a row, though we both knew it should have been Laurie's turn: 'Stick on a brew.'

  Usually, when Dad had it in for me, I consoled myself by hugging my breasts under my jumper, where I stashed most of my dark or angry thoughts as well as my hopes and plans about getting out. It was a trick I learned when I was small,

  after I realized I could keep secrets - a whole other life - under my vest. I knew how to keep my mouth shut, and was forever nagging Laurie and Sarah to do the same, to protect their own ears from clouts, and to avoid trouble for Mum, who had to deal with split loyalties and mop everything up. But now something in me was bursting to get out. College was just around the corner, yet in the belly of summer, it seemed a world away. A tut sneaked off my tongue.

  'Cheeky sod!' Dad ftimed, though he couldn't bring himself to get up off the settee to give me what for. 'I'll make you wish you'd never been born,' he growled, setding back into his cushions.

  'Don't worry,' I muttered under a sigh, 'I already do.'

  The sigh was sharp enough to catch his attention; not loud enough to disguise the words.

  'Terry!' My mother tried to pull him back as he bounded off the settee.

  A fantastic crack sounded when my head hit the wall.

  'Ungrateftil sod!' Dad quivered, while my mother grabbed me and rubbed my crown.

  'Put on a cuppa,' she told Laurie. Fingers feeling for lumps: 'She's in a daze.'

  The wall had knocked my face into a smile that put her and Dad on edge.

  I disappeared upstairs to nurse my bruises. Lying on my bed, I sank back into Sons and Lovers, my fingers straying to the lump at the back of my head. All these years he had got away with beating our mother and lashing out at us. I was sixteen, he was quick to remind me when he bullied me to get out and bring home some dosh. I was sixteen; I could go to the police.

  One more - my smile surfaced through the tears when I touched the tender spot -just one more.

  An unusual kind of hush - happy and exqited - came over the house when our mother put down the phone to the man from the Moss-Care Housing Association. After years on the waiting list, we had been offered a three-storey town house in Withington, not far from Didsbury, where there were no junkies or prostitutes, no street gangs with knives and guns.

  'Four bedrooms! Right next to the posh shops and all.' Mum and Dad gripped hands, their fingers laced into one bristling fist. They were almost afraid to laugh, as if it might shatter our luck.

  'Brand-new neighbours!' Laurie and I thrilled in private at the prospect of living next to people who would think we were normal. A brand-new, sparkling reputation, our parents would have to live up to.

  The women down our street acted sad to see us go. They were caught between liking my mother because she was warm and fiinny, hating her since her face and figure had been made in heaven, and pitying her for what I had heard them refer to as living hell. They prickled between the three when they spoke to me, too.

  'Ta ra!' Our mother bid them quick goodbyes, then stood in the stripped living-room, staring at the carpet she and Auntie Tamara had once laid with the aid of Stanley knives and a sense of humour, oiled by Bacardi and Coke. 'Moons ago,' she sighed. Cigarette burns, coffee stains, streaks of grease, petrol and stubborn specks of blood. I looked at the

  trodden green too, feeling sorry for everything it had through.

  gone

  Our new house seemed to stand by itself, big bay windows facing on to a main road. Laurie and I grinned at its grand front, then exchanged grim looks with one another: no neighbours on either side. Mum and Dad were proud to call it detached, since it jutted out alone on the corner, but its back wall was, we were secredy relieved to discover, actually attached to another house on the end of a terraced block running down a side street.

  'A man's home is his castle.' Dad rubbed his hands, surveying the gloriously wide windows and the door with five steps leading up to it, shrouded by a bushy hedge. As soon as we had unloaded our ftirniture, plugged in the television and put the ketde on for a brew, he unearthed a rusty pair of shears from the cellar and went out to tame the hedge.

  'My hedge.'

  Kerschumnk, kerschwunk, kerschwunk: he snipped the privet into batdements, then came inside to gloat. Strangers passed outside the windows, unable to see in through the hedge, while he squeezed the trigger of an imaginary rifle, firing chuckles at their heads.

  We stayed up long past midnight, arranging ftirniture, hanging those pictures whose frames had survived the years. We sipped through one last pot of tea in silence, putting off the moment of going to bed.

  'Might wake up tomorrow,' our mother rested her cheek against Dad's shoulder, 'and find it's all a dream.'

  She jumped at a small crunch in the back wall - someone pulling their plugs for the night.

  Laurie and I breathed: 'Next door.'

  It snowed fifty-pound notes in our house when Dad wangled not one, not
two, but three contracts to put up porches and extend kitchens, securing some of his payment up fi^ont. 'Two thousand smackeroos!' He kissed the Hps of the stern faces on the notes, before letting them float over our heads.

  'Come on,' he decided to blow a bit for good luck, 'get your posh togs on - we're off to paint the town, we are!'

  My sisters and I huddled under the tarpaulin in the back of his truck, keen to escape the rain and the stares of people in other cars. We used to love scrambling among Dad's tools, singing 'Ten Green Botdes' and waving at strangers. But now I was sixteen and Laurie fourteen: only our ten-year-old sister Sarah still enjoyed the ride.

  Afi:er a splurge on the video machines in the arcade off Piccadilly, Dad decided it was time to eat. The karate-choppers on the screen put him in the mood for Chinese.

  The five of us sat on high-backed gold chairs like thrones, around a table sizzling with bloody sauces, glistening meat and snaky noodles. We gazed at our dad over piles of pearly rice.

  'Best nosh-house in Chinatown,' he was assuring the manager, a tiny man in a black suit who - drawn by our flushed cheeks and wide eyes - had come over to find out whose birthday it was.

  'Everyone's!' Dad grinned and held up his glass to clink ours one more time.

  The manager clicked his fingers for another botde of red wine: 'Compliments of the establishment.'

  'Man of substance, me.' Dad explained why the manager kept hovering around our table: 'He thinks I'll leave him a fat tip.' Putting his hand over his heart, he brushed the wallet

  stashed in the breast pocket of his pinstriped jacket: 'I will, an' all.' He raised his eyebrows: a waiter scurried to top up his glass, stiff face cracking into a smile, a dragon roaring across his waistcoat.

  'Two K up front, Rainie, babe,' he kept repeating in a squiffy voice. The wine had puffed up his plans, then fuddled them, so that they slurred through purple-streaked teeth.

  Edible eyeballs called lychees, sticky nut diamonds and tortured-looking bananas were wheeled out and stuck under our noses.

  'Better get used to the high life, kids,' he declared, when we groaned that we were stuffed: 'Might be the first time you've been in a restaurant, but - mark my words - it'll not be the last.'

  'Classy joint, that.' Dad was impressed when I clinched a job collecting glasses and serving meals at Ye Olde House at Home pub down Burton Road. 'Classy grub, too.'

  I smiled to myself at the thought of the dishes, rummaged out of the deep chest freezer, shoved into the microwave, given a last-minute tan under the grill. Dressed up with a sprig of parsley like a bow tie, ye olde lasagne or moussaka was then carted out on a tray by me, shimmying in a tight skirt and heels. Though he paid me less than £1.50 an hour, the landlord relied on me to melt customers out of their tempers when they discovered the still-frozen bit at the heart of their meals: 'Use your charm, lass!'

  'Aw, Andy, love.' My mother brimmed pride when I put on my uniform, a white paper cap propped over the bun of my hair: 'You look like an air hostess.'

  She cast her eyes down at the awfiil orange check overall she had to wear in her new job as a home help - shopping, cleaning and taking care of old or disabled people.

  'Well, I can't be putting on the Ritz, can I?' She made an effort to laugh at her own reflection: 'Just to be pooed and peed over all day long.'

  By the end of her first week, our mother had gathered a whole slew of friends. 'Partners in grime,' the home helps called themselves, making comedy out of the dirtier side of their days. Although he had allowed few outsiders through the door of our old house, Dad was now happy to let our mother invite her new workmates round for tea. They praised his handiwork after the tea sent them upstairs to the loo, where he had stippled the walls and glossed them peach, our mother's favourite colour. Zooming out for late-night trips to Do-It-All and B&Q, then staying up plastering and painting until dawn. Dad had turned our bathroom into a palace: gleaming mirrors with a matching toothbrush rack and toilet-roll holder; a real mahogany loo seat. The women went away chattering about our mother's right posh house, her daughters - brainy, pretty, polite - and her fantastic, blue-eyed fella, dead brilliant, like, with his hands.

  I felt tipsy when September finally came: Tamsyn and I wandered around Xaverian College, meeting people with nice skin, nice voices, nice clothes, and nice parents behind everything. Masses of glowing faces came up, keen to work out whether I was worth knowing, not for where I came from, but for what I might have to say - and how wittily I could say it -about A Clockwork Orange, Brighton Rock, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the genius of Morrissey and the Smiths. I had never thought of books, poems and plays as ways to get closer to boys. You could go on about stanzas, alexandrines, surreal symbols, while all the time your mind was on someone's mouth, analysing the myriad possible meanings behind a pair of slighdy parted lips.

  My brace was still cemented across my teeth, a fence between me and romance. I joked and flirted with clever boys - rich accents and grins - but saved my serious swoons for James Joyce, Graham Greene and Thomas Stearns Eliot. Happy to hold hands with J. Alfred Prufrock, I listened to mermaids singing, each to each. I had a feeling they would sing to me, eventually.

  Before my seventeenth birthday, I came home from the dental hospital ecstatic but shy about smiling, for fear of dazzling everyone with my flawless white smile. My mouth felt borrowed, or newly bought: I had to practise grinning, resisting the urge to fasten my lips where the brace used to be. The words that came out. Dad teased me, sounded new too. 'La-de-dah!' he mimicked me whenever I opened my mouth. Whereas I had slapped my accent around to fit in at Whitbrook Comprehensive and to avoid catching any flak on the bus, college inspired me to sharpen consonants and to project words from the depths of my chest, coming up with voluptuous vowels where flat ones used to be good enough.

  While my voice dressed itself up, my clothes learnt a chic sort of skulk. After making the terrible mistake of turning up for my first day at college in a shimmery white jacket that I had blown my pub wages on, I slid into threadbare jeans and clompy ankle boots, an old man's shirt knotted at the waist, alternating with a black polo-neck or secondhand Aran sweater when the weather turned foul. Occasionally I would put on something fancy but not too flashy, like the satiny sky-blue waistcoat or pink mohair jumper that I bought in secret using the tips that were slipped me at the pub.

  At first I felt bad because Laurie had no money of her own. There she was, still stuck at secondary school, wearing the same old clothes, while I was going to college, meeting

  interesting people, discovering all sorts of new stuff and wearing what I liked. Comparing our lives made me feel so lucky it ached. Guilt prompted me to lend my sister gear that would make her look cool; it even drove me to give her the odd thing now and then. But it was a relief when she took on a job and could buy nice clothes of her own. She sacrificed her Saturdays to be a part-time shampoo girl at the local salon called Curl Up and Dye, where the old ladies adored the way she massaged their scalps, and queued up especially to put their balding heads in her hands.

  Now that I had found a second skin, wearing things that allowed me to blend in, I could relax and enjoy the fact that my face stuck out. At last, I was beginning to grow out of that awful squashed sense of myself Looking around the common room, my gaze bumped into others', fixed on me. With no brace to hold me back, I fell in love a thousand times -hundreds of times a day - with boys, girls, teachers, books, words. Quintessential. Quidditas. Seraphim. Ignotae artes. Even the colour of the sky knocked me sideways as I crossed the grass to my English class, wondering whether a minus or a plus would be dangling from the A that was known to bloom at the end of my essays.

  Endless Andreas crowded in front of me when I stared into the three-way mirror on Gran's dressing table. Adjusting the wings so that they caught and threw back, caught and threw back the reflection, my face went on for ever, shrinking but not giving up.

  All those Andreas, and no Gran.

  Pride had ma
de her eyes water when I presented her with my flap of O levels and announced that I had got into such a good college. 'Just think of everything you're capable of, Andy, love!' She had smiled and rubbed my hands between

  hers. Now she would never know what else I might have in me.

  Her fingers had brushed the butterfly brooch over her heart, while her face scrunched up one side. A lady had seen it all from her window on the second floor. Gran had sat down on the bench outside the flats. When the milk bottle had slipped from her fist and smashed, the lady rushed to dial 999.

  'Personal effects of Mildred Chadfield.' At the hospital where the ambulance had deposited the body, the nurse handed my mother and Auntie Pauline a clear plastic bag, stufi^ed with the bobbly skirt we used to pluck; Gran's cardigan with the butterfly brooch; her outdoor slippers; her bra - two horribly hollow bowls; wrinkled tights; vast knickers made of something stiff the colour of flesh; and her dentures, fixed in an eternal grin. I wanted to wrap my coat around the bag, to protect Gran from people's eyes.

  'Do we have to?' Laurie and I appealed to our mother when she pulled out of the oven the cheese-and-onion pie that she'd brought home from Gran's kitchen.

  'It's the last thing she ever did.' Our mother was determined to keep Gran's memory alive as long as she could. 'It was milk to brush the pastry, she'd gone out for, when it came on.'

  Dad tried a mouthful of the pie. He couldn't bring himself to swallow. Laurie, Sarah and I watched him leave the table and go down to the workshop he had set up in the cellar, where we heard him hammering around. We churned through cheese and onion, weeping.

  'It's how she would have wanted us to remember her.' Our mother braced herself for another trembling forkful: 'She was your gran.'

  Gazing into the gas fire, our mother clutched a toilet roll and did nothing but sniffle for hours on end. The shrieks of a heartbroken elephant trumpeted through the house each time she blew her nose. Laurie, Sarah and I sat at her feet in the blaze of the fire, letting our faces burn alongside hers. Dad actually brewed pots of tea, served with Jaffa Cakes to help us through our sorrow. Our mother stayed deaf, dumb and blind to everything but the fire.