Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  While we were glued together by grief, Dad was at a loss. He had admired our grandmother's quiet strength and always turned on his best blue twinkle, hoping to grow close enough to call her Milly and give her one of his roll-yer-own smokes, the way Uncle Bill always did. But he suspected she guessed the truth - concerning his other side -and they had never seen eye to eye. Now he tinkered about in the cellar, waiting for our mother to get over her grief. In spite of the cold down there, I sometimes left my mother in front of the fire and went to help him plane or sand a plank of wood while he attacked fresh timber with his crocodile saw.

  'Get this!' Dad had discovered a way to blow glass, breathing into clear, thin tubes that he found on the rubbish dump, while blasting them with his bunsen burner. He and I took turns, twisting melted glass like runny toffee, blowing bubbles that set when you pulled them out of the flame into the frosty underground air.

  'Go give it your mam,' Dad urged, when my glass monsters grew into swans or came out as snowflakes and stars. 'It'll cheer her up.'

  'Mum...' No matter how carefully I cradled the things, they shattered at the shock of cold air, before I could get to the top of the cellar stairs.

  Dad came home with a budgie for Mum. She bought seeds, a small bell and a mirror, then made curtains for its cage. Her old laugh broke out of her chest when she unhooked its door: drunk on so much space, the bird whizzed in mad spirals, divebombing Dad's head, before landing on his shoulder and pecking like fury to make a meal of his ear.

  'Little fu— blighter!' Dad's sense of humour outshone the pain when the budgie drew blood. Without ruffling its feathers, he made a basket of his fist and put the bird back behind bars. Attaching a label to its cage, he created a prison cell: KiLLeR 401.

  When Mum and Dad burst out shouting. Killer hopped from one end of his perch to the other, headbutting his bell to pit its tinkle against their chaos. Once they had forgotten their differences and were back in love with the world and each other, neither of them could understand why that bloody idiot of a bird was always squawking and shuddering and pecking feathers off his own breast.

  Then one day Killer plopped off his perch and Dad flushed him down the loo. 'Maybe it was the paint fumes,' he murmured. Out of work again, Dad had gone on the prowl for things to fix, putting up shelves, changing fuses in all the plugs, finally plastering more fresh white paint over the walls. But before he could finish, the paint ran out. There was no money to buy even one more can.

  'It's that or food,' was the bottom line.

  Our mother was aggravated by the ceilings looking so much dingier than the whitewashed walls. Laurie, Sarah and I were more concerned about the state of the kitchen cupboards: after a honeymoon of Heinz, McVities, Crosse & Blackwell, Nescafe and Knorr, our shelves were swamped once more by stark white labels from Kwik Save.

  'At least it's Marvel,' our mother sighed, pulling powdered milk out of the shopping bags.

  'Yeah.' I stirred it into instant, no-name coffee, admiring the way it dissolved: 'No globs.'

  We needn't have worried about what visitqrs would think if they found powdery clouds in their cups. Our mother's mates dropped off one by one as they got wise to the goings-on behind our closed doors. My dreams of bringing home friends from college, maybe even a boyfriend, had evaporated. Our mother spent the evenings weeping on the stairs, where she went to sit by herself in the cold and dark, while the rest of us watched telly in front of the fire. She was convinced that Gran's ghost was just waiting for the right, quiet moment before stepping forth in all its glory. Having treated our mother this long with kid gloves, Dad had run out of patient ways to pull her up when she found herself sinking back into her misery. Instead of stroking her hair to ease her sobs, he ended up yanking it and slapping her face: 'Snap out of it, Rainie! Snap out of it!'

  'Just a silly ding-dong,' I heard my mother protesting, when her workmates Sally and Josie came straight out and asked her about the rusty shadow in the socket of her eye. They might have believed her if the rest of her face wasn't sunk under wrinkles.

  'You look like you've the weight of the world on your shoulders, love.' Her friend Karen stuck by her. Wide-hipped and big-mouthed, she wore loud-coloured jumpers that showed she was afraid of no one and nowt. Her own husband had been God-forgive-the-bugger vicious. She had put him behind bars where he belonged. For his own good.

  'Taste of their own medicine.' She prescribed the same treatment for our dad: 'Lets 'em know how it feels, being

  locked up all day, treated like shit, wondering what the bloody hell they've done to deserve it.'

  There was a police station tantalizingly near to our house; Laurie and I could see its blue sign glowing when we looked out from my room in the attic. But our mother refused to let us go over and grab an officer when things got out of hand.

  'They won't do any good.' She was sceptical about their willingness as well as their ability to help: 'They think a woman dun't get a slapping for nothing.'

  The police had come round a couple of times, called by someone across the road, and had given our dad a mild ticking off, which only prompted him to hit our mother harder the minute the door shut behind them. Once, a young man from the next street came round and rat-tatted with authority on our door, to ask us to keep the noise down and to find out what was going on. My sisters and I peered through the window nets, spying him as he adjusted his trousers and straightened his spine to look taller. But he turned tail in a flash when Dad went to the door and told him to fuck off and mind his own cunting business.

  We felt even more abandoned by the outside world when Karen eventually lost patience and stopped calling for her usual smoking sessions with our mother, the two of them nattering, putting the world to rights, over a pot of tea.

  'I can't keep coming round, Lorraine, watching you dwindle into nothing more than a punchbag.' Her eyes blurred under tears that were rare for her. 'Why're you letting him beat the living daylights out of you?'

  'It's me own fault,' our mother insisted. 'I bring it on meself, being so morose.'

  She no longer bothered to protect her own head when it was rained on by Dad's rage.

  'At least in the old days,' I said to Laurie, who had also detected a turn for the worse, 'she used to land him one on the jaw when she got the chance.'

  I pleaded with my mother to get some kind of help, now that she had lost her old elastic. If she wouldn't go to the police, surely she could speak to the doctor?

  'Don't be nagging me, Andy.' She came home with a bottle of tranquillizers guaranteed to take even more wind out of her sails. 'I know what's best.'

  The barge she sat in, like a burnish 'd throne. Burnt on the water. The poop was beaten gold. Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them ...

  I would go to bed as early as possible and sink into my pillow with a book and a miniature botde of Bailey's cream, my tongue skating the silky rim of the neck, while I sipped words oflF the page. When Mum and Dad started shouting and screeching, I resisted the urge to run downstairs in my pyjamas like I used to. My sisters and I knew it would make no difference; sometimes it made things worse. Instead, I stayed close to my pillow, whispering the richest lines to myself, whispering and whispering, so that their rhythm swelled against the other stabbing up from downstairs.

  We lowered our voices and turned down the volume on Piccadilly Radio when Dad hauled himself out of bed on Sunday afternoons. He would sit at the dining table in his bedraggled dressing gown, rubbing his eyes, while we waited with bated breath to see which side he had got out of. Some Sundays it was smiles all round, even when there was no bacon

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  to go with his egg and beans, before he hunkered down to the News of the World.

  On days when his face remained stiff, the rest of us froze too. Easter Sunday turned out to be one of those days.

  'You have got to be fucking joking.' Dad's mouth crimped at the sight of our lavish roast, a golden-backed chicken burying its head in a
bed of roast potatoes. Laurie and I had been up for hours, helping our mother to clean the house and cook up a storm.

  'Call this shit gravy?' He sneered at the deliciously thick stuff I had bought from the chippy, thinking he would be thrilled.

  'We'd no OXO, love.. .' Our mother's apology was cut short by a hail of peas, potatoes and gravy showering her chest.

  'Fuckin' .. . fijckin'.. .' Dad grabbed the electrical carving knife, whacked it into the glistening roast, and whirled the chicken against the window. It splatted on to the net curtains, then thudded to the floor. Clutching the knife like a miniature chainsaw, he looked at us looking at him, all five of us wondering what was coming next.

  Then he sat down at the table and rubbed his eyes once more. 'Jesus Fuck Me Christ.'

  He was only just waking up.

  That day, I was certain my dad was going to do my mother in. More terrified than decisive, I ran to the police station. Two constables took ages fastening shirt cuffs, buttoning jackets, stapling helmets under chins, before they strolled up the road behind me.

  Dad opened the door himself 'Sorry to bother you, like.' He gave them one of the boyish smiles he always had ready for strangers: 'I'm afraid it's a load of hoo-ha over nowt, lads.' The officers took a quick look at our mother, still in one piece, and

  the furniture in the dining room, which had been shuffled back into order. There was no sign of the chocolate Easter eggs that had been shattered against the wall. Our mother was too crushed to give anything away when they asked her what had been going on. But this time I found the nerve to speak up about the punches and kicks and the way our dad had been throtding our mother when I ran to fetch help.

  'Right, Sir.' They turned to Dad. 'Word in your ear?'

  The men disappeared into the living-room and shut the door.

  'Don't worry. Mum.' I held her to calm her shaking in the wake of the fight and at the prospect of Dad being carted away by the police. 'It's for the best.'

  When the living-room door opened, I suffered a pang myself, expecting to see Dad's head bowed over handcuffed wrists. Instead, he looked almost chipper, acting pally with the officers. They smiled at our mother as they reached for the door: 'No more silly stuff?'

  'Wait!' I rushed to block the way out. 'Is that it?' Trembling, trying to speak calmly: 'Aren't you going to do anything?'

  'Now, now, girls.' The officers were keen to get back to their Sunday shift of tea and cigarettes at the station. Laurie, Sarah and I burst into tears, while our mother stood behind us, unable to open her mouth.

  'No need to go getting hysterical.' The older policeman ticked us off. 'That's not going to do anybody any good now, is it?'

  'I'll fucking brain you!' Dad's words were slathered in saliva as he lunged to whack the other side of my head. I had lost the knack of keeping my mouth shut when he went for my mother, whose pills made her too sluggish to look out for herself

  'Do it. Dad!' Instead of cowering and straining for peace

  and quiet, I felt so fearless it was scary. I thrust out my face to catch his fist: 'Just do it.'

  'Swine!' Dad lowered his swing, so that his fist collided with my thigh instead of my head.

  The pain felt purple. 'Go on!' It unleashed everything under my tongue: 'Go on, you bullying bastard! Treat yourself! Put me in hospital, why don't you? Anything to get out of this flicking hell-hole.'

  For a long time now, I had been harbouring fantasies of waking up in a white bed surrounded by nurses like angels, afi:er stepping in front of a slow-moving bus or falling down the cellar's stone steps.

  'Andrea!' My mother gasped, her nails digging into Dad's jumper to hold him back. He looked at me, as hot-faced and wet-mouthed as him. Our eyes locked; his muscles unclenched.

  'Leave it, Lorraine.' He eased free of her grasp and went out to drive around in his truck: 'For a think.'

  I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't my fault when Dad finally packed his gear and took off. He had lost a few friends by turning his temper on them, disgusting others by stooping to beat a woman, but he still had plenty of pals from his prison days, and one of them would put him up while he looked for a place of his own.

  'We've got to call it a day.' He had broken down in tears with our mother aft:er a long, ugly night that kept us all up beyond dawn. Whereas before there had been fijnny moments, even whole sweet days and smooth weeks to put us back on track afi:er he and our mother had spun off the rails, for ages now there had been nothing to make up for the bad times. Dad got down on his knees with our mother where their struggle had left them, breathless, at the bottom of the stairs. 'We're killing each other, Rainie,' he whispered.

  Half of me was as excited as Laurie and Sarah at the prospect of having our mother safely to ourselves, without the worry that one extra nasty thud might steal her from us for good. The other half wanted to cling to him and kiss him and tell him he would always be our dad, no majter what his wild side had made him do. All the fun we had ever had with him flashed in front of my eyes, watching him strap his guitar into the passenger seat.

  'Dad!' I ran out to the truck and pressed an ivory plectrum into his palm. Nearly heart-shaped, I had been saving it for his birthday, to encourage him to break the silence of his Spanish guitar, to tease sweet stuff out of it like he used to, in the old days.

  Our mother was standing in the window, a ghost, watching through the nets.

  Jammy bugger,' our mother muttered, when the BBC played repeats of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. She

  sighed over his clothes and shoes on the beach, abandoned at the edge of the sea, which, he left everyone to assume, had swallowed him up.

  I kept my eye on her tranquillizers.

  'God knows I want to.' Our mother pined, as if suicide was a luxury holiday she had her heart set on. She spent hours discussing 'the end' and 'the way out' with me and sometimes Laurie, hushing up in front of Sarah: 'But I could never do it to you kids.'

  The doctor had given her a sick note with her latest batch of tranquillizers.

  'The girls at work'll be gossiping me into the ground.' She was terrified of losing her job, but depression had seeped into her bones, making them too heavy to get out to work.

  I spent days on end sitting with her by the fire, the gas turned up to fiill blast so that I sweated while she lay shivering on the settee. I tried not to think about college: it was selfish to worry about all the time I was missing, and dwelling on it only made me sweat more. Clinging to my mother's hands, I massaged the knuckles and rubbed them between my palms.

  We sipped coffee to kill time: cup after cup after cup.

  Occasionally, my mother would claw in her purse for twenty

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  or thirty pence and send me to Gateways for a packet of biscuits: 'Summat to cheer us up.' I ached for air not made stale by cigarette smoke and coffee, but I sprinted there and back; I couldn't leave my mother a moment too long. My head pounded as I faced the shelves in a fluster to find the perfect biscuit, the one that might lift: her out of her mood. Marsh-mallow? Chocolate chunks? Coffee icing? All-butter shortbread? I imagined a single crunching bite restoring her will to live.

  Sometimes, when I rushed back through the door, she had hauled herself off the settee to make another coffee.

  'Bit of oomph!' She half laughed, surprised at her own legs, which could barely drag her to the loo.

  I held up the fancy biscuits - lemon creams, fig rolls - but there was no flicker in her eyes. 'Lovely.' She had already forgotten what she had sent me to buy; her treat was just to have me back.

  I tried to regard it as medicinal when she spluttered curses off her chest.

  'I know. Mum.' I crooned and nodded when she claimed that something massive was against her. Life, the whole malarky, was shitting fucking unjust. 'I know. Mum. I know.'

  'No!' My mother practically spat in my face, which seemed to stand for the outside world: 'You bleeding well don't.'

  Her eyes blackened over: 'You've no f
ucking idea, thank Christ.'

  'I've not suffered like you. Mum,' I tried soothing. 'But I do have some idea.'

  My mother sneered: 'What do you know? You've got your whole life ahead of you. You'll soon be away in the bloody world.'

  My English teacher, Mrs Wallis, had put forward my name

  as one of the twelve students from Xaverian chosen to sit the Oxford Entrance Examination. Every time I opened a book and flicked pages, my mother heard me flapping my wings.

  'You'll never know how it feels to be trapped. Truly, utterly trapped. Not just by pissing circumstances.' Her knuckles knotted, a tiny bomb: 'But buried a-stinking-live. Locked inside yourself

  My mother's first baby, a boy, had lived for less than twelve hours afi:er he had been born with water on his brain.

  'Stephen.' She sometimes murmured his name, wondering what life would have been like if he had survived and grown up into a strapping lad: 'He would've looked after us all.'

  'Tony.' She mulled over memories of my father, too.

  Grandad had died on her. Gran.

  'And that shithead,' she glared at the chair that used to be Dad's throne, 'may as well be dead.' There had been none of the usual crawling back to plead. No late-night phone calls, although she often slept downstairs to be close to the phone as well as the fire.

  'Not a whiflF,' my mother moaned, sitting bolt upright on the settee when a flash of blue passed outside the window. 'I could have sworn it was his truck.' She settled back under the quilt that went wherever she did, wrapping her head to toe, from bed to settee to the loo.

  'He may have had his faults,' my mother turned misty-eyed, wondering where Dad had got to, 'but at least, with him, I knew where I was.'