Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  I was tempted to stick a mirror in front of her face, where sores were still smouldering, to remind her of the fireworks.

  'I've lost the knack of being me own person, Andy, without a fella telling me what to do.' Her face collapsed: 'I'm nothing by meself.'

  I poured all my spirit into trying to pep my mother up, reminding her that she was only thirty-six - she had the rest of her life ahead.

  'Jesus! Perish the thought.' She looked sick at the idea. 'I'll never get anyone now. Who'd want me? I just want it all to be over.'

  Clouds sagged against the windows; the afternoon stood still.

  It was always on the edge of turning dark outside when we reached the point where there was no use arguing. My mother would give herself up to her gloom, slumping into the very pit of it, while I sat stunned by the massive sense of her deadend.

  Getting up from the fire, I switched on the light, making my mother blink like a creature starded by headlights. I put on the ketde while she worked herself back into a rant: 'What's to stop me from topping meself, eh?'

  I cleared my throat to remind her: 'Us three love you, Mum.'

  'Don't say it.' She recoiled under her quilt: 'That's a dirty word, that is. Love's bloody lethal.'

  When Sarah clattered in from school, our mother let her put on old Drifters and Otis Redding records, but drew the line at Earth, Wind and Fire. It was hard to make my eleven-year-old sister understand, since she had spent the day outside the house, that something twisted and ached inside your ears if you listened to jangling, bouncy music when your heart was banging to a slow, heavy beat. She tried hugging and kissing our mother, who had developed a habit of pushing us all away whenever we expressed affection.

  'Stop trying to take care of me, will you?' She shoved us back when we came close. 'I'm supposed to be the mother. MeJ Often she let her head sag into her hands, wailing the

  same awful things: 'Christ, what a mess I've made of it all. You'd be better off without me.'

  Sarah learnt to make more friends outside, toughening up her act and her accent, getting in with a gang of girls whose boredom drove them to bullying. Laurie kept herself to herself, mosdy diving into the French and German dictionaries that she had won by coming top in tests at school. I let crosses mount up against my name in the college register, missing day after day after day, holding my mother's hand at home, to keep her from doing anything silly.

  'I wish you lot'd stop bombarding me with these flamin' things.' Our mother sighed over the Catherine Cookson romances we had chosen for her at the local library, hoping to persuade her to lose herself in one the way she had when Dad slotted something Kung-Fu into the video, then rubbed and chop-chopped her feet. Now she only ever opened books to let off steam at the size of the overdue fine.

  'You could do a night class in French.' My sisters and I had gathered leaflets fi^om the library. 'Or pottery. What about Flamenco dancing?'

  Our mother puffed on her cigarette, pursed her lips, and let out a smoky snort.

  Finally she put aside coffee, cigarettes and curses, steadying her nerves and hands to make a flower out of an empty Tuesday afternoon.

  'It's amazing, Mum!' I looked at the lily she had copied from a library book of photographs, using watercolour paints that Sarah had been given for Christmas but declared too wishy-washy. The stem looked slighdy twisted, yet the petals

  appeared ready to flutter off the paper. My mother's face grew shaky, looking at the Hly, as if the sight of it made her shy. I stared at the Hly too, pink veins painted ever so faintly in, and wondered when she would be strong enough to venture beyond the front door.

  Leaving her sedated with tablets, asleep on the settee, I risked one day away at college to sit my mock A-level exams. I had been revising late at night, after seeing Sarah and Laurie to bed and watching my mother take her goodnight pill then curl under her quilt in front of the fire. The gas jets were turned down to blue dwarfs, humming and muttering to guard her until dawn, when worry would yank her awake in spite of exhaustion and pills. I sometimes left my books and crept downstairs to treat myself to the sight of her face, unwrinkled in sleep, in the low blue light.

  In the blaze of the hall lights at college, the swotty side of my brain woke up. Equations and formulae unfiided to help me glide through the Chemistry test; light, oxygen and energy still made exquisite sense when it came to Biology; my head spilled purple passages from Antony and Cleopatra, analysing poetic and killing passions, weighing up justice against the juicier urges raging in Angelo in Measure for Measure. I came out of the exams feeling as if I hadn't missed a day. In spite of my absences, everyone seemed pleased to see me, ribbing me about my time off, egging me to come to this gig or that party as soon as my mother got over her illness. Because I didn't want anyone to know about her depression, I told them she had a hernia; in fact, she had pulled muscles in her stomach, stretching them while they were stiffened by stress.

  Her fingers hooked my wrist like a handcuff as soon as I got back in.

  'I can't breathe, Andy, love!' She sat on the edge of the settee, heaving, thumping her chest to persuade it to let in air. Cradling her ribs with one arm, my other was free to massage her back. Circles, flowers, figures of eight: my fingertips tingled with so much rubbing.

  My mother hiccuped, then swayed, drunk on sudden, deep breaths.

  'Bless you.' She grabbed my hand to give it a rest, stroking my fingers for once. 'What would I do without you?'

  After a long silence, her face buried in cushions on the settee, my mother sometimes hoisted up on to her elbows and swore. It was as if she was stammering to say something, like the men who staggered by our windows after the pub closed, cussing, taking swings at each other's mouths. Fuck pissing cunting bloody buggering flaming fiick.

  To insulate myself against my mother's rants, I composed rhymes in the red-black murk of my head which I could copy out on to paper when I was alone in my bedroom after midnight. When my own fragments seemed too flimsy, I would resort to lines of real literature which I memorized at night and nursed through the day. As soon as the afternoon swelled into dark, I was ready to dip into Donne or Coleridge or Keats, lacerating myself with gorgeously morbid lines:

  Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme. To take into the air my quiet breath .. .

  'Soup for brains.' My mother chided me when my face slid into its faraway look. I strove not to look gormless while my mind flitted and soared over sonnets and odes that made miserable things seem sublime.

  Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain. While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!

  One rare, sunny afternoon I read my mother a bit from Paradise Lost to persuade her to think herself out of her dead end.

  'The mind is its own place,' I pronounced with hushed breath, 'and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.'

  'All's that means' - she made mincemeat of Milton - 'is mind over bloody matter. Let the fella who wrote that walk a mile in my shoes, then try saying the same again.'

  Water pounded to fill the bath. Smacking and swishing to build up bubbles, I made a casde of froth for my mother. She undressed under her quilt, then shed it and stepped in.

  'Perfect.' She gasped, relishing the sting of hot water.

  I knelt by the bath to soap her back.

  'Harder.' She urged me to dig in with the sponge, scrubbing up and down her britde spine. The flesh seemed paper thin, as though it might rip if I rubbed too hard. My mother liked me to leave the bathroom before her wall of bubbles had burst. She was so thin, it was painful to see. Her ribs jutted so that her body seemed like a cage.

  When her teeth weren't chattering with cold, my mother was tormented by hot flushes. She would jerk the quilt aside and peel off her jumper, panting for breath in her underwired bra, which seemed to be all that was holding her together. The next moment she would pale
and slide back under her layers, shivering violendy, finally snuggling down to sleep. As soon as

  her eyes closed, I opened my school books, diinking of die Oxford exam less than a fortnight away.

  'Eh?' She eventually stirred and rolled over, her face emerging out of the cushions where they had been buried all day. My heart leapt a mile in a moment, before I saw what was wrong: the pattern of the settee had printed itself on her skin, making it appear scarred and red raw, as if it had been burned.

  'I said, do you want me to go for the doctor?'

  My mother's eyes were muddied by something more disquieting than misery. She had been taking one or two more pills than prescribed. 'Stop shaking,' - she wrestled with the awkward lid - 'help me sleep.'

  'Mum?' I nudged her shoulder after her face sank back into the cushions. 'I'm going for the doctor, okay?'

  My mother was dead to the world. It was too late to be afraid that she would kill me for bringing outsiders in.

  7'fl knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake — an old fat lady wailing down die corridor of die psychiatric ward. She bent to grab the hem of her nightgown, then pulled it up over her head. Baked a cake. Laurie, Sarah and I gawped at masses of flesh, wrinkles heaving and splashing as she ran, naked, from a grim-faced nurse. We heard her warbling - Baked a cake. Baked a cake — until a door slammed on the song.

  *I shouldn't bloody well be in here!' Our mother began carping as soon as she came to meet us in the waiting area. She looked direcdy at me: 'I may have godawful nerves, but there's nowt wrong with my flaming head, thank you very much.' I perked up at the sight of my mother's temper, good as new, setting off^ sparks in her eyes as she led us down the hall to her room: 'Away from the Loony Tunes.'

  My sisters and I couldn't resist peeking into each doorway. 'Alfred!' Screeches exploded out of one room as we tiptoed past. 'Al-fred!' Inside, a woman was lashing out at the face of another, the pair of them clawing over a pot of banana yoghurt whose lid ripped and belched yellow gunk. 'She's trying to steal my Alf!'

  'Poor thing thinks it's her dead hubby,' our mother explained. 'She's forever looking for him in the fridge.'

  295

  After little more than a week in the ward, our mother claimed she was ready to be weaned off her medication, the first step towards getting out.

  'If I thought I was on the verge of doolally before,' she found it in herself to laugh during our family sessions with the social worker who did the rounds at the hospital, 'a holiday with this lovely lot's put me well straight!'

  I squeezed out a giggle to please the social worker, scratching notes on a clipboard, although I wasn't convinced by my mother's brave face.

  'You seem much happier,' the woman said to me, when we were alone for a few moments. My eyes were no longer as swollen as they had been when my mother was first taken into hospital. A rash had exploded across the lids, but it had stopped burning when the doctor prescribed hydrocortisone cream and told me to stop worrying so much. I didn't mention the palpitations that quivered in my chest in otherwise calm, quiet moments; I was afraid of pills like the ones my mother had been given.

  'I've been crying less .. .' I began, 'I. ..'

  The woman scribbled on a form, smiled, 'Good,' and stood up to see me out.

  Empty Coke botdes piled up in the pantry. Laurie, Sarah and I sagged home from the hospital, too anxious to bicker between ourselves like we used to, then filled up on fizz, glugging to get through the night. Laurie and I swotted harder than usual, as if it might make things better, before flaking out in front of the telly with Sarah. Extra chocolate was called for on Saturday nights and Sunday lunchtimes, to comfort my sisters while I went to work at The Princess, the new pub where I was being paid a pittance to collect glasses and wash plates, until I was old enough and busty enough to pull pints.

  I was fascinated by the way ladies' faces lit up or turned melty when they started drinking, before more glasses made them look craggy and tragic.

  'What's a nice girl like you. . . ?' Blokes^ leers drowned in their beer.

  I tottered past on heels that the landlord ordered barmaids to wear, pint glasses teetering up my arm. I stacked them in breathtaking towers that never smashed, except in my nightmares, where tables slanted and jerked as if the pub were a ship in a storm. I found funny lines to throw back in the face of corny come-ons and slurred innuendoes - all the while memorizing dribs and drabs of poetry as if my life depended on it.

  'I don't give a shit,' the landlord had let me know, when I hinted that the Oxford entrance exams were on Monday and I could do with Saturday night or Sunday lunchtime off. 'You do your regular hours, or you don't do no more hours whatsonowt. Savvy?'

  The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry. Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky

  On Sunday I collected dirty dishes as fellas finished their fiy-ups. Cigarettes stubbed in yolks, glinting knobs of bacon grisde, ketchup smeared in mindless swoops.

  Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans

  I had tucked chunks of Yeats' poems inside my bra to smuggle them into the pub kitchen, where I worked alone. There, I stuck them to the steamed-up tiles above the sink, so that I could read them over and over while I scrubbed.

  But now they drift on the still water, Mysterious, beautiful. . .

  My face sweated over the sink. Behind me, smoke hissed off the griddle where one of the kitchen women had slipped and fried her hand last week.

  Among what rushes will they build, By what lake's edge or pool Delight men's eyes when I awake some day To find they have flown away?

  The scraps of paper dampened and peeled off the tiles to flop into the suds. I finished the dishes and pulled out the plug.

  'You're made of bloody good stuff!' My mother was back on her feet at home by the time the news came through. Of the twelve Xaverian students who had sat the exam, I was the one invited to Oxford for an interview.

  I was nervous about leaving my mother and sisters alone, since Dad was back on the rampage. Parking his truck far away from our house so that he could creep up without warning, he would emerge from the hedges after midnight, tapping on windows, crouching to post promises or spit threats through the letterbox.

  'Open this door, y'bitch! Open it, if you don't want me to open your fiickin' skull!' He knelt at the flap night after night, lurching between acid outbursts and sweet nothings: 'Rainie, love, I can't sleep without you. It's not right. We should be together, Rainie.'

  Our mother sat on the stairs like she used to, the eye of her cigarette blinking and flaring in the dark. She craned her head, listening to his hissings, whisperings, croonings, as

  if they were radio adverts for things she knew she couldn't afford.

  On the morning I was due to go to Oxford for my interview, I was alone in the house, ironing my smartest clothes, when his face popped up outside the living-room window. The iron bounced and singed my finger. 'Open the door, Andy, love,' he mouthed through the glass.

  'I can't. Dad.' I hadn't seen his face in daylight for a long time. The eyes reminded me why, against all wisdom, we always used to welcome him back in. My finger throbbed under its burn, my throat swelled with the pressure of tears, 'Dad, I can't.'

  He beckoned me to the letterbox, where his words rushed through.

  'Don't do this to me, Andy, love. Please.' He was weeping. '^X7hy're you treating me like a dog?'

  'I love you. Dad.' I knelt at the flap, eye to eye. 'But you know it's no use.'

  He pulled a beer botde out of his jacket and smashed it against the steps: 'Open it or, so help me God, Andy, I'll top meself!'

  He held the broken bottle in front of his stomach: 'Harry Carry!'

  I screamed as he jerked the jagged end and keeled over.

  My mother filmed when she got in from the shops to find me huddling on the stairs, my blouse burnt on the ironing board, a sultana of a blister on my finger.

  'If he's done himself in,
he's done a flaming fantastic job of tidying up.' She held my finger under the cold water tap. 'Where's the bloody corpse?'

  My mother lanced the blister with a safety pin, stitched to

  hide the burn in my blouse, and rode with me on the bus to town, to stash me safe on the coach for Oxford.

  Someone had spik dark blue ink across the sky. Spires were fingers, grasping at stars. Drunk on tequila and cold air, I lay on my back in the quadrangle court of Hertford College, my eye on the moon. It shimmered, a coin I dreamt I could pocket. Crashed out on either side of me, two boys - real Oxford undergraduates - lay in gowns. Exhausted bats, knocked flat by throat-stripping spirits after finishing their preliminary exams and whooping through Radcliffe Square, past a huge wedding cake made of pale stone - a library, where I would read if I got in. The moment my interview was over, my feet had left the ground as they dragged me between them, gowns flapping like wings I might grow myself

  The eve of Christmas Eve. I went hot and cold and turned deaf for a split second when my mother unfolded the letter.

  'You're in!'

  'Wow!' My sisters wreathed me in hugs and kisses.

  They looked at me differently for the rest of the morning. You could practically see the exit signs lighting up Laurie's eyes: if I could get out, so could she. Her teachers were predicting that she would pass her O levels with ten straight-A grades. Across Sarah's eyes, though, I saw shutters. She had taken to truanting, picking up a different kind of education, hanging out in cemeteries and deserted warehouses with her dodgy mates. Oxford meant nothing to her, except that I would be gone in a few months' time. She smiled nervously, as if she was already expecting me to go up in a puff of smoke.

  Snow was straining the edge of the air; Hght stabbed out of a crystal sky as my mother and I stepped into the street. She couldn't resist holding my hand and parading me around the shops, boasting to everyone we bumpec^ into. Local jaws dropped, old ladies clutched at my wrist, while I swayed, gagged by the grin of an idiot. I wandered around with my mother, on her quest for Liebfraumilch in two-litre botdes, feeling sick with excitement and the sharpness of everything. My eyes smarted at the splatter of blood on butchers' aprons, a pyramid of Clementines in the greengrocer's, the warty faces of potatoes.