Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  'Hiya,' 'Hello,' 'Hi,' 'All right?' I greeted everyone as usual, thinking all the while. Goodbye.

  Christmas Day, and Mum and Dad were reunited. He had rolled up with presents on Christmas Eve. Our mother, made bubbly by Liebfraumilch, giddy at glittering thoughts of the future inspired by my letter from Oxford, opened the door and invited him in. Twinkling red, blue, pink, yellow lights, the Christmas tree made it feel almost safe. After a day or two, waking for breakfast with someone who had been terrorizing us in the middle of the night, my sisters and I got used to our dad again.

  But when Auntie Pauline and Auntie Livia found out, they could not get over what they saw as our mother's gobsmacking stupidity: welcoming the mad bugger back with open arms! They summoned a kind of family conference which ended in tears and terrible words: Auntie Pauline accused her sister of being a bad mother. Our mother protested that Dad had really changed this time, she could see it in his eyes. Our aunts had heard it all before: over and over and over again,

  'It's the same old broken record, Lorraine.' Auntie Pauline was not swerving from her ultimatum: 'It's him or the kids,

  and you know it. You've got to get rid of him now, else those poor blighters're going to end up paying for it, big time.'

  Our mother was not about to budge: our aunts had got a bee in their bonnets over sortiething they knew sod all about. She appealed to my sisters and me to speak up and vouch for our dad's new, improved mood. Our voices were wobbly, but we backed up her story.

  Our aunts looked at each other and decided to wash their hands of the situation.

  'Don't come running to us next time it all goes haywire,' Auntie Pauline warned. After sticking by us and bailing us out all these years, she and Auntie Livia had had more than enough of our mother's shenanigans.

  'Sheer suicide.' They shook their heads.

  It was time to draw the bloody line.

  After that, we knew we were on our own. We put on our best behaviour and prepared to tiptoe about in a world of eggshells, praying that things wouldn't crack. Our hearts stopped if one of us spilt tea or said something thoughdess at home, waiting for the creases to freeze around his blue eyes. But his smile showed no signs of slipping. The monster who had howled and banged to break down the front door seemed like some other man.

  Dad took great, swaggering pleasure in the fact that I had earned a place at Oxford, beating all them other posh gits to it. 'One in the eye,' he called it. He was flabbergasted and chuffed when Laurie outstripped kids who had visited Europe, to win a national competition for young modern linguists. But Sarah was his real pride and joy: he spent hours urging her to take a slug at his jaw, oiling her swing so that she would do better next time she faced Sharon Corkhill and her gang after school.

  'I wish you wouldn't be encouraging her to fight,' our mother moaned while she fried kidney and onions for tea. 'She's only eleven.'

  'She's got to learn how to stand up for herself.' Dad offered his chest as a punchbag to Sarah: 'Gwan, sock it ter me!'

  Thwud! He thrilled when Sarah's left hook hit home.

  The rest of us marvelled that he never raised his own hands to land a smack or a punch nowadays.

  Being on the dole no longer seemed to torment our dad. He took carpentry and bricklaying work where he could. When hard times left him stuck in the house, he spent hours striking match after match after match, blowing each one out as soon as its pink head had spluttered and sighed to a bald, charred tip.

  'Unbelievable,' our mother whispered, peering over his shoulders while he stuck them together. Following no pattern but the one in his head, he squinted, bit his tongue, and caressed his matchsticks with glue to make them grow, one by one, into a gypsy caravan.

  I was still terrified that Dad might blow his lid when we were least expecting it, but I was no longer ashamed of his swearing and ranting from behind the Sun; the smoke that hung about his head in his own private cloud; or the strange, thin taste of tea in our house, made with recycled teabags and powdered milk. I lost my old dread that people would turn up their noses if they knew where and what I came from. My place at Oxford was not just about books; it made me suspect I might be as good a person as anyone else.

  After hearing a talk at college about charities and flindrais-ing, I sent off for sponsorship forms from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Within a fortnight

  I had raised seventy pounds. Now I had to go through with the aerobatic flight I had been sponsored to do. Mum and Dad were as excited as I was: they drove me all the way to Blackpool, where a tiny, two-seater plane was waiting to take off. I climbed in and sat next to the pilot, my knees trembling at the sight of the glamorous man at the controls and the prospect of shooting up in the air.

  A clatter, an awesome roar, and we were shaving the clouds.

  'Guts in your mouth?' the pilot's voice crackled through the headset over my ears. 'You've gone green!'

  Then a nose-dive and a barrel roll, a loop-the-loop, and another barrel roll. I thought of us up there, drawing shapes in the sky. This is my life, my insides were shouting.

  'One more loop-the-loop?' the headset fizzed.

  I nodded and gripped my knees. Inspired by the next swoop, a glob of vomit shot out of my mouth and landed between my feet, where it stayed even when we arced upside-down.

  'Don't worry,' the voice came through the roar. 'Defies gravity every time.

  'The sickness goes if you focus on the horizon,' he shouted. 'Here, take the stick!'

  I prised my right hand off my knee and clamped it around the knob of the steering rod.

  Whish! We lurched down towards Blackpool beach, which bloomed suddenly: hundreds of faces looking up. You could see the ice-creams cradled in kids' fists.

  'Blimey!' The pilot put out his hand to steer us up and away fi^om the sea. 'Trying to take us for a swim?'

  He chuckled and guided us back to the airfield. I scanned the ground until my eyes brushed across Mum and Dad: two pale specks, next to a dab of blue, the truck. A rush of guilt thwacked my gullet as we glided down.

  Small. They looked so small, and far away. Another world.

  A strange shyness came over me as I climbed out of the plane, my whole body shaking, while Mum and Dad rushed towards me, shining with pride.

  'How did it feel?' they were dying to know. 'Could you see us from up there?'

  'Clear as day.' I took my mother's hand to steady myself, while Dad ruffled my hair.

  I wanted to forget how small they had seemed from the sky.

  Now that I was no longer tied down, worrying about Mum and Dad, I was free to lose myself in the whirl of drinking and dancing that everyone else at college had been in for ages. Venturing inside Deville's nightclub, I tried not to stare into shadowy corners at two-headed monsters, hands all over the place: slithering up and down backs, loitering around hips, disappearing inside clothes. I knocked back the vodkas lads urged me to try, and found that they acted like keys: unlocking something inside, they let me slide into a paradise of sweat, saliva and pelvises, slinking and grinding to head-swerving sounds.

  Mind, heart, muscles, lips, nerves, fingertips, toes, soul: everything came together when I finally fell in love.

  Because his house was not far from mine, Jamie had been the one to walk me home when we reeled out of parties and found the streets fabulously still. No cars, no buses, no people. It was as if we were the last pair of souls on earth. My mind rocked fiill of echoes after hours of ear-bashing bass. Over time, this came to be drowned under a more tormenting throb. Desire. I found it deafening, strolling home from party upon party, my head pounding with the din of so many things not said. It was a victory to walk in a straight line, dizzied not just by drink but by thrumming suspense - aching for something

  to come out at last, before we reached my front door and I had to endure one more chaste and fidgety goodnight.

  Long before the first kiss, I knew that he was the one. A hot, blanket-twisting dream, vivid with vodka
, spat me out of sleep in the night. I swayed downstairs to the bathroom and found the mirror lit up by a swipe of moonlight: even after a splash of cold water, there was his face, mingled with mine.

  Throughout that spring, as I looked forward to Oxford and became more and more tangled in love, my family actually felt normal. Happy, even, most of the time. Except for the chicken in our cellar. Having hatched eggs in her science class, Sarah begged Dad to let her bring home a ball of fluff. It lived with cuddly toys in front of the fire until its first feathers began to come through and it was no longer so cute. Then Dad made us spread newspaper across the floor of the cellar, where he kept it in the murky cold, glaring at it to lay eggs for him to fiy. My sisters and I would go downstairs and make clucking noises to cheer it up. We shovelled up the foul mess it continually made, then hustled back upstairs, where we tried not to think of the thing pining away under our house. No sign of an egg.

  Meanwhile, Dad conjured rose bushes to crawl up the front wall and spread pink petals outside our freshly painted green door. My sisters and I kept shtum about the skinny chicken hobbling about in our cellar, but were quick to show off the glorious explosion of roses to friends, now that our parents allowed us to bring them round. The doorway was just beyond fiill bloom - some of the fatter flowers turning blowsy, smaller buds clinging, tight-lipped, to the last of their lustre - when we got home one afternoon and our mother came out blushing

  furiously, asking us to send our friends away, not to bring them inside the house.

  That night, we watched her sniffling tears into toilet tissue, while Dad fumbled with shattered fragmervts of criss-crossed matchsticks, like parts of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to glue his precious caravan back into one piece. Nothing was said about how it broke, but it never looked the same again.

  On May Day, Mum and Dad lined up my sisters and me in front of the telly.

  'Guess what?' They couldn't stop grinning. 'We're going to tie the knot!'

  'When?' Sarah was dying to know. The news made up for the misery they had begun to ooze across the house again lately. My sisters and I were elated to think that they would be married at last; we imagined it coidd seal things with an air of for ever, changing our lives for good.

  I was touched when they chose my birthday, the i6th of May, to be their big day too. It felt like a special gift to me and my sisters, the promise they were going to make on paper to love and to cherish and everything. The day I turned eighteen, I put on a short, short summer dress, all lemony and see-through, under the battered brown leather pilot's jacket my dad had given me for my birthday - the one he used to huddle in for hours when he went fishing, crouching in silence behind his rod on the edge of the water at Sale Park. Laurie wore black clothes and dark sunglasses that made her look slinky and cool as a cat. Sarah loaded her earlobes with earrings that didn't match, cramming as many as possible into the extra holes she had pierced herself.

  We clambered into the back of the truck and took off to the town hall: Mum in a peach satin dress; the pinstripes of

  Dad's old suit jazzed up by a carnation whose petals were the exact same peach. We tried not to stare at the other people outside the Registrar's office, all waiting like us in their shiniest clothes. An old lady, with rotten teeth, even had a too-big tiara: she kept chuckling, revealing brown stumps and gums, and shoving the tiara back into place when it reRised to stay put. Some of the brides-to-be grimaced and looked the other way, as if they were trying to avoid their own reflections. Others glared around the waiting room, looking everyone else up and down: their wedding was the real McCoy, you could see they were thinking, not like the rest of these quickie affairs.

  Once our parents' papers had been signed and stamped and they had paid for an instamatic photo of the just-married kiss, snapped by a doddery old geezer, we went to climb back into the truck.

  'Spot of pub grub, eh?' Dad was ready to hang the expense. 'It's only once in a lifetime!'

  He coughed into his carnation: he had in fact been married once before; there were even two children with his eyes and nose floating around somewhere. At the same time, our mother stroked the peach satin of her dress as if to smooth the creases out of her own history. She adjusted the ring on her finger (which she wouldn't really consider hers until they had completed the payments for it), and laughed a litde laugh: 'Third time lucky!'

  We shot out for a frolic in the country, the way we used to, back when Dad had only just moved into our lives. After baked potatoes in a pub, we went for a long walk. Dad splashed out on proper Mister Softee ice-creams: 99ers, complete with a chocolate chimney of Flake and great swirly squirts of raspberry syrup, which we licked frantically to keep it fi-om bleeding on to our fingers and clothes.

  Mmm. The five of us wandered along the bank of the canal

  near New Mills, trying to eke out our ice-creams and what was left: of the day.

  The sun blazed like an egg yolk, slithering down the sky. It wasn't dying, our mother murmured, only heading to light up somewhere else, far away. But we couldn't help feeling deserted when the horizon of livid pinks faded to a purple haze and the dark made us turn to go home.

  A few weeks after the wedding, our bedraggled chicken slumped in the cellar, choked by a lump in its craw. Our mother carried the chicken upstairs and laid it in a cardboard box by the fire to warm it up. When it failed to stir, she crushed aspirin in water and tried to stop the squawking that way.

  'It's breaking my heart.' She was near to tears as the gasps continued.

  Dad put the hopeless bird in its box with a pile of newspapers and a hammer, then headed back down to the cellar, looking yellow: 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.'

  Spring warmed up into summer. Our mum and dad went through a phase of concocting fantastic plans for the ftiture. They pored together through Exchange and Mart, eyes peeled for things to buy and sell.

  But as Dad's ideas grew more and more extravagant. Mum grew less and less keen. He decided we should go and start a farm on one of the Maldive islands.

  'We're not the Swiss-Family-flamin'-Robinson!' she chided: 'We couldn't even keep one buggerin' chicken alive, remember?'

  We knew they had ditched their dreams when we got up one morning to find a row of headless stalks under the front

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  window sill outside die house, daffodil faces lolling in die soil. They had gone wild with knives the night before, our mother explained wearily, hacking the flowers they had planted so carefully, out of protest at their sodding suffocating life together.

  Soon they were back shrieking at each other until they were hoarse and blue in the face. Between bouts of shouting, they setded down to wage a sly kind of indoor war: our mother hunched over the tape recorder upstairs, playing her Leonard Cohen cassette over and over at fiill blast; Dad in the living-room, spinning his ancient Rod Stewart album, a gravelly racket. Laurie, Sarah and I took turns with the ketde, brewing pots of tea in an effort to keep the peace.

  Occasionally, they woidd snap out of it to join forces and turn their anger on us kids. Every day, before and after school, they would bark at us to brush, scrub, polish to keep the house in spanking order.

  'You know the rules,' Dad glowered, when we sighed to lift stray shoes, clothes and books out of the dirt at the bottom of the cellar stairs. Anything left lying around in the living-room, he hurled down into the dark.

  Along the settee - its Dralon nap combed, according to our mother's screeched orders, in a different direction each day -we had to space the cushions as if with a ruler. Every leaf of every plant had to shine.

  It was worse when the last chore had been done and redone, giving everything an eerie gleam. Mum and Dad would sit, empty-faced, saying nothing, at opposite ends of the settee. Two bluish snakes of smoke writhed up from their estranged cigarettes, while the rest of the house stood horribly still.

  When they did break into talk, it was in low murmurs, listing the various ways - crude, quick, luxurious, artistic - in which they planned
to do one another in.

  'What you waiting for?' Dad ripped open his shirt - pinging buttons across the room - to thrust out his bare chest, the night our mother helped herself to one of his screwdrivers. Though I stayed stony-faced to reassure my sisters, I was on the verge of wetting my pants at the sight of the screwdriver and bare flesh: in my mind, I saw them coming together. But I was even more shaken by the regret I felt when my mother grunted and swung up her arm and plunged the screwdriver harmlessly into the wall.

  I smiled as brighdy as ever at college, even through the exams.

  'Nerves of steel,' friends marvelled when I stayed calm in the face of each paper. Only Jamie knew why: he could see how my fear of our house made everything else a breeze.

  As soon as the exams were over and I stopped going to college, an awesome headache settled on me: sometimes a helmet of metal, biting; when I was lucky, it pulsed and slopped around my skull.

  After tea one night, I went upstairs to my bedroom with a can of Coke and a bottle of paracetemol tablets, determined to put an end to the headache. Mum and Dad were at it downstairs. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I poured the tablets on to the carpet and contemplated the powdery pile. I imagined taking so many that they would have to bring their fighting to a full stop, to call an ambulance and take care of me.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

  I forced down the bitter, fat tablets until my throat seized up against swallowing more.

  It wouldn't bring them to their senses. It would just be letting everyone down and making things worse, if I were to crumple.