Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  Andrea was the steady one. ^•

  I had stiffened myself so much on the outside, my insides were clogged up: it was too exhausting even to cry, to rinse things out that way. And crying was dangerous - it made Mum and Dad even more angry, if any of us burst into tears.

  I fed the rest of the tablets back into the bottle and lay down on my bed with the poems of Hopkins, which I'd been told to read in preparation for my first term at Oxford. / caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin - my eyelids drooped - dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon — afraid of falling asleep with the tablets inside me - My heart in hiding I Stirred for a bird - I gave in to my pillow - Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

  I had submitted fifty lines of verse to a literary society in London, at the su^estion of my English teacher; one morning a certificate for creative writing arrived through the post. It made me feel invincible, for a moment. I could put poetry into clouds and puddles and gutters and all kinds of filth. I could turn nasty things at home into stories. I could cut myself off.

  Instead of clustering in front of the telly like we used to, keeping an eye on Mum and Dad, my sisters and I went out more and more often to do our own things. We never left them alone when a fight was in the offing; we waited for the air to clear, then we crept out.

  I might take the bus to visit Tamsyn or to go out with Helena and Sasha and other girlfriends from college, to the pub or the pictures, sometimes even the theatre. But usually

  my head was too fuzzy for that, and I went straight round to Jamie's instead, even though I had already spent most of the day with him. Now that college was over, we had summer jobs at Manchester Unemployment Benefit Office. At first, the pair of us had rejoiced at being assigned to the same workfloor. Then we were shoved into the front line, on the counters shielded by bullet-proof glass, where we parried insults fi"om people sick of the shitting arsing System that was trying to screw them over. Still, we were able to sail through the day, glimpsing each other across the office, revelling in gooey feelings and looking forward to the hours we would steal, smooching in his bedroom all evening, until his mother pounded up the stairs to announce that the party was over.

  I woidd come away from him in a gorgeous fluster, my fingertips burning after playing up and down his back, hot beneath his T-shirt. He was good-looking and clever and funny, but what really touched me was his gentleness. I was obsessed by the softness of his skin, and its smell.

  At home I suffered a constant buffeting against my ribs, from the storms inside me; but a secret sun shone under my skin when I was with Jamie. As things grew darker in my house, I could look at him and see the future, fabulously bright. He was going to study in London while I was in Oxford, so we could be together every weekend. Being close to him gave me a blissful ache. Clothes came loose under his covers, though I always clung to some shred, no matter how fast our breathing grew. Desire spingled along my nerves, delirious. But something told me to wait, to save the precious thing in my hands until I was far away from home, where nothing could spoil it.

  One night, after I had torn myself away from Jamie, I got back to my house around midnight. I slid my key into the front

  door quietly, hoping no one would be awake, so I could go straight to bed with my thoughts.

  A strange sort of music was seeping out of the living-room. Mum and Dad. Their voices were sputtering and purring and sputtering. Behind them, I could hear Laurie and Sarah sobbing. I pushed open the living-room door.

  TTiey were circling each other, slowly. My mother was clutching the big kitchen knife, jerking it in front of her face to ward off Dad, who had the huge marble ashtray raised in his fist, ready to smash it against her skull as soon as he could get close enough.

  'Andy!' Laurie and Sarah were cowering against the wall, watching the stuff in front of them which they were helpless to stop.

  *I - want - you - out - of - here - you - bastard.' My mother gritted her teeth and ground out her words slowly, as if she were spelling.

  Dad's voice was wet with bloody determination; 'Over my dead body!'

  He lunged towards her, dropping the ashtray, reaching out to grab the knife from her hand. She yanked it back, out of the way of his fingers. Then she shrieked; he turned deadly quiet. The blade had caught Dad's thumb and sheared a slice of flesh off the tip. A line of blood jetted up the wall, spattering a fantastic pattern over the white paint.

  'Shit!' Dad gave a strange laugh, as if the whole thing was happening to someone else.

  My mother nudged him out of his stupor and led him by the wrist to the kitchen, where she ran a bowl of cold water and plunged in his hand. Laurie, Sarah and I stood by, watching the sink turn pink. Then she pulled out his thumb and wrapped the gash under acres of toilet paper, which I tried to bind with Sellotape.

  Dad had to sit with his hand above his head, pressing his

  finger over the cut to slow the flow of blood, still pumping through his home-made bandage.

  'Ta, love.' He gave me a shaky smile when I put a mug of tea, loaded with sugar, into his other hand. 'Ta.'

  My sisters and I went to bed, leaving him stunned on the settee, contemplating the red across the wall, while our mother bent over a bucket of soapy water, wringing a rag and rubbing to wash it away.

  But the paper would not let go of its stain: a great patch of rouge stayed on the wall.

  'Dad, we've got something to ask you.' Laurie's voice trembled. She and Sarah and I were lined up in front of the settee, where he was sprawled out on his back. 'We've been thinking, and we don't know what else to do.' Laurie nudged me.

  'We're afraid that if you don't move out, Dad,' I stammered, 'something's going to happen.'

  He hoisted himself up until he was sitting, feet flat on the floor, his face hung down so we couldn't see it.

  Sarah dared to reach out and hold his hand. 'It doesn't mean we don't love you.'

  'I know, ducky.' Dad squeezed her hand and looked up, smiling sadly, 'I know.'

  'So you'll go?' I asked soft:ly.

  'Will I buggery!' He pulled his hand away, his face hardening: 'I'm not moving out. The rent book's got my name on it, don't forget.'

  Our mother had, in a gesture of trust, transferred the tenancy to him on their wedding day.

  'So it's technically my bloody house, see?' Anger clouded his eyes. 'Mine!'

  'But you're going to kill each other, Dad,' I pleaded.

  'So be it,' he shrugged. 'If you want nje to shift' - he sat squarely in the middle of the settee - 'you'll have to put a bomb under me.'

  My mother took my sisters and me on the bus to pay a secret visit to Auntie Livia, who was too worried, when she saw the state we were in, to waste time on 'I told you so's'. Uncle Max picked up the phone, muttered a bit under his moustache, then clicked it back down with a grim smile. It would cost no more than fifty quid, a pal of his had come up with the best price: 'for a kneecap'.

  'We can lend it.' Uncle Max assured our mother that she could pay him back over as many months as she liked. 'Just say the word.'

  She looked sick, chewing over the idea, twizzling her wedding ring.

  It was only a few seconds, though it felt to us like a lifetime, before she shook her head. With nowhere else to go, no aunties with the patience to put us up, no car to take us anywhere, we got back on the bus and sloped home to our dad.

  It was hard to look at him without thinking of the kneecap plot. When he launched into a rage, my head was blasted clear of any thoughts, reduced to a hot, tight redness - panic, in case this time it would be the end of everything. But when he was in one of his merciftilly mild, trancelike moods, my mind was stalked by men in balaclavas. I saw them homing in on him down a dark alley, taking crowbars and bricks to his bones.

  Nights in white satiric never reaching the end — he let his Moody Blues album crackle quietly when exhaustion had robbed him of his anger - Letters I've written, never meaning to send.

  He didn't hum or jiggle his toes
like he used to. He just sat there, slumped in the song. I cringed when the chorus broke into its wail of / love yous. But my eyes welled when they met my dad's, and I found myself kissing the cheeks with his tears on them.

  It was always a worry to leave the house, not knowing what Mum and Dad would do while they were by themselves. One day, when Dad had gone out to cash his dole cheque, our mother had grabbed his stonking great electric drill and changed the locks behind his back. Instead of hurling his body against the door and howling (the way he used to when Mum locked him out), he had spent hours sweet-talking his way over the threshold, back into the house. Then, our mother told us later, he let his nice front-door face drop off, and got stuck in. He smashed her head against the wall and knocked her to the floor, where she lay in a daze while he let loose with his boot.

  Alarmed because she couldn't open her eyes properly, Dad had grabbed the ketde and chucked hot water into our mother's face to wake her up. She had blinked and seen him rush off in his truck, terrified, before she passed out.

  When our mother came round, she had to call the ambulance herself, with a handfiil of broken fingers. The police were brought to her bedside at the hospital, where she was hooked to a machine that would let her sleep off^ the shock without sliding into a coma. Laurie, Sarah and I stared at it, willing the bleeps to stay nice and steady. The police put on gende.

  spongy voices as if to protect her face and neck from any more damage.

  'We'll have to press charges, love/ A sergeant explained that, because the doctors had called them in the light of her injuries, there would have to be a prosecution whether she liked it or not.

  'It'll only rile him,' my mother mumbled, groggy with painkillers. It would be better to leave things as they were, she struggled to make clear, or this would not be the end of the story.

  The police arrested him. Laurie and I had to go with our mother when the case finally came up at Manchester Crown Court; a solicitor told us that we might be called upon to testify, if our mother's word was not deemed enough. If the law hadn't dragged its feet, our mother pointed out, her face would not have had time to mend and the crime could have spoken for itself

  'If only someone had had the nous to take a photo.' She shook her head.

  She went in to be questioned first, while my sister and I waited in the hall outside the courtroom. Then Dad turned up, dressed in the pinstriped suit he had worn to get married. Laurie and I squirmed, tortured by shyness rather than fear. He sat on the bench opposite, holding his head in his hands, lift:ing it now and then to smile meekly at us. When it was his turn to go in, we went to peek through the pair of glass portholes on the double doors of the courtroom. We couldn't hear what he was saying, but we watched our dad acting like the docile, put-upon husband, defending himself with sparkly eyes and honest hands (no sign of his knuckle-duster gold ring). Laurie and I bristled outside the doors, our breath steaming up the glass of the portholes, dying to be called in to

  tell the truth. But when Dad had finished his performance, the judge just leaned back and looked down at his own hands. Then he sat up straight again and adjusted his wig to make a pronouncement, before pushing his papers to one side and stealing a look at his watch. We saw something crash inside our mother's face, as if she had been walloped again.

  Although they had let him off with a fine of one hundred and fifty pounds. Dad went berserk. He came pounding on our front door, screaming that my mother owed him a hundred and fifty quid and he would kill her, no messing around this time, if she didn't come up with the dosh. By the time the police had come at our call, he had disappeared. For days, he prowled around the streets, chasing our mother if ever she dared to step out through the door. Once he caught her and pinned her against the glass wall of a bus shelter to spoil her healed face by giving her a split lip. Our mother cried out for help, but men and women just passed by, looking the other way.

  'I should have had the bastard kneecapped when I had the chance.' She lurched between steaming up, ftirious, and breaking down to weep, finding herself trapped in her own home, as miserable and fi^ightened as ever.

  He had caught her and Sarah out shopping one afternoon, revved up his truck and tried to ram them both against a lamppost.

  After that, none of us went out after dark, for fear of being spotted and followed by Dad. Sometimes Jamie would come round, or Laurie would bring her boyfriend Christopher home. Although we felt safer when they were there, we could see that our mother was uncomfortable about it. The air inside the house would become clogged with embarrassment as well as

  the usual nerves and dread, waiting for Dad to turn up. It was easier not to see anyone at all, to stay in with our mother in the evenings, ready for his banging on the door and windows, the swearing in a voice that didn't sound human.

  The hedges looked different, knowing he could be creeping up behind them or crouching inside them at night: watching, listening, hissing about a petrol bomb; shovelling dogshit through the letterbox; trapping the telephone line so that we couldn't dial 999 when he took a crowbar to the back door. Some nights we felt as if we'd been caught in a horror film: Dad smashing glass, bloody fingers scrabbling inside the kitchen window to lift the latch; our mother whacking the knuckles with a plate, sweating to keep him at bay without crippling him, while I dashed for a hammer and nails from the cellar, to board up the weak spot in the window.

  Sleep wasn't always to be had in our beds: we got something more like rest when we lay side by side on the living-room floor, ignoring the hard boards under our bones, hugging tennis racquets, the rolling pin, a baseball bat. Our mother rummaged around in the cellar, came up with a poker, a great knob of metal for a head, and chose to sleep with that.

  When Dad surprised us in the doorway - he had shimmied up the drainpipe to the attic and let himself in through a bedroom window - none of us reached for a thing. My legs gave way: I couldn't stand up. Laurie and Sarah took their cue from me, and stayed rooted to the settee. Our mother floated in front of us, looking like death in her nightie. Her body seemed drained of blood, filled with air, bones showing through her skin. She son of smiled. Dad was wearing his pinstriped suit, which showed no trace of his scramble to reach the roof. He seemed to have dressed up to see her. As if it was the last time.

  Our mother shifted towards the phone, shivering, to dial the police.

  'Terry. ..' she began, when he slid the receiver out of her hand.

  I prayed for the lead in my legs to melt and let me move.

  'Mum .. .' It was as if we had already lost her.

  Our dad looked around the room, his eyes sweeping up tennis racquets, the baseball bat, the rolling pin and poker, before throwing them back in our faces with a laugh: 'Red alert, eh?'

  He placed the receiver coolly back on the cradle of the phone.

  'You needn't worry,' he murmured into our mother's face, 'if I wanted to get you, I could do it like that' - he clicked his fingers.

  Then he unhooked the chain on the front door, sliding the bolts across - one, two, three, slowly - and saw himself out.

  Her wails sliced the air, so that we all felt it when she cried.

  'The loneliness. ..' Even her whimpering got into our bones: 'It's killing me.'

  My sisters and I tried huddling close to our mother, but she would burst out shrieking: 'I wish the lot of you would just fuck off!' She shoved us from her, snarling: 'Don't touch me!'

  Then she would cave in, subsiding into hushed, shallow sobs that grated her chest.

  'Forgive me, forgive me,' she snuffled, while Laurie, Sarah and I clustered around her in one of the clammy hugs that kept us together.

  On good days, instead of screaming so that her face looked like it was about to rip, our mother would tuck her knees under her chin and rock back and forth, crooning about pushing up daisies. Her eyes would take on a horrible brightness as she reached to grasp one of us by the hand -'You know I want to be cremated, don't you, when it comes to the crunch?'

  Then sh
e would sit, as still as stone, on the settee, staring at the walls.

  Dad's truck growled past our windows - once, twice, sometimes several times a day. Our mother would snap out of her

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  trance as soon as she heard the buzz of his engine and caught sight of the blue cruising by.

  My sisters and I watched her face, scrutinizing it for signs of what was running through her mind.

  Her temper flared when she saw us fretting. 'I've no intention of letting that devil back into our lives!' Her voice cracked: 'Don't you think I've learnt my lesson?'

  Laurie wasn't convinced. After appealing for help from her teachers, she moved into a council hostel for girls whose families were a threat to their mental or physical health.

  My mother went white. She wept into my chest while I held her: what was the point of carrying on? She was so worthless, her own child couldn't bear to be near her.

  'It's not you, Mum.' I rocked her in my arms, half singing, repeating it like a nursery rhyme: 'It's not you.'

  But I knew how Laurie felt: the same desire to escape careered through me - making me feel drunk, almost ill, with anticipation - whenever I flicked the pages of my Oxford prospectus, sneaking a peek at those spires.

  My mother was still struggling to get over Laurie, when a social worker knocked on the door. Sarah had heard about Childline on TV, and had rung up to speak to someone -anyone. She was truanting from school and getting into scrapes with the police over rough lads and booze. Worse than that, my litde sister was damaging herself in secret: she took safety pins, razors and burning cigarettes to her arms. I winced at the sight of the patterns, all those ugly, hidden things, etched into her skin. For so long she had been going around smiling and pretending nothing was up. Now official plans were being filed to remove her from our mother's custody and place her in a