Once in a house on fire Read online

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  stroked her curly brown hair while she cried. 'You know he's not coming back, don't you?'

  Our mother stared at the carpet and nodded.

  Eventually she looked up and wiped her nose. 'Don't worry - I'll not do anything silly.'

  She kept herself going, she murmured time and time again, for the sake of me and my three-year-old sister, Laurie (whose real name was Lauren). Stepping out through the front door, she carried a big smile on her face. Her veiny hands took us through the sooty streets of Rusholme and Moss Side, up the rougher end of Manchester, as if nothing had changed. Scuffing along the pavement, my red sandals jumped the cracks by heart. I glanced up every now and again, from the shoes of strangers who had stopped in the street to stare at my mother and her daughters. My eyes floated past hedges and chimneys to purple-grey clouds, bellies full of rain, about to bucket down.

  'What bee-yutifril lasses!' ladies exclaimed over our caramel faces, gasping at our mother. 'You don't look old enough, love. You truly don't!'

  Our mother was becoming a celebrity on our street. A twenty-five-year-old widow, she had long lashes casting velvet shadows around her wide, chocolatey eyes, and dimples that danced about her lips when people swore she looked like the gorgeous Natalie Wood.

  'Oh no, she's a beautifiil woman!' Our mother laughed over the compliment every time, blushing and waving it away. Her laughter sounded the same as ever, though it came out of a thinner face.

  By the time I was six, our mother's stomach was swollen full of a third child. She was lucky to find someone prepared to take on a pair of orphans and save her from growing lonely.

  she told her friends when diey showed surprise. A looming, red-faced man, quite a bit older than her, stepped into our house for tea and was introduced to Laurie and me as our new daddy.

  'I used to be a sailor,' he told us. 'In the merchant navy, like, on the big ships.'

  I suspected he was around to stay when huge paintings of ships, sails billowing, began to line the staircase. Our pregnant mother strained on tiptoe to hammer the winking brass hooks into the wall. A new wedding snap squatted on the sideboard in a heavy wooden frame: our mother was standing in front of a brick building (not a church) with the tall new man. Both of them were trying to smile while her dress ballooned in front.

  Before the baby was born, our stepfather, Peter Hawkins, used to lug home bulging sacks of misshapen Mojos for my sister and me.

  'Off the back of a lorry!' He let the sweets spill, all colours, on to the carpet. We gathered up the squashed and twisted squares, then counted them over and over into paper bags to share out in the playground next day. Pale, freckled faces, skinny black girls, short boys in turbans all chased after me.

  I skidded to a halt one afternoon when the headmaster called me by a strange surname.

  'Andrea Clarke-Hawkins!'

  My name wagged its ugly new tail, stirring whispers behind my back until the home bell rang. My mother wasn't there to explain the name; she was in hospital giving birth to our new sister, Sarah, who came out blonde and screaming.

  Sarah's eyes were sky-blue marbles. Her yeasty cheeks made me think of chewing. When my mother wheeled her home from our school, ladies stopped the pram to coo over her face while Laurie and I stood by, fingering the spokes in the wheels.

  'The litde angel.' They tutted and sucked. 'Looks nowt like yer darker ones, though, does she?'

  'Different father,' our mother explained.

  During the day, our mother stewed Sarah's dirty nappies in a bucket in the kitchen. When it threatened to rain, she rushed out into the back yard to unpeg the laundry: the clothes smelt of other people's chimney smoke; the clothes-pegs were wooden princes and princesses. Laurie and I played with them while our mother clanked pots and pans and steamed up the kitchen.

  Every night, at the same time, our stepfather's keys ratded at the front door. Boots brushed and scraped on the doormat. In came Peter Hawkins, a red face sticking out of wide blue overalls smeared with car grease. Before tea, our stepfather scrubbed the oil from his face and hands at the kitchen sink. He combed his black hair flat against his skull and flicked the dandruff from his shoulders. Under the soapy scent, we caught faint whiffs of petroleum when he smacked our cheeks with kisses.

  Tea was ketchup with mashed potato and things out of tins, baked beans or spaghetti. We ate it without a word while our stepfather sat chomping and staring over our heads at the telly. After tea, our mother washed the dishes, washed our faces and changed into a stiff green dress that zipped up the front. Then she folded into her car - a battered blue Princess whose patches of rust she was forever daubing with metallic paint - and drove off to look after dying people until dawn. She worked the night shift at Manchester City Council Home for Geriatrics.

  'It's at night that they pop their clogs, that's the worst part,' she told Auntie Livia, describing the toothless corpses that she lifted from their still-warm beds. 'Their faces are smiling - sort of floating up - but their legs feel like lead.'

  While she swept corridors and bathed worn-out brows, our stepfather was left with my sisters and me. Lulled by soap operas, his eyelids drooped over a warm can of beer. Sarah slept cradled on his dozing belly, calmly rising and falling,

  while Laurie and I played in silence behind die dining table. We were allowed to play with Lego, but only if we pressed the bricks together without any clicking sounds. Our heads were crammed with Lego helicopters and dinosaurs, but we put all our bricks into building ships to please our stepfather. He slumped back on the settee while the television's light flickered electric over his features, now blue, now red.

  'Da-daa!'

  We stuck our ship, portholes and all, under his nose. He rubbed his eyes and sat up to let a smile break over his creased face.

  'It reminds me of me navy days. When I were a lad: no kids to feed; no cars to fix neither.' Our stepfather took a long look at the yellow plastic ship.

  He had gone through a whole other family - wife and babies - before he ran into our mother. One afternoon, while he was at work, his old wife had rung up to tell our mother a thing or two. Our mother's face fell while the high-pitched story chunnered into her ear. She knew nothing about any ex-wives with babies to feed. As soon as she had laid the receiver back on its rest, she and Auntie Livia had to go and brew a pot of tea in the kitchen. Behind the glass-panelled door -clicked shut - they mouthed and made faces. Broken noses, affairs and drained whisky bottles whispered through.

  Before he got home, our mother changed her face and wiped it smooth, her fingers tucking at the temples where crinkles might show. Our stepfather scraped his boots and elbowed at the sink to soap the car-grease from his face. A pale, hairy stomach peeked out over leather-belted jeans. Our mother smiled through his kissing compliments.

  'House looks spotless, love. Me trousers dry? Fried mince for tea? Smells grand. Really grand. Christ, I had a bugger of a motor to fix this afternoon! Let's nip down the pub tonight, eh? I'll fetch the babysitter.'

  Our mother said nothing about the strange phone call. It was kept in the teapot, to be tinkled out and sipped in the afternoons between her and Auntie Livia.

  We ploughed through the mounds of cabbage and mince that our stepfather adored. Then, when she had scrubbed the dishes, our mother pulled on her black silk dress, blooming painted roses. It was the same dress she had slipped into every Friday night when our real father had come home from pasting flowered paper on to people's walls. With the week's housework done, she had set her old Motown vinyls spinning under the needle and swished about hypnotically, purring into her spiky hairbrush. The songs were all about love and leaving, but our mother jus
t smiled and smiled and sang along. Our father used to come home in his baggy white overalls, splashed with gloss paint, to whirl his hips with hers before tea.

  Now our mother fastened a plain, cardboardy coat over her dress to step out into the rain with her new husband. He didn't like music, so there was no swishing, but sweet musk wafted in the hall as the door closed behind her.

  Our babysitter was a fifteen-year-old called Tracy - 'a bit podgy but very pretty,' our mother told Auntie Livia. She curled up in our stepfather's favourite chair, which Laurie and I would never dream of going near, with coffee and chocolate biscuits and a dog-eared paperback.

  'What are you reading?' Laurie and I fidgeted, waiting for the adverts to jingle and burst colours across the screen for fantastic, too-fast minutes, before we had to face the dull grown-up programmes again.

  'Nothing for noseys,' snapped from behind the stained cover.

  Before bedtime, Tracy put down her paperback and nipped out for a smoke in the back yard. We inspected the

  book, splayed over the arm of our stepfather's chair. The Moors Murders. The words were red and dribbUng, Hke blood, over two photos: a man and a woman, with hard mouths. You could tell they had done something evil. But the really spooky thing was the way the faces drew you in, making you peer at their lips and eyes: were they sorry or secretly pleased?

  Laurie and I begged Tracy, when she came in from her smoke, to tell us the story inside the book. She rolled her eyes: 'Okay, but only after you've cleaned your teeth and got into bed. And you're never to tell your mam about it, right?'

  'Right!' We scrubbed our teeth for the Moors Murders and climbed into our bunk beds. The story came out in nicotine and coffee whispers.

  The man and the woman kidnapped children just like Laurie and me. They took the children to a secret place on the Yorkshire Moors where they tortured them and touched them in the wrong places. They recorded the screams and sent the tapes to the children's mothers. Then they killed the children and buried them under the purple heather out on the moors where no one would ever find them.

  Tracy switched out the light and disappeared downstairs to scoff a few more choccy biscuits before our parents came home from the pub.

  'Get to sleep!' she shouted up the stairs, when she heard Laurie and me shifting in our creaky beds, unable to rest. 'And no more of your blummin' whispering, got it?'

  I dangled my left foot over the edge of the top bunk, so Laurie could see it from where she lay underneath. It made my toes icy, but I stuck my foot right out from under the covers, so my sister would know I was there while she was going to sleep.

  I woke in the dark, yellow streetlight seeping through the curtains. Muffled voices squeezed up through the floorboards and swirled about the bedroom before sharpening into whole words. Bastard! Bitch! Bastard! Bitch!

  I went to the top of the stairs and looked down from my hiding-place behind the banister. At the bottom of the stairs Tracy's round face was streaked with green eyeshadow and black mascara tears. I could hear my mother weeping in the living-room. My stepfather strode out into the hall, still shouting. His face was twisted red and shaking.

  'Fucking clear up that shit, Lorraine!' Cold coffee dribbled down the wallpaper in the hall. 'Just Ricking clear it up! I'm taking Tracy home.'

  The next morning my mother spent a long time on the telephone. Tracy's mother was livid because Peter Hawkins had spoiled her daughter. But Tracy insisted that she loved my stepfather. The affair was dropped, and our new babysitter came with thick glasses and horrid skin.

  Most of that summer, when I was seven, was spent with my five-year-old sister Laurie in the back yard. It was all bricks and concrete: the outdoor toilet and a half-demolished air-raid shelter (where people had tried to hide from bombs in the old days), left little room to play. During the school holidays, we entertained ourselves with empty orange crates and high bouncing balls until lunchtime, while our mother spent the days sleeping to get up enough energy for her night shift. The moment our local church gonged twelve, I unlatched the back gate, a pound note tucked into my knickers, and led Laurie down the back alley. This was filled with the pong of dog mess and rotting rubbish, but we pinched our noses and hustled all the way down it to the sweet shop, in order to avoid the road. If anyone spotted my sister and me alone on the street, my

  mother warned me, she'd be reported and sent to prison and we would be taken away. Every evening, when she got up to make tea, she quizzed us about what we'd bought for lunch. I told her apples and oranges: she would ha^e been horrified to know we were thriving on Jelly Babies and Spangles.

  On Saturday afi:ernoons, Laurie and I were banished to the back yard so that our mother could take a nap with Sarah upstairs, while our stepfather put his feet up in front of the telly to contemplate the football in peace, locking the back door and drawing the living-room curtains across, to blot Laurie and me out of sight and bloody mind. Hopping about in the cold, we clambered over the rubble of the air-raid shelter, imagining bombs whisding out of the sky, but taking care to keep our voices down. Every now and then, we crept up to the window to peer through the crack in the cunains to see if our stepfather had fallen asleep. Eventually, his head would tip back on the settee. We opened the back gate without a sound, then dashed through the stinking alley to the street. There, we lifted the letterbox to spy on Auntie Jackie, who was not a real auntie, but the lady who lived next door. If we spied grim-faced in-laws under her letterbox flap, we would skulk back to our frosty yard. But if Auntie Jackie had no visitors, we would tap the chorus of 'Brown Girl in the Ring' on her brass knocker. Then she would usher us into her back room to face the electric fire with its blazing orange bars, for creamy glasses of milk and as many biscuits as we could pluck up the cheek to pick out of a red barrel that we worshipped, blue horses prancing around the gold knob of the lid.

  Because Auntie Jackie and her husband, Uncle Duncan, hadn't managed to make children, their house was crawling with lazy lady cats and scrawny kittens that would be sold to the pet shop the moment they peeled open their eyes and tired

  of kissing their mothers' bellies. On Easter Sunday, instead of Creme Eggs, Auntie Jackie slithered a pulsing ball of kitten into my palm and Laurie's. We fell out of love with them when their ears perked up and their cushiony paws grew claws that scratched our shins, while worms of poo turned up in the carpet's shag pile. Our stepfather gripped Laurie and me by the scruff of our necks and thrust our faces close to the mess on the floor.

  'I'll rub your noses in it,' he promised, 'if you let them do it indoors just one more fucking time.'

  Summer gave way to rain, first spitting, then belting down. Our mother kissed Laurie and me goodbye at the school gate and wheeled Sarah off in the pram. I spent the mornings helping other children to read and to spell, since I was ahead of my year in the Wide Range Reader stories. When I was three, my mother had saved up to buy a set of Ladybird books and taught me to read from them. My father had taken a photo of my mother grinning and pointing at my head bowed over the pages.

  When the bell rang for playtime, I would rush out to look for my sister in the crowded playground. We touched hands for a second, then ran off with separate groups of coloured faces. My eyes scooted along the railings: sometimes, our mother would be standing there on her way home from the shops, peering into the crowd for Laurie and me.

  One time, she stopped to give us some Opal Fruits before she went home to sleep. We took the shiny yellow packets through the railings and kissed her hand before she pushed off into the traffic with Sarah's pram.

  Laurie tore into hers. A flock of schoolmates swooped in, sticky palms and begging smiles. I gave up a green sweet to a

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  red-haired gid who was taller dian me. She was after a pink one, but I was saving those. The freckles gathered over her eyes when she chewed.

  'Why's your mum wear sunglasses all t^ie time, then?' she asked the playground as well as me. 'Even when it's raining.'

  She took
a pink sweet after all and sauntered back into the crowd, her red plait swinging along her spine.

  When I got home I tried not to stare at my mother while she hoovered our trodden green carpet in her dark glasses. Rain tapped at the windows. She put the kettle on. Auntie Livia came round to show off^ the snaps of her new council house. In the photographs, my mother stood out like a beede: every shot caught her smiling in sunglasses. My aunt and she giggled, but when my mother lifted the shades, her face was puffy with green and purple bruises. Sarah's dimpled fist reached for the colours; my mother winced.

  Behind her teacup. Auntie Livia asked, 'He doesn't hit the girls too, does he?'

  'God, no!' My mother was adamant: 'He'd not lay a finger on diem!'

  I looked at my mother's swollen eyes. She knew nothing about the night my stepfather had knocked me out with the back of his hand.

  Sarah had made a stinking mess in her nappy. My stepfather didn't know how to change it because my mother always made sure she had taken care of everything before she went to work. He pinched his hairy nostrils and rolled the dirty nappy into a ball. When he went to fasten the clean one he couldn't find the pin.

  'Where the f—?' Biting his lip, he sent me upstairs to find it.

  I couldn't find the pin anywhere. The nappy was loose, Sarah was screaming, but I couldn't find it anywhere. My stepfather came upstairs, spraying spitde.

  'Where is it then?'

  I couldn't say. My stepfather smacked me across the face, and I fell against the door jamb. My head hit the hinge.

  When I woke up, Sarah had stopped screaming, and my stepfather was crouching over me, a chocolate bar in his fist. His black hair was dripping: he had gone out in the rain to buy it. Pressing the Milky Way into my hand, he murmured, 'You're not going to tell your mum, are you?'

  My throat was tight, but I ate the chocolate to show that I was not going to tell. My stepfather watched me swallow before he stood up tall again. Then he took the bright blue Milky Way wrapper and buried it in the bin, underneath the potato peelings.