Once in a house on fire Read online

  'Whichever you like, Andy, love.' My stepfather ruflflied my hair in front of the man who owned the pet shop, smiling and urging me to pick out my favourite fish from the gurgling tanks. At home, in the alcove of our living-room, he had installed an aquarium: a second, living TV. Laurie and I spent hours gazing at it, hypnotized by the hum of the water pump and the sight of shiny backs skittering about: silver, gold, pink, electric blue. We kept our eyes on the black shark fish. They flared red when we tapped on the glass to distract them fi-om nibbling the tiddlers that had hatched out of splurges of eggs. Laurie was fond of the yellow-and-black-striped ones we called bumblebees. Although they seemed stupid, the pink angels were my favourites: I watched their slow, O-shaped mouths kissing, while their pearly bodies shimmered, so pale you could see something pulsing inside.

  'Do fish have hearts?' I asked my mother.

  *Ask your dad,' she said.

  I kept quiet. Presenting me with a tub of fish food, my stepfather had made it my job to sprinkle flakes on the water every morning and night: 'It's up to you to keep the blighters fi-om goin' belly up.'

  At first, I couldn't help grinning at the honour, which allowed me to lord it over my little sisters. But I soon found my heart doing dives every time I went near the aquarium. I had to kneel down and press my face close to the glass, willing every last fish to keep on swishing its tail and wafery fins.

  When she didn't look too bashed, our mother took us on Sunday mornings to see her own mother. We dressed quickly, rushing to leave while our stepfather still lay snoring in bed. Granny Chadfield lived on the eighth floor of Circle Court, a concrete tower of lonely old people in the middle of Stretford; on Sunday afternoons, kids hijacked the lifts and pelted down the echoing corridors, buzzing pensioners' doorbells then legging it, spurting giggles that ricocheted off the walls. Laurie and I played with our cousins, chasing each other until we were dizzy, then gathered for Gran's meat and potato pies. They glowed in the middle of the table, gravy sizzling through forkholes, with glazed pastry leaves whose veins had been etched in, one by one, with a knife. Wolfing down my wedge, I nodded for more although I felt stufi^ed to bursting. My jaw worked to make sense of the hours Gran put in, kneading and rolling, then waiting by her oven all alone, before the pies came out looking varnished.

  After Sunday dinner. Gran collapsed the table's wings and pressed it back against the wall. During the week she would eat packet meals from a tin tray on her lap. She hardly ever went anywhere or talked to anyone, except for a few polite words if she bumped into a neighbour in the lift. We knew

  that after we had kissed her goodbye, she would sit and gaze over the city, thinking, while cars roared past on the motorway below.

  'I don't ever want to live cooped up alone like that.' Our mother shook her head on the way home. 'I'd rather be dead than so alone.'

  I used to imj^ine living with Gran's wallpaper, patterned over with orange and yellow cubes. One moment they seemed to stick out from the wall; the next they were sucking in. Once I asked, 'Do they go in or out. Gran, these boxes on the wall?'

  'That depends on your perspective,' she said.

  'What's that?'

  Gran gave my hand a squeeze.

  'It's the way you choose to look at things.'

  My grandmother had been forced to look at things differendy years ago, when her second husband had run off with her eldest daughter and the brand-new refrigerator: Grandad and Auntie Vera had moved north into a semi-detached cottage in Bury, where they had three children. Every week, my grandmother trudged across Manchester to take the pies she had baked for her grandchildren who also happened to be her stepchildren.

  'Flesh and blood.' She had stiffened her chin when neighbours twitched their eyebrows, calling it a dirty scandal. 'They're my own flesh and blood, come what may.'

  Now, after a lifetime of lorry driving, my grandfather had died of a heart attack without ever letting his children know that they were his grandchildren too.

  'They'd be gutted,' my grandmother fretted, so the secret was kept from them, though I had worked it out by stringing together grown-ups' whispers and comparing all the eyes and

  noses in the family photographs ranged along Gran's window ledge.

  My mother woke in the night sometimes, sobbing because her family had been mangled. Still, our step^ther drove us out to visit my Auntie Vera on the odd Sunday afternoon. Our car strained up the hill, chugging, then Laurie and I peeled ourselves from the sweating vinyl seats to go dashing across the back fields with our cousins. At teatime, we came in from the cold and crowded around the kitchen table, noses red, feet kicking underneath. 'Mmm!' We were all nudges and murmurs when Auntie Vera pulled a steaming sponge cake from the oven and set it in the middle of the table.

  'Want a piece, Andy, love?' Her great big bosoms beckoned behind the cake. 'It's your favourite: lovely vanilla.'

  I looked up at my stepfather to see if it was all right. The furrow between his brows said it was not. We were not allowed to accept treats when we went visiting with him. The cake loomed there, a heavenly pillow, until my aunt took a knife and cut eight hot slabs from it.

  Plenty. I breathed in lovely vanilla, lovely vanilla . ..

  When I looked up from the crumbs, my stepfather's eyes glowered black under hooded eyelids. He motioned to the door; I swallowed and scraped back my chair. The carved sponge was still steaming in the middle of the table.

  'What have I told you about being greedy, you little sod?'

  It felt frosty outside. I shivered.

  'I wasn't being greedy, Daddy: I was just being polite.'

  'You don't go shovelling down cake to make me look bad!' My stepfather yanked at my hair and jerked my head back against the stone wall. 'You want everyone to think I don't feed you properly?'

  The stones of the wall cut into my head. I whispered, 'I just ate it to be polite. Dad, after Auntie Vera had baked it for us.'

  He lowered his face to mine, his eyebrows meeting in the middle. 'You know fucking not to.'

  His spitde was in my face. The stones were cutting in. I began to cry. My stepfather fastened his moist hand over my mouth and shoved my head back harder against the wall.

  'Shut it! Shut them tears up before I give you what for.'

  I shut them up behind my damp, hot face and he slid his palm from my mouth.

  'Now go inside and be quiet.'

  I went inside and was quiet.

  It was the same whenever we went visiting with him. People wafted biscuits and cups of tea under our noses; we always said no. We had to sit still and be quiet when our stepfather was in the room, if we didn't want a good hiding when we got home.

  Often my smacks came out of the blue, when I thought I had been quiet and well behaved. Sometimes I was able to work out what a smack was for, and could even tell when one was coming: a hot wave would rush up my neck and tingle around the edges of my face.

  My stepfather's favourite ornament was the fat porcelain Chinaman who was supposed to bring good luck. Instead of perching with all the other glass and china creatures on the spindly display stand, it squatted in the middle of the dining table. Our mother put it there, on a crocheted doily like a magic carpet, well out of harm's way. But one awftil afternoon, I knocked its head off with my high-bouncing ball. I balanced the face back on and prayed no one would notice. For days, it sat grinning over its potbelly, good as new, while we went through our meals. I stopped praying.

  In the middle of stewed cabbage one night, the head fell off with a clunk.

  'I'll knock your bloody head off!' My stepfather swiped at

  my face and caught me between the eyes, so that everything went fuzzy for a moment.

  On Sundays we had to be super-quiet and still so that our stepfather could enjoy what he called his day of rest. He snoozed in front of the gas fire while the rain slapped a wet, grey curtain against the window. The television droned through church services or sports or black-and-white films that left Laurie and me flummox
ed: men turning trembly and sweating, screeching about in cars and even grabbing their guns to sort out problems utterly invisible to us. I used to go and lie on the carpet under the dining table, reading with my book propped upside-down, so that the words would seem stranger and more exciting, running back-to-front along the lines. I was hooked on reading this way, but I could only do it under the table, where my stepfather couldn't see me. It got his goat when he caught me - 'flamin' little freak' - with my nose stuck in a book turned the wrong way up.

  This Sunday, I was under the table reading the new book my grandmother had bought me out of her pension money. Fairy tales: hardbacked and expensive. I was reading it the right way up, so I could enjoy the pictures. Coming to the end of the first story, where the ugly duckling sprouts wondrous white feathers, I kept skimming forward and peeking into the next story, to see what the litde mermaid might do in her watery world. Laurie was fidgeting with our plastic toy basket that bulged fiill of playthings being saved for our baby sister, now that we had outgrown them all. She pulled out our old red ball and teased it across the carpet to tickle my elbow. I caught it and held it, itching for a throw. I looked at the Chinaman, whose chubby cheeks had been glued to give him back his grin. I looked at my stepfather, dozing on the settee. Then I sat up and tossed the ball to Laurie. It made a small

  rubber thud. Our stepfather stirred, skipping a snore, and peered at us over his white belly. He spotted the ball through the legs of the dining table.

  'Put that bloody thing away before you break summat else!' His face twisted, furious for a second, then he sank back into the settee's cushions.

  I stuffed the ball into the basket with a sigh. 'God, I hate Sundays.'

  The words escaped him, but he caught the tone.

  'What was that?' He sat up.

  Dropping 'God', I told him, 'I hate Sundays.'

  My stepfather stood up, tightening his belt a notch.

  'You said you hate me, didn't you?'

  'I said I hate Sundays, Daddy, not you.' Looking up at him, I squeezed affection into the word 'Daddy'.

  'You said you hate me, Andrea. Admit it!'

  Behind the hardbacked fairy tales I denied it.

  My stepfather grabbed the book. He was going to have to teach me a lesson. Gripping the first page in a hairy fist, he said, 'Admit that's what you said: you hate me.'

  My lips opened, but nothing came out.

  My stepfather ripped the page and crumpled it in his fist. He tossed the pale paper ball on to the carpet. After that I admitted nothing, because I knew the book was gone. He tore out every single page to the end, to the empty spine and the cover that still said Fairy Tales, though all the endings had been scrunched into paper fists and scattered over the carpet.

  He stormed out into the rain, without his jacket. The door shuddered behind him. My mother made me wash my face while she washed hers. The day was in shreds. It was time for our weekly bath.

  Our mother used washing-up liquid on our hair. She clipped our toenails and our fingernails and trimmed our fringes sharp and high across our foreheads. She kissed me, and I went to

  bed knowing that Gran would never hear where her precious food money had ended up.

  When our stepfather staggered home reeking of whisky, ceramic hit the wall. We got used to the smash and the next-day stain, but eventually the wallpaper began to fade, and he and our mother decided to change it. Every wall had to be stripped of the old flowered paper my real father had pasted up before he drowned. We set to with clumsy metal scrapers.

  During the decorating, our mother and stepfather fixed a date at the domestic court where Laurie and I were to be adopted by Peter Hawkins.

  'A proper, legal family we'll be then,' our mother imagined. She zipped us into our matching party frocks, the ones with green and purple frills that made us feel like flowers.

  At court, Laurie and I stood gripping hands, trying not to gawp at the lion and the unicorn rearing up in gold on the wall above our heads. An official woman wearing a silver badge took us into a side room for questioning. There were no windows. She closed the dark wooden door and asked me:

  'Would you say that you are happy with your stepfather?'

  There had been a time ... There had been a time during the night when my stepfather slid his fingers under my blankets and touched me between the legs. Keeping my eyes closed tight, pretending to be asleep, I had rolled away, close to the wall, to stop it.

  I looked at the official woman, who smelt of apples. Pearly buttons ran straight up her shirt into a dead white collar. Her pen was poised above her clipboard. The silver badge blinked on her breast.

  Yes, I said, we were happy with our stepfather.

  The door opened, and we were ushered into a larger room

  with bright lights. Our stepfather signed some papers, and my new name was pronounced: Andrea Hawkins. We went home in our party dresses to eat spaghetti on toast. Our mother sprinkled cheese on top and melted it under the grill until it bubbled up, gold.

  After tea she let me hang about her skirt while she washed the dishes. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves, squeaking and squeaking against the plates, when she asked in a low voice, 'Andy, which of your two daddies do you love best?'

  My father used to croon Elvis ballads over his wooden guitar. His jacket was padded blue and smelt of turpentine and had pennies hidden in all the zip pockets. Sometimes he would let Laurie and me stay up long after bedtime, snoozing in his lap on the settee while he watched films starring werewolves or vampires; before carrying us up to bed, he would take us out into the back yard to blink at the moon, showing off its fat midnight light.

  My feet shifted and I looked to them for the right answer, the one that would make my mother feel nice.

  Before I could speak, my stepfather yelled from the stairway,

  "Ere, Andy, chuck: come and give us an 'and with this wallpaper.'

  I left my mother's skirts at the kitchen sink to join him on the stairs. He put a blunt, rusted blade into my hand and tousled my hair.

  'Good girl.'

  Biting my lip and making a fist around the handle, I pressed against the wall, scraping to peel off the paper and all its dead, stained flowers.

  Laurie and I were zipped nose to nose into an itchy sleeping ^bag on the settee while our bedroom was stripped and decorated. Our stepfather hired a bearded man who looked like Jesus to paste up the new wallpaper, but soon caught him using our telephone to make secret, long-distance calls. He dragged the man outside and punched him in the street, shoved him into his car and slammed the door on his foot. The car dribbled off with the driver's nose bleeding into his moustache, his half-used cans of paint wobbling on the back seat. My stomach churned because I was the one who had blabbed about the calls.

  It took a long time for our stepfather to paste up the wallpaper himself, but eventually our bedroom was a queasy sea green. A hollow plasterboard wall now divided it in two, with a sliding door to shut Laurie and me off in our bunk beds from Sarah in her cot. When our stepfather's mother, Nana Hawkins, came for tea, she shook her head in admiration.

  'You've done a smashing job, Pete, love.' She bounced our baby sister against her bosom: 'It's nice for our Sarah to have her own room, separate from the other two, like.'

  Because we were darker than Sarah, Nana Hawkins didn't consider us her proper grandchildren. When we stayed with her, she powdered her face in chalky layers before dragging us round the Bramhall shops, tutting over her purse at the extra money she was spending to feed us. Other blue-rinsed ladies, coming out of the shops, raised their eyebrows.

  'They're not yours, are they, Ida?'

  'They're our Pete's adopted,' she explained. 'Proper little Pakis, aren't they?'

  They laughed over our heads, flashing pink dentures.

  Nana's husband, Grandad Fred, had more time for us; while he was sitting in his armchair, watching the wresding, Laurie and I would clamber over his knees on to his squidgy lap. He wore brown nylon trouser
s and a blue string vest that let us fiddle with the moles lurking like mushrooms under his arms.

  'Off Grandad's knee!' Nana Hawkins came out of the kitchen, waving a spatula. 'Tea's ready, so sit still and shush up.'

  We sat on the settee in silence, eating out of bowls on our knees. Instead of knives and forks, Nana Hawkins gave us plastic spoons to shovel up the peas and potatoes she had mashed to hide the fact that there was no meat in the dish. We watched bubbles of green gloop swell and slowly burst in Nana's lava lamp while we let our food setde quiedy, the way we were told. Then we climbed back on to Grandad Fred's lap, to tickle him and whisper in his ear. He was a soft, squashed copy of our stepfather. Laurie and I were drawn to his chair and his sweet potato smell until Nana Hawkins called us upstairs one afternoon, into the bathroom.

  'You see these?' She sat on the toilet's carpeted lid, holding up a packet of pink, doughnut-shaped sponges. 'These,' she said, 'are your Grandad Fred's. He puts them in his trousers 'cause his bladder leaks: it's a medical condition.'

  She let Laurie squeeze one of the sponges.

  'Now then,' she stood up slowly, blotting out the light. 'Don't go bothering your grandad no more, or he'll have to go back to the doctor with his bad bladder.'

  We went downstairs and eyed Grandad Fred as he dozed in his armchair, before Nana's frown sent us outside to play.

  Their council house huddled widi lots of odiers - all exacdy die same - in a low, grey ring around a concrete playground. When Laurie and I went to dawdle on the swings, older kids shoved us off, calling us wogs and dirty Pakis. We insisted we were grandchildren of the Hawkinses at number seven, the ones with the brass lion knocker, and tried to explain that our real, dead father had been a quarter Italian, a quarter Maltese and half English.

  'Yer wot?' A skinhead stuck his broken nose into my face.