My childhood home was a hard-won thing. My parents were the first in the village to get a divorce. Separation was common, affairs were common, disappearing was common, secret lives were more than regular. Divorce was not. Divorce drew a line.
I once asked mum why she pushed for it. She said she wanted the house in her name. Her home. She wanted to stand in front of a judge and have it declared hers. She wanted a new man, a man of good standing, to tell the man who didn’t love her anymore what was no longer his.
A year after the divorce we moved into a new house, which was on the road behind the divorce house but much smaller. We swapped with a recently married couple about to have their first baby. When the newlyweds arrived to move in, their van bursting with joyous potential, the man my mum had managed to convince to help us the night before in the pub had not turned up. So we (my mum and I) had to move all our furniture out onto the street, only partly dismantled. Once the house was empty enough for the couple to fit in, we sat outside on our sofa hoping that something in the situation would give, that any man would remember us and show up. The newlyweds parked their removal van on the drive while a seemingly never-ending procession of friends, parents and colleagues carried neatly labeled boxes and still-packaged white goods through our old front door. You could see in their eyes they hoped we were not a premonition. Eventually some of the newlyweds’ friends took pity on us and carried the sofa and the other big items around the corner to our new house. I followed behind, my small, awkward eight-year-old arms stretched to capacity, pulling suitcases full of clothes and toys along the pavement.
My mum barricaded the windows of this small house with determination, knowing she would leave me there for hours while she went into town to earn money. She sat behind a desk at an office in an old school where she would sometimes meet my aunt for lunch in the playground. She worked full time and the commute stretched that day to its limits, hours on a stuffy bus in the useless in-between of work and home.
In the first year the nighttime was the most threatening. In the dark as the house creaked its weary bones, my mum would run to the top of the landing, tugging on the bathroom light cord repeatedly. HELLO HELLO HELLO. As if this manically aggressive welcome would disarm any intruder. Her obsession with invasion became consuming. When sitting at home after school, our tiny house, still too big to hold my tiny body, would vibrate with the shrill ringing of the phone. She called every half-hour while she was at work. This was a daily drill so I could recite the safety codes she had given me that morning. Those I should give when I was safe and those I should give if an attacker was standing over me with a cartoonishly big knife. “Yes I have homework, Tudors today” for a safe afternoon, “No I was very bad at school today and we had to cover Jack the Ripper” if I was about to get attacked. These codes changed every day so if we were being observed over a period of time an intruder could not pretend to be me on the phone in order to perform my safety.
We ran drills for the codes before I went to sleep, the softness of the pillows which she tucked under each arm to stop me falling out of bed cushioning the violent ideas. The scratchiness of the frills and bows of the bedding pricking through the towelette of my pyjamas.
When she would finally get home each day, she would knock, calm and assured. I would poke my stubby fingers through the letter box holding the flap open and ask her for the password we had agreed that morning. These passwords would often be centred around whatever was for tea that night: ‘baked potato’, ‘chicken kiev’, ‘mini pizza’ and so on. This was another primitive measure, this time to make sure no one was coming to the door disguised as her.
Once confirmed I would clunk the lock open, the keys loaded with keyrings, the plastic shapes decorated with cartoon characters and holiday destinations clacking out a fanfare to welcome her home. When it was raining, as it so often did, her eyeliner would be streaked down her face, her hair matted to her head, revealing the grey I was always tasked with dyeing while she was in the bath.
“Oh my little girl”, she would sigh every time I let her in.
This same door would bear the brunt of the furtive small knocks from women in the evening who would come in cowering from the glare of the road. The same women who ignored us in the street, who would never acknowledge me leaving the school gates alone. Now, in the anonymity of night, they called on my mum, trying to unknot the riddle of divorce. I would sit on the stairs and listen while my mum would mention words like ‘solicitor’ and ‘legal documents’, expensive words which seemed totally alien.
As I got older and began high school, I acquired a certain bravado in my alone time. My patrols of the house began to lessen and I became nonchalant about security, sometimes only locking the door just in time for her arriving home. My safety was a complete performance. In adolescence a village shrinks. This made me brave, even a little arrogant. While she was at work I would lie in the garden blasting music from my third-hand minidisc player, jangling guitars and thumping drums compounding and enlivening my rebellion, tinny headphones making me oblivious to any potential threats. I would check my watch repeatedly to make sure I didn’t miss my half-hourly calls, the landline constantly dragging me back to the house, to the reality of me and her.
The acquisition of a white cordless landline bolstered my boldness. I quickly realised that I could take the phone with me to my friend’s house two doors down. We would lounge on her bed shushing each other when it rang while I tried to imbue a sense of complete safety in my voice when I answered it. As soon as I hung up we would collapse in breathless giggles knowing we had another half hour to daydream about the marriages, the children, the places to live other than here, our feet entangled all the while.
It quickly became normal for me to go to the shops or take walks in the gaps between check-ins. I’d pay for chocolate bars with the 2ps she had saved in jars round the house. The big cordless phone, a hunk of clumsy plastic bouncing against my hip in one of her handbags draped over my shoulder.
The reach of the phone had become clear to me, through some risky trial and error, and because its radius was small, I could only walk somewhere that I could get back from in half an hour. This would often lead to rushed transactions, or trips abandoned halfway because I had frittered my journey time looking at a horse drinking from an old bath or picking flowers to make ad hoc bouquets for untended graves in the church yard.
After a few years I would buy single cigarettes from Tommy Lupton in the year above, taking 20ps from mum’s coat pockets; the change leftover from her bus fares. On my walks I would crouch down in the thickets off the bridle paths and strike one of the matches from the box we would reserve for birthday candles. I would rock back on my heels, breathing the smoke out like an exhausted mum getting her first moment to herself of the day. On the way home, humming with the scent of smoke, I would pick fronds from the conifers that grew outside the bigger houses and rub them between my fingertips, green stains in the ridges of my fingers, the very particular smell masking each danger I had been sucking on. This habit led to frenetic toothbrushing in the ten minutes before she got home. It’s clear to me now, she must have known about the money and most likely the smoking, and I’m left with a complicated embarrassment.
One day I was lying on the sofa in the dark. I had taken to closing the curtains early as I liked to watch my after-school programmes without the glare of the sun. The phone as usual was by my side like a trusty pet and we lay there decompressing from a day of teenage dramas. I must have dozed off, for longer than I realised. Time as a teen was flexible.
I was woken with a start by frenzied banging on the door and the flap of the letter box being cracked like desperate thunder. It never occurred to me that the phone hadn’t rung and now the flat battery exposed my betrayals. She was out there, screaming, howling, “My baby, my baby, my little baby”. I grappled desperately for the keys, with a fear so deeply unknown. Phone thrown on the stairs, I wrenched the door open, its plastic seal ripping away from the frame.
She stood on the drive, her eyes gaped with relief. Her face softened and she fell silent as I stood there, all skin and limbs intact, framed by our protected little house and confused by her unpredictable return.
It wasn’t until I looked past her down the road that I saw the flames rising up from behind her beaming face, and saw my friend’s house was burning to the ground.
I moved aside to let her in, expecting us to flee, to run round in a fever grabbing our most precious possessions in case the flames caught on and got passed down the street. Or for her to pull me outside to stand on the street in my slippers, joining the line of terrified but enthralled neighbours gathered in the middle of the road. Instead, she simply stepped over the threshold of our house, turned around, locked the door and went to bed.
“If they want us out, they’ll knock”, she said.