Susannah Rickards is a UK author. Her first collection, Hot Kitchen Snow (Salt Publishing), won the international Scott Prize. Her second is near completion. She teaches creative writing at Oxford University and Goldsmiths, London.
What kind of person are you, Amy Webb?
One spring Saturday just before your thirteenth birthday, midday sun streams through the tomato plants on your bedroom window, but you’re still in pajamas, cross-legged beside the gas fire, a jar of flour-and-water paste at your feet. You’re cutting images from back-issue Jackie magazines picked up last week at the Methodist jumble sale. Among them, a Summer Special bumper quiz to determine your personality type.
⬜ Squares are good at math and super-organized. As a Square, take care that friends don’t find your logical attitude toward heartbreak too cold for comfort.
You’re confidently not a Square.
△ Triangles have spiky personalities, quick to anger. People gravitate towards your drama and energy, but take care you don’t hurt them with that sharp tongue.
Each time you redo the quiz, your Triangle score rises.
™ Circles are kindly and simple with big hearts. As a Circle, you love animals and have to watch out that friends don’t take advantage of you.
On two occasions you’ve attempted the quiz and come out as an overall Circle. The accusation of simple-mindedness makes you feel distinctly Triangular.
Finally, covetably, ~ the Squiggle. If you’re a Squiggle, you’re a true artist. A visionary. Others find you mysterious and exotic. They long to share your sense of adventure. Your scatterbrain may frustrate your friends but your head is too far in the clouds to notice.
You’re in the process of redoing the quiz a third time, to transition from borderline Circle/Triangle to Squiggle.
A dishy guy bumps into you in the street. Do you:
a) Shout, ‘Oi, mate! Look where you’re going or you’ll be going where you’re looking.’
b) Apologize profusely and blush as he helps you to your feet.
c) Explain the pavement slab was proud of the horizontal by precisely 7mm at one end, causing the accident so, technically, neither of you is to blame.
d) Exclaim in a foreign language then whip out your camera and insist he pose for you. That rugged profile is perfect for your next exhibition.
For the third time, with gloomy honesty, you tick Circle-obvious b).
But the cuttings at your feet promise of a beguiling future. You are decorating your fire surround with a découpage that reflects the inner you. Biba models with kohl-smudged eyelids, Vogue sketches of willowy girls in purple velvet trouser suits, a detailed breakdown of the Taurean character—favorite color, mercifully, squiggishly: indigo; physical weakness: husky voice. You touch your throat.
You start pasting this elegant emergent you onto the gas fire surround, but the flour-and-water, made earlier with haste, is lumpy in parts, watery in others. The paper buckles and tears. A Biba beauty slides down the panel in dripping folds.
Your father comes into your bedroom, sees you, and frowns. He turns off the gas fire and opens a window.
‘Bit whiffy in here,’ he says. ‘When did you last clean out Claudius?’
‘Last Tuesday. Mum forgot to get sawdust.’
‘That’s not your mother’s job. It’s almost noon. Get dressed,’ he says. ‘We’re not the McCluskeys.’
The McCluskeys rent the terraced house next-door. Old Mrs. Mac lives in her quilted housecoat and rarely ventures beyond her front door. Her four adult children and their intermittent spouses move in, fight, move out, then in again. Currently, she has Nerene and Kenneth. There’s no sign of a Mr. McCluskey. Never was. Maybe he left when Kenneth was born basic.
‘Mum and I are going out to Alec’s gallery opening in Alnwick,’ your father tells you. ‘Back late tonight.’
You hear your mother’s light footsteps on the landing. The jasmine and orange blossom scent of her Je Reviens wafts into your room. You borrow it sometimes. On you it smells like a gas leak.
‘Girls,’ your mother calls through the house, ‘I’ve left you a cold plate in the kitchen for later. Miles, darling, are you ready?’
You long to hug her goodbye, to catch a glimpse of her slender body in its tiny Fenwick’s suit, her hair back-brushed like candy floss, her bright lips, but a sudden lethargy glues you to the floor. You want her to come to you. Her footsteps descend and the front door opens, creating a through draft that slams your bedroom door shut. Claudius squeaks on his wheel, abruptly industrious.
Your father is frowning at your mantelpiece. A stack of previously clipped images jut from it, animated by the breeze from the window.
‘These,’ he flicks them with his forefinger, ‘are a fire hazard. Accidents happen. It’s not a question of if but when. Don’t switch your heater back on. It’s a marvelous day.’ He turns his frown to you. ‘You should be out in it.’
Your parents go out for the day and your dad tells you not to turn your fire back on. Do you:
a) Obey him. Rules are made for reasons, right?
b) Head to the beach and build a driftwood bonfire instead. The fantasy figures that emerge from the flames inspire you.
c) Hug him and promise, then snuggle up in a cozy jumper to stay warm.
d) Switch it back on the moment he’s out the door. Who the heck is he to tell you what to do?
Oh, Amy.
. . .
You walk into town and spend the day trailing up and down the Handyside Arcade, gazing through the window of Fynde at the rose crushed-velvet t-shirt with medieval sleeves which is one fifth yours. You go in to make another downpayment on it, blushing as you hand over your fifty-pence piece, because Charlie from Fynde is speechlessly cool with her Pre-Raphaelite curls of copper hair and white tattoo of Chinese lettering on her wrist that means good fortune. She offers you a sample of perfume oil then dabs you with patchouli before you have a chance to pick strawberry, so for the rest of the day you smell like an unneutered cat.
You walk home. In the kitchen, you and your sister, Tish, plough through the cold plate your mother left of tinned ham and salad with homemade bread. The bread has caught and its crust is like brick, leaving charcoal smears on your fingertips. Afterwards, Tish steals a Black Sobranie from the stash your mother keeps behind the candied ginger on the top shelf of the larder. You light one, too, but hold the smoke inside your mouth just once, then leave the Sobranie in the ashtray, watching its black paper glow down to the golden filter.
Tish wants to watch Cannon. A young girl is alone in her flat when a hooded man enters. It scares you, but you keep her company. Dusk is sloping into the house, and although you think it’s great that your parents go out and leave you to your own devices, your spine thinks otherwise.
Halfway through Cannon’s investigations you get up and walk into the hall. Your new personality frieze beckons. The Sobranies and burnt bread reek through the house. Above the stairs a low-hanging mist swirls on the landing, as if someone had just left the steamy bathroom. But no one else is home. Only you and Tish.
You climb the stairs. The mist is not an optical illusion. It’s on the landing, snaking low around your ankles. And it isn’t mist. It’s smoke. It appears to be coming from the gap under your bedroom door. You open your door a crack and smoke hurtles out, catching the back of your throat and the surface of your eyeballs. Not a question of if but when. You lazy, disobedient, untrustworthy, sluggish, forgetful, incompetent, self-obessed, house-wrecking, unlovable, unforgivable brat.
You have accidentally set your house on fire. Do you:
a) I have not! I could never do such a thing. My father told me to turn the gas fire off and I always obey him.
b) Fill buckets with water and put out the blaze. Scrub and repaint the room. Hand-wash the curtains, carpets, continental quilt, and all your clothes. Polish windows, mirrors, and hard surfaces. By the time your parents return they’ll never even know it happened.
c) Weep. Sink to your knees on the swirling landing. Apologize. Beg forgiveness. Ask for help. Weep more. You are sorry, sorry, sorry.
d) Quietly close your bedroom door and turn your back on it. This isn’t happening. Deny all knowledge. It has nothing at all to do with you.
So that’s the sort of person you are, Amy Webb. Your heart is cold and your mind is still. This isn’t happening. It has nothing to do with you. You will deny all knowledge. You head for the stairs. You will go back into the lounge and sit beside Tish. You will find something casual to ask her as you walk in, to prove how very much you didn’t know anything at all about what isn’t happening anyway right now. Above all, and at any cost, you will maintain the illusion of your own innocence. Shame on you, Amy Webb. We have the measure of you now.
You are on the fifth stair, descending, when your heart screams Claudius!
Claudius has already known too much terror in his small life. Last Christmas, a girl you barely knew turned up on your doorstep with a padlocked tin in her arms.
‘I’m going skiing,’ she announced.
‘Oh,’ you said, hoping she wasn’t about to invite you. You’re not the skiing kind.
‘Our mothers said you’d take care of my gerbils.’
‘Right.’ You knew nothing of this.
She handed you the tin. ‘They’re in there,’ she said.
‘Don’t they need light and air?’
She pulled a face that told you such details had never occurred to her. ‘There’s a hole here.’ She showed you a gap in the tin, the size of an old penny. ‘Push food through it. Be quick. They’re vicious. They bite.’
That day you begged a cage from a friend whose mouse had died, took your father’s toolbox, locked yourself in the bathroom, and jemmied open the lid. Two gerbils on acrid yellowed newspaper quivered at the light. One fat, one skeletal. The fat one leapt from the tin, squeezed through a gap where the hot pipe came up through the floorboards, and was never seen again.
The other was Claudius. You named him after the stuttering pouch-cheeked hero of the BBC drama you loved. His companion had eaten all of Claudius’s food, one of his ears, and most of his tail. You lifted him onto your hand, ran a finger along his bony back, and whispered to him. You diluted TCP and bathed his raw gnawed ear and stub of a tail. Crushed a tiny fragment of your cat’s vitamin tablet into water and watched as he drank it thirstily. Offered him cabbage and a walnut. You walked to the library and borrowed a book on gerbil care, read it as you walked home and into the kitchen to cut him an apple and scoop up some sunflower seeds, known to make gerbils plump.
Until now he has lived in your room in his nest and his wheel when he isn’t tunneling up your arm under your sleeve or burrowing into your hair.
Now he is choking on smoke and flame because of you.
You flee back to your room and open the door. The smoke is a wall. You can’t see. You back out and close the door again.
Among the unsolicited advice your father doles out, he once instructed you on how to survive a fire. First, wrap a wet towel across your face to filter the smoke and keep your skin cool. And then either open the door and close the window to stop the fire from spreading or vice versa. You can’t remember; you weren’t listening much at the time. In the bathroom you dampen a towel and bind it around your head. Downstairs your sister is scaring herself with Cannon. You dare not call out to her. There’s no alternative now. Go in.
The room is invisible. Instinctively you close the door to stop the fire spreading. It’s that way round. You must find the window to clear some smoke and call for help, then locate Claudius and exit fast. You move through the solid air. The smoke is strangely cool and bitter through the wet towel. Your arms, outstretched, make tiny circles through the darkness, doubling as eyes. Your bare feet shuffle, treading on the abandoned paintbrush laden with flour-and-water paste from another life with other longings. You reach the window and your arms shoot straight through the glass. There is no glass. The window is still open from when your father complained about Claudius’s cage whiff.
You lean out to gulp in fresh air, look down, and see the McCluskeys’ kitchen next-door is molten orange. Their extension roof tiles are cracking and spears of flame are licking up the windows. For the briefest moment you are guilty of spreading the fire. And then you realize why your room is not hot. The smoke is gusting in through the open window. Your room is not on fire. Next-door’s kitchen is. Your own gas flame is a meek flicker of orange and blue. A heady glory rushes through you: not my fault. I’m free. You switch it off, grope a path around the furniture until you find Claudius, and leave.
Your neighbor’s house is on fire. Do you:
a) Tell your parents.
They’re out.
b) Call the fire brigade.
You have no phone.
c) Run into the street barefoot and shout for help.
No. You don’t do that. You’d like to, but your voice has retracted deep inside. You feel very calm and quiet.
d) Put Claudius in the front room downstairs, diametrically as far away from the McCluskeys’ fire as you can. Then tell your sister.
She switches off the television. ‘I thought there was a funny smell,’ she says.
Together you go into the street to watch for fire engines. There are none. The McCluskeys’ front room curtains are drawn and their lamps are lit. Figures move around slowly behind them like shadow play.
‘They’re in there,’ you say. ‘Maybe they don’t know there’s a fire.’
‘We should tell them,’ says Tish.
You go to the front door and ring then knock. They don’t answer. You open the letterbox and peer down the hall. The kitchen door is closed but scorched with a brown stain. Smoke snakes down the passageway. You ring and knock again. Eventually, Old Mrs. McCluskey comes to the door in her housecoat.
‘Your kitchen’s on fire!’
‘I know, pet,’ Mrs McCluskey says and closes the door on you gently.
Of all the things you expect from her: horror, grateful thanks, panic, you don’t know how to respond to this. You walk back down the path to where your sister stands in the dark street, watching for fire engines. ‘They know,’ you tell her.
‘Then shouldn’t they get out?’
You both return, both bang and shout. Mrs. McCluskey comes to the door again. ‘You need to get out of the house,’ you say.
Mrs. McCluskey just stares.
‘Come on.’ Your voice is bossy, masterful. You are Miles’s daughter when need be. ‘Come out and stand on the grass.’
Mrs. McCluskey regards her small front lawn with distaste. She’s wearing satin mules. She won’t consider mucking them up.
‘Has anyone called the fire brigade?’ your sister asks.
Mrs. McCluskey looks confused by the question. At last she says vaguely, ‘Kenneth went.’ She gestures down the road. On the next street, two blocks down, is a payphone.
‘Wait out here with us till they come.’
She won’t move. You grab her forearm. ‘You have to.’ She stares at you, mildly affronted. She’s used to being yanked and mauled but not by a small girl. Nevertheless, some instinct in her body gives way to physical force; she goes floppy and follows. You stand together on her lawn looking down the road for Kenneth’s return, up the road for the first hint of sirens.
‘It’s parky out here,’ says Mrs. McCluskey. ‘I’ll wait inside.’
‘It’s not safe.’
‘Well, Nerene’s in there,’ she tells you as though you’re daft.
‘Then get her out!’
‘Oh, she’ll not leave,’ she declares.
A rolling figure comes into view at the end of the street. It’s Kenneth. A string bag of canned beers and vodka bottles swings from his fingers and he’s whistling. You run towards him and meet under the orange sodium street lamp. He smiles down asthmatically at you.
‘Evening, pet,’ he says.
‘You have to get your family to leave the house.’
‘Eh?’
‘Until the fire brigade comes.’
‘Oh!’ He screws up his face at his own forgetfulness, stares down at his bag. The phone booth is next to the wine shop.
‘You didn’t phone them, did you?’
‘Ah, nah. Aaah,’ he says and swings the bag to soothe himself. The glass and cans chink. You think of the splitting slates on their roof, the spearheads of red and orange flames climbing through. Your house, terraced with theirs.
‘D’you think the Jamesons have a phone?’ asks Tish, appearing at your side. ‘I’m going to ask them.’ She crosses the street. Kenneth moves away from you. He’s shepherding his mother back inside.
You’re shouting now. Standing on the McCluskeys’ front path and scolding them. Your father’s scathing eloquence flows naturally from your lungs to your larynx and out. Mrs. McCluskey opens the door and her thin voice quails through to the lounge.
‘Nerene? Next door says you’ve to stand in the garden.’
Nerene wails something through the walls.
‘Well, I won’t if she won’t,’ Mrs. McCluskey snaps at you. ‘And she won’t cos of the dogs.’
The dogs are Rough Collies with white lions’ manes and red-gold hair, too handsome for the McCluskeys. They live in a shed in the yard and bark all night long. Nerene claims their kennel’s a palace compared to her room and she sleeps there sometimes.
‘The dogs’ll be fine in their kennel,’ you say.
‘They’re not in their kennel though, are they?’ Mrs. McCluskey seems cheered to have got one up on you. ‘They’ve took fright in the attic.’
Nerene appears in the lounge doorway. She grips it to steady herself. ‘I cannot leave my babies. My doggies, they’re my babies,’ she wails. Behind her, down the passage, the scorch stain on the kitchen door spreads and blackens. The first flame licks through. Kenneth shuffles past Nerene, tinny in hand, and ambles into the front garden as if to enjoy the air.
‘I won’t go!’ Nerene screams. Kenneth catches your eye and raises his brow at you: my sister, eh?
Your own sister appears now, calm and businesslike. The Jamesons have been told and are calling the fire brigade.
‘Will you leave if we get the dogs out?’ you shout into the house at Nerene.
She totters, bewildered. ‘They’re—’ She points heavenward, like a Renaissance saint from your dad’s gallery slides. Behind her, the kitchen door frame burns gold and black.
And then suddenly you are on their stairs and so is your sister.
The smoke is different from the smoke in your bedroom. It hasn’t been cooled by or mixed with fresh night air. It’s hot and sticky and acrid. You climb. No wet towels are wrapped around your face this time. Already your chest feels tight and your skin prickles. The McCluskeys’ house swelters. The lights are all on. The lights are always all on at the McCluskeys. They don’t live in the frugal twilight of an evening like your parents do. They blaze.
When you look down, you see your own thighs bending and straightening, making their way up and up into the hot choking house. You’re not sure they’re still attached to your body.
The house is making a strange sound, like a high-pitched thunder. You wonder if the walls are about to split. You’re on the McCluskeys’ landing now, a mirror image of your own, yet unrecognizable with its nylon swags of décor. The house rumbles and whines again. A dog crouches on the stairwell above, his beautiful mane poking through the banisters. His eyes glare iridescent yellow. You call softly to him and he thunder-rumble-whines back at you. Perhaps your sister brushes past now, yapping orders at you, and you realize you haven’t moved in a while.
Time jumps like a bad film. Next thing you know, you’re on the attic stairs with your hands around a collar, tugging. There’s no deader weight in the world than a dog who’s decided not to move. You can’t drag him an inch. You’re almost horizontal, pulling in one direction as the collie braces his weight in the other. Perhaps your sister is screaming. Perhaps it’s advice that she’s screaming, but you can’t hear the words. The dog she’s saving is even higher up the stairs. Overhead, light bulbs flicker and die with a pop.
You pick up the dog. He is heavier than anything you’ve ever lifted in your life. Your thighs cramp with effort and you stagger across the landing to the head of the stairs. There are flames in the hall below, casting orange shadows up the walls. The front door is open, the night beyond a black oblong through the haze. You shout down but the McCluskeys have wised up. They are outside now on the lawn. You’d shout again but your breath is gone and the smoke tastes foul. Time slurs and stops. You’re at the head of the stairs forever, with a dog in your arms and you haven’t the strength to carry him down.
You are inside your neighbors’ burning house, burdened by a dog that weighs more than you. Do you:
a) Ditch the dog and shin down the stairs. Your life is too precious to risk.
b) Harness previously untapped superhuman strength, stagger through the flames, rescued dog aloft, to the safety of the front street and applause.
c) Die a heroic death, triggering an outpouring of love within the community. People flock to your funeral. Mr. Bailey, your physics master, sobs for having so grossly misjudged you. You look frail, laid out in a glass coffin in your rose crushed-velvet t-shirt, medieval sleeves draped decorously. Charlie from Fynde lays a single white rose over your heart and says she wished she’d known you better but always sensed you were special.
d) Discover a man in a helmet and shiny yellow trousers crouching beside you, bellowing into your face.
You can’t work out why he’s angry with you. What have you done? ‘Anyone else up here?’ he hollers. You say your sister, the attic, other dog, then wonder if it’s true. Has she already overtaken you? Maybe. Smoke closed your eyes. Can’t remember. You try to explain but he shoves past you, up the stairs. Another man, in helmet and yellow, hoists you and the dog off your feet. It hurts. You try to complain but smoke and throat and dog fur blur.
. . .
Time jumps again. It’s late at night. Your house is full of firemen and McCluskeys. They all want tea. You’ve run out of good cups. You’re standing tiptoe on a stool in your own kitchen, attempting to reach down the mugs with chips and stains, hooked on the highest shelves. The McCluskeys have commandeered your front room. Nerene is screeching, ‘My doggies. My babies.’ Firemen keep marching in and out of your hall in huge boots leaving sooty prints on the hallway rugs. Nerene has consumed an entire decanter of your father’s sherry and peed it into your sofa.
Into this fray, at last—at last!—come your parents. Your father, who mistrusts all men in uniform, disappears to take charge of and interrogate the firemen. Your mother grasps your arms.
‘We turned the corner and saw the fire engines right outside our house,’ she says. Her eyes glitter with gallery wine. She must be in shock because then she tells you, ‘I imagined body bags laid out on the front lawn and I was overcome with a terrible euphoria. All I could think was: my duties are done! I’m scot-free. But you’re alive. I am glad. Of course, I am glad.’
She pulls you into her delicate birdlike embrace. Her neck and her hair smell of Je Reviens orange blossom and jasmine. After the foul smelting of the McCluskey kitchen, you bury your face in it.
You are lying awake at night with your windows open because of the smoke. It’s raining. Claudius is working his wheel in his un-mucked out cage and it squeaks. In your neighbor’s yard below, the dogs bark incessantly in their kennel. Do you:
a) Sit up in bed and lean out? Even the rain smells of fire. Below you, the wreck of the McCluskeys’ kitchen looms, tarry and staved in.
b) Turn your pillow to the cool side and wonder if ‘euphoria’ has meanings you didn’t know.
c) Feel the rise and fall in your chest of relief that it wasn’t your fault.
d) Drift off as images of the day kaleidoscope into sleep: Vogue beauties and smoke; Triangles, Squiggles, Circles, and Squares; the baffled surfacing of an errand forgotten on Kenneth’s face; satin mules that cannot bear muck; flames like spears piercing up through the slates; a turning on the stair and the unendurable weight of a petrified dog in your arms.
e) All of the above.
This is who you are.
