Once in a House on Fire [antikvár]

My father drowned when I was five years old. A picture of me, framed in gold piasdc, was fished from his pocket and returned to my mother with a soggy wallet and a bimch of keys. The keys were to our new terraced house, which could now be paid for with his life insurance. Outside the house, my father's mini-van sat undriven. Days before his death, he had stencilled its sides in yellow: anthony clarke: painter and decorator. tel: 431 7677. Occasionally, newly-weds called up, wanting to have their homes decorated. My mother explained that the man they needed was dead. On the way home from his last paint job, he had stopped to take a pee, my mother said. He slipped in the mud, landed on a rock and drowned face down in a shallow stream. 'Less than four inches deep,' she told people. Strangers dropped by to mourn over tea and biscuits. 'Such an 'andsome young feller.' Everyone sighed at my father's photograph on the sideboard. 'What a waste!' My mother lost a lot of weight. Sometimes she would shake all over, after a visit from my father's ghost. He would wait for her on the stairs or in her bedroom at night, she told our granny, trying to reach out and touch her. 'Oh, luwie.' Granny held on to our mother's hand and