The Fire Starters Page 5

  ‘Naw, I couldn’t give a toss about the insurance. I’m for moving in to one of them Folds tomorrow. I just don’t want the government getting their hands on my wee house. When you go into a home they take all your assets to pay the fees. It’s daylight robbery, so it is.’

  Sammy neither agrees nor disagrees. He’d like to move on. His back is toasting and he’s worried about the synthetic elements in his pullover. It won’t be long before they begin to melt. He thinks the old man’s lost it but he can’t, with any decency, leave an elderly person sitting on a bucket while his house burns down.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to call the fire brigade?’ he asks.

  The old man doesn’t answer. Instead he says, ‘I got one over them, did I not, son?’ and starts laughing hysterically, rocking backwards and forwards on his upturned bucket, like some mad eejit out on day release. ‘I got them bastards good.’

  ‘You certainly did,’ says Sammy. He feels tired all the way into his bones, the kind of tired that cannot be fixed with sleeping.

  The noise of the old man laughing wakes the dog. It begins to howl like a thing possessed. Then, it raises itself off the pavement, danders round the back of its owner and pisses, in stops and gushing starts, against the bucket. Sammy feels like his head’s on too tight. He steps behind a hedge to phone the fire brigade in private. He doesn’t want to disrespect the old man but he’s concerned about the houses on either side and the people, pets and various items of property currently contained within growing hotter by the moment.

  The girl on the 999 switchboard has a muddy Fermanagh accent. It is difficult to translate the words containing multiple vowels. She’s not particularly sharp on her consonants either but Sammy can still tell she’s not that worried about the old man’s fire. ‘Is anyone hurt?’ she asks. ‘Could you put it out yourself with a blanket? Is it, like, a famous building, or just an ordinary one? We’re having to prioritize old and important buildings at the minute. Like the City Hall or castles.’

  The waiting time for a fire engine (and, the girl has to be honest, with a fire of this size, it might just be a Transit van with extinguishers and buckets) is approximately twenty minutes, which, she continues, ‘isn’t too bad’, and ‘is way shorter than it will be tonight when the fire starters get going properly’.

  Sammy hangs up and goes to advise the neighbours that, though their homes are not yet burning, they should probably phone the emergency services pre-emptively. Informing the fire brigade that their home will be on fire in around twenty-five minutes’ time might be the difference between getting the blaze extinguished and watching it spread all the way down the row.

  As he walks to the end of the street, in the naïve hope of spotting a fire engine come earlier than predicted, Sammy thinks about the fires of his youth: the bonfires, the burnt-out houses, the furniture store at the bottom of the Newtownards Road, which they’d doused with petrol after the owners failed to pay their protection money, the shops he’d done over for insurance, and all those cars set alight for the sheer godless rush of wreaking havoc.

  They’d been wild keen on burning cars back in the day.

  Sammy specifically remembers the night they’d driven out of the city to the sticks, thirty miles north to one of the wee farming villages on the outskirts of Ballymena. He’d a bunch of hard lads piled into the back of his Ford Cortina so it rode low on the country lanes, backside grating on every hump and muddy hollow. It was 1986 and every one of them was carrying a gun. Sammy kept his in the glove compartment. He’d seen this in an American movie, Mean Streets or Dirty Harry. It made him feel like a gangster just knowing the gun was in there. Sometimes at traffic lights he’d flick open the glove compartment and let his fingers run along the cold, grey metal. He’d think about shooting somebody pulled up next to him at the lights. He could if he wanted to. There was only glass between them. Sammy never shot anyone at the traffic lights, but the thought of it was enough to get his blood up. He could feel it, whiskey warm, running through his veins and lungs.

  This one particular night had been in February or early March. In the country, without the interrupting grace of streetlamps, it was already pitch-black by five. He’d reversed the Cortina into the entrance of a field outside Cullybackey and left it there, its bonnet still steaming in the winter air. They’d purposely picked the sort of road you could get only one car down at a time. Cars went past slowly on these roads for fear of bends and loose cattle. When one came past, Sammy and his mates flagged it down with torches, held their guns against the driver’s head and screamed, ‘Sing “The Sash”, or we’ll pull the trigger and blow your brains out. You, and all them ones in the back seat.’

  The point had been to put the fear of God into every Taig they came across. The point had quickly become confused in the head-rush high of screaming at strangers in the dark. They’d felt like gods when the women cried and the men begged and the guns began to sweat in their cold hands. They’d felt untouchable. You didn’t need a Taig to get this feeling: any poor sod with a Skoda would do.

  Sometimes there’d been children in the cars and they’d let them drive on, waving them past with the guns in their fists, clearly showing. They were not degenerates. They would not hurt children on purpose, though they’d not the same patience with old people. The old Fenians were nearly worse than the young ones, speaking their gobbledygook language and bringing the Pope into everything. They’d no fear of the old priests either. There was a clatter of them living in a monastery beside Portglenone Forest, and all night they’d joked among themselves saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be deadly craic to go down there and burn the monastery, put the fear of proper God into them Holy Joes?’ Nuns were a different matter entirely. Nuns had always scared the living shit out of them. They wouldn’t have known what to do with one on an empty road so late at night. It would have been like coming across a ghost.

  They put balaclavas on each time they flagged down a car, rolling them upwards, over their noses, to smoke freely when the road was empty. The balaclavas would probably have been enough without guns. People, round here, knew what a covered face stood for. But they’d held up their guns anyway and, from time to time, turned into the darkness and emptied a bullet or two into the fields. The bang of it, echoing into the blackness, was a ludicrous sound, like something belonging in a movie. It made people scream, then cup the scream back into their mouths, as if trying to stop the panic leaking out.

  One young fella wet himself as soon as Sammy held up his gun. The stain, spreading out from his crotch and stretching down the length of his trousers, had been dark, like wine spilt on a sofa. He couldn’t even make it through the first verse of ‘The Sash’, though he swore blind he was a Protestant. If they wanted they could have seen on his driving licence that his name was William and his second name, Rodgers. They’d laughed at him, all four of them with their guns, nodding at the wet patch on his trousers, and their heads tilting towards his girlfriend, crying quietly in the passenger seat, as if to say, ‘Would you look at the cut of this one. What are you doing with a fella who pisses himself in the road?’

  When they’d stopped a car with Catholics in it they burnt the car out, left the owners standing by the side of the road and drove two or three miles to another spot. Sammy liked to think of the car fires flaring across the dark countryside, like beacons from the Norman times. There’d been only three cars that night but each one had felt like it was meant specifically for them. It was easy to tell the Catholic drivers from the Protestants. They didn’t know ‘The Sash’, couldn’t even make a stab at the tune. They had rosary beads hanging from their rear-view mirrors: wee tiny silver Jesus, swinging on his wee tiny silver cross. They’d the look of Catholics off them too, the smell of Catholics, evidence of their two dozen children littering the back seat. They’d beat the men up – just a bit and only with fists – for something to do. It was expected. But it was the burning they’d really come for. The fire was something you couldn’t do every day in Belfa
st, not without permission anyway. It was worth the drive just to see the cars catch and the drivers’ faces glow demon red as the owners watched their shiny Fords and Peugeots reduced to blackened ash.

  The third Catholic of the night had been different. After him, they’d lost interest in burning cars. They’d packed up the Cortina and driven back to the East, stopping in Antrim for a fish supper on the way.

  The third man had been driving around by himself: Ballymena via Cullybackey to Garvagh where he had a Chinese takeaway and a young wife waiting for him in his brand-new bungalow. They’d got all this off him by pressing a gun to his head, but he’d probably have told them anyway. He was cool like that, barely sweating in his sheepskin jacket. He asked if anyone minded him smoking and when they’d said, ‘Work away,’ offered all of them one from his packet. He’d known ‘The Sash’ but refused to sing it on the grounds that he was a Catholic and this sort of nonsense was demeaning. Sammy had punched him three or four times in the ribs for saying that, but the man barely flinched.

  ‘Are youse for burning the car, lads?’ he’d asked, as soon as he got his breath back. When they informed him that, yes, they were for burning his brand-new BMW, right to the ground, and slashing the tyres, he’d replied, ‘Well, I suppose there’s not much I can do to stop youse.’ Then he’d sat himself down on the grass verge and smoked the rest of his cigarettes, lighting one from the stub of the last. He’d not seemed at all bothered about losing his car, even when the petrol tank caught and the whole thing went up like Christmas.

  ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ Sammy had asked, standing over him with his gun, tracing the line of the man’s perfectly trimmed beard, down one side of his cheek, across his chin and up the other cheek, a gesture that started out a threat and, by the third stroke, felt painfully intimate, like something one man should not be doing to another.

  ‘I’ve great insurance on the motor,’ the man replied.

  That was enough to provoke a kind of fireball inside Sammy. He’d gone at the man’s face with the barrel of his gun, breaking his nose and blacking both eyes with the heel of his hand, causing those perfectly mown cheeks to cave in upon themselves, like underdone soufflé. His face, after Sammy had finished with him, was meat, with bits of bone and tooth whiting through the red. The others stood back, just watching: three black silhouettes burnt against the flames like those lads from the Bible in the fiery furnace.

  They’d left the man in a ditch, not dead but very close. After this none of them had any stomach left for fires. They turned the car and went back to Belfast. Sammy drove. All the way home he felt sick inside and that was not because of the mess he’d made of the man’s face. It was because the same man would get his insurance money. There was no way of ruining the bastard completely without killing him, and even then his Fenian of a wife would have the insurance, and by that stage it was too late to go back anyway. The peelers might have been there.

  Sammy could not stand the feeling of being beaten, even just a little bit. It stuck in his teeth and seemed to swell daily for weeks afterwards. It was the only thing he’d been able to think about clearly. Every night he’d close his eyes and there was that smug eejit in the sheepskin coat with his brand-new BMW, smiling, smiling, smiling, as if to say, ‘Who’s won now, Sammy Agnew?’

  He still thinks about this fella from Garvagh every time he sees a sheepskin jacket in the street or on TV. There are more of them out there than you’d think. Del Boy. Your man from Ballymena, who does the football results. Bloody David Beckham, posing with his missus in their matching coats. He’s thought about that night at least once a week for the last thirty years. He’s thinking about it more and more now that he’s surrounded by fire.

  Sammy doesn’t wait for the fire brigade to arrive. He gets to the end of the road and keeps on walking. He has a bad taste in his mouth. He knows himself capable of ruining anything he wants to ruin. He should go home and ask Mark if the same dark thing is in his mouth, if it’s the only thing that holds his interest now.

  He knows it is.

  He needs to tell his son that violence is a passed-down thing, like heart disease or cancer. It’s a kind of disease. Mark has caught it from him. It’s not his fault, none of it, not even the fires or the people who have been hurt.

  ‘It’s not your fault, son,’ he will say, laying a hand heavily on Mark’s shoulder. He will look the boy directly in the eye when he says this. He won’t be able to mean it entirely but he’s very good at lying.

  He will say all this and other kindly fluff, though he knows the situation is too complicated to resolve with a shouldered hand. There are things a father can carry for his son and other things that must be borne alone. Mark is almost a man now. He votes. He owns a car. He has an undergraduate degree in something to do with computers, which Sammy doesn’t quite understand. He is old enough to know that functional people do not start fires or incite others to start fires. He is old enough to deal with the repercussions.

  Old enough to make himself stop.

  Sammy thinks about his own hot anger. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It is like ice inside him waiting to melt and, once liquid, boil. There are nights when he lies awake beside his wife, one hand pressed against his ribcage, and he can feel the febrile thump of it trying to climb back out. But he never lets the anger win. He never raises his fists or even his voice. He has made a wall between himself and the old way. It is a high wall with no possibility of doors and, while the larger part of him feels responsible for Mark, the other part, the part that whines and cannot help but compare himself to other men, even his own son, insists that Mark is weak. Mark is evil. Mark is to be blamed for giving in.

  He wants to ruin the boy.

  He wants to give him every good thing.

  As Sammy walks towards the edge of the East, the road rises to meet the Castlereagh Hills. The houses expand. Terraced streets lead to semi-detached streets, then streets entirely populated by detached houses. The roads widen. There are more trees out here, more hedges, and lawns big enough to require a sit-on lawnmower.

  Sammy owns one of these houses. He has a garden to the front and a garden to the back. He is miles from where he first started. Yet distance has not made the slightest difference. He is still the same man he has always been. His son will always be his son. He opens the front door of his house, steps over the Welcome mat and tramps black fire tar all over the good carpet. There is nothing he can do to lift the stain. Tar sticks to everything it touches.

  The Girl Who Could Only Fall

  Ella stands barefoot on the branch. She never wears shoes when she’s attempting to fly. Her mother insists that she strip right down to her knickers. Now she’s older, and more self-conscious about the bumps and curves beginning to swell beneath her skin, Ella insists upon something more substantial: a bathing suit or leotard. Her mother agrees, so long as her legs and arms are bare. It is important not to add any extra weight, to preserve the impression of lightness. Not that it really matters. Ella could bind herself up with birthday balloons, suck helium straight from the canister, or pump her arms up and down, like a racing pigeon, and it would not make the smallest bit of difference. She’d still fall. Drop. Plummet to earth at a furious rate.

  Ella wraps her arms around the trunk. She can feel its damp bark grating against her fingertips. Her skin pressed against the tree’s brown is so white it’s almost glowing. There’s a purple-blue smudge on her left hip from last week’s fall, a pair of pink grazes beginning to crust across her kneecaps. Last week it was a wall. Today it’s a tree. They’ve tried stepladders, climbing frames, even a bridge. Seemingly there is no end to the high things you can push your daughter off for her own good. Ella looks down and notes the springy green grass circling the tree’s trunk. She’s grateful for it. There’s more give in lawn. Concrete is not so forgiving. A starling, rattled out of the tree’s upper branches, goes sweeping past her face. Ella envies its easy flight.

  As she edges forward she’s careful t
o keep her elbows tucked in. She can’t risk unfurling her wings. They’re covered in a thin membrane, like skin but easier torn, and she must avoid loose splinters. She eases out towards the branch’s tip, feeling it bow under her weight, curling her feet around its thin curve. Beneath her naked toes the branch teems with tiny creatures: woodlice, ants, microscopic mini-beasts. They’re drawn to Ella and the power that leaks out of her every time she touches. She feels the tickle of them crushing against her skin. She could stay here for hours. She honestly could. But it’s not what they want from her. It would be a waste of her wings.

  ‘Ready?’ shouts her father.

  ‘Ready,’ Ella replies.

  Twelve feet below he removes the ladder and steps back for a better view. Her mother has the video camera out. Ella unfolds her arms, letting her wings unfurl like pink sails lolloping in the breeze. She bends her knees and pushes off. For the smallest second she moves upwards. It’s only a second, but in this one small moment, Ella always believes. Then gravity grabs her by the ankles and drags her back to earth. She hits the ground rolling. She’s taught herself how to lessen the impact. There’s only so many times you can fall before you become an expert and Ella is only good for falling.

  4

  Siren

  This is how I meet Sophie’s mother, how I remember it, anyway. It’s easier to tell without hindsight. With hindsight I probably wouldn’t tell it at all. I’d know the end right from the start. More than likely I’d call in sick and stay at home. There would be nothing to remember then. No Sophie. No crisis looming. Life would be much as before: simpler, slower, less unknown.

  The first time I encounter her it is early June. Spring is still nipping at the summer’s heels. I’m signing the evening’s second death certificate when the call comes in.