The Fire Starters Read online

  ‘Sorry, Dr Murray,’ the lady receptionist says. ‘I can’t understand what this woman’s talking about.’

  ‘Is she Polish?’ I ask.

  It’s a fair question. There are thousands of displaced Poles calling this city home now. No one in Belfast speaks Polish. (In certain parts of the city they have not yet mastered English.) Very few are inclined to try. Polish is a particularly uncompromising language. It is like spitting words. Even the best-intentioned of social workers can only stumble, club-tongued, through the basics.

  ‘Is she Polish?’ I repeat. ‘Or some sort of African?’

  Lately there have been a fair few Nigerians and Kenyans appearing around the East, like exotic holiday souvenirs. The locals – far too Lagan-centric to mark the subtleties between one impoverished arid country and the next – deem anyone darker than goat’s cheese more than likely African. They are not racists. They are simply under-travelled. They take all their learning from the television.

  ‘No, I don’t think she’s Polish,’ the lady receptionist replies. ‘She’s ranting in English. Not foreign, just sort of crazy.’

  ‘We don’t say “crazy”,’ I repeat automatically, my thirteenth repetition of the week. ‘We say “mentally ill”.’ I make a note not to let this particular lady receptionist answer after-hours calls again. In the background I can hear the sound of a cheap electric kettle farting towards climax. I sigh and rest my forehead on the steering wheel. ‘Can you pass the call on to my mobile, please?’

  ‘Are you sure you want me to do that, Dr Murray? We usually ignore the crazy patients – you know, leave them for the day staff.’

  ‘Mentally ill, Jean! The woman is mentally ill, not crazy!’

  ‘Sorry, Dr Murray. I’ll remember that for the next time I get a mad one on the phone. Will I pass her through to you?’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  I lift my forehead from the steering wheel. The lower part of a Renault diamond has left a fresh, furrowed frown between my eyebrows. I check my watch. It is seven minutes past three. This is the midpoint of the night shift and I’m only holding on by the hem of myself. If I’m not careful the idea of a drink will appear at the back of my head again. Then it will be at the front, and in the East, there are plenty of places you can go for drink, even at this time of night.

  The phone starts bleating at me: thin, tinny music from a popular children’s movie. This is not dignified, I think. We are an out-of-hours GP service. People could be calling about a death or a person who is dying. We should have classical music on hold, something like Wagner, not The Lion King. The lady receptionist is trying to transfer the call. She is not good with technology. It is surprising how many of the lady receptionists are thrown by the workings of a common telephone. The larger part of me hopes she will accidentally hang up. This is the best thing that could possibly happen. It wouldn’t be my fault. Even if the patient dies I could still say it wasn’t my fault and no one, not even Martyn, the eldest of my colleagues and something of a stickler for old-fashioned doctoring, could possibly expect me to shoulder the guilt.

  I usually ignore these calls. It’s considered quite acceptable to procrastinate past the cut-off point (which is approximately five a.m.), so there isn’t time to do anything more than file the mad ones, and leave them in a folder for the day staff. I loathe nights. An average night on call will include strokes, asthma attacks and languid circuits of the local nursing homes where they’ll be waiting on one or more patients to pass from age (specific diagnosis no longer necessary). I’ll be presented with acid indigestion, gastroenteritis, gallstones, arthritic tumbles and at least one set of neurotic new parents fussing over a meningitis rash that will invariably turn out to be eczema. I cover the inner East, from the ring road all the way down to the Lagan, a section of the city roughly six miles squared. I have been blessed with a mere pair of hands, one head and a single, now-ageing Renault estate. In normal circumstances, it is beyond my means or wherewithal to tackle the crazy patients.

  ‘I’m ready for her,’ I say, and Elton John quits plonking in my right ear. There is a silence on the line. I can hear my own breathing.

  I’m not ready for her. I’m always unprepared for the next patient. The possibility of what might come stumbling through the surgery door has kept me on nails for the last twelve years. I’m a good doctor, falling in the upper percentile of competency. In fairness, I’m not known for my bedside manner. Often the female patients will stop at Reception and say, ‘Is it possible to see someone aside from Dr Murray? It’s about women’s problems.’ It is not always about women’s problems but they are prepared to sit up to half an hour longer in the waiting room simply to avoid me. I know this though none of the lady receptionists has ever said anything specific. I take small blue pills for my nerves and insomnia, which has afforded me a more respectable excuse to self-medicate. If my parents had not been so set on medicine, I think I might have become a librarian. There are risks with literature but it is rare for death to result from the improper handling of a book.

  ‘I’m ready for her,’ I repeat, as much to myself as the lady receptionist, who has fallen silent now, sliding back into the secretarial abyss of filing cabinets, instant coffee and Post-it-covered patient files.

  ‘Hello,’ says a voice on the phone.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘You’ve reached the on-call doctor. How can I help you?’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Dr Murray.’

  ‘What’s your name for friends?’

  ‘My first name?’

  ‘Yes, your first name and your second name and whatever name your mammy called you when you were a wee lad.’

  I take a long breath and, with my left hand, reach over myself for the handle on the driver’s door. I lower the window by approximately one inch. The cold air catches at my face and pinches. In front of me the windscreen is stale with condensation. I can just about make out the sleazy Christmas blur of neon signs and stop lights blushing through the traffic spectrum: red and more red, orange, green, greener, greenest yet. I feel nauseous, my belly so light it’s as if it has migrated upwards to meet my lungs. It’s six hours since my last proper meal.

  ‘How can I help?’ I repeat, using the voice I keep for the elderly patients who are the bread and butter of my normal week, and for the occasional psychiatric patient, who will pass briefly through the health centre en route to a more specialized facility.

  ‘You can help me out by telling me your name,’ she replies obstinately. I picture her flirting with the telephone cord as she talks, twisting it into knotty kinks. I imagine her brown-haired. I have never seen much point in blondes.

  ‘Dr Murray.’

  ‘Not good enough! No first name, no information! I could be dying here and you’ll never know.’

  I think I hear her laugh, though it may well have been an overenthusiastic starling, pre-empting the sunrise by a good two hours. Earlier in the shift I’d have hung up at this point, filing her away for the morning staff. But the second death certificate of the evening has unsettled me and now I’m swimming through fog to find the right words and the right way to say them.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I say. ‘Just Jonathan.’

  ‘Jonathan,’ she repeats. ‘I’m going to call you Jonny.’

  I wish she hadn’t called me Jonny. The sound of it is tremendous on her tongue. She has caught at the very thinnest part of me and I don’t know how to say stop.

  ‘Jonny, I need you to come and help me. I’m dying here.’

  That is the worst thing she could possibly have said. I’m hooked now from all sides. ‘What are you dying of?’

  ‘Oh, any number of things: claustrophobia, boredom, thirst, loneliness … I haven’t seen the ocean for almost a week.’

  She laughs again, an honest-to-God fountain of a laugh, twinkling down the telephone line, so I can picture the wires actually glowing with the warmth of it. Laughing in the face of death, I think, and claw this thought back. I’m rom
anticizing the situation. I don’t feel at all like myself tonight. Just another junkie on a bender, I think, and this doesn’t ring particularly true either. ‘Have you taken something?’ I ask.

  ‘No, nothing at all,’ she shoots back. ‘I think that’s part of the problem. I can’t eat the food here. It gets stuck in my belly. It doesn’t come out anywhere. I think I might be dying.’

  ‘Be honest with me. If you’ve taken something just tell me. It makes everything easier if I know what you’ve taken.’

  ‘You want to know what I’ve taken?’ she hisses, suddenly serpentine, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve taken. I’ve taken a wrong turn, a bloody great wrong turn somewhere shy of Iceland. Now I’m grounded here, four storeys up, with not so much as a duck pond to keep things homely.’

  Common sense tells me to hang up. The old fears are pissing themselves: the fear of people and the fear of lacking people, the fear of being mocked by strangers. I should leave her for the day staff. Let them refer her to the psychiatric unit. Let them conquer the paperwork mountains and process the little blue pills and listen to her lunatic ravings. I sigh. My breath leaves a hoary circle on the window just above the dashboard. ‘Where do you live?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t live anywhere,’ she replies. ‘But I’m crashing in this flat, fourth floor, top of the Castlereagh Road.’

  ‘Hold on,’ I hear myself say. It’s not my voice making the words but my mouth is moving. ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘Don’t take the lift. It smells of cat piss.’

  She hangs up. I turn the keys in the ignition, simultaneously fastening my seatbelt. The Renault coughs twice and splutters into action, jerking forwards with arthritic abandon. I pull a wide U-turn and head east.

  Later, much later, I will try to piece this night together, stringing one half-remembered moment to the next, like a series of mismatched beads. I will never be able to come up with a reasonable explanation.

  I park the car on the road, removing my doctor’s badge from the dashboard for fear the Renault will once again fall victim to the local addicts, who seem to consider me a free delivery service. I lift my medical bag from the boot, slip into a grizzled tweed blazer – a gift from my mother some six Christmases ago – and, thus armed, contemplate her block of flats in all its blunted glory.

  The grey concrete, the cubic red windows and crude lines make it look like a child’s notion of a building. Everything is stacked, and there are no trees to break up the straightness. Only one window in the block is illuminated. It peers down at me judgementally: a great godless eye, butter blond and unblinking. I think about sliding back into the Renault and beating a tactical retreat to the safety of some petrol station forecourt. Over in Rosetta, a police siren stutters twice and shrieks into vicious, teeming life. I am startled by the scream of it.

  I take the gravelled area in front of the building in five measured strides, draw breath and hold it against the stench of piss and stale cider, warm rubbish, aerosol, animal and weathered human. Remembering her advice, I avoid the lift and, with cautious deliberation, make my way up eight squat flights to the fourth floor. The medical bag, swinging like a pendulum against my thigh, counts the steps for me. As I climb I hold the horror tightly, imagining it as an actual lump inside my ribcage. ‘She could be dead already,’ I tell myself. ‘She could have OD’d or slit her wrists with a safety razor. She could be blue and bloated, drowning in her own vomit.’

  Any number of possible horrors may be hanging behind the front door. If I had more time, I’d make a list of the very worst. I find lists tremendously helpful. But I don’t need a list to help me realize that the thing I fear most is her presence: alive and staring at me, hungrily, with that voice.

  The front door of her flat is wedged open with a battered tin of Campbell’s chicken soup. I remove it as I enter, toe poking it into the hall. The door slams behind me, settling sharply into its frame.

  ‘Hey,’ she calls triumphantly. ‘Jonny, I knew you’d come.’ She is not dead, or even close to dying.

  I can hear her clearly but I’m struggling to distinguish her in the dark. The room’s features – furniture, wallpaper and occupants – are charcoal grey and furry, as if viewed through a sheet of tissue paper. I stand by the door, allowing my eyes to adjust. The space is a strange composite of living room, kitchen and – I’m guessing – bedroom. A single door, positioned to the right of the electric cooker, insinuates a second room, a bathroom most likely. I hold my ground by the front door, foot-anchored but leaning forwards, as if unsure whether to enter or run.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I call into the darkness. ‘Any better now?’

  ‘I’m still dying,’ she replies. ‘You’d better come over here and examine me.’

  Though I’ve been a doctor for almost twelve years now and examine dozens of patients daily, thousands per year, the word ‘examine’ has never before sounded so illicit. A thing pitches forwards inside me. It is like a magnet. No, this is not quite right. It is like something more dangerous, a cruise missile, perhaps.

  ‘Um, no,’ I say. I screw my heels deep into the ancient carpet. It is blue with faded fleur-de-lis swirls in turquoise. ‘Why don’t you describe your symptoms and I’ll just diagnose you from here?’

  ‘I’m dying,’ she says. ‘I don’t have symptoms. I’m just dying.’

  ‘And have you been dying for a long time?’

  ‘Centuries.’

  ‘Is it painful?’

  ‘Excruciating.’

  ‘Is there anything in particular which exacerbates your condition?’

  ‘This bloody city for one thing.’

  ‘Is there anything that helps?’

  ‘Company,’ she says, and though my heels hold their ground and my ribcage remains stoic to the last, it is impossible to stop my rebel spine sliding forwards. Reluctantly, the rest of me ventures into the darkness, chin first, frowning eyebrows, teeth and elbows, stomach muscles, knees, fingernails, and last – thick with reservations – my cotton-clad ankles.

  ‘That’s better,’ she says, as I stand over her, still clutching my doctor’s bag, like an excuse for what will come after. ‘I wanted to see what you looked like.’

  ‘I look like this,’ I say, and for the first time in almost twenty years, I wonder what I actually look like. ‘What do you look like?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replies. ‘I’ve never seen myself. Maybe you can tell me.’

  I can’t really see her. One arm is visible and also the porcelain arc of what might be a heel or could, just as easily, be an abandoned teacup. The better part of her is buried. Her voice, though instantly familiar, is struggling to surface from beneath a muffled mound of duvets and blankets, carpet tiles and old coats. Still as glass and barely lit, she gives the impression of a hastily wrapped corpse. I can’t stop staring. I am only eyes and, behind the eyes, a mind like a camera, taking notes. Nothing good will come of staying here. Just the two of us, moving closer. I already know this. Just as I know myself incapable of leaving.

  ‘Stop staring,’ she says.

  I stare harder. ‘I’m looking for clues,’ I say. ‘Maybe I could stop you dying if I was able to see you properly. Can I turn the lights on?’

  ‘No lights,’ she snaps, and tunnels deeper. I can see the swell of her, swimming like a mountain range beneath the blankets.

  ‘Come and find me,’ she mumbles. Her words seem to float upwards in tiny handfuls, bursting on the surface, like a series of aquarium air pockets.

  This is not something I’m capable of explaining, either in the moment or later, with several months of hindsight. Good sense leaves me every time she opens her mouth. I’m drawn to her, Medicine is no longer a decent excuse for what I’m doing here. This both shames and thrills me. I’m just as feeble, just as infectious and fading, as the people I call patients. I’ve always known this but now it is a comfort to me. The simplest explanation is desire, and granted, there are lusty little itches running the length of me every time
she speaks. But even desire falls far short of the undulating contractions currently waging war on my brain. My tweed blazer shrinks, like a boa constrictor. My polyester underwear sweats disagreeably. My stethoscope threatens to strangle me for my own good. Even my short-back-and-sides appears to be rising rebelliously about my ears. I feel like a man standing over a woman. This is something I’ve only ever experienced on television.

  I do not want to be a doctor in her presence. I set my medical bag at her feet. It falls open, spilling pills and potions and sterile bandages, like flat white rivers rolling across the filthy carpet. I prise my shoes off, one stiff heel at a time, remove my stethoscope and, attired as an average man, peel her, blanket by blanketty layer. As if she is an onion. When I finally arrive at cold cream flesh I am surprised to find her freckled and average, a little thicker in the thigh than I’d imagined. Her face is the pale face of a girl you’d see carrying eggs or milk in an old painting. She has very dark eyes. Not cold. Just dark. Hair as dark and swimming as her eyes. She laughs at my cold fingers and laughs at my cotton socks. I don’t mind. I peel my own clothes off and stand before her naked, letting her look all over me. We don’t dance but I know, with her, I could. She doesn’t ask if I’m happy or having a good time or if I want to leave. It’s as if she knows what I’m thinking or, perhaps, she’s telling me what to think. I’m not bothered either way.

  I’m having the only time of my life.

  ‘I’m having the time of my life,’ I say over and over again.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ she says.

  She keeps me in her bed, starving, for three full days. Rising, on the third day, with an empty belly and seething static hair, I find her perched upon the kitchen bench observing me keenly. She’s wearing the living-room curtains or, rather, one half of the pair. The remaining curtain hangs morosely from the window, a crushed velvet divorcee, humiliated by its inability to close. She is painting her toenails green.

  ‘I should go,’ I say. ‘I have other patients. I’ve been here for hours.’