The Fire Starters

by Jan Carson

  Mark reminds Sammy of himself as a boy. This is enough to keep him up at night, nipping whiskey from a coffee mug. Yet when he sees the child flying up and down the hill on his bike, standing soldier straight on the pedals and laughing as an eight-year-old should laugh – all open-mouthed and gap-toothed – Sammy can catch his concern by the throat and hope.

  ‘Everything is going to be all right,’ he tells himself.

  There is more good in the boy than evil. He is five parts Pamela to every ounce of his da. He has his mother’s looks, after all. Everyone says so, even strangers. All summer Sammy anchors himself to these cold hopes. He tries not to notice the rage when it comes flying out of Mark on the football pitch or at the dinner table. He looks sideways when other children fall off their bikes and there is Mark, laughing at their bloody knees and broken teeth, laughing with a cruel adult intonation. He takes pains to call it curiosity, natural scientific curiosity, when he stumbles upon wasps and other insects drowned in tumblers of cold water. He knows his son has done this, by himself, for badness. Sammy tries to see what he wants to see in the boy and lets his eye slide loosely over everything else. He can ignore anything, even the knives, but the incident with the chicken shed is like a mountain that won’t let him pass by. It is so very calculated.

  It starts innocently enough. Lauren is scared of the swans in Victoria Park. This is hardly surprising. She’s always been a nervous child and the swans are a notoriously vicious breed, prone to chase small children and hiss, like hot kettles, when adults approach the water’s edge. Lots of children are scared of swans and rightly so: a swan, when provoked, can snap a grown man’s arm so it splinters like a bent toothpick. Neither Sammy nor Pamela is overly concerned about the swans.

  Then Lauren develops a fear of ducks. Ducks are different. Children should love ducks. Ducks are printed on the side of Lauren’s yellow welly boots and they are in her baby books, quack, quack, quacking, while the pigs on the opposite page go, ‘Oink!’ There is nothing threatening about a duck. They begin to grow a little more concerned. They play her videos of cartoon ducks, trying to lift the edge of her fear. They take her to the pond’s edge and hold her in their arms while scattering breadcrumbs in wide circles around their own feet. ‘Look,’ they say, ‘the wee ducks wouldn’t hurt you. They’re only after your bread.’ Lauren howls, like a woman in labour. She claws her mother’s neck in panic. When they get home, Sammy notices she has wet herself for the first time in more than two years.

  The situation spirals. Three days before the start of term Lauren decides that she is terrified of all the birds in the world. ‘Even penguins,’ she says, though she is well aware that Belfast does not have wild penguins. She purges her bedroom of birds, chucking children’s books, stuffed animals and plastic ephemera straight into the kitchen bin. The very act of engaging with pretend birds leaves her trembling. She is up five times through the night with nightmares.

  Sammy wonders if they should take her to the doctor. Pamela says not to be so daft. There’s nothing can be done with medicine. It’s just a phase. The next evening he catches his wife praying the bird fear out of their sleeping daughter. Her hands rest gently on Lauren’s forehead like a priest conferring blessing. They are not a religious family, though they were both brought up in the Church. Under pressure it is strange to see his wife default to prayer. He stands at Lauren’s bedroom door and listens. Pamela is only saying the Lord’s Prayer with a bit added on about birds. This is the only prayer she can remember entirely.

  Prayer doesn’t work. Lauren refuses to go outside for fear of the pigeons strung across the telephone wire. She is already testing out the idea of not going to school. ‘There might be birds there,’ she explains.

  Pamela is firm with the child. ‘Enough of your nonsense,’ she says.

  She lifts Lauren straight off the living-room sofa. This is some manoeuvre. The child is big for seven and as hefty as her dad. Pamela staggers under the weight as she carries her through the patio doors and into the back garden. Lauren is a limpet: arms and legs wrapped round her mother, like a baby koala, but she is outside and she is not screaming. Surely this is progress. Sammy, watching at the kitchen window, smiles and waves to them both. ‘Good girl,’ he shouts, through the open door. ‘Do you want a wee dish of ice cream for supper?’

  He hopes this will be the end of the phase. They’ve been calling it a phase rather than an actual problem. A phase, like the time Mark went off white bread, or when Christopher would wear only the one pair of trousers for two months straight. All is looking hopeful until Lauren spots a starling on next door’s roof and, with a wail that has the neighbours raising their blinds, kicks her mother in the ribs and comes bolting back into the house. This sets a precedent for the next week. Lauren will go outside only if she can’t see a bird. She enters and exits school with her anorak hood drawn tightly over her head. She refuses to go into the playground with the other children at break time. She keeps the entire family trapped inside the electric doors at Tesco for five minutes because there is a pigeon between her and the car. Eventually Mark goes at it, kicking. Mark has no patience with his sister. Mark has no patience with anyone. There is no weakness in him and he cannot tolerate weakness in others.

  He is, by his own admission, trying to help Lauren when he locks her in next door’s chicken shed. The neighbours believe him. He turns on the tears for their benefit, does his trick with the big doe eyes. Why wouldn’t they believe him? They are used to ordinary children who are occasionally naughty but never, or only on television, actually cruel. Sammy does not believe Mark. It is Sammy who finds him leaning against the chicken shed, one ear pressed into its wooden frame, all the better to hear his sister howling, all the better to hear her fingernails bloodying themselves against the locked door and the chickens flustering round her head, like mad, feathered hurricanes.

  For a brief moment, mere seconds, Sammy stands at the top of his neighbours’ garden and watches his son. There is a look on the boy’s face he has seen on the face of preachers, and footballers, firing the ball into the back of the net. The name for this look is rapture. Sammy’s seen it on his own face: once reflected in the window of a burning car, and once in the early days with Pamela, her face as loose and sex-soft as his own. As soon as Mark spots his father he steps away from the chicken shed and holds up his hands, like an innocent criminal. ‘I was only trying to fix her, Dad,’ he says. Then he lets the tears out. But they’re only in the corner of his eyes, not the black parts, which are incapable of lying.

  That night Sammy beats Mark with a wooden spoon. It has taken at least four hours to ease the hysteria out of Lauren. It has taken Calpol and hot chocolate and Pamela curled up next to her in bed with arms full of stuffed animals. He beats Mark with the bedroom door open so his wife can hear and intervene if he cannot stop himself. The boy doesn’t scream or cry, but a dry gasp, like a stuck cough, comes scuttling out of him each time the spoon lands on his backside. Sammy never beats his son again. He is scared he might kill the child. There is something in him that wants hitting.

  After the chicken shed Sammy is afraid for Mark in a way he has never feared for himself. The same rough blood runs through them both, but Mark is so much sharper than he has ever been. For the first time Sammy is glad of his own thick head, which could never see further than the next hard punch. He knows what it is to hurt people. He has felt bones splinter beneath his fists, and scrubbed strangers’ blood from his hands and face. Violence has never been a concept for Sammy. It has always been a physical thing, heavy as a breeze block.

  Mark is different. Mark has the ability to hurt people without actually touching them. It is the distance that thrills him, that makes him feel like God. This, Sammy knows, is a kind of greatness. He is sometimes jealous of his son who, even at eight, is quicker than his father and mother combined. This, Sammy also knows, is the worst kind of power: fists can be held down or even severed, but a mind like Mark’s is impossible to contain. He is afraid of
his son. There is no softness in him, not even with his mother.

  Sammy tells Pamela that the chicken shed was an accident. He cannot look at her directly when he says this. He doesn’t want to see her eyes swimming, trying hard to believe that everything is going to be OK. Everything is not going to be OK. They both know this. But Pamela is a kinder person than Sammy and inclined to see the good in everyone. Though they muddle through for the younger kids’ sake, soon there will be little left between them but a thick cloud of disappointment. And guilt.

  Then it is mid-September 2001. Lauren is still itchy around birds but she’s seeing a counsellor now. The counsellor is confident she’ll be fine by Christmas. Just in time for robin redbreasts and all the doves of peace. The end of the world has just happened in New York and they’ve decided not to let the children watch the news. This will be one of the last decisions Sammy and Pamela make together, like a proper couple. They discuss the matter over mugs of steaming tea when the children are in bed. The television in the living room is showing a constant loop of the first tower falling, then the second, the plane piercing the glassy wall over and over again, like a blip in the film reel.

  ‘We can’t shelter them for ever,’ Pamela argues.

  ‘Course we can’t, love,’ Sammy replies, ‘but nobody should have to see this kind of thing, especially children.’

  He is thinking of Lauren and Christopher, how Christopher has only just stopped having nightmares after accidentally watching a particularly bloody episode of Taggart. He is anxious to place a wall around their innocence. This is normal for fathers. However, when they decide that, in their house, September the eleventh has not happened, it is Mark he is mostly thinking of. Sammy is nearly always thinking of Mark now: his ghost eyes, his vicious tongue, his tiny white fingers, already adept at forming fists. The chicken shed is still fresh in his mind. Every time he looks at his daughter he sees her fear-shot face, pale and hanging, like a corpse, and the bile comes hurtling up his throat in waves. Mark has taken something of his daughter away from him.

  Sammy isn’t at all worried about traumatizing Mark. Nightmares might do the boy some good, put the fear of God back into him. He is strong as sheet metal. Everything glances off him, even physical pain. No, Sammy is afraid of how his son will react to all these vile images: the bodies fluttering from the sky, like wingless birds, the dead already ghosted in white concrete dust, the explosions, the glass screaming from its sockets as buildings evaporate, the sound of so many frightened people running.

  Mark will be all eyes for this kind of misery. He’ll try to see the footage again and again. He will, without any conscious effort, remember the details as other children hold tightly to the details of Christmas Day and Halloween. It will make him happy. Though he is shrewd enough at eight not to say this, Sammy knows that this kind of thing makes his son extremely happy. It is in the curl of his mouth and the questions he asks, numbers, distances, times and temperatures, as if he can see the logic in destruction, as if he is making plans inside his head.

  They don’t tell their children about the Twin Towers but they hear about it anyway, from friends with sloppy parents or sanctimonious parents, who believe that children should not be sheltered from the harsher side of life. Lauren cries and Christopher bolts into the house every time a plane passes overhead. Mark is different. Mark asks questions and lifts Sammy’s newspapers from the recycling bin to clip out pictures. He keeps them in a biscuit tin underneath his bed. Pamela finds the tin tucked inside the toe end of a sleeping bag when she is lifting his laundry. There are other newspaper clippings and articles cut from library books: serial killers, motorway pile-ups, cruel things done to animals with knives. She sits on the bed for almost an hour, holding the tin against her chest. She feels as if she has been shot.

  ‘We should take him to a psychiatrist,’ Pamela says, when she tells Sammy about the photos. She is more upset than she was when her father died.

  ‘It’s just a phase he’s going through,’ he reassures her. ‘Lots of wee boys go through this stage. He’ll grow out of it.’

  Pamela tries to believe him. This is what she wants to hear. But she can’t bring herself to believe Sammy. She has always felt the coldness in Mark, even as a baby. She lets herself imagine what it would be like to lose him. The first and strongest feeling is relief. She knows that Sammy feels the same but they cannot ever admit this. There are certain things parents cannot say. Even to each other.

  They buy football lessons for Mark, a computer of his own, books and videos, anything to keep his mind occupied. None of these distractions works. They do not take him to a psychiatrist. They do not ask their friends for help. They cannot bring themselves to talk about the situation directly. This is resignation on Sammy’s part. For Pamela it is just pretending. They let Mark ruin himself up in his attic room, hardly ever speaking, on his computer, reading books he’s ordered off the internet, out all hours with his friends, who are older or perhaps only hardened about the face. They let him go. He is still in the house but he is essentially gone. The weight of him bears slowly down on them. It is a kind of grief dripping from the attic, through the floorboards and ceiling, into their bedroom. It forces its way between them and they aren’t strong enough to resist.

  Fifteen years go by. A lifetime. Christopher and Lauren up and leave for university in Coleraine and Glasgow. They get into their second-hand cars and drive away. They do not look back. They return only for Christmas. Mark doesn’t leave. He studies something with computers at Queen’s and never moves out of the attic room. He pays his own fees. His parents do not ask where the money comes from. Neither do they ask for rent. They are afraid of what Mark might say.

  Sammy and Pamela are not the same people they were twenty years ago. They do not even look the same. At night they lie in bed listening to the weight of their son creaking through the floorboards as he paces round his room. They want to blame him for everything. Instead they blame themselves – or, rather, Sammy blames himself and Pamela lets him.

  The Boy with Wheels for Feet

  Matthew comes slithering out arms first, his hands thrust far in front of his head, like Superman poised for flight. ‘That’s the head out,’ says the midwife. ‘The worst is over, Mrs Christie.’ She doesn’t know about the wheels. A woman’s body is not cut for birthing wheels. Matthew almost rips his mother in two.

  He’s rolling before he walks. The slightest incline has him gliding from one side of the room to the next. As soon as he’s on his feet, he’s flying. Fastest boy in East Belfast. You should see him work the play area at Vicky Park. He takes the slide like a ski jump. Legs bent. Arms taut. Aiming to claim ten, then twelve and finally fifteen foot of clean air when his wheels lose contact with the slide’s lip. By the age of eight he’s done with baby slopes. Everyone says he’s greased lightning on the hills. Cave Hill. Black Mountain. Any steep spot will do. It’s a glorious thing to watch him hurtling from high to low. Like God himself, sweeping his holiness past at speed. His parents stand on the pavement admiring their boy grow closer and larger, until his quick rush passes by. So fast. It is more felt than seen. Their Matthew leaves burn marks in the road. Actual sparks electric off the asphalt. Holy. Holy. Holy smoke. They’ve no idea where such speed comes from. She’s a dinner lady and he works nights on the line at Shorts. Neither has a fast bone in their body.

  Now Matthew’s ten and the speed is in him like the need to eat. He can’t keep still. He thinks with his feet and every thought is quicker than the last. He is always on the internet looking up fast drops. Olympus. Everest. Kilimanjaro. He has his heart set on the world’s steepest slopes. He only feels right when the floor is falling away from him at tremendous speed. ‘If I can’t be normal,’ he tells his dad, ‘I’ll be really fast instead.’ His parents know they’re losing him. His browser history reads like a suicide note. Table Mountain. Matterhorn. Slieve Donard (which is at least close to home). They consider shackling Matthew to the radiator in his room. By the ankles
. For his own good. His mother sits up at night winding individual strands of her own hair round the boy’s feet. Anything to slow down his leaving. His father knows it’s futile. Matthew’s already gone. You can’t be anything but moving when you’ve wheels where you should have feet.

  6

  The Naming

  It is high summer now and Sophie is four months old. She is the size of an indoor cat. I hold her like a cat, draping her over my shoulder as if she is a fancy scarf. She seems to enjoy this. Her legs hang loose against my chest. Her arms catch at my shoulder blades. I can’t see her face for she is always looking away from me. This suits me just fine. It is easier not to believe in the back of her head.

  I’ve called her Sophie because she required a name. Sophie was also the name of a medical student who shadowed me for six months last year. We weren’t close, but it was easy to sit quietly in her company, like two people reading books in a library. When I began to consider names for my daughter, Sophie came almost instantly to mind and stuck. Perhaps I’ve come to associate this name with silence.

  After acquiring a child you have one week in which to give it a permanent name. I know this because I’m a doctor. It’s a sort of law parents are told when leaving the maternity ward. When she first arrived I stared at the baby’s feet for seven days straight. They were the only part of her I could bear to focus on. ‘What do you want to be called?’ I asked the feet, and the feet didn’t respond. For days all I was able to think of were very common nouns such as ‘child’, and ‘person’, and ‘creature’. These wouldn’t do for a baby. Sophie was the only proper name I could, under pressure, recall, and as it was quite an ordinary name – pretty even – I called her Sophie and this is her now. She will be Sophie for as long as she wishes to hold on to this name.