The Fire Starters

by Jan Carson

  It is less than twenty-four hours till the bonfires are lit, and after this, the parades. The drums are loose from beating. They are ready for battle. Across the city thousands of white shirts have been ironed and uniforms laid to rest on spare beds and back-door hangers. The beer has been got in, and the value-pack crisps. The bowler hats have been dusted and the Sunday shoes polished mirror black. The sashes have yet to be lifted from their ornamental cases. This comes last, on the Twelfth morning, for fear of stains or unavoidable creases.

  All over Belfast, but mostly in the East, the bonfires are being layered up, like enormous wedding cakes. Flags and stuffed effigies of the other side are bound to the pallets with rope. Chairs, borrowed from the community centre, have been looped around the fire’s edge at a distance, accommodating those spectators too old to stand, or ill-inclined to dance, like savages, around the flames. Cranes and pulleys are being used to stack the top tiers. Miles below, at the foot of the pyre, young lads have gathered in bunches to suck energy drinks straight from the bottle and shout, through hands cupped, like megaphones, ‘Wee bit to the left. Swing it to the right there, mate. It’s grand where it is!’

  They are their shipyard fathers and their grandfathers before them, standing with hands idly in pockets. They are waiting for a summer soon to come when they will be invited into the thick of the fire, to push the edges back with long-handled shovels, to work the crane, or empty handguns into the fire’s flaming tongues. Bang. Bang. Bang. Like it’s a beast to be slain. They must cover their faces when they hold a gun, not from shame, or fear exactly, but because a kind of horror comes off a hidden face.

  Most of the bonfires are already lording it over the thirty-foot limit by twenty, thirty, forty extra feet, in one case fifty. They are daring the police to intervene. They are finger-flicking the politicians to stand over the stern words they’ve lately spoken. Politicians here are known for talking and counter-talking and folding, like seaside deckchairs, when required to take action. They are watching each other closely now, waiting to see who will be first to condemn the bonfires. No one wants to be the first stone-caster. No one wants to be last. The trick is to raise your voice at exactly the same moment as everyone else. In this, and other matters, the politicians are not unlike teenage children.

  The local news has been and gone. They’ve captured the unlit bonfires from the ground and, once again, for perspective, from the top of a cherry-picker. They’ve been door to door around the East collecting interviews. Those people interviewed have spent every minute since on the telephone spreading the word; they might be on the six o’clock news if no better story breaks before then. The big BBC will only appear if there’s trouble. There will be trouble. There always is. But the BBC proper has a scale for deciding how bad it needs to get before the mainland will be interested.

  The police are here already. A trio of Land Rovers is parked within spitting distance of the highest bonfires. They’ve been there for a week now, pre-empting trouble and slicing a substantial chunk off the policing budget with each night spent twiddling their thumbs beneath the streetlights. Inside the Land Rovers pairs of bored PSNI officers eat wine gums, text their other halves and read paperback copies of crime novels, one eye flitting across the dark streets. Each local child who passes a Land Rover knows well enough to kick the tyres squarely or run a stick along the vehicle’s armoured flanks, rattling the officers inside.

  Elsewhere in the city the Tall Fires continue to flame. The police are exhausted, endlessly trying to predict which building will burn next. It is not easy to be a member of the PSNI during parade season. On the Twelfth day people will want to walk down roads they are not allowed to walk down. The police will be told to stop them doing this (though many individual officers are not sure why). Nine times out of ten the act of stopping someone walking down a road will result in a riot. There are riots before the Twelfth and on the Twelfth and, sometimes, for up to a week on either side. These are to be expected and can be planned for in advance (annual leave suspended, extra officers drafted in from the more provincial towns, water cannons cleaned in preparation for picking off the worst offenders).

  The Tall Fires are a different kind of trouble. They could not have been predicted so have not been planned for. They sit on top of the ordinary riots like another thing the PSNI is expected to carry. The police are already thin around the edges and there’s still two days before the Twelfth. They wonder when it’s all going to end, how long they’ll be here, whether they can manage to get a holiday in before the kids go back to school. It’s been four weeks now and the fires are only getting worse.

  Each night they patrol the entire city in slow, languid loops, squinting into abandoned buildings and shops for anything that might be a flame. Often they mistake burglar alarms or the glow from a computer monitor for an actual fire and break into the wrong building. This costs time and money. It makes the PSNI look incompetent in the local press. Sometimes they arrest innocent people lighting barbecues in their own back gardens. Sometimes they’re making these arrests while important civic buildings are going up in flames. This does not pass unnoticed.

  The police are not winning. They’ve already lost the west wing of the City Hall and the central library, which burnt from the inside out: all those books and antique manuscripts flaring quickly and turning to dry ash before the fire brigade even arrived. They’ve been told they must try harder. They have received this message from their superiors, from the press, the public and, with quiet desperation, from the politicians on the hill, who wish to have the whole situation under control before the Eleventh Night. If the city is burning and rioting at the same time it will be impossible to keep it from the international press. ‘God,’ they mutter to each other, passing in the corridors of Stormont, ‘as if we didn’t have enough of a job selling this place to tourists. You’d think they could save their riots till after the summer. They wouldn’t be half so hard to stomach, off-peak.’

  In the last week the PSNI have pulled fifty of their undercover officers off regular duties and made them full-time fire-chasers. Some get paid extra money for this. Others are younger and just trying to make a name for themselves. They spend their days following leads and their evenings cruising the housing estates in unmarked Mondeos. Each car is equipped with a fire extinguisher, fire blankets and a first-aid kit specially designed for burns victims. This is a precautionary measure but it’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt. They’ve all been trained to drop and roll, drop and roll, to smother a colleague quickly with blankets should the situation ever arise.

  They are like backyard cats: their eyes have grown accustomed to seeing in the dark. A streak of orange, a holy white flare, and they’re out of the car and bolting across the road, fire extinguisher in hand, ready to coat everything in dry foam. They are almost always too late. Rarely do they get to the scene of a Tall Fire before it’s in full flame. Their uniforms stink of last night’s barbecue, a smell they’ve come to associate with failure. It’s not their fault. There are thousands of buildings in Belfast, each one capable of hosting a Tall Fire, and only so many police officers to go around.

  They are no closer to catching the original Fire Starter than they were a month ago. There’s been nothing new from him in weeks, just the same YouTube video endlessly re-posted on Facebook walls and Twitter feeds. There’s nothing the police can do to stop this message. It’s already gone viral in every English-speaking country. They’ve analysed the video for hours in the computer lab, magnifying each frame until it is nothing but a series of black, blue and flesh-coloured pixels. The Fire Starter is good. He (or could it be a she?) has left nothing for the police to catch on. It could be anyone, even one of them. So they continue to chase their tails all over the city, putting out one fire only to find two more have popped up in its place. It’s like the game children play at amusement arcades, thumping moles with a padded mallet while others seem to multiply underground. It’s hard not to feel mocked. Several of the young
er officers have already gone off with the stress. They cannot sustain this for much longer.

  Late in the evening of the tenth, the politicians reach a decision. They gather the local press on the steps of Stormont and make a brief announcement. The Tall Fires will not win. ‘Anarchy,’ they say, with uncharacteristic confidence, ‘cannot be tolerated in any form.’ They are all, even the women, wearing suit jackets to say this. It is the sort of serious pronouncement that requires a defined shoulder. First thing in the morning all those bonfires breaching the thirty-foot rule will come down.

  The Nationalist side looks jubilant, the Unionists’ weary. Those caught in the impotent space between glance from one side to the other, like creatures caught in the headlights, about to be run over. The decision will not be without repercussions. Everyone knows there will be trouble now, more trouble than the usual kerfuffle on the Twelfth.

  The politicians are asked about the logistics of bringing down seventy-foot bonfires. Will they be dismantled entirely or simply reduced to the legal thirty-foot limit? Who will be responsible for this? Will a contractor be brought in or will PSNI officers be expected to do the job by hand? Is this kind of work included in a police officer’s terms and conditions? Have the trade unions been consulted? Who is going to meet the costs for policing this mess? When the politicians open their mouths to answer, the noise that comes out is the spoken equivalent of a deep shrug. They don’t know exactly. They are spent from having made this one hard decision and will require a week or more to think through its logistical implications. They do not have a week. In less than an hour it will be the Eleventh and twenty hours after this, the Eleventh Night. Something is going to happen now. It will not be good. The city holds its breath and waits.

  Less than two hours later a new video begins appearing on the internet. By breakfast it has gone viral.

  The format is familiar. A small room with a white sheet draped across an entire wall. A person, probably male, sitting in front of this sheet wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, blue jeans and a black hoodie drawn high over its head. It does not speak. It holds cardboard signs to the camera. ‘They’re not listening to us’; ‘Burn the whole city down’; ‘I’m the Fire Starter.’ In the background, the music is the same thirty-second loop of the Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’. Once all the cardboard signs have been revealed, a black screen appears, with seven words printed in white capital letters: ‘YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT OUR BONFIRES ALONE.’

  The press are quick to pick up the story. With every subsequent news bulletin, it edges closer to the headline spot. The Fire Starter has decided it’s time to escalate the violence. Who knows what will happen next? The police call for calm. The politicians echo this, issuing statements from their individual parties. Church leaders also make an appearance: a Catholic priest and a Presbyterian minister stand side by side on the Peace Line, asking people to pray and stay at home and think about how far we’ve come in the last few years.

  The young men and women of Belfast have heard it all before. They don’t want to stay at home and pray for peace. They don’t want to follow rules or put the safety of others first. They are blood blind with anger: ‘First the peace walls, and then the roads, the flags and now our bonfires,’ they say. ‘Soon we won’t have anything left.’ They are, at heart, terrified that once the last symbol has been stolen from them they will not know themselves different from the stranger in the street. They will be left without anything solid to lean upon. They wouldn’t know how to say this to a news reporter even if a news reporter took the time to ask. Instead they talk of the loud violence their parents knew, as if it is a kind of birthright denied to them. They share their seething thoughts with each other, leaning against community-centre walls, on the phone, in vitriolic Facebook posts and tweets. They use the war-weary language of duty: ‘It’s up to us’; ‘Now’s the time’; ‘Our civil liberties are at stake.’ Over the course of a single sun-blessed morning, their anger sours until it spills on to the city’s streets and they are burning buildings and cars and trees for the sheer blood rush of actually doing something.

  Before the authorities can move in to dismantle the bonfires safely, every one of them is alight. Belfast bakes from the combined heat of sunshine and a hundred daytime fires. The tallest lose the run of themselves and swim down the streets, like molten rivers of lava. Unpatrolled, they claim everything in their path, setting cars and terraced houses on fire, turning the warm tarmac to treacle, scorching the double-glazing until it pops one layer at a time, making a noise like water laughing. The old people are evacuated from their houses and stand at the end of their streets watching the fires flame. Some are crying, even some of the men.

  The fire brigade can’t cope. Engines from the south are called upon. This hasn’t happened since De Valera gave the word during the Blitz. Everywhere they go they are pelted by teenagers with bottles and bricks. It is hard enough to fight fire without adding children to the mix. The teenagers wear scarves wrapped round their faces to protect themselves from the television cameras. They stand spread-legged on the roofs of parked cars, and high walls, surveying the chaos they have caused. It is a kind of hell and they have only just started. They raise their fists in rage and triumph, sending their shrill, demonic ‘Yeooo’ echoing up and down the little streets. The noise harmonizes with the sirens and the drums, which are out again, thundering on the horizon, and the dogs howling in their hot backyards. This is the sound of war beginning and the young ones are proud to be doing their bit.

  By midnight on the Eleventh the young fire starters have grown bored with the bonfires and moved on to other, less likely, sources. Hundreds of teenagers and youths in their early twenties have swarmed the streets of Belfast setting fire to anything that speaks of authority: churches, schools, Ulsterbuses idling by the side of the road, postboxes, post vans, police Land Rovers where they can peel the officers out from behind the wheel, shops, trees and pubs, which go up like Halloween night when the spirits catch. Anything that can be burnt has been burnt. In the early hours of the Twelfth an ice-cream van, already stocked for the parades, is driven on to the Albert Bridge and set alight. The tinkling sound of ‘Show Me The Way To Amarillo’ shimmers loose as the flames catch hold, and masked children stand round the fire’s edge passing out choc ices and Twisters lifted, just in time, from the van’s freezer. This is the footage that the BBC run with on their breakfast show. It is like a snapshot of the world’s end: masked children eating ice cream while the whole city glows hell red behind their backs.

  By mid-morning they have replaced this clip with different footage. Before they show it, the newscaster lifts the papers stacked in front of her, shuffles them awkwardly and says, ‘Some viewers may find the content distressing.’ She looks as if something is lodged in her throat.

  It is difficult to imagine a viewer who would not find this content distressing. The politicians in Stormont cannot look at it for shame. The police officers, drinking coffee in the staffroom between shifts, reach to switch the channels as a mark of respect, or possibly fear. Parents will not let their children watch the news this week, and in other countries, people who had almost forgotten the problems with Belfast watch this clip and suck air between their teeth slowly, making a noise that is both shock and sympathy, also something like an old memory resurrected.

  In the attic room of a semi-detached house at the top of the Castlereagh Road, Mark Agnew cannot lift his eyes from the television screen. He is watching a group of young men wearing tracksuit bottoms, with football scarves bandaged across their faces. They are reaching across the barricades at the Short Strand to drag a female PSNI officer into the middle of the road.

  He is still watching as they lift a litre can of tractor diesel and tip it over her head. He is watching the two who are holding out the police officer’s arms, as if she is about to be crucified, the one waving a cigarette lighter over her head, and the one who is pouring the diesel. But mostly he is watching the girl, who is not moving, not even trying to escape
.

  Mark is watching in slow time as the lad whose job it is to start the fire lifts his hands, then doesn’t flick the lighter open, or cannot, or perhaps realizes that a football scarf is not thick enough to hide behind. Then there are shots. Snip. Snip. Snip. Exactly the noise a gun will make in a movie. The one with the lighter is dead. The other three have fallen behind him. But the girl keeps standing there in the middle of the road, arms out, like Jesus waiting to be taken down from the cross.

  Mark watches the clip and pauses it before the next news story starts, then watches it again and again. He thinks about the young PSNI officer as she stands in the shower tonight, smelling like a petrol station, trying to scrape it off herself with shower gel and shampoo, all the time knowing that it is not just in her nose. This smell is everywhere now. She will have six months off on the stress and talk about this moment till it doesn’t seem real any more and, still, even after all the drugs and therapy, never progress beyond a desk job. He is thinking about all this as he rewinds and pauses and plays this clip, keeping his headphones on, lest his dad hear from downstairs.

  Mark knows all this is his fault. He is absolutely sure of it. He feels like the king of the world but he cannot tell anyone.

  9

  The News

  I am following the news now. I have the television on in the kitchen while I fix Sophie’s bottles and prepare my packed lunch. I keep the sound turned off and let the subtitles run across the bottom of the screen. I’ve only just thought to do this and it’s already making evenings much more bearable. I’ve even started watching foreign movies on DVD. When you can’t hear the words it doesn’t matter which language they’re spoken in. I like the idea of being a person who watches arthouse movies. Even romantic comedies are classier in French or Spanish.