The Fire Starters

by Jan Carson

  I decide to wear a suit and tie to my first meeting of the Unfortunate Children of East Belfast. I want to appear grown-up, like a person capable of looking after another person.

  When I arrive at the Portakabin behind the community centre I immediately realize that this isn’t a suit-and-tie kind of meeting. There are posters on the wall about breastfeeding and what to put in which recycling bin. The seats are the kind of plastic seats that can be stacked against a wall, up to twelve layers high. I take in my surroundings, then slip the tie, still in its noose, over my head and stuff it into my blazer pocket. I open the top two buttons of my shirt. I’m still overdressed. Most of the other parents are in jeans or tracksuits; one mother is wearing a dressing-gown. The pale peach glow of her satin pyjamas ghosts through the gap where the robe doesn’t quite cover her belly. She’s too tired to contemplate real clothes. This is perfectly acceptable here. Everyone with an Unfortunate Child is a little worn around the edges. No one is in any position to judge.

  The man who sits next to me introduces himself as Mike. He spends the entire meeting pulling individual strands of hair from the scalp behind his ears. He is balding in at least four different places. He claims to have a child who glows in the dark and can only go out in public during sunlight hours. This, he tells me, isn’t easy to manage in Belfast where the round-the-clock gloom begins on the first day of September and lasts all the way through to May.

  ‘What have you got?’ he asks me, as a tray full of coffee mugs and custard creams circulates round the room.

  ‘A girl,’ I reply, ‘Sophie.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  I’m not sure how to answer this. Most days she seems perfect to me. On other days I think she’d be better off dead. I’ve never had the opportunity to voice this fear. Under pressure I take a slurp of scalding coffee and burn the tip of my tongue. I can’t catch my breath to formulate a response.

  Then, at just the right moment, the meeting is called to order. Everyone introduces themselves. Some people are couples. The majority are here alone. I’m pleased about this, though really it means nothing. I am definitely single but everyone else could well have another half at home, minding the children. Dr Kanuri sends his apologies via an older man, Davy (whose teenage daughter is sometimes a boat and enjoys floating among the swans in Victoria Park). Davy is one of the founder members of the Unfortunate Children. He explains that Dr Kanuri is caught up in theatre and will not be attending tonight’s meeting. A vague dissenting murmur goes mumbling round the circle. It is almost two months since Dr Kanuri last made an appearance. I’m a little disappointed. I was hoping to speak to the man, doctor to doctor, on the subject of Sirens.

  When it’s my turn to speak I introduce myself. The group says, ‘Hi, Jonathan.’ Some of them wave. For a moment it feels like America. Then I speak again. My accent is one hundred per cent Orangefield and the sound of it pins us all to this Portakabin off the Sydenham Bypass. I say, ‘It’s my first time here,’ and, ‘Thanks for inviting me,’ and ‘I have a little girl called Sophie.’ I don’t mention that I’m also a doctor. I don’t say anything about Sophie’s mother or what may happen when Sophie speaks. It is enough to have come tonight. Next time I will try to explain the fear of speaking and the fear of not speaking and all the other fears that came traipsing into the room behind me. No one presses me for anything more. The other parents smile and incline their heads towards me. They are pleased that I’ve come. They’re always pleased to welcome a new member. There is safety in numbers, and safety is probably the best they can hope for, for their children.

  Everyone in the circle has a chance to speak. By the time the introductions are complete I’ve heard about two further flying children, a child who hears trees and a boy who lives in a tree, invisible twins and a little girl who was born with a bird’s egg unhatched in each hand, a child who sees the future in every liquid surface, a baby who turns to cloud every time she falls asleep and, best of all, a boy, named Matthew, who has wheels soldered to the heels and balls of both feet.

  ‘They’re not metal,’ explains his father, ‘or rubber, like bicycle tyres. They’re more like bone or whatever teeth are made of.’

  The rest of the group have heard this before. ‘He’s like greased lightning on hills,’ Mike mutters, under his breath, and plucks another hair nervously from behind his ear.

  A split second later the man is telling us again that his son is like greased lightning on hills. I understand that the parents of Unfortunate Children repeat the same stories every time they meet. This is what they come for. It’s a form of absolution, or perhaps confession. They are only here for the telling. The listening part is just a noise, which must be endured until the opportunity to speak arises. They aren’t interested in the person sitting beside them or the various ways in which their child is unfortunate. They are only interested in their own children and their own problems. This is completely understandable. It isn’t even selfishness. I’m interested, though. I’m all ears, all eyes. I’m a kind of camera catching every detail tonight.

  Kathleen Penney keeps her seat as she tells the other parents about Ella’s broken wrist. This is what passes for news among the Unfortunate Children. She is quick to skip over the details. She does her best to appear casual when she says ‘broken in three different places’ and ‘reduced mobility’. She only half conceals a sob when she says ‘possibility of further surgery’. She isn’t to blame. Ella has not been pushed or coerced towards great height. The child has simply sustained a minor injury in the act of learning to fly. Such injuries are to be expected, and didn’t the girl who is occasionally a boat once almost drown while learning to drift?

  ‘Has she ever flown?’ interrupts the mother of another flying child. ‘Our Simon was clearing three-storey buildings by the time he was Ella’s age.’

  Simon, according to his mother, is hot shit in the flight department. Simon has been flying since before he could walk, possibly since conception. There is every likelihood he may one day orbit the moon. I do not like Simon on principle. He sounds like an overachiever. Or perhaps it is his mother’s version of Simon that I have no patience with.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ exclaims Kathleen. ‘Ella flies all the time. She’s a great wee flier. She’s just having a few problems perfecting her technique.’

  I catch her eye. She gives me daggers across the circle, then blinks and looks suddenly away. Kathleen is lying. She knows I can expose her. I don’t. Sometimes lies sit easier than the truth. My parents taught me this early on: don’t upset the status quo. There is little point in calling Ella’s mother out in front of the other parents. They’re probably all leaning on their own sad little lies. I feel sorry for Kathleen and also for her husband, but I can’t bring myself to feel sorry for Ella Penney. She is much too marvellous for sympathy. It would be like pitying the sun or something equally furious. I can’t stop thinking about Ella and her redundant wings.

  Even now I can picture her in old-fashioned flying goggles and hat, like a First World War pilot. She is about to jump from a very tall tree: a pine or a fir of some sort. She knows she will fall – she’ll always fall – and yet she will never refuse to jump. She has enormous love for her parents. Another name for this kind of love is patience or maybe long-suffering. The parents are fools. Ella is wise and kind and sometimes saintly. She will break every bone in her tiny body before she’ll let them lose faith in her.

  I can also picture her in a wooded place. Her feet are naked and she’s up to the ankles in fallen leaves. It is autumn in this vision, or very early winter. Ella Penney has a face on her like Joan of Arc in the silent movie: old eyes on a young face; sure eyes, impossibly steadfast. While the sky remains temporarily unconquered, the damp forest ground is teeming with miracles: earthworms, centipedes, spiders and dung beetles, all recently resurrected and scrambling, like God’s own messengers, for a place at Ella’s white, white feet. I imagine all this and wonder if this is what it is like for the boy who sees t
he future in water glasses, in cold lakes and toilet bowls. If so, I’m jealous. This is a power worth believing in. I’m not at all sad for Ella Penney. I’m sad for her parents who do not understand what they’ve been given. Who may well miss the most glorious part of her.

  A teenage girl is talking now. She is speaking from inside the curtain of her hair, softly, softly, like tissues crumpling into fists. She is wearing jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and, in lieu of ordinary gloves, oven mitts, taped firmly round her wrists. They are not a pair. One is shaped like a frog, with movable eyes and a pink tongue that lollops between her thumb and the blunt claw of her four conjoined fingers. The other is a gift from Tenerife. It is canary yellow with the entire island spread, like a birthmark, across the back of the hand. She rises to speak. An older man stands next to her. He has her chin, which is to say that neither has a chin so much as a softly sloping absence between jaw and neck. They look like gophers, or perhaps it’s meerkats I’m thinking of, some kind of peering, upright creature.

  ‘This is my daughter, Karen,’ the man says. ‘I’m really proud of her. She’s going to share her story tonight.’

  Everyone claps except Karen, partly because it’s impolite to clap at your own achievement and partly because it’s almost impossible to clap while wearing oven gloves.

  ‘Hi,’ she says, when the applause dies down, ‘my name’s Karen. I suppose I’m one of the Unfortunate Children. At least, Dr Kanuri says I am. Everything I touch turns to Christmas.’ She holds up her oven-glove hands as a kind of illustration, and everyone in the circle nods knowingly. I have no idea what she’s talking about. Perhaps she can impart some sort of vague festive feeling, or actually conjure up tinsel and sparklers; maybe the true meaning of Christmas – a holy baby-Jesus awe – is crouching in her, just below the skin. I have no clear notion what exactly Karen does and even after her testimony I’ll be equally confused. I fold my arms, adopt a listening posture, and wonder how I might go about explaining my Sophie to the other parents of Unfortunate Children. It’s not like she’s done anything awful yet. But she could. The possibility is always there, like a small but definite storm cloud, looming overhead.

  Karen tells her story. She is like Midas but with Christmas, not gold, in her fingertips. Karen would prefer not to have this ‘gift’, to enjoy Christmas within the accepted festive period and not have it leaking out all over the rest of her year. It’s mortifying to be seventeen years old and have everything you touch turn festive. Karen had developed her gift at the age of thirteen. She’d managed to survive high school by wearing gloves and keeping her distance; she’d left at sixteen with nothing but a GCSE in PE. Long-distance running had been her chosen sport. It didn’t require touch of any kind. Other subjects eluded Karen. She couldn’t be trusted to contain herself in group work. Scientific experiments were risky and computers went hysterical every time her naked fingers brushed against their keys. After high school she’d taken a job on the checkout at Connswater Tesco. Though she’d have preferred hairdressing or childcare, she’d gone for Tesco because it didn’t require qualifications or touching people directly with her hands.

  Karen wore oven gloves to keep from accidentally touching the customers or leaving a Christmassy sheen on the produce, which tumbled past her like a circus parade. She lasted two weeks and three days. That was a kind of miracle. She hadn’t even expected to manage a full day. Things began to go wrong during her second week. On the Wednesday she arrived to find the next cash register over occupied by a middle-aged lady with a ‘Doreen’ badge.

  ‘Hello, love!’ Doreen yelled, exploiting a brief break in the grocery parade to introduce herself. ‘What’s your name? I’m Doreen.’

  Karen said nothing. Most of her existence was focused on avoiding unnecessary attention. She elbowed a watermelon from one end of the checkout to the other, using the tip of her nose to operate the buttons on the electronic scales. Doreen stared.

  ‘Ugh, I’m sorry, love,’ Doreen mouthed, a little quieter on account of the customers approaching her till. ‘I didn’t realize you were handicapped. Do you need a wee hand?’

  Karen pretended she hadn’t heard. She continued nudging onions and red peppers across the grocery scales. Doreen, unperturbed by the silence, turned to the lady on the next register and, with an accent thick as buttered bread, asked, ‘Is that wee girl all there?’

  ‘Aye,’ replied Margaret from the next till over. ‘She’s as canny as you or me. She’s just up herself. Wouldn’t bother with the likes of us.’

  ‘I dunno, love. She looks a bit special-needs. She’s a pair of oven gloves on her. She’s doing the register with her chin.’

  Karen heard this entire conversation from behind a mammoth box of washing powder. She wanted to hide, but short of ducking beneath the till, there was nowhere to go.

  ‘I’m just going to check on her!’ shouted Doreen. ‘Would you take my customers for a wee minute?’

  The next sentence was lost in a scurry of panicked squeaks and scratches as Karen abandoned the washing powder, the customers and all hopes of holding on to her job, and attempted to tunnel her way under the cash register. After a few seconds she peeped out. Doreen’s moonish face, huge and haloed in the strip lighting, was peering over the credit-card machine.

  ‘Hello, sweetie,’ she said slowly, her entire mouth caving over each syllable. ‘Nothing to be scared of, nothing I haven’t seen before. Sure, hasn’t my youngest got a wee touch of autism, goes pure hyper on the Smarties, so he does.’

  She smiled. Karen glared.

  ‘There’s a silly girl, working the till with a pair of oven gloves on. Sure, you won’t be able to do the buttons.’

  Before Karen could brace herself to bite, to kick, stab and defend the older woman against the onslaught to come, Doreen had reached behind the register and whipped both gloves off. Right first, then left. Christmas came rushing out of Karen, all of a sudden, like a vomiting bug. Though the phenomenon is never quite explained in detail, I imagine it to be something like an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The sort of thing you read about happening in charismatic churches. Not unpleasant, but somewhat overwhelming. Karen couldn’t help herself. She stood up behind the till. She had the sensation of simultaneous losing and gaining something important. The sensation was strongest in her fingertips where they were touching Doreen’s wrists. Everyone stopped packing and passing groceries to stare in her direction. She could feel their stares poking through her polo shirt like toothpicks.

  Doreen did not stare. Otherwise preoccupied, her mouth fell open, like a castle drawbridge. Karen could clearly make out the fillings in her bottom teeth. A strange noise came dribbling out of the older lady, something similar to the sound created by a slow puncture. People stopped staring at Karen and stared at Doreen. It was pleasant to be on the periphery for a change. Doreen sat down, then lay down, forming a stranded snow angel on the linoleum floor. Her hair – grey, gold, speckled – came loose around her head, flaming upwards in the direction of the trolley store. Her hands were starfish, swimming easy at the end of each arm. She looked drowned and lovely. It was on her like sunburn. Karen could not even be angry with her when the Christmas was this thick.

  ‘Oh,’ said Doreen and her smile was funny, all up and down at the sides, all into her eyes and cheeks. ‘Oh, that was so lovely. Can you do it again?’

  ‘Yes,’ Karen said, ‘I suppose so.’ Then she unleashed Christmas, liberally, outrageously, without reservation, up and down the aisles until even the frozen food section melted out of sheer rosy good cheer. When the management began to notice strange things appearing on their CCTV monitors they came rushing down to the shop floor and fired Karen in full view of the tinned vegetables.

  ‘Don’t you know where you are?’ they screamed. ‘This is Connswater Tesco, no place for miracles!’

  They gave her extra money, an entire month’s wages, to leave immediately, to say nothing of this to the local newspapers and promise she would shop elsewhere from now on
. They were careful in their dismissal, fearing litigation and the tabloid press, to state that Karen was not a bad person, that Christmas was a good thing, far too good for Connswater Tesco, better perhaps for an upmarket place: Marks & Spencer, they suggested, or House of Fraser.

  ‘You give these kinds of people a good thing free,’ her supervisor explained, ‘and they’ll always be wanting more.’

  Then they escorted Karen from the premises under the watchful eyes of three security guards. They prodded her out with a three-metre roll of birthday gift-wrap lest the littlest part of them make contact with the littlest part of her and bloom. Though they could not bear her in public, the staff were waiting in the car park, loitering by the bins, awkward and hungry, hands wide open, asking for a touch, just a small touch: the slimmest slice of Christmas.

  ‘The chance,’ they explained anxiously, ‘might never come again.’

  They couldn’t look each other in the eye. They wouldn’t even raise their heads when she touched them. They wouldn’t say her name. The next day they’d deny it all. The following day, feign ignorance. Only in the moment when the Christmas came rushing over them, and they felt, for the first time in years, like tiny expectant children, did they smile and allow themselves the enormous pleasure of possibility. Karen knew she wouldn’t be back there again.