The Fire Starters

by Jan Carson

  It has been raining for six days now. Monday to Saturday, without so much as an hour’s reprieve. It is still coming down in sheets, bouncing off the pavements, as if anxious to be back up in the clouds, beginning the cycle again. It is impossible to light an outside fire. The rain has no patience with heat. Even a cigarette requires careful manoeuvring with umbrellas and cupped hands. Water kills fire, over and over and over again, like some grand game of Rock, Scissors, Paper. Belfast swims.

  The Tall Fires are over. The rain has drawn a line under the summer and all its nonsense. Now the city is gearing up for another season. It is possible to hear the murmur of it rumbling round the downtown buses: ‘The nights are drawing in,’ they say, ‘and there’s a quare nip in the air.’ They rub their hands together when they speak, though it’s hardly cold enough for a coat. The schools are back in a few weeks’ time and the leaves will soon be turning. Christmas is only four months away. It isn’t summer any more. The Tall Fires are already history. If you look them up on Wikipedia you will find the article is past tense. There are dates, like bookends, birthing and deathing this particular chapter in the city’s story.

  Nothing has been resolved or achieved but this is not considered failing. This is how it has been in Belfast every summer since the Agreement. The same hot anger rises at the end of June and goes stamping up and down the little streets. Stamping and shouting and raising Cain all the way through July until, by August’s end, the energy’s gone right out of it. The spite leaves gradually, like a pendulum losing swing. There are fewer angry people on the streets, fewer and fewer with each end-of-summer evening, until only a handful stand on the corners, talking football and last night’s telly to keep their boredom still. These people are not as loud as they once were. They no longer have the numbers for a decent riot, or the inclination to set fires or shout about their civil liberties. They are younger and younger with each passing night, some no bigger than babies. Round here, protesting is just another way to pass a dull weekend, something to do before the football starts in earnest.

  The remnant begin to wonder why they are still there making half-hearted plans to burn shit or protest about how they’ve been treated. Where has the rest of the rabble gone? ‘Nice for some,’ they mutter, ‘staying in, watching their soaps, getting the weans ready for school. We’re the bigger fools for keeping on with this.’ Every day they are fewer and fewer until one evening no one is standing on the corner muttering or holding a banner. There’s no way of predicting this day precisely. It happens when it happens and goes almost unnoticed, like the last neat sneeze of a head cold. The angry time is over for another year. The people of East Belfast roll up their rebel souls and return to normal. They are relieved to have their nights back. Any evening now The X Factor will be starting on ITV, and Strictly on the other side. They wouldn’t want to miss them. ‘What a summer it’s been,’ they say, and pack their rage, like holiday clothes, ready and waiting for next June when the rising will start all over again.

  This is how it’s always been in the East. Though the Tall Fires have made this summer hotter than most, it is widely understood that it’s August now and time for settling down. Even the young ones have no interest left in setting fires or screaming at the police. The need for it has left their system.

  They walk past the places where the Tall Fires have been and cannot, in the moment, picture themselves angry enough to burn anything. The rain has washed the memory of fire right out of them. They stare at the marks on the ground, the charred black stains that are no longer shops or houses. They poke the damp ash with sticks and clean white trainer toes, leaving slight indentations in the tar. ‘Did we do this one?’ they ask each other. ‘Or was it the one down the road we done?’ They can’t remember a single definite second of the summer.

  The politicians say nothing. They are particularly gifted in this arena and can often talk for hours at a time without saying anything at all. Passing each other in the corridors of Stormont, they shrug their shoulders and smile knowingly. They cannot believe the situation has washed itself out. When they speak they speak quietly, behind closed doors and raised hands. Their mouths are full of platitudes. Sleeping dogs must be allowed to lie and there is no point looking a gift horse in the mouth, especially when the horse in question has rained on exactly the right kind of parade. Some even go so far as to say, ‘We’ve got away with murder this time, lads,’ but this is a dangerous sentiment to voice round here. The older contingent knows better. They throw their entire weight at the rain, ordering sandbags, water pumps, flood provision and, where necessary, evacuations.

  Everyone agrees that the rain must be stopped.

  Everyone wants to get involved.

  What a relief to be on the same side for a change.

  The politicians are on the television together, talking about the floods, loudly, loudly, in casual jumpers, sleeves rolled to the elbow, as if ready to spring into action. They are shoulder to shoulder with politicians from the other side. This is called a united front. The like is rarely seen in Belfast. They are reasonably certain that no one has noticed their failure with the fires. Just to be sure, they’re all front and bluster. Politics is sleight-of-hand in this city, pain here lessened by pain there; an endless game of quick distraction. All is quiet on every front: West, East, city centre and the posh bits on either side.

  The tourist season is also over. It has not been a success – first the fires and now the rain. The uncharacteristically fine weather has not been draw enough to distract from Belfast’s more obvious problems. All but the bravest souls have stayed away. Some have come and kept to the north’s peripheries: Enniskillen, Donegal, Bushmills’ whiskey and the Giant’s Causeway, which never seems to lose its appeal. Even the Tourist Board, whose job it is to spin the city sideways, are calling this summer a washout. They are counting up the cost in millions: more than ten, but less than a hundred. What a mess. What a bloody waste of decent weather. There might not be another decent summer for a decade.

  There have been no more videos from the Fire Starter. It’s been almost a month since the last, and even this is no longer trending on social media. The proper BBC have packed up their cameras and returned to the mainland. There is nothing in Belfast worth pushing to the London set, nothing to compete with real terrorism: hijacked planes, bearded radicals and suicide bombs. The local news is once again weather and car accidents, occasionally drugs and, every week or so, a racist attack. Nothing like the old days, nothing to keep the old folk indoors.

  Confident that the Summer of the Tall Fires is finally over, the PSNI disband their specialist unit. Off go the brave fire-chasers to Florida and Lanzarote on last-minute package deals. They are glad to get a fortnight in the sun before the kids head back to school, gladder still to wash the smoke stink from their clothes. The extra fire engines return to Scotland. Back they go, with grateful thanks and the ill-defined promise of help from Belfast, if this sort of help is ever required. The Newsletter runs a picture of the six Scottish fire engines edging their way up the ramp and on to the Larne–Cairnryan ferry. They are Christmas red against the grey of boat and sky, almost pornographically cheery.

  Elsewhere in the city the builders have moved in. One man’s loss is another’s opportunity, and there has never been a better time for building in the East. Watching the builders congregate outside the trade section of B&Q, it is hard to believe in the recession. The insurance money is beginning to trickle in and everyone is flush. The builders are battling the elements to get their concrete mixed and their foundations down, to get the roof on before winter sets in. They are cutting corners and Building Control is keeping a soft distance. It is in everyone’s interest to get the city rebuilt.

  Up go the walls. Up go the shops and houses. All the builders are saying, ‘Sure, you’ll be in and settled by Christmas.’ It is a kind of mantra. The whole city takes to believing it. Wee terraced houses are rising from the rubble, schools and cafés and community centres springing up from t
he ashes of their former selves. Surely they’ll all be in and settled by Christmas. It’ll be as if the Tall Fires never happened. Belfast will be good as new. She won’t be knowing herself for all these fancy buildings.

  15

  Anarchy

  At the top of the Castlereagh Road Sammy Agnew does not know himself for sheer, dodged-the-bullet relief. The Summer of the Tall Fires is over. It won’t stretch to ruin another season. It will not claim a single life. For this, he is particularly thankful, and for his son, who has failed, and in failing left himself open to other, more innocent, summers to come. The boy might yet be turned. He’s not killed anyone, not directly – at least, there’s been nothing mentioned in the papers. This is more than Sammy can say for himself.

  He allows his imagination to run loose over his son’s future. Gracious he is with the boy, picturing him at thirty or thirty-five, a different man with a desk job and a solid name around town. Somebody you could count on/lean on/bet your bottom dollar on; all the clichés flying now. Mark will be something big in computers. Sammy’s too ignorant for specifics, but definitely something big with an office of his own. Maybe he’ll even have children and a wife, a nice house with a garden in Holywood or Bangor. He won’t have a criminal record, oh, no, for certain sure, not so much as a speeding point on the boy’s licence. He tells himself that Mark will turn out fine. This isn’t the world’s biggest leap. Sure, aren’t there always reformed characters telling their stories on breakfast TV, lads who’ve done much worse things than Mark?

  Sometimes they hear the boy creaking around upstairs and Pamela will ask with her eyes, ‘What’s ever going to come of our Mark?’

  Sammy tells his wife exactly the same thing he tells himself: ‘Wait till you see, love. The lad’ll turn out grand. It’s just a wee phase he’s going through.’ He curls his fists into hammers when he says this, as if hope is something that can be grabbed and held on to. He actually believes himself. There are nail marks pinked into the palms of his hands, proving just how hard he believes. All Mark’s violence will turn out to be a passing phase, like online gaming, or that summer he ran with the Goth kids, shoplifting and loitering outside City Hall.

  If Sammy manages to avoid the actual Mark it is easy enough to imagine his son with a decent future. He can even picture them doing Christmas together, some time soon, like a family in a sitcom. Christopher and Lauren will come home; Pamela will have shifted a bit of weight and be happy again. They’ll all be laughing, laughing, laughing and playing board games round the dining-room table. They’ll watch Christmas movies together: Home Alone and Mary Poppins, Die Hard for the boys. They’ll eat Quality Street straight from the tin and wee nibbly things from Marks & Spencer, heated up in the microwave. They’ll take photos like a normal family.

  What crap. What utter self-indulgence. Five seconds in Mark’s company, even a glimpse of him glooming along the upstairs landing, is enough to remind Sammy that the boy’s just the same as he’s always been. ‘Troubled,’ his teacher once called him, but troubled is much too passive a sentiment for Mark. Mark is trouble.

  For the moment, Sammy shoves his son to the back of his thoughts. He needs to rest his nerves. He does his best to avoid the boy around the house. It isn’t hard. Mark keeps ghost hours. Every so often he’ll hear the floorboards creak and remember that his son is still up there, plotting. He can feel him, like a kind of weariness, seeping through the ceiling. But there’s nothing to show for Mark’s schemes now, not so much as a newspaper cutting. The Tall Fires are over. The air inside the house is thinner and better for breathing. When Sammy sleeps, he sleeps with both ears closed, confident that the PSNI aren’t about to come stampeding through his house with guns. He sits in his living room, coffee mug in hand, and watches the rain slugging down the windows. He feels like a cancer patient in remission. He can’t stop watching the rain. It is the answer to a prayer he hadn’t even thought to pray. Of course, there’s still a mean itch lingering behind all this contentment, but Sammy chooses to ignore it. It’s good to sleep his nerves. They are thin as piano wire, these days. There is always a headache just starting on him, always a tightness in his chest.

  He keeps his days light and his evenings ever so slightly inebriated: three beers to chase dinner and a whiskey before bed. He likes the feeling of a slurred tongue. He talks to Pamela about the box sets they’re watching, what to order from the Chinese, whether they can afford a new kitchen this year or next. They only do the surface chat, nothing like a siren going off. It’s important to keep the conversation going, though; doesn’t much matter what they’re saying, so long as they’re talking. Talking’s like a muscle. If you don’t keep at it, eventually it’ll seize up. They can’t run the risk of this. Sammy only has Pamela and Pamela only has Sammy and neither could manage on their own.

  They are kinder than they’ve been in ages. They tiptoe round each other’s nerves, fixing endless cups of tea and saying, ‘Are you warm enough, love? Should I fire the heating on for an hour?’ You’d think there’d been a death in the house, they’re that gentle with each other. It’s not like they’ve fallen in love again, nothing so bold, it’s more like they’re remembering how to be together, every day, in the same place. It takes a crisis to remind you of what you’ve got, thinks Sammy, and never once considers telling Pamela just how close they’ve come to losing everything. He keeps things nice and quiet, normal, relying on the television to fill in all the awkward gaps. He turns up the volume when Mark starts to move around upstairs. He does this to protect Pamela. He knows they’re just pretending. He knows this well enough for both of them. Best to keep their heads in the sand. Best to avoid a scene. He doesn’t have the balls to go upstairs again. Secretly he hopes that Mark will never come down.

  It is almost September now and still raining. Sammy is off into the city centre for a new pair of slippers. Other men’s wives buy their clothes for them but Pamela’s never been that kind of wife. He’s glad of this. He’s not the sort who’d take easily to being hen-pecked. The soles of his slippers are gaping at the toe, making mouths every time he walks, but she hasn’t even noticed. He’s buying his own slippers as he has bought his own jeans and jumpers and button-up pyjamas for the last thirty years or so.

  It’s Saturday and hell to find a parking spot so he’s taking the bus. On he gets at the top of the Castlereagh Road. He’s still several years shy of a bus pass so it costs him the better part of two quid to travel the four miles into town. ‘It’d be cheaper flying,’ he mutters at the driver and, just to spite him, the cheeky bastard starts off at a clip before he’s managed to sit down. Down he drops, stumbling like a Friday-night drunk, into the first available seat. Two young lads are sitting behind him. He notes their pale faces, smells the second-day sweat crawling off them. They are wearing beanie hats, like builders once wore in the seventies, or fellas from the shipyards. They are every second word cursing, all harsh consonants and phlegm. Click and cluck and gutter spit, like a pair of angry chickens. The sound of it catches at Sammy’s ear so he cannot help but listen.

  Aside from the three of them, and an old one with a zimmer frame, the bus is empty. If he turns his head sideways Sammy can see the two lads reflected in the opposite window. They are watching something on a mobile phone, holding it away from their chests so both can watch at the same time. Sammy has the most basic phone. It does calls and texts. It costs him a tenner a month and half the time is out of battery. This young fella has the same iPhone Sammy bought Christopher for Christmas last year. The price of it had almost killed him. ‘You could have a car for that,’ he’d moaned to Pamela, but handed over his credit card anyway. He can’t afford to ruin things with Christopher too. He only has the one decent son left.

  The bus passes a pizza place and, for a moment, captures all three of them in the plate-glass window: Sammy, in his summer anorak, the two tracksuit lads behind, heads inclined towards each other as they hunch over the phone. They have big, chunky bastards of watches on, gold straps f
laring against the glass, and smaller devices for music hanging on wires from their ears. They spend most of their lives plugged in. Life support, thinks Sammy. He wonders where the young ones get the money for all their toys. Probably drugs.

  ‘Have you seen this one yet?’ the lad directly behind him is asking. The other lad hasn’t.

  ‘It’s your man that done the Fire Starter videos,’ says the first lad. ‘He put a new one up last night.’

  Sammy is suddenly electric. The shock runs up the back of his neck and shoulders. He is struck glass. His stomach swims. His head clenches. He feels as if he might be sick and has nowhere to put it, not even a carrier bag. He wants to turn and whip the phone away from the boys. He doesn’t. He can’t. Instead he looks straight ahead, focusing on the bus’s windscreen, the wipers waving, the back of the driver’s baldy head. He holds himself like a telegraph pole, stiff and straight and thickly present. He must not turn round. It wouldn’t do to draw attention to himself, to seem more than averagely interested.

  He isn’t afraid of the young lads. He could have both of them on the floor, even now with his gammy knee and the old-man gut ballooning round his middle. No, he isn’t particularly afraid of anyone. He is only afraid of the angry knot lodged behind his ribcage and the way it is already clawing up his throat. He knows there will be no end to it, once started. He clamps his teeth. He fists his hands. He wants to ruin everything: these two lads with their mobile phones, Mark, himself, the whole bloody city. There’s no sense in him, only rage. He holds it tightly down. He has taught himself how to do this with breathing and certain key muscles, mostly his head. He sits perfectly still and listens. He listens like he is nothing but ears.

  ‘What’s he saying now?’ asks the second one. ‘Sure, the Tall Fires is all over since the rain started.’