The Fire Starters

by Jan Carson

  Words are elastic. He tells the whole sorry mess from his never-there parents right through to the recent floods, but he doesn’t mention that he’s planning to cut out the child’s tongue with a scalpel. That’s not happened yet. No need to include something that may never take place, he tells himself, excusing his own censorship. He doesn’t want Sammy Agnew to think him a beast. It’s one thing admitting to a psychopathic child, another thing entirely confessing your own cruel intentions. He is too ashamed to say this thing he’s already decided to do.

  When he’s finished there is a loud silence in the room. The air is funeral heavy. Both men sit back in their chairs and eyeball each other.

  ‘That’s some story,’ says Sammy Agnew.

  ‘It’s a hundred per cent true,’ says Jonathan.

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘You don’t have to humour me, Sammy. I know it sounds ridiculous. Nobody believes in all that supernatural crap nowadays. Most people don’t even believe in God.’

  ‘There’s plenty of people in the East believe in your so-called supernatural crap: ghosts and God and weans with powers nobody really understands. I’ve never heard them called Unfortunate Children before but, I guarantee you, if you go down any of them wee streets off the Albertbridge Road, or round Orangefield direction, and stop the auld ones and ask, “Did you ever hear tell of wee ones with special powers?” they’d all have a story for you. Every single one of them.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Swear to God. Sure, wasn’t there a wee lad in the year above me that could make people fall asleep just by looking at them hard? Sort of staring and squinting at the same time. And my ma used to tell us about a friend of hers who’d a baby come out already speaking German. Fluent it was, before it was even two hours old, and, by the time it was walking, it could make a fair stab at French and Spanish too, though there wasn’t a one on the Cregagh Road could tell if it was pronouncing the words right. Oh, and there was a wee girl – a real bad egg – in the year above my sister, who used to make a weird noise, rubbing her hands together like a cricket does with its knees, and if you didn’t get the hands over your ears quick sharp, you’d not be able to catch your breath. It was like suffocating. I swear she actually killed a wee lad with asthma. She done her hand-rubbing thing on him so much he had a massive asthma attack and died in the back of an ambulance. Of course, they never proved nothing, but all of us knew about her and what she could do with her wee bony hands. Naw, Dr Murray, you haven’t shocked me at all with your talk of Unfortunate Children. Though, I have to say, I’ve not heard of Sirens in the East before.’

  ‘And why did I never hear about any of this before Sophie?’ asks Jonathan.

  ‘Cos – no harm intended – Doctor, you’re too posh to have known what was going on at the other end of the road.’

  Jonathan feels as if he should apologize for his own ignorance. If Sammy Agnew’s to be believed, the Unfortunate Children are no new phenomenon in East Belfast. He fully understands the upper-class horror of scandal. Any Unfortunate Child blessed with a home on the Upper Newtownards Road would have been closeted away like a pregnant teenager: denied, disowned, kept like a dirty little secret in the back bedroom. What Jonathan can’t understand is how anybody living in a terraced house could keep such a thing from their neighbours. Surely the word of it would spread up the little streets and down, quick as summer flu.

  ‘Why did the papers never get the hold of this?’ he asks, but he could just as easily be asking, ‘What else do I not know about?’

  ‘Ah, now, if there’s one thing the people of the East are good at, it’s holding a secret close. All them wee houses jammed together arse to elbow, you can’t so much as turn in bed for letting your neighbours know it. Everybody knows everything. But the ranks are tight and they’re good at keeping their business to themselves. If the people of the East don’t want you to know what’s going on, there’s no way in hell you’re ever going to know. It’s hard work and secrets keep this place together.’

  ‘I suppose it’s good to share your problems with your neighbours,’ Jonathan says. He has a brief mental image of introducing Sophie to the two old bitches across the road. He sees himself holding the child under their noses, like a kind of sacrificial lamb. He can’t imagine them particularly pleased to meet her. He can’t see how they could do anything but make matters worse.

  ‘They do say a problem shared is a problem halved,’ says Sammy Agnew.

  ‘That may be true when your baby speaks German or comes out with wings, but it’s not the same when she’s an actual threat. I don’t think I could tell anyone about Sophie. It wouldn’t help. She’s different from all those other children. She could actually hurt people.’

  ‘Or she might be completely fine, Doctor. It’s fifty–fifty, isn’t it? She could take after you just as easily as her mammy.’

  Fifty–fifty, thinks Jonathan, and thinks of all the parents he’s encountered on ICU wards and special-care baby units: the sort of people who are encouraged to take their bad news sitting down. ‘Fifty–fifty chance of survival, or recovery, or making it through the next few hours.’ He’s said the words himself many, many times. Also ‘thirty per cent chance’ and ‘ten per cent’ and, at least a handful of times, ‘no chance at all’, which is a sentence you have to practise saying over and over, before you get it right. You cannot hesitate with ‘no chance at all’. Neither can you cry. You must be a brick. ‘Fifty–fifty’ is almost positive. It’s so far from ‘no chance at all’, Jonathan’s known parents who’d cut their own arms off to be offered odds so high. He is, in a sense, lucky. He should be seeing his glass half full. He should be hoping for the best.

  ‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘She’s fifty per cent mine. She might be entirely human … or she might not.’

  ‘No telling at this stage. So, there’s no point worrying about something that may never happen.’

  ‘I just wish there was something I could do to influence the odds.’

  ‘Uch now, son. Maybe you already have: nature versus nurture and all that. I’m a big believer in training a child up, leading them down the right path.’

  Jonathan resists the urge to say, ‘And how’s that gone with your Mark? Did you always want a balaclava-wearing lunatic for a son, or was it more of a recent aspiration?’ Instead he says, ‘I don’t really go in for that nurture thing myself, Sammy. You are the way you are, regardless of what anybody does to you.’

  ‘So, Mark would have turned out bad no matter how we brought him up?’

  ‘I think so, Sammy. I’ve no scientific proof of it but I’ve seen it over and over again. Good people sometimes raise bad kids. There’s nothing much you can do if you’ve got an evil child on your hands. Not that I’m implying your son is evil.’

  ‘Imply away, mate. You’ve got to have something of the dark side about you to plan the kind of stuff he’s dreamt up this summer.’

  ‘It works the other way too, Sammy. I’ve seen kids turn out decent even though they’ve been treated really badly. Take myself, for example. My parents didn’t love me. They made it quite clear they didn’t even want me and yet here I am, a fully functional human being, a doctor, a father, a reasonably decent man.’

  Every word of this is a lie. Jonathan knows he is not a fully functional human being. He is a poor doctor, a conflicted father: a reasonably pathetic specimen of manhood. He has always believed himself to be half a person: the poor product of bad parenting and upper-class neglect. But he can’t admit this in front of Sammy Agnew. It’s not what the older man needs to hear. He wants Agnew to believe that he’s not to blame for the badness in his son. No heavy hand or lack of discipline could have made any difference to how the boy has turned out. Jonathan wants him to feel as if he’s not responsible for Mark or, at the very least, less responsible.

  ‘It’s scientifically proven,’ he says. ‘I could show you an article in the BMJ if you don’t believe me, tests they’ve done on monkeys and dolphi
ns to show it’s the same in animals as humans. People don’t change, no matter how much you try to influence them. If you’re born evil, you’ll always be like that. Born nice, you’ll basically always be a decent human being, no matter what life throws at you.’

  ‘Really?’ asks Sammy. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Don’t take my word for it. It’s in the British Medical Journal. Brand-new case study, completed last year. No matter how much you try to lead a person, at the end of the day they can only ever be who they actually are.’

  ‘Nature, rather than nurture.’

  ‘Exactly, Sammy.’

  ‘So, I’m not to blame for how our Mark’s turned out?’

  ‘I don’t believe you are.’

  ‘I still feel guilty, though.’

  ‘I understand completely, but you’ve to try to let it go. Guilt like that’ll eat you up. You’ll be no help to the boy in this state.’

  ‘I’ll try. No guarantees, though. And what about you? If your nature-over-nurture thing’s true, you’re in deep shit with that wee lassie of yours. You could be sitting on a time-bomb.’

  ‘I know, Sammy.’

  ‘What are you for doing with her, Doctor?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  Of course this is another of Jonathan’s lies. Each lie is easier to tell than the last. But this is the biggest and boldest one of all. Jonathan knows exactly what he’s going to do about Sophie. He’s not prepared to take any chances with her. He has already brought home everything he needs from the surgery: scalpels, gauze, anaesthetic, sterile needles, sewing thread. He has stored it all at the back of his underwear drawer where Christine shouldn’t be looking. He is making plans for the weekend. He is going to cut her tongue out.

  He isn’t about to tell Sammy this. He’s not even admitting it to himself.

  18

  The Last Supper

  It is early evening in the East. The sky is sliding down in sheets.

  Ballyhackamore is a river banked by coffee shops and restaurants, Chinese takeaways, chippies and pizza places. At one end of the street the restaurants are fancy-name pricey. At the other, giant slices of pepperoni dance the Macarena while burgers with wide-mouthed grins haunt the restaurant windows, like effigies of obscure saints. People come here to eat and to be seen eating. They call it ‘Ballysnackamore’ and park their cars two deep at weekends. They do not give a moment’s damn for the residents who also have cars in need of parking. They come all the way from Dundonald, and even Newtownards, for breakfast with the in-laws, brunch and afternoon coffee, for overpriced cocktails in retro glasses, late dinners, long nights, and drinking themselves sideways with the lads from the rugby club.

  They have a tendency to overdress. The women are fleshy and frocked in the kind of clothes you’d wear to a wedding if only invited to the evening do. They are highly heeled and, for the most part, orange in both hue and political outlook. The men wear sports jackets and tieless shirts, unbuttoned to reveal small triangles of tongue-coloured flesh tucked just beneath the chin. They hope the women will notice this brief flash of nakedness and wish to investigate further. The women don’t. Unless they’ve been drinking. They have often been drinking: wine on week nights, spirits at the weekend. When they speak they are shrill as morning birds. The sound of them all together in a room is enough to set your teeth on edge or force you outside with the smokers. Even if you don’t smoke, even if you never have, it is a relief to be outdoors in the cold just-beginning rain, finally capable of hearing where one sentence ends and the next begins.

  No one is standing outside today. Even the smokers are abstaining. The rain is coming down in tides. People dash from their cars to the coffee shops and back, dragging their partners and children behind them. They group beneath golf umbrellas and slouch down the street like hunchbacked turtles. One foot, one arm or straggling child always escapes the brolly’s edge and brings the wetness inside, leaving sad little perspiration marks on the floors and seats. Afterwards the shape of their left-behind dampness is a loose figure eight from where their buttocks have pressed softly in. Drowned umbrellas wilt beside every door, like tiny defeated trees. Every other window is sweated up: body heat frosting against cold glass. The waitresses are even more strained than usual.

  Sammy doesn’t care about the rain this afternoon. He’s hardly even aware of it sleeking against his windscreen. The traffic is murder, though. He can’t help but notice it huffing to front and rear. He drives halfway through Ballyhack before he finds a free spot outside the fruit shop, three minutes’ walk from his favourite Chinese. Three minutes’ walk through the pissing rain.

  Sammy isn’t wearing a coat today. He’s stopped thinking about practicalities or how he must look to other people. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a church pullover, sandals with gym socks whiting between the straps. Pamela would be mortified if she could see the cut of him in his sandals. She wouldn’t stand beside him in the street. But Pamela isn’t here. Sammy knows he has to face this day alone. As he fumbles with the car locks the rain creeps down the collar of his shirt, plastering the fabric to his back. He is uncomfortable in his dampness. The rain is leaking into his sandals. It’s sweating between his toes. The wool of his jumper is beginning to itch. It is already autumn-cold in Belfast, colder still in this rain. But Sammy doesn’t complain.

  Sammy has recently come to accept even the smallest irritations – hiccups, paper cuts, constipation and such – as a form of penance. In light of past and current sins he sees himself deserving of no good thing. No ease or get-out-of-jail-free card. No avoiding whatever discomfort might come his way. Be it life inside, a quick bullet through the kneecap, or just a soggy V-neck, he must endure the annoyance for it’s nothing more than he deserves. He won’t allow himself the luxury of complaint. He will not even sigh. He drags the cuffs of his now-damp sweater over his shivering hands and steps into the traffic.

  This is to be his last decent meal. It might even be his final time in the rain for a good long while. He doesn’t know if they’ll allow him outside. In the movies they do. They walk the prisoners round and round sun-drenched yards in orange boiler suits. They sometimes let them play basketball. But the movies are all set in America. It’s probably different here. Here, there is rarely any sun and not much interest in basketball, and they couldn’t be dressing prisoners in head-to-toe orange. The other side would quickly cry, ‘Human-rights violation,’ and ask for their own boiler suits in jolly racing green. Sammy has no idea how it will be inside. He’s heard rumours, of course, but he’s long since stopped believing in things he hasn’t seen himself.

  A bell tinkles above the door as he walks into the Chinese restaurant. The rain comes in with him, leaving a scummy puddle on the lino. Mr Chang pops up from behind the till as if he’s been hunkering on the floor, beneath the counter, just waiting for a customer to arrive. He is always down there, waiting, except on Saturday nights when the door can hardly close for swinging open.

  ‘Sammy, my friend, how are you keeping?’ he asks, his accent pure East Belfast, with inflection in all the wrong places.

  ‘I’m fine, Mr Chang,’ he says, ‘and yourself?’

  ‘Grand so.’

  Sammy has decided to have a last meal. He’s not particularly hungry. He hasn’t been able to work up a good hunger in weeks. He nibbles at toast and biscuits, leaving cups of cold tea half drunk and skinning on the coffee-table. He is only ever ravenous in the middle of the night when the weight of everything keeps him from sleeping. Then, he sneaks down to the kitchen and eats dry crackers or bran flakes by the handful. It all tastes like cardboard but he won’t allow himself to enjoy his food, even when he’s bingeing. Today is different. Today’s dinner will be the meal Sammy remembers every time he sits down to stodgy porridge or over-boiled potatoes. He’ll hold the memory of it against the tasteless days to come for months, years, maybe even decades. He has no idea how long he’ll get.

  ‘You will be having the usual, Sammy?�
� asks Mr Chang.

  ‘Yes. Maybe. Actually, I’m not sure. Let me have a wee look before I decide.’ He leans over the counter and scrutinizes the laminated menu, which is Sellotaped next to the till. Chow mein. Sweet and sour. Kung Po chicken. Satay beef. Honey chilli prawns. Which will he miss most when he’s reduced to prison stodge and wee parcels from home?

  ‘I’ll have beef chow mein, please, sweet and sour chicken Cantonese style, a portion of spring rolls, them duck pancakes you gave us last weekend, and a beef with mushrooms.’

  ‘Fried rice or boiled?’

  ‘Sure, go for the fried rice, Mr Chang, and don’t be telling the wife. She has me on the Slimming World these days.’

  Mr Chang winks conspiratorially across the counter. Sammy has never seen a Mrs Chang but she is, occasionally, implied.

  ‘Wee portion of prawn crackers, my friend? Little secret not to tell the wife.’

  ‘Aye, why not?’

  ‘Tin of Coke?’

  ‘Bottle, please.’

  ‘You are having party with your friends, Sammy?’

  ‘Naw,’ says Sammy, then, glancing down at the enormous list of food scribbled on Mr Chang’s notepad, decides it’s best to lie. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’ve the lads coming round to watch the match. The wife’s away up to her sister’s for the day.’

  ‘When the cat’s away, the rats will play.’

  ‘Mice,’ says Sammy. ‘It’s mice, not rats.’

  But Mr Chang has already turned away from the counter and is shouting orders to his brother, the younger one, who is never allowed out of the kitchen. Sammy takes a seat in the window and begins flicking through an old car magazine. He keeps turning pages one after another. Their corners are frail and greasy from dozens of similar flickings. Here is a red car. Here is a blue. Here is a car with a roof that comes off, and one that does nought to ninety almost as fast as a jump jet. This is the sort of stuff that interests people, the crap people go mad for. Cars. Money. Drink. Women.