Before the Fire

by Sarah Butler

Stick listened.

  Nothing.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  Nothing.

  ‘I didn’t mean— You just freaked me out.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘Mac?’

  A swell of tinny music on the TV. A car horn sounding outside. Stick tried to laugh at himself. Talking to the dead! Alan was making him crazy.

  ‘I fucking miss you,’ he whispered. ‘I really fucking miss you.’

  August 2011

  21

  He was with J when his mum called; the two of them sat up on the window ledge in the wasteground near Strangeways, passing a joint back and forth. He’d got an eighth of weed off Ricky and it was almost finished already – it was the only thing that helped him sit still for more than five minutes. He’d been trying to ask J if she knew what she’d do after college, and if she did, how did she know? How do you decide – he was trying to ask – how do you come up with something that might actually happen? He’d been struggling to get his questions to make sense, and she’d kept flicking her hair and sucking on the joint and saying, ‘I don’t know. I can’t be bothered thinking about all that.’

  He knew what his mum was going to say even before she said it.

  ‘Love, it’s the case. I’m sorry.’

  Stick stared down at the handbags, their colours bleached by rain, their clasps and buckles rusted up and their insides rotting. He could sense J looking at him but couldn’t meet her eye.

  ‘The judge said there wasn’t enough evidence to go ahead.’

  Stick could picture the judge in his stupid white wig, banging a wooden mallet thing down with a crash. Case dismissed. That meant everyone go home, we’re done here. That meant we actually can’t be arsed. That meant, who cares, it was only some estate kid – probably drugs, probably gangs, probably the world’s better off without him anyway.

  ‘They’re doing more tests,’ she went on. ‘They’ll find something, they’re bound to. And then they can recharge him. They are sure it’s him, Trish said that. They say it happens sometimes, this kind of thing; it just means things take a bit longer. I’m sorry, love.’

  He wanted to throw his phone as far as he could – over the piles of rubbish and smashed concrete – hear it land with a crash, its screen cracking, the keyboard detaching itself, his mum’s voice silenced.

  ‘Are you OK? Do you want me to come?’

  He shook his head. He knew she couldn’t see him but he didn’t trust himself to speak.

  ‘Love?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he croaked. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Do you want to come home, love?’

  He wanted to run. He wanted to run until he couldn’t run a step further, until his chest burst and his legs burned and his brain stopped thinking.

  ‘Kieran, you’re worrying me now.’

  ‘Fine, I’m fine. I’ve got to go.’ He hung up and shoved his phone back in his pocket.

  J said nothing but he could feel her watching him.

  ‘Fucking police.’ He put a hand on the ledge either side of him because he suddenly wasn’t quite sure where the edges of his body were. ‘They know he did it and they’ve let him go. How does that even make sense? How is that even allowed?’

  They sat in silence for a long time.

  ‘Do they know why he did it?’ J asked.

  Stick ground his knuckles into the rough brick. ‘He wouldn’t say anything. But he was there. There was blood on his shoes. He’s got history.’

  ‘But there’s not enough evidence?’

  ‘Don’t even say that.’

  ‘I’m not saying he didn’t do it, I’m asking.’

  ‘He did it.’

  J held up both hands, then relit the joint and passed it to him. Stick pulled the smoke into his lungs, but it didn’t help.

  On Saturday morning, Stick took a knife out of the kitchen drawer – the one his nan used for cutting potatoes – wrapped it in a plastic bag and shoved it under the waistband of his boxers. He walked home with the creased plastic scratching at his back.

  Someone had snapped the left wing mirror off the car but otherwise it was fine. Still started, the engine coughing into life, the clutch groaning away to itself. He didn’t have a plan other than to find Owen Lee. The fucker would be somewhere. Stick would just have to keep driving until he saw him.

  He drove to Paget Street first. He was sure he remembered hearing something about criminals going back to the scene of their crimes, even when it was dangerous to do so, as though they couldn’t quite believe they’d done what they’d done and thought going back would give them proof, because they’d be there and remember it and it’d feel real again. Stick parked where the incident unit had been. There was no one about.

  Sweat prickled down his back and across his palms. The trees cast chunky black shadows onto the grass. The dandelions had gone to seed, a few white bits of fluff still hanging on, but the rest gone. He shouldn’t have ripped up the newspaper article. The more he tried to remember what Owen Lee looked like the less sure he was – the face from the photo, from the court screen, breaking into tiny squares and falling apart, however much he screwed up his eyes, however much he tried.

  Stick sat, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel, and waited. He would know him when he saw him. And when he saw him he’d kill him. A magpie swept down from one of the trees, landed lightly on the pavement and looked at Stick.

  One for sorrow.

  The bird pecked at something on the ground and then heaved itself up into the air again, flashing its blue-black wings with their bright white tips, an impossibly long twig – three or four times its size – hanging from its beak.

  He’d put the knife in the glove compartment. Stick tightened his grip on the wheel and tried to imagine what it would feel like to stick a blade into a living human being. He wondered if you’d have to push hard to get it through the skin, or if it would be like stabbing a block of cheese, or a loaf of bread. It would be easier if he had a gun. Stick pointed two fingers at the magpie, which sat in a tree still holding the twig, and made shooting noises. That would be easiest – click and blow him away.

  Stick caught a movement in his wing mirror and tensed. It wasn’t Owen Lee, just an old guy on the other side of the road, with a limp and a white plastic bag in one hand. For a split second, he imagined jumping out of the car, running up to the man and shoving the knife into his chest. The man kept walking; Stick locked his door and sat there long after the man had disappeared, his heart pounding and his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

  If he didn’t do it no one else would. Mac would be dead and there’d be no sense to it. Stick started the engine and felt the buzz of it enter through his skin. He jerked the car back onto the road, his body loose with adrenaline, his breath coming in bursts, his hands jittery on the wheel. He screeched down Paget Street and veered left onto Rochdale Road without stopping to look, stuck a finger up at the car hooting behind him. ‘Fuck off,’ he shouted. It made him feel better, somehow. ‘Fuck off. Fuck off.’ His voice rose with the engine’s revs and he felt a smile sneak across his face. This was how it was going to work. He was going to find that bastard and make him wish he’d never been born.

  22

  ‘I’m going to shine this light again.’ The doctor loomed closer to Stick, aiming a light into his left eye, then his right, leaving yellow-pink shapes glowing in the air. ‘And now I’m going to ask you to follow my finger with your eyes, without moving your head. That’s right.’ She moved her finger across his vision. She was skinny, Asian, young, with red lipstick and her hair tied up in a ponytail.

  ‘Any double vision?’ she asked.

  Stick shook his head. It was like the millionth time they’d done this. He remembered the magpie, he’d told the other doctor that – a cheery, ruddy-faced man who looked like he should be a schoolteacher, or a children’s entertainer. He remembered the magpie with the twig in its mouth, almost too big for it to carry, but after that, it was blank.


  ‘I just need you to clench your teeth together.’ She reached out both hands and felt either side of his neck, then rubbed at his temples. Her hands were cool and smooth. She pressed her finger against his chin. ‘And now open your mouth.’

  He’d driven into a lamp post, the other doctor had said. Any idea why that might have been? Stick had shaken his head and shrugged. The knife would still be in the glove compartment, along with an empty pack of tobacco and some sweet wrappers. But it wasn’t illegal to have a kitchen knife in your car.

  The new doctor wrote something on her clipboard, looked at it and then nodded. ‘Your mum’s on her way.’

  Stick stared at the pleated blue curtain the doctor had pulled around his bed and felt the weight of himself, like a lump of concrete on the thin, plastic-coated mattress. Through the gap in the curtain he could see nurses sitting behind a big desk covered in phones and computers and bits of paper, and behind them a white board with people’s names and bed numbers in blue marker pen. The place stank of cleaning fluid and ill people. It was too bright, too loud – machines bleeping and people talking. Made his head hurt. Made his brain pound against his skull. He wanted to go somewhere dark and quiet. If he was somewhere dark and quiet, then maybe he’d be able to remember whether he’d found Owen Lee or not; whether he’d killed him.

  But the doctor hadn’t said anything about anyone else. A lamp post, not a man. And there were no police lining up to ask him questions and take fingerprints. Maybe he’d seen Owen Lee and tried to swerve to hit him. Maybe he’d had his hood up and Stick was leaning towards the window, trying to see his face. He searched his brain but it wouldn’t give him anything. Just a magpie with blue on its wing.

  ‘How can it just go?’ he asked the doctor, who was opening the curtains.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Your memory,’ Stick said. ‘How can it just disappear like that?’

  The doctor pursed her lips. ‘It’s really quite common,’ she said. ‘With a head injury, and shock.’ She looked at her clipboard again. ‘We’ll do a few more tests, but I think it’s nothing serious.’ She smiled as if she’d answered his question and walked away, her heels tapping a no-nonsense rhythm.

  Stick carried on trying to remember, but it was like he’d died for an hour or two, and then come back to life.

  His mum arrived, almost running down the ward towards him, her hand pressed to her chest.

  ‘Oh my God. Oh, Kieran.’ She went on and on, like they were in one of her soap operas. She kept touching him, the same way she’d done after Sophie had died, as if checking he was really there.

  Stick lay as still as he could and let her words wash over him. His whole body ached, like someone had given him a proper kicking. The seat belt, the first doctor had said, tracing his hand diagonally through the air. At least you were wearing one, but there was no air bag so you’ve got the wheel too, and it’s bruised deep. It’ll take a few weeks. No permanent damage though, not to your torso.

  ‘I just can’t believe you’d do that. I can’t.’ His mum started crying, her shoulders shaking with it. ‘I should never have let you two buy that bloody car in the first place.’

  Stick felt like he was watching her through a thick pane of glass. He managed to sit himself up a bit in bed and say, ‘I’m not dead, Mum. They’re just doing tests.’

  ‘But your head.’ She reached up and touched just above his ear. ‘And to try and—’ She put her hand over her mouth. ‘To drive into a lamp post.’ She was crying even more now. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She kept saying it over and over. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ And then pulling herself together, sniffing the tears back, her eyes bright. ‘I’ll fix it. I will. I’ll fix it. We’ll be all right.’ And then crying again.

  He was so tired. He kept thinking about how Sophie had shrunk to just a handful of memories and he wasn’t even sure which of them to trust – which he’d made up, or worked out from photos, and which were actually true. It would be the same with Mac. Ten years from now Mac would be a series of images and phrases and feelings that he’d have to keep rehearsing so they didn’t disappear completely.

  His mum had stopped talking. She was holding his wrist, looking at the Armani watch, which had a single crack right across the face.

  ‘Shit,’ Stick said. His voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away.

  His mum shook her head. ‘We’ll fix it. We’ll fix it, love.’

  They made her leave when it got to dinner time. She walked backwards down the ward towards the double doors, waving at him, but Stick couldn’t find the energy to wave back.

  His meal came on a plastic tray divided into compartments – chicken in cheesy white sauce, damp green beans and not-quite-cooked potatoes. Stick stabbed at them until they broke into pieces; pushed the bits of chicken into a line around the edge of their space; told the nurse who tried to get him to eat that he wasn’t hungry.

  Still, every hour, the same thing. Follow my finger. Shining a light. What day is it? Where are you? What’s your name? He wanted to shout fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, at the top of his voice. He wanted to go to sleep, but his head was too full of noise. Where am I? Who am I? How can Mac be dead?

  He felt exposed – dressed in the stupid, scratchy hospital gown which was basically a dress. Lying on the high metal-framed bed with people rushing past, doctors and nurses, and shuffling slippered patients. He could see one window on the other side of the room. Otherwise it was just bright lights and ugly beds and ugly people in the beds with TVs on extendable arms, and beeping machines and trolleys and sinks and bunches of flowers stuck in plastic jugs and the stink of chemicals and rot.

  And then his dad turned up. Stick spied him coming through the doors to the ward and quickly closed his eyes.

  ‘Kieran?’

  Stick kept his eyes shut and tried to breathe long, slow, asleep-sounding breaths. He felt his dad’s hand on his shoulder and made himself not wince. A little push. Another.

  ‘Kieran?’

  He used to read Stick stories. He’d forgotten about that, but his dad’s voice reminded him now: Stick tucked in bed with the duvet held at his chin and his dad sitting next to him, the weight and the warmth of him against Stick’s legs. Pirates and talking mice and dragons.

  He heard his dad settle himself in the chair next to the bed, the slight effort of his breath, the rustle of his clothes against each other and then the tap tap of his finger against the chair’s arm.

  ‘Are you asleep?’ his dad said.

  Stick shifted onto his side with a sigh, as though he had almost woken up but not quite.

  ‘It’s me,’ his dad said. ‘Your mum called.’ His finger still tapped on the chair. ‘In a state. She said you’d tried to kill yourself.’ His voice veered upwards.

  Stick nearly opened his eyes at that.

  ‘I told her. It’s not your fault, Mandy, I said.’ He paused. ‘I said, if it’s your fault then it’s mine too.’

  Stick concentrated on one high-pitched bleep coming from the other side of the ward.

  ‘Why would you?’ his dad said, his voice careering out of control again. And then, softly, ‘The case. The court case.’

  Stick could imagine him sat there, nodding, the hospital lights shining off his forehead.

  ‘Are you awake, Kieran?’

  Stick tried not to react, tried to keep his breath slow and steady. He heard his dad sigh.

  ‘I wanted someone to blame,’ he went on. ‘God, I wanted someone to blame.’

  Stick remembered. His dad pacing the house those months after Sophie died. Hours on the phone to lawyers and consumer watchdogs, whatever they were. I’ll nail someone for this. I’ll nail the bastards who made this happen. And all the time his mum getting smaller and paler, like someone was sucking the life out of her.

  Stick wanted to sit up and say, well this is different, isn’t it? The fire was an accident. You can’t call getting stabbed five times an accident. He wanted to say, there is so
meone to blame, that’s the point, but they’ve let him go. He half opened one eye, the hospital ward flickering and blurred behind his lashes, his dad a dark, stooped shape at his side. Stick closed it again and thought about Owen Lee, in the newspaper, on the screen in the courtroom. Maybe it would be harder not having someone to fix it all on, not having someone to hate.

  ‘You told me to apologise.’ His dad let out a nervous laugh. ‘I don’t even know where to start.’

  He didn’t start at all. He just sat there another ten, fifteen minutes, and then he got up. Stick could feel him standing there, watching him, for what seemed like forever. But eventually the light shifted and his dad’s footsteps retreated down the ward.

  He tried to sleep, but the nurses kept waking him up to do the tests and anyway his head was too full – his thoughts like fat summer flies bashing at a window. The fluorescent lights dug through his eyelids and made his head hurt even more. He ached like a bastard and when he lifted the gown away from his neck he could see huge red and purple welts across his chest.

  On the wall next to the white board, the clock’s hands barely seemed to move between him looking once and looking again. Stick twisted the outside of his watch around and around and thought about his mum’s face and her fingers worrying at the hospital sheet.

  There was no announcement, just a ripple of uneasy excitement across the ward. Nurses whispering to each other. The woman in the bed opposite sitting up straighter and holding the edges of her TV screen as if to steady the image. A swell of voices. He’d asked to watch TV but it turned out you had to pay for it and he didn’t have any money. If he craned his neck to the left he could just about see his neighbour’s screen but there was no sound, only a static hiss from the man’s plastic headphones.

  The man, who had wires coming off his chest and into a machine, saw Stick looking and pulled his headphones away from his ears. ‘Police shot a black guy,’ he said, then shook his head. ‘Always starts the same bloody way.’