by Sarah Butler
‘Well, say if I can do anything.’
Stick grunted an acknowledgement and then listened to his dad breathing on the other end of the line.
‘So, what do you think about these riots then?’ His dad said it like it had just come into his mind, like it was nothing big.
Stick rolled his eyes.
‘Kieran?’
‘They’re riots.’ The TV was showing the carpet shop on fire again.
His dad cleared his throat. ‘If it starts here I don’t want you getting involved.’
Stick imagined himself, his hood up, his T-shirt covering his mouth, throwing a brick at a window, his reflection cracking into pieces, and Mac standing beside him, grinning. ‘Dad. I’m eighteen.’
‘So you get arrested and you’re in a proper prison, not some juvenile place.’
A cell. A tiny window too high to show anything except a square of sky. A door thicker than his arm.
‘You’ve got a future, Kieran.’
Stick watched the fire rage on the TV. They were showing an aerial shot, the building falling to pieces and the flames getting stronger and stronger.
‘Look, if anything happens, if you get in a situation, you call me, OK?’
‘There are mums handing their kids over to the police, aren’t there?’
His dad cleared his throat again. ‘Just call me if you need to call me. Kieran?’
Stick pictured his dad walking through smashed-up streets, past fires, through police lines, his forehead creased into a frown, his hands in his pockets to make him look braver than he felt. ‘I’ll be fine. Thanks though.’
After he’d hung up, Stick stayed in bed watching TV. They kept playing the same footage on loop. The woman jumping out of the window; the kid with the bottle of wine; the boy in shades and a hood saying who cares, saying fuck you; the photo of the man who got shot. Stick had started to feel like he knew them, like they were characters in a soap opera. And the more he watched, the more something inside of him lifted. The more he thought it might be possible – to find Owen Lee and put a knife through his heart; to buy two coach tickets and sit next to J watching the world flash past; to find a flat, buy a dog, start being alive again.
Stick was still in bed when his mum came home. He had the TV on – a grey-haired man stood in front of a map of England, stains of red showing where the riots had spread to – but he was thinking about J: how she’d shunted herself down the bed, held the bottom of his cock and his balls lightly with both hands and then wrapped her mouth around him.
He got up, closed the bathroom door loudly and turned the shower on – finished himself off with the water splashing over his skin. It left him feeling edgy instead of relaxed.
Downstairs, his mum was sitting at the table with a cup of tea and a pile of computer printouts.
‘I went to the doctors,’ she said when she saw Stick, and pushed the papers towards him.
The top page was titled Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Stick scanned further down: anxiety; fear; reassurance-seeking behaviour; treatment. He felt his stomach tighten.
‘Dr Roberts said she’d put me on the list for –’ she took the papers back and flicked through them – ‘cognitive behavioural therapy.’ She looked up at Stick. ‘I said I’d fix things, didn’t I?’
Her eyes were bright, her face excited, like a kid. Stick had a sudden memory of an art class at school: making something out of plaster of Paris – the white liquid cold when he poured it into the mould, then almost too hot to touch as it set. And he remembered throwing whatever it was at a wall – end of term, on the walk back from school. Hurling it hard, and the whole thing smashing against the brick, leaving a white chalky mark, like the scuff from a football.
‘I thought maybe I’d give up smoking too,’ she said, and then laughed. ‘Why not, eh? They’ve got a special clinic for it, and a support group.’
He wanted her to stop talking.
‘She was so nice, Dr Roberts,’ his mum went on. ‘Really listened. Took the time. I didn’t think she’d be like that.’ She looked at Stick. ‘Aren’t you pleased, Kieran?’
‘Course I am.’ He made himself smile. ‘Course I am, Mum.’ Babs slunk into the room and Stick bent to scoop her into his arms, felt her warm against his chest, her heart beating and her claws on his forearm. She pushed against him, straining towards the floor, and he let her go.
‘And you know I was walking back and thinking that now you’re eighteen and there’s more council tax and less Housing, I’m going to have to start asking you to contribute. Not straight away, but we’re going to need to make plans, love.’
He wanted to be in London – all those people on the streets nicking stuff, running, shouting, doing whatever they wanted. ‘Dad called,’ he said.
His mum raised her eyebrows.
‘Telling me not to get involved in the riots.’
‘But you wouldn’t.’
Stick thought about the man in the hoody silhouetted against the flames.
His mum fussed with the printouts, arranging them into a neat pile. ‘Would you?’ she said.
Stick shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘Course not.’
His mum picked up her cup of tea but didn’t drink. ‘I was thinking we could go and see her,’ she said.
Stick frowned.
‘Sophie. At the weekend maybe? We could take some flowers? For Mac too.’ She looked up. ‘You’re doing so well, Kieran, dealing with Mac. I know how –’ she put the cup down – ‘difficult that is. I’m proud of you.’
Stick swallowed. He could feel tears lurking behind his eyes. He wanted to grab the pile of paper and chuck it across the room. He wanted to break something.
‘I thought I’d take a leaf out of your book.’ Her voice wavered a little. ‘I thought it would be good to go. Don’t you think?’
He wasn’t doing well, he wanted to tell her. He didn’t even know what doing well meant. ‘Yeah,’ he said instead. ‘Sure. Why not?’
It started in Salford the next afternoon. Stick’s phone bleeping with messages. The TV with a new lot of footage to repeat. His mum stood at the back door, silent and pale, smoking one cigarette after another, shaking her head and saying, ‘Here? Not here,’ and then turning to him and saying, ‘You wouldn’t, Kieran? You won’t, will you?’
By evening, the city centre was kicking off and Stick couldn’t stay in the house a minute longer. He kept calling J but no one answered, so he pulled on Mac’s trainers and ran to her house. His mum didn’t stop him going, just told him to not be an idiot, to keep safe, that she trusted him.
No one answered the door, so he crept round to J’s window and tapped on the glass until she drew back the curtain, her finger pressed against her lips.
He wanted to fuck her. He wanted to take her clothes off and fuck her until she came, hard, with that little gasp like she’d been taken by surprise.
She opened the window.
‘It’s started,’ Stick whispered. ‘In town.’
‘I know. I told Dad I needed to be there for college. Sociology,’ she said. ‘They’ll make us write an essay about it. I told him if I’d been there I’d get a better mark.’
Stick laughed and she gestured for him to be quiet.
‘He said he’d kill me with his bare hands if I went anywhere near it. But Mum’s away and he has to go to work in, like, half an hour.’ She turned to some noise in the house Stick couldn’t hear. ‘Go.’ She waved him away. ‘Quick.’
‘I’ll wait.’
‘No. Go. I’ll meet you outside Arndale. By the burger van. In, like, an hour. Go on, go!’
26
Stick ran into town, Mac’s trainers hitting a rhythm on the pavement. Down Oldham Street to Piccadilly Gardens where shop alarms were wailing and the sound of smashing glass and shouting made his heart lift. Mac would have gotten involved in this. Fuck, Mac would have started it. He’d have thrown something through a shop window. He’d have been at the front of the crowd pretending to be Mel Gi
bson in Braveheart, his hands in the air, shouting.
Two boys were trying to lever the shutter away from a shop window. The metal rattled and groaned, but wasn’t quite ready to break. Further towards Market Street, a crowd surged around Primark’s doors – people running inside and coming out with their arms full, coat hangers clattering to the ground.
There were no buses, no cars, no trams. The traffic noise replaced by shouts, whistles, running feet, breaking glass, burglar alarms. The smell of car fumes and coffee and Greggs’ pasties replaced with cigarette smoke and weed, and the sharp, choking stink of burning plastic that reminded him of the toy rabbit they’d burnt down by the canal – Mac smashing its eyes into tiny sharp pieces.
In front of him, two men were aiming kicks at a newsagent’s. A third had a fire extinguisher and was hitting it against the window. The glass was strong and bounced the men back at themselves with a dull thud. Then, as Stick got closer, the edge of the extinguisher made an impression, like stamping hard onto thick ice – a puncture, cracks fanning out around it like a spider’s web. Stick stared as the man with the extinguisher made another hit, then another, each time grunting like an animal, and the other two, still kicking, aiming now at the cracks, almost but never quite crashing into each other. The men kept on punching and kicking and, just before the window gave way, Stick thought of Mac lying on the ground and that bastard stabbing him, the knife – which they’d never found – coming down again and again and again into Mac’s body. One, two, three, four, five.
The glass crumbled, leaving a hole big enough to walk through, head high. The three men ducked into the shop and more followed them, coming out with a bottle of wine, a bag of crisps, packs of beer. One man had a tin of shaving foam; he shook it up and started spraying, yelling like crazy, white foam spurting over the pavement, the broken glass, the tram lines. Stick thought of his mum, stood at the back door, smoking, but still he felt a jolt of excitement. He could walk in and take whatever he wanted. How was that even possible?
He wanted Mac there. He wanted J there. The three of them, J in the middle, their arms stretched out like the paper dolls Sophie used to make. Mac would have loved it. He’d have lived off it for years. Do you remember? he’d say. That day? That Tuesday? When everything they said you couldn’t do you realised you could?
By the time he stepped through the window into the shop, it was a mess – as though a lunatic had come in, swept everything off the shelves and then jumped up and down on it; opened the fridges and pulled out every can, every bottle, every pint of milk and plastic-wrapped samosa; opened the freezer and thrown all the ice-creams up in the air, high enough so they smashed and split when they hit the floor. He wanted to get something for J but he didn’t know what. His feet crunched over the mess as he stalked the aisles. In the corner by the till sat a yellow bucket with a bunch of red roses inside, still perfect. Stick lifted them out and tucked them under his arm.
He reached Primark at the same time as the police, a group of them with dark uniforms, shields like giant contact lenses, helmets with plastic visors. They started hitting at people with batons. One dragged a woman to the ground, her cheek pressed against the pavement, her hands twisted up behind her. They’d do that to J. They’d do that to him. Except there were too many people, and the people turned, started chucking bottles and stones, handbags and shoes and coat hangers at the police. The thump and smash of it against the riot shields, and people still running into the shop, coming out laden with stuff.
Stick stood and watched as the police backed away from the crowd.
‘You couldn’t even keep a fucking murderer locked up,’ he shouted into the noise of the street. ‘You couldn’t even get your shit together enough to do that. So fuck you.’
It felt good, standing in the centre of Manchester, shouting.
‘Fuck you!’ Someone took up his words, then someone else, until there was a group of them, chanting at the police: ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,’ until Stick felt like his skin had turned into sherbet, fizzing and alive.
Around the corner, Jessops was smashed up, the shutters peeled back and the shelves stripped bare. The ground outside HMV was littered with CDs and broken plastic cases. Stick walked down Market Street, past the elevators up to the Arndale Food Hall. Past the crowd of people by the locked shopping centre doors. Down to Topman, where a handful of police officers in riot gear stood, the visors raised on their helmets like they were taking a break from welding. He could feel them watching him. Fuck you, he said in his head. Fuck you. He hugged the roses against his chest, turned and walked back the way he’d come.
And there, stepping out from under the trashed security shutter of Schuh, was Owen Lee.
It couldn’t be. But it was. Owen Lee. Jeans. White trainers. A blue top with the hood pulled up. Two shoeboxes wedged under his arm. The face from the newspaper. The face from the screen. He was taller than Stick had thought – his shoulders broad and meaty.
Stick opened his mouth, then closed it again. He thought about the knife in the car’s glove compartment, its blade sharp enough to break skin. From their right came the sound of breaking glass; the angry wail of a shop alarm like a child screaming; someone whistling, sharp and clear.
Owen Lee was looking left to right like he was about to cross a busy road. His gaze skimmed over Stick as if he was no one in particular. He started walking, and Stick followed him, curving his left hand around the heavy, polished bloodstone in his pocket.
He tried to believe Mac was there too, close by his side, saying, Go on, do it. Give the bastard a taste of his own medicine.
He felt completely calm. Manchester raged around him, but none of it seemed important any more – the shouting, the smashing, the catcalls and the laughter. It was as though he’d put ear defenders on: the world muffled and his own heartbeat sounding in his ears. It was just him and Owen Lee.
Owen Lee. Who stopped by the doors to the Arndale Centre, lifted the broken glass like a curtain, and slipped inside.
Stick went after him into the quiet, white space. All the shutters were down. All the lights were off. It was empty, save for them. Stick dropped the roses onto the nearest bench. He would say something first, he thought, Mac’s trainers squeaking against the floor tiles as he walked. This is for Mac. You can’t get away with doing that to my best mate – to me.
There was a flurry of noise ahead and a crowd of men came around the corner, running.
‘Pigs,’ one of them shouted.
Owen Lee turned and ran towards Stick. ‘Get out,’ he yelled, as he approached. ‘Feds.’
Stick stayed quite still. When Owen Lee dodged to one side to avoid him, Stick also dodged and the two of them collided.
‘Get out the fucking way,’ Owen Lee hissed.
Stick was close enough to see tiny beads of sweat on his top lip, close enough to smell him. He took the bloodstone out of his pocket. It gives courage to overcome obstacles and wisdom to decide how to do so.
Owen Lee shoved him in the chest – the edges of the shoeboxes hard against Stick’s bruises – but Stick got hold of his sleeve and didn’t let go.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Owen Lee shouted. He sounded frightened.
Stick realised he could do anything. Owen Lee was taller and broader but Stick was stronger. He could lift him up above his head and throw him as far as he chose. He could headbutt him until his skull cracked. He could smash the bloodstone into his face until it wasn’t a face any more.
The other men swerved either side of them, like a river splitting around a rock. They were facing the doors now, Owen Lee struggling to get away. Stick looked past him and saw a flicker of orange flame reflected in the shattered glass. He took a breath and thought of the anger-management woman, sitting at the front of the classroom, a lifetime ago – you can make a choice – and then he looked at Owen Lee, wriggling like a caught fish, dragging Stick towards Market Street. J would be there by now, looking for him. And Mac was dead – nothing wa
s going to change that.
He let go.
Owen Lee catapulted forwards and ran to join the scrum at the doors. Mac would be dancing through the streets if he was here – his arms above his head, fists punching the air, whooping and yelling. He’d nick bags of sweets and cans of beer and then give them away. He’d help out people who’d fallen over, or cut themselves on broken glass. He’d be having a ball. Stick felt his friend’s absence like he’d been punched just below the ribcage.
The police were coming. Stick heard the tramp of their boots and as he turned to look it struck him that they must be hot – maybe even scared – underneath all that protective gear. He grabbed the roses off the bench and slipped out onto the street before they reached him.
Miss Selfridge was on fire. Flames surged out of the shop window, their edges gushing black smoke up over the bricks into the cool early-evening sky. Groups of people stood and watched, the blaze repeated over and over again on tiny phone screens held up to catch the action. And there, in amongst the crowd, was J, standing by the burger van like she’d said, strands of blue hair escaping from the edges of her hood.
He watched her watching the shop burn. You’re beautiful, he wanted to tell her. I want to fuck you. I want to run away with you. I want to marry you. She’d laugh and punch him on the arm, and say give over, get out of here. Or maybe she’d say yes, me too.
J looked up, as though she could feel his eyes on her. She saw him and grinned, waved. When he reached her, he slipped an arm around her waist and she turned towards him, lifted her face and kissed him hard, the roses squashed between them, her skin hot from the fire.
Acknowledgements
For me, research is a process of conversation and observation, all of which gets filtered through multiple drafts until it becomes something perhaps unrecognisable but still rooted in a word, a gesture, a story told. Many people shared their expertise, experiences and opinions with me throughout the writing of Before the Fire and I am grateful to them all: Martin Bottomley, Tony Heslop, Karen Ryan, Jean Betteridge, Thomas Nicholson, Paul Hunt, Sam Baars, Jill Johnson, Eilish Blunn-Galagher, Cath Potter, Razia Shah, Katie Parr and students at St Augustine’s: Moyzz, Kevin, Maria, Malika, Naomi, Mariam, Jasmine, Joel, Bradley, Fatimata, Samira and Tayyibah; Moona Khan, Sarah Whittington and students at Manchester Communication Academy: Riler, Kyle, Remy, Mo, Tyler, Thabi, Luke, Mohammed, Habib and Keifer; Rose McCarton and the over-fifties group at the TLM Centre.