Before the Fire (16 page)

He opened his mouth to say, ‘Sorry, I had to, did you hurt yourself ?’ but nothing came out. She held her shoulder and glared at him, waiting, but he couldn’t speak. After a
minute, she turned and walked out into the rain. He wanted to stop her, he wanted to say,
No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean— I never would— I’ve had a shit day. It
wasn’t what it was supposed to be. I’m sorry.
But he just stood and rubbed circles with his finger into the dusty surface of the smashed-up box and felt his chest heave, and then
he squatted down, his hands cupping the top of his head, and held himself tight, rocking a little on his heels.

Saturday. One o’clock. That’s what they’d agreed. She wouldn’t come now, surely, but he’d said he’d be there, and maybe she’d realised
he hadn’t meant to push her like that.

There were four statues in Piccadilly Gardens. How did he not know? How did J not know? Or maybe she did, Stick thought, pacing from one to the other – the fat woman wearing the crown, the
man with a book on his knee, the two others standing with their hands on their hips.

He picked the statue of the fat woman in the crown, because it was the one set furthest back into the gardens and seemed the most obvious. There were stone steps the whole way around it, crowded
with people. Stick did a circuit. A pigeon sat on the woman’s head, and a line of them queued up on the top of her throne, white streaks of shit all over.

It was busy. People with their hands full of shopping bags: Primark, Debenhams, Boots, Schuh. The fountains were going – gobs of water shooting up from the concrete like someone spitting,
and the kids going mental for it. J wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t.

Stick found a space on the stone steps and sat down. He watched two girls, twins – with their hair in thin black bunches – playing in the fountains. One kept holding out her hand to
touch the water and then pulling it back. The other ran straight through the columns of water, laughing. They were both wearing the same dress – bright pink with little pinafore straps
– and the same shoes – black and shiny. How weird, Stick thought, to have someone exactly the same as you. To look at another human and see yourself.

He waited until quarter past, then looped round the other statues again. Sat back on the steps and waited until half past. Quarter to. Two o’clock. Scanning the gardens for a glimpse of
blue hair; a pair of skinny black jeans; thin brown arms.

Mac would have said he was a dick and deserved it. And then he’d have said,
Forget it. Forget her. Plenty more fish in the sea
. And if Stick told him he just wanted to apologise,
to explain, Mac would say,
Get over it, move on, why bother?

Stick had woken up that morning feeling like someone had washed out his insides with the cleaning stuff his mum used in the bathroom, the one that made your eyes sting just from the smell of it.
All the pressure of the day before, the noise in his head, the feeling he was going to explode, all of it was gone and he was white and empty and weightless. Which meant that if J did turn up,
he’d be able to explain. He’d be able to get the right words out in the right order, and she’d listen and nod and then smile at him, and he’d buy a bottle of vodka and
they’d go back to the canal and drink it, and he’d ask her to tell him jokes, he’d lean his head against the rough stone wall and listen to her talk, with the geese honking and
footsteps on the bridge over their heads.

At quarter past two his phone bleeped with a message and he fumbled it out of his pocket.

Spoke 2 Shelia (psychic) 2day. Iain’s doing just fine! Ur nan sends her luv. Looking 4ward 2 the big bday bash! Alan.

Stick cupped his hand around the screen. He didn’t want anyone sitting near enough to read it to think that he was a nutjob too.

Iain’s doing just fine!
He read the line again, then glanced up at the people milling across Piccadilly Gardens in shorts and T-shirts and sandals. It struck him that they must
all know someone who was dead too.

Iain’s doing just fine!
Is he? Are you? Stick fixed his eyes on the jumping fountains, the sun reflecting off the water as it leapt across the concrete. He wondered what Shelia
looked like – if she was into floaty clothes and bangles and crystal balls, or maybe she wore a suit, had her hair cut short and her lips painted bright red. He shoved his phone back into his
pocket, rested his chin on his hands and looked for J.

She didn’t come. He waited until half past. Quarter to three. She wasn’t going to come and he didn’t have her phone number, or know where she lived. So that was that, as his
nan would say. Move on.

At three, Stick stood and walked down Market Street, turned onto Spring Gardens and changed his euros back into pounds at the post office. He put the crisp banknotes and handful of change into
his pocket and went to TK Maxx, where he chose the least girly writing paper he could find – creamy A5 sheets with zebra print around the edges. He stood in the queue, his eyes roaming the
store, but she wasn’t there either.

No harm in it, he told himself, sitting on the bus back up Rochdale Road. No harm in trying. Except he hated writing. Except she’d never read it. But fuck it.

Dear J,

He crossed out
Dear
.

I waited in Piccadilly Gardens today
.

Which sounded like he was pissed off with her rather than the other way round. He scrunched up the paper and took another sheet.

J, I’m sorry. You were being nice and I was being a cunt.

He reached for another piece of paper.

J, I’m sorry. You were being nice and I was being an idiot. I went to court and Owen Lee wasn’t even there, he was in prison and they had a camera and then a screen in the court
so I didn’t properly see him. The trial’s not until February but I thought it would start then and I felt like I was going to explode, if you know what I mean.

I’m sorry
, he wrote again and then stared at the zebra stripes and his shitty handwriting, all cramped up and spiky-edged.
My mum always says ‘sorry isn’t good
enough’ but I can’t think what else to say, except I’m an idiot, but you know that.

Stick

He wrote his phone number underneath, then reread the note and added:

PS. I like your hair blue.

He folded the sheet in half, stuck it into an envelope with a picture of a zebra’s face on the back flap and wrote
J
on the front. It looked lost in the middle of the paper so he
drew a circle around it and then another circle around that.

Back at the wasteground, he picked up half a brick, stood on the back of the ripped leather chair and hauled himself onto the window ledge. There was a smear of cigarette ash in the mortar
between two of the bricks, which was probably from weeks ago but it made him feel better all the same. He put the envelope over the ash and put the brick on top of it, making sure the J was
visible.

Think you’re fucking Romeo
, is what Mac would say.
Think you’re some kind of romantic.
Stick looked at the envelope and without warning the noise was back in his
head, his skin hot, his heart leaping in his chest. He made himself jump down onto the chair and get out of there, before he ripped up the letter, before he smashed anything else, before he fucked
up more than he already had.

The letter stayed there a whole week. Stick kept going back to check, and each time the envelope was softer, grubbier, still unread. And then the weekend after he’d left
it, it disappeared.

Stick climbed up onto the window ledge to make sure. No letter. It meant nothing, he told himself. Some scumbag had probably found it and would start texting him porn any minute. Or a bird had
picked it up in its beak and dropped it somewhere. Stick straddled his legs over the sill and peered left then right but couldn’t see the envelope. And then he saw the piece of glass sat on
top of the half-brick. Not just any piece of glass, but one of those that has been smoothed off by the sea, all the sharp edges gone, the surface scuffed by sand into a pale, opaque green.

He was going soft in the head. But still he pocketed the glass, and when he got home he put it on the table in his room next to the writing paper with the zebra pattern, and then he picked it up
and held it in his left hand as he wrote another letter.

J. Thanks for the present. If it was you. If not, ignore that.

He nearly screwed the paper up again, but then he opened his left hand and looked at the glass, which had turned darker with the sweat from his palm, and carried on.

It made me think about the sea. You said you liked the sea? I want to invite you to Blackpool, for my birthday. Will you come? Saturday, 10 a.m., Piccadilly station, outside Thorntons.
I’ll pay. Stick.

He folded the paper in half, wrote
J
on an envelope and circled it twice, then unfolded the paper and wrote:

PS. It’s my 18th. I’m not a loser with no mates, but I was going to be in Spain, with Mac. He’s 18 three days after me. We’d got big plans. Not big big plans. Beer
and beaches and nightclubs, that kind of thing. Anyway, we’re getting Chinese at mine Saturday night. You could come (my nan’s boyfriend is mental – be warned).

Mac had been desperate to turn eighteen.
Responsibility, respect
, he’d say, puffing out his chest.
No more fake ID cards and staring down bar staff, and people thinking they
can pay you shit-all for working as hard as anyone else.
Stick couldn’t help thinking he’d rather be back at school. Not that he liked school – he didn’t – but at
least it was pretty straightforward. At least you didn’t have to make decisions the whole time.

He left the letter in the same place as before and then hung around for a bit, but J didn’t show. He wandered over to the brick shed and looked at the smashed-in metal
boxes. Two of the fans still turned lazily. He’d managed to damage the third so it stayed stuck in one position.

Stick rubbed at his eyes. He hadn’t been sleeping – spent the nights lying in bed staring at the crack across his bedroom ceiling, and the dust on the light shade, and the cobweb in
the corner that swayed sometimes as if someone was blowing it. As soon as he closed his eyes he’d start thinking about Mac – blood staining his shirt; or Owen Lee sitting at the table,
his eyes blank; or J holding her shoulder, her eyes tearing up.

When he got back home the house smelt of chocolate cake. His mum was at the sink, washing out the mixing bowl.

‘I thought I’d make two,’ she said. ‘And then you can take one over to Iain’s mother. What do you think?’

Stick shrugged.

‘It’s nice to keep in touch with her, love. That kind of thing’s important. And chocolate cake’s comforting, don’t you think?’ She lifted the bowl onto the
draining board and turned round. ‘Are you at your dad’s tomorrow?’

Stick pulled a face. ‘Might not go.’

‘Has he talked to you about—’ She narrowed her eyes like she was trying to read his mind.

‘I’m not selling double glazing.’

‘I thought it was a great offer. Training. A decent salary. Local.’

He was supposed to be in Spain, working in a bar, getting a tan. He was supposed to be enjoying himself.

‘You could try it out,’ she said.

Stick shook his head. He waited for the lecture – you’re eighteen next week; you need to have a plan; you can’t just mooch around here for the rest of your life; most people
don’t get an opportunity like that; look what’s happening in Greece, Kieran, you should count yourself lucky – but it didn’t come. Instead his mum took two chocolate sponges
out of the oven, stuck a knife in each to check they were done and turned them onto a metal cooling rack.

‘Did you make the appointment?’ Stick asked.

His mum tipped icing sugar into a sieve and shook it over a clean bowl, the sugar coming down in fine white drifts.

‘With the GP?’ Stick said.

‘Oh.’ She laughed, like that would make his question go away.

‘Mum?’

‘I haven’t had a moment, love. I’ll do it. I will.’ She dropped a spoonful of butter into the bowl and started stirring it into the icing sugar. ‘These’ll be
cool enough to ice in a minute. Will you drop one round? Give her my love?’

Stick turned and went up to his room without saying anything. He opened the drawer in the narrow desk he used to do his homework on and pulled out the roll of banknotes he’d changed at the
post office. A hundred was a good amount, he reckoned, counting out five twenties and putting the rest back.

Stick’s mum put the cake in a cardboard box, told him to hold it at the bottom and watch where he was walking. Outside, the little kid from next door was wandering about
in his pants, chewing on a piece of toast, but there was no one else around. Stick walked slowly. The cake smelt good. The sun was warm on his face. Stick thought about Alan’s text message.
Iain’s doing just fine!
He imagined ringing Mrs McKinley’s doorbell and Mac answering, grabbing the cake out of Stick’s hands and running off to cut himself a massive
slice.

Mrs McKinley answered the door. She didn’t look good – her eyes bloodshot, her hair greasy. She was in a tracksuit that was too big for her. It might even have
been one of Mac’s.

‘Kieran!’ She held her arms out wide. He could smell the booze on her breath when she leaned in to kiss him.

‘Cake,’ he said. ‘Mum made it.’

Mrs McKinley stared into the box.

‘You said everyone kept bringing food, I know. But—’

‘That’s lovely.’ She looked up at him. ‘Isn’t that lovely?’

Stick followed her into the flat. It looked like someone had broken in and turned the place over – the living room covered with Mac’s stuff: clothes and shoes, DVDs and Xbox games,
wires and headphones. Two black dumb-bells sat on the black leather armchair –
I’m going to get fit, Stick Man
, Mac had said; it had lasted a week if that. Five phone chargers.
Who needed five phone chargers?