Before the Fire (18 page)

‘My nan’s boyfriend’s a spiritualist,’ he said.

‘What’s that then?’

‘He’s got mates who talk to dead people. Do you reckon that’s for real?’ He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon.

‘I think it’s bollocks,’ J said. ‘Dead people are dead, aren’t they? I mean – I don’t mean to be nasty about it, but—’

‘No, you’re right.’ Stick picked bits of paint off the bench and flicked them onto the pier. ‘It’s bollocks.’

He stared up at the sky. Pale blue. Almost not blue at all. Layers of clouds at the horizon, one wedged up against the other. He had a sudden, wild urge to tip himself backwards off the edge of
the railings. It was a long way down. He’d break his neck. Have to be dragged out. He wondered if J would jump in after him.

‘How’s being eighteen?’ J asked.

Stick took the last doughnut from the bag, bit it in half and handed the other piece to her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Same as being seventeen. Except you gave me that
dodgy tea.’

‘You feeling it yet?’

Stick closed his eyes and listened to the sea bashing at the edges of the pier below. ‘Nope.’

‘Let’s go back.’ She pointed towards the beach. ‘There’s too many people here. It’s better to be away from people. First time.’

It started with a pressure at the centre of his forehead, like someone was pushing their fingertip against his skin. Just that for a while. Then a bubbling sense of
anticipation.

‘You need to stay calm when it comes,’ J said. ‘Think good things. Don’t think about your mate, seriously.’

They were sat, side by side, where the pebbles stopped and the sand started. The air had a cool edge and J had taken a loose khaki-green jacket from her bag and hung it around her shoulders.

Stick blinked. Blinked again. There was a layer of green, blue and red blobs over the sea, over the sand, over his hands when he held them in front of his eyes. He could see, but everything
looked like it was on a screen and there was something wrong with the signal. When he closed his eyes the colours were still there. When he opened his eyes they were still there, but squarer.

‘I can—’ His mouth was dry. He moved his tongue around it to try and make it feel right.

J started laughing.

‘It’s red and green and blue,’ Stick said.

J nodded and carried on laughing. ‘Look.’ She pointed. ‘Like someone’s drawn the waves on, with crayon.’

Stick looked. All he could see were the coloured squares and the waves moving in, out, in.

‘Like a kid’s drawn them,’ J said.

Stick looked at her. ‘Your hair.’ He reached out to touch it. Felt like silk. Felt like Babs’s fur. ‘It’s so pink,’ he said. Like paint fresh out of the tin.
He could look at her hair forever.

J sat and let him touch her hair and after a while – he had no idea how long – she lay down on the sand, and he lay down next to her. He could hear the sea, the edges of the waves
bubbling over the sand, towards them, away from them, towards them, away.

J pointed at the sky.

It was the bluest blue he’d ever seen. He kept looking, at the blue, blue sky and the thin white clouds. After a while, the whole thing started to breathe. Stick stared. The sky breathed.
In, out, in, out, moving like someone’s chest when they’re sleeping, the clouds moving too, slipping up and down, up and down. Stick breathed with it. When he stretched his arms to each
side, like wings, his fingers brushed J’s jacket – soft as candyfloss. It felt as though if he pressed, his hand would go all the way into it.

‘We could go to Spain,’ Stick said.

‘Eat paella,’ J said. Her voice seemed to come from directly above him. The sound of it tasted like gingerbread.

‘Get a flat.’

‘Learn to dive.’ She flung her hand upwards and grains of sand flew out, drawing thin yellow lines through the air. ‘I’ve always wanted to go diving.’ Her voice
sounded like it was in a tunnel now, echoing off the edges.

The squares were still there, but they’d faded, or he’d got used to them. It just looked like someone had put a fishing net in front of his face. He had a sudden, clear memory of
climbing into Sophie’s cot, the two of them jumping up and down against the wooden bars and squealing, his mum laughing. He could feel it – the soft, squeaky plastic mat, the hard
wooden bars. He could smell the soapy-sweet baby wipes and Sophie’s skin, sleepy and hot.

The sadness was like a weight dropped into water. He felt it ripple out towards his head, his stomach, his fingertips.

J leaned over him. ‘You all right?’ Her eyes were so dark he almost couldn’t look at them.

Stick reached up and touched her skin, then snatched his hand away and looked at it. He showed it to J and she laughed and then he laughed too, but it didn’t stop the sadness rippling out
again, his limbs heavy as water.

‘What are you going to do?’ he said. His lips felt thick, the words smudged between them, like someone had punched him in the mouth.

J lay down and stretched her arms up over her head. ‘Watch the sky,’ she said.

Stick closed his eyes. He could see red pulses of light on the backs of his eyelids. ‘No, like afterwards,’ he said. ‘Later.’

‘Astronaut,’ J said. ‘Ballet dancer. Racing driver. Nuclear physicist.’

Stick stared at the sky, and realised after a while that its breathing was in time with his own heartbeat.
Dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum
.

When it had worn off, they wandered around the town, eating sticks of pink-and-yellow rock and drinking cans of warm lager. J took him to Coral Island: dark, low-ceilinged,
rammed with slot machines. It was too bright, too noisy, too crowded. Sweat and skin, tattoos and toenails. The sound of falling coins. Kids with plastic guns and stuffed toys, pretend cars rocking
in front of TV screens, a woman in a wheelchair feeding two-pences into the coin waterfall. Stick couldn’t stand it. He dragged J back to the beach, but that was packed too – kids
screeching, the sea dotted with the bobbing heads of swimmers. He could feel his face starting to burn and something like panic simmering in his chest.

‘So, Chinese tonight,’ J said. ‘Cashew chicken, chilli beef, prawn crackers, sweet-and-sour pork.’

Stick picked up a stone and threw it, picked up another and threw that. ‘Isn’t there any more tea?’

J took the flask out of her bag and shook it. ‘You want to go home tripping?’ she said.

It was three o’clock. They had to be back by seven – should be leaving already. Stick thought about his mum setting the dinner table. Blowing up balloons like he was still five years
old. He thought about the sky turned bright blue and J’s eyes like jewels. ‘It’ll be fine.’ He reached out his hand and J shrugged, poured another cup, which Stick drank,
lukewarm and sour.

They walked, side by side but not touching, far up the beach, trying to get away from the families and the kids and the ice-cream trolleys. They could do this forever, Stick thought. Just walk
and walk.

‘Where would we end up?’ he said. ‘If we just carried on.’

J shaded her eyes with one hand. ‘We’d get back here, wouldn’t we? If you kept on walking and went the whole of the way around, you’d get back to here.’

He wanted, suddenly, to do that with her. ‘It’d take fucking ages,’ he said.

‘And you’d end up back where you started.’

‘Just older.’

J laughed.

‘You’re pretty when you laugh,’ Stick said and then blushed.

J stopped and looked at him. He kept walking and after a minute he felt her hand on his sleeve. When he turned, she was standing close. Too close.

‘What?’ he said, stepping back. She stepped forwards. He could see the pores in her skin, a tiny dark mole on her right cheek, the line of her lips, the silver stud. ‘I’m
not going to kiss you,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘You punched me in the face last time.’

She smiled without opening her mouth. ‘Yeah, sorry.’

‘You always punch people who try to kiss you?’

She looked him in the eyes. ‘Recently, yes.’ She dropped his gaze and pushed her foot into the sand. ‘There was this other guy, and—’ She shrugged. ‘He was a
cock.’

‘Right.’

‘But you’re not a cock,’ she said.

Before Stick could think it through and decide not to, he put one hand on her cheek and kissed her. She tasted of lager and mushroom tea and doughnuts. Her lips and the tip of her nose were cold
against his face. He pulled back, but not far, and looked her in the eyes. Her eyelashes were short and black, her eyebrows plucked thin. She held his gaze but he couldn’t tell what she was
thinking.

Stick dropped his palm from J’s cheek and reached for her hand.

‘Your hands are cold,’ he said.

‘Always are.’ She closed her fingers through his. ‘Shall we walk a bit more?’

Stick nodded and they started walking, matching their steps to each other, her hand warming against his, waiting for the mushrooms to kick in again.

They were late. Really late. The train coming into Piccadilly station gone nine o’clock. Both of them groggy and silent.

‘You’d better not come,’ Stick said. ‘She’s going to kill me.’

‘You don’t want back-up?’ J asked, pulling her rucksack onto her shoulders.

Stick shook his head. He’d missed so many calls by the time he’d thought to look at his phone, he’d just turned it off.

‘How do I find you though?’ he said, following her along the platform under the high curved roof. ‘I can’t spend my life leaving you love letters.’

He saw her smile before she caught it and felt himself blush. ‘I mean—’

‘I’ll give you the house number,’ she said, and reached into her bag for a pen. She wrote it in neat black numbers on the back of his hand, and then her address below.

‘Don’t wash it off.’ She stood on tiptoes and kissed him, her tongue darting into his mouth and then retreating. He reached his hand around her back and she let him draw her
towards him. For a moment. Then she pulled away and said, ‘Go on,’ and pushed him gently out of the station door and into the cool city air.

It was almost ten by the time he got to the estate – the street lights on, the sky dimming towards black.

He didn’t take the cut-through down Paget Street; didn’t even turn his head to look at it; didn’t let himself think about Mac the whole way home.

He slowed down as he got to his road. His chest felt packed full – as though a wrong move would make everything spill out. He never looked at his house. Never thought twice about it
really. But now, in this half-light, it felt unfamiliar. The bricks looked too neat, too flat, like a machine had built it, not a person. The paint on the window frames was peeling, dark bits of
wood showing under the black. The curtains were open, the front room alight, and he could just see the top of someone’s head.

Stick stood on the doorstep and waited a moment before he put his key in the lock. He imagined the sea creeping up to the front door, coming through the gaps and into the hallway, turning the
carpet dark, peeling the wallpaper away from the walls, making the lights fizz, and then rising slowly, slowly up the stairs. He imagined letting himself go into it, how his body would lift with
the water.

His mum and dad stood in the living-room doorway, her eyes red, his furious. The house smelt of Chinese takeaway.

‘We were about to call the police,’ his dad said.

‘Well?’ His mum had her arms folded, lips thin.

He tried to brazen it out. Stepped forwards with a ‘Hi, Mum,’ and went to kiss her cheek, but she slapped him, hard, a sharp
thwack
of skin on skin and his face burning with
it.

‘Mandy!’ Stick’s nan was at the door now. Behind her he could see Alan, hovering. A plastic
Happy Birthday
banner was pinned up over the fireplace with coloured
balloons hanging down either side of it. A small pile of parcels sat on the glass coffee table in amongst stained dinner plates and beer cans.

His mum grabbed hold of his chin. ‘Look at me.’ She’d been drinking red wine. He could see it on her lips. ‘Are you high?’

‘No.’ Stick twisted away from her.

‘You are. You’re high.’

‘I’m not.’ He wanted to go to bed, stare at the ceiling and think about J. He pushed past his nan into the living room, picked up a prawn cracker and bit into it. There was an
envelope with his dad’s writing on it propped next to the presents. It’d be money, same as every year. Couldn’t be arsed to think of something I’d like, Stick said to Mac
once. Mac punched him on the arm and said, ‘Shut up. He used to buy you all them toys and you just burnt them. You’d hate whatever he got you if it wasn’t money, and he
isn’t stupid.’ He had a point.

‘Party poppers,’ his mum shouted from the hallway. ‘I bought bloody party poppers.’

Stick looked at the numbers on his hand. He wanted to call J now and say let’s run away. They could follow the railway line back to those green fields, with the cows and sheep and the
hedges and the tiny stone houses.

‘A phone call, Kieran. All you needed to do was call. I’m late. I’m sorry.’ His mum was in the living room now, hands locked on her hips. ‘I thought I’d
brought you up to have some manners.’

Stick caught Alan’s eye, who gave him a ghost of a smile.

‘I don’t have any credit,’ he muttered.

‘You don’t have any credit?’ She stared at him. ‘You don’t have any credit?’ It was as though every word puffed her up, bigger and bigger. ‘I
don’t see what I’m supposed to do, Kieran.’ She stopped and shook her head, and he thought she was going to soften, say
I’m sorry, love, you’re having a hard time,
I know
, but instead she walked over to the fireplace and stabbed at one of the balloons with her fingernail. It was like a bullet fired, the house shocked into silence.

‘There,’ his mum said, and started crying.

Stick’s dad put his arm around her and pulled her towards him. Stick ate the rest of the prawn cracker, took another.

‘An apology?’ his dad said, looking at Stick. ‘Maybe you could see fit to give your mother – all of us – an apology?’

Stick bit into the cracker and stared at his feet. Mac’s red trainers.
We’ll do it in style
, Mac had said, sat down by the canal, waving his arms as he spoke.
Fried
breakfast. Hire a moped and drive about, or get one of those four-wheeled beach buggies. Spend the afternoon on the beach with some cold beers. And then champagne!
Stick had pulled a face and
said he didn’t like champagne.
Champagne
, Mac had insisted.
And steak
, he’d said,
with those thin, twisty little chips, and then chocolate pudding with
strawberries and whipped cream and little drizzles of sauce on the side of the plate. You only turn eighteen once
, he’d said. And now Stick was eighteen and Mac wouldn’t ever be.
Not in three days’ time, not ever.