Before the Fire (22 page)

‘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 someone 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.’

On the screen Stick could see a van on fire. Bright flames and pumping black smoke. It was like the van was a ghost. You could see the shape of it in amongst the flames, but it was as though it
wasn’t really there at all, just the memory of it, and all that really existed was the fire, roaring. The camera shifted to a crowd of men with their hoods pulled up, throwing bricks and
bottles at armed police. Then another group rocking a police van until it overbalanced and fell. Then a grey-haired white guy with frown lines across his forehead, talking. Then the cameras went
back to the burning van. A man Stick’s age, maybe younger, ran in front of the fire and was silhouetted, black against yellow, just for a moment. It looked like a film. It looked beautiful.
Must be Greece again, Stick thought. Not Libya or Egypt – it didn’t look hot enough. The man in the bed kept tutting and shaking his head.

He thought about J lying on the beach in Blackpool, the sand swirled into yellow patterns around her. He thought about Owen Lee walking out of prison, his eyes up to the sky, his mouth twisted
into a smile. He thought about his car, wrapped around a lamp post he didn’t even know where, and wondered if anyone had set that alight. He imagined a lad reaching through the smashed
windscreen, or punching out the passenger window before holding a lighter to the crappy grey seats. The slow burn before it took hold and speeded up faster than you could imagine. He wished he was
sat in the middle of it, the flames coming up around him like knives over his skin, and then everything – him, the car, the lamp post – swallowed up in a yellow-orange roar.

They must have stopped waking him up every hour at some point because Stick woke from a deep sleep to see Jen stood by his bed, Rosie hanging onto her hand.

‘I’ve spoken to the doctor and you are good to go,’ Jen said, smiling.

Stick grunted and turned over.

‘Which is great,’ Jen went on. ‘Because it’s Bea’s swimming gala and we’ve just enough time to get there.’

Stick stared at the grey armchair next to his bed and remembered the burning van on the TV the night before.

‘I’ve packed your things.’ Jen held up a canvas bag with the recycling symbol printed on the front. ‘There was a gift.’ She dipped in her hand and pulled out
something small, wrapped in red paper. ‘And a note.’

Stick looked up.

‘Maybe you can open it in the car?’ Jen said, dropping it back into the bag. She looked down at Stick. ‘You’ll want to get dressed.’

Stick buried his head in the pillow. He did not want to get dressed. He did not want to go anywhere.

‘Kieran?’

‘Leave me alone.’

Jen put her hand on his shoulder and gave him a little shove.

‘That hurts.’

‘There’s no cure for feeling rubbish like getting up and getting on,’ Jen said.

Stick closed his eyes. His head still throbbed.

‘Bea’s so excited you’re coming,’ Jen said. ‘She made you a get-well card but I said she could give it to you herself, after swimming.’

Stick screwed his eyes tighter shut. ‘That’s blackmail,’ he muttered.

‘Maybe it is, but she’ll be looking up to the audience and seeing no one at this rate. Your dad had to go into work.’

Stick felt something drop onto the bed over his legs. He opened an eye and saw a red T-shirt and trackie bottoms neatly folded. His nan must have been in while he was asleep.

Rosie walked towards the head of the bed. She was unsteady on her feet, like she’d been on the beers.

‘Hi, Rosie,’ Stick said.

She reached up and poked him hard on the cheek with her finger. ‘Bea-Bea dof-fin,’ she said.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ Stick swung himself round to standing, his feet cold on the hospital floor, his legs sticking out under the gown – pasty-white knobbly-kneed shite
that he was.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Rosie echoed.

Jen glared at him.

‘Can a man get some privacy round here?’ Stick said, picking up the red T-shirt.

Jen backed off and pulled the blue curtains round the bed. Stick could hear Rosie saying ‘fuck’s sake’ and Jen telling her to hush and it cheered him up enough to get himself
dressed.

Stick sat in the passenger seat of Jen’s little Nissan and lifted the present out of the canvas bag. It was small, heavy, solid. He ripped off the paper to find a stone,
green with specks of red, polished so hard it shone. Stick held it in between two fingers.

‘What’s that then?’ Jen asked, glancing across at him.

Stick shrugged. He curled his fingers into a fist around the stone and imagined throwing it at the windscreen, the glass shooting out cracks from where it hit.

‘You saw the note?’ Jen said.

A white envelope with a plain white postcard inside.
This is a bloodstone
, it read.
For courage, strength and wisdom. It gives courage to overcome obstacles and wisdom to decide how
to do so. Be strong, Kieran, and wise. Alan.

The leisure centre was crowded with kids, shouts and screams and splashes echoing off the tiles. Stick felt the energy seeping out of him.

‘I should be in bed,’ he said to Jen. ‘I should be resting.’

‘Nonsense.’ Jen led him through double doors into a chlorine-stinking corridor, dragging Rosie along with her. They walked up a set of concrete stairs to a balcony that ran the
length of the building. There were five lines of hard red plastic seats, bolted to the floor, each row higher than the one before. It was maybe half full – clusters of families with drinks
cans and packets of crisps, looking down at the blue rectangle of water.

Jen ushered Stick into a seat on the back row and sat Rosie in between them. ‘She’ll be so chuffed you’re here,’ she whispered.

Stick fingered the stone in his pocket and scanned the water below for Bea. He couldn’t see her amongst the crowd of kids running about in swimming costumes, jumping into the water like
nothing bad could happen. Rosie was gazing up at him with big blue eyes, chattering nonsense. She had a bubble of green snot in one nostril that bulged as she breathed.

‘Bea,’ she said, turning to look down at the exact moment her sister walked towards the pool in the middle of a straggly line of kids. Bea wore a red swimming costume, her stomach
puffed out in front of her.

‘Dof-fin.’ Rosie pointed down at the children who now stood solemnly at the edge of the water.

‘That’s right! Dolphin!’ Jen cooed.

Stick couldn’t really work out what was going on. It wasn’t, it seemed, a race – more a disorganised show of sorts. The kids jumped one by one into the shallow end,
doggy-paddled for a bit and then clung to the edge, their faces raised. Adults in red uniforms stood on each side of the pool ready to fish out anyone about to drown. And then at some point people
started clapping, so Stick clapped too. They all got out of the pool, wet and shivering, and a man in a dark suit went along the line and hung a medal on a blue-and-white ribbon around each
kid’s neck. Stick saw Bea scanning the seats, looking for them – left, right, left. He waved, but she didn’t see him.