Before the Fire (25 page)

‘Good. Good.’ His dad sounded like he was walking down a busy road – a police siren in the background; car engines; a lawnmower. ‘Do you need any help with the
car?’

He never wanted to see the car again. ‘Nah, thanks. I’ve just got to call the police and sort it.’

‘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!’

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 Gibson 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.