Before the Fire (8 page)

It was always the threat at school: you’ll end up in Strangeways if you don’t buck your ideas up, if you don’t stop screwing around, if you don’t sit down and keep schtum
and pay attention. Ricky’s dad had been in twice, and his brother.

He tried running again, but the pain was still there, and he was knackered all of a sudden. You need to get some rest, his mum kept saying, you look tired, love. And it was true, he’d not
been sleeping, not properly. Every time he closed his eyes he got a picture of Mac in his head – his stomach ripped open. He hadn’t even been stabbed in the stomach. It was his chest,
straight into an artery, that’s what everyone was saying – you were fucked if they got an artery. But still, in Stick’s dream-waking it was Mac’s stomach, sliced open and
peeled back, his insides raw and red and bleeding.

He started walking, ended up on Cheetham Hill Road next to an offie advertising cheap vodka, and went inside. At the till, he put the bottle on the counter and held the cashier’s gaze,
flicking a creased tenner in his right hand. The man just shrugged and served him. Less than three weeks and he’d be eighteen. Except he didn’t want to be eighteen, not without Mac.

Stick walked through the back streets, looking for the river, but he couldn’t quite remember how to get there. The pain had gone. Even when he pressed his fingers into his side he
couldn’t bring it back. He thought of his dad, those weeks after Sophie, slumped on the sofa with dead eyes – beer cans all over the carpet. He thought of Mac, lifting a bottle of Red
Square to his lips, laughing and coughing as it burnt its way down.

He walked along a road that was a mess of patched tarmac, cobbles showing where bits had worn away, or been ripped up, or whatever it was that happened to tarmac. On the corner with another,
smaller road, he stopped by a bit of badly fenced-in wasteland, full of dandelions and purple flowers and rubbish. There was, he saw, a gap below one of the fence panels where a wall had fallen
away. It was as good a place to drink as any. He bent double and squeezed in sideways.

The ground was scattered with cracked bits of plastic, half-smashed bricks and piles of what looked like clothes – wet and dirty. A Budweiser bottle, a video tape spewing its reel, a cheap
plastic joystick. Stick picked up a belt buckle. The metal was rusted so the prong bit hardly moved. He pushed and pulled it until it snapped off in his hand.

‘Just waltz in and start trashing the place, why don’t you?’

A girl’s voice. Stick turned around, then round again. Couldn’t see anyone. He dropped the buckle.

‘That’s right, litter the place up.’

There was a high, red-brick wall to his left – the remains of a warehouse or something – and there she was, perched on a windowsill, the glass long since gone. He could see the
bottoms of a pair of white Converse, jeans, black hair with a streak of pink and two wide dark eyes.

‘You’re trespassing,’ she shouted.

Stick turned away and walked, not towards the road, but further into whatever the place was. Dirty blue carpet tiles had rotted and curled up from slabs of buckled hardwood. Beneath that, rows
of neat wooden blocks were laid out in Vs. Some had come loose and he could see little ridges on their sides where they were supposed to fit one into the other.

‘I’m serious.’ She was standing behind him, her thin brown arms folded. She wore a sleeveless puffa jacket and had her top lip pierced with a small silver stud.

‘Go.’ She pointed towards the hole in the fence.

‘You don’t own the place.’ Stick kicked the toe of his right foot against a cracked brick.

‘I’d like you to go.’ She tugged at her fringe – the pink half. ‘Please?’ She stretched the word please a little and lifted the corners of her mouth into a
false smile.

Stick looked her up and down. She was almost as skinny as him. No breasts to speak of. No arse to speak of.

‘I said, I’d like you to go.’ She stepped closer and he caught the smell of cigarettes and something sweet.

He turned again and walked away from her, over a pile of bricks and bits of rotten wood and mushed-up who-knew-what. He sat on a lump of concrete and danced one foot up and down, up and down.
She was watching him, he could feel it, but he didn’t look over. Opened the vodka instead and took a drink straight from the bottle, like the guys on the street. Washing their troubles away,
his mum said. Not much like washing. More like drowning. Hot through his chest. It made you realise you’d got insides. Made you remember there was a tube from your mouth to your cock. He
could feel the vodka burn all the way down it. Now his stitch had gone he felt the ache in his legs, his thighs tight and his shins sore. He rolled himself a fag. Then rolled another.

‘You want one?’ he shouted, holding it up.

She didn’t answer.

Stick put the fag in his mouth and flicked his lighter across the end. He tried to blow smoke rings the way Mac did, but he’d never been able to do it.

‘You have to keep your tongue at the back of your mouth.’ She walked round and stood in front of him.

Stick dragged hard on his cigarette and looked at her through narrowed eyes.

She picked up the second fag and held out her hand for the lighter.

‘I’m J,’ she said, once she’d lit up and blown a perfect smoke ring that rose slowly upwards before dissolving into the air. ‘The letter, not the bird.’

‘What’s it stand for?’

‘Itself.’

‘Your parents called you after a letter in the alphabet?’

She blew another smoke ring. ‘Can I have some of that vodka?’

Stick held out the bottle. ‘What? Jennifer? Julie? Jessica? Jody?’

He watched her lift the bottle to her lips and drink without wincing. She had a pointy chin and a dark, bony face. No make-up. Brown freckles across her cheeks. He suspected she always looked
pissed off.

‘What’s yours?’ She handed the vodka back.

‘I thought you wanted me to go? I thought I was trespassing.’

‘I decided to like you. What’s your name?’

Stick hesitated for a minute. ‘Kieran.’

J nodded. ‘Nice to meet you, Kieran. Welcome to my –’ she paused and then laughed, a little snort to herself – ‘abode.’

‘What?’

‘Home.’ She swept her arm in a semicircle.

‘This is where you live?’

‘Course it’s not where I live. Come on, I’ll show you the best view.’ She led him to a red armchair which had been pushed against the wall where he’d first seen her
– its leather slashed and tagged with black marker-pen scrawls. Stick stood on its back and pulled himself up onto the window ledge next to J.

‘Cool, huh?’ she said. ‘I reckon it was a handbag factory. You can see them.’ She pointed.

Stick looked down over the ruined space. She was right; they were scattered in amongst all the other shit: hundreds of cheap fake-leather bags.

‘They look like dead animals,’ J said. ‘Like they’ve all been killed and are just lying there.’ She took a long swig from the bottle. ‘I’ve seen rats
here – big as a cat, one of them was,’ she said. ‘I feel sorry for rats. Everyone thinks they’re evil and all they’re doing is living their lives.’

‘Ugly fuckers though.’

A white van drove past below, techno blasting out of the driver’s window, and they listened until it was out of earshot.

‘Where are you from, anyway?’ Stick said. J frowned. ‘Here.’

‘I mean—’

‘You mean I’m not white.’

‘I just mean—’

‘Dad’s from Ghana. Mum’s from Cheetham Hill.’

‘They together?’

She shrugged. ‘Just about.’ Their knees touched as he reached for the vodka. When he passed it back, he felt the brush of her hand against his.

Stick looked out at the warehouses with their red-brick walls and triangular roofs. ‘I’m going to Spain,’ he said. ‘With my mate, Mac.’ He swallowed and glanced
over at J. She was twisting the vodka cap on and then off and then on again. ‘We’re going to drive,’ he said. ‘Down to Dover, then Calais, through France: Tours, Bordeaux,
then Spain: Bilbao, Madrid, Malaga.’

She didn’t ask why they weren’t going to fly; she just passed him the bottle and smiled. She was too skinny, but she had a nice smile.

‘Mac’s got a mate in Malaga with a flat right on the beach. We’re going to stay with him and then find our own place.’ Stick blinked, swallowed again. ‘We’re
leaving Saturday.’

J rested her head against the wall. ‘Sounds good,’ she said. ‘Better than Cheetham Hill.’

‘You should come out,’ Stick said without thinking.

She gave him a startled look and then laughed and Stick felt his cheeks burn red. ‘I don’t mean – I just meant—’ He got his tobacco out and rolled two more fags so
he didn’t have to look at her.

‘I’m going to live by the sea,’ she said after a while. She took a bit of hair between her finger and thumb and put it into her mouth. ‘I love it. All that space, and
everything smells different and tastes different and sounds different. Don’t you think?’ Her hair stuck to her upper lip as she spoke.

He didn’t tell her he’d never been to the sea. He didn’t tell her that Mac was dead. Instead, he twisted his body to the right and leaned forwards to kiss her. She moved faster
than you’d think, jutted her fist into his cheekbone. Hard.

‘What the fuck?’ He reared back, put one hand to his face and held the ledge with the other – rough brick against his palm.

‘I told you to leave, didn’t I? I told you to fuck off.’

And then she jumped down and was gone. White plastic soles across the rubble. The fence panel rattling as she shoved her way out. He stayed sitting on the ledge, his face smarting, watching her
hurry up the street, hands shoved into her pockets, shoulders up near her ears. He couldn’t think what words to shout after her.

When he got back, the sweat cold under his clothes and his head fogged with vodka, he found his mum all dressed up. White jeans, red sandals, a blue blouse with little flowers
all over it. She held his phone out accusingly.

‘We agreed,’ she said.

‘I went for a run.’

‘You don’t run.’

Stick raised his eyebrows.

‘We agreed, Kieran. You take your phone. You keep it on. There’s me calling you and it’s just ringing away upstairs.’

He should have carried on driving. Stick imagined a ferry swallowing up the shit little red car and him climbing metal steps onto the deck, the wind in his face and water spraying up the side of
the boat.

‘We’re leaving in five minutes.’ She rolled her eyes at Stick’s expression. ‘I’ve told you ten times, Kieran. Your nan’s. And yes, you do have to. They
invited you especially. Your nan seems to think it might help.’

‘With what?’

His mum just shrugged. ‘I’ve made a cake,’ she said. ‘Chocolate.’

She always used to make chocolate cake for his birthday – two dark sponges stuck together with icing and then more icing over the top. She’d buy things to stick on: Lego spacemen,
candles, two racing cars on a sugar-paper track. ‘I thought Nan was off sugar,’ he said.

His mum laughed. ‘I can’t imagine that lasting more than five minutes, can you? Come on.’ She clapped her hands at him. ‘Shower. Get changed. We’ll be
late.’

At his nan’s flat on the Ashton Old Road, Stick and his mum let themselves into the communal entrance and walked up the shallow, carpeted stairs, Stick with the cake in
a cardboard box, his mum clutching a bottle of white wine. Two tree branches had been taped to the door frame to form an arch – the bottom half of each was criss-crossed with thick yellow
ribbon.

‘Lainey said if they haven’t caught anyone in the first twenty-four hours that means they’re, like, fifty per cent less likely to arrest someone,’ Stick said.

His mum had been about to ring the doorbell. She lowered her hand. ‘They’ll catch him,’ she said and then turned to him and said it again, louder, like that might sound more
convincing. ‘They will. They’ve got forensics and all that clever stuff. They’re bound to.’

Stick stared at the pale bark and the green leaves already curling in on themselves. ‘That’s just on telly, isn’t it?’

‘No, love. They’ll find him. They will.’ She put her hand on his cheek, where J had punched him. ‘Have you been fighting?’

Stick twisted away from her.

‘Kieran?’

‘It’s fine.’ Stick rang the bell and they both listened to the electronic scale echoing into the flat.

His nan answered the door wearing a long yellow skirt and an orange top with embroidery all over it. She was sixty-one but liked to tell Stick she still felt eighteen, and since she’d met
Alan she’d started wearing these weird, floaty things you could see her underwear through. Bracelets halfway to her elbows, and three or four necklaces at a time.

‘Cake.’ Stick held the box out towards her. She looked inside and pulled a face.

‘Oh, you are good, but today we eat only fresh fruit and vegetables.’ She glanced at Stick’s mum. ‘I did tell you.’

Stick’s mum smiled thinly. ‘Shall I hold onto the wine then?’

His nan made an apologetic face. ‘It’s all about new beginnings, you see.’

Stick balanced the box on the white wooden chest in the hallway.

‘Careful.’ His nan sprang forwards, lowered the box onto the carpet and bent to rearrange some stones on the chest. ‘Amber and quartz,’ she said. ‘Healing,
purification, new energy.’ Then she turned and pulled Stick into a hug. She smelt of washing-up liquid and incense. He’d cleaned his teeth for ages but odds were she’d still smell
the vodka on him. She held on longer than usual, then gripped her hands around the tops of his arms and looked into his eyes.

‘But Iain. Poor Iain. I can hardly even think about it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘And you. And your trip? All those plans. Oh, my sweet boy.’

Stick looked down at the carpet.

‘Today is the solstice, the longest day. Your mum told you that?’

Stick shook his head.

‘Alan does a ritual. That’s why we wanted you to come. It’s about joy and power and courage. We banish negativity.’ She flung her arm to one side.

Stick looked at his mum. She opened her eyes wide and lifted her shoulders, and for a moment he wanted to laugh.