Before the Fire (21 page)

All he could hear was the TV in the other room, and, faintly, a Hoover going in the flat upstairs. The candles still burned, a narrow rim of metal visible now where the wax had burnt off, the
air shimmering slightly above each flame. It only needed one to burn through its holder, or get knocked onto the carpet, or snatch at someone’s sleeve or the edge of a duvet, and the whole
place would go up. This flat. The one above. The ones next door. Flames pumping from the windows and everything curling in on itself, melted plastic and scarred wood and thick, choking black smoke.
He could pick up both candles and drop them onto the bed, sit there with the flames starting around him. Then he’d know, about the spirit thing. Then he’d properly know.

There was a knock on the door, his nan’s voice. ‘Are you all right, love?’

‘Fine.’

‘I thought for a minute I could smell burning.’

Stick blew both candles out. Soft swirls of smoke lifted up from the wicks. He licked his fingers and pinched them and they hissed at his touch. ‘No. It’s fine,’ he
shouted.

‘Do you want some tea?’

Stick looked at the dark smears of soot on his thumb and forefinger.

‘I can bring you some in there if you want.’

He tried to stand up, to pull the lamp away from the door, to look at his nan and smile and say,
I’ll come through, I’m fine, thank you
. But he couldn’t move.

‘I’ll do you a plate, leave it out here,’ she said.

Stick managed to say thank you, loud enough for her to hear.

‘You’ll open the window if you’re smoking, won’t you?’

‘Yes, Nan.’

‘Kieran?’

‘Yes?’

‘I love you.’

Stick rolled his eyes.

‘Pie and chips on its way, then,’ she said.

He was eating the last of his chips when he heard it.

You asked her yet?

Stick nearly choked. He looked towards the door, but he knew it was closed.

She’s not going to ask you.

He picked up another chip and chewed it slowly.

She’s all right, Stick. She’s a good’un. You’ll have a blast.

The candles sat on the bedside table, the wax hard and cold again. The curtains were pulled shut in front of the dream catcher. Stick couldn’t speak.

Car. Coach. Doesn’t matter much, does it? Pick a place and go. Find somewhere to stay, or just keep on moving. She’ll come with you.

He was going fucking crazy. He needed a fag. Stick lowered his plate onto the floor.

You’ve just got to ask her.

J liked him, that was true. She’d said as much the last time he saw her. She pulled off her T-shirt and unhooked her bra and he traced the wide hard bone between her breasts with his
forefinger, touched the neat brown circles of her nipples. I like you, she’d said, and he’d blushed and said me too, and then kissed her so he didn’t have to think of anything
else to say. She liked him, but he knew it wasn’t going to last – a bright, sparky girl like her with a shitbag like him: no job, no future; he couldn’t even hold it together to
drive himself to Spain.

You’re not a shitbag.

‘You’re not real.’

Silence.

Stick listened.

Nothing.

‘Hi,’ he said.

Nothing.

‘I didn’t mean— You just freaked me out.’

Still nothing.

‘Mac?’

A swell of tinny music on the TV. A car horn sounding outside. Stick tried to laugh at himself. Talking to the dead! Alan was making him crazy.

‘I fucking miss you,’ he whispered. ‘I really fucking miss you.’

He was with J when his mum called; the two of them sat up on the window ledge in the wasteground near Strangeways, passing a joint back and forth. He’d got an eighth of
weed off Ricky and it was almost finished already – it was the only thing that helped him sit still for more than five minutes. He’d been trying to ask J if she knew what she’d do
after college, and if she did, how did she know? How do you decide – he was trying to ask – how do you come up with something that might actually happen? He’d been struggling to
get his questions to make sense, and she’d kept flicking her hair and sucking on the joint and saying, ‘I don’t know. I can’t be bothered thinking about all that.’

He knew what his mum was going to say even before she said it.

‘Love, it’s the case. I’m sorry.’

Stick stared down at the handbags, their colours bleached by rain, their clasps and buckles rusted up and their insides rotting. He could sense J looking at him but couldn’t meet her
eye.

‘The judge said there wasn’t enough evidence to go ahead.’

Stick could picture the judge in his stupid white wig, banging a wooden mallet thing down with a crash. Case dismissed. That meant everyone go home, we’re done here. That meant we actually
can’t be arsed. That meant, who cares, it was only some estate kid – probably drugs, probably gangs, probably the world’s better off without him anyway.

‘They’re doing more tests,’ she went on. ‘They’ll find something, they’re bound to. And then they can recharge him. They are sure it’s him, Trish said
that. They say it happens sometimes, this kind of thing; it just means things take a bit longer. I’m sorry, love.’

He wanted to throw his phone as far as he could – over the piles of rubbish and smashed concrete – hear it land with a crash, its screen cracking, the keyboard detaching itself, his
mum’s voice silenced.

‘Are you OK? Do you want me to come?’

He shook his head. He knew she couldn’t see him but he didn’t trust himself to speak.

‘Love?’

‘I’m fine,’ he croaked. ‘Fine.’

‘Do you want to come home, love?’

He wanted to run. He wanted to run until he couldn’t run a step further, until his chest burst and his legs burned and his brain stopped thinking.

‘Kieran, you’re worrying me now.’

‘Fine, I’m fine. I’ve got to go.’ He hung up and shoved his phone back in his pocket.

J said nothing but he could feel her watching him.

‘Fucking police.’ He put a hand on the ledge either side of him because he suddenly wasn’t quite sure where the edges of his body were. ‘They know he did it and
they’ve let him go. How does that even make sense? How is that even allowed?’

They sat in silence for a long time.

‘Do they know why he did it?’ J asked.

Stick ground his knuckles into the rough brick. ‘He wouldn’t say anything. But he was there. There was blood on his shoes. He’s got history.’

‘But there’s not enough evidence?’

‘Don’t even say that.’

‘I’m not saying he didn’t do it, I’m asking.’

‘He did it.’

J held up both hands, then relit the joint and passed it to him. Stick pulled the smoke into his lungs, but it didn’t help.

On Saturday morning, Stick took a knife out of the kitchen drawer – the one his nan used for cutting potatoes – wrapped it in a plastic bag and shoved it under the
waistband of his boxers. He walked home with the creased plastic scratching at his back.

Someone had snapped the left wing mirror off the car but otherwise it was fine. Still started, the engine coughing into life, the clutch groaning away to itself. He didn’t have a plan
other than to find Owen Lee. The fucker would be somewhere. Stick would just have to keep driving until he saw him.

He drove to Paget Street first. He was sure he remembered hearing something about criminals going back to the scene of their crimes, even when it was dangerous to do so, as though they
couldn’t quite believe they’d done what they’d done and thought going back would give them proof, because they’d be there and remember it and it’d feel real again.
Stick parked where the incident unit had been. There was no one about.

Sweat prickled down his back and across his palms. The trees cast chunky black shadows onto the grass. The dandelions had gone to seed, a few white bits of fluff still hanging on, but the rest
gone. He shouldn’t have ripped up the newspaper article. The more he tried to remember what Owen Lee looked like the less sure he was – the face from the photo, from the court screen,
breaking into tiny squares and falling apart, however much he screwed up his eyes, however much he tried.

Stick sat, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel, and waited. He would know him when he saw him. And when he saw him he’d kill him. A magpie swept down from one of the trees,
landed lightly on the pavement and looked at Stick.

One for sorrow.

The bird pecked at something on the ground and then heaved itself up into the air again, flashing its blue-black wings with their bright white tips, an impossibly long twig – three or four
times its size – hanging from its beak.

He’d put the knife in the glove compartment. Stick tightened his grip on the wheel and tried to imagine what it would feel like to stick a blade into a living human being. He wondered if
you’d have to push hard to get it through the skin, or if it would be like stabbing a block of cheese, or a loaf of bread. It would be easier if he had a gun. Stick pointed two fingers at the
magpie, which sat in a tree still holding the twig, and made shooting noises. That would be easiest – click and blow him away.

Stick caught a movement in his wing mirror and tensed. It wasn’t Owen Lee, just an old guy on the other side of the road, with a limp and a white plastic bag in one hand. For a split
second, he imagined jumping out of the car, running up to the man and shoving the knife into his chest. The man kept walking; Stick locked his door and sat there long after the man had disappeared,
his heart pounding and his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

If he didn’t do it no one else would. Mac would be dead and there’d be no sense to it. Stick started the engine and felt the buzz of it enter through his skin. He jerked the car back
onto the road, his body loose with adrenaline, his breath coming in bursts, his hands jittery on the wheel. He screeched down Paget Street and veered left onto Rochdale Road without stopping to
look, stuck a finger up at the car hooting behind him. ‘Fuck off,’ he shouted. It made him feel better, somehow. ‘Fuck off. Fuck off.’ His voice rose with the engine’s
revs and he felt a smile sneak across his face. This was how it was going to work. He was going to find that bastard and make him wish he’d never been born.

‘I’m going to shine this light again.’ The doctor loomed closer to Stick, aiming a light into his left eye, then his right, leaving yellow-pink shapes glowing
in the air. ‘And now I’m going to ask you to follow my finger with your eyes, without moving your head. That’s right.’ She moved her finger across his vision. She was
skinny, Asian, young, with red lipstick and her hair tied up in a ponytail.

‘Any double vision?’ she asked.

Stick shook his head. It was like the millionth time they’d done this. He remembered the magpie, he’d told the other doctor that – a cheery, ruddy-faced man who looked like he
should be a schoolteacher, or a children’s entertainer. He remembered the magpie with the twig in its mouth, almost too big for it to carry, but after that, it was blank.

‘I just need you to clench your teeth together.’ She reached out both hands and felt either side of his neck, then rubbed at his temples. Her hands were cool and smooth. She pressed
her finger against his chin. ‘And now open your mouth.’

He’d driven into a lamp post, the other doctor had said. Any idea why that might have been? Stick had shaken his head and shrugged. The knife would still be in the glove compartment, along
with an empty pack of tobacco and some sweet wrappers. But it wasn’t illegal to have a kitchen knife in your car.

The new doctor wrote something on her clipboard, looked at it and then nodded. ‘Your mum’s on her way.’

Stick stared at the pleated blue curtain the doctor had pulled around his bed and felt the weight of himself, like a lump of concrete on the thin, plastic-coated mattress. Through the gap in the
curtain he could see nurses sitting behind a big desk covered in phones and computers and bits of paper, and behind them a white board with people’s names and bed numbers in blue marker pen.
The place stank of cleaning fluid and ill people. It was too bright, too loud – machines bleeping and people talking. Made his head hurt. Made his brain pound against his skull. He wanted to
go somewhere dark and quiet. If he was somewhere dark and quiet, then maybe he’d be able to remember whether he’d found Owen Lee or not; whether he’d killed him.

But the doctor hadn’t said anything about anyone else. A lamp post, not a man. And there were no police lining up to ask him questions and take fingerprints. Maybe he’d seen Owen Lee
and tried to swerve to hit him. Maybe he’d had his hood up and Stick was leaning towards the window, trying to see his face. He searched his brain but it wouldn’t give him anything.
Just a magpie with blue on its wing.

‘How can it just go?’ he asked the doctor, who was opening the curtains.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Your memory,’ Stick said. ‘How can it just disappear like that?’

The doctor pursed her lips. ‘It’s really quite common,’ she said. ‘With a head injury, and shock.’ She looked at her clipboard again. ‘We’ll do a few
more tests, but I think it’s nothing serious.’ She smiled as if she’d answered his question and walked away, her heels tapping a no-nonsense rhythm.

Stick carried on trying to remember, but it was like he’d died for an hour or two, and then come back to life.

His mum arrived, almost running down the ward towards him, her hand pressed to her chest.

‘Oh my God. Oh, Kieran.’ She went on and on, like they were in one of her soap operas. She kept touching him, the same way she’d done after Sophie had died, as if checking he
was really there.

Stick lay as still as he could and let her words wash over him. His whole body ached, like someone had given him a proper kicking.
The seat belt
, the first doctor had said, tracing his
hand diagonally through the air.
At least you were wearing one, but there was no air bag so you’ve got the wheel too, and it’s bruised deep. It’ll take a few weeks. No
permanent damage though, not to your torso.