Before the Fire (7 page)

Inside, the living room was stuffed full of flowers. Every surface, it seemed, had a vase or a wine bottle or a pint glass full of them. The smell make Stick’s head spin.

He looked down at his flowers. Waste of thirty quid. And how was a bunch of flowers supposed to help anyway?

She took them though, held them against her chest and smiled. ‘Everyone’s so good,’ she said. ‘They all come. Bring flowers, and little plastic boxes of food. Make cups
of tea.’ She let out a sigh. ‘I can’t eat anything.’ She paused. ‘Do you want to take some food, Kieran? There’s so much of it.’

‘You’re all right, Mrs McKinley,’ Stick said. ‘Mum works at Tesco’s, doesn’t she? She gets discount.’

Mrs McKinley nodded. She was still holding the flowers, her fingers worrying at their petals. She’d ruin them, but Stick couldn’t think how to say so, and it didn’t much
matter.

‘Are you— How are—’ Stick felt himself reddening. ‘I just came round to—’ He was trying not to think about Mac, but he was everywhere. Mac stood at the
window eating biscuits straight from the packet. Mac with his Wii, dancing round the room like an idiot. Mac with man flu, lying on the sofa with a duvet, screwed-up tissues spread around him.

‘Should I put those in water?’ he managed to say. He took the flowers off her and went into the kitchen. A bottle of vodka sat on top of the fridge next to an empty plastic bag. The
sink was crowded with glasses. He found a jug in a cupboard, filled it with water and shoved the flowers in. It wasn’t big or heavy enough to keep them straight so he propped them up against
the wall and then turned and looked through the hatch. Mrs McKinley was standing in the middle of the living room staring out of the window. She didn’t move, didn’t turn and look at
him, didn’t cough or check her phone or touch her hair. She looked like a statue. He should make her a cup of tea, go back in and say something to her, take her arm and get her to sit down.
But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do anything except back out of the kitchen, quietly open the front door and walk down the corridor, his heart up near his throat, telling himself he
was a cunt, a coward, a twat, but leaving all the same.

When he got home, the TV wouldn’t turn on. Stick flicked the living-room light but nothing happened. The fuse box was in the understairs cupboard, behind a pile of empty
cardboard boxes and the gazebo they’d used for his nan’s sixtieth the year before. Stick threw everything out into the hallway and got the torch from its hook on the door. He pressed
the trip switch down and heard the phone beep, the fridge whir back into life.

Mrs McKinley was probably still standing in the living room, waiting for him to come back in. Or she was looking for him, shouting through the flat, out into the corridor – ‘Kieran?
Kieran?’ Or maybe she hadn’t even noticed. Maybe someone else had turned up and she’d forgotten he’d even been there.

Instead of stepping back into the hallway, Stick pulled the cupboard door shut, turned off the torch and dropped it onto the floor. The place smelt of old shoes – dust and rubber and stale
feet – and it was hot, or at least Stick was sweating, damp patches starting under his arms and across his back. He opened his eyes as wide as they’d go, so that his eyeballs felt like
they could fall out of their sockets and into his lap. His left side pressed against the soft fake fur of his mum’s winter coat. His right arm just touched the rough wooden slats of the door.
If he stretched out either foot he’d hit the Hoover.

They would put Mac in a coffin and nail it shut. There’d be a funeral and a grave, a stone with his name on it and then nothing. ‘You fucking bastard,’ Stick whispered into the
fusty cupboard air. ‘You’ve gone and ruined everything.’

He’d freaked out once in a lift, when he was a kid – suddenly unable to breathe and terrified he’d never be able to escape. He could feel the same sensation coming now, like a
slow, creeping burn. The walls too close. The ceiling too low. The Hoover looming up towards him and his mum’s coat like some kind of dead animal, hot against his arm. Stick scrunched his
eyes shut but all he could see was Mac falling face forwards onto the grass, and a figure standing over him. As he reached for the door he thought of Mrs McKinley standing in her flat, wondering
where he’d gone. He deserved to feel shit, so he shoved his hands under his armpits and lowered himself to the ground, sat in a tight, curled ball. His head felt like it would explode, his
brain coming out through his eyes, his nose, his ears; his lungs would close up and suffocate him to death. Get the fuck over yourself, he told himself. Mac’s dead. Mac’s fucking dead
and you can’t even make his ma a cup of tea.

When he finally opened the cupboard door and unfolded himself back into the hallway, Stick had made up his mind. He chucked the boxes and the gazebo back under the stairs.
They’d left bits of rubbish on the carpet – scraps of cardboard, a leaf, a speck of dried mud. He tried to brush them to one side with his foot but they wouldn’t shift.

He wrote his mum a note –
Gone to Spain. Will call. Don’t freak out
– and positioned it on the little table in the hallway. Then he lifted the black sports bag off his
bed, picked up his keys, and left.

The car coughed and spluttered but started. Stick did a fast three-point turn, and drove down the worn-out tarmac of the cul-de-sac, right then right again, past the school. The steering wheel
cool under his hands. He didn’t look up at Mac’s flat but accelerated past the fenced-in garden at the front of the block, past the neat red-brick houses, past the Clarendon with its
ugly walls and scratty wooden benches, hard over the speed bumps. He only stopped, brakes squealing, for the bus, which was taking up the road. A woman with headphones turned to look out of the
back window at him and he held her gaze until the bus heaved itself down the road and round the corner.

Manchester. Birmingham. Dover. Calais.
His mum would go mental, but he’d be long gone by the time she got back from work. Stick turned on the radio. There was a scratchy hiss
behind the music when he turned it up, plus they were playing shit; he didn’t even know what it was, but it helped to fill up his head with the noise. And it was even better once he got on
the motorway, burning down the fast lane, feeling the car groan and strain as he pushed his foot flat against the floor.

Two hours in and he was crawling in traffic near to Birmingham. The car’s fan belt kept squealing like a trapped bird. ‘Nordausques, St Omer, Aire-sur-la-Lys,’ he said, almost
too quietly to hear above the radio. ‘Bordeaux, Bilbao, Madrid.’ And then, ‘Hey, dude! What’s with the shit music?’, trying to make his voice sound like
Mac’s.

He pictured his mum reading the note, a fag in one hand, the other fussing at her clothes. She’d probably call the police, tell them to chase him down the motorway and bring him home. He
was seventeen. He was nearly eighteen. It wasn’t illegal to drive to Spain. ‘I’m going to Spain,’ he said out loud. ‘I am going to Spain.’ He brought his fist
down hard on the steering wheel, his eyes tearing up so he could hardly see out of the windscreen. ‘You fucking bastard,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘You fucking bastarding
bastard. Why aren’t you here?’

He took the next exit, drove fast around the roundabout and pulled onto the motorway in the opposite direction. He switched the radio off and the car filled with the noise of the wheezing engine
and the buffet of wind against metal. His eyes were tired. His head ached. He had just enough petrol, he reckoned, to get back home.

By the time Stick got home it was early evening. The note had gone. His mum was by the back door, smoking. She turned to him and he could see the tension in her jaw, her eyes
bright and panicked.

He walked across the room and stood next to her. ‘Can I have a fag?’

She stared at him, then tapped one out of the packet and lit it.

Stick drew the smoke into his lungs and looked at the paved back yard, the shed, the flower bed with the oversized daisies on their too-thin stems. The kids next door were kicking a ball against
the fence.

‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ his mum said.

Stick took another drag. ‘I know.’

They stood there in silence, listening to the slap of the football and the rattle of the fence panel.

‘I was thinking you could go to the doctor’s,’ Stick said. He felt her stiffen but carried on. ‘So you can sleep better. I think they can help with that. I could make you
an appointment.’

His mum stubbed her cigarette out on the wall, hard enough to break the end in two. ‘I did lamb chops for your tea,’ she said.

‘Mum?’

‘I can put a plate in the microwave. I’ll do that now.’ She went inside and Stick stayed where he was, smoking slowly and thinking he’d like Mac to come back from the
dead so he could punch him in the face.

She sat opposite him while he ate. Stick waited for her to say something about the note, about the car, but she just watched him eat, and then as he was about to go up to bed she said,
‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ and handed him a white plastic bag. ‘Mrs McKinley brought it round,’ she said, watching him carefully. ‘I think she was hoping to see
you.’

Stick looked in the bag. A pair of red Nike trainers. Mac’s red Nike trainers. He looked at his mum and she shrugged.

‘I don’t know, love. She said she wanted you to have them. I couldn’t say no.’

Stick stared at the trainers. He remembered Mac wearing them for the first time a couple of months back, the strut he always did when he’d bought something new.

‘She’s in shock. We all are.’

‘And the police?’

‘She didn’t say anything, love.’

Stick touched the inside of one trainer with his forefinger, then snatched his hand away. ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘You can talk to me, Kieran.’

For one brief moment he wanted to lie on the sofa with his head in her lap, the way he used to when he was little, her stroking his hair and them laughing at the TV. He tried to smile. He tried
to say thanks, but ended up just shaking his head and walking upstairs, Mac’s shoes banging against his leg.

The whole of the next day the trainers sat by Stick’s bed still in the plastic bag. He kept pulling the edges of it apart so he could look at them, but every time he
went to pick them up he had an image of Mac lying on a metal trolley – his face covered up with a white sheet and his bare feet sticking out at the bottom.

Tuesday morning though, he sat on the edge of his bed, snatched up the shoes and put them on, yanking the laces tight and trying to keep his brain quiet. They pretty much fitted.

He hadn’t been running since school and hadn’t really done it then either, Mr Brazey shouting at them, all red-faced like he thought he was in the army. Stick and Mac sauntering
along, having a smoke. He waited until he was on Queen’s Road before he started. It felt wrong, like he couldn’t get one leg in time with the other, but he kept on, listening to his
breath scratch at his throat, past the bottom of the park and onto the bridge. He stopped, panting, to look over the low red-brick wall at the trees and the river below. He should be in Spain,
sitting on the beach with a beer, listening to Mac chatting shit.

He started running again, turned off the main road and down a shallow hill, along a street of houses that looked like his mum’s, except they had little porches stuck on the front and that
bumpy stuff on the walls. Down towards a railway bridge with a long wet stain on the patchy red-and-grey bricks – looked like a giant kept pissing there on his way home from the pub; smelt
like it too. On the other side, gravel and stubby grass, and then a road with tall brick walls on both sides, plants and trees crowding over the top.

He kept running. Still wheezing like he smoked fifty a day, not three. Stick gathered up the spit in his mouth and gobbed it at the wall to his right. Why couldn’t Mac have taken the
coconuts off, and the grass skirts and the stupid fucking hat? Why did he always have to draw attention to himself? The trainers were starting to rub at his heels, the skin turning hot and sore.
Another railway bridge and now an industrial estate – blue security fences, lines of delivery vans. They hadn’t even arrested anyone. Four days and no arrests. A bit in the
Manchester Evening News
, a bit on the local TV, that was it. Both had used the same picture – Mac with his hood pulled up, grinning. If he’d been a girl there’d have been
TV appeals and everyone wringing their hands and saying, ‘Oh, was she raped? Oh, did she suffer? Oh, what a tragedy.’ It was a fucking joke.

Up the hill to his left were the three tower blocks that had got fancied up a few years back. Down where he was: barbed wire, security shutters, window mesh. A sign for bouncy castle hire,
another for dog shampooing, another – hand-painted – for car repairs. He spied a path on his right and followed it to the river. It was dirty – bits of toilet paper and rags
hanging from the trees either side; a bleached-out crisp packet and a Mars Bar wrapper going in circles. He carried on running along a thin, muddy path by the edge of the river, trees scratching at
his arms.

The stitch doubled him up. A tearing pain, sharp in his left side. Couldn’t breathe without it stabbing underneath his skin. He pressed his fingers deep into the muscle of his stomach but
it didn’t help. He sucked air in through his teeth, then blew it out again. Felt like he had a bag of nails pushing into his insides. Mac’s trainers were covered in mud. Mac’d be
pissed off about that; he was always cleaning his trainers – stopping in the middle of the road to wipe off a bit of dirt.

He was almost in town, near the railway arches, a new lot of flats off to his right. He took slow, cautious steps and tried to breathe deeply. He could see Strangeways’ tower at the top of
the hill. Red brick, straight sides, a balcony and then a smaller curved top. Looks like a cock, Mac always said. Get in trouble with the pigs and you’ll end up in the cock. Stick had googled
it once at the youth club. It’s supposed to be a ventilation shaft, he’d told Mac, but I reckon it’s for observation. Shaft, Mac had said, shaft – and pissed himself
laughing. You could see everything from up there, Stick had said. You’d need binoculars, Mac said, otherwise you’d be so high up everyone would look the same.