Before the Fire (2 page)

Stick cooked the last of the bacon. He wedged the rashers between two slices of buttered bread and ate standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the back yard where a rectangle of sun
folded itself around the side of the shed and the too-big daisies drooped in the heat. It had been hot the whole week, Manchester gripped by the sudden promise of summer. It’s not like you
need to go all the way to Spain, his mum had said, pretending it was a joke. It’s like the Med here for once; even you might put a pair of shorts on.

Babs curled herself around his ankles, purring.

‘I’m not feeding you.’ His voice sounded thin. He had another go, lowering his chin and trying to boom the way Mac did. ‘I’m not feeding you.’

She looked up at him, her eyes wide, and purred some more. He squatted and ran his hands over her head and along her back, furrowing his fingers through her long fur.

‘It’s up to you now, Babs,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to look after her, OK?’ He could feel the cat’s skull beneath his hand, hard and fragile at
the same time. ‘Make sure she listens to that CD before she goes to bed.’ Babs narrowed her eyes and pushed her head against his palm. ‘And don’t let her go throwing herself
at Dad,’ he said. ‘And don’t die. Just because you’re old, don’t fucking die.’ Babs tensed, her ears pricked to some noise outside. She slunk into the hallway
and Stick listened for the slap-rattle of the cat flap closing behind her.

He dragged the ironing board out from under the stairs, filled the iron with water and lifted his jeans and blue shirt from the washing basket. He was all for just shoving their bags in the car
and driving off. But Mac had insisted.
This is big
, he’d said.
We can’t leave without a party.

The iron hissed as Stick pushed it across his jeans, the denim warm beneath his palms. Mac wanted everyone to dress up, but he could fuck off. Stick hated dressing up. Sophie used to love it. He
didn’t remember all that much about her, but he remembered that. She’ll be an actress, his mum used to say. You just wait, we’ll be sitting here watching her on telly in ten
years’ time. And his dad would frown and say, not if he had anything to do with it – bunch of sharks, telly people. She was always putting on shows. Stick would try to slip out of the
room, but his mum would catch his arm and glare at him, and when he opened his mouth to say how stupid the whole thing was she’d raise a hand and say, be nice.

Stick draped his jeans over the end of the ironing board and started on the shirt. Collar first, then sleeves. Everyone would be there to see them off, buy them a drink, pat them on the back and
make jokes about Spanish birds and not forgetting where home was. Stick nosed the iron around the buttons the way his mum had shown him, and felt a tug of excitement beneath his ribcage.

Upstairs, he heaved his sports bag onto the bed. He was packed already: clothes, trainers, sunglasses, toothpaste, condoms, passport, money. The map was still on the wall opposite the window,
fold lines running left to right, top to bottom. They’d bought it from WH Smith’s in town, spread it out on the table downstairs and drawn on their route with a yellow highlighter:
Manchester to Malaga. Mac had wanted to cut it into smaller sheets. You can’t open that up in a car, he’d said, stretching his arms as wide as they’d go. But Stick liked the size
of it: the fancy in-and-out of the coastlines; all the roads – orange, green, yellow, blue – like electric wires connecting places up. The sun had faded the highlighter a bit, but he
pretty much knew the route off by heart anyway:
Manchester — Birmingham — Dover — Calais — Tours — Bordeaux — Bilbao — Madrid — Malaga
. And
then a load of unpronounceable places along the way:
Nordausques — St Omer — Aire-sur-la-Lys — St-Hilaire-Cottes — Lillers
. He could close his eyes and trace the
route in his head, reciting the place names as he went, like some kind of spell, like the kind of thing his nan might do now she was with Alan, with incense and crystals, feathers and drums.

Stick took hold of the bottom left-hand corner of the map and pulled it away from the wall. Too fast, a rip across the sea. For a moment, he almost carried on, tearing the whole thing from
bottom to top, but he stopped himself and carefully prised the paper from the lumps of Blu-Tack. It refused to fold up the way it was supposed to and he ended up with a fat rectangle that
wouldn’t stay closed. He shoved it into the top of the bag, pulled the zip shut and sat down on the bed. The wall looked bare, a faint patch of damp he’d forgotten about, the blobs of
Blu-Tack still marking out the shape of the map. We’re leaving, he told himself. We’re really actually properly leaving.

‘I’ve got an hour,’ Stick said, as soon as his dad opened the door.

‘An hour?’ His dad tugged his shirt down over his stomach. ‘I’ve taken the afternoon off.’

‘Got to go to Mac’s. Sort stuff.’ Stick fixed his gaze on the thick cream carpet, the neatly paired shoes lined up along the hall.

‘I was thinking we’d go for lunch. There’s a tapas place in town – get you in practice.’ Stick’s dad gave a little laugh. ‘Have a glass of vino,
even.’ He paused. ‘I’ll not be seeing you for a while, will I? I thought it would be nice.’

‘We’ve got stuff to sort out, for tomorrow.’

His dad rubbed at the side of his nose. ‘Well, you’d better come in then. I think there’s a pizza in the freezer. Do you want pizza?’

Stick shrugged and stepped inside. The house had its usual weird smell, like a mix of air freshener and paint.

‘Drink?’ his dad asked.

Stick followed him past the crowd of family photographs into the kitchen. Stainless-steel surfaces, glossy red doors, slate floor. Twice the size of his mum’s. Three times the size. His
dad opened the bulky silver fridge.

‘Orange, apple and mango, or pineapple?’

‘Got any Coke?’

His dad shook his head. ‘Banned substance, mate.’

‘Orange then.’

Stick stood and watched his dad fuss about, pouring the juice into two thin glasses, then pulling things out of the freezer, puffs of cold air escaping around him.

‘Goat’s cheese and sun-blushed tomatoes?’ He held up a pizza box. ‘Whatever that is. Or, hang on.’ He took out another. ‘Pepperoni, that’s more like
it.’

‘Fine.’

‘Two hundred degrees, twelve minutes.’ His dad peered at the box as he read – mouth slightly open, eyes scrunched. He looked like a dickhead. Stick jigged his foot against the
floor and stared at the girls’ drawings stuck to the fridge with magnets shaped like strawberries and bananas.

His dad shut the oven and shoved the pizza box into a plastic container by the back door. He turned to Stick. ‘Jen was hoping to see you.’

Jen. Call-me-mum Jen. Who smiled even when she was saying she was angry. Who thought it was best for everyone to keep their voices down and act like adults, even when they were kids. Who sent
Stick’s mum a bunch of flowers every birthday – expensive flowers, with fancy wrapping and ribbon – that would sit in the ugly vase next to the TV for weeks, refusing to die.

‘The girls too. They’re at swimming after school, till five or so. Jen’s picking them up.’ He eyeballed Stick. ‘You couldn’t be around then?’

‘Got to get to Mac’s.’ Stick stared at the huge kitchen clock so he didn’t have to meet his dad’s gaze. It was one o’clock. ‘Like two, two
thirty?’ He glanced at his dad, who didn’t look like he was buying it. ‘We’ve got to check the ferry times,’ Stick said. ‘And there’s a party tonight. Like
a goodbye thing.’ He caught a frown cross his dad’s face. ‘It’s just mates,’ he said and then wished he hadn’t; he didn’t need to make excuses.

‘I thought it’d be good for us all to be together. As a family. Before you go.’

A couple of years ago – he must have been about fifteen – Stick had been sent to anger management classes at school. They were run by a woman with gym-toned arms, green eyes and a
posh voice, and he’d sat at the back with a hard-on most of the time. He remembered her now, the way her tongue brushed her lips when she spoke. Take a breath, Kieran. Don’t react
straight away. Stop and think.

‘We’re not a family,’ he said. Like a grenade. He wasn’t stupid. He knew how to lob a couple of words and wait for the explosion – a
wumpf
of flame and
smoke and dust.

His dad’s face hardened. ‘You don’t make it easy, Kieran.’

You can make a choice, the anger management woman had said. You can choose to manage things differently.

Stick picked up the nearest thing to hand – a cheese grater shaped like a hedgehog, with a blue plastic handle to stop idiots from grating themselves.

‘I’m not trying to cramp your style, but you are my son, and the girls are your sisters,’ his dad said.

Half-sisters. Stick ran his finger lightly over the grater’s sharp-edged holes.

‘And Jen—’

‘Is not my mum.’

His dad turned away sharply, opened the oven and stared at the half-cooked pizza. Stick listened to the whirr of the fan.

‘I don’t know why you have to make things so difficult.’ His dad closed the door and turned around, his cheeks flushed. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to
do.’

Stick pressed his forefinger against the grater. If he moved it up or down it would slice the skin.

‘Is this about your mother?’

Stick stared at one of Bea’s pictures on the fridge door – two figures with fat yellow bodies, thin blue arms and legs, and massive orange hands. He could hear himself breathing.

‘Kieran, I tried. I did.’

Stick thought about her, leaning over the TV, trying to reach the plug socket without knocking over the piles of DVDs. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Whatever. Just don’t expect me to
cosy up to your new family in your fancy new house with your fancy fucking pizzas.’

His dad coughed and then wiped at his lips. He had a fat mouth, while Stick had his mum’s thin lips, the top one almost non-existent. ‘It’s not so new any more,’ he
said.

Stick slammed the cheese grater down onto the metal worktop. It made a satisfyingly loud noise. He wanted to pick it up and slam it down again. And again. And again.

‘She still calls it Sophie’s room,’ he said, without meaning to.

His dad lifted his arms out from his sides like he was thinking about hugging Stick, and then let them fall. Stick looked at his dad’s feet – red socks with a patch of turquoise over
the toes. He heard him take a breath as if to say something, but then the oven timer started beeping and he turned away from Stick and took the pizza – bubbling cheese and oily circles of
pepperoni – out of the oven.

‘I’m not hungry,’ Stick said, once they were in the dining room, sitting opposite each other on the overstuffed leather chairs. He saw his dad’s jaw tense and waited for
him to have a go, but instead he just shrugged and helped himself to a slice of pizza. Stick listened to him chew, swallow, swallow again, kept his eyes fixed on the framed photo on the far wall
– his dad, Jen, Bea and Rosie lying on their fronts, grinning, against a white studio background.

‘So, tomorrow,’ his dad said. ‘The big trip. Are you taking the toll roads?’

Stick shrugged.

‘It’s a lot quicker.’ His dad lifted another slice of pizza, pulling the strings of cheese to separate them. It smelt good. Stick licked his lips but kept his hands under the
table.

‘A friend of mine ties a rubber band onto the steering wheel,’ his dad said. ‘To remind himself to stay on the right. You could try that.’

Him and Mac in the shitty Ford Fiesta, windows down, music on, engine roaring. Stick watched his dad eating and had to stop himself from laughing out loud. He was out of there.

‘And when you get back?’ his dad said. ‘Have you thought about what you’ll do?’

Stick wriggled his shoulders, like he was trying to escape from a too-tight jacket. ‘We talked about this.’

His dad picked up his knife and fork and then put them down again. ‘No,’ he said, the way he did when he was angry but pretending not to be. ‘We said we were going to talk
about it.’

‘I said I’d think about it when I got back,’ Stick said. Which was never, or not for years anyway, not until he had money in the bank, a proper tan, a beautiful girl on his arm
– maybe a kid even. He’d come back and they’d see they couldn’t boss him around any more.

‘It’ll be over before you know it, Kieran.’

‘Stop trying to make everything shit.’

His dad sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. ‘I don’t want my son on benefits.’

‘I’m not going to be on fucking benefits.’ Stick saw his dad’s eyes narrow. ‘I’m seventeen. I’m going to Spain.’

His dad held up both palms. ‘OK. When you’re home, then? We’ll talk about it when you’re home?’

‘Fine.’

His dad sat back in his chair. ‘I think this trip will be good for you.’ He smiled; Stick didn’t smile back. ‘I think it’ll help you get some perspective.’
Stick could see bits of pizza dough in between his teeth when he spoke.

‘I’m proud of you, Kieran. Heading off on an adventure. Not everyone has the guts to do that.’

Stick ran his forefinger around his empty plate.

‘Just make sure you take good care of yourself,’ his dad said. ‘Keep your phone charged. Don’t get involved with any drugs or what have you.’ He coughed and then
blushed. ‘Use a condom.’

Stick rolled his eyes.

‘You know we’re here if you need us. Jen and me. You just have to call.’

‘I’m not twelve.’

‘The world’s not always an easy place, Kieran. People aren’t always—’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘I’m just saying.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

Back home, Stick showered, swapped his trackies for jeans, his T-shirt for the blue shirt; rubbed wax into his palms and then over his hair, flattening it close to his scalp.
He fed Babs; left a note for his mum:
Cat fed. Don’t wait up. Love you
; took a half-bottle of vodka from the bottom of his wardrobe, and went over to Mac’s.

‘Boobs!’ Mac shouted, standing in the doorway of his flat, a coconut in each hand. ‘Am I a fucking genius or am I actually a fucking genius?’ He was wearing electric-blue
shorts with a white drawstring, his calves fat and pink above white sports socks.