The Fire Starters

by Jan Carson

  The Fire Starters

  Jan Carson

  Contents

  JUNE Jonathan

  1: This Is Belfast

  2: Belfast Is For Lovers

  3: Burning Cars

  The Girl Who Could Only Fall

  4: Siren

  5: The Difficult Son

  The Boy with Wheels for Feet

  6: The Naming

  JULY Sammy

  7: Tall Fires

  The Boy Who Sees the Future in Every Liquid Surface

  8: Eleventh, Twelfth, Thirteenth

  9: The News

  The Girl Who Is Occasionally a Boat

  10: A Very Bad Man

  11: Little Wings

  Lois, the Daytime Vampire

  12: Talks

  13: The Unfortunate Children of East Belfast

  AUGUST Jonathan

  14: The Rains

  15: Anarchy

  16: The Flood

  17: Confession

  18: The Last Supper

  19: Cut

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Photo © Jonathan Ryder

  JAN CARSON is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, was published in 2014 to critical acclaim, followed by a short story collection, Children’s Children (2016), and a flash fiction anthology, Postcard Stories (2017). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. In 2016 she won the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition and was shortlisted for the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize. She specializes in running arts projects and events with older people, especially those living with dementia. The Fire Starters is her second novel.

  Praise for The Fire Starters

  ‘Shot through this gripping tangle of events is real insight. Carson explores our complexities with her tremendously keen eye.’

  AIMEE BENDER

  ‘Spectacular … Dark, beautiful, at once grittily real and wildly magical. Insanely alluring.’

  DONAL RYAN

  ‘Jan Carson seems to have invented a new Belfast in this gripping, surprising, exhilarating novel.’

  RODDY DOYLE

  ‘With her idiosyncratic blend of warm intelligence, dark humour, and magic realism, Jan Carson brings us a singular portrait of a city and its people struggling with questions of guilt, responsibility, and the limits of love.’

  CARYS DAVIES

  ‘Gripping, affecting, surprising. I inhaled it.’

  LISA McINERNEY

  ‘Shimmering with wit, simmering with an incandescent rage, shot through with a seam of wild magic, The Fire Starters is a powerful, disturbing portrait of East Belfast and its people and its hope for the future … I won’t be the only reader to proclaim that, in the best way possible, Jan Carson is on fire.’

  LUCY CALDWELL

  ‘Irresistible, vivid and gripping.’

  CAOILINN HUGHES

  ‘A brilliant, wry novel, fizzing with energy.’

  BARNEY NORRIS

  ‘Both a fiercely gripping thriller and a beautifully twisted fable, The Fire Starters is an electrifying blast of Belfast Gothic: a luminous, furious vision of a city at war with itself.’

  MICHAEL HUGHES

  www.penguin.co.uk

  Also by Jan Carson

  Malcolm Orange Disappears

  STORIES

  Children’s Children

  Postcard Stories

  For my parents, with love and thanks.

  siren

  'sʌɪr(ə)n/

  noun

  noun: siren; plural noun: sirens; noun: greater siren; plural noun: greater sirens

  1. a device that makes a loud prolonged signal or warning sound.

  2. GREEK MYTHOLOGY each of a number of women or winged creatures whose singing lured unwary sailors on to rocks.

  In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.

  George Eliot, Silas Marner

  JUNE

  Jonathan

  Your ears are not the same as mine.

  It has taken me three months to notice this. I am sorry. I am not really sorry. I have been preoccupied. There are so many things to worry about now there are two of us. You were not here. Then you were. You didn’t send word to say you were coming. You didn’t call ahead. How could you have? All the same it was a shock. One morning I was I. The next, I was we. There was not enough time to prepare; not enough time to run away.

  Before you, I was already afraid. My fears were spread across different rooms and all the doors were firmly closed. Coming sharply from one room into another, I could pretend not to see the accumulating clutter. After you arrived there were no longer lines keeping one fear from the next. My individual fears spread into each other, like puddles pooling wildly until I had a lake on my hands. I couldn’t see the bottom of it. I couldn’t see the sides. I was a drowning man.

  I have made a list of the fears that did not exist before you: the fear of people and the fear of lacking people, the fear of money, telephones and time. The fear of silence and the fear of sounds. The fear of dropping you on your head and your head being split in two, like an egg, with all the wet parts leaking out. I thought this list might be a kind of ladder, something I could climb upwards out of myself. But one fear fed the next and there wasn’t enough paper for all my fearful thinking. I did not write down this list for fear it might be found and held against me. This was another fear to add to my list.

  Between you, and the worry of you, everything else has begun to peel away. I have not had the time to notice your ears. But this morning, when I lifted you out of the bath, I was not thinking about my job or your breakfast. I was not thinking about all the ways this house is falling down around us in strips. It was the weekend. I was giving myself a little space to sit down and breathe.

  It has been many weeks since I last sat down and did not immediately stand up. Time is the biggest thing you have taken from me: time and the permission to leave. This morning I took the time to stare at you. I even turned on the long light over the bathroom mirror. I think you enjoyed being looked at. You smiled at me. It was the first time you had smiled at me. I’m sure of this. I’ve been watching your mouth as if it is a clock. Your mouth is a kind of clock and there is nothing I can do to slow it down.

  You were pink from the bath. The type of pink that is actually white speckled with thousands of tiny red dots, like a painting. Your fingernails were sharp. They required cutting or biting. I have read on the internet that biting is recommended in the early months. Maybe I will do this tonight. Your hair was running in wet threads over your head. Your hair is like contour lines hilling on a map. Usually you are covered with curls. The curls are a kind of shield, shadowing the edges of your face, as if you’re trying to keep yourself a secret. I liked seeing the shape of your head with no hair. It made me think of baby birds before their feathers have fluffed out, or very old men. I held you up to the bathroom window, turned you this way and that in the watery light. For the first time I particularly noticed your ears.

  It’s not that I’ve been disregarding your ears. I’ve always suspected they were there. I’ve known your ears in the same way I knew you possessed fingers, toes, eyes and the possibility of teeth; all your organs, present and quietly ticking. This was not just professionalism on my part. With you, I actually wanted to keep note. When observing bodies the obvious miracles are easy to take for granted. I’m speaking of the details common to all human
beings. I include smiling, sleeping and certain motor responses among the general specifics. Your freckles I paid particular attention to, and your hair. Both are uncommon and quite striking. I do not know if these will turn out to be beautiful or ugly in the eyes of your peers. It isn’t my place to say.

  Your hair is so black it appears damp even when dry. This is not a good sign. This is not the worst sign. Plenty of women have shiny hair. I keep telling myself this, but it’s hard to hook into the truth of it. It is much easier to believe the worst.

  Your hair, if I’m honest, is why I put you in a hat. Your mouth, the reason I’m considering a balaclava. I am afraid for us both every time I see your damp black hair. I do not even want to believe you have a mouth. I know mouths are necessary, for breathing and such, but I cannot look at yours directly. The red of it is like an ambulance siren saying a terrible thing is already happening, and soon I will see it for myself. I want to place my hand across your mouth and make it disappear.

  And now, this morning, another fear to add to my list. I have noticed that your ears are different from mine.

  This is not a good sign. This is two for your mother and only your eyes for me. I have been holding on to your eyes for anchors. They are exactly the same nut-brown colour as mine. I like to look at your eyes and see the reflection of myself, mirroring in the black. I like to think, There you are, Little One. Just as much mine as hers.

  Your mother had ocean-blue eyes. Any other colour would have been an insult. But yours are brown, like land, like soil, like tree trunks and autumn leaves mulching into winter. You are a ground baby, and on good days I believe that you are mine. ‘To Hell with your ears and your hair,’ I say to myself. Your mother can have them. They are secondary concerns. Your eyes are mine, and do they not say that the eyes are almost as holy as the heart? Windows to the soul, they say, and other such reassuring sentiments. Eyes are greater than hair and ears combined. I am also hopeful for your hands, which form fists like my fists when you’re sleeping, your little sausage feet, and the way you may carry yourself, bent slightly forwards, when walking across a room.

  I will do my best to teach myself into you. ‘Carry your back like this,’ I will say, ‘and your legs as if they don’t hold the memory of water.’ I will remind you, over and over again, that people cannot swim. I will shield you from pictures of swimming pools and swimmers on the television. I will say, ‘Water is for drinking, and washing, that’s all.’ I will say, ‘Fold your hands, Little One, you belong to me.’

  I will hope your ears can hear but they may already be ringing with your mother’s songs.

  I will wait and I will watch your mouth.

  Your mouth is where the world will begin or end. I cannot bear to look at it. I am watching it, like a clock, even now. I am waiting to see what will come out of it; to see if you are hers or mine.

  1

  This Is Belfast

  This is Belfast. This is not Belfast.

  Better to avoid calling anything a spade in this city. Better to avoid names and places, dates and second names. In this city names are like points on a map or words worked in ink. They are trying too hard to pass for truth. In this city truth is a circle from one side and a square from the other. It is possible to go blind staring at the shape of it. Even now, sixteen years after the Troubles, it is much safer to stand back and say with conviction, ‘It all looks the same to me.’

  The Troubles are over now. They told us so in the newspapers and on the television. Here, we’re very great with religion. We need to believe everything for ourselves. (We’re all about sticking the finger in and having a good hoke around.) We did not believe it in the newspapers or on the television. We did not believe it in our bones. After so many years of sitting one way, our spines had set. We will take centuries to unfold.

  The Troubles have only just begun. This is hardly true either. It depends upon who you’re talking to, how they’re standing, and which particular day you’ve chosen for the chat. Those who are ignorant of our situation can look it up on Wikipedia and find there a three-thousand-word overview. Further articles can be read online and in academic journals. Alternatively, a kind of history may be acquired from talking to the locals. Piecing this together will be a painstaking process, similar to forging one jigsaw puzzle from two, or perhaps twenty.

  The Troubles is too less a word for all of this. It is a word for minor inconveniences, such as overdrawn bank accounts, slow punctures, a woman’s time of the month. It is not a violent word. Surely we have earnt ourselves a violent word, something as blunt and brutal as ‘apartheid’. Instead, we have a word like ‘scissors’, which can only be said in the plural. The Troubles is/was one monster thing. The Troubles is/are many individual evils caught up together. (Other similar words include ‘trousers’ and ‘pliers’.) The Troubles is always written with a capital T as if it were an event, as the Battle of Hastings is an event with a fixed beginning and end, a point on the calendar year. History will no doubt prove it is actually a verb; an action that can be done to people over and over again, like stealing.

  And so we draw no lines. We say this is not Belfast but rather a city similar to Belfast, with two sides and a muck-brown river soldering one to the other. Roads, other roads, train tracks, chimneys. All those things common to a functional city are present here in limited measure. Shopping centres. Schools. Parks, and the unspoken possibility of green acres glooming in the spring. Three hospitals. A zoo, from which animals occasionally escape. To the east of the city, a pair of yellow cranes stride across the horizon, like bow-legged gentlemen. To the west, a hill, hardly a mountain by Alpine standards, trips over itself as it tumbles into the bay. Strung along the coastline there are very many buildings. They are perched like coy bathers, dipping their toes in the greeny sea. There are boats: big boats, smaller boats and that sunken boat, which holds the whole city captive from the ocean floor. There are no future boats.

  Instead, there are glass and gunmetal structures stapled across the skyline. These are like stairs ascending towards the tooth-white heights once occupied by God. These are office blocks and hotels for visiting strangers: Americans mostly, and people from other earnest places. We have scant respect for these people and the photographs they will take. They believe themselves brave for coming to this city or, at the very least, open-minded. We wish to say to them, ‘Are you mad? Why have you come here? Don’t you know there are other proper cities just one hour away by budget airline? There is even Dublin.’ We are not supposed to say this. We have already begun to lean on their money.

  We put the visitors in black beetle taxis and drive them round and round the ring road, up the tiny streets and down, until they, too, are dizzy, seeing this city from so many angles. We feed them fried eggs and bacon on almost-white plates and say, ‘There you go, a taste of local cuisine. That’ll set you up for the day.’ We dance for them and their foreign money. We are also prepared to cry if this is expected. We wonder what our grandparents would say to all this clamour, all this proving talk.

  In this city we have a great love of the talking. The talking can be practised on buses and park benches, from pulpits and other high places. It is occasionally expressed in poems, more frequently on gable walls. It swells in the presence of an audience, though a second party is not strictly required. There is never enough silence to contain all our talking. We have talked ourselves sideways on subjects such as politics and religion, history, rain and the godless way these elements are bound together, like some bastard version of the water cycle. We continue to believe that across the sea, Europe (and also the world) is holding its breath for the next chapter in our sad story. The world is not waiting for us. There are louder voices around the table now. African. Russian. Refugee. They say terrible things in words that require translation. We are wet paper in comparison.

  This city continues to talk. It tells anyone inclined to listen that it is a European city, twinned with other European cities. Who is this city kidding? It has no piazz
a, no marble fountains, no art to speak of. It crouches on the edge of the Continent, like a car park for mainland Europe. The people, when they speak, have a homely sound off them, like boiled potatoes dripping butter. There is no sun to speak of and no one sits outside at café tables. Even when there is a sun it is only a kind of cloud for the rain to hide behind. This is not a city as Barcelona is a city, or Paris, or even Amsterdam. This is a city like a word that was once bad and needs redeeming, ‘queer’ being the first that comes to mind.

  Which is not to say this place is without charm. Despite its best attempts to disappoint, people do not leave and those who do keep coming back. They say, ‘It’s the people,’ and ‘You’d go a long way before you found a better breed of person.’ They say, ‘It’s certainly not the weather we came for.’ There is truth in every version of this.

  Sammy Agnew has known this city his entire life. The map of its little streets and rivers is stamped into him, like a second set of fingerprints. When he opens his mouth, it is this city’s sharp and stringy words that come nosing out. He cannot bear the sound of his own voice played back. Sammy can’t stand this place, can’t quite curse it either. He’d give anything to scrape himself clean of it. To flit and start again, some place warmer like Florida or Benidorm. Some place less like a goldfish bowl. He has tried. God only knows how hard he’s tried. But this place is like a magnet: coaxing, dragging, reeling him back in. No matter how far he goes, by plane or boat, or in his everyday thinking – which is the hardest place to achieve distance – he’ll still be a son of this city; a disloyal son but, none the less, linked.

  Sammy keeps himself to the edge of things now, toeing the line where the nicer neighbourhoods fold into the not so nice. He knows he isn’t above any of it. The stink of a backstreet beginning cannot be washed off with soap or careful distance. He is this place, as his children are this place. This is not necessarily a good thing to carry, though, these days, there’s a sort of mumbling hope rising off the city, swelling mostly in the young. There are even individuals proud to raise their heads and say, ‘I’m from here and I will not apologize for it.’ Sammy thinks these folks are fools. He fears for his children, his son in particular. There’s a hardness in the boy, peculiar to this place. Hardness is not the worst way to hold yourself in a city so marked by disappointment. Yet Sammy knows that hardness left to simmer breeds rage, and rage is next to cruelty, and this is what he sees every time he looks at Mark: this city, fouling his boy up, just like it once ruined him.