The Fire Starters

by Jan Carson

  All that had taken place in March. Karen has hardly left the house since. She’s working as a telesales person now, holding the telephone with a tea-towel so she doesn’t leak down the line as she pushes double-glazing and payment-protection insurance to elderly people on the mainland. Sometimes she has doubts. She wonders if she’ll ever be able to love another person in the ordinary way. She knows that none of this is fair, but what good is knowing the difference between fair and unfair when nothing can be done about it?

  This is a common enough theme among the Unfortunate Children and their parents. I’ve only known them for a single evening but I’ve already heard ‘What will become of them?’ repeated half a dozen times at least. The future lingers in the room, like last night’s dinner, souring the air. It colours everything the parents say, the things they don’t say too. There’s a grand unknown looming on the edge of all their horizons.

  Perhaps Karen will become a radio DJ, her voice touching people in a way her fingers aren’t allowed to, or maybe she’ll learn to love those same errant fingers and find a job in a nursing home or hospice, laying hands on hopeless souls, bringing joy and respite in the darkest places. Maybe the girl who is occasionally a boat will grow into her land legs and no longer feel the need to float alone among the geese and beaky swans, or she will acquire a summer job, transporting holidaymakers round the boating lake at Pickie Pool and come to understand her calling is to carry strangers, to be present, but hardly noticed, in their good-day photos. Perhaps, that one boy will stop seeing the future in every liquid surface, or that other boy will come down from his tree and take a job in the civil service, wearing Next office clothing to work like an ordinary man.

  Maybe the Unfortunate Children will grow out of themselves, or into themselves, and in the end, sit easily in their own odd skins. Perhaps they won’t become unfortunate adults. Every parent in the room hopes for this. I hope for it, too. I hold tightly to the knowledge – medical, social, psychological – that children are fluid, not-yet-formed creatures. That they are not, at six months or even six years, set in their ways. That some children, even those who have never known a single unfortunate day, will often grow into adults so far removed from their early selves it is impossible to recognize them in old photographs and anecdotes. All this is possible. Every parent in the room, myself included, is hoping for their own peculiar version of happy ever after. But from this side of their stories there’s no way of knowing how any of them will end.

  Karen looks as if she’s going to cry, but she won’t let herself. When she’s finished telling her story everyone claps. ‘You must be very proud of her,’ says Davy, and her father says he is. I can understand why he’s proud. Yes, Karen is an Unfortunate Child. I can see it in the way she draws her hair across her face and never lifts her eyes from her feet. But she doesn’t hurt people. She’s blessed with a variety of goodness too great for her to control. I glance around the circle. The invisible twins do not hurt people, and neither does the boy who sees the future in liquid surfaces. The girl who is sometimes a boat is odd, but not destructively so, and Ella Penney couldn’t harm another person if she tried. These are the sort of children who are hurt rather than harmful. They are unfortunate.

  Sophie is different. Sophie has the potential to be a terrible kind of creature. She doesn’t belong here with these children. She belongs with the dark beasts – the devils and vampires and soulless haunting things – who cannot keep both feet in the underworld. I do not belong with the parents of the Unfortunate Children. I have brought a shameful thing into their midst.

  I make my excuses, lift my jacket from the back of the seat and slip out before the second round of coffee begins. All the way home I think about how close I have come to belonging. This nearness, followed by distance, is somehow worse than always being alone. I remember this feeling from childhood, from university, from every day I’ve ever spent in the health centre. I am always, always on my own. Of course, there is Sophie now, but she is not the kind of company I’d hoped for.

  AUGUST

  Jonathan

  I cut myself last night, deep enough to require stitches.

  I did it to see what it would be like for you. I pressed the blade against my thigh and watched the blood line, then form bubbles, and finally a solid red gush, rushing down my leg and on to the bathroom floor. The blood made a dark pool on the lino, a stain like red wine left too long in the glass. I should have put newspaper down before I started, or towels. I should have been ready with the bleach.

  I thought cutting myself would hurt more than it did, that it would sting like an accidental burn. I thought my hand would refuse me. But it didn’t. My hand was just as curious as the rest of my body, eyes, nose, muscles, skin, testicles retreating as the blade dug in. I felt every named part of myself a separate unit, tensing and easing and tensing again, like a labouring woman. I could feel myself dividing. Once started, I hadn’t the sense to stop.

  Cutting was a new experience.

  I’ve had broken bones and stitches before but never an injury, on purpose. You are also a new experience for me, as was your mother and almost everything that’s happened since I first picked up the telephone and heard her, like a magnet, speaking or possibly singing. No, let’s be honest here: she was definitely only speaking, though the books would suggest she sang. Speaking, singing, it doesn’t really matter what she did. I couldn’t help myself around her. Your mother was a new experience for me, a kind of accident. She was not the sort of thing that bears repeating.

  Cutting myself was different. I was all intention. I felt compelled to do it properly, like a surgeon on TV. I brought a suture kit and scalpel home from work. No one noticed these items missing. I take things from work all the time: painkillers, thermometers, plasters, the nicer pens advertising prescription drugs. All doctors steal things. Most don’t use the stolen items on themselves. But I did. I’ve been planning to cut myself for more than a week. I’d memorized all the details so they became a kind of music running through my head every time I wasn’t speaking.

  All my other sadnesses have felt like falling over. But this one felt just like dancing: one learnt step after another until there were no steps left to follow. I can pace these steps even now. It’s important not to forget. I may have to do this again.

  I chose the leg because legs are fleshy and because a leg can be easily covered with trousers. I chose the left over the right because I’m right-handed. This made everything less awkward when it came to angling the blade. I used a disposable razor to shave four square inches of leg. My pale grey flesh appeared beneath, like a freshly stubbled field. I poured antiseptic on the leg, poured antiseptic on the scalpel, drew the scalpel lightly from one side of the square to the other so it formed a faint line, a guide line no thicker than an eyelash. I drew the blade along this line using a heavier hand. I dug in, avoided the artery, avoided the bone: such things could not be dealt with alone in an en-suite bathroom. I held the edge of the toilet seat with one hand, as if it was the hand of a woman who wished to offer me genuine support. Not my mother. Not your mother. A perfect kind of mother, with hair drawn back in a soft bun, and a smell off her like just-baked cake.

  I sweated a little. This was the hardest part.

  The hardest part was still to come. I poured antiseptic on the wound. It screamed. I did not look at it directly. It was the world ending in fire, the sacred heart of Christ bleeding, a woman spread open like sliced meat, too pure a thing to be looked at directly. I thought I might fall over from the lightness in my head. It was a kind of rapture.

  I pulled myself together and did not fall.

  I was already sitting down. I took my own raw edges and sewed myself together, one tight black knot at a time. It took six, maybe seven stitches. I do not remember the details. I was doing this in my head to another man. This was how I managed without anaesthetic. I poured more antiseptic over my leg. It ran off me, like lies. I would have drunk the antiseptic if I’d thought it would soothe
me.

  This was actually the hardest part.

  When the stitches were finally in they were ‘xxx’, like a series of neat black kisses ending a letter. The rest was window-dressing: antiseptic, gauze, clean white bandages collaring my thigh like a turtle-neck sweater, two ibuprofen for the pain, which would begin rawing through my leg as soon as the shock wore off, a pair of clean pyjama bottoms settling against my hot flesh, gently, gently, gentle as soft-brushed air. I mopped up the blood with old towels, put the towels in the washing-machine and made sure it was a hot wash so there would not be stains. Then I nipped whiskey for the pain; nipped a second glass to chase the first; might possibly have returned for a third. By this stage the painkillers were beginning to sing. I took myself to bed with a pillow lumping beneath my thigh.

  I did not sleep and did not sleep and still do not sleep for thinking about you.

  I’m thinking about your mouth again.

  I thought I was over your mouth. I’m not. I’m constantly thinking about your tongue, and your lips, the two knuckly walls of your gums. They are spit smooth and yet to tooth. I check them every morning, running a finger from one side to the other, bracing myself for the grit nip of a cresting tooth. You suck at my finger. Your mouth muscles draw it in and out so I feel my blood pulsing upwards, root to tip. You are powerful with your mouth, like a much larger machine. Even without a mother you are pre-conditioned to go for the nipple. You have not been taught this. Some skills do not require learning.

  Every time I close my eyes I see your mouth smiling at me. Sometimes you have a face. Sometimes you are just a mouth floating up and down the stairs or hovering over the kitchen table. You are the Cheshire Cat without teeth. Your mouth is so many different shades of pink, and red, and pinkish red. It is like a butcher’s window. The mouth is where the inside comes climbing out of a person. This is why I’m afraid and cannot look at you straight or even sideways. This is why I’m still not sleeping, even with the tablets.

  It would be so much easier to seal you up.

  To take a needle and sew one plump lip to the other, or possibly use glue, the strong stuff, which is recommended for holding furniture together. This would keep you quiet. This would surely keep you safe. But I have always known it would be necessary to cut you. Your tongue should suffice. I have no desire to disfigure you further. If you keep your mouth closed and do not try to speak no one will know. Who am I kidding? Of course they’ll know, but by then it will be too late to undo it.

  You won’t understand this now but your tongue is a root, like a potato eye running long beneath the surface. Your tongue is connected to your throat, to your lungs, to your heart, which clutches and releases all the very essence of you, sixty-five times per minute. If your tongue is rotten, all of you is ruined: heart, lungs, throat, head and eyes. A rotten tongue must be cut out with knives. You cannot seal the wrong into a person and expect them to heal. This is a lesson I have personally learnt. I have used doors and neck ties and tightly folded arms to hold my rotten self in until I’m all shot through with the sadness of it. I have spent thirty years perfecting this operation. Wood glue would have been much more convenient.

  I do not want you to be always holding yourself in. I want a clean start for you. I want every good thing. I can give you this with a knife. I promise I will do this properly, once and never again.

  I cut myself last night, deep enough to require stitches.

  I told myself I was doing it for you. ‘Now I’ll know how she feels,’ I told myself. ‘Now I’ll be able to look at her with empathy when she bleeds.’

  What a coward I am. What a fearful man. This had nothing to do with empathy. This was all about absolution: my little hurt for your grand hurt, which will not hold water in comparison.

  Here will be a red gash on my thigh and there, the bloody stump of your severed tongue.

  Here a smooth pink scar, barely noticeable with time, and there, your mouth at twenty and thirty, incapable of solid thought.

  Here will be the memory of a quick blade digging in, and there, the emptiness of all your silent years, screaming and screaming, and only catching on your own teeth.

  What a coward I am. What a fearful child.

  Will you forgive me when you’re old enough to understand forgiveness? Will you have the words for it?

  I’m hoping that it will not come to this, little one. I’m watching your mouth like a clock. This is where the world will begin and end for us. I’m wondering if my hand will refuse me in the moment. I suspect it may. I’m practising the first cut in my head. It’s so much harder to call this kindness now, now you’ve grown into me, like a stubborn root.

  Like a thing that other people would call love.

  14

  The Rains

  For days there’s been a heaviness in the air that will not subside or come to thunder. Then a cloud appears behind Cave Hill, a single cloud, no bigger than a child’s fist and no more threatening. It is remarkably white against the emptiness of the sky, like a sheep lost at sea. People stare at it. They come out of their houses to stare. They point out the cloud to their children. They take pictures on their mobile phones, texting them to relatives in Portrush and Enniskillen. It is months since they last saw a cloud. They’re so very thankful to see one now, casting its cottony shadow over Cave Hill.

  The older folk are happiest. Having exhausted all but the most obvious things to say about heat they’ve been waiting anxiously for some variation in the weather. They have all manner of damp sentiments ready to drop into conversation – drizzle, fog and biting winds – but they need a little rain for lubrication. ‘Looks like it might rain,’ they say eagerly, their eyes never for a moment falling from the little cloud.

  The cloud takes several days to swell. It makes the weather report on Friday, and by Saturday evening is featured on the actual news. People allow themselves to believe a little. Some are praying for rain. Some do not want to force the hand of God. They ask for his will to be done, even if this means more heat. No one wants the heat to continue. The northern constitution can take only so much sun.

  While the city is sleeping the cloud gives birth to other, larger, clouds. This has everything to do with pressure fronts and cold currents sweeping in from the Atlantic, but the local churches still call it answered prayer. In the morning the sky is a thick beard of a blanket descending upon the city. The weathermen speculate. ‘Maybe, possibly, hopefully,’ they say. They don’t want to disappoint their viewers. They don’t want anyone switching to the other channel. People start to carry a light coat every time they leave the house. ‘Just to be on the safe side,’ they say, as if they require an excuse for their own hopefulness. Some even keep pocket-sized umbrellas tucked inside their handbags.

  When the rain finally arrives, the sky is an ocean. Everything is upside down and gushing. The world appears to be ending with water and, in the downpour, all thought of fire is washed away. In the East they are taken by surprise. They have forgotten what it is to be damp. What a relief the rain is. What a way to start again.

  The rain starts on Monday morning. Monday is as good a day as any for a new start. Most of the city’s residents are still asleep when it begins. They wake to the shrill patter of raindrops tickling their windows and skylights. They wake smiling. The air is good today. It smells of nothing but air.

  The first fat drop of rain lands on the hand of a postman as he reaches to stuff envelopes through a letterbox on the Beersbridge Road. Instinctively he looks up, wondering what has hit him. The second drop makes contact with his forehead and, within seconds, he’s drenched to the skin, not cold for the rain is lukewarm, like the rain in Mallorca or Tenerife, but drenched none the less, all the way through his uniform, right down to his underwear and socks. The letters go soggy in his hand. Ink runs. Paper disintegrates. He finds himself holding a wad of brown mush. All over the city other up-early-and-outside types experience the same sudden baptism. Dog-walkers, joggers, bin men and shift workers waiting for
the bus find themselves soaked and squelching onwards. They are smiling this first morning. What a laugh it is to be wet after all that dry. They are seeing the rain as a definite blessing. They have no idea how long it will last.

  By Saturday most people have had more than enough of the rain. Gutters have overrun and sewage is swimming down the street in thick, meaty chunks. The worst parts of the city reek of damp animal, potato peelings and raw human shit. The Westlink is three feet underwater. It is nothing but the memory of a road now. In the south of the city, near Cutter’s Wharf, the Lagan splits its banks and parked cars go gliding down the street, their windscreens peeping above the waterline, like submarines coming up for air. The university rowing team burst open their boat shed and paddle round the roundabouts in luminous orange canoes. They are featured on the news at six, grinning for the cameras, holding their paddles aloft, like happy-birthday banners. It is a holiday for them, a break from the everyday dull. It is not a holiday for those unfortunate residents whose houses border the river on either side. It is a reckoning. There’s only so much that can be saved with a mop and bucket.

  In the city centre the pavements are the same gunmetal grey as the sky, as the shop windows, as the lake quickly forming outside the markets. Everywhere is grey and sliding. People are pale pink thumbprints smudging behind the rain. Most stay indoors, only leaving the house when strictly necessary: work, groceries, elderly relatives, who may require anchoring down. Walking, even a short distance, feels just like swimming tastes deep inside the lungs. The smell of the rain is painfully clean after so much smoke. Some people go out and stand in it with their hands and mouths open, drinking it and grinning like actors in romantic movies. Many of these people are not even in love. They’re just relieved to have their weather back. Umbrellas are all but useless against the torrent. They exist only to indicate which way is up. Everything is damp. Everything is sleek as spit and softly lined.