The Fire Starters

by Jan Carson

  Mr Young turns out to be older than I’d expected. He arrives in a white van with a pair of thigh-high fisherman’s boots and a young lad, Mickey, who’s doing his work experience. ‘What a week to pick,’ says Mr Young. ‘At least he’s getting his money’s worth.’ Mickey shrugs. I can tell he’s heard this line several times already and will hear it again, numerous times, before the end of the week.

  ‘Work away,’ I say, ‘but if you can be quiet it’d be much appreciated. I’ve just got the baby down upstairs. She’s all over the place today, with the floods and everything. It was a nightmare getting her over.’

  ‘Understood,’ replies Mr Young. ‘I’ve three of my own. The youngest one was up a dozen times every night until he started nursery. You’ll not hear a peep out of us, not a single peep.’

  This is hardly true. The pair of them make a tremendous racket splashing around downstairs, pumping water out the kitchen window and tinning their various wrenches off the pipes. I don’t mind. They can knock the walls down and set the burglar alarm off, yawp and yowl like savage beasts for all I care, so long as they don’t speak in front of Sophie. She’s upstairs in her cot, sleeping deeply through the whole fiasco. The plumbers are downstairs, making the mess go away. Everything is almost under control. Everything is not the end of the world it was a few hours earlier. I lie down on my bed for half an hour. What else is there to do in a house with no electricity? I think about reading. I lift a novel from the stack on my bedside table, and wake up to find Mr Young standing in the doorframe, cap in one hand, wrench in the other, like a caricature of a plumber.

  ‘All sorted, Mr Murray,’ the older man says. ‘It’s a bit of a mess downstairs but the water’s gone and we’ve put some sandbags round your doors so it shouldn’t come in again. If you call an electrician first thing they’ll get the lights back on for you.’

  I draw myself up into a sitting position and rub the sleep out of my eyes. I wonder how long the older man has been standing outside my room, watching me sleep. ‘Thanks,’ I say, trying to sound coherent. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘I’ll get the invoice out to you at the end of the week, son. No panic. I’m heading straight on to another job now. Half of Belfast’s drowning.’

  ‘Thanks again, Mr Young.’ I make as if to stand up. I should show the plumbers out of my house. This is what you do with tradesmen.

  ‘Trevor,’ the older man insists. ‘It’s just Trevor, for the next time, and don’t be worrying about showing us out. I’m all packed up. Mickey’s already in the van. Go and see to that wee lassie of yours. She’s been up for ages, babbling away to herself in the cot. I hope you don’t mind, she was already awake, and when I heard her giggling, sure I just couldn’t keep from having a peek. She’s a wee dote so she is, looks like she’s going to be a right talker when the words start coming properly. You’ll have your hands full with that one, son.’

  I go from sitting to standing in one fluid movement.

  ‘She’s not talking yet,’ I say. ‘She’s ages to go before that.’

  ‘Sounds like she’s already trying, mate. It won’t be long. Trust me, I know from my own three. Best feeling in the world, the first time one of your own calls you “Dad”. There’s nothing like it.’

  Mr Young leaves. I sit there for ages, frozen to the bed. I can hear Sophie beginning to cry in the other room. I don’t want to go in to her. I’m loath to admit this but, for the first time in weeks, I’m properly afraid of my own daughter. I try to move but my muscles stick. I attempt to reassure myself. The plumber could’ve been all talk. He’s not to know that Sophie mustn’t be allowed to speak. Most parents want their children to talk and walk and hit all the milestones of development early. He might well have been trying to be nice, just saying the first thing that came to mind. The alternative is terrifying. What if the plumber is right and she’s going to start talking soon? My hand would be forced. Things would have to be done and done quickly.

  When I finally go into the nursery to lift Sophie I’m wearing headphones: big buckets of ear defenders, left over from my student days. I lift her from the cot and change her nappy by candlelight. The flames cast wild lava shadows across her belly. She looks like a savage in the warm glow. a little hell baby. She’s all smiles tonight. She swipes at my head playfully, intrigued by the big red growths bugging over my ears. She dimples. She laughs. She might well be making other sounds but, with my headphones on, I can’t hear anything. I carry her into my own room and place her carefully on the bed. She crabs her legs and arms around, rolling from tummy to back and back to tummy, enjoying the spring in the mattress. She is eggshell white in the flickering dark. She weighs less than a bag of potatoes. It is hard to believe her capable of destroying anything. Yet the fear is in me now, like a little bit of grit lodged between my teeth. It catches on everything.

  I take Sophie’s jaw in my left hand, ever so gently. It is no bigger than a grapefruit. I can pinch it easily between finger and thumb. I make my right hand into a point and trace my first finger lightly across her neck. She smiles up at me. This is a game to her, like tickling or blowing raspberries on her naked belly. She trusts me. Perhaps, in some deep-down part of her, she already knows I’m her dad. I draw my finger across her neck, slowly, deliberately, like a needle pulling thread. This is where I will go in with the blade. This is how I’ll save Sophie. This is how I’ll save myself. It is my job to do this, no one else’s. I am her father, or, as my long-gone father liked to remind me, I am responsible for all of my own mistakes.

  ‘Could I hurt her?’ I ask myself. ‘If it was for her own good?’

  Other parents hurt their children every day. I know this. I’m a doctor after all. They stick their children with needles and feed them sick-making medicine. They thump them hard between the shoulder blades until all their phlegm comes choking up. They strap them down and hoist them up, poke, prod and hoke the illness out of them. They say, ‘Trust us. It’s for the best,’ and do their crying in bathrooms and hospital corridors where the children won’t see. They make themselves deliberately cruel. They have to.

  These people aren’t like me. They are brave and selfless. Their children need saving from cancer, or diabetes, or lungs that have forgotten how to breathe. They are not to blame. They are to be carried by sisters and brothers and other parents whose children are without fault. No one should feel compelled to carry me. My child is not a victim. My child requires saving from herself. The fault runs through Sophie, like a blood-borne disease. I’ve done this to her, passed on my weakness. What a pair we are. What a cruel mess.

  I don’t think I could hurt her. Or, to see the problem from another angle, I don’t think I can help her. Not with scalpels. Not with blood. Even with a stranger I’d struggle to break the skin. With Sophie I could barely keep my hand still. Which is why I phone the Royal and ask for Dr Kunari, why the anger comes galloping out of me when the secretary won’t put me through: ‘Not without an appointment, sir. Not even if you’re a doctor yourself.’ It’s why I put Sophie in the car and drive her through the floods to sit in the car park outside the Portakabin where the Unfortunate Children meet, waiting for Dr Kunari to come out. Why I’m weeping over my steering wheel, misting up the car windows, when Mrs Penney finds me, still waiting, almost two hours later.

  ‘I need someone to help me,’ I confess. ‘I can’t do it myself.’

  Mrs Penney understands. She has been here herself, and not so long ago. Eventually everyone needs help with an Unfortunate Child. She probably has a vision of me sitting at her kitchen table, drinking tea, crying if I need to cry, driving home later with an extra portion of shepherd’s pie for tomorrow night’s dinner. This is how she would help me. This is how she has been helped. I’m imagining something entirely different when I say I can no longer continue on my own. I’m picturing myself on the sidelines while Dr Kunari slices the tongue right out of my daughter’s mouth. This is how I want to be helped. I don’t want to hurt her myself. It might be more be
arable if I’m only watching. Like Judas, hovering on the sidelines.

  ‘Is that your little girl?’ asks Mrs Penney, peering through the condensation at Sophie in her car seat. We’re talking through a tiny sliver of empty window. Even this is a risk with Sophie. I get out of the car and close the door gently behind me. It’s raining. Mrs Penney has an umbrella. I step under the roof of it and notice Ella, hiding behind her mother’s legs.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘that’s Sophie. But she’s sleeping.’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ replies Mrs Penney. I don’t know how she can tell through the sweaty glass. She’s probably just saying this to make me feel better.

  ‘Where’s Dr Kunari? I came to see him.’

  ‘He’s not here tonight. He’s hardly ever here. Between you and me, I think he favours the children in south Belfast. Their parents can afford to go private.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. I turn towards the car, as if to leave.

  Mrs Penney reaches for my elbow and steers me back under her umbrella. ‘Can I help?’ she asks, and I wonder if she wants to kiss me. If this was a movie and a lady was standing in the rain, asking if she could help a man, it would definitely mean kissing. But she is a married woman and this is not a movie, and Ella is peeping round her mother’s waist, grinning out from under the hood of her anorak.

  ‘The group’s here to help, Jonathan,’ Mrs Penney says. ‘I know it’s hard work being the parent of an Unfortunate Child but we’re here for you … if you want us to be. You have to want the help, though.’

  ‘I need help,’ I say.

  Mrs Penney leans towards me. Her arms go up at the side as if she’s about to embrace me. I step back.

  ‘You can’t help me,’ I say firmly. ‘None of you can. Your children aren’t unfortunate. They’re just challenging or a bit odd … or really gifted.’ I look directly at Ella when I say this. ‘Sophie is actually unfortunate. She’s probably going to hurt people, I mean really hurt people. She won’t be able to stop herself. You can’t help me with her. It’d be too much of a risk.’

  ‘Look, Jonathan,’ says Mrs Penney, ‘I could take you into that room right now and ask each of those parents to tell you how awful their children are and it wouldn’t take very much to get the stories out of them. The tantrums. The violent rages. It’s not easy being an Unfortunate Child. That little girl who turns into a boat, well, her parents don’t talk about it very often, but when she was five she got so mad about not being normal, she tried to drown her baby brother in the paddling pool. And the one who sees the future in liquid surfaces, he used to be so mean, he’d go around telling old people they were going to die soon, told them he’d seen it in a puddle or some such crap. Completely made up. He was just a vindictive wee bastard—’

  I interrupt her mid-flow: ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I hear you, but those kids aren’t wired to be evil. They’re just good kids stuck in weird situations, trying to work out who they are. Sophie’s actually, well, maybe dangerous.’

  ‘Oh, you think there aren’t dangerous Unfortunate Children?’ she says, her voice getting high and twitchetty. ‘You think this is just a little club for parents of kids who are a bit odd? I wish. You just turned up on a good night. You missed the parents of the teenager who sets things on fire every time he gets horny. Unfortunately for you, they were preoccupied with their other son. He’s in the burns unit at the minute. As is their next-door neighbour’s daughter and their son’s geography teacher. Oh, and Lois the daytime vampire. She can’t be left alone at night, so her parents weren’t there either. And, of course, we don’t even talk about Simon any more, not since they locked him up for sneezing acid on the school bus. All those beautiful little baby faces marked for life. There’s not much they can do for an acid burn even now, with all the advances in plastic surgery. No, Jonathan, we have no truly “unfortunate” children here. Nobody’s as badly off as you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know. I honestly thought Sophie was the only one who could really hurt people.’

  ‘All children hurt people, Jonathan,’ says Mrs Penney. Her voice has lost the spiteful edge. She just sounds defeated now. ‘Mostly they hurt their parents. You can’t protect Sophie for ever. None of us can.’

  ‘I know. But I have to try.’

  ‘Look, you know where we are if you want our help, but we can’t force you. You’re always welcome here.’ She sounds weary, as if this is a conversation she’s had before, many times, in this same car park. I wonder if there have been other parents too scared to hang around, parents with children as messed up as Sophie. People who might be even worse off than we are.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I really appreciate that.’

  She turns away from me, taking the umbrella with her as she steps into the darkness. The rain is drumming on my head. It seeps through my pullover and down the back of my collar. I have never, in all my empty life, felt quite so lonely. I want to say something to her and can only manage a strangled ‘Goodbye.’ She doesn’t hear me through the rain, or perhaps she hears and chooses not to respond. The thing I want to say is ‘Pray for us,’ but I don’t know if I believe in prayer or the point of it when nothing can be fixed.

  Ella doesn’t follow her mother immediately. She stands on the puddling tarmac smiling up at me. Her face is a kind of moon, glowing beneath the shadow of her anorak hood. She is such a thing to look at. It’s impossible not to stare. She holds her hand out. The rain collects in the cup of her palm. I stretch my own hand to meet hers. Our hands clasp. Hers is so much warmer than mine, so much smaller.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Ella says, and almost immediately she’s gone.

  The place where she touched me is now warm. I feel the life of her go shooting up my arms and over my chest, into my mouth and lungs, like hot whiskey heat. It enters my heart. It enters my head. It will be all right, I think. I wonder if this is how a prayer is answered. ‘It will be all right,’ I tell myself, as I drive home and put Sophie to bed and later go to bed myself and rise for work the next morning to sit at my desk, knowing something must soon be done about the child.

  A decision must be made. In some strange way, it has made everything both better and worse to know Sophie is not the only one. It is comforting to think of other children capable of instigating evil. Comforting in the sickest sense. It also makes my daughter more real. This is not my imagination ticking into overdrive. Not some latent neurosis kicking in late. Other parents, right here in Belfast, are dealing with their Unfortunate Children, decisively, brutally, with cold objectivity, for the sake of protecting others. I must take my situation in hand. I must be cold, stiff-lipped, equally objective. I can’t delay for much longer.

  At the surgery, my first patient of the day is Samuel Agnew. I’m not expecting this. I’m not prepared for the questions he has come to ask.

  17

  Confession

  The door is knocked.

  ‘Come in,’ says Jonathan.

  The door does not open. The door is knocked again. Tat. Tat. Tat.

  ‘Come in,’ says Jonathan, louder this time. He stops writing and lays his pen on top of his notepad. The door remains closed. The door is knocked a third time and then, in quick succession, a fourth and fifth.

  It is probably an elderly patient, most likely an old man with an improperly fitted hearing aid. They are the worst when it comes to knocking. Behold, I stand at the door and knock and knock and never bloody well come in, thinks Jonathan, and smiles a little at his own wit. He reminds himself, as he does every time the not-opening-the-door thing happens, that he must ask the lady receptionists to make a sign. ‘Please enter’ or ‘The doctor is in’ or ‘STOP HAMMERING ON MY DOOR AND BLOODY WELL OPEN IT YOURSELF.’ He will ask for the sign to be entirely written in bold-as-bullet capital letters so the short-sighted ones can’t cite blindness as an excuse. He’s reasonably sure it won’t make any difference: the old people will still stand there knocking cautiously. But making a sign will give the lady receptionists something to do.<
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  They are always on at him for fresh pictures of Sophie. At first he’d enjoyed the attention. Now they make him feel inadequate with their questions.

  ‘Isn’t she a bit small for her age?’

  ‘Is she not sleeping through the night yet?’

  ‘You’d need to be giving her supplements, seeing as she’s not getting the breast.’

  He tries to avoid the lady receptionists. but there are so many of them, it’s like attempting to avoid air. They keep demanding to see Sophie, as if they have some kind of right to her.

  ‘Why don’t you bring her in to the surgery, Dr Murray?’

  ‘Jesus, the child’ll be married before we’ve clapped eyes on her.’

  ‘Do you think we’re going to eat her or something?’

  ‘Yes,’ he wants to say, ‘yes, I think you will eat my daughter alive, you harpy bitches. That is, if Sophie doesn’t go for you first.’

  They don’t know what they’re asking of him. They can’t possibly understand the implications.

  The door is knocked again, so violently that Jonathan’s coat, hanging on its hook, slips off and crumples on the floor. He can’t ignore the pounding any longer. As he crosses the floor and reaches for the door handle, he is cheered by the realization that talk of a sign will give him something to say to the lady receptionists. Today they will discuss colours, fonts and paper choices. Sophie won’t even come into their conversation. The relief of this is mighty. He will insist that the sign is laminated. The lady receptionists are particularly fond of laminating things.

  Jonathan opens his door. He braces himself for an elderly man. They have their own particular smell and way of entering a quiet space. He already has his old-people’s voice on. It is louder and sharper: more like a hammer than a spade. He opens the door away from himself and steps back to accommodate his visitor.