The Fire Starters

by Jan Carson

  ‘Please come in,’ he says, with a grand sweep of his hand. Once again, he feels like a character in a BBC period drama: an elderly vicar from Austen or Dickens. The patient doesn’t move. He must be older than Jonathan has imagined. Perhaps he’s deaf or blind or muddled with dementia. Any number of illnesses will make a statue of a human being. The man in the corridor is younger than Jonathan has expected. He knows this man. His name is either William or Samuel, something dry and of the East. Samuel. Sammy Agnew. The sight of him makes Jonathan’s stomach drop, not like nausea, more like fear.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says, no need for the old-people’s voice now. ‘You’d better come in.’

  Sammy Agnew is standing in the corridor. His fist is raised, ready to begin another assault on the door. He pockets his hand quickly. It is less than a month since Jonathan last saw him but the change is profound. Sammy has aged a decade in a matter of weeks. There are lines around his eyes and mouth now: deep, well-etched folds, like the wrinkles in a paper bag. His pullover is crumpled, his trainers filthy. His chin is frosted with a three-day stubble, white and grey to match the unkempt thatch of his hair. He is slouching, shoulders hunched above his neck, like a man who is bracing himself against the cold. He enters Jonathan’s room and wilts into the nearest chair.

  ‘You look like I feel, Doctor,’ he says.

  This is hardly a compliment. Sammy looks like shit stirred. Instinctively Jonathan raises a hand to his collar, straightens his tie and slicks the fly-away ends of his hair back into place. He knows he’s not looking his best today – he’s hardly slept all week – but he hadn’t thought the patients would notice. They rarely ask after him, and even when they do it’s out of politeness, in passing, a kind of introduction to their own ill-health. They say, ‘How’s yourself, Dr Murray?’ and he says, ‘Not too bad. What brings you in today?’ and off they go with their aches and ulcers, their fungal foot infections and croup. They are not interested in the doctor. They probably wouldn’t notice if his arms fell off, as long as it didn’t impact his ability to write prescriptions for antibiotics and hydrocortisone cream. It is rare for a patient to look him in the eye. But here’s Sammy, giving him nothing but the big beady eye and a running commentary on how he’s looking less than A-star.

  ‘I’m fine, Mr Agnew,’ Jonathan snaps. ‘I take it you’re not feeling so good yourself.’

  ‘No, Doctor. I’m feeling rough as.’

  ‘Is it the same thing as before?’

  ‘Yes. It’s worse now, though. It’s all the time now. I feel like death when I get up in the morning and I feel like death warmed up when I go to bed. It’s playing on me constantly.’

  ‘The anxiety?’

  ‘Anxiety, worry, fear, call it whatever you want, Dr Murray. Half the time I feel like there’s no point going on.’

  ‘Would you say you were depressed, Sammy?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sitting round the house crying and getting on, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘There’s other symptoms you might have. People with depression don’t necessarily cry at all. Are you more tired than usual? Anxious? Off your sleep or your food? Lost your libido?’

  ‘Libido?’

  ‘Sex, Sammy. Are you not as interested in sex as you used to be?’

  ‘Aye, Doctor, I’m not. But that’s more to do with my wife putting on the weight than anything else. I’d say yes, definitely yes, to all them other things, though, the not sleeping or eating and such. I’m not feeling myself at the minute. Not at all.’

  ‘Would you say you ever have suicidal thoughts?’

  ‘Jesus, no, Doctor. That’s a thing to be asking anyone.’

  ‘Sorry, it’s not meant to be offensive. I just have to ask. It helps me to understand how bad your depression is.’

  ‘It’s not that bad. I’d never seriously think about doing myself in.’

  ‘Do you never feel really down, Sammy, or wonder how you’ll make it to the end of the day?’

  ‘Well, when you put it like that, sometimes I do feel a wee bit desperate. Like the walls are coming in.’

  ‘Is there anything that triggers these feelings?’

  ‘Uch, it’s usually when I’m thinking about my oldest lad and the mess he’s got himself into, and all the stuff I done when I was his age. Well, I know it’s my fault that our Mark’s the way he is. That’s some weight to be carrying round with you. If I let myself dwell on it for too long I sometimes get to thinking it’d be easier if I wasn’t around any more.’

  ‘Easier for who, Sammy?’

  ‘The wife, the weans, myself, half the East. Most everybody in Belfast would be better off without Sammy Agnew.’

  Once again, Jonathan is struck by how obvious this statement is, like a line lifted from a blockbuster movie. He can picture Tom Hanks or one of those other sad-sack A-listers looking straight down the camera as they question whether the world wouldn’t be better off without them. There’s a Christmas movie, a classic black-and-white number, entirely built around this premise. Jonathan struggles to surface the name of it and can’t, and wonders for the hundredth time this year why these people talk the way they do, in cheap slang and clichés, phrases they’ve lifted from the television. It’s as if they’ve lost their own language. Or grown lazy with it. He doesn’t think he can stomach another season of patients talking like LA hustlers or extras from EastEnders.

  ‘Of course your family would miss you,’ Jonathan says. ‘Their world wouldn’t be the same without you.’ Almost instantly he regrets this, starts replaying his own words. He is just as bad as Sammy. He sounds like the poetry part of a greetings card, the sort of thing women stick on their fridge doors.

  The older man is touched, though. He looks as if he might start up the weeping again. Jonathan does a quick desk check for tissues and, yes, there is a box of Kleenex, unopened beside his pen holder. He sees this as a sort of safety net, to be avoided if possible. He isn’t good with crying patients. Especially men. He clears his throat and allows his voice to settle into the calm teacher voice he keeps for slightly hysterical patients. When speaking in this voice, he delivers each sentence like a set of operating instructions. Here’s how it’s going to be. Here’s what you’re going to do. Everything will be fine.

  ‘Listen, Sammy,’ he says, sliding effortlessly into the realm of familiarity, ‘you’re going to take a deep breath and tell me all about it. Then we’re going to work out a plan. Together. So you feel better.’

  ‘It’s getting worse, Doctor. I don’t think I can ignore it any longer.’

  ‘Well, if the situation’s getting worse, we should definitely try to do something about it sooner rather than later. We have some options here.’

  ‘What sort of options?’

  ‘Well, I know you’re reluctant to go on the anti-depressants, Sammy. A lot of people are. But it would be a short-term solution, something to get you back on your feet, help you sleep and keep the anxiety at bay. That’s one option. Or I can arrange for you to talk to someone professional, a counsellor. Or we can do both. I’d recommend both, to be honest. It wouldn’t hurt to talk to somebody about your issues, even if you were already on the tablets.’

  ‘I don’t want to see a shrink.’

  ‘Not a shrink, Samuel, a counsellor. Somebody who’d help you work through the things that are bothering you so much.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to a stranger.’

  ‘So, I’ll just write you a prescription, then?’

  ‘Naw, I don’t want drugs either. I came here to talk to you.’

  ‘I’m not a counsellor, Sammy. I’m just a GP. You’d be better off talking to someone who’s actually trained in that kind of thing. I can arrange it for you.’

  ‘No, Dr Murray. I only want to talk to you.’

  ‘Why me?’ asks Jonathan. He doesn’t know why he’s asking this. He doesn’t particularly want to hear the answer. He knows it will be ugly. But his mouth is raising the question before his head has the sense t
o stop it.

  ‘Because you’re in the same boat as me,’ says Sammy. ‘I could tell the first time I clapped eyes on you. You’re just as shit-scared as I am. Just as down.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ replies Jonathan. But there’s very little point in trying to argue with the older man. His hands are stuttering all over his desk, straining to hold their itch still. He picks up a pen. Puts it down. Picks up his notepad and turns it sideways. He is sweating. He can feel the wet of it pooling at the base of his spine, gathering in great greasy slicks across his forehead. He is sweating like a stuck pig. He is just as messed up as Sammy Agnew, just as down.

  He thinks about disappearing all the time. In his head he calls it disappearing but he could just as easily be saying, ‘The world would be much better off without me.’ It’s only snobbery that has him baulking at the cliché. He pushes his chair away from his desk. There is a foot or more of empty space between his knees and the edge of the desk now. He crosses his legs at the knee, rests his elbows on his thighs and cradles his entire head in the cup of his hands. Like a small boy trying to fold into himself. Out of the corner of his eye he can see the unopened box of Kleenex. It’s good to know it’s still there, if needed.

  ‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘I’m not fine either.’

  Sammy gets up from his chair, crosses the room in two clumpy strides, and locks the door. He locks them both in. Locks everyone else out. Jonathan isn’t supposed to lock doors when he’s with a patient. For his own safety. For their protection. He can see the situation from both sides but the door is locked now and there’s not much he can do about it without causing a scene. Sammy drags his chair across the room so they will be looking directly at each other, like two people sitting in a café, if they didn’t have a table between them. He sits down heavily.

  ‘Talk,’ he says. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘You first,’ says Jonathan. He feels he must insist upon this. He is the professional, after all. Technically he is still sitting behind a desk.

  Sammy tells his story. Before beginning, he decides not to hold back any part, even the ugliest bits and those that may not be relevant to the telling: the way he sometimes has to think about your woman who does the TV weather when he’s giving it to his wife. The bitter relief of putting two children on the P&O ferry, floating them off to the mainland and knowing they wouldn’t be coming back. The time wee Mark caught him in the garage, angering his fists against an old tyre, pretending it was that young lad from the Falls, the one who got the promotion over him. And how, when the boy had asked, ‘What are you doing to that tyre, Dad?’ he’d replied, ‘Stopping myself hurting someone, son.’ He’d thought the child was too young to remember the way his face went like an animal’s when the rage was on him. But maybe the boy had remembered. Maybe something in that exact moment had turned him. Or maybe the change could not be placed so precisely: point of conversion timed and dated like a born-again Christian. Maybe there was no way of knowing exactly when a good thing went bad.

  Sammy Agnew’s story begins: ‘There’s this thing inside me that wants to ruin people.’ Jonathan has heard the same story before, with variations. There are dozens of men in East Belfast who do not know what to do with their anger. They are red in the face with it and often drunk. They are occasionally hysterical. Sometimes he suggests counselling or some sort of talking group. Mostly he knows that rage so deep cannot be rooted out with words. ‘Try running,’ he says. ‘Lift weights. Join a boxing club.’ Anger can’t be exorcized, but sometimes you can wear out the force of it.

  Then Sammy is telling him about Mark: his son, the Fire Starter. Jonathan hasn’t heard this version of the old story before. Most of the men he listens to are doubled over with guilt and sore regret. They’re looking for anti-depressants or pills to knock them out at night. They still have dreams about the vile things they did back in the seventies and eighties. They know they’re not exactly victims. But you try telling that to a night terror. You try reasoning with a panic attack. They’re only after an opportunity to confess, to shove the guilt up their throat and into somebody else’s ears. This is what passes for relief in the East.

  They won’t talk to priests, they can’t trust the police, and they wouldn’t, for a minute, consider burdening their women. So, the doctor it is, because there’s that promise all doctors have to make, where everything a patient says is between the pair of you and the four white walls. Before they start talking they always ask, ‘You can’t tell no one what I say, sure you can’t?’ Afterwards they feel less heavy, less monstrous, but only for an hour or two. Only till the next time they catch sight of themselves reflected in a shop window and remember that they are still, despite all their confessing, the same men with the same filthy hands.

  Jonathan knows these men. He sees at least one a week. He listens to their ugly stories. They follow a kind of pattern. Guns. Bombs. Beatings. Fear. Long ‘holidays’ inside, or over on the mainland. The air in his surgery grows thicker each time one enters and, when they leave, he has a desire to wash his hands hard with surgical soap, like you would after touching something rotten.

  Sammy Agnew’s story is different. He skims over the guns, the bombs and the beatings with sticks. He isn’t here to talk about the distant past. He’s here to offload his son. To try to talk himself into a happy ending. Maybe, if Mark plays his cards right, if this is the end of the fires, and there’s no more trouble out of him, maybe, just maybe, the boy will be OK. Jonathan wants to stop him mid-sentence. He wants to say, ‘Wise up, mate. Your son’s a psychopath. He wants locking up. This story will not have a happy ending,’ but he holds his thoughts close and lets him finish. It’s important not to interrupt. They teach you that in Clinical Skills. Sammy Agnew’s story does not end so much as fade out. ‘I don’t know what to do now,’ he says, and he’s done. He sits back in his chair, hands clasped behind his neck so his elbows make wings. He takes a deep breath and slows it out. He looks exhausted.

  Jonathan doesn’t know what Sammy should do either. He knows he should. He should be lifting the phone and dialling 999 for this is nothing if not a proper emergency. As a doctor he has made promises to protect the general public from harm. Illness. Infection. Lunatic elements with bomb-making capacities. He is a responsible man. Answers are supposed to come easily to him. But since Sophie they haven’t. He can’t see past the end of his own problems. He doesn’t care as much as he should, and at other times he cares far too much. If anything, it is comforting to hear someone whose life is even more impossible than his own. He is inclined to keep Sammy Agnew’s story at the back of his mind, something to revisit every time he looks at Sophie and thinks, Things couldn’t get any worse.

  ‘You should probably go to the police,’ he says. But he doesn’t force the point. He says it like he could just as easily be saying, ‘You should probably bring a jacket for later.’ His voice is without edge or any kind of authority. He’s in no position to advocate hard and set rules. Not when he’s already considered locking his daughter into a cupboard, not when he’s planning the most efficient way to slice her up. Rules are for simple men, not for the fathers of Unfortunate Children.

  ‘You’re right,’ says Sammy Agnew. ‘I should probably go to the police.’

  ‘Sooner, rather than later.’

  ‘Give me a week, Doctor. To get everything sorted out.’

  ‘Tomorrow, Sammy. Before anyone gets hurt.’

  ‘Two days,’ says Agnew, splitting the difference, like they’re haggling over a used car.

  ‘Two days, absolute max. If you’ve not done it by then, I’ll be phoning the police myself.’

  ‘I have to be the one who makes the call. You understand that, don’t you? I’m his da.’

  Jonathan understands. It’s different for fathers. He agrees not to go to the police. He makes Sammy Agnew promise to phone him as soon as he’s made the call. He has no intention of calling the authorities himself, even if his patient never does. When he tries to im
agine Mark planting bombs and shooting people in the street it isn’t real to him. It’s a montage lifted from old action movies and television dramas. Dead people. Blood. Shattered glass and smoke rising, like dry-ice clouds. The image of it engenders no sense of urgency, no gut tug of responsibility. His sympathy has grown blunt worrying about Sophie. He can’t see any situation as sharply as his own. He isn’t fit to be a doctor right now, but no one else seems to have noticed.

  The phone on his desk flashes red and begins to ring. It’s one of the lady receptionists. The patients are backing up in the waiting room. They’re wondering how long he’s going to be. He’s already been twenty minutes with Sammy and he can’t see himself finished before lunchtime.

  ‘I have a migraine,’ he says, to the lady receptionist (Ciara? Claire? Cathy? Definitely something beginning with a C, though it could just as easily be an L).

  She sighs. ‘Another, Dr Murray? That’s three in the last two weeks. Maybe you should see a doctor.’

  She’s trying to be funny or, perhaps, cheeky. He can never tell when the lady receptionists are insulting him. He needs to take a firm line with this one. She’s far too brassy with the doctors and she doesn’t wear the uniform correctly. He uses his no-nonsense voice: the voice he keeps for telesales marketers and taxi drivers.

  ‘Tell the patients I’m taken ill and reschedule them for tomorrow, Cathy,’ he says.

  She doesn’t correct him so Jonathan assumes she’s either Cathy or too cowed by the sharp edge in his voice to admit she’s actually Claire or Ciara. He puts the phone down before she has a chance to take the conversation any further. He turns back to Sammy, apologizing for the interruption.

  ‘Your turn, Doc,’ says the older man, folding his arms and nodding ever so slightly, like you would with a hesitant child.

  Jonathan tells his story then. He keeps all the details in, but censors the part where he’s seduced by Sophie’s mother. He is not comfortable talking about sex in the first person. ‘One thing led to another and then she was pregnant,’ he says. He can’t believe how easy it is to skate across such complex truths.