by Jan Carson
What nonsense. What utter shite it all seems to Sammy today.
Tomorrow he won’t have a car. He won’t have money or beer or any woman touching him with lust or even fondness. He won’t have anything but dry memories and, if he’s lucky, the occasional phone call. This should give him some clarity, should sharpen the edge of his thinking. He’s not after a moment of epiphany or anything. He’d just like to think that, faced with losing everything, he might have some idea of what’s actually important. He’s definitely not doing this for love. And it’s not guilt propelling him, or even hope. It’s some odd notion of duty. I must do this, he thinks. I must try to put things right. This, then, he decides, as he waits for his sweet and sour chicken to cook, is the most important thing. He calls it making amends. It could just as easily be called absolution, but that sounds a bit too papal for Sammy Agnew.
‘There you go, Sammy-boy,’ says Mr Chang, depositing two carrier bags full of individually boxed meals on the counter.
‘Cheers,’ says Sammy. ‘You look after yourself, Mr Chang.’ He presses an extra twenty into the man’s hand, just in case this is a never-again scenario. He hopes he hasn’t embarrassed him or lorded it over him in some sort of racist way. Jesus, he thinks, as he reaches for his food, your man’ll be thinking I’m dying or something, giving him a twenty-quid tip, and it not even Christmas.
He lifts the bags from the counter without looking at Mr Chang directly. They are slippy with hot-food sweat, the prawn crackers already ghosting inside their translucent plastic sack. He balances the bags, one in each hand. They lump awkwardly against his legs so he has to swagger like an old-fashioned gunslinger. Mr Chang laughs, just a little, not unkindly. Sammy keeps his eyes on the floor, on his sandals, on the pale inch of skin cuffing between his socks and tracksuit bottoms. He is just a hair’s breadth from tears, the first dull throb of them already gathering at the base of his nose. He tips his forehead towards the counter, mumbles something that could be ‘Night’ or ‘Thanks for everything’ or ‘Maybe I’ll never see you again’ and backs out the door into the rain.
‘Enjoy!’ shouts Mr Chang, as the door settles behind Sammy.
Sammy knows he isn’t going to enjoy a single mouthful of his food but he’ll drive it all the way home. He sets it on the floor of the passenger side and adjusts the air-conditioning so it is blasting hot, hot heat directly at his ankles. He learnt this trick from Pamela, who learnt it from a girl in college. Perhaps she got it from an older brother or cousin. Nothing is actually learnt in this place, only inherited. He does the hot air on all his takeaways now: everything except pizzas, which are too big to fit on the floor. It is the sort of habit that doesn’t break even in a crisis. After a mile or so his wet socks start steaming. Then his feet grow uncomfortably warm. By the time he reaches the ring road his toes have begun to roast, curling instinctively away from the heat. This, too, he bears, although it would be easy enough to adjust the air-conditioning. It is like a little needle poking away at the wrong in him. Never letting him be. There is more of this to come.
At the end of his street the steering wheel tries to turn against him. His head says home but his arms are drawn south: to Lisburn, to Dublin, then the ocean, which could easily swallow him whole. His hands, gripping the wheel, are all knuckles, white-capped with the pressure. His eyes itch. His throat is dry. No part of him wishes to go home. Sammy’s body is bracing itself for something painful, something like a punch. He can already feel the stiffness of it running up his spine and across his shoulders. If he raises a hand to his neck he can touch it. It is tight and coiled like muscle that has lumped into bone. The thought of stepping through his own front door makes him feel sick, but he goes home anyway. His head wins. His head is thumping with guilt, with the migraine-sharp need to make amends. It’s a kind of magnet drawing him off the ring road, up the hill and home to certain ruin.
Mark isn’t in tonight. Thursday is the only evening he leaves the house. Sammy has no idea where he goes. Pamela has even less notion. Every Thursday, for the last two years, the boy’s come thundering down the stairs at six fifteen and left the house without so much as a ‘See you later’ for his parents sitting, like a pair of stuffed pigeons, on the living-room sofa.
‘Where’s Mark off to?’ Pamela used to ask, as if Sammy might actually know, might be party to the odd chit-chat with his son on the landing.
‘Pilates,’ he used to say. ‘Book group. Prayer meeting. Weight Watchers,’ and they’d laugh at the idea of Mark doing normal things with normal people in a community centre or church hall.
‘Zumba,’ Pamela had once suggested, making Sammy choke on the image of their spade-faced son shaking his booty to a Latin beat. Lukewarm tea had come chortling down his nose, spraying the TV magazines piled on the coffee-table. They’d laughed all the way through the weather forecast and into the ads. Now Sammy doesn’t make jokes and Pamela doesn’t ask where their son is off to. They barely lift their eyes from the television screen to acknowledge the door closing behind him. Terrorist cell. Brothel. Drug den, Sammy thinks, every time Mark leaves the house. He wonders if Pamela is having similar thoughts. Or worse.
Of course they could try to stop him. They could stand in the doorway, blocking the boy’s exit route, to ask and continue asking until Mark gives them some sort of answer. They never do. The truth is, the whole house feels lighter without him. Sometimes they even chance conversation on a Thursday night. Nothing too heavy: news and weather, funny things they’ve seen on the internet. Memories. There’s more room for them when Mark isn’t in the house. Sammy is glad he can count on Thursday evenings. None of his plan would be possible with the boy holed up in the attic, listening.
Pamela isn’t at home either. Sammy’s made sure of it. He’s given her his credit card and permission to take the girls out for the night. Drinks. Dinner. More drinks in a different place. ‘No special reason, love,’ he said, pre-empting her suspicion. ‘You just deserve a wee treat.’ Pamela hasn’t believed him. He isn’t the sort of man who does ‘no special reason’. He can barely remember to pick up a card on their anniversary and sometimes mixes her birthday up with the children’s. He knows she hasn’t believed him. There is a particular way her mouth twitches when she’s suspicious. He felt the flicker of it, like a moth pressed against his cheek, as she kissed him on the doorstep. Does she think I’m bringing another woman round here tonight? he wonders. Does she think I’m trying to get rid of her? And the answer to this is, maybe she does, which makes Sammy feel dreadful. He wishes he knew how to make things right with Pamela, how to draw a line and start again.
Sammy turns the car into his own street. He’s done this a hundred thousand times before but maybe never again. It’s a cul-de-sac with all the little houses spun out around an island of carefully mown lawn. When they were younger all three of his children learnt to ride their bikes on this particular patch of grass. Removing the stabilizer wheels he’d watched each of them wobble and sometimes topple over, safe in the knowledge that grass was much more forgiving than the tarmac roads they’d soon be speeding along. Only Mark had not required his assistance, had kicked out at him with trainered feet when he offered a steadying hand. Only Mark had flown on the first attempt, never faltering, never looking back as he sped from the grass to the road and the other streets beyond.
The rain’s let up for a bit and the neighbours are out on the grass getting the good of it: Tom, who lives three doors down, and his oldest lad, Caleb. Sammy knows them from coming in and out of the house and sometimes keeping their post when they’re not at home. The boy is a tall lick of a kid, seven or possibly eight years old. He is California blond to his father’s grey-greased crop. Sammy can see how handsome Caleb will be once he’s grown into himself. For now, he carries his arms awkwardly, like he’s holding them for a much older boy. He is sometimes shy and at other times driven by that peculiar friendliness found in much-loved children.
The pair of them are playing cricket in matching Liverp
ool shirts: the boy’s kit is bang on season, the older man’s a throwback from his student days, sponsor’s logo faded from one too many runs through the washing-machine. They’re using a proper cricket bat, but the ball is a tennis ball and the stumps an upturned mop bucket. They are laughing like they don’t know how lucky they are, how normal, how easy, how everything Sammy has never been with Mark.
He stares at them through the windscreen. He can imagine the boy twenty years from now, married or not married, maybe even bringing his own son home for show-and-tell. He will leave home and do things and come back occasionally, just to visit. His father will always be glad to see him. He can see all this in the way the boy is looking at his father, all eyes and pitched ears, like the older man is something worth learning. Mark has never once looked at Sammy like that. Not even when he gave the child expensive toys.
He slows the car almost to a stop. He’s in two minds. He hates his neighbours. He hates their bold joy and their matching shirts, their bloody upturned mop bucket. The future belongs to people like them, people who already have their hands all over it. His foot hovers over the accelerator pedal. He could easily mount the pavement and run them over. Rush. Crush. Crunch. It wouldn’t take much effort to destroy them. Only a slight tipping of the ankle. This is how it must be for God every day, he thinks. Every act an act of restraint. Afterwards they wouldn’t be laughing. They wouldn’t be easy with each other again. It would be a relief of sorts not to have their happiness thrust upon him every time he backs his car out of the drive.
Tom sees him and raises a hand to wave. His own hand is too heavy to return the gesture. It is only good for fists and hitting now. Up comes the old blood, hot and jealous. Up comes the rage. There is a particular way it tastes at the back of his mouth, like last night’s wine in a morning throat. Up comes the need to break things crisply, to ruin. Stop, says he to himself, to his hands at the wheel, and his feet on the pedal, to all the thinking bits between. Stop, says he, because in that moment he understands his own son and the feel of this is vile. He turns the wheel away from them, skirts the edge of the grass and pulls up the car outside his own house.
‘Hey!’ he shouts across the cul-de-sac. ‘Hey, Tom! Hey, Caleb!’ He even raises a hand to wave.
‘Hi!’ they shout back, and Sammy feels a certain kind of tenderness towards them. He knows how breakable they are.
He carries his dinner into the kitchen and places it, still steaming, in the fridge. He knows he’s not going to eat any of it tonight. The nausea is like a solid wall sitting at the bottom of his throat. He chances a couple of prawn crackers and they come sliding back up on a tide of sick. He shoves them into the bin, gagging at the fried ocean smell as it slicks across his fingers. Tomorrow, after he’s gone, Pamela will find his dinner in the fridge. Maybe she’ll reheat a portion of the chow mein and wonder why he never touched any of it. She might even see the provision of food as a small act of kindness on his part. Sammy likes to think of himself looking out for her, even after he’s gone. He opens the Coke, lets the fizz of it sizzle out, and takes a swig straight from the bottle. The sugar goes screaming to his head. He pops two headache tablets and downs them with a second swig of Coke. He needs to have a clear head. He needs to be sharp. There is so much to do before Mark gets back.
Up the stairs he goes, past his own room, its door lolling open to reveal this morning’s bed, yet to be made, the laundry avalanching out of its hamper and the cat curled up, like a tiny Buddha, atop a mountain of mismatched pyjamas and damp towels. He pulls the door to. He can’t bear the ordinariness of it: the cat hair, the smell of Pamela’s good shampoo wafting out of the en-suite, last night’s paperback splayed open and rising, like a tiny tent, from his bedside table.
He stops in the main bathroom to lift bin liners and Marigolds from the cleaning cupboard. He’s watched enough CSI repeats to know about fingerprints and DNA, not leaving any damp trace of himself at the crime scene. As he eases his hands into the yellow rubber gloves he tries to think of his own house as a crime scene, to imagine how it will look tomorrow morning with police tape running round the drive. The neighbours staring from a distance. He can’t. His head keeps catching on the stillness. There isn’t a noise in the house tonight. He pauses for a moment on the landing, allows the breath to stick and swell inside his lungs. Now there is no movement at all, not so much as a dry shudder in the entire house. Without Mark, there’s no urgency to the place. No pressure.
Sammy keeps climbing, up the back stairs, to the extension where Mark lives. There is a creak on the third and sixth step. He already knows this. Sometimes the sound of ancient floorboards groaning is the only way they know the boy is still alive up there. Mark’s bedroom door is closed tightly and, for a moment, Sammy wonders if it might be locked. He hasn’t a plan for this. Perhaps he could do something with a hairgrip or a credit card, like they do in the movies. This isn’t necessary. The handle turns freely. The door opens and here he is, standing in the middle of his son’s bedroom. It’s hard to breathe. There’s not enough air up here.
Everything is white: the walls, the carpet, the cheap IKEA wardrobe and matching drawers, the sheets on the bed, drawn into neat right angles at every corner, as if freshly made by a hotel chambermaid, the single desk lamp, bowing its tulipy head over the white desk and chair. Sammy has not expected so much whiteness. He looks at his arms, with their yolk-yellow gloves bursting from either end, and his filthy sandals, and he feels awkward in this white, white space. Exposed. Like a coloured creature in the snow.
He begins opening drawers. It isn’t difficult to find the things he’s looking for: in the wardrobe, carefully hung next to shirts and sweaters, the hoodie from the videos. A plastic mask in the bottom drawer of the desk. Cardboard signs underneath the bed, laid flat beneath a duffel bag, which contains a video camera and tripod. Markers, standing upright in a jam jar, like a huddle of helmeted soldiers awaiting orders. And Mark’s laptop, which is sitting right in the middle of his desk, its edges squared against the desk’s edges. Two biros are laid neatly on either side of the keyboard, like cutlery cupping the rim of a plate. Sammy throws everything into a bin liner. He doesn’t care if things break or bleed into each other. Everything’s for the fire anyway.
He begins riffling through drawers and cupboards. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for: diaries, letters, bomb-making equipment, anything that might hang over Mark when the police arrive. He finds nothing of real interest but tosses every third or fourth item into his bin liner anyway. Just so he feels like he’s achieving something. There’s no sign of anything that could be a bomb. But, then again, bombs don’t look like they used to look in Sammy’s day. Clocks. Pipes. Bottles. Nails. Petrol. Actual flames. Nowadays bombs are more like computers. He throws Mark’s alarm clock into the bag, fires in his phone charger and computer plug after it. Best to be on the safe side, he thinks. He feels like a blind man, groping around for the way out.
Once finished, he closes the wardrobe door, slides all the drawers shut and smooths the creases from Mark’s bedspread. The room looks untouched. He stands for a final moment in the middle of the floor, surveying the space for left-behind things, like he always does before leaving a holiday rental. After he leaves this room he won’t be back. It will be the end of one time and the beginning of another. He tries to summon up the ghost of his rage, but it’s gone. His fists refuse to curl. His blood has no heat left in it. Up comes nothing but the need to cry. He pulls the door behind him, drags his bin liner all the way down the stairs and into the backyard.
It’s more difficult than he thought to get a fire going. Everything is sodden after a month’s worth of rain and the electronics refuse to catch. He piles all Mark’s stuff into the barbecue and douses it with lighter fuel. The papers burn off quickly, the fabric and plastics melt and re-form under the heat, but the laptop refuses to burn. It just sits there, singeing around the edges, emitting an acrid grey smoke, which catches at the back of Sammy’s throat, like breathe
d-in hairspray. He pulls the collar of his sweater up over his mouth and, breathing through a woolly filter, goes back in with a canister of petrol.
All of a sudden the barbecue is engulfed in an explosion of hot red flames. The heat causes him to step back, catching his heel on the edge of a planter so he is, for a moment, shocked back into his own skin by the sting of concrete on raw flesh. He sits down on the back doorstep, cradling his heel in his hand until it stops throbbing. The blood has soaked through his sock and on to his fingers. Absent-mindedly he raises his hand to his mouth and sucks the blood off before it has a chance to crust. It tastes like salt and money. Something he shouldn’t be putting in his mouth.
At five to ten he rises and calls the police from the hall phone. Mark will be back any second. He’s never out later than ten on a Thursday. Sammy has to time his phone call just right. Too early and the police will have him away before he gets a chance to speak to the boy. Too late, and Mark will try to stop him. It’s almost dark outside and the fire is down to its last embers, the glow of it a brief orange smudge reflected in the greenhouse windows. As he dials the numbers Sammy can see through the hall to the kitchen, where the sky is like a pint settling in black and golden layers above the garden fence.
It’ll be a nice day tomorrow, he thinks, knowing the weather will have little relevance to him now.
‘Police,’ he says, when the lady asks which emergency service he’s after. Then he gives his address and phone number.
‘I’d like to hand myself in,’ he says, all the time wondering why he doesn’t sound like himself, why he’s fallen into a filmy way of speaking. ‘I’m the man who done those videos, the Fire Starter ones. I want to turn myself in.’
They tell him to stay where he is.
He tries to make a joke of it, says, ‘Sure, I’ll just put the kettle on and wait till you get here.’
