‘Cairo?’ he says towards the half-propped-up fence. He’d meant to get Cairo to pour some concrete into that fence post, was fed up of waiting for the council to come and tidy things up, and you’d think that Cairo might think of that for himself, but he still seemed sometimes lost in a dream. ‘Cairo?’ And he says Cairo again and shivers even though it is warm now, out of the breeze, the sun shines and the clouds are high in the sky.
‘No sign of him?’ Joan says, when he comes back through the door.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ll check upstairs.’
‘I doh think he’s upstairs. Must have gone out again. Cor her phone his mobile?’
‘Iss bost, I think,’ he says, through the room, the phone already half to his ear, and he can hear Stacey-Ann saying something to the babby.
‘That boy,’ Joan says. ‘I never did know what was going on with him.’
‘Yer’ll have to write down a message for him, Grandad.’
‘Hang on a sec, chick. I’ll get a pen out of the drawer.’
He should write it down. He remembers he should have told Cairo that Jamie Iqbal had phoned. It was about him fighting again. That idea was best forgotten.
‘Or just remember it. Tell him Grace wants to speak to him, iss important. I’ll phone yer back later.’
‘Grace?’
‘Grace.’
‘Who’s Grace?’
‘It doh matter, Grandad.’
‘That nice girl who’s doing the film?’ he says.
‘That one, yeah. Just remember to tell him when he comes in. And tell him I’m sorry.’
‘All right, love. Doh worry, I’ll remember. I’ll tell him.’ He can hear the baby crying for a moment before the line goes dead. Always a drama, always a fuss about not much at all, as if the world was not hard enough.
Cairo drives along the side of the stalls, with the stallholders watching him, some of them packing up now, and a couple of vans parked at angles to load up, and this is probably why no one stops him. A bloke carrying a rail of white underclothes waves at him, points at the car and back down the High Street, says something that Cairo doesn’t catch, and no one else tries to stop him. He has his head low over the wheel looking for any sign of them, sees the lad with the camera strutting about near the entrance to the precinct, considers putting his foot down and driving right into him, of doing things that way, then pulls up, the car aslant to the last of the stalls, jumps out and doesn’t even shut the door, leaves the keys in the ignition, moves quickly to open the boot.
‘What yer doing? Yer cor park there, mate,’ a woman shouts from her mobility scooter, and he keeps his head down, pulls at the tarpaulin, the can of petrol, wonders if that is enough.
Tony is cleaning the grooves of his golf clubs and the cleats of his shoes with a tee and an old rag, sitting out on the patio.
‘Am yer stopping in for a bit?’ she asks him, and she realizes she no longer says dad or Tony, wonders how this will work in the future.
‘I am love, yeah. Friday afternoon,’ he says, shrugs his shoulders. ‘Work’s a bit slow, if I’m honest.’
‘I wondered if yer could have Zach for half an hour? I’ve got to pop out, urgent, up Dudley, like.’
‘You all right, love? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘No, I’m all right. I’m all right.’
Stacey-Ann waves him away, runs her hand across the top of the barbecue, moves back towards the patio doors.
‘I’ve changed him. His bottle’s on the side there if he starts to cry. I wouldn’t normally, you know, but summat’s come up.’
‘It’s OK, love. I’ll do it, no problem.’
Zach lies on his mat, laughing at the animal shapes on the mobile she unscrewed from his cot before she left.
‘Is it Duane?’ he asks.
She is struck by how he says this. No one else uses his name, this absent boy, man, father.
‘No,’ she says, ‘it’s me dad.’
She pulls on her sandals, pulls the strap so hard that it breaks, tries not to show it.
‘Oh, Stace,’ Tony says. ‘You watch what yome doing. It’s nice to have you back,’ he adds, to the percussive slap-slap of her sandals across the tiled floor. ‘He looked all right this morning,’ he then says, about no one in particular – Cairo, Duane, both of them, he supposes.
Cairo has the kindling gathered in the tarpaulin and shuffles with it away from the car towards the fountain. There are people looking at him now, and surely people he might recognize, who might recognize him and shout, ‘All right, Cairo?’ Which could snap him out of it, or to which he might reply, ‘No, not really. What’s it look like to you?’ or more likely just say, ‘All right, mate,’ put his thumb up even, and then go home.
But he doesn’t see people he knows, only people he doesn’t know shuffle past, veering out of his way, he can see them, apart from a couple of kids in tracksuits standing around a solitary floored bike and smoking a ragged spliff, who nod at him as he goes past like he is some lost pilgrim deserving of a kind of awe. He recognizes one of the boys as the kid from Lupin Road.
They watch Cairo as he continues past the market stalls, lays the tarpaulin on the floor, kneels.
Cairo imagines someone will stop him now, by the fountain, when he drops to his knees, tips the can so that the petrol splashes on the wood and firelighters scattered around him, gives it all a good dousing. There are a couple of men wearing high-visibility coats somewhere off down the line of stalls, security guards, he can see. He imagines them strolling across, the crackle of a walkie-talkie, the nervous glance and decision about whether to approach him. But nothing. A pigeon comes to have a peck at a firelighter and he waves his hand out towards it and it hops a few feet away, not perturbed enough to fly.
He kneels on the wood and the smell of petrol hits him. Something moves in him now, some fear. Someone will stop him. But they want a show. Grace. The sun feels warm, accentuates the smell of the petrol. It has turned into a pleasant day. There is a small crowd gathered near the top of the arcade. It is not for him. He can see the man with the camera, he cannot see Grace.
He lays the rags around him that had been gathered by the petrol can, wasting time. Someone will stop him, save him from himself. He splashes the petrol all around. The pigeon pecks at a splash. He thinks of St Kenelm, the story of the dove that flew from his wound and off to Rome, and wonders where this pigeon might fly, its wings ablaze, what message it might carry, other than that of a burning body. He pours the petrol carefully into the well of his hand, like a lotion, he cups it to his face and fights the sting of it, rubs it through his hair and massages it up his arms, tips the last of it into his lap. Ablutions, they are called, these motions, cleansing. The mosque will be full, Friday afternoon. He thinks of the ritual of the corner, how his dad would hold the bottle to his lips, tighten the laces in his gloves, wipe his Vaselined thumbs under Cairo’s eyes. He never cut, barely ever, and if he did the blood would come slow and they could stem it and hide it. Cuts were never a problem. Getting hit was never a problem. They voted to relight the fires. He will be the furnace and the flames.
Franco is filming down the row of shops. Grace sees Cairo at the end of the market stalls. She holds her phone in her hand like a charm. The girl had said she’d come straight here, to wait here. Cairo pulls old shirts from a bag, looks for a moment like a magician performing that trick where the material goes on for ever. Except he has stopped with the material now and has a can in his hands, pours something from it, people moving towards him. And she walks towards him too, and now she runs, because she can see what he is going to do, it is registering in her all the time she moves towards him. She knows what he is going to do, but at the same time cannot know, and his hand shakes, she can see that.
He sits cross-legged among his rags. He fumbles in his pocket for the lighter, puts his lips to the can, feels the sear of the petrol on his face. He hears a voice. Things speed up. The men in the high-vis coats move towards
him. There is a woman holding a phone in the air, pointing it towards him. The man filming still has his back turned. The show is here, you wanted a show and here it is. His hands shake as he fumbles with the lighter, and he wonders if it has run out of gas, and he expects to feel hands upon him, because there are people now, moving towards him, and he can hear someone shouting.
‘No,’ he hears, but it feels very far away, because he is scrabbling with his thumb, clicking the lighter in front of him and he cannot get the flame to catch and then it does and for a moment there is a small blue flame and nothing happens, and then there is a sudden rush of fire and he is alight.
‘Cairo,’ he hears, ‘Cairo,’ and he sees her appear through the people moving in front of him, some coming forward, some running away, in a way they always seemed to when he was on the ropes in the ring and you could make out the faces in the front few rows – shouting or laughing or gleeful or scared – and it was like you were somewhere else altogether, miles away. And for a second it doesn’t feel like anything, though he can see his hands and arms on fire in front of him, and then he is inside it all, a man on fire. And she is there, for a moment, Grace, and then she is gone.
Someone holds his hand. It is her, Grace, here in the darkness. He can hear voices, quiet, a murmur, and the sound of machines, rhythmic and slow, as if on an aeroplane. And perhaps that is it, they are flying. And she squeezes his hand, says everything is all right, and here they go, and they are flying, he feels them veer away so the earth is there before them and it is a field of lights.
Someone holds her hand. It is him. She feels they are somewhere deep underground. He spoke of caverns, she remembers, of halls so big they sailed barges into them, choirs sang. She can hear voices that swell in this cave far below the surface, an underground babel. She does not know what the voices say and listens hard but cannot make out the words, mournful and joyful, not one word, only the sound of them as shadows flicker on the walls. There is a sudden well of light and the patterns of bones of creatures dead for millions of years. They move through the tunnels and the dark.
From the marketplace comes the glow of candles. Police tape cordons off small fields of darkness. People stand with lit phones, not quite sure what to do. Crowds gather. There are flowers and flags of different territories laid on this first night. Smoke rises from the candles. Hunched figures stand and guard the darkness. People are told gently to go home, ignore the request, and no one is quite sure what to do. The numbers build, the flowers, the candles, the cards, the flags, the people. To be here, just to be here, is what people answer when asked why they are here at all.
THANK YOU
The publisher and the author would like to thank everyone who responded to the Kickstarter funding call for this project. Without your generous support this book would not have been possible.
The author would also like to thank the following people:
Many thanks to Meike Ziervogel, James Tookey and everyone involved with Peirene Press in making this book and the Peirene Now! series happen. To Jacob Polley, for suggesting this collaboration. Thanks also to Hannah Westland and Nick Sheerin at Serpent’s Tail, and Sam Copeland at Rogers, Coleridge and White. The character of Cairo Jukes developed in part after separate conversations with Isabella Ferretti, Rob Williams and Phil O’Brien: my gratitude to you. And thank you, as always, to my family for their ongoing support.
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About the Author
Born in Dudley in 1973, Anthony Cartwright is the author of four previous novels, published by Serpent’s Tail, most recently Iron Towns (2016), which was praised in both the Guardian (‘Cartwright achieves something bold in Iron Towns: a fictional enactment of communal identity and shared culture… expert, restrained and skilful’) and the Daily Mail (A gritty, moving elegy for an abandoned, once-thriving section of society’). His novels have been shortlisted for various literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, and Heartland was adapted for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. Anthony has also published a collaborative novel with Gian Luca Favetto, Il giorno perduto (The Lost Day), released in Italy in 2015. He lives in London with his wife and son.
Copyright
First published in 2017 by Peirene Press
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Copyright © Anthony Cartwright, 2017
The right of Anthony Cartwright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-908670-41-0
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