Before the Fire (17 page)

‘That boy had so much stuff. You wouldn’t believe.’ Mac’s ma waved her arm around the room, shaking her head. ‘I can’t stand it,’ she said.
‘Everywhere. He’s everywhere.’ Her voice cracked as she spoke. ‘I thought—’

After the fire, two guys had come round and repainted Sophie’s room, a tiny box room next to Stick’s with a narrow window looking out over the school car park. The insurance paid for
it. Pale creamy walls. A new white carpet. But the smell of smoke was still there, under the smell of new paint. And there was the faintest of smudges in the corner above the window which no one
ever mentioned, or painted over. They got a new bed, wardrobe and bedside cabinet on the insurance too. After the men had finished, Stick and his mum and dad went upstairs and stood in the room,
which smelt of paint and carpet and plastic wrapping and smoke, and said nothing.

Weeks later Stick had wandered in, bored after school one day, and found a photo of Sophie in a large silver frame propped on the bedside table, loads of her stuff piled around it. Her toy dog,
black with smoke; her shoes; a coat button; hat; dummy; the bracelet their nan had given her when she was born. He’d stood and stared at his sister and then gone downstairs and asked his mum
what happened to people when they died, and she stared at him and shook her head and said, ‘I don’t know, love. I’m sorry, I don’t know.’

Mac’s ma stood with her arms loose by her sides, crying. ‘It’s so quiet these days,’ she said. ‘With Iain not— There’s just that dog upstairs. Barking
fit to drive you mad.’

‘Do you want a slice of cake, Mrs McKinley?’ Stick asked.

‘I need a drink,’ she said.

‘Tea? I can make tea?’

‘A proper drink.’ She looked at him, wild-eyed. ‘Would you get me one? Just a nip of vodka. It’s in the fridge.’

Stick escaped to the kitchen, put the cake on the side and poured out two large measures of vodka. As he went back into the cluttered living room, he thought of Sophie’s room and all the
things lined up on the bedside table. They weren’t there any more and he couldn’t remember when they had gone. He hadn’t asked and his mum hadn’t said anything. Maybe
she’d just decided: enough. Maybe she still had everything, in a box under her bed. Maybe it was the same with not going to the graveyard – she didn’t want to look at it any
more.

‘What would he think of me?’ Mrs McKinley held the glass up towards the window as if there might be something to see in it other than vodka. ‘Drinking in the
afternoon.’

‘He drank in the afternoon,’ Stick said, and she almost smiled – he saw it, the smallest twitch of her lips.

‘I did his room.’ She let out a little hiccup and pushed her fingertips against her lips like she’d said something wrong.

‘What do you mean, did?’ Stick moved towards the hallway. Mrs McKinley didn’t try to stop him; she just stood holding her glass, staring at nothing.

He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he heard the noise he made when he opened the door.

The room was empty.

Not just clear shelves and a bare wardrobe. It was no-shelves, no-wardrobe, no-fucking-carpet empty. A grubby square of a room. The window had been stripped of its curtains. The ceiling felt too
low and the bare lightbulb too small. The floor was hardboard, the glue which had stuck the carpet down splashed in big, dirty globs across it. It made him think of J’s place near the prison
– the floor warped with rain and underneath it all those neat blocks of wood too bloated to fit together any more.

When he went back through, she wouldn’t look at him.

‘Where’s the furniture?’ he said. ‘Mrs McKinley? The furniture?’

‘They’ll take it away,’ she said, her voice brittle.

‘Who are they?’ Stick couldn’t stop his voice from shaking.

She waved one hand as though it didn’t really matter, then looked up. ‘I did give you his shoes?’

Stick nodded, and she smiled as though everything was as it should be. The dog upstairs started barking.
Yap yap yap
, pause,
yap yap yap
, pause.

‘Is this because you’re broke?’ he said, as calmly as he could.

She frowned.

‘You’re skint and so you’re selling his stuff ?’

She shook her head.

‘I’m going to put it back. I’m putting it back, Mrs McKinley. He’s not been dead two minutes. You can’t do this.’ It was like he’d drunk three cans of
Red Bull – the energy fizzing through his body. He couldn’t stand still.

Everything had been piled into her bedroom: the wardrobe; chest of drawers; black-and-silver TV stand; the bed dismantled and propped against the wall. The carpet had been sliced into strips,
rolled up and shoved into bin bags.

He dragged the bags back into Mac’s room, pulled out the carpet and unrolled the pieces one by one. It was like a jigsaw, except that nothing quite fitted together and he ended up with
patches of wood showing and bits of carpet overlaid on top of each other.

He’d replaced the bed and the TV stand and had his arms around the wardrobe, walking it down the corridor, when he saw Mrs McKinley standing in the doorway to the living room.

‘I took the carpet up,’ she said, and rubbed her fingertips together. ‘All those spiky bits round by the skirting boards.’ The dog was still barking. ‘And the dust,
coming up when I pulled it.’ She kept on rubbing her fingers. ‘It’s heavy, carpet.’

‘I’m putting this back,’ he said, pointing at the wardrobe. ‘I’m going to put everything back.’

She shrugged, like she didn’t care either way, and wandered into the living room. Stick put everything back the way it used to be. Bed by the window, TV against the wall, wardrobe in the
corner opposite the door. He was sweating by the time he’d finished.

When he went back into the living room, Mrs McKinley was perched on the edge of the sofa, her glass and the vodka bottle on the coffee table in front of her, next to a pile of old schoolbooks
and a toy plastic giraffe. Stick took the twentypound notes out of his pocket.

‘I brought this for you.’ He held out the money and Mrs McKinley looked at it like it was still in euros, or some other currency she’d never seen before. ‘It was for the
trip,’ Stick said. ‘I thought you might— Well, I don’t need it now, do I? Go on. Take it.’

She kept shaking her head, kept saying, ‘No, no, I can’t do that. No.’ And then she started picking up things of Mac’s – stuffed toys and Xbox games and old
T-shirts, and saying, ‘You must take something. You must take whatever you want. There’s so much stuff.’ And it was Stick’s turn to say, ‘No, no, I can’t.
I’ve really got to go, Mrs McKinley.’

Before he went, Stick walked down the corridor and stood by Mac’s bedroom door. It looked nothing like Mac’s bedroom, just looked like a shit, square room with shit IKEA furniture
and a slashed-up carpet. It looked like no one lived there. Stick put the twenty-pound notes in a neat pile on the pillow and left.

Mac would think he was an idiot, leaving messages under bricks and then standing outside Thorntons at Piccadilly station like a spare part, twenty minutes early, on his own
birthday, waiting for some crazy blue-haired girl who wasn’t going to turn up. He’d shaved, even though he didn’t much need to; sprayed on half a can of deodorant.

After ten minutes he went into Thorntons and bought J one of those chocolate mice, with the peppermint insides, its face long and sleek underneath the plastic wrapping. As he came out he saw
her, at the far end of the station, and felt his stomach twist. Her hair was pink again, tied up in a ponytail, and she had a black canvas rucksack slung over her shoulder. Stick put the chocolate
mouse in his pocket and left his hand in there. He stared at the floor, at the departure boards, at the people sitting on the benches and coming up the elevators – anywhere, so she
didn’t see him waiting for her, so he didn’t look too keen.

J stopped in front of him. ‘Hi.’

He couldn’t tell if she was still pissed off with him. ‘Oh, hi.’ He tried to sound cool, like he hadn’t really been expecting her to come.

‘Blackpool,’ she said. ‘Good choice.’

Stick held back a smile. ‘I’ve got cash,’ he said. ‘Saved it up for the trip, but—’

She nodded. ‘Rock, candyfloss, doughnuts, rides.’ And then she patted at her rucksack. ‘I brought you a birthday present too. But—’ She held up one hand. ‘Not
until we’re there.’

On the train, they sat opposite each other at a table sticky with someone else’s spilt drink, J going backwards because she said she liked it – seeing where she’d already been,
not knowing what was coming up. They chugged through the city. Oxford Road. Deansgate. Castlefield. Past the Beetham Tower and the courts, then east towards Salford – stretches of scrubby
grass, bigger roads, the three tower blocks on Rochdale Road.

‘You got my—’ Stick blurted at last.

J nodded.

‘You should get a phone.’

She raised her eyebrows.

‘I felt like someone out of a play or something,’ Stick said and she smiled then, her face softening. ‘I am sorry,’ he barged on. ‘I didn’t—’

J shook her head. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Means we’re square, anyway.’

Stick took the chocolate mouse out of his pocket. It looked small and cheap. ‘I got you a mouse,’ he said and put it on the table in front of her.

J glanced up at him. ‘Thanks.’ She pulled off the wrapper and nibbled the mouse’s nose.

Stick sat and watched her eat it, bite by tiny bite, the landscape changing from streets and warehouses to fields, with hedges and sheep. He felt a lightness, like when you get the swing up high
enough to leave your stomach behind for a second. J finished the mouse, licked her fingers one by one and then stood to push the window open. The train sucked in the air and threw it across their
faces and they sat listening to the racket of the wheels against the tracks.

‘To the sea,’ J said, pulling Stick through the bright train station hall out onto the street.

She wore denim shorts with frayed bits of thread hanging down her legs. A black vest top, loose enough to keep showing her bra. Stick walked behind her, noticing how the skin met in dark creases
at the backs of her knees, listening to the seagulls screeching overhead.

Eighteen. He was eighteen. He straightened his shoulders and put a slight side-to-side in his step, his shoulders shifting left right, left right.

‘You’re a man now,’ his mum had said that morning, pushing a bacon sandwich towards him. She’d sounded like she was trying hard not to let on that she was sad.

He followed J, past a huge pub with photos of the inside on the outside. Past an electrics shop, its window crammed with toasters and kettles and lightbulbs and TVs showing men with T-shirts
wrapped round their heads, guns to their shoulders, running along a dusty road. Past banks, charity shops, a nightclub shut up for the daytime. Posters for body piercing and karaoke and cabaret
shows, half of them ripped so you had to piece together leftover bits of words to work out what they were about. Past hoardings with pictures of people in posh flats – a man in a kitchen
holding a plate of pasta; two kids sitting on a white rug. Past more charity shops and more banks, Blackpool Tower stretching up on their left. And then there, at the end of the street, was the
sea.

Stick stopped and stared. A thin stretch of beach – grey pebbles and a glimpse of yellow sand, and then nothing but water, the waves curling into long white lines, sending up flecks of
spray.

‘Smell it,’ J said, drawing in a breath through her nostrils.

‘Smells of chips.’

‘No, under that.’

Stick tried to smell it. Maybe there was something – salty, a bit grubby, like wet socks.

They went all the way to the beach and J plonked herself down on the pebbles, her bag between her knees. She pulled out a silver Thermos flask and held it towards Stick. ‘You like getting
high?’ She grinned.

‘On tea?’ Stick said, sitting next to her as she poured brown liquid into the flask’s lid and handed it to him.

‘Mushrooms,’ she said. ‘My own recipe. Happy birthday.’

Stick sniffed at the liquid. It looked like tea but smelt like sweaty feet. ‘I don’t drink tea.’

‘It’s not tea.’

‘It smells bad.’

‘So hold your nose.’

Stick looked out towards the sea and thought about his mum, sat across from him at the breakfast table, biting her fingernails. He lifted the cup to his lips and drank it in one bitter gulp,
screwed up his eyes and stuck out his tongue.

J laughed, took the cup back and poured herself some. ‘Here’s to the sea,’ she said, drank it in one and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. ‘Let’s get
doughnuts before we start feeling it.’

‘How long does it take?’

J shrugged. ‘Twenty minutes? Come on.’

Stick bought them doughnuts from a kiosk, and they went down the pier to eat them. J perched on the back of a long metal bench, her feet on the mouldy-looking wooden seat. She didn’t look
safe and Stick wanted, for a moment, to take her arm and hold her steady.

She ate her doughnut the same way she ate the chocolate mouse. Stick sat next to her and swallowed his in two mouthfuls. Now he could smell it – the salty, dark-green edge of the sea.

‘Every time we came to Blackpool I’d buy loads of rock and take it home in a big plastic bag and then eat it in like two days. Except I’d always keep one bit. One for each
birthday. I’ve still got them,’ J said. A seagull landed on the ground by their feet and eyed them. She aimed a kick at it but it didn’t even flinch. ‘They’re all
faded and sticky. Can’t throw them away though.’ J chucked the end of her doughnut to the seagull, who snatched it up like she might change her mind and take it back. ‘I’m
like my dad,’ she said. ‘Except not as bad.’

‘He saves sweets?’

‘He saves everything. He doesn’t just save everything, he spends his life buying shit we don’t need. Seriously, our house is so full of crap you can’t move. Mum says
it’s because he grew up with nothing, but I reckon he’s just mental.’

Stick looked out across the water to another pier, with a Ferris wheel and funfair rides perched at the sea end.