At the top of the Castlereagh Road Sammy Agnew does not know himself for sheer, dodged-the-bullet relief. The Summer of the Tall Fires is over. It won’t stretch to ruin another season. It will not claim a single life. For this, he is particularly thankful, and for his son, who has failed, and in failing left himself open to other, more innocent, summers to come. The boy might yet be turned. He’s not killed anyone, not directly – at least, there’s been nothing mentioned in the papers. This is more than Sammy can say for himself.
He allows his imagination to run loose over his son’s future. Gracious he is with the boy, picturing him at thirty or thirty-five, a different man with a desk job and a solid name around town. Somebody you could count on/lean on/bet your bottom dollar on; all the clichés flying now. Mark will be something big in computers. Sammy’s too ignorant for specifics, but definitely something big with an office of his own. Maybe he’ll even have children and a wife, a nice house with a garden in Holywood or Bangor. He won’t have a criminal record, oh, no, for certain sure, not so much as a speeding point on the boy’s licence. He tells himself that Mark will turn out fine. This isn’t the world’s biggest leap. Sure, aren’t there always reformed characters telling their stories on breakfast TV, lads who’ve done much worse things than Mark?
Sometimes they hear the boy creaking around upstairs and Pamela will ask with her eyes, ‘What’s ever going to come of our Mark?’
Sammy tells his wife exactly the same thing he tells himself: ‘Wait till you see, love. The lad’ll turn out grand. It’s just a wee phase he’s going through.’ He curls his fists into hammers when he says this, as if hope is something that can be grabbed and held on to. He actually believes himself. There are nail marks pinked into the palms of his hands, proving just how hard he believes. All Mark’s violence will turn out to be a passing phase, like online gaming, or that summer he ran with the Goth kids, shoplifting and loitering outside City Hall.
If Sammy manages to avoid the actual Mark it is easy enough to imagine his son with a decent future. He can even picture them doing Christmas together, some time soon, like a family in a sitcom. Christopher and Lauren will come home; Pamela will have shifted a bit of weight and be happy again. They’ll all be laughing, laughing, laughing and playing board games round the dining-room table. They’ll watch Christmas movies together: Home Alone and Mary Poppins, Die Hard for the boys. They’ll eat Quality Street straight from the tin and wee nibbly things from Marks & Spencer, heated up in the microwave. They’ll take photos like a normal family.
What crap. What utter self-indulgence. Five seconds in Mark’s company, even a glimpse of him glooming along the upstairs landing, is enough to remind Sammy that the boy’s just the same as he’s always been. ‘Troubled,’ his teacher once called him, but troubled is much too passive a sentiment for Mark. Mark is trouble.
For the moment, Sammy shoves his son to the back of his thoughts. He needs to rest his nerves. He does his best to avoid the boy around the house. It isn’t hard. Mark keeps ghost hours. Every so often he’ll hear the floorboards creak and remember that his son is still up there, plotting. He can feel him, like a kind of weariness, seeping through the ceiling. But there’s nothing to show for Mark’s schemes now, not so much as a newspaper cutting. The Tall Fires are over. The air inside the house is thinner and better for breathing. When Sammy sleeps, he sleeps with both ears closed, confident that the PSNI aren’t about to come stampeding through his house with guns. He sits in his living room, coffee mug in hand, and watches the rain slugging down the windows. He feels like a cancer patient in remission. He can’t stop watching the rain. It is the answer to a prayer he hadn’t even thought to pray. Of course, there’s still a mean itch lingering behind all this contentment, but Sammy chooses to ignore it. It’s good to sleep his nerves. They are thin as piano wire, these days. There is always a headache just starting on him, always a tightness in his chest.
He keeps his days light and his evenings ever so slightly inebriated: three beers to chase dinner and a whiskey before bed. He likes the feeling of a slurred tongue. He talks to Pamela about the box sets they’re watching, what to order from the Chinese, whether they can afford a new kitchen this year or next. They only do the surface chat, nothing like a siren going off. It’s important to keep the conversation going, though; doesn’t much matter what they’re saying, so long as they’re talking. Talking’s like a muscle. If you don’t keep at it, eventually it’ll seize up. They can’t run the risk of this. Sammy only has Pamela and Pamela only has Sammy and neither could manage on their own.
They are kinder than they’ve been in ages. They tiptoe round each other’s nerves, fixing endless cups of tea and saying, ‘Are you warm enough, love? Should I fire the heating on for an hour?’ You’d think there’d been a death in the house, they’re that gentle with each other. It’s not like they’ve fallen in love again, nothing so bold, it’s more like they’re remembering how to be together, every day, in the same place. It takes a crisis to remind you of what you’ve got, thinks Sammy, and never once considers telling Pamela just how close they’ve come to losing everything. He keeps things nice and quiet, normal, relying on the television to fill in all the awkward gaps. He turns up the volume when Mark starts to move around upstairs. He does this to protect Pamela. He knows they’re just pretending. He knows this well enough for both of them. Best to keep their heads in the sand. Best to avoid a scene. He doesn’t have the balls to go upstairs again. Secretly he hopes that Mark will never come down.
It is almost September now and still raining. Sammy is off into the city centre for a new pair of slippers. Other men’s wives buy their clothes for them but Pamela’s never been that kind of wife. He’s glad of this. He’s not the sort who’d take easily to being hen-pecked. The soles of his slippers are gaping at the toe, making mouths every time he walks, but she hasn’t even noticed. He’s buying his own slippers as he has bought his own jeans and jumpers and button-up pyjamas for the last thirty years or so.
It’s Saturday and hell to find a parking spot so he’s taking the bus. On he gets at the top of the Castlereagh Road. He’s still several years shy of a bus pass so it costs him the better part of two quid to travel the four miles into town. ‘It’d be cheaper flying,’ he mutters at the driver and, just to spite him, the cheeky bastard starts off at a clip before he’s managed to sit down. Down he drops, stumbling like a Friday-night drunk, into the first available seat. Two young lads are sitting behind him. He notes their pale faces, smells the second-day sweat crawling off them. They are wearing beanie hats, like builders once wore in the seventies, or fellas from the shipyards. They are every second word cursing, all harsh consonants and phlegm. Click and cluck and gutter spit, like a pair of angry chickens. The sound of it catches at Sammy’s ear so he cannot help but listen.
Aside from the three of them, and an old one with a zimmer frame, the bus is empty. If he turns his head sideways Sammy can see the two lads reflected in the opposite window. They are watching something on a mobile phone, holding it away from their chests so both can watch at the same time. Sammy has the most basic phone. It does calls and texts. It costs him a tenner a month and half the time is out of battery. This young fella has the same iPhone Sammy bought Christopher for Christmas last year. The price of it had almost killed him. ‘You could have a car for that,’ he’d moaned to Pamela, but handed over his credit card anyway. He can’t afford to ruin things with Christopher too. He only has the one decent son left.
The bus passes a pizza place and, for a moment, captures all three of them in the plate-glass window: Sammy, in his summer anorak, the two tracksuit lads behind, heads inclined towards each other as they hunch over the phone. They have big, chunky bastards of watches on, gold straps flaring against the glass, and smaller devices for music hanging on wires from their ears. They spend most of their lives plugged in. Life support, thinks Sammy. He wonders where the young ones get the money for all their toys. Probably drugs.
‘Have you seen this one yet?’ the lad directly behind him is asking. The other lad hasn’t.
‘It’s your man that done the Fire Starter videos,’ says the first lad. ‘He put a new one up last night.’
Sammy is suddenly electric. The shock runs up the back of his neck and shoulders. He is struck glass. His stomach swims. His head clenches. He feels as if he might be sick and has nowhere to put it, not even a carrier bag. He wants to turn and whip the phone away from the boys. He doesn’t. He can’t. Instead he looks straight ahead, focusing on the bus’s windscreen, the wipers waving, the back of the driver’s baldy head. He holds himself like a telegraph pole, stiff and straight and thickly present. He must not turn round. It wouldn’t do to draw attention to himself, to seem more than averagely interested.
He isn’t afraid of the young lads. He could have both of them on the floor, even now with his gammy knee and the old-man gut ballooning round his middle. No, he isn’t particularly afraid of anyone. He is only afraid of the angry knot lodged behind his ribcage and the way it is already clawing up his throat. He knows there will be no end to it, once started. He clamps his teeth. He fists his hands. He wants to ruin everything: these two lads with their mobile phones, Mark, himself, the whole bloody city. There’s no sense in him, only rage. He holds it tightly down. He has taught himself how to do this with breathing and certain key muscles, mostly his head. He sits perfectly still and listens. He listens like he is nothing but ears.
‘What’s he saying now?’ asks the second one. ‘Sure, the Tall Fires is all over since the rain started.’
‘Not according to your man, here. He says it’s only getting started. Look, till you see for yourself.’
In the window sideways, Sammy can see the second lad in profile. He can’t be more than fifteen. His voice is still girlish on the vowels.
‘Give us a look,’ he says. He takes his mate’s phone in his own hand and holds it up to his face, plugs the earphones into his own ears so Sammy can’t hear what’s being said. He has to imagine the threatening thump of the Prodigy bookending either side of the clip and the papered flinch of cardboard signs passing through his son’s hand, like Bob Dylan feeding lyrics to the camera. He has to imagine it all. It isn’t difficult. He dreams about those videos.
The lad watches the video all the way through. It takes less than a minute. It feels like a month to Sammy but the bus is still idling at the same red light when he yanks the headphones out of his ears and passes the phone back to his friend.
‘Deadly,’ he says.
‘I know,’ replies the second. ‘That lad’s a psycho, isn’t he?’
‘Complete mentalist.’
‘Some balls on him having another punt at the whole thing. You’d think he’d have given up by now.’
‘Naw, my da says lunatics like that never change. He went to school with this fella that was deep into torturing and stuff during the Troubles. Dad says you’d always have known there was something odd about him. He’d no fear nor nothing. No sympathy for other people. He was just unhinged. Your lad in the Fire Starter video’s the same.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Aye, my da says he’s no more interest in the politics. He’s only doing it to cause chaos.’
‘Like the Joker.’
‘Aye, Darren, exactly like the Joker.’
‘Cool.’
‘Very cool. I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of that bastard, though. You never know what a psycho like that’s capable of.’
The lads fall briefly silent as the bus pulls away from the stop lights and goes lumbering down the Castlereagh Road, wavering between the rows of parked cars.
‘I’d be up for it, so I would,’ says the first lad, breaking the damp silence.
‘Up for what?’ asks the second.
‘Whatever your man’s after.’
‘More fires?’
‘Whatever – fires, beatings, bricking the police. Sure, wasn’t it good to have something to be at for a change?’
‘Aye, it was great craic.’
‘Best summer ever.’
‘No reason why it has to end.’
‘No reason at all.’
‘Wee bit of rain shouldn’t stop us defending our civil liberties.’
‘Dead right. Psycho or not, your man’s no pussy. He’s not lying down and letting the other side march all over him. I’m in. Whatever it is he’s wanting us to do, I’m totally in.’
‘Chaos. Anarchy. No surrender,’ they chant together.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Like lyrics from an old punk tune. Sammy can only imagine this is part of the Fire Starter’s call to arms. He pictures each word individually, printed on a single sheet of card. He can almost hear the thundering bass line. It’s not the most original, but Mark knows exactly what he’s doing, wheeling out the mother tongue, provoking nostalgia.
No surrender, indeed.
The vomit comes sliding up Sammy’s throat. He forces himself to choke it down, placing a hand over his mouth to keep the bile in. It isn’t my fault, he thinks. I did everything I could to keep him straight. Sins of the fathers, he thinks, dredging up all the old Sunday-school guff. He knows his hand is in this, heavy as a dropped hammer. He might as well be posting these videos himself. Part of him wishes he was. The smallest, ugliest part of him is proud of Mark. Jealous, even. He feels a headache coming on, a tightening in his heart, which might be angina or just anxiety. Maybe, if he’s lucky, the bus will drive itself off the Albert Bridge, put him out of his misery.
‘What’s anarchy?’ asks the lad behind him. The other one isn’t quite sure but thinks it definitely involves guns. ‘Deadly,’ says the first lad. The other claims he’s heard from a mate of his brother that the Fire Starter’s going to do a bomb next.
‘Is it still anarchy if you use a bomb instead of guns?’ asks his mate, and the other lad reassures him that it’s totally still anarchy so long as there’s some kind of explosion. This seems to satisfy them both. They return to their individual phones, googling football results and texting their friends.
They get off the bus two stops before the bridge. Sammy sits on, all the way to the depot. He means to get off at the markets and can’t. He tries again at Rosemary Street but his muscles won’t move and he doesn’t trust his legs for standing. When he finally manages to make it down the three steps at the front of the bus he feels as if he’s aged ten years in the course of the journey. He holds tightly to the door to keep himself from toppling over.
Sammy walks round the town for an hour. He does not buy slippers. He doesn’t buy anything at all. He moves from one bench to another, sitting down to watch the Saturday-afternoon shoppers cart their carrier bags and children round the shops. In and out they go, buying birthday presents and books, school shoes for the weans and wee tasty things from Marks & Spencer, a jumper they fancied in H&M, make-up remover from Boots, cappuccinos in Starbucks: a hundred thousand ordinary exchanges, which Sammy usually doesn’t take the time to notice. He notices now. He wonders where they are all coming from, these people he doesn’t know; where they will be in three hours’ time; who they matter to; who will feel the gap they leave behind. They are so ordinary to him, unremarkable as ants. This is how God must feel with all the power in his hands.
He imagines the afternoon in pieces. It isn’t hard. There are photos from before: news reports from the seventies and eighties come quickly to mind. Those pictures are not easily forgotten. Shattered windows. Shopping bags shredded, like wedding confetti, tins of beans and other groceries rolling down the street. Dust settling. The grainy hint of something no one really needs to see: an arm, a head, a shoeless leg kicking at thin air. A child’s stuffed animal, sooty now from the blast. Blood. Cars and rubbish bins turned wrong side up. Flashing lights. Sirens. The dead, ghostly silence before the screaming begins. Sammy sees it all: the way it has been; the way it could be again. He sits for fifteen minutes outside Build-A-Bear watching the children queue to spend their pocket money. Families with buggies and little babies strapped to their parents’ chests. Grandparents. Tourists. Teenagers chirruping away, like angry starlings. Shop girls on their breaks. No one is bracing themselves for an explosion. No one is suspicious or afraid.
These people are like children, trusting implicitly. They should know better. How could they have forgotten so quickly? Sammy’s anger rises against them. Stupid they are, like sheep moving in the one direction, never looking back. He wants to scream at their ignorance, spit judgement like an old-time street preacher. Then the pity comes in waves. He might cry. He can’t, not in public, but the sobs are going through him, regular as contractions. He wishes to place himself as a barrier between them and the things his son might do. He can do this right now with his mobile phone. He can call for help. Police. Ambulance. Fire brigade. All of the above, and the Coast Guard too. This is my son. He’s going to ruin everything. Abraham he will then be, or maybe God, offering his son up as a sacrifice. No, this won’t be anything close to true. Sacrifice only works with good sons. The bad ones are dispensable. Still he can’t bring himself to dial the number.
His chest is turning itself inside out. He can’t breathe. This must be a heart attack, he thinks. He hopes it is: an easy way out; a decision lifted out of his hands. It isn’t a heart attack. After twenty minutes his breathing evens. He can walk so long as he doesn’t think too much about the step after the next. He gets a taxi home, through the East, over the ring road to his house. And Mark.
Police. Ambulance. Fire brigade. Sammy knows what should be done. He doesn’t know if he can do it. Not today, he tells himself. It’s not that urgent. He decides to sleep on it. He doesn’t sleep. The next morning he feels like death. Pamela puts him into the car and drives him to the doctor’s. She doesn’t ask him what’s wrong. She knows better.