Jonathan Lee - High Dive

For a moment he wondered dumbly who would have a bonfire at this hour. Gradually the fog on his thoughts burned off and an upsurge in sensory detail came: siren noises getting louder; people moving in the street. He realised he’d been aware all along of an orange glow clinging to the bend in the road. The fire was nearer than he’d imagined.

He moved off the pavement, onto the stuttering white line. In the houses either side of him windows and porch lights flickered to life. Front doors were swinging open, more people waking up. They staggered and rubbed their eyes. He felt he was picking his way through an intricate dream.

The chemical tang thickened and he spat. The orange glow was thinning into specific tongues of fire. Only a hook of moon above. Ash falling softly on rooftops. Clouds like steel wool expanded in the sky. He was running — a burnout, a burnout.

It might be number 12. It might be 42. Feet hitting concrete. Legs absorbing shock. Nothing in his mind was properly fused. The ground was harder than it had been before. He sprinted until the road was straight.

Again the truth revealed itself in increments: the property on fire was number 17; number 17 was where he lived; he lived with his mother and his mother would be home.

He stopped dead in the street he called home. The night arranged around him was all motion now. He was seeing the neighbourhood as if for the first time. The small crowded houses, the patchwork gardens. The air of dilapidation and minimum love. His eyes winced in their sockets. A tropical warmth souped him. It was a warmth that told you this couldn’t be Ireland, and then you saw the embattled bystanders, the rich plumes of smoke rising up from burning property, and you heard the skid of a tyre, and the shouting of commandments, and the quiet prayers recited at the edges of the flames — all the things that told you it was.

The right side of his house was melting away. The flames were leaning, extending. Enjoying themselves. Ten or twenty men were at work hurling water out of buckets. The roof. The fencing. As liquid sped from the buckets the men swivelled and grunted, ran to refill, sweating into their sleeves. The stooped figure of Ancient Jones was among the helpers, half killing himself with each bucket-thrust.

Empty of strength Dan watched the collective effort: good Catholics and good Protestants trying to save his home. Among these mixed civilians he felt a crushing need to sleep. ‘He’s snattered,’ someone said. People pointed. ‘Is that …?’

The men urged their women to stay clear, but some of the women threw water nonetheless. Two or three he knew from the club, the ones with that special moxie, that defiant spark, the extraordinary refusal to relent that you find in people punished too long: the blacks, the Jews, kids sleeping in the street. What he felt in this moment was close to joy. Call it acceptance, acquiescence. It came even before he saw his mother sitting on the kerb unharmed. This thought: I’ve got what I deserve. It came even before he saw that his house wasn’t the only one burning. Twenty doors down there were a few slight flames from the home of the next Catholic family.

I’ve got what I deserve. There is an order to events after all. The bomb has gone off. Revenge has begun. This is lads from Loyalist groups clutching their lists. This is the proper reciprocation of damage and it gets quicker every year. There were tears in his eyes. Ash in the air. Love in his heart. The anger had gone. He blinked and wiped his face. He looked for rumours of light in the sky. What a time to get sentimental, he thought, and cursed his wasted years.

He watched the dark loop on the roof. A ten-foot TV aerial he’d helped to install aged fourteen, melting. First thing he ever did that worked. He saw it and thought of his CB radio. He used that radio to talk half the night with people across the Province. Catholic, Protestant. One of the girls on CB had a handle, a call sign, which had caught his attention straight out: ‘Perfect Shankill Kiss’. They spoke for a few nights. They met in person outside a pharmacy in town. It was where all the CB freaks leaned against lamp posts. If he had anything worth swapping, she said, she’d swap it for a kiss. There were bins on the pavement back then. He took from the top of one of these bins an almost-clean copy of Rushlight magazine. Gave it to her. Wad of Wrigley’s on the corner of the cover. They kissed. She complained he kissed too wetly. There were happy months in which they went to the pool. Ridiculous to cling to a romance like that. When his CB radio broke, he took it apart under his uncle’s supervision. They put it back together and it worked. He used it less and less. The fixing was more fun than the listening. Perfect Shankill Kiss began kissing someone else.

His mother on the kerb was flanked by other women. They were smoking. He could not believe they were smoking. Through the soft haze of cigarette smoke mixed with the smoke of burnt belongings he saw up the skirt of one of these old women, glimpsing the beige mysteries of her underwear.

HE HAD TO pick himself up. No one helped him. Maybe there were too many people for any one person to feel responsible. Maybe they just didn’t see?

It was all too hectic. A wedding reception times five. He begged Marina to get a grip on things, to use her feminine wiles, and she gave him a look that said he’d phrased that very badly. He went to the toilet to breathe deeply and be alone. The simple smells of soap and bleach. The dreamy tinkle of urine in the bowl. Took an aspirin. It left a bitter taste in his mouth. Imagined conversations drip-dripped through his thoughts.

Really, Margaret? Me?

You.

Me? The major national speech on leniency? Me?

I need a man I can trust, Moose. I think you’re the man to deliver the speech.

Not the Secretary of State for Education?

No.

Not the … not the prisons guy?

No, I’m asking you — you — to be the man to deliver it.

Even though I’m arguably lacking piZZaZZ?

Nonsense, you genius. The way you made those beer ice cubes, that time, so you could keep your beer cool outside without diluting the beer?

You saw that?

I see everything.

He woke with a jolt, a sense of being watched. Trousers around his ankles.

By the time he’d buckled up and straightened his tie and acknowledged to himself that sleeping on the toilet constituted a new low, the crowd in the bar area was of a manageable size. Good: he’d have proper time with the Prime Minister.

He leaned onto tiptoes and looked around. Was that …? No, not her. Maybe behind …? No, no. The crackle of a throat being cleared. A man with a cane saying, ‘I took a bus once.’ Whatever story followed could never live up to the audacity of that opening line.

A tall, needle-faced young man was standing in front of him — the man who had helped call for order on the stairs when the Prime Minister was working her way through the lobby. Moose had seen him a few times these last few days without knowing exactly who he was. He had a pointed chin that preceded him into confrontations with people you suspected he hated.

‘Hi,’ Moose said. ‘I don’t think we’ve —’

‘Edward Peterson,’ the man said. ‘Logistics.’

‘Right. The Prime Minister’s team.’

Peterson’s smile was pure hygiene, the expression of a guy about to floss. The teeth were big. The mouth couldn’t quite hold them. It was a miracle the lips didn’t bleed. There was saliva pooling on his gums and shining on his bottom lip and when he closed his mouth to swallow there was a faint, squeaky sucking sound, like a cloth being used to polish cutlery.