When you stand in front of fire, your clothes absorb the heat and there is a whisper of time, shred thin as a wafer of ham, when the heat is pure pleasure, like the anticipation of an orgasm, before skin cells send a message to brain cells shrieking “Hot, hot!” The neurons fire back a message to move away. You don’t have to obey. If you don’t obey, and you burn, it means the rebel-brave cells have won over the pissy-weak cells.
You only retreat from the flame because someone calls your name. It doesn’t need to be someone you know, they don’t need to be calling you; you cannot help but turn and pay attention, and the heat waves pass around and beyond you, and the earth is bleak again. That is the power of fire. It is the most alive thing of life, it is the start and the end, it is var str = “CH4+2O2+heat=CO2+2H2O+heat” str.repeat(inf.); the code become flesh.
***
Once upon a time, a boy and a girl tried to set fire to Snow Hill Station in Birmingham. It was an act of resistance against boredom and the unsustainability and emptiness of a consumer-driven society. It was also a really fucking funny idea.
The Bullring Shopping Centre was dead, old man dead with a stink of ammonia that makes you ruffle up your nose like a pissed off rabbit and hurry on past to something more alive. Collapsed star dead that trickles out a mean, false light even though it kicked the stellar bucket a trillion years ago. But my cousin Martey, he was more alive than anything, he had a superpower to suck all the death out of the world with a grin and a scheme. He could roll a cigarette with one hand and carry six pints without spilling a precious drop. He could flee the cops without breaking into sweat. He could charm his way out of a bill and sweet talk a lemon. I loved Martey.
***
Every day, more than a million people in the UK alone ask Google how to make fire.
When people say you need to fight fire with fire, they mean you need to give as good as you get, take no shit from no one. Or perhaps they’re thinking of lightsabers. Only farmers know what it means: make a small fire, keep control over it, like humans have owned fire since they discovered it, and that way you can stop a wildfire happening. Like telling a little lie to prevent something worse.
***
When I was seven, we were sat in front of the fire one evening. My Ma always worried that my pyjamas would melt because there was a label on them that said Warning! Stay away from fire. She looked at me nervously if I stood up or seemed like I was falling asleep on the sofa. At school that day, we’d made Midas crowns, a strip of bright card decorated with leaves of crimson-gold-butter. I was heart-burst proud when she hung it over the corner of the TV screen so everyone could see it. Lovely. She said it was lovely. The next morning, I saw the ashes of the crown in the fireplace. I was so grumpy on the way to school, eyes locked to the pavement, shoulders high as the breeze, and I never told her why. When I cried, Martey didn’t tell me to shut up or say I was being a wuss. He said it was a lesson I had to learn, never to trust people, any people, especially the ones you love. I tried hard to believe that. But I couldn’t help trusting Martey.
***
When little kids draw fire, it is always orange-red-yellow and they forget the tongue of blue-butterfly-sky that connects fire-thing to fuel-thing.
***
The night me and Martey set fire to the station, we’d been out drinking. I had a Saturday job, and he didn’t, so by the time he met me he’d already had a couple, and I had £80 in crisp five-pound-notes in my jacket. There was a little tour we did, of the Fox and Hounds, the Three Guineas, the Maid’s Retreat, always ending up at the Feuer ‘n’ Firkin, where the ‘foyer’ was painted orange. Somebody’s little joke. Maybe that’s what gave us the idea. I remember every pint I drank that night, the beautiful colours of them, the effervescence and the purity. I remember crushing my fingers in the door of the pisser and not feeling a thing.
***
Fire is not stuff. Earth is stuff. Wind is stuff. Everything is stuff, a thing, even if you cannot hold it, like a sound wave, or you cannot comprehend it, like a galaxy. Yet fire is not stuff. Fire is a reaction, like pain. It is the result of combustion.
***
We had forty-five minutes to wait for the bus, and it was fucking freezing outside after the pubs we knew as home. He put his hands deep into his pockets, trying to hug himself warm, and said, “This ain’t mine,” pulling a lighter out of the pocket. Martey always used matches. “Martey,” I said, “that ain’t your jacket.” “I wasn’t wearing one,” he said in wonder, as his beer-dulled senses caught up with the earth’s steady orbit. “I wasn’t fucking wearing one!” And we laughed so much, like not wearing a jacket and now wearing a jacket was the best joke in the world, and he was a Brummie Cinderella with a Fairy Godmother who dealt solely in leather jackets.
***
Some people cut themselves to feel pain, others touch fire. In the primeval-time-before-bitcoin, fire was used as punishment for thinking that mass noun (also Mass; synonyms: Lord’s Supper, Communion, Eucharist) was not a thing. You must believe that bread becomes flesh. Otherwise, flesh becomes fire.
***
Snow Hill wasn’t far from the bus stop and it was shush-shush-quiet at that time, just rats watching a security guard smoking a cigarette deeply, like it was the best moment of his day. His night. The ticket office was closed and I followed Martey around the back, to where you could sometimes see the scraggy freight trains rattle through like old ladies on their way to bingo. It was a dry night and Martey kicked up a pile of leaves to make a little bonfire. It was almost cosy. He put the lighter up against the wall and smashed open the top with a stone. “What you doing Martey?” I asked. I didn’t mean why. I had every faith in Martey’s reasoning, whether it existed or not. I just didn’t get what would happen after he had smashed the lighter. “Watch,” he said. The metal bit of the lighter came off, leaving jagged plastic, and Martey poured the lighter fluid over the leaves. Grinning at me, like he was a comet, and I was a Perseid desperate to keep up, he struck a match. “Stand back,” he said.
***
When the Firebird by Igor Stravinsky is played at concerts, the opening is so quiet you think the musicians have fallen into a spellbound sleep. Then the sound rises up to meet the heavens, like a poodle on its hind legs begging for a treat, like fire rising up to escape its fuel. A Firebird does not exist. All creatures, every living thing, exist above and beyond human existence. We just got the chance to name them. Humans aren’t creators. We’re just labellers and the world is one big fucking filing cabinet. The name for a thing is the human perspective and interpretation of a thing; it is not the thing. A Firebird would not call itself a Firebird. It does not know fire.
***
Ever since that night with Martey at Snow Hill, I’ve been looking for the perfect pub, with its not-yet-I-don’t-want-to-leave-yet cosiness, a lambent fire that toasts your front and chills your back, and the sweet anticipation of queuing and the sticky swilling foam that escapes like lava over your fingers as you ease back to your table. But I know that there was only ever one perfect pub, the last one I ever went to with Martey and his nicked jacket.
***
“And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.” I’ve felt the Holy Spirit come down upon me, and it felt like the hot breath evaporating from the jaws of a spaniel who’s been in the park too long, too moist for fire, full of enthusiasm even though you know the enthusiasm won’t get you anywhere. It’s a lost stick you have in your mouth little puppy, not a lost soul.
***
The week before what happened at Snow Hill, we were sprawled on Martey’s sofa, watching the darts. He said to me, absent like, “Do you want to be buried or cremated?” He was picking the spots on his upper arm, methodically, up one side and down the other, pausing with pleasure when he found a juicy one and watching the tendril of pure white pus spiral out.
“I don’t think I’ll know. Or care,” I said. Those sorts of conversations always make me nervous.
“But what if you did though? What if you could hear them all saying, ‘Well, we’ll all feel better when the cremation is over,’ and you were screaming ‘I want to be buried!’ Wouldn’t that be a total headfuck?”
“Cremated then. You can remember when the time comes and tell everyone those are my last wishes.”
“I’ll go first though,” Martey said, like we were queuing for a piss at a gig.
“Not necessarily.”
“I will but. And you’ll have to go to my funeral and wonder if I’m screaming at you to dig me up and turn me into ashes.”
“So tell me now then.”
“Fuck off will I,” he said. “I just want to think about my first pint. I don’t want to think about my funeral and yous all having a pint without me.”
We headed to the pub, only I was cold, so Martey gave me a jumper, and he just wore a short-sleeved top, and his arms went all bumpy-cold until the booze started to warm him up.