Before the Fire Read Online Free Page B

it all the same and put the turquoise one on instead. What did it matter? Tomorrow they were out of there.
    The shirt would have fitted Mac but it hung loose on him. Stick chose a pair of glasses with blue plastic rims and smeary lenses. The flowers scratched at the back of his neck. He looked like a
knob.
    Mac wore three strings of flowers, two grass skirts over his shorts, a straw hat tilted to one side and a pair of pink sunglasses. Stick helped him tie the coconuts on with gaffer tape and
string.
    ‘More is more,’ he said when Stick started laughing. ‘At least I look like I mean it.’
    Mac’s ma howled with laughter too when they walked into the living room, Mac strutting about saying, ‘
Hola, senorita bella, veinte cervezas por favor
.’
    ‘Can you tell him?’ Stick said. ‘We can’t go out like this.’
    ‘You look cracking,’ she said. ‘Both of you.’
    She made them pasta with a thick creamy sauce and strips of salty bacon. ‘Line your stomachs,’ she said. ‘I saw you with that vodka.’ She winked at Stick and he held his
hand to his face to hide the colour in his cheeks. He was just like his dad, always reddening up. It did his head in.

4
    They crossed Queen’s Road and cut through the back streets to Rochdale Road, finishing off the vodka at the bus stop. Everyone kept staring at them but Mac didn’t
seem to give a shit. When a white-van driver blasted his horn, his two mates leaning out of the window, laughing, Mac just fondled his coconuts and shouted ‘Want a lick?’ Stick
wondered, sometimes, how one person could be so different from another.
    The vodka helped though, the way it always did, making him softer and easier than he actually was. On the bus, he sat next to Mac and managed to half smile at the people who grinned and made
comments. He lowered the sunglasses over his eyes so everything darkened, and looked out of the window: a patch of tall grasses and yellow flowers where there used to be a shop or maybe a house;
Cash for Scrap signs in front of a low-slung brick building; a nothingy sort of a park with a path cut through the middle of it and daisies dotting the grass. And then ahead, down the hill –
Manchester.
    Some idiot had spread sand over the floor of the bar. It might have looked good before anyone arrived, but now it was gathered in thin, dirtied lines and Stick could feel it
scratch against the bottoms of his trainers. Mac walked in and roared with laughter. ‘Fucking genius. Love it!’ he said. Plastic starfish wedged between the bottles of spirits; beach
balls set loose amongst the crowd; the bar staff in bikini tops mixing blue cocktails; Ibiza anthems. Pretty much everyone had dressed up. Lainey in a red bikini top and black hot pants, Aaron and
Malika with matching pink flower garlands down to their knees. Shooter dressed as a pirate for some reason – eyepatch, black hat, wide-sleeved white shirt. Even Ricky had a cocktail umbrella
shoved through his top buttonhole.
    Stick headed for the bar. Double shot for the price of a single. He got a quadruple, with Coke, and a thin yellow straw that reminded him of being a kid.
    ‘Gets you drunk faster.’
    Stick turned. It was a girl he didn’t know in a blue sequinned top, her face already blurred with drink.
    ‘Through a straw,’ she said, lurching towards him a little and then steadying herself against the bar. ‘It gets it in your bloodstream quicker.’ She frowned.
‘Something like that. I’m Stacey.’ Her hand was on his forearm, Nan tattooed on the bit of skin between her thumb and forefinger.
    ‘Stick.’
    ‘Stick?’ She scrunched up her nose.
    ‘Kieran. Whatever.’ He’d almost finished his drink, the straw making sucking noises in between the ice cubes.
    ‘Is that cos you’re skinny?’
    Stick shrugged.
    ‘I’ve always wanted a nickname. Stace, that’s like the best there is for me. You can’t just come up with it yourself though, can you? Someone’s got to give it to