“Alma, you fucking asshole, don’t you fucking dare!”
Mick turned, from only idle curiosity, and found himself confronted by the single image from this viewing that he’d take away with him, the solitary tableau that was genuinely unforgettable. His sister, with a blankness of expression that was either innocent or guilty to a point past caring, saint or serial murderer, leaned forward over Marefair and Saint Mary’s Street, reaching past Castle Street and across Peter’s House to Bath Street. The old ladies huddling behind her hugged each other and performed a clumsy, hopping little dance. Lucy Lisowiec’s enormous eyes prepared to fire themselves across the room, accompanying her rising siren wail.
“Almaaaaaaa!”
Pressing a wavering tongue of blue and yellow from the flint-wheel of Mick’s lighter, Alma let it taste the simulated birdshit caked around the rim of her scaled-down Destructor. More-ish, evidently. Dribbling incendiary frills of indigo poured down the lampblacked chimney tower to its base with startling rapidity, sending up acrid and authentic billows of particulate towards the ceiling-mounted sensors as they did so. It all burned so fast, being constructed wholly from materials designed to do just that, and in his sister’s dawning look of apprehension it appeared that even she was unprepared for the appalling pace of the toy-town calamity she’d just unleashed.
A spreading gorse of conflagration engulfed Bristol Street and its environs, with the bijoux fever-cart and centimetre-high mare towing it into the mouth of Fort Street parched to curling smuts and gone upon the instant. Arson reflux scorched the narrow gullet of Chalk Lane and spewed annihilating riot-bile down Marefair, the anachronistic witch-hat turret on Black Lion Hill shrivelling unrepentant at the stake and twisted round with shifting scarves of gold. Infernal tributaries sluiced from long-gone Bearward Street to flood the Mayorhold with combusting vapour, tromp l’oeil sweetshop windows disappearing into light before the flickering translucence climbed the razor-cut of Bullhead Lane to Sheep Street, where ignition moved like scrapie through the paper flock. Hot orange devils swarmed on the crusader church, unravelling its steeple into sparks and levelling the thick-walled round down to a howling mouth red as a branding-iron, a blazing torus, pinkie ring of an apocalyptic angel. Mercy, bright and cauterising, stroked the wounded neighbourhood. In Marefair, Cromwell’s bunk at Hazelrigg House was made immolate among the millenarian tinder, shaved skulls you could strike a match on, cavalier plumes smouldering on pinpricked cornices. From the charred stump of Bath Street’s smokestack, searing ripples spread through the flea-circus district in dilating sapphire hoops, as from a shooting star fallen into a petrol pond. Incineration danced on Broad Street and Bellbarn, flash-vanishing Salvation Army forts and suffering no barber’s pole that it remain unlit. The Rizla laundry flapped like phoenix wings in Greyfriars’ central courtyard, damp with drizzled flames, while all along the crisping terraces six dozen public houses called last orders and submitted to a harsher temperance. Saint Elmo flirted with the upper reaches of Saint Katherine’s high-rise, jumped between laboriously fashioned television aerials on Mary’s Street in a peak-time transmission, sentimentally retracing the trajectories of a Restoration predecessor, and the martyring Niagara spilled down Horsemarket dragging a bridal gauze of choking fume behind. Cremating fancywork writhed briefly on Saint Peter’s architraves. Zero-gage holocaust accomplished in mere seconds an erasure over which the Borough Council had deliberated for just shy a century, deleting cobbled histories in its sheathing Catherine-wheel spray, no west wind this time to ensure that only the torched gloveries and milliners of Mercers’ Row or thereabouts would ever be regenerated. The short reach of houses on St. Andrew’s Road from Scarletwell Street to Spring Lane became an ashen Rothko bad day, by some fluke of thermal whimsy sparing only the Monopoly-sized premises at the line’s south extremity. Boys’ clubs and bookmakers, cottaging-friendly lavatories and corner dives were caught up in a pyroclastic flow from Regent Square down to the foot of Grafton Street, and Marjorie Pitt-Draffen’s dance-school on the current site of Alma’s exhibition spouted rolling white clouds from its open door in microcosm of the building it was modelled on and situated in. Sharp to the sinuses and tear-ducts, these at least elicited a lachrymosity that the more gradual demolitions of some several decades had failed to provoke. Fast-forwarded there on the tabletop a precinct of the heart was firestormed to oblivion in facsimile, its final music the repeated shrill of panicking detectors.
All of this had taken only moments, a rose of disaster blossoming and withering in time-delay, plunging the nursery into swirling opacity with everybody coughing, cursing, laughing, stumbling for the exit. Tasting a sour flinch of burning paper in the no-man’s-land dividing nose from throat, Mick blundered blind towards fresh air and freedom. On his way out he collided with a fogbound pit-bull on its hind legs that turned out to be Ted Tripp, the erstwhile burglar ushering his girlfriend Jan before him, both of them apparently more entertained than traumatised. Beside the doorway to the right the white-haired carpenter from item one looked back across his shoulder at the sputtering herd as it stampeded past, while on the left stood Mick himself in mayoral drag with his arms raised in what now read as an apologetic shrug: “Blame her. Nothing to do with me.” He staggered onto the comb-over turf outside, lank green locks plastered to the muddy scalp, trailing asphyxiating ribbons in his wake. Pressing the heels of both hands to his streaming sockets he smeared stinging moisture down across his cheekbones until he could see again.
The nursery entrance was still belching smoke and people into what was otherwise a pleasant afternoon. Murderous-looking maulers reassured each other that they were okay, asthmatic anarchists sat wheezing on the cusp of Phoenix Street, and Roman Thompson did his best to look compliant when his boyfriend told him that, no, seriously, this really wasn’t funny. Backing off in the direction of the Golden Lion on Castle Street, Melinda Gebbie helped a stunned Lucy Lisowiec to get a cover story blaming everything on unidentifiable street-drinkers into place, the latter gaping with that thunderstone-struck look that Mick had observed often on associates of his sister. Somewhere at his back he heard Dave Daniels say “Where’s Alma?”, and was just beginning to conjecture that the exhibition might have been intended as a Viking funeral pyre when through the smoking portal like a Halloween edition of Stars in their Eyes lumbered the reverse hedge-dragged artist.
Her eyes were like particle collisions, black matter decay trajectories descending to the chin from watery corners, and in her Sargasso hair perched huge pale butterflies of settled ash. Singed, ugly holes now perforated the new turquoise jumper, but then Mick supposed it would look pretty much the same after a week of Alma’s normal wear and meteoritic hashish-spillage. Smudged vermillion lips were stretched into a ghastly apprehensive rictus as she lifted sooty, blistered palms to her bewildered audience as though attempting to surrender.
“It’s okay. I put it all out. I’ll buy them another table. Or two tables if they want, how’s that?”
His sister was like Werner Von Braun trying to mollify senior Nazis after a V2 had detonated on the launch pad, simpering nervously and wiping blast debris from Goering’s frizzled eyebrows. She stood slapping her own bosom where a turquoise brushfire had rekindled, and it seemed to Mick that she had never looked more catastrophically deranged that she did at that moment. He was almost, well, not proud of her, but less ashamed. Then he remembered the old women who’d been standing behind Alma prior to her electing to employ the nuclear option, and who both were very definitely not among the emphysemic huddle of survivors on the fraying verge. Oh fuck. She’d finally killed someone, and when journalists swooped on her friends and family, nobody would affect surprise or offer testimonials to her quietness and normality. Striding towards her, Mick was only shocked that she had somehow managed to restrain herself for as long as she had.