Tomorrow they will pull down the old fire station drill tower. Structural problems — they say. It’s not safe to pitch a ladder against it anymore. We were instructed to start practising our hoselines against the station wall after a portion of the roof caved in two summers ago. But word of the demolition has spread fast outside of the station. It’s the only landmark left on this side of town. You can see its five empty windows loom above the hillside like a church steeple, still ablaze with imaginary flames.
Inside the fire station, the sound of overalls shuffling on and off marks the handover of the watch. Weary firefighters in mufti lumber single-file through reception, bellies rumbling at the promise of four home-cooked dinners before they must return to the taste of each other’s cooking. I wait for the last person to leave before exiting out the back and walking fifty paces across the yard to the tower. The door is nothing more than a sheet of olive-green metal bolted to the frame with two padlocks and it wheezes with resistance as I enter the building. For most of the firefighters in the station, the door is decorative — vestigial, like wings on a flightless bird. Not for me, though. Not for the chief.
“Feel like I should say something,” the chief mutters from across the tower’s empty cavity. Even at dusk, the dusty interior is well-illuminated by the generous light offered from its windows. The building is designed to simulate a large apartment block for us to rehearse our ladder rescues. For decades, we pulled invisible men, women and children out of the brickwork onto our shoulders, carrying them down to safety. “What do people say to a ship on its last voyage?”
“I dunno,” I say. “Abandon ship?”
The chief steps forward and glances up. He is still wearing his uniform and his face is crosshatched by shadows filtering through a wiry staircase that zig-zags up to a slumping concrete roof, five floors above. “This tower’s been here since before I was born, since the 1950s. Maybe tomorrow, we give her a little send-off. Some sense of ceremony before the demolition boys have at it with the crane.”
“Perhaps we give her a little send-off now,” I suggest. The chief grimaces. He gestures to one of the two plastic chairs laid out between us, their spindly legs splattered with rust.
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” he says, pushing aside a pile of dirty blankets and lowering himself to the seat. A hot flush surges through my chest and I’m certain he sees the pink swell in my cheeks. “Since the building’s coming down, I was thinking, maybe it’s time we stop. Quit while we’re ahead.”
“We can find somewhere else,” I say, playing with the buttons on my shirt. “I saw a couple mattresses under the railway bridge yesterday. Could be cosy.” The chief looks unimpressed. His face is unshaven and the stubble obscures a prominent chin, making his features appear softer, more like mine. “Have the others said something?” I ask, incurious.
“They don’t need to. Everybody can see the way you look at me round the station, during mess, out in the yard.”
“I am playing my part out there. Like we agreed. And in here—”
“There’s no more in here. The place is falling apart. The roof’s going to cave in any day now. The back half is subsiding. One more storm and this whole place could topple.” The chief readjusts his posture. The blue plastic of the chair bows as he moves, white-knuckled under the weight of his thighs. His torso faces towards the door and he turns only his head, like we are strangers exchanging pleasantries on the bus. “You know I’ve got a reputation here. I’m the station commander. A married man. I can’t keep coming home late to the wife. My clothes smell weird and I’m always covered in this bloody dust.”
I pout my lips. “I suppose it’ll always be our little secret.” I make no attempt to disguise the disappointment in my voice.
“What’s to tell?” he says, matter-of-fact. I can hear his teeth grinding and I imagine that it is the noise of his thoughts churning against one another. He looks straight ahead and I notice how unfamiliar I am with his profile. The bridge of his nose is higher than I recall and his lips are slightly smaller, though still eminently kissable.
“So what do we do out there? Do we keep up our little roles?”
He gets up to leave. “You mean doing our jobs?”
My body shrinks several sizes. I realise that I am swinging my legs like a schoolchild, but I can’t stop. “Whatever you say, chief.”
“Stop calling me that.” He pushes his hand against the door. “Are you coming?” I jump to my feet, step across the room and place my hand on his wrist, enclosing it with three fingers and a thumb, as if I were holding a teacup. The chief studies my hand and for a moment, there is a glint of recognition, his body softening and easing towards my grip, but then something shifts in the building. Some debris makes loose from a wall and rattles through the staircase, coming to rest just behind him in a cloud of red dust. He sighs, pulling his arm away from me to brush off his shirt and his face returns to its stony expression. “Don’t forget to wait a few minutes before coming out,” he instructs me, for the last time.
The door squeaks shut. My arm is still outstretched grasping at the air as I listen to the chief’s footsteps fade away across the yard into the gentle drone of the traffic. I notice how familiar this sequence of sounds has become, like the refrain from a terrible song that I can’t help but hum along to.
I ascend to the top level of the tower. I can feel the wind sweeping off the moors but the view is unremarkable, hardly worth the five flights of stairs. Although there are no houses that reach above three stories in this town, the metal staircase gives the whole structure the feel of a New York tenement. For the last two years, the chief and I presided over the whole thing, like slum landlords. It was our dominion. Now, it feels miniature, pretend, the time we spent together only as real as the fires that were once put out here.
My boot makes a clunk as it collides with something beneath my feet. I peer down to see a glass ashtray, overflowing with red dust and the sodden remains of countless cigarettes. I brought it from my flat two years ago but the glass dips and swells in shapes that seem suddenly unfamiliar to my eyes. Besides it are two sleeping bags, a torch, and an empty bottle of cognac. It all looks like a crime scene now. In a fury, I kick the ashtray down the stairs, not stopping to worry if the night watch might hear the shards of glass ricocheting off the walls below from within the fire station.
That night before sleep, my mind brings me back to the Saddleworth Moor wildfires, two years before. It is 8am. I have already been up since dawn. Though smoke ripples off the earth like a cold foggy morning, the breeze has already begun to warm, whipping up clouds of dust and pushing them along the scorched remains of old footpaths. Unusual weather conditions. We should have seen it coming. This terrain is supposed to be a bog — four seasons a year — but after an unusually snowy March, Greater Manchester has been dealt an unusually dry spring and the peaty ground has become as flammable as the brittle heather swirling above it.
Several brigades are out from across the county. Helplessly, we thrash at the steadily encroaching fire with our beaters, knowing that our efforts will soon be undone in the mid-morning sun. I strike the smouldering ground, putting a few inches of peat to rest, for now. Sweat and sunblock stream down my forehead, stinging my eyes. I stand up to wipe it away, but my foot becomes ensnared in a coil of undergrowth and I fall forward, right onto the fire.
The nerves in my face and neck do not register the sensation at first. Then, for an instant, I am ice-cold. By the time I feel the true bite of the flames, I realise I have been shouting for several seconds. A rush of footsteps and I am pulled off as quickly as I fell. On my back, I watch in a daze as a crowd of silhouettes peer over me to see the damage. As my eyes adjust to the sunlight, the chief is the only face I recognise. He bends down and squeezes my arm.
“You scared us there for a second,” he says, a grin on his face.
“I scared me too.”
I place my hand over his hand in a gesture intended to shrug him off, but he does not release his grip. His fingers are thinner than I expected. The thick fabric of my jacket pinches against my skin where he holds me, three fingers and a thumb. I am immobilised in his hands.
No real injuries sustained, the first aid man informs me minutes later. A sunburn-like red patch across my neck at worst. Cool compress, ibuprofen, moisturiser. Stay out of the sun. Back at the station, I am a walking invitation for ridicule. “Damsel in distress” soon becomes the evening’s riff. I hear the other firefighters reenacting my scream from rooms I’m not in.
“Now now,” the chief says to a half-full mess room. “I’m not sure this flippant attitude to fire safety is very becoming of a firefighter.” The others are quiet. They stare into their bowls of soggy carbonara. Out of the corner of my eye, I witness two elbows nudge in a cryptic exchange but the chief takes no notice. “Let’s just be glad that you didn’t have to make a trip to A&E, or worse. You’ll be back out there tomorrow, and I want you to stay vigilant.” The chief has a way of speaking to a room full of people like he is speaking just to me, at once intimate and oratorical. My cheeks blush, though I don’t look away like the others do. He pulls out his phone and checks the forecast. “Tomorrow is going to be another hot gusty day,” he informs us, looking straight at me as he says it.
It is only hours until the drill tower is due to be demolished and the chief is late for parade. The seven of us stand at ease, backs to the firetruck. At our feet, lie seven helmets, each atop a pair of boots and a roll of protective clothing. They look like little people. Or like the garments were worn by other people who had evaporated only moments ago. Out of the corner of my eyes, I can see the other firefighters fidgeting with impatience.
“I don’t know if anybody else has noticed,” one of them says wryly, “but our station commander ain’t here.”
“Gone AWOL,” says a second.
“Well it’s a big day for the old man,” butts in a third.
“How’d you mean?” asks the second.
“His wife will be here today,” I say.
Heavy footsteps sound from the steel mezzanine floor above our heads. I turn forward again as the firefighters readjust their posture, spines straightening, chests expanding an extra inch. The chief appears in front of us. The skin on his neck, now freshly shaven, is crimson, potted with razor burn. A pair of reading glasses perched at the end of his nose make his eyes appear sunken. He has aged since yesterday.
He claps his hands together. “We can skip the ceremony for now, boys. There’ll be plenty of that later.” The others relax a little. A few hands make their way into pockets. But I stay standing at attention for a moment. I discover myself clinging to the formality of our morning ritual. I know I am supposed to have cherished our moments together in the tower the most, but the real excitement for me was always playing out our little roles in public. The past two years, the chief and I have made a home together in the anonymity of duty and rank, instilling our daily motions with a quiet, yet shared enchantment. But now that the tower is due to be dispatched, it’s unclear what will become of our lives out here. “I said, at ease,” he repeats, peering back down at his clipboard. His commands play out across my body like muscle memory, though today I find no joy in my obedience. “Treat this like a normal station visit. Evans — you clean upstairs. Throw away whatever smells in that fridge. Hussein, Marshall, Butler — you’re on engines. O’Connor — sort out the yard and get the stalls out of the store. And the rest of you… look busy.”
I help O’Connor with the tables. Though he doesn’t really need my assistance, he ingratiates me, offering one end of each as we carry them out to the entrance. As we arrange the stalls by the entrance, the wind picks up, so I secure the piles of fire safety leaflets with pebbles gathered from the yard. Just as I finish with the last table, I hear the rumbling of the crane approaching. It appears at the gate, with two men in high-visibility jackets walking alongside it, like horses towing a barge. Brandishing its steel wrecking ball as if it is something indecent, the crane rivals the drill tower in stature. I try not to make eye contact with the men as they circle the base. One of them tries the door. It doesn’t budge.
The chief appears shortly and begins to talk in quiet tones with the men. They gesture up at the tower, demonstrating their intentions for the structure with their hands. One of them says something that makes the chief pause and look back towards the station, before nodding. The chief pats his pockets in exaggerated motions before turning on the spot and marching in my direction.
“They need to check the interior before they start,” he says, blankly. “Show the men inside so that they can check if anything might be left inside.”
“If anything might be left inside?”
My mind leaps between the words in search of something as I fumble with the padlocks. I can never remember which of the two corresponds to my key and which to the chief’s. The first lock crunches as the mechanism rejects my entry but the second surrenders itself and the door falls inwards. The demolition men follow closely behind me as I step into the building. It is much smaller inside this morning. There is no poetry to its interior, only the gloom of four dimly lit corners.
“This place must’ve been here since the 80s, 70s even,” says one of the men.
“50s,” I reply.
I pick up two pillows and carry them outside. They hang limp in my hands, like dead rabbits. I throw them at the feet of the chief, nonchalantly, though I could have put them anywhere else. A little red dust puffs up as the fabric hits the ground, and slowly settles on the cuffs of his trousers. He looks down, his face inscrutable, before grasping the material of his trousers and shaking off the dust.
“Do you need a hand taking this rubbish out boys?” he shouts.
“Aye” the word emanating as a chorus from the tower, individual voices indistinguishable from the echoes which they produce.
The items are brought down one by one and laid out across the yard with the precision of an archaeological excavation. There is more than I remember — chairs, bedding, milk crates, a radio, empty cans and bottles — and some of it new to me — piles of magazines and newspapers. All of it is tinted adobe red.
“Not yours?” one of the demolition men says, kneeling down to lift a corner of a sleeping bag.
“Homeless probably,” I reply, looking up at the chief expectantly, waiting for him to agree. He screws up his face and grinds his teeth, but doesn’t say anything. Behind me, I sense a rustle of activity and I turn to see the other firefighters looking on at us from the station door, uninterested by the miscellany of objects scattered across the yard. “C’mon boys,” orders the chief. “Let’s get this into the rubbish before everybody arrives.”
I watch as the various articles are stuffed into black plastic bags and piled up unceremoniously against the bins. The bent leg of a chair protrudes from the wreckage as if it is waving farewell.
The chief puts out his cigarette in the ashtray, and leans back on his chair. It is a few months prior, nearly 9pm, and the tower is plunged in total darkness, spare the glowing orange tips of our cigarettes.
“You live up on the estate?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’re in the old town?”
“Do you like it there?” ignoring me.
“The buildings are ugly. They don’t look like they’re part of the rest of the town, but they also don’t look new.”
“It’s the tiny windows.”
“The windows are tiny.”
“A lot of them are old right-to-buy houses. There’s a little social housing left, though most of it’s in pretty bad shape these days. The ones up on the cragg are bloody unsafe too. We had an officer go over recently, and half of them aren’t fit to live in.” I have always noticed how the chief begins a conversation so generously with questions, but ends up doing most of the talking. As I have come to expect, he does little to temper his tone for our one-on-one setting. It irritates me how he speaks as if the other firefighters are in the room, the world beyond the tower impinging on our time here, uninvited.
“You’re in the old town?” I ask again.
The question is disarming. “Aye.”
“Have you and your wife always lived there?”
He nods, batting the question away more than answering it. “Old houses have their troubles too,” he continues. “Breezy, full of mice. A lot of upkeep.”
“You don’t have kids though?”
The chief narrows his eyes. He pulls out another cigarette and lights it, illuminating his lips. “You know I’ve never had to do a proper ladder rescue from a height.” He points to the floor. “I’ve dealt with plenty of kitchen fires, little incidents, all the rest of it. But entering a full-on inferno, five stories up like we are now, scares the daylights out of me.” The strap of the chief’s vest falls down his shoulder a little. He reaches out and paws at my wrist. I open my hand out and he takes it, three fingers and a thumb. “The right weather conditions,” he explains again, “and it can accelerate a blaze at this height. A gusty day and you’ll get wind-driven fires—”
“When it comes to it, I’m sure you’ll be just fine, chief,” I interrupt. He recoils from my remark, screws up his face. Discarding the freshly lit cigarette, he pulls his overshirt on. “I better go.” As he descends the staircase, I stare at the empty seat, the chief’s body leaving an impression in the dust.
The rest of the morning, the chief can be heard bawling instructions from his office. He directs them to us as a collective like rhetorical questions. At one point, he comes downstairs to ask one of the firefighters to give the mayor a tour of the station, but moments later abandons the idea, declaring in a huff that the task has been forced upon him. Hussein offered twice.
I silently help the others wash the engines. Chamois squeaks against metal. I rediscover the banality in these tasks now that they are mere work and nothing more. No longer harbouring any tenderness — any promise of the chief’s affections — the motions become automatic. They don’t belong to me. I begin to wonder if I’ve made the whole thing up, not the time we spent together in the tower, but our lives outside. I had always believed that there was something more than those precious few evenings we spent unfurling one another in the dust. Perhaps we have just been doing our jobs all along.
We are barely finished before town folk gather outside of the station. The crowd approaches as one homogenous mass, like a cloud blown off the moors, though they are a mixed bunch. Some appear in their Sunday best. Others come clad in football shirts, clutching cans. People bicker and jest with the nervous excitement of a wedding, quickly spilling into the interior of the station. The firefighters pair off with their wives, making bashful hellos at little children, who are in turn flustered at the sight of their fathers on the job. The mayor paces slowly through the crowd, weighed down by the heft of her ceremonial garb. She holds onto the feather in her hat to stop it fluttering in the wind as Hussein waits patiently out front, giving the tour after all.
Behind me, I hear a small commotion. The chief is standing several paces away from his wife who looks on unimpressed. He brushes himself down frantically, like he is trying to shake off an insect. “Darling,” says the wife, “you look fine.” She is handsome, though she looks a lot older than the chief. Her hair is greyer than his, short, fixed neatly behind her ears.
“This bloody dust. It’s all over me,” the chief grunts.
I step forward. “I wouldn’t worry, chief. We’ll all be covered in it soon.”
“Chief?” the wife smirks. “Do you make them all call you that?”
He ignores me. Instead, he looks over at his wife, but her amusement only perturbs him further. I too find myself frustrated at her demeanour. “Is the mayor here already?” he asks.
“She’s been here a while,” I state, hastily answering on her behalf.
“For crying out loud,” the chief says. “I’m going to put on a clean shirt.”
“You’ll be great,” says the wife, a hint of condescension audible in her voice as she pulls him into a brief embrace. They hold each other for a moment before he pushes past me and wades through the crowd and up the stairs. We both wince as his hurried footsteps ring out through the metal landing of the mezzanine, the whole thing rattling like a tambourine, prompting a small cheer from the crowd.
The wife looks at me. “I don’t know why he’s so worried. He’s always covered in that stuff.” She looks me up and down. “Quite the turnout for your little tower.”
“It feels like a public hanging.”
“Still,” she chuckles, “it’ll freshen up the view, having it gone.”
“I think it looks noble.”
“I suppose you’ve spent a great deal more time up there than me.”
I nod and glance up at the empty windows of the tower. It feels as if it is gone already. Nothing to be rescued here anymore. A gust of wind swoops through the gathering, blowing a few coat hoods and scarves awry as the chief reappears in front of the crowd. His overshirt is slightly unbuttoned, revealing a white vest beneath. The pristine-ironed fabric fresh out of the drawer divides his broad torso into even portions along the fold lines.
“Today,” he announces, “we are here to say adieu.” A few sniggers ripple through the crowd. “She may not be much to look at. But our old faithful has put in a good shift, these last seventy-something years.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself!” somebody yells from the back, and the crowd erupts in laughter. I hear his wife stifling a giggle beside me. But the chief’s expression immediately sours. He scans the faces, in search of the culprit.
“Well,” his face stoney, “I suppose it shan’t be missed. What more is there to say than that?” He turns to the demolition men. “I’ll let you get on with the show.” The crowd cheers but the chief looks quietly deflated. One of the men starts the crane. The engine rumbles deep as it turns over and the vehicle lurches into motion. It approaches the tower and slowly raises its wrecking ball like a lumberjack about to split a log. The chief steps aside and busies himself once again patting down his now-clean uniform. Looking at him in front of all these people, thumping away at his trousers, I realise for the first time how awkward the chief really is. Where I had seen confidence and command, his mannerisms appear to others ungainly, his speech cumbersome.
“Do you smoke?” the wife asks.
“Sure.”
As she passes me a cigarette, I notice the trace of four faint red fingerprints on her jacket, three fingers and a thumb. I light the cigarette using my own lighter, and through the cloud of smoke, I see a pair of eyes. The chief is looking at me, really looking at me, for the first time today. It is like pulling off a pair of sunglasses and seeing daylight afresh, the kind of look that shrinks a person in seconds. He looks ashamed. But I can only smile back. Here we are, in plain sight, where silently the two of us reside together.
There is a scream from behind me. Shouts of “stop the crane!” hocket across the yard. Outstretched hands reach up to the tower like it is offering them gifts. The chief follows the pointing fingers up to the top window of the tower and gasps with astonishment. Dark black plumes of smoke bellow from the cavity inside. From the lowest window, a lick of flame spits at the crowd, taunting us, and quickly several fingers of fire start to dance away at the window above. The tower begins to expel smoke from all five of its windows and gradually the entire structure is engulfed in flames. The wind beats hard against the empty window frames, carrying the smoke off onto the moors. Everybody watches on in silence. Everybody except for me. I am still looking at the chief, my chief, blotted out black against the infernal drill tower that looms beyond him, as real as can be.
