The Explosion Seekers

My elder brother, Tom, and I share a bedroom at the rear of our parents’ house in a suburb of a northern city. He recently celebrated his eighteenth birthday, and as he goes through life you’ll find me hanging on to his shirt tails, always two years behind. I’ve occasionally worn those shirt tails as hand-me-downs, as we’re not an affluent family.

Tom and I are very close, and while our personalities are similar, he’s a conscientious soul with a more caring nature than me. He demonstrated that trait one icy morning when he was fourteen. Tom had climbed from his bed, and he dressed to brave the cold on his daily paper round. We’d had a row the previous night when I accused him of cheating at Cluedo, so we weren’t on the best of terms. As he shivered into his jeans, I goaded him mercilessly from the snug warmth of my bed, but he took it in good humour. He showed no hard feelings over those taunts later that morning when we shared a box of Bakewell tarts he’d stolen from the newsagent’s, and we ate three each on the way to school.

I tell that anecdote to demonstrate the strength of our sibling bond because it would be tested to its limit following an accident in which he suffered terrible injuries and for which I feel responsible.

There was a well-attended disco every Thursday night at St Mark’s church hall on our housing estate. At one such event, when neither Tom nor I were present, a boy called Harris surreptitiously explored parts of the building that were off-limits in search of plunder. Pickings were slim, but he did steal a box from a store cupboard that contained three aerosol cans of furniture polish.

You might consider three cans of spray polish a worthless haul, but Harris took them because at the time, kids in the area were getting their kicks by throwing aerosol cans onto fires to watch them explode. For its duration, the craze affected parents from all over the estate. Cans of air freshener went AWOL from bathrooms, mothers appeared in public with unlacquered hair, and dads pulled on clean shirts with their underarms bereft of deodorant. It was a mystery worthy of investigation by Poirot himself.

Harris knew that aerosols only part-full made more of a pop than an explosion because of the air inside. He figured that the combustion of the pressurised liquid in these full cans would replicate a scene from Apocalypse Now, and the perfect opportunity to detonate them was fast approaching.

November 5th is Guy Fawkes night in England. The natives set off fireworks, and light bonfires to mark the thwarting of the so-called Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Over the preceding weeks, Tom and I had assisted local urchins in gathering wood, which we piled up to make an enormous bonfire, topped with an effigy of the man whose undoing we were to celebrate.

As the bonfire roared and fireworks exploded, those enjoying the spectacle could be classified into three groups: excited children, cocksure teenagers, and mindful adults. Those last included Harvey Parkin’s dad, who held a cardboard box filled with potatoes wrapped in baking foil, which he tossed individually into the fire to bake in the embers.

I sat alongside Harvey Parkin and Harris on a wall behind which we’d stashed the box of aerosols. Our simple version of the gunpowder plot was to wait until interest in the fire had waned, then throw the aerosols into the embers.

As the starbursts above our heads petered out and the bonfire collapsed, participants started to depart, leaving only a few hungry stalwarts holding out for baked potatoes. Parkin Senior went indoors to retrieve his cigarettes, and the fire was all-but unattended.

“This is our chance,” Harris said. He handed an aerosol each to Harvey and me and grabbed one himself. With no adults supervising, we threw the cans into the flames and stepped back to watch developments. I took three cigarettes from a packet and gave one each to Harris and Harvey, and we laughed in excited anticipation. As I leaned forward to get a light from Harvey’s match, my peripheral vision picked up a figure moving toward the fire. I turned to see Tom on his hunkers, attempting to retrieve a potato from the embers with a stick.

The warning cry I yelled came too late, and one of the cans exploded as Tom faced it directly. Cries of alarm rang out as Tom was engulfed in flames, and he let out a sickening high-pitched screech that matched anything a firework could offer. He stumbled back from the inferno and fell to the ground, where he writhed, screaming with his hair ablaze. One of the adults had provided a bucket of water in case of emergencies. I grabbed it and threw the contents over Tom’s face just as a second can exploded in the fire. By the light of the fireball, I saw that Tom’s skin had peeled in the area around his cheekbone. I ran away in fright.

I looked on, terrified from a distance, as Harvey’s dad hurried toward the chaos. I could hear him barking out orders for wet towels and cold water. He and Harris pulled Tom to his feet and took him to the former’s car. I trembled as I watched the slow-moving trio, momentarily silhouetted against the vivid red and yellow fireball of the final exploding can. The sound of my brother crying out in agony broke my heart.

When I got home, I learned that someone had called with news of the accident, and Dad had rushed to the hospital. I went to the toilet to be sick, and tears flowed as the gravity of what I had caused hit me. Apart from what I’d done to Tom, Dad was frantic with worry at the burns ward of the city hospital, and my mother fought back tears as she comforted rather than berated her sobbing, penitent son.

And that’s how it was when Tom came home from hospital three days later, and how it will be for evermore. He must bear the physical pain of what happened, and I carry the mental anguish of having caused it.

True to form, Tom adapted to his life-changing injuries better than I coped with my part in the tragedy, and he bore me no more ill will than he did that morning when I teased him from my bed.

Six months after the accident, I told Tom I was still struggling with guilt. He urged me not to think that way. He reminded me how one of the rifles used by firing squads was said to be loaded with a blank rather than live ammunition so that none of the men could state with absolute certainty that they had shot a fellow human being.

“You don’t know that I was burned by the can you threw into the fire,” he said, “it was a one-in-three chance, so the odds are in favour of it not being yours. You have to adopt a positive attitude and move on, Paul.” It was the smallest comfort crumb, but I took it, and we moved on together as a family. Gradually, my parents came to terms with Tom’s injuries, and my brave and thoroughly decent brother almost reverted to his old fun-loving self.

One Sunday afternoon, Tom and I were sitting at the dining table. Dad was at the pub, and Mum prepared lunch. The radio in the kitchen played If I Could Turn Back Time by Cher. I listened and pondered, and Tom picked up on my silence.

“Are you wishing you could?” he said. Boy, he was astute.

“If only,” I said. “Just give me five lousy seconds to warn you not to approach the fire, and all the wretched pain we’ve suffered doesn’t happen.”

“It would be nice to turn back time,” he said, “but we can’t. We are where we are, so that jolly old jape of last Guy Fawkes night is a fact of life that will live long in the memory.” I admired him for making light of the tragedy and calling our family disaster, in which he played the leading role, a jolly old jape. Self-depreciation is par for the course for Tom, who often uses words ironically, sometimes to the point of irritation.

For example, one Saturday morning, I was still in bed when he came into the room after Dad had taken him to an appointment at the clinic. I asked what the weather was like, as I’d arranged a cricket game with friends for that afternoon.

“Oh, it’s glorious,” he said. I took that to mean it wasn’t very nice out, and sure enough, rain was coming down in buckets. Another time, Dad’s new car broke down the day after he’d bought it, and Tom called it an astute purchase. I tell you, Tom gets a real kick out of the irony thing.

A word he regularly uses that way is gorgeous, and he’ll drop it into the conversation at any given opportunity.

I once came home after having a fight at school, and he said I’d have a gorgeous black eye by supper time. And when a taxi I’d booked to take Tom to a hospital appointment didn’t arrive, he called it “a gorgeous state of affairs.” He started using the word soon after he’d read The Catcher in the Rye, so I assume that’s where he picked it up.

At home after Tom’s eighteenth birthday party, we lay in our beds, reading and talking until late. Tom told me how Jenny, his new girlfriend, is gorgeous in the true sense of the word. I agreed although I had her down as plain-looking with lank hair and a chipped front tooth; gorgeous like my black eye.

As tiredness overtook us, we talked less and read more. Tom began snoring softly, and his book fell to the floor. I reached down, picked it up, and laid it on the small table that separated our beds. As I pressed it flat, I felt the tiny bumps on the pages beneath my fingertips.