Joe Belton knew one thing: life only gets worse. So can he really be getting visions from God?
When you get dragged towards faith your life changes. So much you thought you’d buried comes back at you. And that hurts.
Haunted by the memories of the beautiful girl who died long ago, Joe heads home to gate-crash a school reunion. There's one thing he badly needs to know: how his childhood love really died.
He's got God-given confidence, but tensions from his school days kick in fast - and the bullies are no longer little kids. Mick and Sean know how to damage people, and they’re all after the same woman.
It's a time of conflict and agonising suspense. If Joe is to survive, this broken man from the bottom of society must finally stand up for himself.
Can he uncover the darkest truth from all those years ago?
Will the miracle of love heal everything?
Or will there be another fire?
AFTER THE FIRE combines ancient blood feuds, seductions, longings for past love, and the sunlight of childhood.
It’s a gritty, character-filled quest for redemption; a dramatic mystery that will affect anyone who has loved and lost.
Joe Belton knew one thing: life only gets worse. So can he really be getting visions from God?
When you get dragged towards faith your life changes. So much you thought you’d buried comes back at you. And that hurts.
Haunted by the memories of the beautiful girl who died long ago, Joe heads home to gate-crash a school reunion. There's one thing he badly needs to know: how his childhood love really died.
He's got God-given confidence, but tensions from his school days kick in fast - and the bullies are no longer little kids. Mick and Sean know how to damage people, and they’re all after the same woman.
It's a time of conflict and agonising suspense. If Joe is to survive, this broken man from the bottom of society must finally stand up for himself.
Can he uncover the darkest truth from all those years ago?
Will the miracle of love heal everything?
Or will there be another fire?
AFTER THE FIRE combines ancient blood feuds, seductions, longings for past love, and the sunlight of childhood.
It’s a gritty, character-filled quest for redemption; a dramatic mystery that will affect anyone who has loved and lost.
Grimsby, ages ago
Being kissed by Suzanne Devlin was the best thing that would happen to Joe Belton for nearly fifty years. He didn’t realise this at the time because how could he? Does anyone think much beyond the next day or two when they’re ten? Oh, you might long for Christmas, or for snow, but Suzanne kissed Joe on a warm dinnertime in the first truly sunny week of March. The snow had melted into slush a month before and Christmas was impossibly far off whichever way you looked at it.
This dinnertime Joe was flying through the low hills at the back of the playground. He was alight with the thrill of the hunt, hearing the first notes of the delicious theme that obsesses, delights, and ruins so many people over their lives. Kiss Chase was his favourite game, and it had been for a week now. It was simple enough: the boys chased the girls. If they caught them, they could kiss them on the cheek, more daringly on the lips. Joe was an outsider, uninterested in most of the other children for most of the time, but he wanted to play this game, and for once they let him.
At this minute the excitement was high. Because the real magic, the treasure that jolted Joe’s stomach with pleasure, was that sometimes the game switched round and the girls chased the boys. This was gold, because if a girl chased you that meant something. And this playtime Joe was being chased by Suzanne Devlin.
Like every boy, Joe was in love with Suzanne, and he had been all year. She was the prettiest, everyone knew that, and she was too pretty for Joe. If he saw her in the school corridor, he walked the other way. Once she asked him if he had seen her friend Corinne and he shook his head and blushed dark red, for which Sean Garner and Michael Bluff had mocked him for days. Yet when he was walking home, or watching telly waiting for his tea, or shivering in his bath before bed, he escaped into daydreams. In those dreams he was the only one who realised she had been kidnapped, so it came to him to rescue her. Sometimes he scored winning goals while she watched. Sometimes he simply walked up to her and took hold of her hand.
So today he was on fire. First the thing on the bus. Then Kiss Chase. A great day, and it made him bold. Rather than escaping, he slowed as cleverly as he could so Suzanne could catch him without realising he was letting her – and then her hands were on his arm, and she had him and she was pulling him toward her.
He froze, waiting in a glorious terror …
For Suzanne the playground was an ever-changing adventure. One week everyone would be skipping. Ropes made of knicker elastic or hundreds of rubber bands swarmed across the tarmac. Another week they’d all be singing. The winter she was six her best friend Corinne Ayr taught her the whole of the song ‘Two Little Boys’. They stood in the playground by the railings, and line-by-line Suzanne got hold of the words. Then it might be hopscotch. You’d find a chunk of chalk, mark out the squares, and use the chalk as a marker as you hopped and jumped up and back down the grid. Some girls spent hours playing at horses, skipping round and pretending to hold reins. Some stood and talked all they could. That was Suzanne. In those first few years at school it was so exciting to talk to each other. You’d get up early on school days because you couldn’t wait to be there, you’d be excited to see your friends walking up the road, and when you got chance you’d laugh for a whole playtime.
The boys were different. Suzanne watched them sometimes. They didn’t do so much talking. They did more shouting. Spent more time in motion. Sean Garner would get his gang going, and they’d start a war. Soon all the boys and half the girls would be involved every playtime in a battle that ebbed and flowed round the old Victorian school buildings for a day or two. The biggest crime you could commit was not taking your shots. If someone bren-gunned you and they got you fair and square, you had to die – and you couldn’t lie down for a moment and then jump up, you had to do it properly.
Suzanne understood war because singing ‘Two Little Boys’ so many times had shown her what happened. It was sad, and heroic, and about being the best friends you could be, helping each other through to the end, whatever went wrong. You did have to watch Sean Garner and his friends though. Sometimes while you were talking, or singing, in your group, and you thought the boys were off somewhere shouting and fighting, they surprised you by running in and lifting up your skirts.
It wasn’t all one way. Helen Lacey flashed her knickers at the boys, and there were stories she once even took them off in the field of dock leaves next to the school. Suzanne’s mum sucked hard on her cigarette when Suzanne told her that and said Helen needed a good slap. Suzanne nodded, yes, she did, but Helen’s family weren’t around much and when they were, they were loud and rude and worried about running their hardware shop. Suzanne understood why Helen did that – it was a very exciting idea – but Suzanne knew it was wrong. Besides, if she ever felt like that, there would be far better ways to get what she wanted.
Suzanne had her first boyfriend around then. A Londoner called Glen. As an outsider, a southerner, he was exotic, his family somehow washing up in this remote northern fishing town. He was also the sweetest, kindest boy Suzanne had ever met. When he was around her, she felt better. He clearly felt the same about her.
They were six, so their entire relationship was a set of five-minute moments stripped across one autumn of infant school. Every morning the class had to line up in pairs before assembly. That involved each pair holding hands. Then one day Suzanne realised she was different. The custom was for the boys to walk hand in hand with boys, girls with girls. Glen didn’t go along with this. He’d find her and take her hand and hold it as the class walked in pairs out of the classroom, along the corridor, into assembly. They never talked – Suzanne couldn’t remember ever having a single conversation with him – but they didn’t need to, because there was nothing which couldn’t be said by holding hands. She knew she was very special to him, and he was certainly very special to her. Over that autumn, she became sure that the one thing she could rely on was holding hands with Glen.
When she came back after the Christmas holiday Glen wasn’t there. No-one knew where he was. This hurt, a lot. She cried, and her mum couldn’t comfort her. She eventually found out his dad had got a new job in Boston, forty-five miles away in South Lincolnshire, and the entire family had moved down there on Christmas Eve. Suzanne never saw Glen again, but the faint, growing ever fainter, memory of how it felt to hold his hand and walk into assembly with him beside her always warmed her, no matter what else was happening in her life.
This didn’t do her good. From then on, in all the boys she liked, she would always be searching for uncatchable echoes of Glen.
Suzanne didn’t notice Joe in those first years at school, but when they were eight their mothers ended up working together as telephonists in the hospital, and that made the first connection. Suzanne would walk home through the hospital grounds after school and wait outside the main door for her mum to finish work. If she was early, Suzanne could go into the switchboard room. She’d find a stool and watch the cigarette smoke drift through the shafts of sunlight. Mary and Janet, Joe’s mum, spent their days in there, chain-smoking Players Number 6, cackling at each other’s jokes, commiserating over each other’s problems, while plugging and unplugging a fiendish nest of cables into the giant dark wood plugboard which flashed and buzzed and filled the side wall of the little room.
One afternoon Suzanne came in and saw the mood was different. Janet was crying. Her mum had her arm round her and was doing her best to comfort her. Janet had a suitcase next to her and Suzanne’s mum caught her looking, so she took her out and gave her some pop and a biscuit. She told her Joe’s mum was having problems at home, and they didn’t have enough money, and Joe’s dad sometimes wasn’t very nice to her, but it would be alright – and then, feeling guilty at having said too much, she swore Suzanne to secrecy. Suzanne wasn’t to say anything at school because poor Joe had it hard enough already.
That intrigued Suzanne because it hadn’t occurred to her that Joe was poor anything. She thought he just liked being on his own.
After that she kept half an eye on him. She’d notice him, on his own by the fence, or playing with toy cars in the mud. Reading an American comic as he walked to school. On the edge of one group or another, smiling too much, not sure what to say. Even at their age Suzanne knew there was something about his pale face and his grubby mustard-coloured cardigan which set him aside, which made him forgettable to most. She noticed when he got caught for stealing from the tuck shop at the Christmas Fair, and she was sitting nearby when he explained the secret about burgling his uncle had told the night before.
A little crowd had gathered, and he talked fast, thrilled to be in the spotlight: you could get into a house so easily. First off, you stick a rubber sucker on a back window. Then you scrape a circle on the glass with a diamond ring and tap the window with a hammer. The glass circle breaks out of the glass of the window. The sucker on the glass stops the glass falling and so there’s no noise. You pull the circle out with the sucker, and put your arm through the hole to open the window catch…
Suzanne noticed people had stopped listening, which she thought was strange, because it sounded pretty interesting to her. Joe realised his audience was slipping away and talked louder, doing his best to hook them back in.
The problem was, he explained, if the police found you walking down the street with a sucker in your pocket and hammer in your bag and a diamond ring on your finger, they might guess you were going to burgle somewhere. The real trick was – and Suzanne never forget how pleased Joe was with his clever uncle – to forget about carrying any sucker or hammer. When it came to it, you’d use a rock you could find in the back garden of the house, and you’d put your lips up against the glass, like this, suck the glass with your own mouth, like this, and it would come out fine …
She wanted to clap, but by now almost everyone else had gone. She felt sad that they had left him, but she did understand the impulse. There was something about Joe that meant, even when he was telling a wonderful story, it was hard to be around him. Sometimes she’d find him staring at her. He’d look away, and pretend he was looking somewhere else, but it still made her uncomfortable. And then, even when she heard him speaking to other people, he didn’t get it right. When people were listening to him it seemed like he was showing off, but he didn’t seem to believe in what he was showing off. It was always the same. After a while everything Joe said flew off somewhere, went past your ears without ever bothering them. What he said didn’t count because of his dirty clothes, because of the way his hair stood out, because he was made to be ignored.
Nevertheless, Joe’s story, and what her mother said, had hooked her a little. Suzanne was usually surrounded by a laughing crowd, so it bothered her how he could be so alone. It made her curious, sometimes even envious, so, over the next year or so, whenever she was bored, she’d check on Joe. She was always disappointed that he didn’t do much. He’d keep silent in class, stay on the edges of the playground, walk home alone. He’d always be reading. And then he started to draw. Every chance he got he’d draw spaceships, goblins, wizards, aliens. The teachers told him it was rubbish, and he should draw proper things, which annoyed her, but even so, she never saw how, or why, she should talk to him.
Then, on that warm March day when they were both ten, there was the bus ride, and the kiss, and things between them changed for ever.
Earlier that morning, just like every Wednesday, the entire school had climbed into three double-decker buses and gone the half mile from the school playground to the local swimming baths. The drive took ten minutes, but the noise was always epic. It might be songs they’d learned at scout camp, or songs the older kids had taught them, but the best times were when Michael Bluff stood up at the front of the bus, punched the air with his black and white Grimsby Town FC scarf tied round his wrist, and led the chant in the standards they sang down the Pontoon on a Saturday afternoon:
G R I
M-S B Y
Grimsby’s the pride of the Humberside
The whole bus roared into this, even Joe, and for a few minutes it was eighty children chanting as one, in a way the drivers hated, but could never silence, no matter how much they bellowed over their shoulders.
Na na nah, na na na
Na na nah, na na na na
Na na nah, na na na
We are the Grimsby
Boot Boys
This morning, Suzanne and Corinne were sitting a few rows behind Joe on the top deck, when the bus stopped at roadworks. Out of nowhere Joe got up in his seat and started banging on the window, looking at something below them. The boys around him saw this, but most of them rolled their eyes and carried on with what they were doing.
Until he started shouting, ‘Dad! Dad! Up here. Dad!’
The kids nearby broke off from singing and scrambled over to see what was there, then Sean Garner fell about pointing and laughing.
Corinne looked out the window. ‘That’s never his dad.’
Suzanne couldn’t see. ‘Why?’
‘He looks like my grandpa’.
Suzanne got up and looked down past Corinne. Two old men stood in a hole in the road. One of them used a pneumatic drill while the other shovelled the debris. Unshaven, in dirty donkey jackets, they were grey, lined, hollowed out by years of hard work.
Up ahead Joe was frantic, banging louder on the glass.
‘Dad! Dad! I’m up here. Look up here.’
The men weren’t looking up; banging on the window wasn’t loud enough to get above the sound of the road drill. Joe broke off to look round the top deck at the other children. Suzanne saw how his face was messy with joy and pride.
‘That’s my dad down there!’
The kids round him broke off singing long enough to sneer at him, ‘He’s a road digger!’
Joe looked round them and saw the contempt. The light in his face collapsed in on itself, and Suzanne couldn’t stand it.
When the bus moved off past the traffic lights and they got past the road works and the other kids had turned back to what they were doing, Suzanne got up and walked over to Joe.
He looked up, startled.
‘Budge up.’
He obliged, alarmed, and she sat next to him, ignoring the ‘Wooh’s from the kids around her. She looked at him properly, for what was probably the first time in her life. He dropped his eyes. She could tell she terrified him, and that flattered her, but it also touched her. She realised he had a sweet face.
She was genuinely curious. ‘Was that really your dad?’
‘Yeah. So?’
Suzanne shrugged. ‘He looks like a fine man.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Digging the roads looks hard. Does it make him tired?’
‘He’s alright. He gets a bit mardy sometimes,’ she said.
‘So does my dad. And he never says owt. He never speaks to me or mam. And him and our Malcolm are always off down his lockup. They never invite me.’
Not used to a flow of conversation aimed at him, Joe didn’t know what to say. He smiled a snaggle-toothed smile, which touched her even more.
‘Anyway. I wanted to tell you that.’
He nodded.
‘What’s his name?’ she said.
‘Eddie.’
‘Mine’s called Bill.’
He nodded again and looked out the window. The conversation had ended.
Suzanne went back to her seat.
Corinne was alive to this amazing breaking of protocol. ‘What did he say? Was he upset? What’s he like?’
‘He’s alright. Normal, you know.’
That wasn’t what Corinne had wanted to hear, and she switched her attention to the front of the bus.
‘Look at Michael!’
Michael Bluff was standing on his head on the front seat, his legs splayed, and his feet braced against the roof. The bus lurched on the kerb and then turned sharp right as it pulled into the swimming baths car park, but Michael kept it going around the corner, finally toppling forward over the back of a chair, ending up on his feet for applause like a circus acrobat.
Corinne clapped and cheered him with the rest of the lads, but Suzanne was looking at Joe sitting on his own, with his ratty hair, in his dirty blue anorak and his mustard cardigan. Same old, annoying old, Joe. For a moment she had a pure sense of him. It was overwhelming, as though she could see through to something more real. She knew for certain he was someone, there, living, and alive, and she loved him. It made no sense. She’d worked out what it would be like to be in love with your boyfriend, and what she was feeling right now for Joe was something else. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She realised she desperately wanted to help him. To give him something. She didn’t know what.
So, later that day, after swimming, in the playground at dinnertime, out of all the boys Suzanne could chase – and she loved to chase the boys just as much as the boys loved to be chased by her – she chased Joe.
It didn’t surprise her when she caught him. She was beginning to realise she always caught the boys she chased.
Held by her, Joe stopped running and twisted round, pretending to wriggle free, as she pulled him round and leaned in. He saw the freckles on her cheeks, and her eyes blur as they came so close. He caught the smell of Bazooka Joe; and then she kissed him. Her lips were softer than he had expected, and her mouth was open. He felt a flash of foolishness. He’d had his lips pursed like he was going to kiss his mam, but she was kissing him like he’d seen grown-ups do in films, with her mouth open, with something that felt like hunger.
She kissed him, and he felt his body liquify, like he was plunging over distant water, like his heart and his mind were reaching out to the sky far, far above.
Then she was backing away from him, pulling a strand of her long dark hair out of her mouth, grinning as always — yet for all her energy and laughter she was a hint less confident, even a little confused. He looked back on that moment many, many times over the following years, wondering why that could have happened. It always felt to him that something in the kiss had surprised her.
She turned and ran. He watched her as she went. And saw to his wonder how, when she got back to her friends, she turned away from their conversation to look back at him. She locked eyes with him for a long moment across the playground, until he had to break it off, overcome by the knowledge of her.
All that day his heart was the size of the sun, and that massive heart soaked up the happiness of being alive. He felt tall, and proud, and brave, and complete, like he was a proper person who would have friends and walk tall and take part in the world. She washed away all that held him back, all that made him scared and weak. He felt filled by light and knew total, self-sacrificing love for her.
All this, from one moment in a long life. But this glimpse of light formed him. Elevated him. Oriented him. So, even though he was only ten when they kissed, through all the dark times in his later years it was never a surprise whenever he found her living still in him.
Suzanne never did become Joe’s girlfriend, and in many ways that kiss was the closest they ever got. They were still too young, and it would take another couple of years for those first boyfriend/girlfriend relationships to bud. What’s more, a year later, Eddie died in bed. It was a quick end for Eddie, but the family was never the same. Janet was smoking next to him when it began, looking at the new Grattan’s catalogue. By the time it finished she was screaming blue murder in the bathroom.
Joe surprised Janet, and himself, by crying for three days solid. The shock turned him in on himself far more than he ever had been. Janet wasn’t available to help. She had fought with Eddie every day of their marriage and had always fantasised of being free of him. Now it had happened, she had no more purpose. They had married when she was 17; he was all she had known, and the scrapping was part of her. His death took a vital part of her confidence, and she diminished from then on, growing hollow and frustrated.
The fact Joe and Suzanne didn’t connect also had much to do with Suzanne. She was always friendly to Joe, and cared what happened to him, but the minor curiosity and tenderness she felt for him could never be enough when she had so much else calling for her attention. Though she wasn’t unkind, she had her own needs, and there was far too much to do in the world besides be patient with Joe. That didn’t hurt him as much as he expected, because he never for a moment thought he deserved love from someone so alive as her. For Joe’s part, he was happy enough to be around her: unrequited love was better than no love.
So he stood by and watched her as they went through the rest of their time at school. He understood when she was sad, was happy when she did well. He managed to be pleased for her when she got her first proper boyfriend, and he worried for her later on when she got into a habit of treating boys carelessly. Throughout it all he remained faithful to that moment of the kiss. His overriding feeling through it all was a simple happiness, a glowing joy she existed.
As it turned out, Suzanne died the summer they were eighteen. She was caught, alone, in a fire in the holiday chalet her dad had bought for the family when she was six. The chalet was one of many on a pre-war holiday camp called “The Fitties” at the edge of town. It was a scrappy old thing, made of wood and plasterboard, parched dry by the summer sun, and intensely flammable. It stood away in a corner at the far end of the park, nestling among the sand dunes and the seagrass, and by the time people realised there was a fire the flames were too much. The fire brigade came quickly, but a butane gas canister had exploded in the chalet and it was all far too late.
There was an investigation, but in the absence of any prosecutions the newspapers moved on to Prince Charles and his wedding to “Lady Di”. Yet in the real world, among the grief, some questions wouldn’t go away. Why was she alone out there in the first place? How did the fire start? And why, when it was just a single-story four-room chalet, hadn’t she escaped? The coroner eventually put it down to misadventure, but there were rumours she’d been drinking, and there was enough suspicious about it that the police didn’t let it go until every single avenue was closed.
They questioned her family, Mary, Bill, and her brother Malcolm, and, frustrated by the sombre silence of the men in particular, went hard at them. They questioned the people who said they were friends with her at school, of whom there were many, and they went around her inner circle of close friends, of whom there were surprisingly few, but no-one knew anything.
Eighteen months later the police boxed up Suzanne’s file and put it away, although it nagged away at the investigating officer for the rest of his life. One by one, everyone who knew her moved on.
Except for Joe Belton.
They’d locked him up on remand in Freiston borstal a couple of months before the fire, so he couldn’t be around the town to hear first-hand what happened. When he got back to town eighteen months later, he raged around demanding answers, but did no better than the police. No-one could be bothered to talk to him at the best of times, and now that he was borstal scum few talked to him at all. Plus, by then it was old news, so people who had buried the trauma of Suzanne’s death could use the gap as an excuse not to remember.
Joe realised there was confusion over what had happened to her, but he never did find out the details. Back then there was no internet, people only existed in one time, in one place. You talked to the people in the same room as you, or maybe on the phone. You read the papers, but once you threw them away, that was it. The TV news came and went, and cast a light for a while, but soon vanished in a fog of distance. So, if you weren’t there, on the scene, around people who could be bothered to tell you, you’d never quite find out what happened.
It stopped hurting eventually, but Joe never quite put her behind him. He lived a long life, that went increasingly wrong. It was only when he had walked his own road for further than he could ever have imagined that an intervention from the greatest love of all gave him the chance to go back home and find out what really happened to Suzanne…
Joe Belton begins Philip Gladwin’s After The Fire as a lonesome, scared child. By the second chapter, he is a homeless and drug-addicted adult, living a life of hopelessness on the streets of Brighton, having grown up to be no more than an older and more complicated version of that kid who was bullied at school all those decades ago, in Grimsby. He finds hot food at a church evening course, rediscovers the Faith he had had in childhood, and uncovers his true purpose: to discover how his childhood sweetheart came to be killed in an unlikely fire when she was only a teenager, and Joe was doing time in a juvenile prison.
Gladwin’s writing is solid all throughout the novel. His sentences are simple and precise, and he moves from omniscient narration to his characters’ most intimate thoughts as smoothly as a boxer changes their stance. The end result is an almost perfect melding of the story’s external world and the characters’ internal dialogues, which color the atmospheres of the scenes with their emotions - melancholy, desperation, love, nostalgia. Shallower mystery novels are plot-driven; After The Fire, however, is powered by the changes that occur in the characters, rather than the mission to solve the mystery. The principal change - i.e., the change that sparks all others - is Joe Belton’s return to the Christian faith of his childhood.
The book is unafraid to ask the questions Faith asks of anyone: Is there a God? Can, and should, a person believe in Him/Her/It? Why would a person believe in God?
Not only that, but it is very far removed from the mushiness and over-simplification that often plagues Faith. Joe finds his Faith in the dirt and desperation of alcoholism; to stand by it at the novel’s close requires tremendous sacrifice on his part. In this book, Faith is not a squeaky-clean and clear-cut thing, but a confusing, complicated, and very human, experience. Gladwin deserves serious commendations simply for tackling such large questions, and even greater ones for doing so with the eloquence and understanding that he wields so masterfully. After The Fire works very well as both an exploration of what it means to have Faith and to act upon it, but also as a pure, gut-wrenching thriller.
The book’s focus on the Christian Faith, however, could be an insurmountable obstacle for some readers. Almost everyone who picks up the book will have a relationship with Christianity and its doctrines. Some relationships will be based on contempt for it; others will be based on a preexisting allegiance to it. Both viewpoints could stand between the reader and the pleasure of reading After The Fire, for, obviously, opposite reasons.
For its simple handling of complex questions, however, and for its value as a good story, After The Fire stands apart from the vast majority of thriller novels. While the great G.K. Chesterton did something similar with his Father Brown stories and the wonderful novel The Man Who Was Thursday, there are very few crime or thriller works that make full use of their potential to explore the deep, pervading questions of humanness as After The Fire does. It is a great oversight of the genres’ many geniuses that so few of them, in a literary world so full of murders, reflect so little on what it means to live.