The Bonfire Committee

Key vocabulary

a barn — сарай, амбар

a beam — балка

smoke — дым

a spark — искра

to catch fire — загореться

a fuel can — канистра

straw — солома

a fire engine — пожарная машина

a hose — шланг

to collapse — обрушиться

ash — пепел

a witness — свидетель

to accuse — обвинять

a suspect — подозреваемый

deliberate — умышленный

The Ninth of September

The barn at Haddon Farm had been standing since 1840 and it burned in about forty minutes.

Nora Finnegan saw the first of it at twenty past eight on a Tuesday evening, from the inside, which was a fact she would spend the next two months not explaining to anybody.

She had been coming to the barn since March. It was the sort of place nobody bothered with any more: half of it was full of pallets and broken machinery, and the other half had a dry corner where Ted Rowntree stored straw he never used. Ted had stopped farming properly in 2019. He came to the barn twice a year, in June and December, and the rest of the time it belonged to whoever wanted it, which for six months had meant Nora.

There were three cardboard boxes behind the pallets in the dry corner. They had been in her father’s workshop until April, when her mother had put them in the hall and said, in the flat voice she used for large decisions, that they were going to the tip on Saturday.

They had not gone to the tip on Saturday. Nora had moved them, in two trips, on her bike, with the boxes strapped to the rack, and she had never told anybody, and eighteen months later she still came up here about twice a week to sit on a pallet next to them and not open them.

That was what she was doing when she heard somebody moving about at the far end.

She stood up.

The barn was long and dark and full of shapes. There was one window at the far end with the glass gone, and against it, in the grey light, she could see a figure that was much too small to be Ted Rowntree.

Then there was a sound she did not recognise, a soft hollow whump, like a heavy coat being dropped, and the far end of the barn turned orange.

For about two seconds Nora did not move at all.

She was not proud of those two seconds afterwards. She thought about them a great deal.

Then she was running, and shouting, and the smoke arrived much faster than she had expected. It did not rise. That was the thing nobody tells you. It came along the roof and then it came down the walls and then it was at chest height, and the far end of the barn was a wall of yellow light with black shapes standing in front of it, and the straw was going up in a way that made a noise like heavy rain.

She shouted twice more and got no answer, and afterwards she was never able to say whether that was because there was nobody left to answer or because the fire was simply louder than a human voice, which it was.

She got to the middle of the barn and could not go any further.

—Get out! she shouted. Whoever you are, get out, get out the other side!

She could not tell whether anybody heard her. The noise had become enormous.

She went back the way she had come, with her sleeve over her mouth, and she was outside in the wet grass with her lungs burning before she understood that she had left the boxes ten metres from a fire.

She was still trying to make herself go back in when somebody came round the corner of the barn at a dead run and nearly knocked her over.

It was a boy in a dark jacket with his hood up, and he was carrying a red plastic fuel can in one hand, and he was moving away from the building as fast as anybody can move while carrying twenty litres of anything.

He went eight or nine metres past her, put the can down in the grass, and bent over with his hands on his knees.

Nora stood absolutely still.

She knew who it was. Everybody in Marlow End knew who everybody was, and Ray Abiola had been in her year at school for three years and in her form group for two of them, and she would have recognised him from the back of his head at a hundred metres in fog.

—Ray?

He straightened up. His face was completely blank for a second, the way faces are when a person is doing several things in their head at once.

—Nora, he said.

—What are you doing?

—What are you doing?

They stood in the field looking at each other while the roof of a hundred and eighty year old barn burned behind them.

—There’s a can, Nora said.

—Yeah.

—There’s a fuel can in your hand.

—There was a fuel can in the barn, said Ray, and now there isn’t, which is the entire point of the last thirty seconds.

Something cracked inside the building, very loudly, and a section of the roof went down. The heat arrived across the grass in a wave that made them both step backwards at the same time.

—Have you phoned? she said.

—I phoned from the gate.

—Is there anybody inside?

He looked at her.

It was, she thought afterwards, the strangest half second of her life. He looked at her and she watched him decide something.

—No, he said.

—Ray.

—There is nobody inside, he said again, and this time it came out differently, and he did not look at her while he said it.

The fire engine came from Bakewell and took nineteen minutes, which everybody agreed afterwards was very good going, and it made no difference at all. By the time the hoses were out, the roof was down and the fire had nothing left to do. The crew spent an hour and a half wetting the beams and the pallets and the black steaming heap where the straw had been, and Ted Rowntree stood at the gate in a dressing gown and a waxed jacket and did not say anything to anybody.

Half the village came. That is what happens in a place with four hundred people and one thing happening. They stood along the hedge in coats over pyjamas, and some of them had brought children, and somebody had brought a flask, and the light from the fire moved on all their faces at once and made the whole thing look like something being watched rather than something happening.

Nora and Ray gave their names to a firefighter with a tablet, separately, and then to a police officer, separately, and both of them said the same three things: that they had been walking past, that they had seen the fire start at the far end, and that they had not seen anybody else.

Neither of them heard the other say it. Both of them assumed the worst.

Nora’s mother arrived at half past nine, in her work fleece, having run the last two hundred metres, and held on to Nora’s arm hard enough to leave marks and said nothing about it until they were in the car.

—What were you doing up there? she said.

—Walking.

—At half past eight? In September?

—Yes.

Bridget Finnegan drove down the lane in second gear for a while.

—Nora.

—I was walking, Mum.

She could not say: your husband’s boxes are in that barn, or were, and I have been sitting next to them twice a week for six months because you would not let me keep them in the house. There was no version of that sentence that did not end somewhere terrible, and it was twenty to ten at night, and her hands still smelled of smoke.

So she said nothing, and her mother said nothing, and they drove home like that.

Nora lay in bed that night with the window open and her hands smelling of smoke however many times she washed them, and went through it again.

A shape at the far end of the barn. Too small for Ted. Too small for Ray, who was six foot one and had been in the school basketball team for exactly one season before deciding he did not enjoy it.

Too small for anybody over about fourteen.

She turned over and put her face in the pillow and did not sleep for a long time.

The village talked for four days.

By Wednesday lunchtime everybody knew that two seventeen year olds had been at the barn. By Wednesday evening everybody knew which two. By Thursday there were three theories, and Nora heard all of them in the shop, standing behind a shelf, while two women she had known her whole life discussed her in normal voices.

Theory one was that it was an accident and it was nobody’s fault, and that old barns full of dry straw go up on their own.

Theory two was that it was the two of them, together, and that something had got out of hand.

Theory three was more specific and Nora heard it on Thursday afternoon from a man buying a newspaper.

—The Abiola lad had a can of petrol in his hand, he said. Fact. Two people saw him.

—He was carrying it out, said Amos behind the counter.

—That is what he says.

She left the shop without buying anything, which she regretted immediately, because leaving a shop without buying anything in Marlow End is itself a piece of information and it went round by teatime.

On Friday morning Nora walked back up to the barn on her own.

The police tape was still there, going from a fence post to a tree and back to a fence post, sagging in the middle. The building was not a building any more. Three of the walls stood to about two metres and the fourth had gone completely. Inside there were beams lying at angles and a great deal of grey and black material that had once been other things.

She stood at the tape for ten minutes.

Then she ducked under it and walked into the middle of it in her school shoes, because there was nobody there, and she went to the corner where the dry straw had been.

There was nothing. There was black ground and a bent metal thing that might have been part of a plough.

She got down on her knees anyway and moved some of it about with her hands, and after a while she found a piece of green plastic, about the size of a bank card, curled at the edges from the heat. It had been the corner of a folder. On it there were four printed letters, half melted, and she could read three of them.

FIN

She sat back on her heels in the ash.

—You shouldn’t be in here.

Ray Abiola was standing at the gap where the fourth wall had been, with his hands in his pockets.

Nora got up much too fast and did not manage to look as though she had been doing anything reasonable.

—Neither should you.

—No, he agreed.

—Why are you here?

—Why are you?

—I asked first.

—You did, said Ray. That is true.

They looked at each other across nine metres of burnt floor.

—I’m going to say something, he said, and you are going to hate it.

—Go on.

—Everyone in this village thinks one of us did this.

—I know.

—And the two of us are the only people who know that neither of us did.

Nora said nothing, because she did not know that. She had spent three nights lying awake seeing a boy running out of a burning building with a fuel can in his hand, and she had not managed to make it look like anything else, and she was not going to say so standing in the middle of the evidence.

—Do we? she said.

Something happened in Ray’s face that she did not like at all.

—Right, he said. Great. Good talk.

He turned round and walked back through the gap, and Nora stood in the burnt barn with a piece of melted green plastic in her hand and understood that she had just made an enemy for reasons that were entirely her own fault and that she still could not explain.

The letter from the parish council arrived on Monday the fifteenth of September, addressed to Miss N. Finnegan, in an envelope with a window.

It invited her to attend an extraordinary meeting of Marlow End Parish Council on Thursday at seven o’clock in the village hall.

It said that the matter for discussion was Item 4, and that Item 4 was:

Community reparation. Bonfire Night, 5 November.

Key vocabulary

a parish council — приходской совет

an agenda — повестка дня

minutes (of a meeting) — протокол заседания

a chairman / chairwoman — председатель

a proposal — предложение

to vote — голосовать

unanimous — единогласный

a motion — резолюция, предложение на голосование

to second (a motion) — поддержать предложение

reparation — возмещение, искупление

a punishment — наказание

to object — возражать

liability — ответственность (юридическая)

an apology — извинение

a resolution — решение

Item Four

Marlow End village hall had been built in 1928 out of corrugated iron and optimism, and it had a stage at one end, ninety plastic chairs, a hatch through to a kitchen and a smell that nobody had ever successfully identified.

On Thursday the eighteenth of September, at seven o’clock in the evening, it contained forty-one people.

—That is more than we had for the defibrillator, said a voice behind Nora.

—That is more than we had for anything since the reservoir, said another one.

Nora sat in the third row with her mother on one side and an empty chair on the other. She had put on a shirt, which she regretted, because it made her look as though she thought this was serious, and everybody else was in fleeces.

Ray came in at four minutes past seven with his uncle and sat on the other side of the aisle, and did not look across, and Nora did not look across either, and both of them managed this for the entire meeting with the sort of concentration usually reserved for exams.

At the front, behind a folding table with a green cloth on it, sat the parish council.

There were six of them and Nora knew all six by sight and none of them by conversation, which is a very specific way of knowing people and is the normal way in a village if you are under thirty.

Dorothy Vane was in the middle. She was seventy-eight, and she had been chair since 1998, and in front of her she had a hardback book, a pen, a small brass bell and a wristwatch which she took off and put on the table, face up, in a way that made the whole room sit down.

—Right, she said. Marlow End Parish Council, extraordinary meeting, eighteenth of September. We have four items and we are going to do all four of them, including the ones you have not come for, because that is how a meeting works.

It took fifty minutes to get to Item Four, and Nora spent most of them realising something about her village that she had never quite seen before, which was that it ran on procedure the way other places run on money. Nothing happened in Marlow End because somebody wanted it. Things happened because somebody proposed them, somebody else seconded them, and a woman of seventy-eight wrote them in a book.

There were fifteen of those books in a cupboard behind the stage. The earliest was 1954.

Item One was a hedge. Item Two was the drain outside the church, which had been Item Two, in one form or another, since 2016. Item Three was a request from somebody in Bakewell to hold a car boot sale on the green, which was refused, with feeling.

By ten to eight the hall had gone quiet in the way rooms go quiet when the thing everybody came for is next.

—Item Four, said Dorothy Vane. Community reparation. Bonfire Night, fifth of November.

She turned a page.

—Before anybody says anything, I am going to establish some facts, because we have had nine days of people not doing that.

She read from her book without looking up.

—Fact one. On the ninth of September a fire destroyed the barn at Haddon Farm. Fact two. The fire service report says the cause is undetermined and probably accidental. Fact three. Derbyshire Police have taken statements and are not pursuing the matter. Fact four. No insurance claim has been made, because Mr. Rowntree stopped insuring that building in 2011.

There was a small noise from the second row.

—Yes, Ted, said Dorothy Vane. I am aware.

—It was a barn, said Ted Rowntree. It was full of nothing.

—It was a listed structure and it was in this village for a hundred and eighty five years and it is now a hole. Fact five. Two young people were present. Neither has been charged with anything. I want that said out loud in this hall because I have heard four hundred people say the opposite in the last week and I am extremely tired of it.

Nora looked at the floor. Beside her, her mother sat very upright and did not move.

—Now, said Dorothy Vane. Councillor Sharp.

Colin Sharp stood up. He was seventy-one and he had worked for the water board for thirty-four years and he was holding a ring binder.

—Thank you, Chair. The council has a problem which is not about blame. The problem is that we have a bonfire on the fifth of November on Rowntree’s field, as we have done since 1887, and this year we have a village that is frightened of fire.

He put the binder down.

—I have had eleven people tell me this month that we should cancel it. Eleven. In thirty years nobody has ever said that to me once.

—Then cancel it, said somebody at the back.

There was a small amount of agreement, and Nora noticed that it came from the younger half of the room, the people in their thirties and forties, and that the older half went completely silent.

—If we cancel it this year, said Colin Sharp, we will not do it next year either. That is how these things go. I have watched it happen to the flower show, the carnival and the Boxing Day walk.

Dorothy Vane picked up her pen.

—Which brings us to the proposal, she said. Councillor Hesketh.

Peggy Hesketh did not stand up. She was seventy-four, small, in a green cardigan, and she spoke without any particular emphasis, which somehow made everybody lean forward.

—We have two young people who were in that barn and who have not explained what they were doing there, she said. I am not accusing anybody of anything. But there is a great deal of talk in this village and it is doing harm, and in my experience talk does not stop because you ask it to. It stops when people see something else instead.

She folded her hands.

—So I propose this. The bonfire goes ahead. And the two of them run it.

The hall made a noise.

Nora felt it arrive somewhere under her ribs.

—Run it? said Ray, out loud, which was the first thing either of them had said all evening.

—Run it, said Peggy Hesketh. Site, wood, safety, licence, tea tent, raffle, insurance, the lot. Under the committee, obviously. Nobody is asking a seventeen year old to sign a public liability form. But they do the work and they do it in front of everybody for seven weeks.

—That is a punishment, said Bridget Finnegan, standing up.

—It is reparation, said Peggy Hesketh.

—For something nobody has proved they did.

—Mrs. Finnegan, said Dorothy Vane, that is a fair point and it is going in the minutes. Sit down please.

Bridget sat down. Her hands were shaking slightly and Nora looked at them and then looked away.

—May I speak? said Ray’s uncle.

He was a big man in a work jacket, and he stood up slowly, the way people do when they have decided to be careful.

—Femi Abiola. My nephew has lived in this village three years. In three years nobody has knocked on my door. Last week four people did, and two of them were about the fire, and two of them were about whether I have a licence for fireworks, which I do, and which the council has had a copy of since 2022.

—Noted, said Dorothy Vane.

—I am not against the proposal, said Femi. I want to say that clearly. I am against the reason for it. If you make these two do this because the village needs somebody to blame, that is not reparation, that is a show. But if you make them do it because the bonfire needs doing and they are two capable people, then I will lend the van.

He sat down.

There was a pause.

—Well, said Dorothy Vane. That is the most useful thing anybody has said in this hall since March.

She looked over her glasses at the two of them, one on each side of the aisle.

—Miss Finnegan. Mr. Abiola. Stand up, both of you, and look at each other, because you have been avoiding it for fifty minutes and it is childish.

They stood up.

Nora looked across the aisle. Ray looked back. He had a face like a closed door.

—I am going to ask you one question each, said Dorothy Vane, and I want you to know that I am not asking you what you were doing in that barn, because that is your business and because I have read the police report and they did not get anywhere either.

—Thank you, said Nora.

—Question. Did you start that fire?

—No.

—Mr. Abiola. Did you start that fire?

—No.

—Do you know who did?

Nora did not answer for slightly too long.

She heard herself not answering. She heard the whole hall hear it.

—No, she said.

Across the aisle, at almost the same moment, Ray said:

—No.

Dorothy Vane looked at them both for a period of time that felt considerably longer than it was.

—Right, she said, and wrote something in her book.

—I have one condition, said Peggy Hesketh, before we vote.

—Go on.

—If they do it, nobody in this village helps them out of pity. If somebody wants to lend a trailer, they lend a trailer because it needs lending. I will not have half of Marlow End turning up on the fourth of November to do the work for two children so that everybody can feel comfortable about it.

—That is a good condition, said Dorothy Vane, and it is going in as an amendment.

The vote took four minutes.

Peggy Hesketh proposed it. Colin Sharp seconded it. Gordon Pym, the treasurer, asked whether it would cost anything, and was told that it would cost exactly what the bonfire cost every year, and voted for it. Winnie Bhatt voted for it without putting down her knitting. Ted Rowntree said that it was his field and that he would think about it, which Dorothy Vane recorded as an abstention.

—Motion carried, five for, none against, one abstention, she said. Not unanimous. It is never unanimous, and the last time it was, in 1998, we ended up with the wrong bus shelter.

She closed the book.

—Miss Finnegan, Mr. Abiola. First committee meeting is here on Monday at half past six. Bring a pen. Any questions?

Ray put his hand up.

—Do we get a say in this?

—No, said Dorothy Vane.

—Right, said Ray.

Outside, in the car park, in the dark, the two of them ended up ten metres apart for the second time in nine days.

—Seven weeks, said Ray.

—Yes.

—With six people whose combined age is about four hundred and fifty.

—Yes.

He put his hands in his pockets.

—You paused, he said.

Nora’s stomach did something unpleasant.

—What?

—When she asked if you knew who did it. You paused.

—I was thinking.

—You were thinking about whether to say no.

—Ray.

—I am not having a go at you, he said, and the annoying thing was that he sounded as though he meant it. I am telling you that everybody in that hall heard it, and one of those people is going to think about it for seven weeks, and it is not going to be me.

He walked off towards his uncle’s van.

Nora stood in the car park of a corrugated iron hall in the middle of Derbyshire and thought: he paused too.

She had heard it. Half a second, maybe less, before he said no.

She got into her mother’s car and put her seatbelt on and looked out of the window all the way home, and in her head, over and over, was a shape at the far end of a burning barn that was much too small to be anybody it should have been.

Key vocabulary

a treasurer — казначей

a budget — бюджет

a raffle — лотерея

a marquee — большой шатёр, тент

a trestle table — раскладной стол на козлах

a risk assessment — оценка рисков

a regulation — правило, норматив

a deadline — крайний срок

a rota — график дежурств

to allocate — распределять

a volunteer — доброволец

an item — пункт

to postpone — откладывать

in charge of — ответственный за