Ben and Jerry’s Is On Fire

They never found out how it started, but they were all drinking and having a good time before someone ran into the pub and said “Ben and Jerry’s is on fire!”.

Martha had arranged the evening when she was two years out of university and filled with a strange positional, almost special, uncertainty; recently out of home and into a strange studio flat in shepherd’s bush that smelt of wet towels and stale bread. She pulled all their friends together, the ones they had for years, and the ones they had picked up along the way, like barnacles on the hull of a cruise liner. Someone’s ex-girlfriend here, a work colleague there, and someone else’s brother. But they were all there, as was traditional, arriving at staggered times throughout the evening, increasingly later and later from the original 8:30 meeting point.

This was six months before Dave died, and soon after that, they would all begin to slowly disband. Like overworked and over weathered ropes on a yacht. Soaked day after day, and tightened and loosened continually, abandoned for years under a tarpaulin, eventually giving way.

It was one of those chain pubs that tried far too hard to be unique. The handwritten chalk price board, the deliberately mix and match chairs, and the odd selection of lamps. Across one of the walls there was this bookcase covered in old looking spine covers, antique books, ancient books. It was only when, a few years ago, Will had climbed onto the table and reached up for them, they realised they were all made of cardboard.

But the pub had a special place in their hearts, as the only place that would regularly serve them alcohol when they were sixteen and seventeen, Martha and Dave and Will and Lauren and Stuart, friends from school, sticking with eachother through college, as other friends fragmented and drifted apart, becoming separated like chemicals, like liquid and atoms and electrons and neutrons and all those things they never learnt at school but whose names they still remembered. They often wondered, these five, why they still, despite new boyfriends, new girlfriends, different courses, jobs, houses, and universities, seemed to gravitate back to eachother. Like parts of an abacus, swinging away and then cannoning back together again, knocking some other part out of connection for a short, airborne, time.

Now they had finished university. Some had degrees, and some didn’t, and they were left, like the first space explorers, fumbling from bright white shiny capsule, into a dark vacuum. Martha had temped for a while, before taking a position up in a financial consultancy firm where all the employees arrived for work drinking coffee and wearing scarves in the winter months, living in St Johns Wood, and in Hammersmith, in Maida Vale and White City.

The rest of them were at various stages of trying to accept futures that were less than their imaginings. Will was working in media sales, selling advertising space in business to business magazines to other companies. Dave had a physics degree and worked at a recruitment agency up north in Camden. Will was studying for a masters degree in Spanish to become a diplomatic interpreter, and Lauren had a degree in English and was, after a failed spell running one of those fiddly gift shops, a classroom assistant at an inner city comprehensive.

They had each had a few drinks, and Martha was trying to ignore the too loud and too drunk group of men behind them at the bar, these men who were invading their group, invading their space on their table. They were contaminating the pub and putting everyone on edge, and whenever one of them shouted too loud, or punched the other one on the shoulder, or slapped his glass down on the bar, she could see the worry and the flinch in other people’s eyes. Everyone was aware of them, they were quietly logged and watched as an unknown dangerous poison, waiting to ruin, like spilt ink over a love letter. Martha was, as were the rest of her group, having a good time, but she was so aware of them shouting and singing and drinking, and wished they were not in her consciousness, not always there in the corner of her eye. She was watching when someone ran into the bar and shouted “Ben and Jerry’s is on fire!”

The first time she shouted, nobody really turned round, thinking the bearer of such a cry to be drunk or mad. Nobody wanted to be first to fall for a trick, or be pulled into a strange conversation with a crazy person from the street. More turned the second time, when she shouted “Seriously guys. Ben and Jerry’s is on fire!”

Martha, saw, as the rest of them, that this person appeared neither drunk nor mad. She looked particularly sensible really, black hair tied up in a bun and a white shirt poking out of a tank top. She looked like a friendly bank clerk, or a woman from a sandwich shop, except excited, her face flushed red, as she shouted again. “Come quick. Come quick, it’s outside”.

“Didn’t it used to be one of those key-cutting places?” said Will. As they began to spill outside the pub into the street, they saw the smoke first. It was an odd sight, black against black, silhouetted by moonlight and streetlight, like really low level cloud, or early morning mist inverted and smoky. It was thin and acrid as they walked towards the shop, dark and closed as normal, but with a faint orange glow coming from somewhere far back behind the counter. One of the windows upstairs was broken, and the room glowed orange. Already the frame was stained with ash and smoke, and the plastic Ben and Jerry’s sign was dusted and warping from the heat, turning to a well cooked brown.

They surrounded it in a horseshoe, twenty, thirty people from the pub. Their pints still in one hand, and the other held against their eyes to block the heat and the smoke that was viciously darting from one direction to the next, painful needles at the whim of a staccato breeze. It was strangely quiet, Martha thought, rather than roar and break and bellow of the fire she could imagine, there was just a gentle hum. Like a reminder of a noise, just so they knew something was there. And they stood, quiet, in this horseshoe, watching smoke come out the windows of Ben and Jerry’s, and watching the walls and fixtures inside slowly become stained and black.
There were snatches of conversation, everyone standing and drinking and sharing the spectacle, as if they were at a football match, or watching cricket on a village green. Martha heard someone ask if the fire brigade were called, and suddenly felt guilty.

She wondered then, where the two poisonous guys from the bar were. The shouting drunken pair who loved their intimidation, who sat and preyed and salted their brains, dipping hooks into their awareness and memories of the evening. Where were they now, quiet, in front of the fire.

Although she would never admit it, Martha thought of herself as the centre of their group of friends. She would tell herself that she thought this not out of ego, but more out of practical observation and reality. Will and Stuart were friends first of all, and she and Lauren and Dave shared another class at the same school, until, somewhere when they were fourteen, she went out with Will for two months. It was the last month of their school year and the first month of the summer holidays, until Will went to Turkey for three weeks, and she decided she didn’t want to be with him anymore. Somehow, in surprisingly amicable terms, they burned their anger, and found they had all gravitated into eachother. It became normal to invite the five of them together, if one was missing it would be practice for the others to ask why. It became practice that they became ‘the others’, and fulfilled roles for the group. They fell in love with eachother, had arguments like tiny storms and all grew more sensible and changed hairstyles. They took roles, Dave was like water, funny, and impossible to grip, he would slide carefree between any long held grudges or traditions, to him they were irrelevant and unnecessary, he was like elastic between them all. Martha and Will became philosophers, elder statesmen, gently tugging back others running too fast or heading for cliffs. Lauren grew taller and thinner, she became more elegant and beautiful, and the more she struggled at life the more they all loved her, wanting to take her home and watch over her like a lifeguard looking at the sea. Stuart waned in and out, coming up bright every time he had a new grand idea or plan, and a little darker everytime he landed back to earth.

At this point, something clicked or tweaked inside Ben and Jerry’s, and the fire found itself some more fuel and some more motivation, as it sprang forwards into the shopfront, and they could see, behind glass, little tracts and veins of fire, spreading throughout.

The crowd took a step back, and Martha looked at her friends to check they were all there.
She saw them standing in this order;
Will,
Martha,
Dave,
Lauren,
Stuart.

Then Dave began walking toward the shop.

”What are you doing?” said Will.
“I want to get a closer look” he said, his back turned to them.

They could see it was hot in front of the glass, as he turned his face away slightly, and shielded his eyes with his elbow, wrapping his shirt up over his head like an amateur ninja or terrorist.

“Come back” she had said, but Dave stood back and threw his pint glass at the shop front. Perfect overarm, it arced and twisted into the glass front of the store, and crashed noisily.

“Ha ha” he shouted, and jumped in the air and punched the air like he’d dismissed a world class batsmen for a duck. Then he turned back to them. Grinning.

“Did you see that?” he said “Wasn’t that great?”

They all wondered what was happening. When he picked up a bottle, discarded and left beside a phonebox, and threw it back at the flaming storefront. Another smash of glass.

”Woo ha!” he said. “Come on!”

Martha never worked out what happened next, or rather, how what happened next happened, but soon there were more objects flying through the air towards the flaming Ben and Jerry’s. Glasses and Bottles first, then stones and pebbles, bits of pavement possibly. Then someone took one of the metal chairs sitting at one of the pub’s outside tables, and hurled it through the front window, punching through the glass like a fist into a wedding cake. They were cheering and jumping and shouting, warmed and turned red by the growing flames snaking and shooting up and down out of the broken storefront. They were laughing and Martha was surprised that it was, as Dave said, it would be, it was so much fun. There were drums and sparks and they danced. They cheered when the windows crashed, and they smiled when the neon sign burst into flames.

It was ridiculous. And they were caught up and invincible, the other drinkers from the pub came and stood, eyes gawping, mouths open like some old cartoon, and whilst some began to join in she wanted them all. They were hers and she wanted them there. She wanted them all to join in this dancing, to warm their hands on the burnt walls, the cash registers melting one by one full of burning notes, the fridges and the staff changing rooms, the credit card machines and all the ice cream cones, catching and burning and shooting up into the air in tiny red hot pieces. After this they would torch the town piece by piece, and they would rebuild it. Martha imagined hundreds of silver towers. Thousands of them, thin and needlelike, like elevator shafts, ringed with clouds and with plants and trees growing off them like branches. Entire cities of these needles, spiderweb walkways keeping them off the ground, all clear and bright and reflecting the sun.
And the needles would come out of the water! Yes! They would be in the middle of the sea, and they would fish and take out boats before climbing up the tops of their towers, -one each- to watch suns fall, and to go to sleep.

Someone must’ve called the police, or maybe they just arrived with the fire engines as a matter of routine, she never knew, but soon there were sirens everywhere, and blue lights echoing down the walls and through the streets. Martha looked around for her friends in the crowd and saw them, heads equally craning, trying to find eachother. Will said they had to run, and they looked around for Dave but couldn’t see him. “Had he already run?”
They said,
“Or should we wait for him?”

But they didn’t want to be suspected of starting it, they didn’t want the messy stains of police and questions, it would be all “What happened?” and “Why did you not call us before?” and “Was anyone hurt?”
And they had collective paranoia, and could feel the guilt standing over them like a parent, sinking it’s long nails into their shoulders as it patted them in a way it thought was reassuring, whilst leading them to own up their weakness to authority.
They would not take it, not whilst they were still together. So they ran away. Footsteps pounding on the pavement they ran past all the closed shops and executive apartments until they reached the river, where hot and panting they stood, hands on their knees in the dark and getting their breath back. Nothing was really said, but there some smiles, as if they had burned off their own guilt with the run, they were warm now, and their cheeks were glowing, and they realised how crazy it all was, how weird! Not just what happened, but how they all got scared afterwards, like drug paranoia, do you remember how we were all so scared?

And they stood in a circle, and clockwise they were this order;
Lauren,
Martha,
Stuart,
Will,

They didn’t see Dave for two days after that. They sent him text messages and were too scared to ring up to see why he never replied. Two days later he turned up at the pub, despite the fact nobody invited him, and he was funny and relaxed and had a new shirt that Martha remembered commenting favourably on. And though they tried, they didn’t really speak about it to him, they all knew that something was too different, and that they didn’t know how to assimilate it.

But that night, they stood in front of that river for what seemed like hours. They could see the boats and dinghies, all covered with tarpaulins holding little pools of rain water. And in the water were the black outlines of the trees, and the sounds of the cars on the bridge above them crossed over their heads, and they stood for hours before someone decided they should walk all the way home, hoping they would see their friend on the way back.