The Tightrope Walkers (11 page)

“I hear that you’re something of a wordsmith yourself,” he said. “Is that correct?”

I looked blankly back at him.

“A whisper from your old school,” he said.

He winked.

“Sometimes,” he said, “we aren’t even aware of our own strengths, and the effects that we have on others.”

He shook Dad’s hand.

“Congratulations on your son’s success,” he said. “A credit to the whole family, I’m sure.”

“Thank you, sir,” Dad muttered.

He trembled as he spoke. I knew he couldn’t wait to get away.

We stood close together. There were other inward-turning trios just like us. A couple of the other trios approached. Families like us, fathers who worked in the yard with Dad, welders and caulkers and electricians. The men passed cigarettes around, held them in cupped hands, smoked, tapped the cigarettes nervously on ashtrays, sipped coffee and tea, twisted their faces at each other with the embarrassment of it all.

“I can’t bliddy believe it,” I heard Dad say. “A man like me, in a place like this, taalking to a man like that.”

“Thanks to our bairns,” said one of his friends.

“Aye,” said Dad. “Our bairns.”

He glanced shyly at me, as if I’d become some alien creature to him.

Holly laughed. She was with a music teacher. She started singing happily and the teacher’s face was wreathed in smiles.

The school was red brick with a tarmac yard around it, then a broad field with a football pitch and running track. The teachers wore black gowns over dark suits, white shirts and ties. Several carried a black strap, which curled out from their top jacket pocket. These straps were used coldly, matter-of-factly, rather sadly. Why are you making such a noise, child? Put out your hand. How dare you look at me like that, boy? Put out your hand. Why are you not paying attention to what I say? Put out your hand.

It was another Catholic school, so, yes, there were statues and crucifixes, but they were perched on shelves high up on walls, screwed to the wall above the stage used for assemblies. They were hardly ever mentioned. Prayers were said, but more brusquely than before. No lessons were drawn from them. Priests were to be seen in the corridors, and sometimes one of them led a recitation of Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Glory Bes in school assembly, but in their black clothes and their white collars, they carried an aura of loneliness, of ineffectiveness, and they seemed out of place here.

The first terms passed by quickly. I learned to become a grammar school boy. I was polite to the teachers, I worked hard. I kept my shoes polished, my hair combed, my uniform neat. I did my homework diligently. I was praised for my attitude, my application, my cleverness. Unlike many others, I avoided the strap. I went to football trials and became the school team’s centre half. I went to lunchtime discos and danced to Chubby Checker. We were told that it was essential to play hard as well as to work hard, and that moral fibre must be matched to our intelligence.

I learned about the rivers and mountains of South America, about the savage rituals of the Aztec priests, how they’d cut out the still-beating hearts of sacrificial girls and boys. I learned that different metals expanded and contracted at different rates, that frozen rubber tubing could be snapped like glass, that the exposed heart of a dead frog could be made to beat again by the simple application of a weak electric current. We did elocution and we learned about articulation and pronunciation. We were told that it was fine to retain an element of our own tongue, but it would be better to reach towards an accent more suited to the world beyond these local horizons. In speaking French, however, it could be beneficial to speak in Geordie.
Say it as if you were a pupil at Saint Tim’s
, we were told.
Say it as you would to your pals on your estate
. And we did so, and we giggled at the strange words attached to our familiar sounds.
L’eau. L’oeuf. Le ruisseau
. In class we read Conrad and the poems of Edward Thomas. We were told that Adlestrop, and
all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire
, was beautiful. In the playground we searched D. H. Lawrence for
cunt
and John Thomas and Lady Jane, leafed through Henry Miller for
fuck
and
prick
. In second year, we were guided into Shakespeare by Joyce. He stared hard at those who repeated the dreaded word, Shakespeare, under their breath.

“You think that Shakespeare is not for you?” he said to us. “You think he is above you? Or, dare we say it, you think you are above
him
?”

“Double, double toil and trouble,” said Holly.

Joyce laughed.

“Indeed,” he said. “And fire burn and cauldron bubble. Such language sings to all of us, no matter what our age.”

He leaned forward, as if passing on some whispered secret.

“Shakespeare, of all the greats, speaks to us in a common tongue. Fair is foul and foul is fair. Is this a dagger which I see before me? One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child. To be or not to be . . .”

He paused, as many of us, half-consciously, murmured the true response.

He smiled.

“See? He is in all of us, whether we want him or not. But perhaps you simply think you are too young to be exposed to him? Then think of this. Shakespeare’s Juliet was little older than our Holly Stroud. Her beloved Romeo hardly older than you boys. And think of what those star-crossed lovers knew in their young lives. Love and death, children, before they’d hardly lived at all. And think of Macduff’s poor bairns, gone almost before they came into this troubled world. . . .”

He stared at us.

“You do not know the tale?” he said.

He wandered through the aisles between the desks, leaning suddenly down to us as he passed by.

“ ‘All my pretty ones? Did you say
all
? O hell-kite!
All?
What,
all
my pretty chickens and their dam
at one fell swoop
?’ ”

The words echoed in the air and in my mind.

I scribbled as he spoke them.

O hell-kite. All my pretty chickens. One fell swoop
.

Joyce saw me scribbling. He grinned.

He returned to the front.

“Words,” he breathed to us all. “Words words words. Ha! Dismissed!”

That night Dad was cursing, showing me the new marks on his skin. He lamented the bliddy gatekeepers, the fuckin foremen and these soddin scalds and burns.

“Look at the fuckin state of them, Dom. I’m damaged as them ancient tortured fuckin saints. And listen to the inside, to this raspin, wheezin, rattlin, gaspin. Day after bliddy fuckin day, since I was hardly a few years more’n you. Crawlin in the filth and shadows every fuckin day God sends, there inside the bliddy ship, in confined space and dark and filth. It’s like I’m the speck o’ dirt in me own damn lung, crawlin and crawlin through tubes in search of the way out, and findin the way out, but knowing next day I’ll be in there again, fuckin in there yet abliddygain. For what?”

“For all of us,” said Mam. “And so you can pay your round at the Iona Club with your good mates. Come on, get washed, get out.”

He watched me reading. He saw the book.

“Billy Waggledagger, eh?”

“Aye,” I answered.

“Good?” he said.

I shrugged.

“Aye,” I said.

I surprised myself by turning my eyes to him, showing the book to him.

“This is what I want to do,” I said.

He grunted. “Eh?”

“Be a writer,” I said. “Write books.”

He laughed. He looked out at the darkening pebbledash.

“What’ll you have to write about?”

I shrugged.

“You,” I said, for something to say.

“Me? You’d better bliddy not!”

He laughed.

“Or, if ye do, ye’d better tone the bliddy fuckin language down.”

I smiled and scribbled it.

Tone the bliddy fuckin language down
.

I smiled and smiled and was a villain. I started to feel a spite for Holly’s singing, her piano playing, for her art, for her family. I cursed like my dad at the music drifting across the street. At school, despite all my supposed talents and skills, I was out of place. I was a caulker’s son, a tank cleaner’s grandson. Yes, there were others like me from families like mine, but there were also the sons and daughters of draughtsmen, doctors, teachers. I’d been reading Enid Blyton when Holly and her like had been reading Dickens. I’d been listening to Doris Day when she’d been playing Chopin. I’d been to the pantomime when she’d been watching Chekhov. I’d gone on believing in God and Heaven and Hell and Sin when the Holly Strouds had been calmly discarding the illusions as they grew. I had so much to learn, so much to throw away, and the effort to do it seemed so huge.

I changed, of course. But the boy in the mirror seemed to be turning into a brutish thing, a Vincent McAlinden thing. Hairs on my chin, hairs on my cock-and-balls. I kept pushing my fringe back, scared of finding a new widow’s peak there. My muscles thickened. They wrenched me into a copy of my father. Brows thickened, darkened. Lips turned downward. A scowl often took possession of my face. We boys wore shorts as part of our uniform. The sudden growth of dense black hairs on my legs drew much laughter. For a time I was referred to as the Ape-Boy and, when we learned about evolution, as the Missing Link.

I worked hard and my marks were good. We were continually tested, graded. To be top of the class must be the bright ones’ constant aim. I kept on coming top, or near to top. But as I got to twelve, thirteen, I became ever more uncertain, ever more insecure. Maybe it was the alienation common to all adolescents. But how could I know that when I was in the throes of it? How can anyone know anything true of his life when he is in the throes of the life? All I knew was that I teetered, that there seemed to be a void beneath me, nothing to support me.

I wrote with care at school. I scribbled in secret notebooks at home — violent bloody outbursts of rampant nouns and verbs and blasphemies and curses.

One day Joyce said that we were to read
Macbeth
.

Holly clapped her hands and grinned at me.

“Yes, Miss Stroud?” asked Joyce.

“Eye of newt and toe of frog!” said Holly.

“Indeed!” he said. “And wool of bat and tongue of dog! My favourite of all plays. A thing of blood and guts and sorcery, and gorgeous brutal language.”

He curled his lips and bared his teeth.

“In theatrical circles, this play, because of superstition, is often only referred to as —”

“The Scottish play,” Holly interjected.

“Indeed! And this is to do with fears of doom and disaster and death! Imagine that. A name with such a force, a play with such a force. We neither shall give it its proper terrifying name. But we shall name it something else.”

He stared at all the faces.

“We shall turn this into a play for
us
, as all works of art should be. Its language being Scottish is not too far distant from the tongue we use right here. Its setting in the northern wastelands is not too distant from the lands that ring us here. Its action being brutal is not too far distant from the leanings of you boys. We shall call it the Geordie play and we shall speak it in our own dear tongue. And if you do not enjoy it you may . . . what? Hang me in a bottle like a cat and shoot at me!”

In a bottle like a cat and shoot at me!

Holly spoke the lady’s part. She ignored the sniggers when she said that she’d given suck and knew how tender ’twas to love the babe that milked her. She glared when I giggled with the others, even though the words were singing in me, even though I knew they’d echo and echo that night in my dreams. I giggled again when I spoke the porter’s part and declared that I’d been carousing till the second cock.

She spat at me the words intended for her husband. “ ‘We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking-point and we’ll not fail.’ ”

The sticking-point and we’ll not fail
.

I giggled again.

“You giggle?” she spat. “You giggle when we are in the throes of killing a king!”

Joyce laughed.