The Tightrope Walkers (15 page)

And when we’d smoked he handed a packet of fruit gums to me, and a packet of chewing gum, and he snorted at my astonishment, and said again that it was easy, oh so easy, and that everybody did it. Bliddy everybody, man.

On we went, down the High Street.

“Now you,” he said as we approached another fruit shop, Connor’s, whose boxes lay open on a table outside.

I shuddered, my footsteps faltered, and he knew it.

“Just lift one out,” he said, so matter-of-fact, “and keep it by your side and keep on walking on.”

I hesitated.

“Just do it. Learn from me. Nobody will see.”

Again my heart was stopped, and then it started thumping and my brain was filled with agitation.

“Believe that you can do it and you will,” whispered my friend. “Hand straight in and hand straight out and keep on walking. Easy.”

We were almost upon it. I looked towards the sky, the drifting clouds. Beyond the fruit shop roof, the steeple of the church appeared about to topple over us.

I was cold as ice, as hot as fire.

We walked. I put my hand inside the box, I lifted out a fruit, I walked. It was as if it wasn’t me, as if another boy had done this thing. We walked together, Vincent, the different me and me.

“Well done!” he whispered.

He grasped my wrist and squeezed it fast, a touch of reassurance, of respect.

We came to the foot of the street. We leaned against the wall of the Beeswing pub, below its green dome.

I showed the green pear in my hand.

I bit, I passed it to him, and he bit, too.

He grinned. He swiped his hand across his lips to catch the juice.

“See?” he said. “And after all it’s just a pear. It’s just a piece of bliddy fruit. And now you’ve done it once it all gets easier.”

And on we walked, and continued all morning to thieve more childish things, just sweets, just fruit, just things that were hardly noticed, things that hardly mattered to anyone at all.

And on we went beyond the Beeswing pub and passed the railway station and crossed the railway line, hesitating on the footbridge to feel the power of the Newcastle train as it thundered beneath, and then on again, chewing our stolen Beech Nut gum, following the ancient terraced streets, the ones that hadn’t been swept away along with the hovels in which so many of us had spent the first years of our lives. And the scent of the river was coming to us now, and the sound of gulls from above the water, and the din of the yards was closer, more intense. We walked down through old paddocks in which squat black and black-and-white ponies chewed the grass or lifted their heads and regarded us with questioning tender eyes. And other lads and other girls were wandering, and all of us were glancing at each other and wondering should we be interested, should we be friendly, should we be wary or suspicious or scared? Vincent strutted, he held his head high, he was Vincent McAlinden, after all, many of these must surely know him, or know of his old reputation.

He lit a Park Drive and blew wild plumes of smoke into the air and said, “Sod ’em,” apparently to nothing, to no one. “Sod ’em all, eh, Dominic?”

“Aye,” I answered, though I knew not why.

“Aye,” I answered. “Sod ’em all.”

And then to the river itself, to a place where the paddocks petered to a pebbly rubbly muddy slope with the water slopping at its foot. We sat on the final patch of green, on stones, with grass about us drifting upon the downriver breeze, and Vincent told me this was the life, wasn’t this just the best of bliddy lives?

I laughed. I muttered that yes, it probably bliddy was. I looked at the jetsam on the shore, the bones of beasts and the boughs of trees, and the condoms and the broken timbers and the stones and boxes and bottles that had settled upon the silt, and saw the logs and the trees and the litter being carried upon the water, and I smelt the stench of the dark and filthy Tyne, and I saw the ancientness of the stonework beneath the jetties on the opposite bank, and I looked along the shore, and saw the shipyards and their great cranes and their great ships stretching to the sea, and I saw the distant sky above the distant invisible sea, and I took all these things into me. This is where I had come from, this place. The buildings in which I’d spent my first months were gone, but they lived on inside me.

“That’s where I’ll end up,” he said. “Down here in the bliddy yard. Soon, before too long. Going each morning to the noise and the filth. Not like you. You’ll be up and off and fancy free.”

I felt his hand upon me, upon my shoulder, and I felt his face against mine, and felt his breath upon me, and heard that breath carrying his words into my ear.

“Won’t you?” he said. “Won’t you be free as a bird while I’m crawling round in a filthy tank?”

“I will,” I said.

“That’s right. Let’s fight,” he said.

“What?”

“Fight. It’s what we should do. Let’s do it all and bliddy fight.”

I didn’t understand but somehow my body did understand, and I rolled my head and turned my eyes towards the sky, and it was as if my soul recoiled inside myself, rebalanced itself and then turned again, and found a different and very new way of being, and I looked upon this new friend, Vincent McAlinden, who had terrified me since childhood, who sought me out to take me killing and thieving and who now was close to me and about to fight me, and I turned back to him again and muttered yes to him. I grunted bliddy yes.

We rolled away from the river and the stones. He rolled on top of me and knelt on my shoulders and held my wrists to the earth and snarled down at me.

“Howay, then,” he said. “Don’t hold back. Do bliddy something.”

I squirmed, I struggled beneath him, I shoved him off.

“Well done,” he snarled. He grabbed me, and we wrestled. “Hurt us!” he said. “Bliddy hurt us, man!”

I gripped him tight, I stamped the earth, I felt the power in my new squat muscles and the desire to struggle in my blood. I got him round the chest and squeezed him hard. I was shorter than him, but I had my father’s caulker’s body and my father’s caulker’s strength. I was astonished by the effort we needed to stay upright, the effort I needed to try to make him fall, the effort I needed just to breathe, to keep on doing this. Snot and tears came from me. Blood came from me. I saw these things on Vincent McAlinden too and didn’t know if they had come from him or come from me. I spun him round and at last he fell.

“Good lad,” he snarled. “Now the knife!”

“Eh?”

“Get your knife and bliddy stab us now!”

“What?”

Suddenly his own knife was in his hand, pointing towards me. He got to his feet. He grinned.

“Or are ye just goin to be defenceless?”

I took out my ship-steel knife. He crouched low and circled me. I crouched low as well. He beckoned me with his free hand.

“Howay,” he said. “Stab us, Dom.”

He lunged at me. I backed away.

“Cos I’m tellin you — if you don’t do me, I fuckin will do you.”

He lunged again. Again.

I gasped in terror, and in greater terror as I lunged at him and stabbed my knife towards him.

“That’s the way,” he hissed. “Again! Do it like ye bliddy mean it, man.”

I stabbed the air again. Suddenly he grabbed my wrist and pulled me close. He raised his knife. I grabbed his wrist.

“That’s right,” he groaned.

Linked together like that, we struggled. We resisted each other, we pressed our blades towards each other. I knew the torment of resisting and attacking in the same moment, the terror of a sharp steel blade just inches from my flesh. We gasped and grunted. Vincent grinned, he urged me on. We rocked each other back and forth. Suddenly he was down again and I was squatting over him and my snot and blood dangled down in a long gluey string upon his face.

“Divent stop,” he hissed. “This is yer chance, Dom. Do it now. Now!”

The image of my knife in his throat flashed within me.

I blinked my eyes to make it go.

“Submit,” I said, as we boys used to say to each other in Saint Lawrence’s Infants when we gave each other Chinese burns or played our innocent fighting games in the schoolyard. “Give in, Vincent McAlinden!”

He laughed.

“Aye,” he said. “I submit. And that’ll dae.”

We rolled apart.

“Who’d’ve thought ye had that in ye, young Dom?” he said.

I licked my fingers and cleaned the snot and blood away from myself, and Vincent did the same. I tried to clean away the grass stains and mud stains, and Vincent did the same.

“I’ll get ye next time,” Vincent said.

“Naa,” I answered. “You never will.”

“Ha. Give us your blood.”

He made a small cut with his knife in the ball of his thumb, held it towards me. I did the same with my knife in my thumb. We pressed the wounds together.

“Now I’m in you and you’re in me,” he said. “Brothers in blood.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. We lay in the grass.

“Linked forever,” he murmured.

It became strangely peaceful as we lay there by the river, as our hearts and breathing calmed. The sky was beautiful, the blue of the day beginning to be streaked with red and gold and black. Black marks of birds moved beautifully across it. There was an aching inside me that seemed as great as the sky above, as great as the world itself. And Vincent, in his matter-of-fact daring, came close to me again and breathed his breath on me, then pressed his lips to mine, and for the first time I got the weird harsh taste of him.

He breathed his harsh-sweet words into me.

“Let us see you,” he whispered.

I glanced into his eyes.

“You knaa what I mean, Dominic,” he whispered.

I let him see me. He let me see him.

“Good lad,” he said. “Now let’s touch.”

We fought many times after that. We came to expect it after a day of slaughtering or of thieving, or of simply roaming these streets and fields and riverbanks. I saw him differently. He wasn’t just a brute in a brutish form. He fought, but he also laughed and played with me, as if he was a child. Maybe in those months, he experienced something of a childhood that he’d never had, or that he’d left behind. And maybe I experienced what it might be to be a certain kind of man. And we had friendship, the kind of friendship I’d never known with Holly Stroud, the kind of friendship he’d never had with Bernard.

Sometimes it seemed that we were preparing for war. We did press-ups and squats. We raised rocks above our heads. We challenged each other to lift boulders. We fought with jagged stones in our hands, slavering as we feigned attempts to break each other’s skulls. We continued to fight with our knives, gripping each other’s wrists, forcing the blade closer closer to the other’s throat. We cursed and spat. We called each other the blackest of names. We cursed each other’s family, each other’s ancestors. We called each other animal names: rat, pig, ape, dog. We named each other after genitalia and human waste. We bled and drooled. Our muscles tightened, strengthened. Our minds seethed, bodies ached, souls coarsened. We went home at the end of such days drained of energy, drained of thought. Bruises and wounds on me, marks of grass and earth on me. Wildness in my eyes.

Early on, after one of the first scary ecstatic afternoons with Vincent, I returned home as night was coming on. I lowered myself painfully down onto the sofa.

“Dominic?” Mam gasped. “What on earth?”

“Eh?” I grunted.

“What you been getting up to out there? Who on earth . . .”

I groaned a meaningless answer.

“Dominic?” said Dad.

He stroked his cheek in contemplation for a moment.

“Leave him,” he said softly.

He continued to regard me, my hooded eyes, my hunched body.

“He’s got the beast in him,” he said.

“The what?” said Mam.

He laughed.

“Haven’t you, my son?” he said.

“Don’t talk such nonsense,” whispered Mam.

I turned and groaned at her again, a kind of growl.

“See?” Dad said.

“See what?”

“It’ll run right through him, then out it’ll run again.”

He smoked his cigarette.

“Down, boy!” he laughed.

I turned from them both, went to the table, did my homework. The subject was biology, the contents of the blood. Haemoglobin, oxygen, metabolic waste. I named them all, and within myself I named the other matter rushing through me: excitement, yearning, wildness, dread, and the blood and breath of Vincent McAlinden.