The Tightrope Walkers (21 page)

“There’s God!” whispered Holly.

He was high up on the wall. A sentimental hackneyed God in white robes with white beard. The rock around him and above him was painted in flaking crackling sky-blue. Angels flew there on widespread wings. There were awkward figures that must have been saints in prayer. There was a white bird, there was a tiny tongue of white fire. This was the childish sentimental Heaven we’d been told about in junior school, but here, inside this rock upon the hill, smudged by the soot of the candles, it was a thing of beauty. It quickened our hearts, it made us catch our breath.

We stared for minutes. We didn’t crawl in. Maybe we were scared. Maybe we felt it would be a kind of trespass if we did go in. We lay close to the opening. Such silence in there, such light. We gazed for minutes and then we left. The world seemed much darker now. We heard a low murmuring sound — like weird singing, or maybe just the breeze moving through the grass and across the rocks.

We hurried back through the paddocks, the hedges, past the earthworks. A flock of crows cawed as they scattered from some trees and took erratic flight above our heads. We caught sight of each other’s golden faces. Holly laughed, and suddenly kissed me on the cheek. “Phew!” she whispered. “Bloody hell!” And then we ran to the top and to the hawthorn trees. I snapped off the blossomed fruiting lichen-laden bough to carry home for Mam. We headed past the spawn ponds and the mines and the gorse. We ran down through the fields and as we ran we heard the voices of parents ringing out across the roofs and across the darkened sky as they called their playing children home.

She was already half asleep.

I sat on the bed beside her.

“I brought you this,” I whispered.

She stirred.

I already had it in a glass vase. It angled upwards through the clear water, the white falling blossom and the new red fruit exposed.

“I’ll put it here,” I whispered.

I put it on her bedside table beside her clock, her box of white handkerchiefs.

She came round, opened her eyes.

“Hawthorn,” she said.

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes again.

“It’s lovely, Dominic,” she whispered.

She put her hand on mine as if to comfort me.

“It’s beautiful, my son.”

The cough abated. No more blood. But pains in her back, pains in her legs, pains in her head. She said it was nothing, it was all the lying around and sitting around she’d been doing. She just needed to get back to normal. One night her screaming woke me up.

An ambulance came to take her to hospital for X-rays. Dad took a day off work and went with her. The ambulance brought them home again. They said the radiologist had been so kind, so sweet, was a girl they knew, in fact, the daughter of a nice lass from down Stoneygate way. Nothing happened. She went on coughing a little. She got out of bed each morning, made breakfast. I saw her wincing as she moved, I saw her losing weight.

I took to leaving the house early, calling into church on my way to school. I’d kneel beneath the cross that hung suspended above the front pews. How did it stay up there? The cords that held it were so thin, hardly visible. As I had when I was a child, I waited for the cross to fall, for Christ’s body to crash to earth and shatter. But he hung there as he always had, with his arms spread wide, making the shapes of pain, making the shape of an angel with outstretched wings against the dark brown roof above. At first I stupidly tried to pray, but soon I took to cursing his silence, his changelessness. He’d hung there all my life without affecting anything, without changing anything, despite all the fervent bodies below him, despite all the eyes on him, despite the endless prayers. I cursed the creamy shining bloody body of him, the blood fixed in mid-trickle on his skin, the suffering eyes that looked upon nothing and nobody. And I cursed his mother as well. There she was, like always, high up in her niche in the wall, in her sky-blue clothes, with the serpents crushed beneath her feet, with her eyes turned down towards us.

“What are you going to do?” I yelled from deep inside myself. “What the fuck?
What?
”

Nothing, was the answer.

Silence, was the answer.

She stood there like he hung there, two jokes, two massive lies.

Holly came to me with a saw, with a long-bladed knife, with some pruning shears, with the wire.

We went quickly to our trees. The blossom was nearly gone by now.

“First cut away the old dead stuff,” she said.

Some of it was so old, so sapless, it could be just snapped off. Thin boughs cut easily. They tumbled down onto the grass. We sawed off the bigger boughs. We snagged our skin on thorns. Bulbs of blood and trickles of blood appeared on our skin. We kept moving in with the cutting tools, moving back again, assessing, revising, editing, changing. We trimmed tiny single growths, snapped off single thorns. The boughs that remained reached up towards the sky to form an interleaving arch. They appeared to form an upturned nest with the sky as ground, the ground as sky.

We pulled away the cuttings so that the earth under the trees was clear, just tangled grass with flowers in it.

We watched for Jack Law, but there was no sign of him.

We attached the wire between the trees. We attached it to branching boughs and tightened it with the tightening winch. It was almost as high as my shoulder.

Holly went up first. She shinned up into the red tree, stood with one foot on the wire, one foot on a bough, back pressed against the boughs behind, and then stepped out and walked the wire against the sky. So secure in her walking, in her balance, in just being herself up there. She leapt down and rolled across the grass to my feet.

Then me, squat me with the muscles and the hair and the thickening chest. Me, the chimpanzee. I climbed up into the white tree. I walked on the wire. I stepped, slithered, teetered, but I got across. I crossed again. Paused at the centre, stood there swaying high above the river and the town, against the sky.

I dropped to the earth, caught the scent of decay.

I sniffed, I looked around.

“It’s the hawthorn,” said Holly Stroud.

She lifted a cut stem to her face.

“It’s known for it,” she said.

We kept on walking, improving. We untied the wire.

We walked away from our trees, our beautiful damaged pruned trees.

They took Mam away the very next day. An ambulance again, so garish, so massive-looking in our little street. She walked out with Dad. She lay down on a stretcher inside. I stood at the ambulance doorway.

“All this fuss,” she said to me as we said goodbye. “You make sure you get to school now. Work hard, be good. I’ll soon be back. This fuss!”

Her lips trembled as she kissed me, and I saw how pleased she was, to be taken away from having to be so strong. I watched the ambulance drive away. Its orange light began to flash and spin. I didn’t go to school. I went down to steal fruit from Bamling’s. I stole Beech Nut and a Mars Bar. I bought five Park Drives and smoked them one after the other by the railway line and sickened myself with them. I eyed up flying birds and thought
Kapow!
I thought how puny my transgressions were. How puny I was to have allowed them to affect me so much. Stealing a fiver from an open doorway! What was that? What a child I was! I walked back and forward through the familiar streets. I thought of Mrs. Charlton, her contempt for us as she travelled through our estate, as she stood in our little house. She shouldn’t have got that far. Instead of pissing on her carpet, I should have found her, and murdered her in her home. I thought of God, of nonexistent, useless, absent God. “Save my mother and I will be good,” I said into the nothingness. “Let her die and I’ll start to kill!”

I gathered some stones and put them in my pocket. I went into the church. It was silent and empty.

I started to fling the stones at Christ, trying to bring him down, to break his stillness, his stupid silence.

“Fall!” I said, in savage whispers. “Fucking fall.”

He rocked and swung and creaked as the stones struck. I saw the marks I made on his body. Flakes of his skin and tiny fragments of his flesh drifted to the floor. The stones that missed scattered down onto the altar, littered the white cloth there and the red carpet around it.

“Fall. Fall! Fall!”

I aimed for the cords that held the cross, but even when I hit them, I didn’t bring him down, his cross didn’t fall.

He just hung there, swayed and shuddered there.

I heard doors opening beyond the altar. Heard running feet. Maybe I should stand my ground. But I ran out again. The great church door groaned open and groaned shut behind me.

I ran across the wasteland.

I knew that she would surely die.

It only took two weeks. I saw her a few times more. I was with her when she died. A Tuesday afternoon. A message had been sent to Dad, but there was no way of knowing if it would get to him, and no way of knowing if he’d be set free. Through the window of her little room I could see the river and the yard, the dark and distant sea. I knelt at the bedside. I held her hand and whispered that everything would be OK, that Dad would be with us soon.

“Yes, it is,” she whispered. “Yes, he will.”

She was stunned by pain and morphine. Her breath diminished to a whistle, but her lips still moved. Boats were important, she whispered. She said that she could see them on the shore.

“Will you wave?” she gasped.

“Yes, Mam.”

Her body jerked and her breath came to an end.

I kissed her brow.

A nurse came in.

I should have called her, she said.

There would have been nothing she could do, she whispered.

“She died knowing that she was loved,” she said.

Then Dad arrived. He had the smell of the yard on him. Sweat trickled down over the dust and oil on his face.

“The gate was locked,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me out.”

He wiped his filthy hands on a towel.

“They said wait till shift’s end. It’s just a few minutes’ time. I could see the hospital through the locked gates. I climbed over them. Somebody even tried to pull me down as I was climbing them.”

He groaned.

“I saw her go,” he said. “I saw her soul.”