The Tightrope Walkers (22 page)

I listened.

“I was running. I was still right down on the High Street. I kept my eyes on the hospital. And I saw her, Dominic. I saw her soul rising from the roof of the hospital and disappearing into the sky. Her! Yes! Don’t go! Not yet!”

He leaned to her now.

“Oh, love. Oh, how I ran. Where are you now?”

She came back home. A hearse drew up. A top-hatted undertaker led her in. She was carried by men in shiny black suits and grubby black shoes and white nylon shirts and slipshod black ties. They closed the front-room curtains, laid her on trestles, opened the coffin lid. Mascara on her lashes, foundation on her face. Neighbours and relatives came to drink tea and to eat ham sandwiches. They brought cards and flowers. They said she was just as lovely as she’d been in life. They said she was out of pain now, it was a blessing it’d been so quick. Father Caffrey came. He drank whisky and smoked cigarettes with Dad. He said it was impossible to always understand the ways of God but there was always a purpose to events in this world. He said she’d gone to a better place. He said we’d all be with her there one day. Dad said that was all a load of crap. He said God must be a fucking cunt to do a thing like this. The priest said he understood our pain, our confusion. Dad told him no, he didn’t. He said if he was going to drink his whisky he should just shut the fuck up and fucking drink.

I left the house when the Brothers arrived, as they always did when a Catholic died. They gathered in the garden, whispering, wearing black ties and pompous faces, carrying rolled-up rosary beads in their pockets. I slipped past them, shrugged off their attempts at comforting words and comforting touches, and went to Holly. We watched from her window as the Brothers went in, so many of them I wondered how they’d fit into the room around her. Even through the window we heard the ghastly beat and drone of their chants, their
Thy will be done
, their
Pray for us sinners
, their
Deliver us from evil
. I imagined our little house vibrating with it, humming with it. The estate shone pale beneath a sickle moon. The gardens darkened.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We walked the ring of the estate, then went through the alleyway that led to the upper wasteland. Kids had a fire burning there. We sat on stones beside it. There was a white tent nearby.

A boy came to us.

“We’re campin oot,” he said. “We’re never gannin yem again.”

“There’s been a war,” said another. “Everythin’s gone. Everybody’s deed. We’re the last of the survivors.”

“But we’re ready to kill,” said the first. “I’m Dan, and he’s Stan.”

They lifted black potatoes from the edge of the fire and gave them to us. We cracked the hard scorched skins and nibbled at the steaming creamy flesh inside.

“We seen three shooting stars,” said Dan. “And we think there’s a fox in that hedge there.”

“And the ghosts of the slaughtered’ll be comin at midnight,” said Stan.

“It’s true,” said Dan. “You ever seen the ghosts? There’s always been a load of them roond here, ever since I was a little bairn. I could see them, I could hear them groanin and stuff.”

“The ghosts of what?” said Holly Stroud.

“Ghosts of the deed. Ghosts of them from the past that’s still aroond.”

“They can find nae peace,” said Stan. “They roam the earth forevermore and evermore.”

We fell silent for a time. We listened to the hissing and the crackle of the fire. Holly hummed something hymn-like. I scraped at the ashes with my feet.

“You could tek your lass in the tent and shag her if you like,” said Stan.

“Aye,” said Dan. “We got to get mankind started up again.”

We laughed and ate the delicious potatoes. We saw a shooting star, and another.

“That might be nothing but a bit of dust,” I said.

“Are you the one that’s Mam just died?” said Stan.

“Aye.”

“Ye’ll get over it. Me dad died last year. Me mam says the best thing to do is pretend I never loved him and he never loved me. Then I won’t feel so bad.”

“So are you doing that?” I said.

“Aye.”

“And is it working?”

“I think so. You want another spud?”

“No.”

“She says I got to pretend he was never even here. She says I got to think that what I think I remember aboot him is really just a dream.”

“And is that working?”

“I think it is. Sometimes I’m not sure if what I remember is real. You should try it.”

“I will,” I said.

“Good. Now we got to gan and get ready for the comin of the ghosts.”

We stayed a while and then we left.

In the shadows between the fire and the estate we kissed each other hard. I held Holly tight, and wanted to disappear into her.

Then Dad’s yells echoed over the rooftops.

The Brothers were leaving the estate. We pushed our way through a group of them.

One pushed back.

“Stop your shoving,” he snarled.

“Son of the bloody father,” said another.

Another caught me for a moment by the arm.

“Keep an eye on him,” he murmured.

Dad was at Holly’s door, yelling at Bill Stroud. His fists were flailing. The priest was trying to haul him back.

“Howay, then, Mr. Bliddy Conchie Draughtsman!” Dad yelled. “Let’s see some fight! Let’s have it out at bliddy last.”

I put my arms around him.

“Please, Dad!” I called.

He writhed, snorted, grunted, swung his fists.

“Why wasn’t it yours?” he snarled at Bill. “Why wasn’t it the bliddy maniac upstairs?”

Bill stepped forward and held him, too.

“Oh, Francis,” he said.

“Daddy!” I begged. “Daddy, please!”

He slumped at last. He let us pull him back. He leaned upon me as we shuffled across the street.

“Would you like me to stay?” said the priest at the door.

“No, Father,” Dad sighed. “Just fuck off back to your God.”

We went inside. He went to her one more time. I helped him up the stairs and into his bed and then went down again.

There was a scent of hawthorn in the coffin room.

I touched her icy brow. I kissed her icy cheek.

They laid her in the earth next day.

Dad drank. He drank in the Iona Club and tottered home to drink again. He drank cans of McEwan’s Export and bottles of Bell’s whisky. He chain smoked Player’s No. 6. I smoked along with him, and he didn’t care, and we flicked our fag ends into cinders and ashes that slid out from the grate. We ate Heinz baked beans, Heinz spaghetti, sausages, fried eggs, tinned tomatoes, ambrosia creamed rice. Loaf after loaf of white sliced bread. Bags of chips smothered in HP sauce. We hardly washed the dishes, we hardly changed the sheets. Lightbulbs flickered out and weren’t replaced. We wore pants for days and shirts for weeks. The house smelt, we smelt. We watched
The Outer Limits
and
The Twilight Zone
. We lay awake at four a.m. and listened to the howling dogs and the night-shift caulkers and we stared into the horrors of the night. I’d hear him weeping, hear him cursing, hear him wrestling with himself within his tangled sheets. I’d hear him rising with a groan to go downhill to his detested work. I’d get up and follow him an hour later.

At school, Creel and Joyce tried to comfort me. Joyce tried to give me poems for grieving. The poems told of veils, of separation, of lights in darkness, of a coming-together again. They tried to tell me that death itself would die.

I ripped them up, dropped them into bins, burned them in my heart. I scribbled my own words of hate, yowls of rage and snarls of spite. I cursed, blasphemed and howled onto page after empty page. I wrote of monstrous murders, of knives, guns, hatchets, of broken bones and severed flesh and pouring blood and seeping gore.

I wrote that every missile should be launched right now and all bombs dropped. I dreamed of the whole world blazing bright.

Holly stayed at my side. She went down to school with me. She sought me out after lessons and at break times.

She said there was meaning in nothing, and that was the only meaning we could know.

She painted me and painted me: against the pebbledash, against fierce flames, against abundant never-ending stars, against the hawthorn trees, upon the wire against the foliage and the sky. In each of them I had a different face, a different shape. I was old, I was young, I was a tender innocent, I was a brute.

When I questioned the variety, she laughed.

“We have everything inside us,” she said.

“Each of us is everybody,” she said.

We hardly knew what we were saying but we said such things and thought such things. We were young. We were testing ourselves out against the pebbledash and against the future and the past.

She painted my mother for me, as she had been in my first memory, reaching up to a clothesline with bright-blue sky beyond and with bright translucent fabrics dancing around her head.

I hung these paintings in my room. Dad hated them.

“Fucking art,” he said. “What’s the use of fucking art?”

I tried to lift myself. I worked hard. The time of O levels was approaching. I read, I revised, I committed great chunks of history and geography to heart. I memorized list after list of French vocabulary. I learned Archimedes’s principle and SOHCAHTOA and Euclid’s
Elements
. I drew the human lungs and the human brain and named their parts. I learned the speeches of King Lear.

But to the girdle do the gods inherit
,

Beneath is all the fiends’;

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit
,

Burning, scalding, stench, consumption;

fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!

I sat by the hearth cramming information into my brain and Dad wavered between pride, astonishment and scorn. One day,
Oh, I’m so proud of you, Dominic. You are what it’s all been for
. And on another,
What’s the bliddy point of it? There’s nae place for the likes of us. You’d be better getting a trade, learnin a skill. What’s the point of all this learnin and all these bliddy books?
And then tears would be falling from his eyes.
Oh, she was so proud of you. Wasn’t she so proud
. And then again,
What is the point? What’s the point of this of that of anybliddything at all?

I got on with it. I felt like I was facedown to an icy deck, that I slithered all alone through a dark and filthy double hull.

One day I ran uphill alone in search of what? In search of skylarks, of light, of disappearance? In order to run and not stop running till I’d run into a new life that wasn’t me, in which there was not a me at all? I ran past the hawthorn trees upon their crag and ran to the rock with the heavenly space in it. Could see it nowhere, told myself it had just been an illusion, a kind of dream. Then there it was. Gnarled shrubs and the ancient oak, the jagged stone beneath, the narrow opening between the roots. It was as if it had been prepared for me. I crouched and saw that new candles had been recently lit, illuminating Heaven. I slithered in, the knee-high opening just wide enough to let me through. I lay facing upward. The air was warm and scented by the candles. The only sound seemed to be the tiny hiss of the candles burning, the tiny crackle of the paper shifting. The floor was soft. I ran my fingertips across the sky, across the saints and angels, God in glory, Christ at his side, the dove and the tongues of fire to the Holy Ghost. I tried to pray.
Our Father, who art in Heaven
. Knew I could not. As I looked close, I saw that Heaven was painted upon other images, earlier shapes. There was graffiti visible just beneath the blue: cocks and balls and blasphemy and scrawled black curses. Jack’s Heaven was painted over coarseness, mischief, violence, grief, confusion. Maybe it had been repainted many times. I closed my eyes. I wept for a while. After what could have been a thousand years the tears stopped and I grew still and calm.