The Tightrope Walkers (24 page)

He kept on humming softly.

“She liked the country, did me bonny lass. She used to say we’d come out to the country when me work was done. Ha. As if we ever could.”

We went through Dunston, left the edges of the city, passed through Blaydon.

“You should’ve seen her back in them days, boy,” he said. “She was a looker. How’d she ever end up choosin me?”

There were fields of cows and sheep now. The first lambs were gambolling. Men stood in the water, fishing. A bunch of kids walked on the riverbank with a crowd of scampering dogs. The moors of the west were closer, brighter.

We got out at Wylam. We walked through the woods above the station. We drank pints of bitter on a wooden bench outside the Dr. Syntax Inn. We ate the cheese sandwiches we’d brought. He said they’d sat exactly here on such a day as this. Said he could taste the hard-boiled eggs they’d had. And the beer tasted just the same as it did back then. He raised his glass to the sky. He laughed.

“Praise be,” he said. “I love this stuff, ye knaa.”

“I know.”

He shook his head, he shrugged.

“So lovely,” he said. “The taste of it, that bitterness and sweetness, the feelin of it gannin doon, the feelin of it settlin in you, spreadin through you.”

The sunlight streamed through the liquid and the glass, illuminating the brilliant amber of it.

“Is it daft to say it’s beautiful?” he said.

“No.”

“It is,” he said. “It truly bliddy is.”

He swigged.

“And the same sun shines,” he said. “And the same trees grow. And the same pub sign still swings in the breeze. And I close me eyes and it’s her I see that’s sittin there, not you.” He swigged his beer. He touched my hand. “Divent worry, son. I’m not descendin. It’s just I sometimes wonder, How come everything didn’t die that day?”

We walked again through fields. There was still dew in the grass. He named the tiny blue flowers as speedwell. I played, walking in circles and spirals, kept looking back to see where we’d come from, the lovely patterns of our footsteps in the grass. He led me through a copse of birch trees to a place of ancient sandpits and quarries. He told me that all of this was like walking back into the past. A path led us right into one of the sandpits and he pointed up and showed me the line of holes that had been burrowed by birds into the sandy soil at the top.

“Sand martins,” he said. “We done this as well.”

He started to climb, on all fours, the sand falling away in waves and clumps around and below him. He told me to follow. Climbing was slow and difficult. The sand so soft, so dense, warm at the surface but cold within. We kept sliding backward, but then the earth became more solid where it became more steep. Almost at the top, he said we should pause. We gathered our breath. The brown-and-white fork-tailed creatures whirled around us, singing their alarms, beating their wings within inches of our faces.

“Just the same as then,” he said.

Poor troubled things — who were we to be here in their place?

“We’ll just stay a moment,” he whispered. “They won’t remember nowt.”

He shinned a little higher.

“And mebbe that’s the way to be,” he said.

He put his hand into one of the holes. He reached deep until almost his whole arm had disappeared. He sighed, drew his hand out again, opened it and showed the small white egg on his palm.

“They won’t know,” he said. “They cannot count. There was five of them in there. You do it now. Another nest.”

I didn’t dare at first, but knew I must. I shoved with my feet in the sand and climbed higher. I fearfully put my hand into one of the holes. Slow as slow I reached inside. I remember the grit, the cold sand against my skin, the rising thrill and fear. I recall how my hand and arm seemed to fit so well in there. And then I touched it, the bird that hadn’t left its nest. It shivered and vibrated and quaked against my fingers. I felt its feathers, its beak, its claws. I gaped and gasped in terror and wonder. I told myself do not recoil. I touched the stunning terrified frantic life within and then let go at last, and tumbled down the quarry slope and yelped.

He slithered down and lay with me. I told him what I’d felt.

As I told it, it intensified in me.

He opened his mouth, raised his hand to it, and allowed the egg he was holding there to drop out onto his palm.

“Safest place of aal,” he said.

He showed it, the lovely impossible fragile thing.

“Think what this is,” he said, and his brow furrowed as he had that thought. He pointed to the sky, where the birds were less frantic now. “And think what it’ll turn to. How can such a thing occur?”

I gazed at his blemished nicotine-stained fingers and the beautiful white creation that they held.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody knows. That’s the amazing thing about it all.”

He kept on staring at the egg.

“Is that the way to think about it? To think that naebody knaas?” he said. “Is that a better way than thinking that there must be a God and there must be a truth and there must be a bliddy answer to it all?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Good. I never really had much time for God and I never knew much truth.” He pondered. “But I guess that meks us lonely, eh?”

I shrugged.

“Mebbe.”

“So what? Couldn’t be much lonelier than I am.”

He reached out and took my arm.

“Unless ye were took from me, of course.”

Then he took a thin penknife from his pocket, made tiny holes in each end of the egg, put the egg to his lips and blew and the yolk and white spattered down onto the sand. He wiped away the salty dribble of yolk from the corner of his lips. He spat. The yolk and the white were just a mess on the earth. The creature that would have grown from them was gone before it lived. The song it would have sung was silent.

“Used to have a hundred of these,” he said. “All boys did. All of us were collectors and admirers, back in them old days.”

He wrapped the egg in a handkerchief, put it in his jacket pocket.

“So she was alive in there?” he said.

I nodded. Yes.

“That’s the kind of thing you’ll remember forevermore.”

After a time we followed our tracks through the grass back towards the woods. This time the marks of our footsteps intertwined more closely, made two curving interlinking pathways, our elegant drawing upon the earth.

We drank again outside the Dr. Syntax. He sang a brighter song now, “The Blaydon Races.”

“ ‘I went to Blaydon Races, ’twas on the ninth of June

Eighteen hundred and sixty-two on a summer’s afternoon . . .’”

I read to him again.

“ ‘Hope is the thing with feathers
—

That perches in the soul
—

And sings the tune without the words
—

And never stops — at all.’”

He grinned. He swigged his beautiful beer. His white shirt collar gleamed in the afternoon light. I had a sudden vision of a bird hatching in his mouth, flying free into the air above the fields and woods and sandpits. I told him and he laughed and he tipped his head back and opened his mouth and we both saw the bird flying free from him again.

“We can imagine anything,” I said.

“Anythin,” he answered. “Anythin at aal.”

We drank some more. We felt the birds fluttering inside us.

We dozed against each other on the red seats as the train headed along the valley and through the darkening city. We walked towards the pale estate. We paused on the wasteland. I held him tight, and I felt the tender fluttering of my poor lovely father’s heart.

I grew my hair so that it hung across my ears and curled across my collar. I practised yoga in my bedroom. I stood on my head and contemplated nothingness. While Dad snored and grunted in his sleep, I tried to travel in the astral plane. I lay flat on my bed, closed my eyes, breathed deeply, slowly. Tried to empty my mind of all unnecessary thoughts, all distractions. Pictured my spirit breaking free, leaving my body behind. Imagined looking down upon myself from above. Imagined going higher, rising through the roof of the house, away from the estate, away from Tyneside, moving eastward across the North Sea towards India, Nepal, the mysterious palaces and peaks and valleys of Tibet, and towards the unknown unseen worlds beyond. I never made it.

I worked at Dixon’s newsagents, delivering
Chronic
les
in the evenings and the Sundays at weekends. I stole Beech Nut and Mars Bars and packets of Park Drives. I slipped my hand into the till a few times. I saved up to buy my jeans and shirts and books. I got a Saturday job at the Co-op in Newcastle. I sold boiler suits and anoraks and slacks and blazers. Customers would raise their arms as I measured their chests, and I’d catch the scent of sweat on them. I measured their inside legs using a tape with a three-inch-long steel end to make sure I didn’t touch their balls.

One Saturday during my lunchtime from the Co-op, I wandered into Handysides, a little run-down Victorian arcade off Percy Street, and discovered Ultima Thule. A sign on the door said that the shop lay beyond the limits of the known world. It was next door to Vercelli’s Coffee Bar and just across the alley from Psychic Giftes.

It was run by a poet, Tom Pickard, and a novelist, Tony Jackson. It smelt of joss sticks, tobacco, dust. I found pamphlets of concrete poetry and fractured prose. And little magazines —
Grunt, Stand, Steel, Lighthouse, Black Middens Review
— that invited writers to send in stories and poems. I dreamed of seeing my own work in such pages, but would I ever dare to send in my adolescent words? They seemed so forceful as they rushed down my arm and through my pen and onto paper, but within an hour or so they seemed as useless as the graffiti beneath Jack Law’s covering of heavenly blue. I saw little posses of real writers in that shop, men with haggard faces, goatee beards and intense eyes, women in floral frocks smoking roll-ups. I dreamed of going up to them and saying, “I am Dominic Hall and I am like you.” I didn’t dare. I was silent, and too small, too young and far too shy beside them. Then one day I was with Holly in there and she nudged me.

“Go on,” she said. “Be brave.”

Took a deep breath, clenched my fists, went up to Pickard.

“Hello,” I said.

“Aye.”

I didn’t know how to go on. I wanted to turn around.

“I seen you in here before,” he said.

“It’s a brilliant p-place.”

He laughed.

“Aa knaa that,” he said. “Tell us something new. What ye writin?”

“Eh?” I said.

“It’s obvious. What ye writin?”

I took a breath. I hardly dared.

“Poems,” I said. “And a tale about a cruel kid and a silent tramp.”

“He’s brilliant,” said Holly.

“You sent them anywhere?”

“Not yet. I will.”

“Do it. Shy bairns get nowt.”

“I know.”

He laughed, came closer.

“Do I smell the yards on you?” he said.

“My dad’s a caulker.”

“Smoothin the lines that the welder makes. Good background for a writer. And you?” he said to Holly.

“I paint,” she said. “I draw. My dad’s a draughtsman.”

Pickard laughed again.

“Seems we got the future in the shop today,” he said.

“Shy bairns get
nowt
!” I whispered inside myself.

“I wondered,” I said, “if there’s any jobs in here.”

“This is Newcassel, ye knaa. This is a bliddy
book
shop, ye knaa.”

“A few hours sometimes. You wouldn’t have to pay me much.”

“Wouldn’t be
able
to pay ye much. Give us a line of poetry.”

“Eh?”

“A line of poetry. If we’re ganna employ a poet we’d better knaa we’re employin a poet. Give us a line.”

“Go
on
, Dominic,” said Holly.

“I touched the stitch marks on his lips,” I said.

“Another.”

“I heard the crackle of the rods and the thunder of the hammers. I saw men bending to the deck as if in prayer.”

“How old are ye?”

“Sixteen. Nearly seventeen.”

He called across the little shop to Jackson.

“Tony! Howay over and meet the new member of staff. We’ll pay ye in books and tickets to the Tower. That’s aal reet? It should be for a bliddy poet.”

A few hours, here and there. Sometimes I went straight from school to do half an hour before closing time. Served poets and novelists and students and teachers and seekers after arcane paranormal truths. Served kids like myself with the shy and yearning eyes of would-be writers. Blushed along with blokes who spotted
Oz
and Henry Miller in the window and came to scan the shelves of underground magazines in search of porn. I read
Steel
and
Black Middens Review
and
Bullocks
and
Grunt
. Kept the joss sticks burning. Kept the shelves in order. Cleared the ashtrays. Made coffee for Pickard and Jackson and tried to stay cool and calm as I tried to chat with them. Gaped at the famous poets passing through for their readings at Morden Tower: Patten, Corso, Bunting, Dunn, McGough, Mitchell, Heaney. Loved the sensations of being in the same room as them, touching the same books as them, drinking from the same cups as them. I read William Burroughs with thrill and confusion and didn’t have a clue what he was on about. I read Kerouac and rode with him from my pebbledashed house across the rails and roads of the USA and across the border into Mexico. I read Paul Klee’s words about taking a line for a walk, and I tried to make sense of John Cage’s explorations of silence. I found Hemingway, read his stories aloud to myself, and fell in love with such syntax that worked so fluently on a northern tongue. I read Pickard and McGough, poets of the North who dared to write in northern rhythms and words. Pickard was right. Writing was like welding and caulking, spattering ink onto the sheets, then hammering it to make it neat and smooth and watertight. And writing books must be like making ships, welding words and pages in pursuit of an elusive image of the finished perfect thing.