The Tightrope Walkers (25 page)

“Mebbe we’ll get you to read sometime,” Pickard said.

“Eh?”

“At the Tower. A poem or two. Get ye started.”

Shy bairns get nowt.

“Great,” I said.

We saw Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti at the Tower. We sat in that dark candlelit room in the ancient city walls and sipped red wine and let the rhythms of New York and California sing in our northern brains. We shivered as Ferlinghetti read to us. We clutched each other, as we had in the circus on the playing fields so long ago, when the poet stood up on his chair and spread his arms like wings and teetered over us as if about to fall and called out his poem about tightrope walking, balance and rhyme and determination.

I started to send poems and stories to magazines. The editor of
Bullocks
wrote back that a story called “Pebbledash Poltergeist” was too way out even for them.
Black Middens
said that the same story was far too English, far too staid. I sent again, was rejected again. I didn’t tell my dad about this, but I told Bill Stroud.

“Rejection is nowt,” he said. “The world’s brimful of folk who’ll say you cannot do what you can do. Be brave, press on. You’re hardly more than a child and a lifetime of wonders lies in wait.”

We went to the Oxford Ballroom on Mondays and danced to Motown. At weekends we went to the A’Gogo and saw the Junco Partners, the Animals, Pink Floyd and Cream.

I bought an old secondhand record player. I went to Windows Music in Newcastle and bought Jefferson Airplane and the Deviants, and stole the Grateful Dead. I dreamed of finding sources of marijuana and LSD to accompany the music, but this was the pebbledashed North, this was Tyneside, and I didn’t have a clue where to go to, who to talk to. So I bought cans of McEwan’s Export and drank instead.

I drank them in my room with Holly lying at my side. We listened to the sounds from the sunlit West Coast and she sang and hummed along as we dreamed of being free. We kissed, and slipped our hands inside each other’s clothes, and wondered if this was what was meant by love. We sang, we kissed, we began to penetrate each other more and more deeply, seeking the Ultima Thule that lay inside ourselves and beyond ourselves.

“ ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow,’” Joyce read, “ ‘out of this stony rubbish?’” He read us
The Waste Land
at the beginning of lunchtime each Friday. We could just turn up and listen. Didn’t have to ask any questions, didn’t have to say anything unless we wanted to.

He said that silence was maybe the only proper response to something so amazing. Even when we thought we understood, we’d find out that we didn’t.

“What does it mean?” he asked.

“ ‘Shantih shantih shantih,’” he answered. “ ‘Jug jug jug.’”

He said that Eliot himself probably didn’t know how he’d done what he had done. And why should he? Like all true creators, he was astonished by his own creation.

“ ‘Weilala leia’” he said. “Waly waly waly.” He laughed. “It’s nearly Geordie. Why aye, man. Why aye!”

I loved the way the words moved in the air, the way they set up such rhythms and disturbances in my body and brain. And I loved the silence afterwards, in which the words continued. You cannot say, or guess, for you know only “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter.” And “I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

One Friday I left the reading with Holly.

“I’m going to perform,” I said. “You can announce it.”

It was something people had started to do, performances in the sixth-form common room. Last week Bella Carr had read a poem called “Scream” in a high-pitched frantic voice. It was a Geordie homage to Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

“What’ll I say you’re going to do?” asked Holly.

“I’m playing the piano.”

“The piano? You?”

“Aye. For four minutes thirty-three seconds.”

“Oh, that!”

The Zombies were on the record player as we went in. She switched it off.

“Dominic will now perform,” she said.

I was already at the piano.

“He will play a piece by an American composer called John Cage. It is called ‘Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds.’”

I held my watch in my hand. I lifted the piano lid, hesitated, and immediately closed it again.

“Howay, Dom!” Ricky Eckart yelled. “Get on with it!”

There was the noise of the road outside, the howling of younger kids in the yard outside.

I lifted the lid again, hesitated, took a deep breath and closed it again.

I watched the watch.

Heather Milford whispered, “Poor soul. He’s gannin daft, ye knaa.”

Somewhere far off a desperate teacher yelled. Minutes passed. I checked the watch, lifted the lid, held it poised above the keys, then closed it again. I didn’t look at the kids gathering around me. I watched the watch. A couple of minutes passed: voices, laughter, curses, shifting chairs. I suddenly lifted the lid again, straightened my back, breathed deeply, then stood up and bowed.

“Nice one, Dominic!” Ricky yelled.

Much applause.

“That,” said Holly, “was four minutes thirty-three seconds.”

“Four minutes thirty-three seconds of nowt!” laughed Willie Cook.

“There’s no such thing as nowt,” said Holly. “There’s no such thing as silence.”

“Each something,” I said, “is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.”

“Very true,” said Willie. “So very very true, Dominic.”

I grinned, took Holly’s hand and walked away from the piano.

“That was bliddy brilliant!” she whispered.

Everybody had kind of heard about the silent composition. The music with no music. Just as we’d heard of the play without actors and without any words, and the paintings that were plain white or totally black. We’d all laughed at the idea of such stuff. We maybe doubted its very existence. But now here it was in this ordinary Tyneside place. And I’d never thought it could be so weird, so disconcerting.

“Did you hear that little bird outside?” said Holly. “Did you hear that teacher yelling far away?”

“Aye.”

I’d also heard
The Waste Land
in me, and my mother’s final breaths and her final silence, and my father’s wheezing, and the sound of McAlinden pissing down onto a rug, and the voice of Mrs. Stroud, and Jack Law’s grunts and Jack Law’s song. And my own heart, and my own yearnings. And I heard the silence of the world that was not silence but was filled with traffic and factory and shipyard din and the cries of children and the songs of birds. All the sounds that made the song of this part of the earth, all the sounds that made our local music of the spheres. And I heard the laughter of my friends and of the lovely Holly Stroud, and I knew I’d hear the silent piece forevermore, even when there was no piano anywhere to be seen.

There was much laughter. I knew that I’d begun a tradition, that John Cage would be played in this place many times.

“Now!” shouted Bella Carr. “After that, I think it’s time for ‘Scream’ again!”

She jumped onto a chair and started yelling.

Which is what Holly and I did, that early August Saturday, which was not bitter at all, when we first made proper love. We took a blanket each, something to swim in, a little money. I had a tin of luncheon meat, a tin of tomatoes, a loaf of white bread. She had ham and apples. She carried a rucksack, I rolled my things into the blanket and tied it around my shoulders with a belt. I had
The Mersey Sound
, she had Plath’s
Ariel
. We both wore faded jeans and faded shirts.

Dad was on a half-shift at the yard.

Bill stood at his gate and watched us leave.

“Wish I could come,” he said.

“Dad,” said Holly.

“But I watch the shadow of the travellers’ backs as they disappear.”

He gave us a bottle of Hirondelle wine.

We took the train to Newcastle, walked northwards through the city. Arrived at the beginning of the Great North Road. There were others there, a line of young people heading for the sea. Those at the front held out their arms and raised their thumbs. The line diminished. Soon we came to the front. Lifts were easy then, before we became suspicious, and the roads were slow, before the bypasses were built.

We were picked up by a lawyer in a Rover. He told us that he’d travelled all the way from Wolverhampton to find the woman who had left him for another.

“Where is she now?” asked Holly.

He didn’t know. In a village beyond Morpeth, he thought. She was called Chantelle and she was from the South. He loved her desperately. He’d drive through the villages, ask questions about a woman with an unfamiliar accent.

“It’s a wild-goose chase,” he said. “But it’s a journey I have to make.” He laughed. “I’m a lawyer. I thought I was a sensible man. But where’s the sense in this?”

He bought us lunch in a roadside pub, the Fox.

“Why am I telling
you
all this?” he said. “Because I’ll never see you again, I guess. Because you’re young. I missed all that. I grew up in the war. Is it good to be young today?”

We told him that it was. Before he dropped us off he said, “Maybe I’ll never go back again. Maybe it’s not too late to be the me I might have been.”

We bounced towards Alnwick with a pair of terrified sheep in the open-backed pickup truck of a wizened farmer who told us as we left him that he would nivver have let his kids dae what we were daeing. Ower much freedom these days, he told us. That’s the top ’n’ bliddy borrom of it. What if he let his sheep just wander where they wished? What’d happen to them then? Tek care, he said. There’s alwiz a villain or three hangin aboot roond here. He gave us a pound note. Divent hoy it away on rubbish, he said.

We were picked up by a gentle German named Hans in an old green van. There were ancient stone-cutting tools in an enamel bowl on the backseat. He told us they were everywhere in these parts, knives and axes just below the grass.

“I’m a remnant of war,” he said, “discovering other remnants of other wars.”

He’d been a prisoner of war during World War Two.

“I was travelling,” he said. “A student, a young man on my own seeing the wonders of Northumberland. My plan was to be a historian, an archaeologist. But war impeded me.”

He drove slowly. He pointed to a kestrel that hovered above the roadside, a pair of swans that flew seaward high above. He’d been detained in a tin shack in the Cheviots with another German and an Austrian.

“War seemed far away,” he said, “for all of us. The farmers let us till their fields, which is where I first began to find these things. They even let us drink with them in their country bars. People were so kind, even on the nights we heard the bombs, even as we stood at the village’s edge as the sky darkened and we saw the fires of Tyneside shining bright in the sky to the south. ‘It is not you,’ they said. ‘We know it is not you.’”

He lived in his own shack now, a stone and timber place with two rooms and without electricity. He lived alone. He had only once been home to Germany. He collected stone artefacts. He kept a pair of goats. Sometimes he served at a bar and in spring he helped farmers with their lambs. He was happy. People were very kind. He did not understand the world. Did we? He told us to visit him sometime. We would find his shack in the Simonside Hills, next to a sheet of black rock upon which mysterious circles and spirals had been carved many thousands of years ago.