The Tightrope Walkers (26 page)

“You must live in peace,” he told us. “We are only in this world for a short period of vivid and wonderful waking in an eternity of dreamless dark.”

We walked the final mile towards the sea. Fishing boats moved on it, the homeward-heading ones surrounded by white storms of dancing birds. The islands, the Farnes, reached towards the horizon. The red-and-white hooped Longstone Lighthouse stood on the rocks of Outer Farne.

We kept pausing, staring.

“It’s just so beautiful,” said Holly. “And it’s where we’re from, and it’s like Heaven.”

We walked by the sea into Beadnell. In the harbour there were little fishing boats and sailing boats. Families picnicked on the beach. Kids splashed and screamed in the water. A fire burned at the far end of the long curved bay. We took off our shoes and waded ankle-high through the icy water towards it.

Someone was singing Joni Mitchell, a song that told of our journey from the city to the sea.

We paused by the rock pools and saw scuttling crabs, limpets, barnacles, grey little fish, dark rubbery anemones. Foot-long jellyfish were stranded on the sand. The rocks were black. Brown seaweed swayed in the surf. Strips of it lay dead and pungent on the tideline and flies buzzed on it. There was a line of great concrete cubes below the dunes, tank traps left over from the war. It was all so northern, so un-Californian, but Joni Mitchell’s words mingled with the crying of the dainty terns that danced above the water. A flight of our exotic-looking bird, the puffin, dashed by above our heads. A pair of seals raised their whiskery heads from the water and watched as we waved and hooted at them.

The kids at the fire were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, poised at the end of schooldays. We hailed the ones we knew, and the ones we didn’t know. All of us were friends. Some of the boys wore necklaces of stones and seeds. Some who could manage it had scrawny beards. There were bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale, cans of Younger’s Tartan, bottles of wine like ours.

The sun was warm all afternoon. High-up gannets headed further north towards invisible Bass Rock. There was talk of where we’d come from, where we were and where we’d go. We talked about those we knew who were following the trail to Afghanistan or had gone to Athens on the Magic Bus.

“That’ll be us soon,” we said.

A blond boy on a rock burned a lump of dope and rolled a joint and passed it round. I hardly dared to touch it, but I took a shallow drag and passed it on.

The boys started playing Fally the Best in the dunes. It was a game that all boys played on these beaches. You imagined that war was going on. You took turns to tiptoe through the dunes. You kept crouching, tense, watchful, apprehensive. You knew that the silent enemy was somewhere close by. They waited, hidden, with their weapons poised — their rifles, their grenades, their knives. You came to the crest of the dunes. You never survived. You screamed in agony as the machine-gun bullets thudded into you, as the grenades burst open and shrapnel ripped its way into your flesh, as the sniper hiding still as death in the marram grass hit you with a single deadly shot, as the silent spinning knife struck deep into the heart.

“Die!” called the killers. “Die!”

“Aaaagh!” you screamed. “Ayeeee!”

And you fell, in ostentatious agony, and tumbled down the dune, and lay dead still in distorted shapes upon the sand. And you were given a score out of ten, and you laughed, and rose, and brushed the sand away, and started again, and killed again and died again, and started again, again, again.

The sun went down over the Cheviots and dunes behind. The air cooled, the game ended. We hung our blankets across our shoulders. We searched the jetsam for more fuel.

We cooked potatoes in the fire. We ate bread and tins of meat, tomatoes and beans. We drank beer and wine. The fire glowed more brightly. The sky burned red and orange behind and all continued darkening. The sea moved gently, gleamed metallic. The Longstone Lighthouse light began to turn, just distant flashes at first, but soon the cone-shaped beam was visible, sweeping across the sea, the islands, the beach and us. The dope smokers sighed more deeply than the rest of us, but we all sighed, we all muttered and murmured. The cone of light intensified and we moved from darkness to light, darkness to light. We saw the lights of boats like stars beneath the stars. I sat with my arm around Holly. We sang along to the guitars, to the tambourine that someone gently swung. We kissed, and then we slipped away from the fire, walked hand-in-hand to the dunes. We found a hollow edged with marram grass, a kind of nest from which we could see the fire and the lighthouse light, the boats, the stars, the darkness of the sky to the north, the glow of the city to the south. The sand was still warm from the day’s sun. We kissed, and undressed each other. Do you have anything? we asked each other. No. We laughed. Oh, God, to be so unprepared after so much preparation. We made love and told each other that what would be would be. We told each other we had loved each other since that first moment we saw each other from the windows of our opposite houses. We made love again, and then lay silent and naked, as the light swept across us and away from us and back to us again.

She ran her fingers across the sand upon my skin.

She smiled.

“Pebbledashed Dominic,” she whispered.

How strange to think of that.

“On Beadnell Beach,” I said, “I can connect nothing with nothing.”

A boy sang, “The Times They Are A-Changin.”

The voice moved on, and back into time, into the strains of “Felton Lonnen.”

“ ‘The kye’s come hyem, but Aa see not me hinny;

The kye’s come hyem, but Aa see not me bairn;

Aa’d rather loss aall the kye than loss me bairn.’”

Then silence, just the turning of the sea, beating of our hearts, soft sighing of our breath. We pulled the blankets close around us and we slept.

“Dominic. Dom!”

She was shaking me awake.

“Look!” she whispered.

She held the marram grass aside. The tide was out, the sea was still, the red edge of the sun rose over the Farnes. An ambulance slithered and swerved its way along the beach. A police car stood by the smouldering fire. Gulls called. Girls cried. Kids held each other tight. They stood around in nervous little groups. They knelt in depression and dejection. A policeman moved among them, scribbling in a notebook. Another policeman crouched by the body lying on the sand.

We didn’t move. Just watched as the ambulance came closer, as the stretcher was brought out, as the body was laid on it, lifted into the ambulance and carried away. The policemen stayed as the kids collected their belongings. Two boys got into the car and were driven away. The others trudged afterwards, carrying their sacks and blankets and guitars, leaving a trail of scattered footprints in the glistening wet sand. We stayed till they’d all gone, till the beach was cleared, till the sun was huge and orange and round and the sea shivered as it turned and started to come back in again.

Then we went down. Stood among the litter — the smouldering timbers, the ash, the cans and bottles, the bread crusts, the cigarette ends. Still early. Nobody around except a single dog walker along by the harbour. A black low-flying jet roared by above our heads, then another.

We headed back towards the village through the dunes. We stood at the roadside and hitched. A red car swerved to a halt.

“Get in.”

He drove us quickly away. A middle-aged man with a long scar on his cheek.

“You’re the third lot I’ve picked up already,” he said. “I’m doing my duty to get rid of you all.”

He turned to glare at Holly in the backseat, swerved towards a ditch, swerved back into the middle of the road.

“Who do you think you are?” he said. “Coming up here with your guitars and drink and drugs and sex.”

“Did he die?” I said.

“It was the same last year, the same the year before. Wailing all the night, drowning in your own damn sick, leaving the place like a midden.”

“Did he?”

“How old are you? Seventeen? Eighteen? What are your parents thinking of?”

He roared through the silent villages towards the A1. Another pair of long-haired hitchers stood in a lay-by at Chathill. He blared his horn at them. He flung a V-sign at them. He put his foot down.

“Layabouts!” he snarled.

We leaned back in our seats. We clung on to door handles.

“What effect do you think you have on our children?”

“
Did
he die?” said Holly.

“It’d be a lesson for you all if he did. Is this what we fought a war for? No, he didn’t. Get ready to get out.”

He shuddered to a halt at Felton.

“Get away from here and back to your Tyneside hovels. And don’t come back.”

“There’s bin a death,” said Dad.

We were in the kitchen. I was frying chops and chips.

“One of the tank lads,” he said. “Straight overboard. Straight doon to the bliddy dock. With not a bliddy hope.”

Nothing I could say.

“End of the shift. He was steppin down onto the shipside ladder. Mebbe it was loose or slippy, mebbe he just took a wrong step. Who knows?” He sighed. “They’re not too clever, that lot. Mebbe he was showin off or something. Mebbe anything.”

“Who was he?”

“Miller, he was called. A young’n, not been there too long. A bit of a clot by all accounts, but a canny lad, they say. You wouldn’t know him, son.”

“One of McAlinden’s lot?”

“Eh?”

“Vincent. He’s in the tanks, isn’t he?”

“He’s been took out. He’s just a bliddy skiver now, one of them that wanders about pretendin they’re goin somewhere special and doin something useful.”

“And they keep him on?”

“There’s always a few like that. Nobody knows quite what they do. They’re usually ones that’s soft in the head or hard as bliddy nails. The talk is that McAlinden’s got some kind of pull with Blister.”

“Blister?”

“Ye’ll find out. He’s always had his bliddy favourites.”

I put the food on the plates. We sat together at the table.

“What do you mean, I’ll find out?”

“It’s awful, but it made us think of you.”

“Of me?”

He poured HP sauce across the chips.

“They’ve been takin students on for the holidays. Usin them as cleaners and gofers and stuff.”

“Aye?”

“So I thought we could mebbe get you something for a couple of weeks afore school starts again.”

“In the tank?”

“Aye.” He shrugged. “They’re a man short, after all.” He laughed. “A job, eh? An amazin thought, eh?”

I dunked HP onto my plate.

“The wage’ll be canny enough.”

I chewed a chip.

“Or is it beneath you?” he said.

“Course it’s not.”

“Good. It’s your roots, you know. Your heritage. I’ll put in a word, see what’s what.”

He laughed.

“I already have, to tell the truth,” he said.

He lifted a forkful of pork to his mouth.

“Long ago,” he said, “I telt you I’d find a way to let you see.” He rolled his eyes and grinned. “Mebbe the time has come.”

Holly and I made love in the hills now. We’d make our way across the fields towards the top. We’d go beyond the hawthorn trees, to the copses and meadows and paddocks on the opposite slope. We found beautiful places, where only the birds could see us. An ancient grassy clearing in a birch wood. A mossy bank at the edge of a flowered meadow. We heard groups of kids playing nearby. We saw distant couples walking hand-in-hand, maybe heading for their own sanctuaries. No one came to disturb us. We took precautions now, of course. Once a little black dog appeared, rushing at us to lick us and leap across our feet, before pelting back to its unseen hidden master. We heard bleating sheep and lowing cows. Once there was an hour when we heard the regular twang of an air rifle and regular yells of triumph. And as always there were the traffic and the factories and the insects in the air and singing birds.