The Tightrope Walkers (28 page)

“Havin fun?” he asked.

I lifted my own mask, rolled my eyes.

“See, you didn’t tumble,” he said.

The others finished and came to join us. We all sat together on a strut.

“Tek five, eh?” said Norman.

Silversleeve rolled a cigarette and lit it and breathed smoke and dust into himself and out into the dust again.

“That’s better,” he sighed. “That’s just lovely.”

He coughed, retched, smoked again.

There was a stench of urine and rot. A shaft of widening light shone down from the distant rectangular hole. It illuminated the dancing dust, the fluttering trapped birds, the quartet of filthy workers in the depths. It framed far-off sunlight and bright blue sky. I turned my face towards it and let the light and the image of the light pour into me.

A siren wailed.

“Break time,” said Norman. “Up we gan, then back we’ll come.”

We climbed the ladder towards the light. Climbed out.

Up there, men sprawled upon the deck, smoking, drinking mugs of tea.

I saw the shape of Dad far away. I waved, got no response.

“Look out!” called somebody nearby. “It’s the beasts of the deep come back to the earth!”

We sat at the edge of the deck and let our legs dangle over the river far below. The others smoked. Silversleeve indicated the sewage on the water, the floating dead birds and passing condoms.

“Just like the inside of your mind, Norm,” he said.

“No, it is not,” said Norman. “Me head is empty as an oil tank. Just rubbish and crap heaped up in it and loonies like you and me and Jakey crawlin roond inside.” He leaned towards Silversleeve. “Gan on, tap it, Silver. Thump it hard. Nowt but emptiness.”

Silversleeve gently rapped Norman’s skull with his knuckles. He grinned.

“Enj-joyin it, B-boff?” said Jakey.

“Aye,” I said, and said it again, for it was strangely true.

I looked at Norman, remembered him at the desk alongside me, remembered the shock of seeing his exercise book for the first time, seeing that nothing of what he saw made sense. It was just scrawl, random assortments of roaming letters and empty spaces with full stops stabbed down at the end of each line. The boy couldn’t hold the pencil properly, but gripped it in his fist like a knife and dragged it clumsily back and forth across the page. His lip would curl and his tongue hang out as he tried to write. His breath would slurp and snort in his throat.

One day Miss O’Kane appeared above us, massive in her faded green tweed jacket and brown feathered hat. She lifted Norman’s book between her thumb and finger, and let it dangle in the air.

“What should we do with a thing like this?” she said to the class.

No one spoke. The cane of Miss O’Kane lay still and silent on her desk.

“And what should we do with a
boy
like this?”

No one spoke.

“What do
you
think, Dominic?” she continued.

No reply.

“Come along, Dominic, what do you
think
?”

“Nothing, Miss,” I muttered at last.

She laughed bitterly.

“Nothing indeed,” she said. She sighed. “Then I will do your thinking for you. Norman Dobson,” she said, “have you looked at Dominic’s work? Have you seen what diligence and care and attention can produce? Have you seen what a
good
boy can do?”

Norman slumped. Miss O’Kane licked a silver star and pressed it down onto my book. Norman turned his head to look. The teacher laughed out in delight.

“Are you trying to
copy
, boy?” she snapped. “Are you trying to reap the benefits of another’s virtue?”

He didn’t speak. None of the others dared to speak. She took Norman by his ear, led him to her desk, bent him over it, and thrashed him with the cane of Miss O’Kane.

I remembered that. And I remembered the catechism test, but little more. We must have continued at Saint Lawrence’s together, but maybe in different classes. Maybe he was one of the crowd that gathered to play in the great football games that streamed back and forward on the playing fields above the pebbledashed estate. Maybe we’d knelt together at the altar rail in church, waiting for the Host to be pressed like silver stars onto our tongues.

“Do you remember Miss O’Kane?” I asked him now.

Norman twisted his face and laughed.

“Aye,” he said. “And I remember you. And I remember Miss O’Bliddykane and all the other Miss O’Bliddykanes.”

He spat towards the river.

“You passed, eh?”

I shrugged and nodded. The eleven-plus, he meant.

“Course you did,” said Norman.

The siren wailed. We all stood up and headed back towards the tank.

“I used to dream of stabbin her, killin her, stringin her up,” said Norman. “Hated her, and all the rest of them. What a waste of hate. They divent deserve it.” He smoked. “She’d say I’m in the right place now, eh, squirmin roond in muck?”

He pulled up his mask from where it dangled around his throat.

“And I remember your mother,” he said quickly.

I caught my breath.

“Aye,” said Norman. “I remember she was nice to me. Outside the school one day. She must’ve been waitin for you. She tapped us on the shoulder. ‘Hello, Norman,’ she said. She put a fruit gum in me hand. She was a good woman. She was kind to us. I remember her.”

He put the filthy mask upon his filthy face, told us to pick up our buckets and he led us down again.

Months-old sandwiches and pies. Discarded welding rods and broken glass. Wedges of steel, holey buckets, ruined boots,
Evening Chronicle
s from six months back. Sodden copies of
Parade
and
Playboy
and
Daily Mirror
s. Paintbrushes and half-empty tins of paint. Broken timbers, lengths of pipe, scrambles of wire and cables. Ripped overalls and shirts and torn tarpaulins, socks, snapped knives, hammers, twisted chisels. A scent of piss, of waste and rot. Dust and grit that’d been swept down and layered over everything. And dead sparrows. And a dead herring gull.

“D-disgusting,” said Jakey.

“They hoy it in cos they knaa there’s us to bring it oot,” said Norman.

“K-keeps us in work,” said Jakey.

“So let’s give thanks to them above. Thanks to yez all in the sunny world above!”

“Get on with it!” boomed Blister through the caulkers’ din.

“We’re doin it, Blister!” called Norman. “What do you think we’re doin? Sunbathin?”

He groaned.

“I hate it is the bliddy truth of it. I dae it aal day long, and I dae it in me dreams at neet, and I dae it when I’m waking up. Is this what lads is bliddy born for? Is it?”

“Yes, it is,” said Silversleeve, “if you’re the ones that’s born to be us and turn oot to be us.”

“Nae other w-way,” said Jakey.

Norman laughed.

“And that is bliddy dreadful, and it’s bliddy true. Haha! So mebbe it’s time to do a Joe Nelson.”

“Joe Nelson?” I said.

“Suicide Joe. A welder come to the end of his time. The ship’s aal ready to be launched. He checks the net has been took out, and in he jumps headbliddyfirst. Wallop and blam and broken bones and squirtin blood and there’s an end to it. Bang. Why wait that lang?”

Jakey laughed.

“Cos you’re a ch-chicken.”

“Squawk squawk!” went Norman, shuffling his non-existent feathers.

He turned his eyes to me.

“Different for you, of course,” he said. “What’ve you been born to be?”

I shrugged.

“Dunno.”

“What d’you
want
to be?”

“Myself.” It sounded pathetic down here in the tank. “Nothing.” I thought of feathers and I looked up at the distant square of sky and I laughed. “A skylark!” I drew on the flamboyant part of myself. “A tightrope walker!”

“Aye?” said Jakey.

“Aye.”

“You m-mean it?”

“Aye!”

“I seen a tightrope walker once,” said Norman. “Years ago.”

“The circus on the playing fields!” I said.

“Aye, that one. You were there an aal?”

“Aye,” I said. “I loved it.”

“And me. I liked the clowns. Liked the donkeys. And was there a strongman, I think I remember.”

“Aye,” I said. “Rudolfo.”

“See?” said Norman to the others. “He even remembers the names.”

He pondered the darkness at his feet.

“Thought them like you would want to be an office worker. Or a teacher or something.”

“Naah,” I said. “Far too boring.”

He lowered his eyes.

“I remember your books. I remember aal the ticks on your sums and how you could write and write and read and read. Bit different from me.”

“Ye could be a wr-writer, then,” said Jakey.

“Aye!” said Silversleeve. “And write aboot us!”

“Now that would be a f-fascinatin tale!”

“One day they went d-doon in the tank, they crawled in the muck, that neet they come b-back oot again, they done the same for many years and then they died. The End.”

Blister’s voice: “Get on with it! Get on with it!”

“You used to help us sometimes,” said Norman. “You remember that?”

He laughed gently.

“Ye showed us how to hold the pen. ‘Stay on the line, Norman,’ you whispered.”

“GET ON WITH IT!”

“Who’d’ve thought we’d meet again doon here?”

“Who’d’ve thought it, eh?” I said.

We smiled at each other. The others looked away.

“GET BLIDDY ON WITH IT!”

We got on with it. Silversleeve went to the top and passed down a rope with a hook on the end of it. We started at one edge of the tank and worked across. We tied the bigger objects to the rope and Silversleeve hauled them up. The rope kept coming down and going up.

We moved across the floor of the tank, clambering over the struts. The oldest deep-down waste was slimy. We swept it into buckets, tied the buckets to the rope. I kept tightening my mask against the intensifying stench. Norman laughed.

“Be glad,” he said, “they give us dirty rates for this.”

“D-double bottoms are even b-better,” said Jakey.

“Aye,” laughed Norman, “confined space as well as filth.”

“If y-you’re up to it,” said Jakey. “If you don’t pass out like Silversleeve that b-bliddy day.”

We lifted, hauled, yanked, pulled, pushed, swept, bucketed, yelled, groaned and laughed and retched. The afternoon wore on. Jakey sighed to find a nest of mice within an ancient battered cloth cap.

“Oh, b-babies!” he said in amazement.

We all looked down to see the tiny naked creatures squirming there.

“They grow from filth,” said Norman. “That’s one good thing about the filth. New life.”

I laughed.

“They can’t!” I said. “It can’t happen like that.”

“Well, how else do they get here, Boff?” said Norman.

“Aye. H-how else?” said Jakey.

He smiled.

“Look at the th-things. The gorgeous beautiful tender b-bairns.”

Norman stubbed out his cigarette.

“We find them everywhere we gan,” he said. “It’s doon to me to dae the deed. Forgive me, mice. You come into a wrong and very bliddy rotten world.”

And stamped three times with his steel-capped boots and dragged a boot-length of waste across the mess.

“Now g-gan back to the Lord,” said Jakey. There were tears in his eyes. He made the sign of the cross above the scene of death. “Be b-born again in a b-better world.”

We worked on.

I reeled at the ugliness, but felt a weird joy in it, a weird joy in being with these others so unlike myself but so like myself, a weird joy to be down in the depths with that shaft of light falling so beautifully from far above, a weird joy to be lost in work, to be becoming lost in memories and thoughts, a weird joy in just being a being on the floor of a tank on the bank of the river at the foot of the hill at the foot of the town.

And then came the moment when Jakey screamed.

“B-body!” he yelled. “B-bliddy body!”

Everything stopped. Even the din of the caulkers seemed to stop.

Then I climbed with Norman through the litter to where Jakey stood in shock.

The corpse lay in a spotlight’s glare, with the hatched shadow of the net across it. It lay face-downward in the shadows between two struts.

“B-body!” Jakey screamed again.