The Tightrope Walkers (3 page)

“Remember finger spaces, Norman,” I’d whisper. “Stay on the lines.”

He’d turn to me with furrowed brow and with snot trickling to his upper lip.

“You can do it, Norman,” I’d whisper.

“I can’t,” he’d say. “I just bliddy cannot, Dom.”

I’d watch his hands trembling with the struggle of it, the fear of it.

Holly knew the joy of it. I loved the times we were allowed to work together, to see the pictures that she drew to supplement and intensify my words, to make our shared creation.
Sum people said Don’t go. It is too danjerus. But the boy was very brayv
. And to see a boy shaped just like me setting out across the page’s snowy waste.

The school, Saint Lawrence’s, was a stone-built place towards the river. It stood upon earth that was riddled with ancient mines. We were close to the wailing and shuddering of engines in the factories and shipyards down here. We could smell oil and weird sweet chemicals and the foulness of the river when it was low. On hot days we gagged at the stench of the boneyard on the opposite bank.

The school was a place of ghosts. The older children told us tales of the children who had died below a hundred years ago, children killed in rockfalls and explosions. They rose to haunt this place above.

Beware of certain corridors
, we were told.

Beware of that cupboard, of turning that corner
.

Try this. Count the kids in your classroom. Sometimes you’ll be counting more than there really are. You’re counting ghosts. They come up from the dark to sit here in the light, especially with you, the younger ones. You haven’t seen them yet? Keep your eyes peeled. Watch and be prepared. There, look! Oh no. Just a shadow. There! Run!

And worse. Monsters roamed the schoolyard at night when we children were away. They that hid in the daytime in lairs in the earth.

They’re things half human and half beast
.

We’d stare and wonder. How could that be so?

You’ll come to understand, when you’re old enough to know
.

They sniggered, rolled their eyes.

Dogs and women, mares and men
.

Ask your fathers, if you’re brave enough, but be ready to get clouted
.

Holly was a sceptic, even in her infancy.

“All a load of nonsense,” she would say.

I didn’t dare to contradict her, didn’t dare agree.

She put her hand up in class one day.

“Yes, Holly?” said Miss Fagan.

“There are no such things as ghosts, are there, Miss Fagan?”

Miss Fagan smiled.

“Some say yes, some say no.”

“But there
aren’t
, are there, Miss?”

“Well, I don’t believe so, Holly. I believe God sends us on our proper way once life is done.”

“And there are no such things as monsters, are there? They’re just things for stories, aren’t they?”

“Hmm. Jesus himself encountered demons, Holly. In truth, there are things we cannot really know and understand. That is why we need the Church and prayer.”

“The Church and prayer!” Holly muttered.

Miss Fagan’s face darkened, a rare occurrence.

“Holly,”
she said.

“Sorry, Miss.”

“Be careful, Holly Stroud.”

“Yes, Miss Fagan.”

Saint Lawrence’s was the school of all Catholic children in that town. Vincent McAlinden was one of us. He was three years older than I. He had few friends. For a time he took Norman Dobson to his side, until Norman came into the classroom one afternoon with tears in his eyes and a cigarette burn on the back of his hand.

“Vincent?” I whispered.

“It was an accident,” he said. “He didn’t mean it, Dom.”

Later, as we worked, tears fell to his book and made his page even messier than usual. I put my arm around him. I whispered to him to stay away from awful Vincent. By this time we’d left the room of kind Miss Fagan and were in the care of cold, strict Miss Mulvaney.

“Dominic Hall!” the teacher snapped. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

I took my arm away.

“Sorry, Miss,” I said.

“Sorry, indeed,” said Miss Mulvaney. “And stop that snivelling, Dobson. I can’t bear a boy who snivels.”

Fortunately for Norman, Vincent seemed to lose interest in him. He turned his attentions to a boy of his own age called Bernard, who lived on the far side of our estate. Bernard wore knee-length shorts and battered plimsolls and glasses with one lens blocked by grimy Elastoplast. It was said that he was even simpler than Norman, that he couldn’t read, couldn’t write, that even the kindness of Miss Fagan and the cruelties of Miss O’Kane had been unable to change him.

Like many children, Vincent and Bernard left the premises at dinnertime. But they did not go home like others did, to lunch on egg and chips or tomato soup. They played games with fires and knives. They dug down into the ancient pit heap nearby. Vincent forced Bernard into tunnels in the earth, seeking the entrances to the ancient workings below. Sometimes Bernard encountered ghosts and came out screaming. The two boys had been seen swimming naked together in the filthy Tyne. They’d been seen struggling, grunting, wrestling, groaning. We even heard that Vincent drank Bernard’s blood. And it was said that they committed sins so awful that they were beyond forgiveness, sins that would consign them both to Hell forevermore.

One sun-filled day I caught sight of them. I was alone, gazing through a fence towards Simpson’s Shipyard. I was lost in thoughts of Dad. I tried to imagine him crawling through darkness and fumes. Tried to pinpoint the noise of the caulking hammers hammering on steel. Tried to imagine his own hammer jumping and rattling in his hands. To imagine the showers of sparks that arose around the welders’ rods, the red-hot fragments of flying metal. I saw the goggles he wore, the oily cap, the battered knee pads, battered boots, the cigarette that dangled at the corner of his mouth. I heard him wheezing, coughing, hawking, spitting. Imagined him grinning at his mates, snarling at the foremen, cursing the timekeepers, the gate controllers, the managers, the draughtsmen in their offices, the bliddy owners.

Then I saw Vincent. He was kneeling in the field outside, just where it slanted down towards the river. Bernard was at his side, on all fours in the long pale grass. He was very still and his head was hanging downward like a beast’s. Vincent leaned close to him, as if in tenderness, as if softly whispering something into his friend’s ear. A few seconds of this, then Vincent touched Bernard’s neck, and Bernard slumped into the grass and out of sight, as if he’d died. Vincent gazed down and watched. Then turned, and it was as if he knew I’d been watching. I could see him grinning even from this distance. He raised his hand and beckoned me. I wanted to run, but couldn’t turn. Tried to see some movement in the place where Bernard had gone. Vincent stood up and started to wade through the grass towards me. I couldn’t move. Said a rapid prayer in fright, then saw Bernard rising, and I ran, and heard Vincent laughing, and calling out, “I’m comin! I’m just behind ye, Dom! Aaaaah!”

Vincent was in the class of the dreaded Miss O’Kane. Once we had left Miss Fagan’s, all of us were taken to that room each Friday morning to be tested. We walked along a stone-paved corridor and up an iron stairway to the heavy wooden half-glazed classroom door. One of the clever ones would be told to knock. Miss O’Kane’s cold voice would call upon us to enter. And so we entered.

Miss O’Kane waited, sitting on her high chair. The cane of Miss O’Kane waited also, resting before her on her desk.

It was so easy.
Who made you? Why did God make you? Where is God?
These were simple things to recollect. And there was even a degree of kindness in the asking, for it was only we clever few — myself, Holly Stroud, a handful of others — who were ever called upon to respond to the complicated questions.
What were the chief sufferings of Christ? What is Hope? What does the Fifth Commandment forbid? In how many ways can we cause or share the guilt of another’s sin?

Despite that, many failed, and kept on failing. Of course it was often nervousness as much as dullness, or the expectation of failure, or an acceptance of the habit of suffering. There were those who knew perfectly well one week what was meant by a Mystery, only to have totally forgotten just a few short days later. Those who did not know their answer, or who had forgotten, were called to stand before us at the front. And it was then that the cane of Miss O’Kane was lifted from the desk.

“Yes, it is important,” she would say, “to know your letters and your numbers. But it is more important to understand why it is that you were placed upon this earth, and it is essential to know what will happen when you die. Put out your hand.”

One day when the sky outside was all tormented she turned with spite to Norman Dobson.

“What,” she asked him, “will Christ say to the wicked?”

I and many others caught our breath. Surely Norman shouldn’t be given such a question, which came from deep within the catechism and which needed such a complex answer. The school by now saw him as beyond help, or as one beyond the need of help, destined to become a labourer in the yard, or a cleaner, the lowest of the low.

But Miss O’Kane decided that day that his faith must be tested. Maybe her impatience was at a peak that day. Maybe there were troubles in her own life, a life that we children had no notion of.

“Come along, Norman Dobson!” she snapped. “What will Christ say to the wicked?”

Someone hissed the beginning of an answer. A glare from Miss O’Kane stopped that. Norman stuttered, stumbled, did not know.

“Oh, Norman,” sighed Miss O’Kane. “Have you forgotten? Perhaps it is a sign that you are indeed one of those to whom God will refer on the Day of Judgement, when He says to you these words. Listen to them closely. Are you ready? ‘Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.’ Did you listen, Norman? Did you understand?”

“Y-y . . .”

“Good boy. If you do not learn these things and live according to God’s will, you will spend a lifetime building your own fire, and in death you will walk straight into it. Do you understand that?”

“Y-y . . .”

“You do not. You are too dull. God’s words must be beaten into you. Now repeat them after me.”

She spoke them again, phrase by phrase. He stammered the answer, phrase by phrase.

“Go away from me . . .”

“G-go away f-from me . . .”

“Well done,” she said when they reached the end. “Perhaps you will be saved after all, Norman. Would you like to be saved? Good boy. Now put out your hand and we will help you in that purpose.”

And Norman presented his obedient outstretched palm to her. And she raised the cane so high and brought it down so fast, and she hit Norman’s hand in time to her chanting of the true response.

“Go away from me”—
thrash
—“with your curse upon you”—
thrash
—“to the eternal fire”—
thrash
—“prepared for the Devil —”
thrash
— “and his” —
thrash
—“angels!”

She put the cane of Miss O’Kane back upon the desk.

“On your deathbed,” she said to Norman, “you may have reason to thank me for this day. Now go away from me.”

It was known that Vincent McAlinden had never been known to falter and had never once been caned. It was said that he was asked exactly the same question every week.

“To whose image and likeness did God make you?”

“God made me to his own image and likeness.”

“Correct, Vincent McAlinden.”

The McAlindens. Their ancestors fled from Cork during the Famine. They’d been cast out during the Clearances from the Western Isles. They’d been tinkers in Yorkshire, seacoalers in Durham, rag-and-boners in the Glasgow slums. They were vagabonds, wastrels, wanderers, thieves. The father was in Durham Jail for murder. Been murdered himself in the Jungle at Shields. He’d strangled a bairn of his own, chucked its body into a Pelaw cesspit. He was Mrs. McAlinden’s own damn brother, her own damn bliddy father. There wasn’t just one dad but a clutch of them. Black-souled bliddy sinners, every single one of them. And her? Just had to look at her. Them whiskers on her cheeks, them moles, that sweat, that roll-up in the corner of the mouth. And that clutch of bairns that looked the same. The widow’s peak that marked them out, the jet-black hair, the furrowed brows. Witchcraft in that family, had to be. Mebbe worse. Hey, mebbe they weren’t true human at all. Mebbe some weird thing twixt man and beast.

In autumn and winter kids gathered beneath a certain street light as the night came on. Some of us were little more than toddlers, some were already in their teens. We told each other ghost tales and gave accounts of nightmares as the sun dropped down over the estate.

We shuddered as the sky darkened and reddened and true night came on. A boy called Colin Moss called us into a ring within the pool of light and began to speak.

“Now we will tell of the father McAlinden. Prepare yourselves. For the father and his dog will walk tonight.”

We shivered and gasped, our breath plumed into the icy air. He looked from face to face.