The Tightrope Walkers (31 page)

“They talk about peace, Dr. Molly, but this one seems to be forever in the wars.”

She smiled at Dad’s words. I winced as she asked me to breathe in deeply and breathe out again. I had a broken rib, a broken nose, a lost tooth.

“He’s healing,” said the doctor, “as is Holly.”

“On the outside, Doctor.”

“Yes. But we’re a tough species, Mr. Hall. We have to be.”

She touched my cheek gently.

“We’ve come through worse than this. And how are
you
these days?”

“Canny, Doctor.”

“That’s what I mean.”

She closed her bag, adjusted her green jacket.

“They haven’t found Vincent?”

“No,” said Dad.

“Let’s hope he isn’t causing mayhem somewhere else.”

The police came a couple of times to take down details. They were different days back then. Even with the wounds on us, they hinted at collusion, at teenagers’ games gone wrong.

PC Romero turned up one day when Dad was in the yard.

He stood bulky in our little living room with his helmet in the crook of his arm.

“I telt them I’d come out and check the facts again. Telt them we know each other from the past and we have an understandin. Telt them I know the laddo that we’re lookin for. I’ve come to clarify the tale so we can see what’s what.”

“There’s no sign of him?”

“The world is big. A lad is small. You’ve no idea where he’s gone?”

I shook my head.

“Strange. Two peas in a pod, you were.”

“Back then. Not now.”

He looked through the window across the street.

“She’s a very nice lass by all accounts. And clever with it. And bonny, of course. But weird, eh?”

“Weird?”

“A bit of the hippie, eh? Free love and whatnot?”

“What?”

He grinned.

“Isn’t that what they call it? Free love? Not like my day, anyway. Smoke?”

He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and held them out to me. I shook my head. He lit up, blew out smoke, picked a fragment of tobacco from his lip.

“The word is,” he said, “that both you lads have been tied up with her.”

“What do you mean?”

He smoked again.

“Shagging her, Dom. Both of you.”

“What?”

“Howay, Dom. You know what I mean. You’re hardly a bliddy innocent.”

He laughed.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Anybody’d understand. The bonny lass across the street. Who could blame you? But you’re not so happy when your pal gets his eye on her and all.”

I said nothing. He went on.

“So you get to battlin over her as you lads do. Fists at sunset! That’s the story, eh? And off he scarpers like the tinker that he is.”

“The story is he raped her,” I answered.

“Aye.”

“What do you mean, aye?”

“So this is his comeuppance, eh? Get him back, good and proper.”

“I was there. Jack Law was there.”

“Now you have a sane and eloquent witness there, lad! And what about your father. The caulker. What’s he make of all of this?”

“He makes the truth.”

“The truth? That’s very good. Tell you what. Now I’ll go and get it from the horse’s mouth.”

He lifted his helmet to his head, adjusted the strap under his chin.

“Best to sort it all out now,” he said. “And then we can move on.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. No, you won’t.” His face hardened. “That’s not the way these things is done.”

He crossed the street, knocked at Holly’s door, leaned back, and gazed up at the open window above his head, and the door opened. He stepped inside.

Out he came fifteen minutes later, walked through the garden gate, squeezed himself into his small blue car, and drove away.

Then Holly came.

She stood in the living room and wept.

“ ‘You’re sure you didn’t lead him on,’ he said! ‘There’s talk there was a thing with you and him before! When you were hardly more than a bairn they say! And you’re still just kids! Thing is, there’s too much of this freedom thing! Specially for them like you from a place like this!’ I could have killed him, Dominic!
Should
have killed him! Got a kitchen knife, and oh! Got a hammer, oh! ‘And anyway what you doin up there in a place like that and all alone with lads like that,’ he said! ‘What did you think would happen, pet?’ Die, you stupid policeman! Die! And all the time she’s up there listening! All the time she’s doing nothing but listening to the bliddy angels! Die, you stupid woman! Die! ‘Having a bit of fun, eh?’ he said. ‘Havin a little cuddle and shag, eh? That’s right, ain’t it, pet? You were messing about like kids from the pebbledash will! Yes! No! What? And oh the daft tramp seen it, did he! Now there’s a one we can put some trust in! Or mebbe — and I would only whisper it, pet — he stuck his oar in too! Eh! No!’”

She went on weeping.

“ ‘So what did you think would come to pass?’ he said. ‘What did you think would happen, petal?’ Petal! Oh, Dominic! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”

And we raged and wept together, then calmed, and sat together on the sofa, wincing with our wounds.

And we said afterwards that we both knew, as we joined our hands upon her belly, that everything had changed, and that there was a child growing in her.

“You don’t
know
?” said Dad. “You don’t bliddy
know
?”

“No.”

“You’ve chucked it all away for the price of a blob?”

“Would you
prefer
it to be a McAlinden?”

“I’d prefer it to be nowt.”

“So would I.”

“All for the sake of a tuppenny blob. All cos you can’t keep your cock in your pants!”

He stared through the window, then clicked his fingers in relief.

“Abortion!” he said. “It’s legal now!”

“Abortion?”

“But no, we can’t do that, not here. Or can we? Could we? But what if the child is yours and not that git’s? Then we’re murderin one of us. Oh, bliddy hell. Oh, Dominic, man!”

“Or there’s adoption,” I said.

“Oh aye? Your mother’s grandkid and you send it straight away?”

Holly said she wanted to die. She wanted to plunge a knitting needle into herself and spew the baby out. Her mother knew nothing, said nothing, did nothing, as always. Her father said that he’d give love and support whatever she did. The word got out. Camilla Muldoon from Stoneygate Lane appeared at the door like a joke from the past and said she’d get rid of it nice and silent and quick and cheap. Bill Stroud guffawed and sent her on her way.

A levels approached.

A bunch of parents went to Creel. They’d heard the news.

Was he going to let this happen in his school? In a Catholic school?

What did they suggest? That she disappeared? That he kicked her out? That he ban her from the exams she’d been preparing for all her school life?

Yes!

But she was raped
.

That’s the story, is it?

The story?

Well, she’s hardly an innocent! Putting herself in a place like that with lads like that
.

She’s a child
.

What kind of message does this send to the younger ones? How can it be right for her to swan into school, to sit her exams, to get a reward?

And the boy?

The Hall boy? Punish him
.

How?

However you see fit
.

Not in the same way?

The child may not be his . . . and he is a boy
.

And the other boy?

Castrate him if he’s caught. Lock him up and throw away the key
.

And you? What would you do if they were children of yours?

They are not, thank God
.

And Jesus?

Jesus?

What would he have said?

We lay on the field beneath the larks.

“How can I have a child that was conceived in violence?”

“It might be born of love. The father might be me. And whoever’s the father, you’ll be the mam.”

“So I should have it, then?”

“I don’t know, Holly.”

No way to know.

She laughed.

“I was to be the first of my family to go to university. If I want to do that, will I have to be the first to have an abortion?”

Martins swept over us, screaming.

We went to Dr. Molly.

The two dogs watched us from below the desk.

“I could sign the papers,” she said. “You’d go to the clinic in Durham and it could all be over within the week.”

She rested her chin on the arch of her fingers.

She pondered. She reached down to stroke her dogs.

“The things that are absent in the world,” she said, “are often as potent as the things that are here. The dead, of course. Your mother, for instance, Dominic. All those young lives lost in Burma or in France. My brother Robert killed at Monte Cassino at eighteen years old. They linger endlessly, the dead. You could be free of this mess. You could go forward with your life and go to university. You could have many children later. Balance this against the thought that you might be forever haunted by the dreams of how this child might have been, how its face might be, how its voice might sound. But maybe that’s the price to pay. There are no answers, Holly. That’s the only answer. And it’s your body, your child. You are the one who has to choose.”

She smiled.

“And I could help to arrange adoption, too.”

She looked down at the dogs at her feet.

“What do you two think?” she asked.

They growled fondly.

“Ah,” she told them. “How very wise.”

We lay on the sofa in her living room.

“How strange. I’ve been dreaming of university, of New York, California, and I find that the undiscovered world is right inside myself. Hello, my little one. Not yet born and you’re already changing the world!”

She laughed.

“How could I abandon you?” she said.

I put my ear to her womb, and heard gurglings and groanings and the endless din of running blood.

“Hello, little’n,” I whispered.

“Jesus Christ,” Holly whispered. “I’m really going to do this, aren’t I?”

“Seems so.”

She put her hands across her belly. She closed her eyes.

“Can you hear, little one?” she said. “I promise I won’t let you go.”

Holly and I held hands as we walked into the examination room. Her belly was already as taut and smooth and beautiful as the curved shell of an egg. Creel greeted us. He guided Holly to her desk, then stood at the front of the room before the time to start.

“Work hard,” he told us. “Work hopefully. Be modest but aim high. We are proud of you all. Remember that you carry the aspirations of those who have gone before and that you create the world for those yet to come. You may begin.”

We were both accepted by UEA.

“You could go,” said Holly. “You
should
go.”

Dad said the same.

I imagined striding away alone along the wire, turning back to see where Holly was, but knew it shouldn’t be me, it couldn’t be done.

We wrote with our explanation. We said we’d love to come later if we could. Later? we asked each other. When the baby was at school? When we were old? When we were retired?

A response came back. They were sorry to hear about this. Yes, they’d consider another application in the future, perhaps in a few years’ time. There was a leaflet with information about a small number of rooms for families on the campus: normally for postgraduates, but one or two exceptions had been made.

“What’s it now, then?” sighed Dad. “Wedding bells?”

It’s how things were usually done. A quick wedding, a night’s honeymoon at Whitley Bay, a narrow bed and a hand-me-down cot in the spare room of a pebbledash house, then two skinny kids pushing another kid in a worn-out Silver Cross.

“
Shall
we marry?” I asked her, as her mother wailed upstairs and Bruce Forsyth pranced on the TV. Bill and Dad were at the Three Tuns, exclaiming in their different ways at the weirdness of the world.

We talked of marrying on the hill, beside the heavenly rock, with Jack Law as silent minister and skylarks as the choir. Or on Beadnell Beach between dunes and surf, with moon above, bonfire blazing, lighthouse turning, the songs of Joni Mitchell. Or we’d wait until the baby came and have her christened at the moment we were wed.