The Tightrope Walkers (33 page)

Fairy lights shone from the jibs of cranes. Scrap-metal Christmas trees stood on the decks. Baubles and tinsel dangled and swayed. We swigged from hip flasks of cheap whisky and brandy to bring the illusion of warmth and to toast each other and to filthily start our Christmas celebrations. It was Christmas Eve morning and I was curled up in the depths of the hull when the message came. How had it got to me? I never knew. The message came from the outside, was passed across the yard, onto the ship, down through welders and caulkers, down through the confined spaces, the tangle of men and cables and oxygen tanks and filth.

Is Coco doon there?

Coco Hall?

Aye, him!

He’s doon there somewhere with the dirt monkeys
.

Tell him his lass has gone in!

Eh?

His lass! She’s gone in!

Coco! COCO! COCO HALL!

I clambered out. Out towards the hole in the ship’s side, out through the hole, down the ladder. I heard Blister yelling something after me but I didn’t turn. Hurried across the yard towards the locked gates, went to the gatekeeper’s hatch.

“I’ve got to gan,” I said.

“Oh, aye?”

“Me baby’s on the way.”

“Oh, aye?”

“I’ve got to be there.”

“Oh, aye?”

“Let me oot.”

He pointed to his clock.

“Wait twenty minutes, son, and ye won’t get docked.”

“Let me oot.”

“I cannot. Not without a . . .”

I turned away. I climbed the gates. He came out after me, yelled after me, cursed me. I dropped down on the other side and ran.

Ran uphill towards the town. There was ice on the pavements, slush thrown from the roadway. Dark clouds hung heavy and low over everything. All sound was muted. Lights dimly shone. The summit of the town and the summits of Buckingham House 1, 2 and 3 were lost in the sky. The hospital was nothing but a bulky shadow in the gloom. Sleet started to fall. Kids and drunks were singing carols. I passed a priest who called out, “Blessings upon you, Dominic!” Someone else called something to me but I couldn’t turn. I hurried towards the towering hospital past an ambulance with its amber light spinning and with a body on a stretcher illuminated inside. Through the door.

A nurse was instantly before me.

“May I help you?”

We were in a brightly lit and disinfected corridor. The sign that hung over her pointed to Maternity.

She asked again.

“I’ve come to see my baby being born.”

“Your
baby
?”

An older nurse came to her side.

“He’s come to see his baby being born, Matron.”

“Not like that, he’s not. Go home, get scrubbed, get changed, and then come back again and we shall see.”

“But I might be late. I . . . I think the mother’s already here.”

“Then that is all that matters. Off you go.”

And she turned, hurried away.

“It’s for the best,” said the young nurse. “Just think of the germs that are . . . Dominic? Dominic
Hall
?”

“Maria?”

Maria Lewandowska, from Miss O’Kane’s class, Maria Lewandowska, whose family had fled from Poland in the ’40s, prim and pretty Maria Lewandowska who knew the names of the sorrowful mysteries and glorious mysteries, who was one of those like me who was never caned for not knowing the catechismic truths.

“Maria
Lewandowska
?”

“Yes. And yes, Holly is here. I took her along myself. But
really
, Dominic. What might the poor baby
catch
?”

She glanced over her shoulder.

“Quickly,” she said.

She took me through a yellow door, into a room with a shower, a toilet, a narrow bed.

“It’s for the about-to-be-bereaved,” she said. She clapped her hand across her mouth. “Sorry! But it is. The ones whose relatives are about to die in the middle of the night and who won’t go home. Maybe not the best thing. Maybe you should get home and get back here again.”

“No.”

“And we have clothes. . . . Is this
mad
?”

I shook my head.

“You won’t
tell
?”

“Hardly!”

“Quick. Turn the shower on. Get those off and get in and I’ll bring the stuff.” She laughed as I waited for her to leave. “I’m a
nurse
, Dominic. You wouldn’t
believe
the things I’ve seen.”

She giggled and left. I dumped my clothes in a heap on the floor. Scrubbed myself in the shower, saw the dirt draining from me, scrubbed fast and hard until there was hardly a mark on me, until my skin was shining, as if a whole layer of it was gone.

I stood wrapped in a white towel, waiting.

She laughed when she came back.

“Like a newborn babe yourself,” she said.

She had some old man’s clothes: beige trousers, beige nylon shirt, blue velvety slippers. “The height of fashion in here,” she said. “And these?” She pointed to the heap of clothes on the floor. They lay like something hauled in a bucket from the depths of a tank.

“Chuck them.”

She stuffed them into a disposal sack.

“They’ll get torched with the medical waste.”

“OK.”

And then she opened the door and showed me the way. I ran, with the too-big slippers flopping on my feet. I took a lift up to the maternity ward, stepped out.

Another nurse was before me.

“Can I help you?”

“I’ve come to see my baby being born.”

“This way. My name is Claire.”

She took me through some doors.

“This is your mask,” she said. “These are your scissors.”

She put these things in my hand. She laughed.

“Put that on. The midwife will tell you what to do with those.”

More doors, then there she was, lying on a bed with a midwife at her side.

I moved the mask aside and kissed her. I held her hand. Through the window I saw that the world up here was lost in cloud. Soon the window reflected only us, the midwife, the lights around. Holly sobbed and gasped as the baby made its hours-long ten-inch journey. We were there for the length of a complete shift.

The baby slithered out in the middle of the night, a bloodied, sticky, red, grey, blue, black thing. How could it have fitted in there? How could it have been so close, so hidden, and seem to be so far away? How could it take so long to come? How could it appear so fast?

“A lovely girl!” said the midwife.

She turned to me.

“Would you like to cut?” she said.

She laughed.

“The cord, my dear,” she said. “Would you like to cut the cord between your daughter and your wife?”

I cut the cord, felt the scrape and vibration of sharp steel on flesh.

The baby screamed.

“Girls are gorgeous!” the midwife said, then lifted the child to Holly’s breast.

We named her Elaine.

We took her when she was just a few days old to the McAlinden house.

Mrs. McAlinden gave us tea and biscuits. The endless fire blazed in the grate. A boy sat silent against the wall in a corner, reading a
Superman
comic. There was a faded black-and-white photograph of a woman standing before a turf cottage holding a basket of fish. There was a map of the peninsulas of southern Ireland on the wall. There were tears in Mrs. McAlinden’s eyes as she took the baby on her lap.

“So beautiful,” she murmured.

She touched the trace of a widow’s peak on the baby’s brow.

“She’s nowt like us, of course,” she said.

She sighed deeply.

“It’s clear as day,” she said. “She’s the spit of you both.”

She leaned down to the baby’s tiny ear.

“I’m not your gran,” she whispered. “Though I’d love to be the grandma of a lovely thing like you.”

She told us to have more tea.

“You’ll look after her,” she said.

“Yes,” we told her.

“And you’ll bring her back to see me sometimes, won’t you?”

“Yes, we will.”

“That’s grand. That’s wonderful.”

She kissed the baby gently, then let us lift it away.

“Welcome to the world, Elaine,” she breathed.

Another place I’d never entered was the bedroom of Mrs. Stroud. It was Elaine who gained me entry. The curtain fluttered in the draught of the half-open window as we stepped in. Mrs. Stroud was sitting up in bed, pillows arranged around her. The wavering light exposed her pale face, her strange smile. All around the walls were Holly’s paintings and drawings.

“Which one are you?” she said to me.

Holly clicked her tongue.

“Mam!” she breathed.

“Dominic,” I answered.

“I get mixed up. And is that the bairn?”

“Your grandchild,” said Holly.

“My?”

“Yes. Her name is Elaine.”

We laid the baby on the bed beside her. I looked at the portraits of Vincent, the portraits of me, at Mrs. Stroud’s own indecipherable marks and swirls and letters and gaps.

Mrs. Stroud touched the baby’s kicking legs.

“Does it walk?” said Mrs. Stroud.

“Mam!” said Holly.

“Not yet, Mrs. Stroud,” I said.

“That’s good. I heard her coming before she came. Yes, she was with the angels. She was singing with them.”

The baby cooed and gurgled.

“Yes!” said Mrs. Stroud. “Like that! But much more beautiful, of course. Are you going now?”

Bill was simple in his love.

“You,” he’d whisper, and he’d gaze into her eyes and she’d gaze straight back at him, “are the most gorgeous beautiful lovely thing in the whole wide lovely world, and you have the very loveliest parents in the whole wide world, and we all love you very much, and we are very pleased that you came to us!”

He’d hold her tight, and ask her, “Do you know this one?” before breaking out into a sweet singing of “Waters of Tyne” or “Felton Lonnen.” “Get ready for the ride,” he’d say, and would rest her upon his knee and begin to bounce her gently to “Bobby Shaftoe.”

Dad was slow. I saw him searching her features for the shapes of McAlinden. He may have found some, he may have not, he did not speak of them. Then I found him in tears in our high living room one day. Elaine lay on her changing mat, waving her hands before her face. Dad looked down upon her.

“You’re just like your grandma,” he told her. “You’re just like my very own Elaine.”

He lifted her to himself.

“Oh,” he said, “she would have loved you very, very much.”

The baby sang as she had sung for Mrs. Stroud, and Dad laughed through his tears, and started singing, too.

We took her to the grave, of course.

“This is where your other grandma is,” I said. “And she’s also up in Heaven, and she looks down on you and loves you, and she always will.”

We took her to Morden Tower and she sat on our laps while poets read and raved and teetered on the high wires of verse. I read there myself, from the first photocopied pamphlet of my first awkward poems, poems about wires and cables and stitchmarks and tanks, about bonfires on beaches and Heaven in rock. In spring we carried her across the fields. We showed her allotments and greenhouses and the curving river and the distant sea. We spoke of skylarks and circuses and of the tunnels beneath the grass and the endless sky above. We showed her rabbits, beetles, rats and birds. We whispered of secret nests and nestlings. We told the tales of miracles — of flight, of eggs, of trembling leaves, of opening blooms. We came to our two hawthorn trees and told the tale of those. We lay on the earth beneath, with her between us. We put her fingers to the miraculous shapes of every single blade of grass. We told her of this world that turns and turns and turns beneath us, this light that pours eternally upon us. We showed how light and shadow shift and flicker across our skin. We told her of the other turning worlds beyond this world and of worlds beyond those worlds. We told her of the miracle of herself, how she came from the great gulfs of space and time to become an almost-nothing inside her mother’s womb, how she had grown and would grow, how she would walk and dance, how she would walk across the sky with us one day. We told her that new bodies would be born from hers one day. We told the miracle of all of us. She kicked her feet through the air and the light. She waved her hands and looked at them and at us in giggly wonder. We sang together, there beneath the upturned nest, a weird cooing gurgling trio accompanied by the birds.