The Tightrope Walkers (8 page)

Holly was bolder than I. She turned her eyes to Vincent. She stepped many times into his wasteland. She carried easel, paints, and paper.

“Are ye not scared?” he’d ask her.

“No,” she’d say.

She told him she made pictures of him to show to her mam. She laughed when he said he could just go up the stairs and show himself in the flesh.

She painted him with the knife in his hand, with his dog at his feet, with Bernard at his side. She drew him all alone wreathed in smoke from his fires and with his face shining in the light of the setting sun. She drew him close up to show the dark eyes, dark hair, dark pointed widow’s peak. Sometimes he looked exactly like Vincent, sometimes like a character from a storybook of ancient times — a Celtic warrior, an Apache brave, a Stone Age man. Sometimes his face was sunken, brutal, ugly, old. Sometimes it was strong and young, the face of a child.

Sometimes, she said, his voice was low and guttural, sometimes softer, almost sweet.

He asked her why I didn’t come with her. Too scared? I thought he’d hurt me? He stroked the edge of his knife blade. Was I mebbe scared he’d kill me?

“I don’t think you’d kill anybody,” she told him.

“There’s some would not agree with you. There’s some say I am bad and nowt but bad. Ye seen me kill a chicken. D’ye not think somebody that could do that could go on to kill a man?”

“No. That was showing off. And there’s good in everyone.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“Paint on.”

She drew him as a tiny figure in a great wasteland. She drew the towers and bridges of a city far beyond. She drew the flocks of birds overhead. She drew the children at their skipping games and wrote the relentlessly repeated words that spiralled upwards from their mouths:
January, February, March, April, Ma-ay
. . . She drew herself with him, side by side with him against the pebbledashed estate. She drew herself at her easel painting him. She drew children who looked on in amazement to see Holly Stroud and Vincent McAlinden in such a strange formation.

She told me that he asked how she could draw and paint like this when she was so young. She answered that children were capable of great things. Did he not know that?

She said that one day Vincent came to her and asked if she’d give him a little kiss to thank him. She told him no. She gave him some of the pictures. He said he stuck them on his wall. She said he said he’d show them to his kids one day.

“If I ever have any, that is,” he said.

“If you ever do,” she said.

“D’you think I ever will?” he said.

“How would I know?”

He laughed.

“If I do have them,” he said, “it’d be good to have them bonny, just like you.”

She turned away.

“What d’ye think it’d be like?” he asked. “A bairn born of Holly Stroud and me?”

Again he came in close and asked to kiss her. She said she told him he was showing off again, and she walked away.

She took the best of the pictures to her mother’s shadowed room.

“This is Vincent McAlinden,” she said.

This one showed Vincent in the guise of an ancient chieftain. He wore animal skins. There were tattoos all over him. He bore a knife and an axe in his hands.

“He’s a boy who lives just down the street, Mam,” Holly said.

“Is he?” whispered her mam.

“He’s older than me but still a boy.”

Mrs. Stroud angled the paper to the light.

“So,” she breathed. “There are still things like that out there?”

October. My last year of primary school. Vincent and Bernard came to the door. There were a dog and a handcart at the gate outside.

“Owt for the bonfire?” Vincent grunted. “Boxes, boards, broke old chairs?”

“Owt that’ll burn,” smirked Bernard.

Mam came to my side.

“That time of year again,” she said. “Doesn’t time fly by!”

“We’re ganna make it the biggest one in town, Mrs. Hall,” said Vincent.

“Bliddy massive,” said Bernard.

“And aren’t you getting tall, young Vincent?”

“Aye, Mrs. Hall.”

“And rather handsome, too.”

He grinned. He winked at me.

“You could come and help,” he said.

Mam nudged me.

“Yes,” she said. “Why not?”

I gave no answer. Bernard sneered, Vincent shrugged, Mam smiled.

We gave them a bag of our own kindling and a stool that had lost a leg.

“Thank ye kindly,” said Vincent.

They walked away.

“You could join in,” said Mam. “It might be fun.”

Bernard dropped the kindling and stool into the cart, then took the handles, leaned forward, lowered his head. Vincent slapped his arse, and Bernard shoved. Vincent waved and Mam waved back.

“He’s not the monster of your dreams,” she said. “He’s growing up, like all you bairns. We have a duty to make sure that the Vincents of the world feel that they are part of us.”

The bonfire on the wasteland grew. They spent weeks gathering material for it. They came to houses, they ripped branches from trees at the top of town, they got wooden boxes from Bamling’s fruit shop and the Co-op and Walter Willson’s. They stole wood from other bonfires, they snapped railing and fences in other parts of town. Somehow they found doors and floorboards and mattresses and a wooden bedstead and a battered armchair. They hauled them and pushed these in the handcart through the street. They built carefully. Vincent laid a ladder against the fire as it grew, so that he could haul the material to the top. They built neatly, carefully. They put the shapeless lumpy stuff inside, with planks and boards and branches on the outside, turning it to a tepee shape. It grew almost as high as a house. Quite an achievement, said Dad. Shows what lads like that are capable of when they have a proper job to do. I saw it was a place to play as well. One day I saw Vincent slipping into the bonfire, through a doorway made with boards.

He saw me and he laughed.

“Anybody that comes trying to nick stuff had better watch out,” he said. “There’ll always be one of us hid in here, waiting for the plunderers.”

It was what many did, made dens inside their own bonfires, for there were always robbers and plunderers around at Guy Fawkes time, always those who wanted to make sure that their own bonfire would be the best in town. And they were children’s places, hiding places, dens, places to play.

Bonfires appeared everywhere, on patches of waste ground, in back gardens, high up on the playing fields.

We looked forward to the thrill of the night itself, when we’d gather to see Vincent’s bonfire burn, to see its flames and sparks raging across the waste, to see the black fumes stream across the sky, to feel the scorch of it, the thrill of it. To see the other fires burning all across Tyneside, to see the glow of fires by the sea that blended with the sky, the glow of fires beyond the hill, to see rockets screeching up into the night, the cascades of Roman candles, the whiz of Catherine wheels, to hear the snap and crack of bangers, to leap away when a jumping jack came snapping at your feet. To be with a crowd of adults and kids, all with faces shining in the light, all of them amazed, all of them excited and alive.

Vincent’s wasteland turned to war zone. He patrolled with a stick through his belt like a sword. He wore his sheath knife at his hip. He put warnings on the fire itself. Keep Off. Property of the McAlindens. Get Lost. Danjer of Death! He had a snarling dog on a bright steel chain. He had Bernard at his side. He sat by one of his holes in the far corner, from where he could scan it all. He had a little fire burning there. He cooked sausages on sticks, beans in billy cans, potatoes in the embers. He smoked little cigarettes, No. 6. He coughed and spat and glared at anyone who dared come near. He and Bernard took turns in the hiding place within the bonfire, ready to leap out and scare any plunderer.

It was on a Saturday afternoon, when the light was quickly falling, that the burners came. How did Vincent not see them? Perhaps he just wasn’t as perceptive as he thought. Perhaps he was asleep and dreaming. Perhaps he had become complacent: surely nobody would ever truly dare to trespass against the McAlindens. Perhaps it was simply the lack of light. But why did the dog not bark? Because it was sleeping, too? But the dogs of the McAlindens had never been known to sleep, had never been known to miss a chance to slaver and howl and bark.

The intruders didn’t come to steal. They simply came to burn, to set the bonfire alight days before its proper date, and to quickly disappear into the gathering night. What a lark! Just a joke. Just a way of getting a one-up on Vincent McAlinden. They must have been silent as death as they approached, as they crawled through the shadows to trickle their fuel, to empty their can, to strike a match, to slip away.

How were they to know that poor Bernard was inside?

I was in the kitchen with Mam. There was a sudden shudder in the air. There was a sudden glare above the wasteland. Flames leapt towards the stars. We didn’t know what it was, but we ran, and as we ran others were running at our side. The air raged and crackled. There was the stench of blazing petrol. We found the fire roaring.

Vincent danced at the edges of the flames, screaming the name of Bernard, his only pal. A dog howled at his side. Vincent’s mother stood further back, holding her arm against the heat, yelling for Vincent to retreat.

Bill Stroud phoned the fire service. Minutes later the fire engine could be heard roaring through town with its bells ringing, minutes after that here it came into the estate, and here came the firemen running, unrolling great hosepipes, then unleashing streams of water onto the flames.

Holly came, and we stood there useless, holding hands.

“He was in there?” she said.

“He must have been.”

“I saw him just yesterday.”

“Get back!” the firemen called to all of us. “Go home.”

The fire became a soaked and sunken hissing, smouldering thing. The firemen began carefully lifting ashes and half-burnt stuff away. We were told again to leave. This was not a thing that children should see.

“Come on,” said Mam. “There’s nothing we can do.”

She crossed herself and turned her eyes to Heaven.

“Who’d do such a thing?”

“Kids,” said Dad. “Just bliddy kids doing kids’ daft bliddy stuff.”

Then Vincent was beside us.

“I’ll get them,” he told us through his tears and snot. “I’ll catch the buggers and I’ll make them pay.”

He ran away towards the flames, ran back again.

“Is this what it’ll be like in Hell?” he said. He glared at Holly: wild eyes, bared teeth, skin blotched with soot and tears. “Draw me now! Draw me now! Draw Vincent-bliddy-McAlinden now!”

“Oh, Vincent,” she said. “Not now.”

She reached out to him. He glared.

“Go back to your mam,” she said.

It was then that we saw Jack Law, at the far side of the fire with the smoke swirling around him. His mouth was opening, closing, opening, closing, as if in a ceaseless stream of sounds or words.

Vincent ran through the smouldering waste to him.

“How come you’re the one that’s always there?” he screamed. “How come it’s always you that’s always lookin with your beady bliddy stupid eyes?”