The Fire-Eaters

by David Almond

  “So is the frog alive again?” she said.

  “No, miss.”

  “Course not, miss.”

  “It's just a trick, miss.”

  She smiled.

  “Yes. It's just a trick. A Frankensteiny trick.”

  She put the battery back. She eased back the frog's bones, flesh and skin. She pressed it tenderly with her palm. She looked at us.

  “I'll ask the same question again. What is missing? What has the frog lost?”

  “Life,” someone said.

  “So what is life?” she said.

  We couldn't answer.

  “Does a frog have a soul?” asked Mary Marr.

  “Ask that question to a priest,” said Miss Bute. “But what it does have is a mystery. We open it up to find an answer and the mystery only deepens. What is missing? What has been lost? What is life?”

  Far off down a corridor, the bell rang.

  “No homework,” said Miss Bute. “Just remember what you've seen.”

  We filed out. Todd was outside the room, strap in hand. But we were quiet and subdued. He slid the strap back into his breast pocket. As we walked past him, Daniel murmured something.

  “What was that, boy?” said Todd.

  “Nothing, sir,” said Daniel.

  Todd narrowed his eyes. Daniel walked on, close behind me. Out of earshot, he murmured again.

  “Smile, please.”

  I turned to look at him.

  “I'll get our evil Mr. Todd,” he said.

  He winked.

  “Smile, please, Mr. Todd, sir.”

  “Psst! Psst!”

  When I got off the bus that evening, Joseph was waiting for me.

  “Psst! Bobby!”

  He was in the hawthorn. I remembered how he'd shoved me down in the sand. How many times could I let him get away with it? I tried to walk by without acknowledging him, but he came out to me. He held my elbow.

  “Bobby, man.”

  I looked at him. He lowered his eyes.

  “I know,” he said. “I shouldn't've done it.” He shrugged. “I didn't mean nowt, man. I just get carried away. You know that, man.”

  “Do I?”

  “Aye.” He gritted his teeth. “I'm just a stupid plonker, man. I'm sorry. OK?”

  I shook my head. I knew I was about to let him get away with it again.

  “How sorry?” I said.

  “Dead sorry.”

  “Dead dead sorry?”

  “Aye.”

  “Say it.”

  “I'm dead dead sorry.”

  “Bobby.”

  “Eh?”

  “Say, I'm dead dead sorry, Bobby.”

  “I'm dead dead sorry, Bobby.”

  “Sir.”

  “Eh?”

  “Say, I'm dead dead sorry, Bobby, sir.”

  He grinned. We looked at each other.

  “Hadaway and shite,” he said.

  “Aye,” I said. “OK.”

  He rubbed his hands.

  “Right,” he said.

  “That's done. I want you to come with me. Something to show you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Another incomer. A weird one.”

  I knew that it must be McNulty.

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “I'll show you. Howay.”

  We headed toward the beach, close together, shoulders bumping each other as we walked. He hung about as I went into the house to drop my bag off and get changed. Mam and Dad were in the kitchen. Dad was on a stool with a cup of tea in his hand.

  “You OK, then?” I said.

  “Right as rain,” he said. “They took half an armful of blood. They looked deep into me lovely eyes, then deep into me throat. They stuck a torch in me lugs and a tube up me bum. And how many X-rays was it, love?”

  Mam shoved a buttered scone into my hand.

  “Seven,” she said. “Or was it eight?”

  “So if there's owt to find, they'll find it, then they'll fix it. But there'll be nowt to find.”

  I looked at them. They both looked away.

  “I'm going out for a bit,” I said. “With Joseph.”

  She clicked her tongue and shook her head, but she got another scone.

  “Go on,” she said. “One for him and all, I suppose.”

  I let her kiss me.

  “Tea'll be on the table in an hour,” she said. “No later.”

  I hurried out.

  “She's a bliddy great cook,” Joseph said as he led me toward the lighthouse and the pines. “Remember them times I used to come for dinner?”

  “Aye.”

  “Them steak pies, man!”

  He smacked his lips at the memory. We chewed the scones. We walked across the sand toward the lighthouse headland. The tide was far out. There was a long line of jetsam left behind: heaps of seaweed, timber carved to smooth strange shapes, bits of net, fishermen's ropes, broken fish boxes, seashells, crab shells, desiccated starfish, bottles, a tire, a dead gannet, stones, pebbles, glinting glass. I reached down and picked up a leather shoe. It seemed something ancient, was stiff as a board, but with its pointed toe and its thin sole had probably been lost or thrown away just a few weeks ago. I slung it back toward the sea. I lifted a bone. It was dried and bleached and worn, but it was a mammal's bone, maybe a thighbone. I let myself imagine it was a bone from one of Ailsa's drowned sailors, then threw it also toward the sea. Joseph smoked and the scent of it mingled with the seaweed stench, the salt, the airy autumn smell of the sea. I threw stones, and watched the way they spun and curved and twisted in the air.

  Then we crossed the stony headland and entered the pines.

  “I know who you've found,” I said.

  “You know him?”

  “He's called McNulty. I told you about him. The strongman, the escapologist, the …”

  “Him?”

  “Aye.”

  “So what's he doing here?”

  “Dunno.”

  Ahead of us were dunes, with the ancient holiday shacks in them. Some of them were breaking up, sinking into the sand. Others were better preserved, with fresh paint, felted roofs, little fenced-off gardens. Their doors were locked and there were boards at the windows for protection against the coming winter. They were places that had been built by pitmen generations back, places for holidays beside the coaly sea. Several had names carved into their front doors: Buckingham Hut, Desandoris, Dunhewing, Worgate Manor. I knew that Daniel's dad had been among them with his camera, that they'd look like things of wonder in his book.

  “Look,” said Joseph.

  Smoke was rising, a narrow plume of it. We headed toward it. As we waded through the soft sand and the knee-high marram grass, I told Joseph what I knew about McNulty: the war, Burma, escapology, fire-eating.

  “Fire-eating?” he said. “Always wanted to have a go at that.”

  He struck a match and quickly pushed the flame into and out of his wide-open mouth. Then he lit a cigarette that crackled as he drew on it. He sucked the smoke deep down.

  “Aaaaaah,” he said as the smoke seethed out again. “Lovely.”

  Then he pondered.

  “Mind you,” he said, “if he's really cracked we'll mebbe have to drive him out.”

  “Drive him out?”

  “There's bairns round here, Bobby. There's no telling what a bloke like him might do.”

  “He's harmless.”

  “That's what they always say. We'll see.”

  We stooped as we got closer to the smoke. We climbed a hill of sand. We peered through the grass into a depression in the earth. There was McNulty, outside a half-ruined green-painted shack. He knelt in front of his little fire, feeding it sticks, and it glowed more strongly in the fading light. He drank from a little bottle. He nibbled at some bread. He crouched with his head on his knees and bobbed back and forward as if praying. He held his hands palm upward toward the sky. Then he sat cross-legged, eyes closed, dead still. The grass around him shifted gently
in the breeze. High above, a single seagull screamed. The light continued fading. Then McNulty leaned forward and lowered his hands into the fire and let them rest there for a moment. Joseph gasped. Then McNulty lit a torch and breathed flames into the air, then seemed to breathe them in again, right into himself. “Beautiful,” whispered Joseph. Then McNulty turned and looked toward us. We slithered backward. But right away, McNulty was above us, standing there against the sky.

  “You got to pay,” he said. “You got to pay!”

  I stared full into his face, willing him to see me and know me. “Mr. McNulty,” I said, but Joseph dragged me away, and we ran, slipping and tumbling through the sand. At the pines we stood gasping and giggling. Our hearts thundered. McNulty hadn't followed us. He was nowhere to be seen.

  “Lock your doors!” yelled Joseph.

  Then we hurried onward, and the sky above our heads was a storm of screaming gulls and the sea was roaring in again.

  Ishoved meat and gravy into my mouth. The curtains were shut. The fire blazed at my back.

  “Good time?” said Dad.

  “Aye,” I said.

  “Where'd you go?”

  I shrugged and raised my hands: just out. I knew he wouldn't pry.

  “Good lad. I see the dark's in your eyes tonight.”

  He smiled.

  “They're the best times, eh? Out with your mates in darkening nights. Winter coming on, chilly air, thumping heart.” He swigged his glass of beer. “They say that summer's best and mebbe it is in the long run, but there's nowt to beat the fun of summer's end and the turn to autumn. All that sense that things is doomed and all that gathering scariness.”

  He laughed at himself.

  “Listen to Mister Romantic,” said Mam. “What he means is there's nowt to beat a nice warm meal in a nice warm chair by a nice warm fire.”

  She reached out and rubbed his stomach, then spooned vegetables onto his plate.

  “Come on,” she said. “Eat up, man. You need your strength.”

  “One time,” he said, and his eyes glittered as they turned toward the past, “one November, me and Ted Garbutt slept out all night in the dunes. Just a blanket and a slice of tarpaulin for each of us and a hunk of bread and a bottle of cold tea and the fire crackling and the ghostly tales we told each other. Hell, the ghouls and monsters we magicked with our words to roam the beach that night. They crept in the shadows of the dunes and whispered in the hissing of the flames and reached into our blankets with their claws and bony fingers. I can hear Ted still: There's a goblin in the fire! The way we screamed! And who knew where the laughter finished and the terror started?”

  Mam rolled her eyes at me. She winked.

  “He's in his dotage, son. It was all a long long time ago.”

  He swigged his beer.

  “Aye, it was. I'm glad we did them things, had times like that. There was hardship enough all around us but what did we care? We were bairns, free and easy. Who were we to know the war'd be so soon upon us?”

  He coughed and retched, and held his hand to his chest, and tears flooded his eyes. He blinked.

  “So you make sure you get your good times in, son. You never know what's round the corner.”

  Later, he nodded off in his armchair. Mam and I looked at each other, said nothing. Then she opened the handbag she always kept by the side of her chair.

  “You ever seen this one?” she said.

  It was a photograph of her when she was young. It was so tiny. She laid it at the center of my palm. Just her face, the collar of a pale blouse, and a narrow border of white around her. It had darkened. It seemed as though it could have come from centuries ago.

  “The fading's because of the heat,” she said. “He took it with him to Burma. He carried it in his tunic pocket against his heart. Mister Softie. He said it went with him always and everywhere.”

  She smiled and stroked my hair.

  “He said it was his lucky charm and it kept him alive. He said he knew that if he carried it with him he'd come home to me again.”

  She looked up at me from the photograph, young and lovely, laughing eyes. I felt her breath on me.

  “Do you know how privileged you are?” she said.

  “Privileged?”

  “Aye. It's not a word that many'd think of when they think of us. Privileged. To have a dad like him and be from a place like this and…”

  She smiled.

  “Aye,” I said. “I know.”

  She took the photo from me, then leaned toward Dad. She kissed his cheek, then slipped the photograph into the breast pocket of his shirt.

  “Look after him again,” she said.

  I was going to tell her about McNulty then, but there were tears in her eyes and it didn't seem the right time. I went up to my room. I did my homework of remembering; then I gazed into the night and watched the moonlit breakers crashing on the shore. When I slept, I dreamed that McNulty crept through the dunes and entered the house and came upstairs to lie in bed with Dad. They whispered together about Burma; then the bed became a boat and they clutched each other tight as they rocked and reeled in the stormy sea that carried them toward another war.

  The first photograph of Todd appeared next morning. It was pinned to the notice board just inside the school's front door. It had been taken in the schoolyard. There were lots of kids in it, standing about in groups, playing football, lost in thought. Todd, in this one, was just a figure in the crowd. He held the pose that had quickly become so familiar to all of us. One hand was stretched out to hold a kid's forearm still; his other hand was raised, about to strike downward with the strap. The kid was Martin Keane, a second-year.

  “Aye, that was me,” I heard Martin say. “I took this shot and it hit the window. He give us two. He done the second right across me wrist, the sod.” He puffed his chest out as he started to tell the tale again. “Aye, you're right, it's me….”

  The photo was soon removed but not before a few dozen of us had seen it. We thought little more of it. Then the second photograph appeared that afternoon. It was taped up in the science block toilets. It was the same photograph, but this time it was enlarged, so that Todd and Martin filled more of it. You could see the cold look on Todd's face, and the way Martin was flinching. Loads of lads saw it, and even the girls started coming in. One of the science teachers, Bunsen Brooks, took this one down. I was there when he came in. He clicked his tongue, as if it was all just a little thing.

  “Come on,” he said. “The show's over. What's all the fuss?”

  He yanked it off the wall, but underneath there was black ink, the single word, EVIL. Bunsen ran his fingers across it.

  “Who knows anything about this ?” he said.

  We looked back at him. Nobody.

  On the bus home that day, Diggy said, “Wouldn't like to be in his shoes when they find him.”

  “Todd'll kill him,” said Col.

  “Aye,” said Ed. “I wonder who it is.”

  I looked at Daniel. He lounged with his knees up, reading. He met my eye for a second. He lowered his eyes again. As he began to read again, he let a finger cross his lips: Keep quiet.

  “Was it you?” I said as we stepped down outside the Rat.

  “You don't want to know too much,” he said. “Keep mum. First rule in resistance. Anyway, whoever it is, it's a bit different, eh? Stops things getting yawn yawn yawn.”

  He pulled his collar close against the wind, looked up into the bleak gray sky.

  “Hell's teeth,” he said. “This is it, then? Northern winter on its way.”

  He pressed his finger to his lips and headed away.

  Next day it was different. This time the image was much closer in: just Todd and Martin right in the foreground, the strap at the top edge of the photograph, Martin's hand at the bottom. You saw the true fear in Martin's eyes, the true cold contempt in Todd's. As we were looking at this one, which was pasted over a photograph of last year's school athletic team, there was news of several more. The
y'd been found throughout the school: on walls, dropped into desks, slipped into library books. There were several new images now, all of them containing Todd and his strap. Sometimes words accompanied them, written on the walls beneath or scrawled across the photographs themselves. Simple words: EVIL, WICKED, CRUELTY, SIN. The photographs quickly became collectors' items. Those that weren't taken down by staff were hidden deep in satchels and workbags. The most famous image was of Todd and the Whitby twins, Julia and John. The twins had their hands out together, side by side. They leaned their heads together and closed their eyes as the black strap descended.

  In the classroom, Lubbock prowled through the aisles between our desks. His breath seethed.

  “I pray that there is no one in this room connected to this business,” he said. “There is a sly sneak at work. A serpent, a snake.” He cracked his knuckles. “We will draw him out. He will slither out into the light. And then …” He licked his lips and sighed. There was silence as we worked, drawing a map of Jesus' journeys through the Holy Land. Then a crash as Lubbock smashed his fist onto Dorothy Peacock's desk. We jumped. We stared at him, his bulging flushed face.

  “Mr. Todd,” he snarled, “is worth ten of any of you inside this place.”

  He swept his hand across Dorothy's work. Her book and pencils flew onto the floor.

  “Well!” he yelled. “What's the matter with you, girl? Pick them up! Pick them up!”

  Dorothy scuttled to pick them up. Daniel raised his hand. He was expressionless.

  “Sir!” he called.

  Lubbock watched him, said nothing.

  “Please, sir,” said Daniel. “Could you show us where it was that Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount?”

  That afternoon, a special assembly was called. The whole school was ushered by prefects and grim-faced teachers through silent corridors toward the hall. The teachers mounted the stage and sat on hard chairs facing us. Many of them had their black gowns on. Todd was in the front row. His head was tilted, his eyes were lowered, his chest kept rising as he sighed, as if he'd been deeply wronged, as if he was in pain. His strap was nowhere to be seen.

  Grace, the head, stepped forward. He carried a clutch of the photographs in his hand. He stared down at us for seconds; then he slowly started to rip the photographs. He bent forward and let the pieces fall into a waste bin at his feet.