The Fire-Eaters

by David Almond

  Mam laid blankets on the sand. She brought food out for us all. Scones and bread and butter and cheese and golden syrup. Losh dashed home and brought a crate of beer. We spread ourselves out on the sand and ate and drank. Joseph came and ate hungrily. He reached out and took a bottle of beer and swigged from it and wiped his lips with his fist like a man. Ailsa let the fawn lick butter from her fingers. Wilberforce nibbled the grass nearby. As we sat there, Daniel and his parents came out of their house. They paused and watched us for a while, then came shyly on. They carried some bottles of wine. Losh and Yak and Joseph watched them coldly.

  “What they wanting with us?” muttered Losh.

  But Mam stood up and greeted them and drew them in. Dad shook hands with Mr. Gower.

  “There's a bit of sorting out to do, I hear,” he said.

  Mr. Gower shrugged.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Seems we got a pair of fighters on our hands,” said Dad.

  Mr. Gower looked at us.

  “Maybe because they were brought up in similar ways,” he said.

  He pulled the cork from a bottle of wine, handed it to Dad, and Dad smiled and swigged.

  Mam beckoned Mrs. Gower.

  “Come and sit,” said Mam. “Make yourself at home.”

  Daniel came to my side.

  “Did they strap you?” he said.

  I nodded and showed him the marks.

  “And we're both kicked out?”

  I nodded again.

  “One day,” he said, “there'll be a law against the things they do.”

  “Oh, aye?” I said.

  “Oh, aye.” He laughed at himself using the strange word. “Aye. Oh, aye.” Then he asked, “Are you keeping up with things?”

  He started to draw a map in the sand: Cuba, the USA, where the ships were now. Did we know a plane had been shot down? Had we heard—

  “Stop it,” I said.

  I swept his map away. I knelt there and hung my head and expected to be struck down at any moment.

  “Just stop it!”

  It was Mam who said we should bring McNulty.

  “That poor soul,” she said. “Who'd be alone on a day like this?”

  “It'll need to be Bobby that goes,” said Ailsa. “I'll go with him.”

  We saw the fear in Mam's eyes, in everyone's eyes. “We'll be fast,” I said. “Five minutes, no more.”

  We stood up in the silence. We scanned the sky. And then we ran. Dad came with us as far as the pines. He stood at the edge of the dunes, below the hill of sand, and watched us climb. We lay side by side at the top and looked down on McNulty's shack. His fire was out. Sand was heaped on it. No movement, no signs of life. I waved to Dad and we crawled over and slithered down.

  “Mr. McNulty!” I called.

  Nothing stirred. We went to the window but couldn't see through the tattered curtain. We called his name from the door. We went inside, over the heaped-up sand at the threshold. We pushed open the door to the inner room. He was there, below the window filled with sand and roots and skeletons. He whimpered in fright.

  “It's me,” I said. “It's Bobby. I helped you, Mr. McNulty. Remember?”

  “Get back to your shelters!” he hissed. “Stay still. Stay quiet. Get down where the dead are!”

  “We've come to help you,” Ailsa said. “We've got food and drink waiting.”

  “There's people there,” I said. “They want you to be with them.”

  “People!” His eyes were shining. “People! Get them underground, bonny. Cover them up.”

  I crouched beside him.

  “There's no point to it,” I said. “There's nowhere safe, nowhere to hide.” I put my hand on his skinny elbow. “Please come with us.”

  “Please,” echoed Ailsa.

  I held him.

  “These people will care for you,” I whispered.

  “Care?” he said.

  “Will love you,” I said.

  I smiled.

  “And you could perform for them,” I said. “You could do your act for them, Mr. McNulty.”

  He whimpered again. He closed his eyes.

  “Oh, bonny,” he whispered. He gripped my hand. “Oh, what are you saying, my bonny boy?”

  McNulty hung his chains around his shoulders. I carried his box of instruments, his torches, his bottle of kerosene, his sack on a stick. Ailsa held his elbow and guided him. We climbed away from the shack. We encouraged him, we told him who was waiting, we told him that everything would turn out fine. He didn't make a sound. The sun was already descending toward the moors in the west.

  Dad clenched his fists with relief when he saw us.

  “McNulty!” he said as we approached. He took McNulty by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. “It's grand to see you again, McNulty.”

  “It's my dad,” I murmured. “Do you remember?”

  But we saw that he remembered nothing.

  We walked through the shadows of the pines, past the lighthouse, past the bonfire, toward the group of

  neighbors. We saw that Joseph's parents had come to join us as well now.

  “This is where we live,” I said. “Keely Bay. That's our house there. These are the people who live here. This is my mam.” She stood up and came toward us. “She was with me when I saw you first. Do you remember her, Mr. McNulty?” He hesitated on the sand, narrowed his eyes, and I saw that yes, maybe he did remember. “She was the angel at my side,” I said. He sighed and closed his eyes as she came close to him. She took his arm. “Come and be with us, Mr. McNulty,” she said, and he let her lead him further.

  He knelt in the sand beside her and took bread and cheese from her. He drank beer. He kept his eyes turned downward. The others watched him, uncertain. It was as if all their dread had been disturbed by the presence of this stranger in our midst.

  “This is Mr. McNulty,” I said. “He's an escapologist and a fire-eater.”

  “The greatest of the fire-eaters,” said Ailsa.

  McNulty sighed.

  “In the greatest of the fire-eaters,” he said, “you cannot see where the …”

  He ran out of words, stumbled into a silence in which we remembered our dread again and we stared into the sky and we listened.

  “What's next?” whispered McNulty. “The fire or the chains or…” He got up awkwardly, he stood there, he caught my eye, he groaned. “Help me, bonny?”

  I stood beside him.

  “Fasten my chains.”

  I started to unwind the chains from around his shoulders, to wrap them around his body.

  “Tighter!” he whispered. “Tighter, bonny!”

  I wrapped them tighter. I wrapped them around his arms, his legs. I intertwined and knotted them. There were little padlocks that I snapped shut. All the time he told me, “Tighter! Tighter!”

  I wrapped the last section of chain around his throat.

  “Pay!” he said. He glared out at his audience. He glared at me. “The sack, bonny. Tell them to put their coins in it. Tell them they'll not see nowt till they pay.”

  I lifted the sack on the stick and I held it out. The others fiddled in their pockets for coins.

  “Pay!” he said. “D'you think a man like me can live on empty air?”

  Soon a few coins were in the sack.

  “Enough! To hell with them,” he said.

  He dropped to the earth. He squirmed and jerked and gasped and started to slither free of the chains. We chewed our lips at the horror of this happening on our beach today. We laughed at the stupidity of it, the madness of it. We shed tears at the sadness of it. Then he was free, and kneeling on the sand with his head hanging low.

  “See?” he said. “See what a man can do?”

  We stared into the sky. It was reddening, darkening. McNulty gasped as if in agony.

  “What's the wailing?” he said.

  “The sea,” I told him. “Nothing but the sea.”

  He put his hands across his ears.

  “Stop the
wailing!” he said. “Stop that screaming! Oh, what's to be done about the doom that's everywhere?”

  He reached out, grabbed me.

  “The box!” he said. “Get the box, bonny. Get the thing that'll make the most pain.”

  I opened the box and took out the silver skewer with the fierce pointed tip, the handle a Saracen's head. “Who would dare?” he asked. No one answered. He told nobody to pay. He pushed it through his cheeks and we gathered in front of him to see the metal stretched between his teeth, across his throat, to see it gleaming there in the last fiery rays of the setting sun.

  Mam sang when the sun had gone.

  “Oh, weel may the keel row,

  The keel row, the kee-el row,

  Oh, weel may the keel row,

  That my true laddie's in.”

  Mr. Gower poured her a glass of wine.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You didn't bring your camera today, Paul?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not today.”

  “So you have all you need for your book?”

  “There'll be more, Mrs. Burns, once this is over.”

  “Once this is over,” growled Joseph softly, imitating Mr. Gower's southern vowels.

  “Do you really like it here, Paul?” said Mam. She looked into his eyes. “Or are you just using us?”

  “It is very beautiful, Mrs. Burns. We're very pleased that we came.”

  “Oh, weel may the keel row,

  The keel row, the kee-el row…”

  McNulty lay silent in the sand, curled up, apart from us. It grew dark. The moon didn't rise. The lighthouse light didn't turn. Nothing but stars, the impossible number of them looking down, and the endless reflections of them on the sea. Then Ailsa saw the single light among them, moving slowly from the east. “Look,” she whispered, and she pointed, and we traced it with our eyes in silence.

  “It'll be Sputnik,” said Daniel.

  It passed over us. We breathed.

  “What did the satellite say to the moon?” said Yak.

  “Dunno,” someone answered.

  “Can't stop,” said Yak. “I'm Russian.”

  “Fire time,” said Joseph. “Let's not wait for Guy Fawkes Night.”

  “Guy Fawkes Night!” said Losh, and he jumped up and he and Joseph and Yak ran full speed to the fire and we saw the matches sparking there and the first flames burning.

  McNulty didn't come with us. Mam laid a blanket over him.

  “God bless,” she whispered.

  I crouched beside him for a moment. “You OK?” I said.

  He caught my hand. His eyes softened.

  “Aye,” he said, and for a moment all the madness seemed gone from him. He looked at me tenderly. “Don't be troubled,” he said. “I love you, bonny.” Then he closed his eyes and I followed the others to the shoreline. The great fire quickly began to roar. The fires to the south began to burn as well, making a row of fires at the edge of the land and sea. We had to back away from the heat. Joseph put his arm around me.

  “Watch it burn as high as heaven, Bobby,” he said.

  He kissed me suddenly, secretly.

  Mam asked us to pray.

  “Even if you don't believe,” she said. “Even if you think there's nothing but nothing.”

  So we knelt there, all of us, beside the fire and the water and we sent our voices upward with the flames.

  “Don't let it happen,” I said with Ailsa. “Please. Please.”

  I took my prayer from my pocket and threw it into the fire and it leapt upward as it blazed.

  Then we sat in pairs and little groups and hardly spoke and the grown-ups drank beer and wine and I lay sleeping for a while and when I woke I found Daniel and Ailsa sitting together close by. They were talking about Kent and Keely Bay and schools and mothers and fawns and how they loved freedom and how they hated being told what to do and I lay listening to their voices, that were both so quiet and strong and yet so different from each other, and I knew that if we could just get through these days and nights of dread a time of great excitement might be waiting for us all. And as I lay there I half opened my eyes to look at my friends and I saw the fire-eater far beyond them in the darkness, all alone, breathing his flag of flame into the air. No one else had seen. The grown-ups faced the fire and the sea. I crawled to Daniel and Ailsa.

  “Look,” I whispered.

  And they turned, and we shuffled silently away from the fire and into the deeper dark and we sat together there and we saw how marvelous McNulty was and how his face blazed like his fire and how when he ate his fire we couldn't tell where the fire ended and the man began. And perhaps he saw us, too, and recognized the children who had discovered him and drawn him here and who had tried to care for him and love him, for he spread his torches wide as if in greeting; then he breathed his fire again, breathed it out, then breathed it in.

  If. If Kennedy or Khrushchev had given the order to launch the missiles that night … If some general in some bunker under the earth, or some commander of a submarine deep down in the sea, or some pilot of some plane, had gone mad with the pressure of it all and stabbed the launch button all alone … If some primitive computer had simply gone wrong …If the ships heading for Cuba had continued heading for Cuba. If…If… I'd not be sitting here beside the old Lourdes light writing the story. There'd be no record of what happened in Keely Bay during that autumn of 1962. Maybe there'd be no record of what happened anywhere in autumn 1962. Maybe there'd be nothing, no world at all, just a charred and blasted ball of poisoned earth and poisoned air and poisoned seas, spinning through the darkness and the emptiness of space. All of history gone. All the stories gone. No me, no you, no anyone. But no one pressed the launch button. The ships turned back. We stepped back from the gates of hell.

  All over the world, people behaved the way we did in little tattered Keely Bay. We trembled and quaked and were filled with dread. We shouted, No! Of course, there were riots and looting in some places. Even close to home in Newcastle there was fighting in the streets. A bunch of kids set fire to a newsagent's in Blyth. But most of us, as in Keely Bay, stayed together and fed each other and tried to love each other. Even those of us who believed in nothing prayed. We lit our fire. We told jokes, we dreamed, we cried, we slipped into our pasts and tried to look into our futures. And all the time the careless stars looked down and showed how tiny we were and how insignificant we were and how maybe we just didn't matter at all.

  In the middle of that final night, McNulty performed for nothing, for no one. He didn't demand an audience, he didn't demand that they pay. He breathed his fire toward heaven and then he did the most lethal thing of all and breathed it back into himself.

  By the time we reached him, he was already dead. The torches flickered like candles at his side. As we knelt beside him, we heard our names ringing fearfully through the darkness. Bobby! Ailsa! Daniel!

  I waved the torches and we saw their silhouettes approaching us, and soon all of us had shifted from the blazing fire to the fire-eater lying all alone in death on the cold sand.

  Mam closed his eyes.

  “Poor soul,” she whispered.

  She held me tight.

  We gazed down at his skinny tortured body until the torches puttered out and I imagined opening him up, to see the inside of his body, the stillness and silence of it, the mysterious disappearance of its life.

  There are other ifs, of course. If I hadn't gone with Mam to Newcastle's quay that Sunday… If Dad hadn't remembered the boat back from Burma … If McNulty hadn't come to Keely Bay… If I hadn't gone into the dunes with Ailsa to bring him out … If. But these things happened, and so he died, and so the story is as it is.

  There was nothing we could do. We laid a blanket over him. We sat with him for a while. We prayed that he would have peace.

  “Forgive me,” I whispered, so soft that nobody would hear; then we went back to the fireside and sat around the fierce hissing embers and waited for our dreadful night to end.<
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  Now it all seems so long ago, and it's as if it happened in some different kind of time, in some different kind of world, almost as if it happened in a dream. But it happened in this world, to me and people like me, to people like you. It's part of history. It's all recorded. And McNulty lies in the little graveyard in Keely Bay. A simple little stone and a simple little message: McNulty. d. 1962. Fire-Eater. God Bless. And there are always posies of flowers there.

  A couple of days after he died, I was with Mam and Dad at the table. We had rice pudding, creamy and sweet beneath its scorched skin. We mixed jam into it and sighed at such deliciousness. There was a knock at the door and we found Miss Bute standing there. She came in shyly, but when she sat with us her eyes began to burn with fire. “I just can't stand by and let this happen,” she said, and so another story started, of how Daniel and I found our way back to school, and how Ailsa Spink joined us there, and how she turned out to be the brightest and boldest of us all.

  And after Miss Bute had gone, Ailsa herself came, filled with passion and delight, calling my name as she ran to the door.

  “Bobby! Bobby! Oh, come and see!”

  So I left the pudding and went out to her and she took my hand and hauled me away. We ran across the beach and past the lighthouse headland and through the pines and to her house with its ancient lean-tos and its heaps of shining coal and its rich allotment garden.

  “Look!” she told me, and she pointed into the fields that led toward the pitheads and the distant woodlands. “There, Bobby. Look!”

  And my eyes adjusted, and I saw them there, the pair of deer, the stag and the doe. They stood before the nearest hawthorn hedge, fifty yards away.