The Tightrope Walkers

by David Almond

  I shrugged.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “That’s right. You can’t. And nor can I and nor can nobody.”

  He fired the final shot into the empty air.

  We headed homeward.

  “I sometimes want to be him,” he said.

  “To be Jack Law?”

  “Aye. When I’m stuck in school and heading for a lifetime in the yards, and he’s runnin round the place in freedom. I wonder what it’d be like. Wonder what I would be like if I was on the loose like that. No rules. No responsibilities to nobody. You ever wonder that?”

  “Aye,” I said.

  “Aye. You could do anything. Owt you bliddy liked. Mind you, I’d do different bliddy things than him. I’d be bliddy crazier and wilder.”

  “Is your dad like that?”

  “That fucker? Who bliddy knows? But mebbe yes. A bliddy lunatic Jack Law, as mebbe I will be one day. Now slice the heads off?”

  “Eh?”

  “Off the rabbits. And the feet, and split them open and get the guts. Then skin the buggers.”

  “Eh?”

  “Butchery, Dom. First you kill, then you get yer kill ready for the pot. Use the knife you nicked from the yard.”

  He took the knife. He sharpened it on a stone. He took the first rabbit and demonstrated. He sawed off the head, snapped the bones that the knife wouldn’t saw through. He sliced and wrenched off the feet. Stabbed the point into the soft flesh below the breastbone, sawed up towards the throat and down towards the arse. Upended the beast and moved the blade about inside and let the innards fall. They slithered down onto the grass. I saw what must be heart and lungs among the tubes and blood and slop. He put his fingers in and scooped and tugged out what remained. Then lifted the edge of the beast’s pelt and started peeling it away, exposing slick purplish flesh beneath. He tugged and eased and pulled, and it came off in a single coat, and all that remained were bones with flesh on them, smears of blood.

  “Needs cleaning proper under a tap or in a stream,” he said. “But that’ll do for now.” He passed the knife. “Now you.”

  I started on the second one. Cutting, sawing, slicing, trying not to gag. He instructed me. Sometimes he put his hands on mine and guided me. Blood got into my pores, under my fingernails. The knife slipped and nicked me a couple of times. Bone shards nicked me too. I held the rabbit’s heart in my palm. I held a lung. I tugged away the world of life that had lain hidden since birth within this bone-protected cavity. I took away the skin. Wrenched open the corpse to the sun and the air. A lovely thing, reduced to scattered body parts, a discarded pelt, a few ounces of food, streaks of slop in the grass.

  “Good lad,” said Vincent. “Well done. Dominic Hall — killer, butcher. Ha!”

  We put the rabbits into their sack. I cleaned the knife by stabbing it into the earth, wiping it on the grass. We moved away and cawing crows quickly fell on the stuff we’d left behind.

  Vincent laughed at them.

  “Savages,” he said. “See how the living is fed by the dead? First the crows, then you and your folks. And you’ll be got by worms in the end and the crows’ll get the worms and on and on and bliddy on.”

  We went back down across the fields to our pebbledashed place. He put his arm across my shoulder as we came close to home.

  Holly was still in her garden. She raised her eyes to us.

  “She telt me I was an animal,” he whispered in my ear. “I said I knaa. I telt her she was mental and she said I knaa.”

  “When? When she painted you?”

  “Aye. Must have been.”

  He waved at her. She didn’t move.

  “It was a good day, eh?” he said, loud enough for her to hear.

  “Aye.”

  “And we even got to thinkin about souls, which suits you, eh?”

  “Aye.”

  “Lead slugs and souls. Ha! Souls!” He said this loud again. “Mebbe we’re all just bodies, eh, despite everythin they try to tell us? Bones and blood and guts and nowt beyond. How can a thing like Jack Law have a soul? How can killers like us have a bliddy soul?”

  He pulled me close.

  “Tek no notice,” he breathed. “I’m sure you’ve got a soul, Dominic Hall. Mebbe not me. What d’you think?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Dunno. Nor me. Mebbe I should weigh you, then kill you, then weigh you quick again. Or you kill me and do the same. Eh?”

  I said nothing. Holly went on watching.

  “We’ll do it again, eh?” said Vincent. “We’ll be together again, eh? Me and you, you and me.”

  I stood straight, looked him in the eye.

  “Aye, Vincent.”

  “Good lad.”

  I took the sack of rabbits from him and went through the gate. Mam cried to see the dead. She asked me what did I think I was doing. I said they were just rabbits, it was just an air gun, I was just doing what lots of people did. And where did she think her food came from?

  “What on earth is happening to you?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing! Don’t you think there’s enough death in the world without you adding to it?”

  I said nothing.

  “Bury the poor beasts. Put them deep in the flower border.”

  I did so.

  She watched me from the door. I got a spade and buried the bodies deep. I crumbled soil on them, then shoved clods of earth on them. As I did so, I relived the thrill of the shot, the thrill of a crow tumbling from the sky. The thrill was in my flesh, my blood, in what might have been my soul.

  Does everybody do the things that I did in my adolescence? Does everybody kill and thieve and do other things that they’d never admit to, or that they somehow manage to forget? Or is it just the wayward kids? Or the uncertain kids? Kids like me, drawn to the grace and the beauty of the Holly Strouds of the world, but also drawn to the cruelty and ugliness of the Vincent McAlindens?

  Is each of us precarious? Does each of us teeter in the space between the artist and the killer in ourselves? Or do some live a whole life in innocence, and never have the suspicion that somewhere within them lies a Vincent McAlinden to entice, and to be unleashed?

  I don’t know. I only know of me. I accepted Vincent into my life, he accepted me into his.

  It went on for months. We killed not only birds, but other living things. The rabbits and rats that were daft enough to show themselves to us. A black cat that dared to cross our path, that Vincent said was an unlucky event and so the cat deserved to die. A limping dog beside the old mine workings, an ancient mangy collarless thing. I shot this one in the head from ten yards away. We laughed. An act of mercy, I said. An act that put it out of its misery. My mother knew none of these things, of course. I got none of the bodies ready for the pot. I brought home no more murdered beasts. I left unbutchered corpses in the paddocks and hedgerows.

  What on earth did we do out there, Mam sometimes asked.

  I’d only shrug. Nothing, Mam. Messing about, Mam.

  Dad told her to leave me alone. There was a time for lads to be left alone.

  We went on killing. And yes, we went a-thieving, too.

  Soon after that first day with the birds, I went out seeking him again, found him waiting at his door. He strolled to me, led me away. We went downhill this time, through the lower wasteland, that place of dread that had reverted to a place of play now that the Vincent McAlinden who walked at my side had been tamed. Kids even called out his name along with mine as we walked through, and he called back, and smiled, and they smiled back, for they had forgotten, forgiven, or simply knew nothing of, the earlier terrifying form of Vincent McAlinden. Vincent had been tamed by the loss of his friend. And he was with Dominic Hall, a new and better friend for him.

  We passed the endless leaping girls with their endless elemental skipping song as they spun the rope around each other’s heads and feet and leapt and leapt in order to avoid the whirring edge of night.

  January, Februa
ry, March, April, Ma-ay . . .

  Away from the place of play and down the rocky path and into town. To the little town square with the fountain at its heart where old men in dark caps sat with dogs and leaned on sticks and murmured of the old days to each other. Past the scents of beer outside the Blue Bell, the scents of lotions at Lough’s Barber Shop, the scents of saveloy and gravy outside Myer’s pork shop, the scents of cigarette smoke and pipe smoke everywhere. Kids everywhere, dogs running everywhere, women in headscarves with shopping bags. A priest, Father Boyle, hurrying somewhere with his hand held to his chest, where the Host must be hidden and secure, waiting to be pressed onto the tongue of one in sickness or one in grief or one about to die. The sounds of sparrows and traffic, of playing children, of gossiping women, of laughing women, of coughing men, of wheezing men.

  Vincent paused for a moment as we crossed the square.

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  “Sometimes what?”

  “I think I see him.”

  “Who?”

  “Him that’s bliddy gone.”

  “Bernard?”

  “No, not him. Me bliddy father, Dom. Think I see him on one of the benches or sitting behind the glass in the pub. Like he’s come back or like he’s a bliddy ghost or something or like he’s never even gone away. Then I look more close and of course it isn’t him, the bastard.”

  “Do you want to see him?”

  “You must be bliddy jokin. But mebbe yes. Mebbe if I did, I’d murder him. Kapow!”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “Don’t want to, but aye, I sometimes do. And I see him in me dreams. Nightmares, more like.”

  He spat, he cursed.

  “He won’t come back. We’re free of him, the bliddy get.”

  He spat again.

  “I’m in his place now,” he said.

  We passed a fruit shop. I smiled at a neighbour inside and then a few yards further on I felt an apple in my hand, placed there by Vincent.

  “Didn’t see a thing, did you?” he said. “And neither did they.”

  We bit and chewed and the juice ran down our chins, and beyond the sudden dread I felt at the eating of the fruit, I found a place in me in which I could smile at this, in which I could laugh, in which I could delight at the taste of fruit and friendship and crime together.

  “It’s nowt,” said Vincent. “And it’s bliddy easy, and it’s done by everybody, and naebody gets harmed.”

  Further on we shared our coins and Vincent bought a pack of five Park Drives, and we crouched and smoked, in an alley between the fishmonger’s and Lang’s Betting Shop, and goggled at the great North Sea cod, almost as big as we were, that lay on the fishmonger’s slab with herrings and crabs all open to the outside air.

  And when we’d smoked he handed a packet of fruit gums to me, and a packet of chewing gum, and he snorted at my astonishment, and said again that it was easy, oh so easy, and that everybody did it. Bliddy everybody, man.

  On we went, down the High Street.

  “Now you,” he said as we approached another fruit shop, Connor’s, whose boxes lay open on a table outside.

  I shuddered, my footsteps faltered, and he knew it.

  “Just lift one out,” he said, so matter-of-fact, “and keep it by your side and keep on walking on.”

  I hesitated.

  “Just do it. Learn from me. Nobody will see.”

  Again my heart was stopped, and then it started thumping and my brain was filled with agitation.

  “Believe that you can do it and you will,” whispered my friend. “Hand straight in and hand straight out and keep on walking. Easy.”

  We were almost upon it. I looked towards the sky, the drifting clouds. Beyond the fruit shop roof, the steeple of the church appeared about to topple over us.

  I was cold as ice, as hot as fire.

  We walked. I put my hand inside the box, I lifted out a fruit, I walked. It was as if it wasn’t me, as if another boy had done this thing. We walked together, Vincent, the different me and me.

  “Well done!” he whispered.

  He grasped my wrist and squeezed it fast, a touch of reassurance, of respect.

  We came to the foot of the street. We leaned against the wall of the Beeswing pub, below its green dome.

  I showed the green pear in my hand.

  I bit, I passed it to him, and he bit, too.

  He grinned. He swiped his hand across his lips to catch the juice.

  “See?” he said. “And after all it’s just a pear. It’s just a piece of bliddy fruit. And now you’ve done it once it all gets easier.”

  And on we walked, and continued all morning to thieve more childish things, just sweets, just fruit, just things that were hardly noticed, things that hardly mattered to anyone at all.

  And on we went beyond the Beeswing pub and passed the railway station and crossed the railway line, hesitating on the footbridge to feel the power of the Newcastle train as it thundered beneath, and then on again, chewing our stolen Beech Nut gum, following the ancient terraced streets, the ones that hadn’t been swept away along with the hovels in which so many of us had spent the first years of our lives. And the scent of the river was coming to us now, and the sound of gulls from above the water, and the din of the yards was closer, more intense. We walked down through old paddocks in which squat black and black-and-white ponies chewed the grass or lifted their heads and regarded us with questioning tender eyes. And other lads and other girls were wandering, and all of us were glancing at each other and wondering should we be interested, should we be friendly, should we be wary or suspicious or scared? Vincent strutted, he held his head high, he was Vincent McAlinden, after all, many of these must surely know him, or know of his old reputation.

  He lit a Park Drive and blew wild plumes of smoke into the air and said, “Sod ’em,” apparently to nothing, to no one. “Sod ’em all, eh, Dominic?”

  “Aye,” I answered, though I knew not why.

  “Aye,” I answered. “Sod ’em all.”

  And then to the river itself, to a place where the paddocks petered to a pebbly rubbly muddy slope with the water slopping at its foot. We sat on the final patch of green, on stones, with grass about us drifting upon the downriver breeze, and Vincent told me this was the life, wasn’t this just the best of bliddy lives?

  I laughed. I muttered that yes, it probably bliddy was. I looked at the jetsam on the shore, the bones of beasts and the boughs of trees, and the condoms and the broken timbers and the stones and boxes and bottles that had settled upon the silt, and saw the logs and the trees and the litter being carried upon the water, and I smelt the stench of the dark and filthy Tyne, and I saw the ancientness of the stonework beneath the jetties on the opposite bank, and I looked along the shore, and saw the shipyards and their great cranes and their great ships stretching to the sea, and I saw the distant sky above the distant invisible sea, and I took all these things into me. This is where I had come from, this place. The buildings in which I’d spent my first months were gone, but they lived on inside me.

  “That’s where I’ll end up,” he said. “Down here in the bliddy yard. Soon, before too long. Going each morning to the noise and the filth. Not like you. You’ll be up and off and fancy free.”

  I felt his hand upon me, upon my shoulder, and I felt his face against mine, and felt his breath upon me, and heard that breath carrying his words into my ear.

  “Won’t you?” he said. “Won’t you be free as a bird while I’m crawling round in a filthy tank?”

  “I will,” I said.

  “That’s right. Let’s fight,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Fight. It’s what we should do. Let’s do it all and bliddy fight.”

  I didn’t understand but somehow my body did understand, and I rolled my head and turned my eyes towards the sky, and it was as if my soul recoiled inside myself, rebalanced itself and then turned again, and found a different and very new way of being, and I looke
d upon this new friend, Vincent McAlinden, who had terrified me since childhood, who sought me out to take me killing and thieving and who now was close to me and about to fight me, and I turned back to him again and muttered yes to him. I grunted bliddy yes.

  We rolled away from the river and the stones. He rolled on top of me and knelt on my shoulders and held my wrists to the earth and snarled down at me.

  “Howay, then,” he said. “Don’t hold back. Do bliddy something.”

  I squirmed, I struggled beneath him, I shoved him off.

  “Well done,” he snarled. He grabbed me, and we wrestled. “Hurt us!” he said. “Bliddy hurt us, man!”

  I gripped him tight, I stamped the earth, I felt the power in my new squat muscles and the desire to struggle in my blood. I got him round the chest and squeezed him hard. I was shorter than him, but I had my father’s caulker’s body and my father’s caulker’s strength. I was astonished by the effort we needed to stay upright, the effort I needed to try to make him fall, the effort I needed just to breathe, to keep on doing this. Snot and tears came from me. Blood came from me. I saw these things on Vincent McAlinden too and didn’t know if they had come from him or come from me. I spun him round and at last he fell.

  “Good lad,” he snarled. “Now the knife!”

  “Eh?”

  “Get your knife and bliddy stab us now!”

  “What?”

  Suddenly his own knife was in his hand, pointing towards me. He got to his feet. He grinned.

  “Or are ye just goin to be defenceless?”

  I took out my ship-steel knife. He crouched low and circled me. I crouched low as well. He beckoned me with his free hand.

  “Howay,” he said. “Stab us, Dom.”

  He lunged at me. I backed away.

  “Cos I’m tellin you — if you don’t do me, I fuckin will do you.”

  He lunged again. Again.

  I gasped in terror, and in greater terror as I lunged at him and stabbed my knife towards him.

  “That’s the way,” he hissed. “Again! Do it like ye bliddy mean it, man.”

  I stabbed the air again. Suddenly he grabbed my wrist and pulled me close. He raised his knife. I grabbed his wrist.