The Tightrope Walkers

by David Almond

  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 b
ounce 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.

  We lifted her again and wandered on. We told her of the gentle silent wandering tramp, Jack Law, and we took her to his rock. A candle burned in there today. We slithered in, for there was room for two bodies and a tiny one. We gasped. Everything had changed. The sky was freshly painted blue, but there was no Heaven in it, no God, no angels. There was the sun, a flight of silhouetted birds. There were two trees with a cord between, two smiling dancing figures balancing on the cord with a baby held between them. Lower down were many figures, individuals and little groups, all human, wandering beside buildings, or through patches of bright green. There were boats on a river and on a distant sea that blended with the sky. And there was Jack himself, in mid-stride, heading upwards, bowed forward with his little rucksack on his back.

  We sighed. The baby cooed.

  We moved out of the rock as Jack came to us.

  We lifted the baby into his arms. He smiled. He raised her high and gasped at the beauty of her in the light.

  He brought her close to his scarred and gentle face.

  He sang his high, wordless note.

  “E-U,” he said to her.

  And then he became still and held his breath and shaped his lips.

  “Good,” he said. “G-good.”

  “Goo,” replied Elaine. “Goo-goo.”

  He smiled and sighed.

  “Goo,” cried the bairn. “Goo-goo.”

  ALSO BY DAVID ALMOND

  Hardcover ISBN 978-0-7636-6309-4

  Paperback ISBN 978-0-7636-7662-9

  Also available as an e-book and in audio

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2014 by David Almond

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First U.S. electronic edition 2015

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2014944915

  ISBN 978-0-7636-7310-9 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7636-7704-6 (electronic)

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com