The Tightrope Walkers (14 page)

No larks. They were all too far away, all too tiny, all too unlike birds at all. And though Vincent raised the gun and indeed did aim and fire upon them, I allowed myself to watch him and to say nothing, for I knew there was no way for a little grey lead pellet to reach them up there.

We grew tired as the sun began to fall.

And the joy and satisfaction of it all began to fade.

Just a few pellets left now.

“We’ve used hundreds!” Vincent gasped. “A few more each and then we’re done.”

I killed another bird. He killed two.

I loaded one of the final pellets, pointed it towards a sparsely growing hedge. A pigeon perched on a swaying branch there. I took aim. And the foliage parted, and the bird took flight and a face was looking directly back at me, a pale face, fair hair around it, mouth opening as if saying words.

“Jack Law!” I whispered.

“Jack bliddy nosey-parker Law,” said Vincent.

Jack started moving forward. He held out his hands, showed the dead birds he held in both of them. He raised them up to show them to us, to show us what we’d done.

His mouth kept opening, closing, as if saying something.

He kept on coming to us.

Vincent grabbed the gun from me. He raised it towards Jack Law.

“Stay back,” he said. “I’ve telt you before, Jack bliddy Law. Go back!”

Jack kept coming. I saw the feathers, wings, beaks, blood in his hands. I saw the horror in his eyes. I saw his mouth opening, closing.

“We wouldn’t miss you, Jack Law,” said Vincent. “Nobody would fuckin miss you. Nobody would even notice you were fuckin gone.”

He stepped forward. He pointed the gun towards Jack’s head. Jack kept coming.

“See?” said Vincent. “He’s a lunatic. It’s likely all a big bliddy dream for him. Stay back. Stay bliddy back!”

Jack stopped only when the gun was six inches from his eyes.

“I’ll kill you, Jack,” said Vincent. “A pellet through the eye and to your brain. Or what there is of brain.”

I couldn’t move, was as still as the two of them below the brilliant setting sun. I watched the two bodies, the handful of dead birds, the gun.

“You know I would,” said Vincent very softly, very calm. “You of all others know I would.”

A silence lasted minutes more, then Jack backed away at last, into the hedge. He turned his eyes to me before he disappeared. They widened, they were frantic for a moment.

Then he was gone.

“I should have fuckin done it,” said Vincent. “Straight into the bliddy eyes. Blinded him at least if not killed him. Then there’d be nowt for him to see as well as nowt to say. What right’s a lunatic like that to be here in the same world as us?”

“He’s harmless,” I said.

“How can you know what he thinks? How can you know what he gets up to? How can you know what he’s planning when he’s wandering the world alone?”

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, February, 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.