The Tightrope Walkers (19 page)

I said nothing.

“She really does believe these things,” she said.

“Maybe because they’re true.”

“No, they’re not. And how did
that
feel, kissing Vincent McAlinden?”

“I don’t know.”

“She says that we live in ancient days, no matter what the world and all the things within it say. She says the heart of time stands still and that present, past and future are illusions. But maybe she’s just mad. Maybe she should be locked away. Lots of people say that. Do you say that?”

“I don’t know, Holly.”

“You don’t know much. She’s frightened of walking.”

“Of walking?”

“That’s how it started, says my dad. She became frightened of walking, then of seeing others walk. He says she’s frightened of seeing one step then another, one thing then another.”

She sighed and hesitated, and then lay down on the turf and let the sunlight fall on her.

“When I was little,” she said, “I never thought about how strange she was. The strange seems normal when you live with it.”

“We’re all strange in some way.”

“I think of growing up and going to university. I think of all the places in the world I want to travel to, but I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“That I’ll end up just like her, lying in the darkness and listening to the bloody music of the bloody spheres.”

“You’ve got too much life for that.”

“So did she, or so she says. She used to say she was a scamp that skipped along the banks of the Tyne. She used to say that she’d been an ordinary kid. So kissing Vincent McAlinden and other things are over now?”

“Yes. They are.”

She lay back in the grass and her shirt lifted and exposed the flesh above her jeans. There was a dark circle there. She lifted the shirt higher to show an uneven CND symbol, etched into the skin, a clumsy home-made tattoo. The skin around it was pink with inflammation. She touched it tenderly with her fingertips.

“Vincent did it,” she said. “With ink, and the point of a compass sterilized in flames.”

I couldn’t speak. Vincent McAlinden. Holly Stroud.

“When?”

“Not long ago. Probably when you were up to what you were up to with him.” She shrugged. “I wanted to paint him again. Mam wanted to see how he’s been changing as he grows, or if he’d stayed the same.”

“Have your parents seen?”

“Mam hasn’t seen me naked since I was a little girl. Dad will never see, of course. It’s just for me, and for the others that I allow to see.”

She ran her fingertips across the marks.

“I’ll regret it, of course. It’s not the most beautiful thing.”

“It goes with this,” I said, and I raised my hair to show the half-forgotten but still extant mark caused years ago by Vincent McAlinden’s spinning stone.

“He said he’s marked me on the inside, too.”

“Ha! So he got both of us. Now I sometimes dream that my whole body’s covered with words and patterns and pictures. Like a book, or a work of art. It’d be weird and beautiful.”

“Can I touch?” I said.

“Yes.”

I touched gently. Smooth warm skin, a slight roughness where the marks were.

“Did it hurt?” I said.

“Yes. But he said I’d be able to stand it. He was right.”

She held my fingers against her.

“I was stupid, wasn’t I?” she said.

I shrugged.

“We both were. And we both weren’t.”

“What would
you
write on my skin?” she said.

I shrugged.

“Stories. Stories where you don’t end up in dark rooms being weird.”

“That’s good. Vincent’s in the yard now. A working man.”

“I know.”

“In my last painting he was climbing through a trapdoor on a deck. His head’s hanging down like a beast’s, his arms hang down like fallen wings.”

“Did you do other things with him?” I said.

She looked away.

“Not much.”

“Kissed him?”

“Yes.”

We lay side by side and stared into the sky.

“Was it exciting?”

“Ha. Yes. I wanted to hate him, but it was no good. It was exciting and strange.”

“There was a strange taste on him.”

“Yes. I tasted that, too.”

“It’s over. He’s a working man. We’ll all move on. Do you feel grown up, Dom?”

“Grown up?”

“Now you’ve killed and thieved and kissed your friend.”

“Dunno what it means, to be grown up. Mebbe we keep on growing up until we die.”

“And then we die.”

“And never get to be grown up.”

“And we’re all kids, no matter how old we are.”

“Kids disguised by adult bodies.”

“Masked by adult faces.”

“And we understand nothing.”

“That’s right, Dom. Absolutely bliddy nowt at all!”

We laughed. Then we kissed each other hard, there on the warm grass of the wide playing fields below the abundant sky, and it was wonderful and strange and very new.

I gave my writing to Creel. He passed it to Joyce.

“I could hate this,” he told me. “It tells me what I’m not.”

It was lunchtime and we were on the school field. Some kids nearby were climbing on each other to make a pyramid. Three stood in a line at the base. Two climbed onto their shoulders and stood there giggling and swaying.

“I’m a novelist manqué, Dominic. I see stories all around, but my pen makes nothing but sketches, images, useless starts and paltry endings.”

A boy tried to scramble up to stand at the top, but the pyramid tottered and he fell again.

We laughed. Joyce called to him to try again.

“Maybe the greatness of my namesake holds me back,” he said.

He opened a notebook and showed me a scribbled page with the title at the top.

“I have the idea for a novel called
The Singing of Angels
. I know I’ll never finish it.”

He laughed.

“It’ll come to nothing,” he said.

“You should just write it,” I said.

“It’s so simple, isn’t it? You want to write it, so write it. You want to live, so live! Ha!”

He read some of my pages, and sighed.

“It’s so good, Dominic.”

“Can I ask you something, sir?”

He looked up in surprise.

“Yes.”

“Did you do the kind of things that I did, when you were young?”

“That’s quite a question to ask a teacher.”

“I know, sir.”

“If I did say yes, imagine what the governors and the priests and the villains of the classrooms would make of it. Oh, look at those youngsters!”

The kids were starting again, three at the bottom, two climbing up, the smallest one urging them on and waiting his turn.

“And if I just said no, you’d suspect that it was a lie. Stand firm, boys! And truth is everything, or so we’re told. I stole fruit, as perhaps we all do. I had the chance to do other things.”

“Did you do them?”

He shrugged, looked away, looked back again.

“No. Yes. Not many of them. The weird thing is, I don’t really remember, Dominic.”

The small boy reached upward, and his friends took his hands.

“We grow in order to discover ourselves. But maybe we just discover ways of hiding our selves from ourselves.”

We watched the boy clambering upwards.

“Climb, lad!” called Joyce. “Maybe I had your talent when I was your age, Dom. But I didn’t have the other thing.”

“What other thing?” I said.

“I wasn’t cold enough. I wasn’t wild enough. Go on, lad! Ha! I was always too correct, Dom.”

He ran his finger along a line of my work.

“Maybe it’s why I became a teacher — to teach about the things I wasn’t brave enough to do myself. This has such great rhythm, Dom. Hold him! And I’ve tried to be a good teacher.”

“You are,” I said.

“Thank you. Be careful with your talent. Don’t let it damage you. Don’t let it take you too far from the people you love.”

The kids teetered on each other’s shoulders. The pyramid stood almost-firm for a short moment, the kids all roared in triumph, then the whole thing fell.

Joyce ran to the children. He lifted the small boy to his feet and stood before him, laughing in delight.

Dad wheezed. She coughed. Dad wheezed. She coughed. Noises in the night that came through the thin walls of our little house to me. He wheezed. She coughed. It went on for nights. I heard them whispering. I heard them wondering.

One morning I came down and she was slumped head forward at the kitchen table. She smiled weakly at me. Was that blood at the corner of her mouth?

Dad was in his working clothes. It was late. He should have been gone an hour ago.

“You got to stay with her today,” he said. “Go to the Strouds and call the doctor for her.”

“I’m fine,” she whispered. “He has school to go to.”

“Do as I say,” said Dad. “The both of you. Get the doctor, Dominic.”

He left. We heard his running feet on the pavement outside.

“He’ll get docked,” she said. “They might even send him home. I told him to go an hour ago.”

Yes. Blood. A tiny pale smudge of it at the corner of her mouth.

“We don’t want you missing stuff as well,” she said.

She wiped the smudge away with her wrist.

“He’s fussing,” she said. “You go to school now, Dominic.”

She retched, began to cough again.

I went to the Strouds. Holly stood behind me as I called the doctor, who said she’d come mid-morning.

“Shall I stay with you?” asked Holly.

I shook my head.

“What is it?” she said.

“A cough. A cold.”

I listened. Holly’s mother sweetly sang.

“Where are the angels now?” I asked.

I shivered. Did I want them to be close or to be far away?

I went back home. I led Mam to her bed. She leaned on me as we ascended the stairs. She sighed as she lay down again.

“It’s nothing, Dominic,” she whispered. “It’s just a cold.”

She stroked my head.

“Silly boy,” she said. “Stop your worrying, will you?”

She coughed. More blood, little spatters of it on her handkerchief.

The doctor came at eleven, in her black Rover car. Dr. Molly, in a fur-collared green coat with the familiar scent of dog on her. Dogs in the car: two black-eyed white bull terriers that stared out as she closed the car door and walked through the gate. Black leather bag in her hand with buckled straps around it.

“Good morning, Dominic. Goodness, how grown up you’ve become.” She smiled. “And where is our patient?”

I let her in, heard the low muffled single bark of her dogs, guided her up.

“Good morning, Mrs. Hall. And what appears to be the problem?”

“Just a cold, Dr. Molly, a cough. They’re fussing, Doctor.”

The doctor took out a stethoscope, asked Mam to sit up, to lower her nightgown, asked me to turn away. I turned, heard the murmured words:
Breathe in. And now breathe out. Hold it. Yes. Again, please. And now again. And how long have you been coughing, my dear? Not long, Doctor. A week or so, Doctor. A little longer, perhaps. And how long has there been blood? Not long, just a few days, Doctor. A bit longer, perhaps. Your husband? At work, Doctor. He’s a caulker in the yards. And is there pain? Not much, thank you, Doctor. You’re sleeping? A little, thank you, Doctor. There is just your son with you? Yes, Doctor. Turn back again, Dominic, if you would
.

She rolled up her stethoscope.

She took out a prescription pad from her bag.

“Will you be able to get this for your mother this morning?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Good lad.”

She scribbled some notes, fast and hard.

Mam coughed, coughed again.

“We’ll see about getting a check-up for you, Mrs. Hall. Get you up to the hospital for that, I think.”

Mam didn’t speak. I didn’t speak.

“A little X-ray or two, I think. That kind of thing.”

We didn’t speak.

“I’ll sort it out. You have a telephone?”

“No, Doctor,” I answered.

“We’ll send a card.”

She closed her bag. She tugged at her fur collar.

“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “Lie back, Mrs. Hall. Rest is important.”

I led her down to the door. She smiled on the threshold.

“Oh, how quickly you children grow,” she said. “You’ll stay with her today?”