The Tightrope Walkers (30 page)

“Will you?”

“Yes, Dad. I really will.”

We heard the battle in the McAlinden house: yelling voices and howling dogs and screaming kids and breaking glass. Bill and Dad went down. Vincent strode out of the door as they entered the gate.

“What you buggers after?” he snarled.

Bill looked towards the door. Mrs. McAlinden came out.

“You all right, love?” said Bill.

“Aye,” she gasped.

She watched Vincent muscle through the gate.

“Divent worry,” he said to her. “I’ll not be back.”

He slung a sack across his back and moved off down the rocky path.

“Better if ye’d died in me womb,” his mother sobbed. “Better if ye’d not been born.”

“You’re reet!” yelled Vincent as he walked away. “That’s the truth of it. I should’ve never been here. And now I’m off to bliddy Hell at last!”

He became a thing of rumour. There were tales of him carrying a soldier’s knapsack, dressed in a massive ripped greatcoat with dangling sergeant’s stripes on the shoulders. He led his sick dog on a rope. His hair grew long, matted, tangled. A scrawny beard grew. He was seen to sift through the rubbish in the town’s bins. There was talk of him drinking meths. When he was heard to speak, the sounds seemed formless, as if he was losing the power to form words at all.

In the estate, I’d hear children chanting beneath a streetlight as darkness fell, chanting their dread of Vincent just as we had once chanted our dread of his father:

“Vincent Mac is coming up from Hell
.

Vincent Mac will walk these streets this night
.

Whose door will he enter?

Whose life will it be this night?

Who will Vincent gobble up tonight?

Which child will he carry down to Hell?

Will it be you, will it be you?

No, it will be Y-O-U!
”

I dreamed that he wandered through me as I’d once dreamed of wandering Jack Law. Sometimes I woke with a start to the sudden scent of him, to the sudden touch of his lips on mine.

Holly drew new pictures of him. Almost-abstract charcoal sketches of a dark jagged figure crossing the landscape with his shadow before him. Pencil drawings of a tiny figure below a heavenly sky. Abstract patterns of a troubled soul en route through deeply darkened spaces towards another deeply darkened space.

He went from view as winter came. The story was he slept in ditches, in the remains of the hovels down on the Tyne. There were reports that he sometimes took a room in Simpson’s dilapidated hostel down by the yard. We heard that he spent a couple of weeks in Durham Jail for drunkenness and thieving. There was talk he tried to get a job in the tanks again. Fat chance of that. And there was talk that he began to change himself, that in setting out on his homelessness and wandering, he had discovered his roots, his travelling heritage. He became a wandering man. Home and work could have no place for him. The world must be his roadway and his wilderness in which he could lose himself and be himself. We didn’t know for sure. He was said to wander the northern beaches, the tracks of old mineral railways, the slopes of the snowy northern fells.

I dreamed of him fading into misty nothingness, into his own Ultima Thule.

It was Easter Day when we walked uphill to prune the hawthorn trees. There wasn’t much to do: some dead wood clinging on from last year, a few unwanted thorns. The wire was beautiful, had become more flexible, like rope. We attached it to the trees. Tightened it with the tightening winch and it became a clear dark horizontal line against the Easter sky.

Holly danced across it through the air as if she needed no wire at all.

Then me, the chimpanzee.

“Make shapes!” she said, as she had all those years ago as we walked the garden wall. “Be beautiful!”

I spread my arms and crossed again, and she told me I was lovely. We crossed a few more times. We laughed. We could do this so easily now.

The factories and yards were silent. The song of the larks like the singing of angels or the music of the spheres could fill the sky and us.

We kissed on the grass below the wire, the trees and the astounding sky. Then walked away from the wire. Kissed in a copse of birch trees. Kissed at the edge of a flowered meadow. There was no sign anywhere of Jack Law. Walked hand-in-hand across the speedwell, primrose, wild garlic and abundant grass towards his Heaven in the rock.

We knelt and peered in. No candles burning and Heaven in deep shadow.

“Do we dare?” said Holly.

I went in first, shuffled up to the rock, made space for Holly to follow. The earth was soft. We giggled and hugged each other tight and kissed again, giggled again.

Our eyes adjusted to the light.

I pointed into Heaven and showed my mother there.

She said it was beautiful.

She put up her hand to cover my mother’s eyes.

“She’s watching us!” she whispered.

“And she’s happy for us.”

“Who could I put there?”

“Us?”

“But we’re not dead yet, Dom.”

“But sometimes we’re in Heaven.”

“That’s true.”

She took my pen and drew us in a space alongside the saints, close to my mother and not too far from God. We held hands, as if we both floated in midair.

“Lovely,” I said. “We’ll have to go to Miss O’Kane and say, ‘Please, Miss, we made it into Heaven!’”

“ ‘Blasphemy,’ she’d say! ‘Go away with my curse upon thee!’”

The place was still and warm, as shallow as a double hull. We saw the graffiti underneath the blue. And there were bodies lower down on the walls: dark jagged figures with spears or swords. Warriors of the earth, or devils on the brink of Hell yelling curses up to Heaven. Maybe they’d always been there. Maybe Jack Law had recently put them there, in his endless, onward-moving, ever-changing artwork.

We told each other that we loved each other. We entangled our limbs and moved across each other’s skin with hands and tongues. We moved away from being one to being each other. Forgot about Heaven, forgot about Earth, forgot about protection, entered each other, interpenetrated, sighed, disappeared, dissolved, moved into the silence.

McAlinden grabbed my throat. He dragged me from her, dragged me headfirst to the opening. He yanked me away into the light. I was halfway in, halfway out of the rock. He already had the wire wrapped around my chest beneath my armpits, and it was tightening.

“Yell, and I’ll do you now,” he said.

He punched me, punched me.

“I messed with you,” he said. “Let you think ye were up to playin and fightin with Vincent McAlinden. What a joke.”

He tied my hands with wire behind my back.

“Shut up in there,” he snarled.

He gripped me tighter.

“And then ye thought I was finished, didn’t ye? And I keep on comin back. What a joke.”

Holly tried to squirm past me.

“You’re locked in, pet,” he laughed. “There’s nae way oot.”

He spun another loop of wire around me, yanked it tight.

“They telt me I need a war,” he said. “This is it, then.”

He pressed his wet lips to mine.

“Or mebbe I’ll mek love not war,” he grunted.

He laughed and drooled.

“Let’s fight,” he snarled. “Let’s kiss. Let us see you, Dom. Oh, let us touch you.”

He licked my face. Then he punched me hard, and again.

“Keep still,” he said. “I’m ganna hang ye now.”

He yanked the wire tighter. He hauled on the loose end, and I was dragged out of the place. The wire was looped around the bough of the tree above. I slithered over the rock towards it. Holly burst out of the rock after me. McAlinden turned from me. He punched Holly in the face, once, twice. She fell, and he laughed. He kicked me in the head and stunned me. He stood up on the rock and pulled the rope. The wire pulled me into the air. I knelt, I kept on rising. I stood. I stood on tiptoe, and then I was off the ground, and the bough lurched with the weight of me. And McAlinden laughed at me, and kissed me again, and thumped me again, and pushed me softly, to make me sway and dangle as he dragged Holly back into the rock.

Dazzling shafts of light through the foliage. Songbirds singing and the distant engine din. The creak and sway of the bough and the tree. The wire tightened, tightened, the agony of it as it digs into flesh. Blood running down my face from where he thumped me. The pain of that, of bones that are surely broken in my face. The kicking and squirming for relief just making it worse. The gasping for breath, the mouthfuls of slaver and blood. The certainty that I’ll die this day, that both of us will die this day. And the grunts and screams and snarling from below. The imagining of what is happening down there. Trying to scream for help but giving out nothing but splatters of blood and snot and strangled squawks. Trying to call her name to let her know I’m with her even though I’m dancing useless in the air above. Knowing she can’t hear, knowing that she’s fighting all alone, suffering all alone. God, what is he doing to her down there? But who is this now coming from the hedgerow, running through the dazzling light? Jack Law. He stoops as he runs. He has a great knife in his hand. Doesn’t look at me. Runs to Heaven in the rock and plunges to the entrance and McAlinden protests and howls. Jack Law backs away and now here’s McAlinden, crawling out. Blood running from his shoulder, curses from his mouth. Jack holds the knife, body so still, eyes so still as he waits for grunting McAlinden to come at him. McAlinden doesn’t come. Wipes the blood, looks at the wound beneath the pierced shirt. Winces, but laughs. “Good shot, Jack! Ouch!” Coughs and spits, pulls his clothes around himself. “You could’ve got me right, though, Jack. Could’ve brung it to an end.” Spreads his arms, presents his body to the tramp. “So do it now! What better time to bliddy die than after what I’ve just done. Come on, Jack. Fuckin finish me.” He steps forward. “What’s wrong? Too scared? No killin instinct in ye? Come on, Jack. This is war. A lad like me needs war. Do it. At least come close and bliddy try.” Now Holly’s crawling out. Her face all bloody. The falling tears, the gasps of pain, the struggle to slither out of Heaven. “Kill him, Jack!” she snarls. “Finish him.” He won’t. He can’t. He shifts sideways, makes sure he stands between Holly and Vincent. McAlinden sighs. “Listen to that from the lips of Holly Stroud! You could give the knife to her,” he says. “She might do it, the state she’s bliddy in. Would ye, Holly? Naa. Too much peace and love in ye even now. Need another one to do your dirty work like all the conchie crew. Him dangling in the tree there mebbe? All right up there, Dom? Still with us? Aye? What d’you think, Dom? You up for a bit of killin? Mebbe not. Ah well.” He backs away from us. “I’ll be off, then. I’ve done what I come to do. Now it’s time for movin on. See you later. I mean, won’t see you later.” And he turns, moves through the abundant grass, the wild garlic, the primrose, the speedwell. Leaves hardly a track behind. Steps through a row of gnarled and ancient hawthorn. Turns northward and is gone.