by David Almond
The ladies laugh.
“Tell your mam that I was asking,” says Letitia. “My sympathies to her and to you for your sad loss.”
She reaches out and tousles him again.
“Like the babe,” she says, “what is lost might be discovered again, but in a different form, and the form might simply be a tale that could be lies and could be truths and could be lovely bits of both.”
She pushes a coin into his hand.
“Take this,” she says. “It’s like the coin I slipped between the covers in your pram when you were a tiny babe. It’s for the future, as I whispered to sleeping tiny you, before you knew there was such a thing as future at all.”
Davie thanks her, and sighs, and turns away from the happy pair.
“Don’t let the buzzards take you!” says Letitia Spall.
He laughs. He wanders on. He imagines the buzzard’s claws on his shoulders. He imagines dark wings beating above his head. He imagines himself being lifted, his walking feet rising from the earth. He feels the warm breeze at his back.
He steps from the narrow allotment path onto the green grass of the fields. Everything’s at peace, the way it was just yesterday. Loads of lads scuttle and swarm across the green in the distance, caught up in the everlasting football game. Mams push toddlers on swings in the little play park nearby. There’s the rhythmical squeak squeak squeak of the swings and the giggles and the laughter and the high-pitched yells of “Higher, higher, higher, higher!” There’s the grinding up and down of the ancient seesaw that’s been there since Davie’s mam was young. Lads and lasses stroll hand in hand or arm in arm. Others’ll be further up the field, lying hidden in the long grass. And the larks sing high in the sky as they always do, no matter what dreadful things might have occurred on the earth below.
Davie walks. He’s been this way a thousand times, but every time it seems so different and so strange, like he comes upon it every time so new. Or maybe it’s because he’s new every time, like every time he walks he’s a different Davie from the one who walked before.
Heat and the scent of the dry earth rise from the grass. The air is all ashimmer. He hears the calling of his name from far away.
“Davie! Davie! Davie!”
Must be one of the footballers. He pauses and watches. They’re swarming closer now. There are goals, but they’ve left these far behind. Two goalkeepers, tiny, dark, distant figures, guard them. It’s one of the formless games. All ideas of a proper rectangular pitch are gone. A little leading bunch kick and dribble, trip and nudge. They blast the ball forward and hurry after it. Others swarm and follow. Some of the slower ones or younger ones have already given up. They’re lounging on the grass, waiting, knowing that the game will return.
Davie hears his name again.
“Davie!”
It’s a boy he’s known since he was a toddler. Raymond Brooks. He’s naked to the waist, as half the lads always are when they play on days like this. He runs out of the pack at Davie.
“Come and play, Davie! Skin or Top?”
“I can’t,” says Davie. “I’ve got no time.”
“You’ve got all the time in the world, man. It’s the middle of the summer. Skin or Top?”
Skin or Top? Does Davie want to join the half-naked team or the team that still has tops on?
“Be a Skin,” says Raymond. “We need you. We’re losing seven-two. Or eight-three.”
Davie thinks of the haversack. He can’t take it off and leave it lying and run away from it.
“It’ll have to be Tops,” he says.
He tightens the haversack straps.
Raymond’s disappointed but he laughs.
“Davie’s playing!” he yells. “He’s a Top.”
Somebody curls the ball toward Davie. He traps it, but right away he’s tackled and it’s gone. He runs, with the haversack bobbing and thumping at his back. He’s in the crowd, three dozen or more boys and a couple of girls from across the town. They’re kids of all ages, from five to seventeen. So many of them that hardly anybody gets a kick, and when the ball does come to you, all you can do is kick it on before somebody’s barging into you or tripping you up. The stupid dog runs too, grunting and gasping and slobbering, twisting its way through the game. Davie yells at it to go away, but of course it takes no notice. It yelps back at him, leaps at him. He runs away from it and it runs after him. The best players, Ronnie Hodgson or Leonard Hall, keep the ball for a short dribble and swerve elegantly past a boy or two, but even they are quickly shoved aside, knocked over, dispossessed. Everybody’s gasping, laughing, grunting, cursing. Everybody’s lost in it. They all swarm back to where the game came from, toward the distant goals. Davie gets a kick or two. Once he manages to pass it accurately to another Top.
“Great ball, Davie!” comes the shout.
The blood is thumping through Davie’s heart. His head is reeling with the effort and the heat. He runs. At times he stops to gasp and recover himself just like all the others do and then runs on again. They’re a frantic crowd, in love with each other and the game. At moments they’re famous players in a famous stadium. Then they’re what they really are — kids from Tyneside in jeans and battered trainers on a field with all of Tyneside down below, with the river snaking to the dark, distant sea.
He gets the ball again. He drops his shoulder, feints, beats another player and kicks it on. Back they go toward the goals. The goalkeepers are ready now. They tug at their gloves, swing their arms, bob from side to side between their posts. The players are all back inside the rectangle where the faded pitch lines are. Every one of them yearns to be the one to score. Each player dreams of rising to head home a cross, of curving the ball so sweetly into the top corner, of chipping the ball over the spread-eagled keeper, of lashing it unstoppably home. For a split second Davie thinks it might be him. He has the ball. He can see the goal. There’s nobody between him and it. But he hesitates. The tackle’s brutal. He goes down and his head reels and he sees stars, and when the pain kicks in he thinks his ankle must be broken. He lies there in agony and sees Leonard Hall blast the ball past the keeper into the net.
“Sorry, pal,” says somebody, a skinny kid Davie’s never seen before. Must be the one that tackled him.
“You OK?” says the tackler.
Davie grits his teeth, rubs his ankle.
“Aye,” he says. “Nae bother.”
As the skinny kid turns to go back to the game, Davie asks, “You haven’t seen Zorro Craig, have you?”
“No,” says the kid. “And if I did, I’d make sure I was going the other way.”
And off he goes, yelling for the ball.
The dog is standing over Davie, hanging its stupid head over him. Long strings of drool dangle and drip from its gob. Davie reels in disgust, stands up, tries to put some weight on his ankle. Not broken. Very sore. The game surges on toward the far end of the field. Davie waves, tries to catch Raymond’s attention, but he’s gone.
Davie limps back toward where he’d come from.
The soreness fades.
The laughter and yelling of the teams fade.
He attempts a little run. Yes, everything’s OK, he thinks. He walks forward, upward. He heads toward the poppies that are shining not far above.
The dog at his side is exhausted.
“Lie down,” he tells it.
It keeps on coming.
“Die,” he tells it.
“I’m sorry,” he tells it. “No, don’t die. Just give up.”
It doesn’t die. It doesn’t give up. Davie crouches down and stares into its eyes. He wonders if there’s anything in there. He wonders if there’s any soul in there. The dog gazes back. Does it wonder the same things about Davie? Is it capable of wondering?
“What are you?” says Davie. He knows the answer would be “I am a dog,” but he wants more than that.
“What do you see?” he says. “What do you think, dog?”
No answer, of course.
“Why are
you with me?” he asks.
No answer, just a slobber and a drool and a dangling string of horrid spit.
Then there’s music that draws his attention from the stupid dog. A voice, the sound of a violin.
Shona Doonan and her brother, Vincent, are sitting in long grass, leaning against an allotment fence. Davie waves at Shona and she waves back, and Vincent fiddles and she goes on singing some ancient song.
He goes higher.
He sits for a moment among the astonishing poppies. He falls back and lies among them. They have no scent, but the air seems filled with their intensity and seems to glow. He breathes in this warm poppy air, takes it deep into himself, imagines that the air inside his lungs is red, that the redness spreads and seeps through all of him.
He closes his eyes. He breathes so deep. The pain in his ankle relents as he breathes. He could sleep here, find himself drifting easily into strange red dreams. But he is so dry. He sits up again and takes out Oliver Henderson’s pear from the sack, and he begins to eat. It’s battered and bruised and soft and delicious but far from enough. He needs to drink.
So stupid, not to have brought something to drink on such a day as this.
He knows where there’s water higher up, beyond the zigzag path, beyond the kissing gate. He’ll reach it soon enough.
He takes out his book.
He draws Shona and her brother, she in bright red, he in bright green.
He draws musical notes the way Fernando Craig drew his frightened cry. The notes leap and curl and swarm from their mouths and bodies and from the violin, and they rise through the shimmering red-blue Tyneside air toward the larks.
And then his name is called from what must be so far away.
“Davie! Davie! Davie!”
He looks back down toward the field.
Gosh Todd, running onto the green from the allotment path. He must be able to see Davie. He swings his arms wide and goes on calling the name, his voice so tiny it might be from a different world.
“Davie! Davie! Davie! Stop, Davie!”
Davie doesn’t want to be with Gosh Todd. He stands up and pretends he doesn’t see, doesn’t hear. He walks on. After a time he turns back to see if Gosh is following. No. The footballers swarm around him, and he’s absorbed by them, lost in them, and he runs with them across the green and empty spaces toward the far-off goals.
The zigzag path. It starts beyond the poppies. It follows the route of an ancient stream. Sometimes the water gushes and pours. This summer it’s a thin, elusive trickle. Davie looks with longing at the water, but he knows it could be perilous. Who knows what dead things might be lying in it further up? The path weaves back and forth past ruined cottages. In places the banks are higher than your head. There’s shrubs and long grass and stunted trees and huge boulders and stones and tangled brambly gardens. He’s been here so often in his short life. He’s made dens here, lit fires here, played cops and robbers and war games here. He’s seen toads and rats and grass snakes. He knows tales of kids bitten by adders here.
Last summer, he spent nights camping out here with Gosh Todd and other pals. One day, they all stripped off most of their clothes, daubed themselves with mud, pretended that they were feral children, brought up in the wilderness with wild beasts. They had no parents, no schooling, no power of speech. They spent the day grunting, howling, lumbering about on all fours. When they did use words, they muttered that this was how they’d really like to be, this was the life they’d really like to live. They screamed the names of teachers, policemen and priests and yelled about how they’d torture them and inflict slow and painful deaths. When people passed by, they hid in the shrubs and the undergrowth and grunted and hissed and held back their sniggers. Late in the day, somebody somehow killed a rabbit, and they skinned it, gutted it, cooked it on a fire. It wasn’t properly cooked. Blood trickled down their chins as they ripped the meat from the bones.
All night long, while the full moon shone down onto the walls of the little tent, they told stories of demons, ghosts and monsters. One of the boys, a shy and skinny kid called Steven Brooks, ran out of the tent gasping in fear at two in the morning and ran all the way through the moonlight to his home in Waterloo Place.
This is where some of town’s most vicious fights are fought. Battles between the Killens and the Craigs, duels with sticks and stones set up in schoolyards or in the Bay Horse. Maybe Jimmy Killen and Zorro Craig have battled here. Maybe here the blow was struck or the words were said that led each of them to say that they wanted the other dead.
The zigzag path. It’s also the place where lads and lasses walk hand in hand. Hand in hand they leave the path and find soft pockets of turf, clearings in the shrubs, where they can lie down with each other, love each other.
It’s a place, like all the places that he passes through today, all the places he has passed through since he was an infant, that seeps deep into Davie’s dreams. It’s a place, like all the places, that feeds the tales he writes, that infects the sentences and pages that fall from his pen as day comes to a close and night comes slowly on.
He walks through everything today as if through a dream, as if through an unfolding tale. It’s a tale of exploration, even though he walks through spaces he knows so well. It’s a tale in which each step is a word leading him further into the unknown.
Today the zigzag path is deserted. He weaves upward all alone, only the dog before him, across the almost dried-out stream.
And then he hears a voice in his ear.
“Hello, Davie.”
It brings him to a halt.
A voice so soft, so true, just like his dead father’s voice.
Davie looks around, but there’s nothing, no one.
He walks on. The voice continues.
“I always loved the zigzag path, Davie.”
Davie walks on. The voice continues.
“Always felt it was leading me somewhere special, somewhere strange. I felt that when I was a lad.”
Davie walks on. The voice continues.
“I felt it when I used to walk up here with you.”
Davie pauses, remembering the days he’d walk up here with Dad, wandering together.
“You felt it too?” says the voice.
“Yes,” Davie whispers, and he knows he feels it again today.
“I love you, son.”
Davie blinks the tears from his eyes.
“Walk on in peace, son.”
And then the voice is gone, and there’s just the sound of the larks and the breeze in the grass, and Davie thinks it must not have been there at all, and he leaves the zigzag path and the stream behind, and he approaches the kissing gate and he steps into it while the dog slopes through the wizened hawthorn hedge beside it, and suddenly here she comes, from the other side, with her black hair flying, the running lass.
The earth trembles with the beating of her feet. She’s in blue jeans, blue top, black running shoes. A multicolored necklace swings and sparkles around her throat. She runs toward the gate, doesn’t see Davie there at first, and then she does. She pauses on the other side. She leans forward, gasping for breath. Her voice wavers.
“Do you know Zorro Craig?” she says.
“Aye,” says Davie.
“Have you seen him?”
“No.”
He’s seen her at school. He’s seen her at the park. Maria. Maria O’Flynn. Slender and bright-eyed.
She waves her arm toward the world behind her.
“Been looking everywhere. There’s so much space up here, so many places he could be. He could be anywhere.”
She stands up straight and looks at him.
“Do you know what they say he’s done?” she says.
“Yes.”
“Do you believe it?” she says.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe.”
“Nor me.”
She comes closer to the gate. She peers at him.
“You’re called Davie, aren’t you?” she s
ays. “Hello, Davie.”
“Hello, Maria.”
“It was me.”
“What was you?”
“It was me they fought about. I was with Jimmy and I chucked him. Then I was with Zorro and they started battling about me, so I chucked Zorro too. I’m just an ordinary lass. I don’t want any of it. I want an ordinary life. What’s happening down below?”
“There’s lots of police. The Craigs and Killens are getting ready to fight again.”
She sighs and groans.
“So stupid. It was me and it wasn’t me. It was nothing to do with me.”
Davie stands within the kissing gate and looks at her.
“Why you telling me?” he says.
“Because you’re here. Because there’s nobody else to tell up here.”
He thinks of Paddy Kelly. He thinks of love.
He may as well ask her.
“Did you love them?” he says.
“I liked them. They were both wild but I liked them both.”
The dog stands beyond the gate, looking at Davie, as if asking him to move forward. The hot breeze still presses at Davie’s back.
“Did they love you?” says Davie.
“They said they did. They said it mainly after I’d chucked them. Whatever love they had wasn’t stronger than the hate they had for each other. It was about me but it wasn’t about me. I was nothing to do with it. Love was nothing to do with it. It was about their stupid hate.”
She spreads her arms toward the sky.
“And now poor Jimmy’s dead and Zorro’s gone. And I think I’m going crazy, Davie. I’ve been running round up here, yelling for Zorro, then sometimes I find I’m yelling for Jimmy too, like they’re all mixed up in me.”
“You should go back down, go back home.”
“No, not yet. I’ll keep on looking.”
“What will you do if you find him?”
“I’ll kiss him. Ha! I’ll kiss him. I’ll tell him he’s been stupid and to come back down again with me.”
She looks toward the south.
“I’ll look over that way now,” she says.
She steps into the gate before Davie can move through.