by David Almond
There was a little bit of pity from the girls. Some of them said we should be ashamed of ourselves. They even said it was us that was half evolved. But it didn’t last long. It was hard for them to keep on feeling sorry for hunched shoulders and hairy moles and a grunty voice and smelly breath.
And the teachers? Well, they were different days. Bullying was everywhere. There was neither blood nor broken bones, so they managed to turn their eyes away, and to see next to nowt.
Soon after McNally arrives, we’re in the school hall with the priest. You wouldn’t believe it nowadays but back then it was all that ancient stuff about fighting temptation and avoiding sin, and about how God sees everything, even our most secret thoughts. It was all to make sure we kept our hands off the girls, of course. Not that it worked very well. Every year there were fifth-formers and sixth-formers slinking off with bairns in their bellies. Anyway, the lads are rolling their eyes like always, and the girls are blushing and sniggering and staring at their nails. Then we get the catechism for the millionth time: Who made you? Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Why did God make you? Blah blah blah. Then the dire warnings:
What if death came now, this very second?
Are you in a state of grace?
Are you prepared for Final Judgment?
The Final Judgment. My God, we still believed in that. Or even if we said we didn’t, we were still half terrified of it.
“Hell lies in wait,” they said. “How will you keep yourself away from it?”
Anyway, Link’s at the back. We can hear his grunty breath, and it’s like there’s some weird snuffling beast among us.
Nixon pipes up.
“Have all creatures got souls, Father?”
“All creatures?” says the priest.
“Yes, Father. Even them from way, way back, like the apes and the half-human things we grew from and that?”
We all start nudging, giggling. We all start turning and looking at Link.
The priest sighs.
“An interesting question. But you are leaping into dark theological waters, my son. What is certain is that we have souls, and we must fortify them. Which leads me to my main topic – to introduce you to the First Friday Novena.”
Novenas. We were always doing sodding novenas. Don’t know what it was about the number nine, but we were always saying nine prayers for this and nine for that. We’d light nine candles in a row. We’d contemplate the nine orders of angels and the nine rivers of Hell. And this one?
“This novena,” says the priest, “may be the most powerful of all. You must come to Mass and take Holy Communion on the first Friday of the month, for nine months in a row.”
He pauses. We wait for whatever reward will be promised.
“Do this,” he says, “and the hour of your death will not arrive without a priest being close at hand to administer the blessed sacrament.”
We all listen. We know what that could mean. No matter what sins we have committed, a priest will be there to take our last confession, to give us his blessing. We will be kept out of the jaws of Hell.
“None of us is perfect,” he whispers. “But do we not all dream of dying without a trace of sin on our souls? This novena helps that dream come true.”
“Is it true?” asks someone.
“There is no infallible teaching. But the devout have always observed this novena, and many of our greatest saints. Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?” He peers at us. “Or perhaps you would prefer to take a risk. Perhaps you would prefer to toy with the fires of destruction.”
Before he leaves, he says, “I see we have a new boy. What’s your name, lad?”
Link grunts something. We all squeeze our eyes and hold our laughter in.
“He’s the Missing Link,” squeaks Nixon.
Our laughter bursts free.
The priest shakes his head.
“Take no notice, my son,” he says. He pats Link on the arm as he leaves. “You’ll find they’re not all badness. You’ll surely find a pal among them.”
He rolls his eyes.
“You lot! What are we going to do with you?” he says. “We begin this Friday. Don’t forget.”
We didn’t forget. The church was full, and there we were, breakfasts in brown paper bags, stomachs groaning, souls yearning, tongues stuck out to welcome Christ’s body and salvation into ourselves.
And there was Link, kneeling just along the altar rail from us.
“Who does he bliddy think he is?” muttered Nixon at my side. He groaned in disgust as the priest pressed the pure white host onto Link’s horrible lumpy tongue.
“Novena?” he said. “I’ll bliddy novena him.”
After Mass, we waited in an alleyway between the church and the school. We dragged Link in and started on him.
That morning saw the first of the monthly beatings of the missing link between the age of stupid apes and the age of brainy men.
I don’t know why he came to me. I was always there, those Friday mornings in the alleyway. I wasn’t the worst of us, but I always did my bit. And I always urged the others on. I always laughed at Nixon – the way he slapped and poked and kicked and spat, leaving pain and fright but neither blood nor broken bones. I was always there hooting with laughter as Link scuttled off.
But it was me that Link came to, in the school yard, one bright and early morning. There was hardly anybody else around. I must’ve still been half asleep. I felt the touch on my shoulder. I turned round and Link was there, his wet eyes looking down at me, his tongue flapping in his horrible wet mouth.
I couldn’t catch his words at first.
“Eh?” I said.
“It’s an illness,” he grunted.
I looked around, backed away.
“Eh?” I said.
“The thing that makes me h-horrible,” he said. “Look at how me arms and legs is thickening and me chin’s dropping.”
He showed his thick, muscly, lumpy limbs, his grotesque chin, the hairs sprouting on his face.
“And me tongue,” he said. “It’s too big for me mouth. It’s why I…”
“What’re the doctors doing?” I said.
He took a big purple pill out. He shoved it in his mouth and swallowed it.
“The novena’ll help and all,” he said. “I’m praying for deliverance from it.”
He swiped his sleeve across his mouth.
“D’you believe me?” he said.
“Dunno,” I said.
Link moved closer. He reached out to me, held me by the collar, breathed on me with his rotten breath.
“Look through this,” he said. “Look through all the ugliness.”
I tried to pull away.
Beyond him, I saw Nixon swaggering through the school gates.
“Look right inside,” said Link. “I’m just like you.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Aye, like y-you.”
Nixon quickened towards us. He started grinning.
“Hey, Nixon,” I said. “I’m just having a nice chat with the Missing Link.”
“Ah, isn’t that nice,” said Nixon.
“I know,” I said. “And listen – Link says he’s just like us.”
“Is that right?” said Nixon.
“Aye,” I said.
“Then Link,” said Nixon, “is even stupider than we thought.”
Link took his hand away from me. We laughed and watched him shuffle off.
We went round the back and lit a fag.
“What’s he doing coming to you?” said Nixon.
“Mebbe he thinks I’ll be his pal.”
Nixon laughed.
“Funny, eh? You always look as sweet as pie. Mothers and old biddies and missing links think you’re the bee’s bliddy knees. They don’t see to the inside. Not like I do.”
I drew on the fag and showed my teeth.
“They don’t,” I said. “I’m a bliddy devil, eh?”
Even so, I think I did start to change that day. I th
ought about being dragged out of West Bromwich to a place like this; having no father, having a mother like that, having some horrible condition; being scared of what’s happening to your own body; being all alone at school; being scared of kids that should be your mates.
But what good’s change if it’s all inside yourself and nowt happens on the outside? What’s the good of knowing that you shouldn’t do something like beating up Link when you go on doing it? What’s the use of it when your mate Nixon comes and tells you you’re going to stop the Missing Link from finishing his novena, and you just answer, “Aye! That’s a great idea! That’ll be a real bliddy laugh!”
The trouble is, it’s easy to go along with it all. And it’s a laugh, especially when you get to plotting with your mates.
“Novena?” you say. “Ha! We’ll bliddy novena him!”
Early morning, first Friday, ninth month. It was November, still dark, icy cold. We waited, half a dozen of us, in a deep doorway on the High Street. We smoked Woodbines and thought about salvation, and resisted the temptation to eat our breakfasts there and then. We felt good. We were going to escape the jaws of Hell today.
“Link alert!” whispered somebody at last, and there he was, lurching up from Jonadab beneath the streetlights.
We did it fast. He hardly struggled. We dragged him down the alleyway into a little abandoned printing shop. We tied him to a twisted doorframe and gagged him with his scarf. He kept his eyes on me but I did nothing while Nixon softly whispered, “Don’t worry, Link. We’ll soon be back to let you go.”
We hurried churchward under heavy, sleety-looking clouds. Inside, we hung our heads and murmured the prayers. At the altar rail I cast my eyes over the ornate altar, the saints in their little niches, the crucifix, the monstrance. I felt no connection to any of it. I told myself I believed none of it. I stared through to the emptiness behind it all, then opened my mouth and stuck out my tongue when the priest came to me. I closed my eyes, felt the bread pressed onto my tongue then swallowed it down into the emptiness inside myself.
Afterwards, we clenched our fists in triumph at achieving our novenas.
“Hell is defeated!” said Nixon.
Then we went back to the alleyway to liberate the Missing Link.
He died in mid-December. We were hanging baubles on the classroom tree when the priest came in.
The boy had fallen into the river, he told us. He’d been washed up on a mud bank. He must have been out walking, maybe stumbled in the dark.
“You weren’t there, Father?” I said.
“Me?”
“There was no priest there, Father?”
He spread his hands. How could there have been? But he saw the yearning in our eyes.
“Christopher was a good lad,” he said. “He held to his faith. God will have recognized one of his own. Now let us pray for his soul.”
I clenched my fists, and I begged God to hear us.
In the yard we leant together against a frosty wall. We smoked, and tried to imagine drowning all alone in the filthy Tyne, tried to imagine what waited afterwards.
“It’s all ballocks,” said Nixon at last.
“Eh?” we said.
“That novena stuff. It’s just made up, man.”
“Not just that,” I said. “It’s all made up. Every last little bit.”
“Aye!” we said. “All of it. It’s ballocks!”
We coughed and laughed and our breath swirled around us in the icy air. But we shuddered with the dread of what we might have done to Link, and to ourselves.
I’ve told nobody till now what happened next. I’ve tried forgetting it, I’ve tried not believing it, but there’s been no escape.
Link came back, not long after that Christmas. I was in bed. I woke up in the middle of the night and there he was. He was standing over me, showing the massive distended bones and muscles of his arms, just like he had in the yard that day.
“It’s stopped getting worse,” he said. His voice was still all slobbery. “And there’s no pain, and no fear.”
I could smell the river on him.
“Did you jump?” I said.
He smiled.
“You could’ve saved me,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I?” I said.
“Aye. In the alleyway that day. You could’ve spoken up. But you didn’t. You just looked away.”
“Did you jump?” I said again.
He laughed and nodded.
“Yes. I did. I couldn’t stand it any more so I jumped.”
“Suicide,” I whispered.
“Aye. Suicide.”
Suicide. It was despair, a mortal sin. There could be no forgiveness. It meant eternal damnation.
I heard Hell’s gates creaking open for both of us.
“So you’re in Hell?” I whispered.
He smiled again.
“Because I jumped? No, that’s all ballocks, just like First Fridays, novenas, all that stuff. All that matters is goodness, just simple goodness.”
“And how d’you get that?”
He shrugged. He was so free, so easy, not like the Link I used to know.
“Dunno. But it seems I had it.”
Then he shrugged again and he was gone.
He’s kept on coming back, through all the years between. It’s always the same: the smell of the river, the smile. He hasn’t spoken again. Doesn’t need to, I suppose. He said it all that very first time. He just stands there in the darkness, like he simply wants me to look upon him. And I do. Sometimes there’s been years between his visits and I get to hope it’s all over, but then he appears again, unexpected but expected, like last night. He disappeared as dawn came and then I started writing it all down at last.
It was long ago. Link’s mum died soon after him.
We grammar school boys are all scattered. Some of us could well be dead. Most of us have forgotten Link, I’m sure. Nixon’s ended up in California, surfing, playing golf and drinking. He sends me cards and says it’s Paradise. Me, I’ve always talked of moving, but I keep on staying here. Funny, but the faith draws you back, even when you don’t believe it. I’ve gone back to lighting candles, saying my prayers in nines. I try to keep in a state of grace. I’m even in the middle of a First Friday Novena. It’s all because the end’s not too far away, of course.
Mebbe after that I’ll discover what simple goodness is.
I hope I don’t.
“A story is a journey. Every word is a footstep. Every sentence, paragraph and page carries you a little further. You might know where it starts and where it’s headed, but you can never be certain if you’ll take the right turnings, or what you’ll see and who you’ll meet along the way. And, of course, a story is a life.
This story’s inspired by the Great North Run, the half-marathon that takes place every year in the north-east of England. It starts in Newcastle, goes through Gateshead, Felling, Hebburn, Jarrow, and ends at South Shields, beside the North Sea. Famous athletes like Mo Farah and Paula Radcliffe take part. So do joggers and sports-club members, and people dressed as ducks and fairies. I went to the same school as Brendan Foster, the man who helped to set it all up. In Felling we lived next door to Brendan’s coach, Stan Long, who started training runners when he was a welder in Gateshead. He was still Brendan’s coach when he became an Olympic medallist and world record holder. The Great North Run started in 1981 and it grows bigger and more famous every year. Probably influenced by Brendan and Stan, I’ve run it three times myself.
To prepare to write this story I went to watch the run, of course. That morning I’d arranged to give a writing workshop in Low Newton women’s prison in Durham, along with the writers Wendy Robertson and Avril Joy, who ran the educational programme there. When I arrived I was guided through a series of gates and doors by a uniformed prison officer. Each one was unlocked, opened, then shut and locked again. Keys jangled and steel clanged. I was taken to a library room with a few armchairs and tables in it. Then the women c
ame in. They were shy at first, maybe suspicious, but they soon relaxed. I talked about my life and my writing. We did a couple of quick imagination exercises, made a few first scribbles. Some of the women began to tell me about their own lives and childhoods. They hinted at the difficulties, deprivations and abuses they’d endured. They talked about the constrictions of being in this place, about the fellowship they tried to develop with each other, and the inevitable frictions and fights. Many of them wanted to write about themselves, to somehow turn their lives into coherent stories. I said that fictionalizing a life can make it seem more real, and can make difficult personal experiences more bearable. We scribbled again, and began to shape the scribbles into narratives.
Before I left, one of the women suddenly said, “I’m like you, David. My childhood was like yours.”
She laughed.
“And look where I’ve ended up!” she said.
I was led back through the clanging doors. At the exit Avril told me that there was much more the women could have said.
“They’ve had some awful journeys,” she said.
I drove away from the prison towards Felling. I parked the car. There were crowds lining the bypass, closed to traffic on this special race day. I was early. I walked down into the pebble dashed estate where I’d spent my boyhood. I stood before the little house in which Mam, Dad, Colin, Catherine, Barbara and I had lived, and in which Barbara had died. I watched the memories and imaginings rise for a few moments in my mind. Then I hurried back to the road.
Here came the runners, streaming past towards the sea, hundreds upon hundreds of them, sprinting, trotting, striding, dancing, exulting in their freedom, running for their lives.
Later, at home, I started to doodle a map of the route. I scribbled a few possibilities. Then the young narrator came into my mind, and he led me to Harry Miller, and both of them began to run, taking the story all the way to South Shields and back again.
I don’t want to go to Harry Miller’s. It’s Saturday morning. My entry for the Junior Great North Run’s just come through the post. I’m already wearing the T-shirt. I’m already imagining belting round the quayside and over the bridges in two weeks’ time. I’m imagining all the running kids, the cheering crowds. I’m dreaming of sprinting to the finish line. I phone Jacksie and we end up yelling and laughing at each other. His stuff’s come as well. He’s number 2594. I’m 2593. We can’t believe it. But we say it’s fate. We’ve been best mates for ever. We say we’ll meet up straight away and get some training done in Jesmond Dene.