The Tightrope Walkers

by David Almond

  “That’s right,” he groaned.

  Linked together like that, we struggled. We resisted each other, we pressed our blades towards each other. I knew the torment of resisting and attacking in the same moment, the terror of a sharp steel blade just inches from my flesh. We gasped and grunted. Vincent grinned, he urged me on. We rocked each other back and forth. Suddenly he was down again and I was squatting over him and my snot and blood dangled down in a long gluey string upon his face.

  “Divent stop,” he hissed. “This is yer chance, Dom. Do it now. Now!”

  The image of my knife in his throat flashed within me.

  I blinked my eyes to make it go.

  “Submit,” I said, as we boys used to say to each other in Saint Lawrence’s Infants when we gave each other Chinese burns or played our innocent fighting games in the schoolyard. “Give in, Vincent McAlinden!”

  He laughed.

  “Aye,” he said. “I submit. And that’ll dae.”

  We rolled apart.

  “Who’d’ve thought ye had that in ye, young Dom?” he said.

  I licked my fingers and cleaned the snot and blood away from myself, and Vincent did the same. I tried to clean away the grass stains and mud stains, and Vincent did the same.

  “I’ll get ye next time,” Vincent said.

  “Naa,” I answered. “You never will.”

  “Ha. Give us your blood.”

  He made a small cut with his knife in the ball of his thumb, held it towards me. I did the same with my knife in my thumb. We pressed the wounds together.

  “Now I’m in you and you’re in me,” he said. “Brothers in blood.”

  He sighed and closed his eyes. We lay in the grass.

  “Linked forever,” he murmured.

  It became strangely peaceful as we lay there by the river, as our hearts and breathing calmed. The sky was beautiful, the blue of the day beginning to be streaked with red and gold and black. Black marks of birds moved beautifully across it. There was an aching inside me that seemed as great as the sky above, as great as the world itself. And Vincent, in his matter-of-fact daring, came close to me again and breathed his breath on me, then pressed his lips to mine, and for the first time I got the weird harsh taste of him.

  He breathed his harsh-sweet words into me.

  “Let us see you,” he whispered.

  I glanced into his eyes.

  “You knaa what I mean, Dominic,” he whispered.

  I let him see me. He let me see him.

  “Good lad,” he said. “Now let’s touch.”

  We fought many times after that. We came to expect it after a day of slaughtering or of thieving, or of simply roaming these streets and fields and riverbanks. I saw him differently. He wasn’t just a brute in a brutish form. He fought, but he also laughed and played with me, as if he was a child. Maybe in those months, he experienced something of a childhood that he’d never had, or that he’d left behind. And maybe I experienced what it might be to be a certain kind of man. And we had friendship, the kind of friendship I’d never known with Holly Stroud, the kind of friendship he’d never had with Bernard.

  Sometimes it seemed that we were preparing for war. We did press-ups and squats. We raised rocks above our heads. We challenged each other to lift boulders. We fought with jagged stones in our hands, slavering as we feigned attempts to break each other’s skulls. We continued to fight with our knives, gripping each other’s wrists, forcing the blade closer closer to the other’s throat. We cursed and spat. We called each other the blackest of names. We cursed each other’s family, each other’s ancestors. We called each other animal names: rat, pig, ape, dog. We named each other after genitalia and human waste. We bled and drooled. Our muscles tightened, strengthened. Our minds seethed, bodies ached, souls coarsened. We went home at the end of such days drained of energy, drained of thought. Bruises and wounds on me, marks of grass and earth on me. Wildness in my eyes.

  Early on, after one of the first scary ecstatic afternoons with Vincent, I returned home as night was coming on. I lowered myself painfully down onto the sofa.

  “Dominic?” Mam gasped. “What on earth?”

  “Eh?” I grunted.

  “What you been getting up to out there? Who on earth . . .”

  I groaned a meaningless answer.

  “Dominic?” said Dad.

  He stroked his cheek in contemplation for a moment.

  “Leave him,” he said softly.

  He continued to regard me, my hooded eyes, my hunched body.

  “He’s got the beast in him,” he said.

  “The what?” said Mam.

  He laughed.

  “Haven’t you, my son?” he said.

  “Don’t talk such nonsense,” whispered Mam.

  I turned and groaned at her again, a kind of growl.

  “See?” Dad said.

  “See what?”

  “It’ll run right through him, then out it’ll run again.”

  He smoked his cigarette.

  “Down, boy!” he laughed.

  I turned from them both, went to the table, did my homework. The subject was biology, the contents of the blood. Haemoglobin, oxygen, metabolic waste. I named them all, and within myself I named the other matter rushing through me: excitement, yearning, wildness, dread, and the blood and breath of Vincent McAlinden.

  Mam came to me, put her arm across my shoulder. I leaned back, became a child again for a few short moments and let myself be held by her.

  “My lovely child,” she sighed.

  Then I leaned forward again and wrote on, with my neat handwriting, my fluent sentences, my clear diagrams, my accurate naming of parts.

  Later, when I was in bed, Dad came to me. I felt his coarse hand on my brow. I thought he’d speak, but nothing came. He only sat there as the darkness deepened, his coarse hand on my brow.

  “Be careful,” he whispered at last. “Don’t go too far.”

  Next day I wrestled with Vincent McAlinden again, by a brook that ran down towards the Tyne. We struggled in the flowing water, bodies bruised by stones. I forced his face down into the water, as if to drown him, as if to kill, then hauled him out again.

  “Submit?” I snarled. “Submit?”

  “Yes.” He smiled through tears. “Well done. I submit. Come here.”

  At school, nobody saw beyond the mask. My marks were good. I stayed near the top of the class. I put words in an order and shape that pleased my teachers. I could write a sentence, a paragraph, a page. My words came fluently step by step by step. I could change a page of tangled text to a few sentences of rhythm and meaning. Could precis and comprehend, could analyse and parse, could charm and move and convince. The Ape Boy had a flow, a grace, an imagination. Who was this alien graceful boy, I wondered, as my muscles continued to thicken, and my hairs to grow, as I continued to thieve and kill, as I continued to fight and kiss with Vincent McAlinden?

  Holly seemed a world away, a being from a distant age, a distant past. I hardly acknowledged her. She became a gymnast, a dancer, a trampolinist. She was celebrated for it. She was in her element, using springboards, bars and beams, horses, rings and ropes. Leaping, climbing, cartwheeling and spiralling, she seemed at times, they said, about to fly. And though she grew older, her body remained small, a thing of great delicacy and great strength, a lovely thing, a bird-like thing. Often I caught her watching me as I watched her, but I couldn’t go to her. When I heard her voice or her piano playing drifting through the air, I tilted my head and listened. I knew that I could easily be entranced. Part of me wanted to reach out to her, to hold tight to her, as if I could be somehow rescued by her, as if her bird-like strength could lift me up and leave behind the boy who fought and loved with Vincent McAlinden. But I turned away, told myself that I was finished with her, that she was finished with me. Holly and her family would leave the estate and I’d be left alone at last to be the boy that I was bound to be.

  My mam would ask, “No time for Holly Stroud th
ese days?”

  I’d tell her that we’d grown apart.

  I’d laugh and tell her, “She’s a lass, Mam!”

  And Dad would shrug and say that this was bound to happen, this was just the way of the world. No point in fighting it.

  “And he’s got plenty time for girls,” he said.

  Bill Stroud kept a kindly eye on me. He smiled. He waved. I knew that he might be the only one to see through the mask towards the boy inside. I knew he’d make no judgements, no demands, he’d ask no difficult questions of me.

  What if Bill had been my father? What if I’d been born as Dominic Stroud? What if Holly’d been born as Holly Hall? I tried to imagine drawings flowing easily from my fingers, songs drifting easily upon my breath. I imagined being at ease in the world, no need to struggle with it and with myself. How would it be to be such a graceful thing?

  And how would it be to be Vincent McAlinden, to be formed like that, born like that, raised like that, to have desires and habits like that? What if I’d been Dominic McAlinden?

  No answers to questions like that. But they pestered me and pestered me. Did they pester everyone? How would it be to be anyone? Why am I me? Why? Why am I not someone else?

  That last day started with a fight about smoking. I was hooked by now. I woke up, lit up, breathed the smoke out through the bedroom window. I washed, fiercely brushed my teeth.

  “You think I can’t smell it?” said Mam when I went downstairs. “You think it doesn’t bother us?”

  Dad laughed. He lit a cigarette of his own.

  “Stunts your growth,” he said. “Just look at me.”

  She waved his smoke away from her face.

  “You should stop as well,” she said. “It’ll kill the two of you.”

  “Kill!” mocked Dad.

  “Yes! Kill! Do you not care?”

  He relented.

  “Mebbe too late for me,” he said. “But your mother’s right. Stop before it gets its hooks in you.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder. She stared into my eyes. I stared back at her. Her eyes so clear, so bright. Her touch so vividly alive.

  “Please, Dominic,” she said.

  Dad breathed his smoke towards me.

  Mam tried to blow it away. She coughed. She coughed again.

  “See?” she said. “It’ll damage us all.”

  “Everybody tries it once,” he said to her. “He’ll see how daft it is.”

  She coughed again.

  Again.

  “Stop it!” she said.

  She went into the kitchen.

  “She’ll get over it,” Dad said. He winked. He drew on his cigarette. “But she’s right. Pack it in.”

  He went into the garden.

  I took a cigarette from Dad’s packet on the hearth. I took some coins from her purse on the kitchen table. I went downhill. I bought five No. 6s and stole two Milky Ways. I met Vincent behind the Blue Bell pub. We walked down to the little park on Holly Hill. Sixth-form girls were playing tennis in short skirts and T-shirts. They saw us, giggled at us.

  “Bliddy gorgeous!” he snarled.

  He bared his teeth at me.

  “Aren’t they?” he snapped.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Bliddy yes! But they wouldn’t want me, would they? Would they?”

  “I . . .”

  “Bliddy no.”

  He turned away. We left the park.

  “Bliddy sun!” he said, holding his hand against it.

  “Bliddy you!” he said as our shoulders touched.

  “You ever want to get it over with?” he said. “Get everything you want?”

  “Everything?” I said.

  “Yes, bliddy everything right bliddy now.”

  He smoked and spat.

  “And d’you ever want to do damage? I mean proper bliddy damage.”

  He moved fast. I almost ran to keep up with him.

  “Course you’ve got the time to wait,” he said. “You’ll not be dropped into a tank in a few months’ time. You’ll be Dominic Goody Two-Shoes for ages more.” He grabbed me, tugged me to his side. “One day we’ll just start smashing things up, the likes of me, and takin what we want. Good job we’ve got no bombs. Cos we’d be using them and dropping them and blasting everything to bliddy bits. You understand?”

  I said nothing.

  “Of course you divent understand. Keep up, will you! That’s why you shove us into tanks and hulls, to keep us down. But we’re bliddy seethin and all we want is to do damage damage bliddy damage. Move! Keep up!”

  I held out the packet of No. 6 and a Milky Way.

  “Look how hard you are!” he snorted. “You smoke, you slaughter ickle dicky birds, you pinch sweeties, you fight, you pretend to nearly kill, you look at bouncing tits and naked legs.”

  He lit a cigarette, he bit the Milky Way.

  “Look at them!” he said.

  “Look at who?”

  “At all of them. At everybliddybody. Look how bliddy tame they are.”

  I looked. Familiar faces, familiar bodies, doing familiar things in familiar places.

  “I’d do the whole damn bliddy lot. Bliddy wallop. Bliddy bang!”

  He made a fist.

  “That’s what war is, isn’t it?” he said. “Bomb the boring bliddy world to mek it jump.”

  He turned to me.

  “I’d drop a bomb on you as well, you dozy prat.”

  He laughed.

  “Mebbe the Holly Strouds should be marching and chanting against me! CMD. Campaign for McAlinden Disarmament! Ha!”

  We walked on.

  “Why’s it all so bliddy ordinary? Why?”

  “Because it is,” I said.

  “What kind of answer’s that? I thought you had some bliddy brains in you! Move! Keep up, will ye!”

  We walked, we smoked.

  “I dream of killing me own dad,” he said. “Huntin him down and splittin his head with a rock. Sometimes it’s God I’m after to pay him back for all the crap down here, but when he turns around I see me father standing there. Then I get him with a knife, a bayonet, a gun.” He raised his hand high and brought it down quick. “Kapow! Die, you dog!”

  He tugged me to his side.

  “You must dream like that,” he said.

  “I don’t,” I told him.

  “You must,” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Huh!”

  He snarled a laugh. We hurried on. We stole some fruit. Stole an egg from a tray outside Walter Willson’s. There was nothing we could do with this, so Vincent flung it down an ancient alleyway between a butcher’s and a bank.

  “To hell with it all,” Vincent muttered. “To hell with this, to hell with that, to hell with him, to hell with her!”

  We walked the road towards Newcastle, entered the fringes of Gateshead. Hidden river on our right beyond a labyrinth of terraced houses.

  Kids watched us walk, suspicious. Vincent glared.

  “To hell with you! And with you, and you!”

  Young kids scattered from him. Older kids backed off, turned their eyes away, moved on.

  We came to the unfamiliar alleyways and shops of Gateshead town. Nobody smiling at us, nobody greeting us. Took a lane that turned to a track that passed by a line of old pigeon crees. A man rattling a tin of food and calling into the sky. A sudden rush and clatter of wings above our heads as his birds returned to him. Then a little park with children swinging on creaking swings. Then tree-lined streets, grassy verges, cultivated gardens, a sense of peace. Stone houses with stained-glass windows, little turreted towers, driveways. We wandered more slowly now, breathing this different oh-so-unfamiliar air. We moved through the heavy shade of roadside trees. No sounds of caulkers here, no scent of the Tyne, no underlying engine din. Vincent snapped off the heads of red roses overhanging the path. Threw a stone at a squirrel in a treetop. Cursed a dog, a golden Labrador, threw another stone at that. Pointed to gleaming cars, to furnishings, paintings,
bookcases seen through high windows.

  “Look. Rich gits,” he muttered. “To hell with ’em.”

  Then there it was, the familiar place, like something from a previous dream. The driveway, the car, the heavy wooden front door wide open, letting air and light into a polished hallway. Who said we should go through the gate? Neither of us. We didn’t even speak. The open door seemed open just for us. We walked the driveway to it. Shadow beneath the trees then bright sunlight, shadows then light. The earth felt paper-thin, felt hardly there at all. Seemed to be nobody around. Kids in a distant garden. Dog in a distant street. I see us now, two boys before an open door. See us both lean sideways to look in. See us edge together into that hallway. There’s no sound in the house. Scents of polish and flowers, everything so clean. And a narrow table against a wall below a painting of Tyneside as it used to be: sailboats on the river, quaint houses on an old stone bridge, fields between the streets.

  Another open door, into a room of books. I know where I am now, of course.

  Vincent’s curse brings me back to the here and now.

  “Treasure, Dom,” he whispers.

  A five-pound note on the hall table, held there by a chunk of marble. Vincent lifts the marble, I take the note, close my hand around it, slide it into my pocket. Tiptoe further in, to the door of the room where my words were. Peep into it. Silent, empty, books stacked high on all the walls. Armchairs, a sofa, a great white marble fireplace. No heartbeat, no breath. I think of my childish words in my childish script in here, my treasure story, lying in this room with all these books. It’ll have been long ripped up. It’ll have been long ago thrown away, the childish thing. A bit of scribble by the cleaner’s son, scrawl by a brat from the pebbledash. I think of my mother, working here, polishing the furniture, dusting the shelves, washing the windows, telling the lady of the house about her son. Does she talk about her son? And if she does, is it in order to praise him as it used to be? Or does she whisper doubts and troubles about her changing boy? Does she sing as she works? Is there any evidence of her here? Not a sound, not a smell. Just the cleanliness, the orderliness. I take a little silver spoon from a little table and put it in my pocket. Vincent grins. He upends a vase of roses onto the floor. He crushes a little statue of a farmer beneath his feet. He takes a silver ashtray. I reach up to the books on the shelves, start to get them down, to rip them apart, to scatter them around us on the floor. And then Vincent opens his zip and pisses down onto them. Giggles savagely. Whispers for me to join him, and I do, and I grin with him at what we’re up to, and a roar of terror fills my brain. What am I doing? And how will my mother clean this? And then we’re out again, hurrying down the hall, and out through the door, and Vincent gasps with savage delight.