The Tightrope Walkers

by David Almond

  We didn’t move.

  “Who are you both?” sighed Mam at last.

  “Your husband,” he whispered.

  “Your son,” I said.

  We sat like that in my little room as the sun rose over our pale and fragile estate.

  “You never know with boys,” said Creel. “Such talent for disguise, for misdirection . . .”

  I was with my parents in his office. He had a police report on his desk. He had my books, my recent marks, my school report.

  “None of this seems to have affected his work,” he said.

  He peered at me.

  “How can that be?” he asked me. “But of course you do not know. Of course there is no answer.”

  My parents sat awkwardly in hard upright chairs. I stood at their side.

  “We are subject to great mysteries,” he said. “Are we not?”

  “Yes, sir,” whispered Mam.

  “Yes indeed. As I prepared for this meeting, Dominic, your English teacher talked of you with unbridled admiration — of an old essay on ‘The Secret Sharer,’ for instance. He even quoted you to me. ‘The sharer is a hidden element of the narrator’s self.’ That, from one who was so young. From one who has, to all appearances, continued to flourish under our care. One who is even the linchpin of our football team. But a strange deception has occurred. We have been prey to an illusion. And what are we to do with you?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “And nor do I.”

  He turned to Dad.

  “We were once boys, Mr. Hall. What would have been done with us had our indiscretions been discovered? And Mrs. Hall, you who are of the more transparent section of humanity, what do you think should be done?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I don’t think he knew what he was doing.”

  “Can that — such an extraordinary that — be so? But what would that say of our morality? And we must ask, in this place with crucifixes nailed to the walls and priests roaming in the corridors, what would that say of sin? What would that say of goodness and of our intention to avoid all evil?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “And nor do I, Mrs. Hall. This is a place of education. Our purpose is to bring knowledge to the children in our care. Perhaps it would be better to tell them all day long about the things we do not know.” He stared at us across his arched fingertips. “But enough. Were we to ponder that, there would be no end to our pondering. Dominic, had charges been pressed, we would have had to cast you into the wilderness. But you received mercy. This must be a turning point. You must not do again the things that we know that you have done. And you must not do again the things which we do not know you have done.”

  He smiled.

  “There must be a punishment, I suppose. Do you approve of punishments, Mr. Hall, Mrs. Hall?”

  “Mebbe there should be a lot more punishment,” said Dad. “He’s been let off by Mrs. Charlton. He’s been let off by the police . . .”

  “And by you?” said Creel.

  “My first thought was to thrash him, like my dad would have thrashed me, to within an inch of my life.”

  “But you did not.”

  Dad looked down.

  “No, sir.”

  Creel turned his eyes to Mam.

  “What good would it do?” she whispered.

  “Spare the rod, spoil the child. You don’t believe that, Mrs. Hall?”

  “I know there’s enough pain in the world without inflicting more on our children.”

  “And you,” said Creel to me. “What punishment would pay you back for your wrongdoings? What punishment would ensure that you do not transgress again?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  He reached below his desk and lifted a cane. It was three feet long, hooked at one end. He flexed it between his hands and peered over it into my eyes. He swished it through the air. He bared his teeth, he grimaced, he raised the cane and held it in the air above my head, as if about to strike.

  He laughed.

  “How easy it is,” he said, “for we teachers to strike dread into those in our care.”

  He put the cane away again.

  “I should like the boy,” he said, “to write for me. What say you to that, Mr. Hall?”

  “I’d say he’s a lucky bugger. Sorry, sir.”

  “Perhaps he is. Perhaps we could ask if that is a punishment at all. But maybe it is the best of all punishments — one that makes use of the sinner’s gifts, and that helps him to truly change. What do you think, Mrs. Hall?”

  “I don’t mind, sir.”

  “Well, then, Dominic Hall. I should like you to write an answer to the question which must engage us all: Is it possible for one human being to know and to understand another? Will you do that for me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good lad. And don’t just write, ‘I don’t know,’ though that indeed may be the only honest answer that any of us could give.”

  I wrote about the mysteries of Jack Law and Mrs. Stroud. I told tales to explain the causes of Jack’s silence and Mrs. Stroud’s seclusion. I changed their names to protect them, wrote about them as if they were inventions. I wrote of wordlessness and singing and angels, of curtained bedrooms and bird-filled hawthorn hedges. And I wrote stories that rose from riverside hovels and pebbledashed estates, stories of poltergeists and ponies and bleeding statues, of children endlessly bombing Berlin and bayoneting the Japanese. In the midst of my writing one day, I looked up and saw Holly in the cracked and dusty street, looking up at me.

  I put down the pen and went out.

  “Hello, Dominic,” she said, so easily.

  “Hello, Holly.”

  We walked the crooked pavements.

  She said she’d heard about what I’d done. I told her there was a lot more than she’d heard.

  “I killed things,” I said.

  She kept on walking.

  “Birds,” I said. “Sparrows and robins and finches and crows.”

  “Poor things.”

  “And other things. A cat. A dog.”

  “And how did it feel?”

  “It felt OK.”

  We walked rapidly towards the sunlit fields.

  “It did,” I said. “It felt weirdly OK.”

  “Exciting?”

  “Yes. We stole things, too.”

  “And was that exciting, too?”

  “Yes. But not so much.”

  We walked.

  “We did other things, Holly.”

  I took a long deep breath. I slowed my steps.

  “Holly,” I said. “We kissed each other.”

  She sighed, walked on, with sunlight burning in her hair, grass swishing underneath her feet.

  “And we did other things,” I said.

  “I don’t really want to know, not now. Mam says the music has been sweeter than ever in these past few weeks. She says the angels seem closer to the earth somehow.”

  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. Sh
e 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?”