by David Almond
“So she was alive in there?” he said.
I nodded. Yes.
“That’s the kind of thing you’ll remember forevermore.”
After a time we followed our tracks through the grass back towards the woods. This time the marks of our footsteps intertwined more closely, made two curving interlinking pathways, our elegant drawing upon the earth.
We drank again outside the Dr. Syntax. He sang a brighter song now, “The Blaydon Races.”
“ ‘I went to Blaydon Races, ’twas on the ninth of June
Eighteen hundred and sixty-two on a summer’s afternoon . . .’”
I read to him again.
“ ‘Hope is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all.’”
He grinned. He swigged his beautiful beer. His white shirt collar gleamed in the afternoon light. I had a sudden vision of a bird hatching in his mouth, flying free into the air above the fields and woods and sandpits. I told him and he laughed and he tipped his head back and opened his mouth and we both saw the bird flying free from him again.
“We can imagine anything,” I said.
“Anythin,” he answered. “Anythin at aal.”
We drank some more. We felt the birds fluttering inside us.
We dozed against each other on the red seats as the train headed along the valley and through the darkening city. We walked towards the pale estate. We paused on the wasteland. I held him tight, and I felt the tender fluttering of my poor lovely father’s heart.
I grew my hair so that it hung across my ears and curled across my collar. I practised yoga in my bedroom. I stood on my head and contemplated nothingness. While Dad snored and grunted in his sleep, I tried to travel in the astral plane. I lay flat on my bed, closed my eyes, breathed deeply, slowly. Tried to empty my mind of all unnecessary thoughts, all distractions. Pictured my spirit breaking free, leaving my body behind. Imagined looking down upon myself from above. Imagined going higher, rising through the roof of the house, away from the estate, away from Tyneside, moving eastward across the North Sea towards India, Nepal, the mysterious palaces and peaks and valleys of Tibet, and towards the unknown unseen worlds beyond. I never made it.
I worked at Dixon’s newsagents, delivering Chronicles in the evenings and the Sundays at weekends. I stole Beech Nut and Mars Bars and packets of Park Drives. I slipped my hand into the till a few times. I saved up to buy my jeans and shirts and books. I got a Saturday job at the Co-op in Newcastle. I sold boiler suits and anoraks and slacks and blazers. Customers would raise their arms as I measured their chests, and I’d catch the scent of sweat on them. I measured their inside legs using a tape with a three-inch-long steel end to make sure I didn’t touch their balls.
One Saturday during my lunchtime from the Co-op, I wandered into Handysides, a little run-down Victorian arcade off Percy Street, and discovered Ultima Thule. A sign on the door said that the shop lay beyond the limits of the known world. It was next door to Vercelli’s Coffee Bar and just across the alley from Psychic Giftes.
It was run by a poet, Tom Pickard, and a novelist, Tony Jackson. It smelt of joss sticks, tobacco, dust. I found pamphlets of concrete poetry and fractured prose. And little magazines — Grunt, Stand, Steel, Lighthouse, Black Middens Review — that invited writers to send in stories and poems. I dreamed of seeing my own work in such pages, but would I ever dare to send in my adolescent words? They seemed so forceful as they rushed down my arm and through my pen and onto paper, but within an hour or so they seemed as useless as the graffiti beneath Jack Law’s covering of heavenly blue. I saw little posses of real writers in that shop, men with haggard faces, goatee beards and intense eyes, women in floral frocks smoking roll-ups. I dreamed of going up to them and saying, “I am Dominic Hall and I am like you.” I didn’t dare. I was silent, and too small, too young and far too shy beside them. Then one day I was with Holly in there and she nudged me.
“Go on,” she said. “Be brave.”
Took a deep breath, clenched my fists, went up to Pickard.
“Hello,” I said.
“Aye.”
I didn’t know how to go on. I wanted to turn around.
“I seen you in here before,” he said.
“It’s a brilliant p-place.”
He laughed.
“Aa knaa that,” he said. “Tell us something new. What ye writin?”
“Eh?” I said.
“It’s obvious. What ye writin?”
I took a breath. I hardly dared.
“Poems,” I said. “And a tale about a cruel kid and a silent tramp.”
“He’s brilliant,” said Holly.
“You sent them anywhere?”
“Not yet. I will.”
“Do it. Shy bairns get nowt.”
“I know.”
He laughed, came closer.
“Do I smell the yards on you?” he said.
“My dad’s a caulker.”
“Smoothin the lines that the welder makes. Good background for a writer. And you?” he said to Holly.
“I paint,” she said. “I draw. My dad’s a draughtsman.”
Pickard laughed again.
“Seems we got the future in the shop today,” he said.
“Shy bairns get nowt!” I whispered inside myself.
“I wondered,” I said, “if there’s any jobs in here.”
“This is Newcassel, ye knaa. This is a bliddy book shop, ye knaa.”
“A few hours sometimes. You wouldn’t have to pay me much.”
“Wouldn’t be able to pay ye much. Give us a line of poetry.”
“Eh?”
“A line of poetry. If we’re ganna employ a poet we’d better knaa we’re employin a poet. Give us a line.”
“Go on, Dominic,” said Holly.
“I touched the stitch marks on his lips,” I said.
“Another.”
“I heard the crackle of the rods and the thunder of the hammers. I saw men bending to the deck as if in prayer.”
“How old are ye?”
“Sixteen. Nearly seventeen.”
He called across the little shop to Jackson.
“Tony! Howay over and meet the new member of staff. We’ll pay ye in books and tickets to the Tower. That’s aal reet? It should be for a bliddy poet.”
A few hours, here and there. Sometimes I went straight from school to do half an hour before closing time. Served poets and novelists and students and teachers and seekers after arcane paranormal truths. Served kids like myself with the shy and yearning eyes of would-be writers. Blushed along with blokes who spotted Oz and Henry Miller in the window and came to scan the shelves of underground magazines in search of porn. I read Steel and Black Middens Review and Bullocks and Grunt. Kept the joss sticks burning. Kept the shelves in order. Cleared the ashtrays. Made coffee for Pickard and Jackson and tried to stay cool and calm as I tried to chat with them. Gaped at the famous poets passing through for their readings at Morden Tower: Patten, Corso, Bunting, Dunn, McGough, Mitchell, Heaney. Loved the sensations of being in the same room as them, touching the same books as them, drinking from the same cups as them. I read William Burroughs with thrill and confusion and didn’t have a clue what he was on about. I read Kerouac and rode with him from my pebbledashed house across the rails and roads of the USA and across the border into Mexico. I read Paul Klee’s words about taking a line for a walk, and I tried to make sense of John Cage’s explorations of silence. I found Hemingway, read his stories aloud to myself, and fell in love with such syntax that worked so fluently on a northern tongue. I read Pickard and McGough, poets of the North who dared to write in northern rhythms and words. Pickard was right. Writing was like welding and caulking, spattering ink onto the sheets, then hammering it to make it neat and smooth and watertight. And writing books must be like making ships, welding words and pages in pursuit of an elusive image of the fin
ished perfect thing.
“Mebbe we’ll get you to read sometime,” Pickard said.
“Eh?”
“At the Tower. A poem or two. Get ye started.”
Shy bairns get nowt.
“Great,” I said.
We saw Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti at the Tower. We sat in that dark candlelit room in the ancient city walls and sipped red wine and let the rhythms of New York and California sing in our northern brains. We shivered as Ferlinghetti read to us. We clutched each other, as we had in the circus on the playing fields so long ago, when the poet stood up on his chair and spread his arms like wings and teetered over us as if about to fall and called out his poem about tightrope walking, balance and rhyme and determination.
I started to send poems and stories to magazines. The editor of Bullocks wrote back that a story called “Pebbledash Poltergeist” was too way out even for them. Black Middens said that the same story was far too English, far too staid. I sent again, was rejected again. I didn’t tell my dad about this, but I told Bill Stroud.
“Rejection is nowt,” he said. “The world’s brimful of folk who’ll say you cannot do what you can do. Be brave, press on. You’re hardly more than a child and a lifetime of wonders lies in wait.”
We went to the Oxford Ballroom on Mondays and danced to Motown. At weekends we went to the A’Gogo and saw the Junco Partners, the Animals, Pink Floyd and Cream.
I bought an old secondhand record player. I went to Windows Music in Newcastle and bought Jefferson Airplane and the Deviants, and stole the Grateful Dead. I dreamed of finding sources of marijuana and LSD to accompany the music, but this was the pebbledashed North, this was Tyneside, and I didn’t have a clue where to go to, who to talk to. So I bought cans of McEwan’s Export and drank instead.
I drank them in my room with Holly lying at my side. We listened to the sounds from the sunlit West Coast and she sang and hummed along as we dreamed of being free. We kissed, and slipped our hands inside each other’s clothes, and wondered if this was what was meant by love. We sang, we kissed, we began to penetrate each other more and more deeply, seeking the Ultima Thule that lay inside ourselves and beyond ourselves.
“ ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow,’” Joyce read, “ ‘out of this stony rubbish?’” He read us The Waste Land at the beginning of lunchtime each Friday. We could just turn up and listen. Didn’t have to ask any questions, didn’t have to say anything unless we wanted to.
He said that silence was maybe the only proper response to something so amazing. Even when we thought we understood, we’d find out that we didn’t.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“ ‘Shantih shantih shantih,’” he answered. “ ‘Jug jug jug.’”
He said that Eliot himself probably didn’t know how he’d done what he had done. And why should he? Like all true creators, he was astonished by his own creation.
“ ‘Weilala leia’” he said. “Waly waly waly.” He laughed. “It’s nearly Geordie. Why aye, man. Why aye!”
I loved the way the words moved in the air, the way they set up such rhythms and disturbances in my body and brain. And I loved the silence afterwards, in which the words continued. You cannot say, or guess, for you know only “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter.” And “I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
One Friday I left the reading with Holly.
“I’m going to perform,” I said. “You can announce it.”
It was something people had started to do, performances in the sixth-form common room. Last week Bella Carr had read a poem called “Scream” in a high-pitched frantic voice. It was a Geordie homage to Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
“What’ll I say you’re going to do?” asked Holly.
“I’m playing the piano.”
“The piano? You?”
“Aye. For four minutes thirty-three seconds.”
“Oh, that!”
The Zombies were on the record player as we went in. She switched it off.
“Dominic will now perform,” she said.
I was already at the piano.
“He will play a piece by an American composer called John Cage. It is called ‘Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds.’”
I held my watch in my hand. I lifted the piano lid, hesitated, and immediately closed it again.
“Howay, Dom!” Ricky Eckart yelled. “Get on with it!”
There was the noise of the road outside, the howling of younger kids in the yard outside.
I lifted the lid again, hesitated, took a deep breath and closed it again.
I watched the watch.
Heather Milford whispered, “Poor soul. He’s gannin daft, ye knaa.”
Somewhere far off a desperate teacher yelled. Minutes passed. I checked the watch, lifted the lid, held it poised above the keys, then closed it again. I didn’t look at the kids gathering around me. I watched the watch. A couple of minutes passed: voices, laughter, curses, shifting chairs. I suddenly lifted the lid again, straightened my back, breathed deeply, then stood up and bowed.
“Nice one, Dominic!” Ricky yelled.
Much applause.
“That,” said Holly, “was four minutes thirty-three seconds.”
“Four minutes thirty-three seconds of nowt!” laughed Willie Cook.
“There’s no such thing as nowt,” said Holly. “There’s no such thing as silence.”
“Each something,” I said, “is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.”
“Very true,” said Willie. “So very very true, Dominic.”
I grinned, took Holly’s hand and walked away from the piano.
“That was bliddy brilliant!” she whispered.
Everybody had kind of heard about the silent composition. The music with no music. Just as we’d heard of the play without actors and without any words, and the paintings that were plain white or totally black. We’d all laughed at the idea of such stuff. We maybe doubted its very existence. But now here it was in this ordinary Tyneside place. And I’d never thought it could be so weird, so disconcerting.
“Did you hear that little bird outside?” said Holly. “Did you hear that teacher yelling far away?”
“Aye.”
I’d also heard The Waste Land in me, and my mother’s final breaths and her final silence, and my father’s wheezing, and the sound of McAlinden pissing down onto a rug, and the voice of Mrs. Stroud, and Jack Law’s grunts and Jack Law’s song. And my own heart, and my own yearnings. And I heard the silence of the world that was not silence but was filled with traffic and factory and shipyard din and the cries of children and the songs of birds. All the sounds that made the song of this part of the earth, all the sounds that made our local music of the spheres. And I heard the laughter of my friends and of the lovely Holly Stroud, and I knew I’d hear the silent piece forevermore, even when there was no piano anywhere to be seen.
There was much laughter. I knew that I’d begun a tradition, that John Cage would be played in this place many times.
“Now!” shouted Bella Carr. “After that, I think it’s time for ‘Scream’ again!”
She jumped onto a chair and started yelling.
“‘I seen the best of the Geordies gannin mad and getting pissed and stuffin chips and broon into themsels
and starin doon into the Tyne from broken yards and yellin at the stars from shattered factories
and rippin their heeds wide open on the bridges and runnin naked on the moors and drawin doon the wind and sky
and smokin No. 6 and electric bananas and gritty little lumps of Moroccan black
and dancin to Motown at the Oxford and to Hendrix at the A’Gogo
and staggerin from council estates to colleges and universities
and hallucinatin Seaton Sluice and Plessey Woods and Jackie Milburn and Saint Bede
and taalkin ballocks to Classics scholars and kickin in the heeds of aal the tossers
from the public schools
and headin for the lovely bitter beaches on the lovely bitter summer days . . .’”
Which is what Holly and I did, that early August Saturday, which was not bitter at all, when we first made proper love. We took a blanket each, something to swim in, a little money. I had a tin of luncheon meat, a tin of tomatoes, a loaf of white bread. She had ham and apples. She carried a rucksack, I rolled my things into the blanket and tied it around my shoulders with a belt. I had The Mersey Sound, she had Plath’s Ariel. We both wore faded jeans and faded shirts.
Dad was on a half-shift at the yard.
Bill stood at his gate and watched us leave.
“Wish I could come,” he said.
“Dad,” said Holly.
“But I watch the shadow of the travellers’ backs as they disappear.”
He gave us a bottle of Hirondelle wine.
We took the train to Newcastle, walked northwards through the city. Arrived at the beginning of the Great North Road. There were others there, a line of young people heading for the sea. Those at the front held out their arms and raised their thumbs. The line diminished. Soon we came to the front. Lifts were easy then, before we became suspicious, and the roads were slow, before the bypasses were built.
We were picked up by a lawyer in a Rover. He told us that he’d travelled all the way from Wolverhampton to find the woman who had left him for another.
“Where is she now?” asked Holly.
He didn’t know. In a village beyond Morpeth, he thought. She was called Chantelle and she was from the South. He loved her desperately. He’d drive through the villages, ask questions about a woman with an unfamiliar accent.
“It’s a wild-goose chase,” he said. “But it’s a journey I have to make.” He laughed. “I’m a lawyer. I thought I was a sensible man. But where’s the sense in this?”
He bought us lunch in a roadside pub, the Fox.
“Why am I telling you all this?” he said. “Because I’ll never see you again, I guess. Because you’re young. I missed all that. I grew up in the war. Is it good to be young today?”
We told him that it was. Before he dropped us off he said, “Maybe I’ll never go back again. Maybe it’s not too late to be the me I might have been.”