by David Almond
“Nick off, Blister!” Norman shouted back. “We’re training the new lad.”
“Training? Get out of that shed and in that tank!”
Norman grinned. I knew him now: Norman Dobson. Miss O’Kane’s class, just along the river from here. Did Norman remember? No sign of it. I recalled the catechism test: What will Christ say to the wicked? . . . Put your hand out, Norman Dobson. We will help you to be saved.
And then the hiss and crack of the cane of Miss O’Kane as it whipped in rhythm onto Norman’s outstretched obedient hand: “Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire . . .”
“Norman Dobson, you lazy prat!” yelled Blister’s voice again.
Norman flicked a V-sign towards the door.
“Coming, Blister!” he called. “Watch!”
And he led us out, and we walked towards the ship that waited, half formed in its dock, casting a huge dark shadow over everything below. We walked through great heaps of steel sheets, men working with acetylene burners, men crouching to the earth with welding masks and welding rods flickering. There were scaffolding and ladders against the ship. The din of riveting and caulking was intense. The air was filled with fumes, the smell of oil and drains and piss. We paused at the foot of a ladder and Norman pointed down to the hard earth. He had to yell against the din. “This is where it happened!” Then looked upward to the monstrous curved steel wall. He spat, wiped a tear from his eye, then led us up a series of steep ladders to the deck. On the deck itself there were curls of cables, heaps of curving pipes, more piles of sheet steel. There were pools of oil, splinters of metal, spatters of bird shit, cigarette ends everywhere.
“Watch yer bliddy feet!” yelled somebody as I stumbled on a cable.
“He’s right,” said Norman. “Watch your feet, Boff.”
I thought I saw Dad far away, or what seemed to be the shape of Dad. He leaned down to the deck as if in prayer, pressing down his caulking hammer to the steel. I paused to watch.
“Hell’s teeth, Dominic!” Norman snapped. “This ain’t a place for dreamin in!”
He pointed down. There was a rectangular hole in the deck just in front of my feet.
“We want to get at least one damn day from you afore you’re gone. Don’t want you endin up like Windy, do we? Or like our Jakey.”
Jakey grinned, toothlessly. He lifted his cap, swept his hair back, showed a great pale gash across his skull. He rolled back his sleeve to show the weird angle of his forearm. He put his hand across the bottom of his spine and groaned as if in massive pain. Then yelped like a dog and flapped his tongue and winked.
“Bottom is a b-bloody long way down,” he said.
Silversleeve laughed. Wiped his nose noisily on his sleeve. Slung the bucket across his arm.
“So in we go,” said Norman. He widened his eyes at me. “Ready? Follow me.”
I quaked. Norman crouched and backed his way down into the opening. Stepped onto the top of a steel ladder that descended into the dark. Went down, looked up, his face illuminated by the sky above.
“Howay,” he said. He laughed. “Not feared of heights, are you? If you are, they’ve sent you to the wrong damn place.”
Still I couldn’t move.
“Divent be scared,” he said. “I’ll guide you doon.”
I looked back, saw Dad, or the man in the shape of Dad, watching from afar.
“Just do it,” said Silversleeve. “Do it and you’ll quick get used to it. Do it for as long as us and ye’ll know it’s nowt at aal.”
I crouched as Norman had, I edged backwards until my reaching foot slipped beyond the steel and felt nothingness. Shuffled backwards, reached down with the foot until I felt the ladder’s rungs. Kept shuffling and sliding backwards.
“That’s the way,” said Silversleeve.
“B-bottom is a l-long way down,” said Jakey.
I kept on going. Stepped properly onto the ladder, gripped the first rung, and went in.
“Good lad,” said Norman. “Keep on comin. I’ll give you space. Step down, step down. Let Silversleeve and Jakey follow. We’re with you. Divent worry. You won’t faal.”
You won’t faal. It was what I had told myself as I walked the rope between the drainpipe and the outhouse, as I walked the wire between the hawthorn trees. But I had fallen, many times, but just four feet or so, and I had been prepared for it, had turned every fall into a leap. Here, in this place, I couldn’t look down, couldn’t see how many four feets of emptiness were beneath. How prepare for that, how leap into the littered darkness? I told myself I didn’t have to do this at all. Told myself I could just turn away and leave the place. The place had no claim on me. I had no responsibility to it. And what was Dad doing sending me, his son, to this? And then I told myself how stupid I was. Men came down here day after day and day after day and had done for ten thousand days before. Yes, Windy Miller had fallen, but that was rare, and Windy was a clot. And this was my heritage. I kept on staring at the wall of steel behind the ladder, six inches from my face. Gripped the cold rungs tight, kept stepping down, stepping down. Riveters and caulkers attacked the metal from outside. There were tiny explosions somewhere. The ladder and the walls continually trembled.
“OK!” yelled Norman. “Tek a break. Nae need to rush now. Blister knaas we’re in.”
Now I clung to the ladder and dared to look. Spotlights dangled down on cables. The lights were garish, narrow-focused. Great gulfs of dimness lay between them. The tank was as deep as the ship itself and broad as a church. Dark-shadowed rubbish was cluttered and heaped up in the bottom.
“Looks like the net’s in tight today!” yelled Norman.
I saw it, the dark meshed lines that stretched from wall to wall.
“Mind you,” continued Norman, “didn’t we say that on Jakey’s big day!”
Jakey guffawed, Silversleeve sniffed, the ladder trembled. I yelped as something fluttered past my head. The others laughed again.
“The deadly spuggies of the tank!” said Silversleeve.
“Blister!” hissed Norman. He leaned right back, shouted up at the silhouetted face that had appeared in the hole above.
“Blister man! Bugger off and chase some proper skivers!”
Blister didn’t move.
“We’re doin it, Blister! Look!”
And Norman stepped from the ladder onto one of the strengthening ledges that were arranged all around the walls of the tank. He swept his brush across the ledge and a cloud of dust and debris scattered away.
“See!” he yelled.
“I want it done tobliddyday!” came the answering voice. “Or there’ll be bliddy hell to pay!”
Norman laughed.
“It needs wetting doon!” he yelled.
The face disappeared, returned again. Blister sprayed water from a hosepipe down into the tank and onto us.
“Keeps the dust down, Dom,” shouted Norman. “But meks things slippery. Tek care.”
Blister kept on spraying.
“Enough?” he yelled.
“Enough!” answered Norman. “You’ll start a bliddy flood.”
Blister laughed and disappeared.
“Bye-bye, Blister!” shouted Norman. He spoke to me again. “Mask on now. You can dae this one with me.”
“Do what?” I said.
“This. Which ain’t too hard to learn. I’ll show you.”
He knelt on the ledge. He bowed forward, brushed again. He crawled away from the ladder, brushing the ledge in front of him, and a cloud rose around him and tumbled down through the light of the spotlights into the gloom below.
I quaked again. The ledge was less than three feet wide. It ran all around the walls of the tank. There were other ledges further down.
“We do that?” I said.
“Aye,” said Silversleeve. “Brush it doon, then crane it up.”
“Piece of p-piss for a boff like you,” said Jakey.
“Ship’s getting near to finish,” said Norman. “Our job’s to
brush it doon and get the shite oot. Then come back in to wash it doon. Then a final spit ’n’ polish and the lid gans on the hatch and its ready for the oil.”
He crawled away, brushing as he went.
“This is the mucky stage! I gan this way, you gan that. Meet up in the middle. Then we gan to the one below.”
He paused.
“Gan on,” he said. “Divent worry. Just get on the shelf.”
“It’ll b-be aal reet!” said Jakey.
I couldn’t answer.
“Just divent look doon,” said Norman.
“Keep your mind on higher things!” laughed Silversleeve.
I did it at last. Took a deep breath. Knew that I wouldn’t fall, that a three-foot ledge of metal was a different thing from a half-inch of rope. I put on the mask. Crept out from the ladder, crept around the ledge, swept trash to the depths, crawled forward, swept again, swept again. In places the ledge was wet. The knees of my jeans were soon damp and caked with filth. The mask was useless. I breathed in dust and grit. Found all kinds of stuff. The dried-out withered body of an ancient bird. Another. And another. Over the ledge they went. I tried not to look down. Imagined falling so very far. Would the net be strong enough to hold me? Or was it just for show? I knew that Windy wasn’t the only one to fall. Men went overboard into the dock or into the river, men stepped out onto a duckboard that wasn’t there, they simply took a wrong turn and tumbled down into the murk, men walked from open decks into the river itself. Many injuries, lots of frights and yes, an occasional death. I crawled and swept, met Norman at the centre, on the opposite wall of the tank. Norman shook my hand, then we turned and went our separate ways back to the ladder again. Jakey and Silversleeve swept the ledge below. Then I went with Norman to the ledge below that, where we swept again, where dust from the ledge above cascaded down upon us. The tank was a cloud of dust dancing in the spotlights. Sometimes an obscure sparrow fluttered through it. The caulkers and riveters dinned. After the second ledge, we came to the net. We clambered through, further down into the murk. We swept the ledge below. Then came to the bottom of the tank at last and rested, sitting on the great metal struts that rose from the floor. Norman was black in the spotlights. Red shining lips when he lifted his blackened mask away.
“Havin fun?” he asked.
I lifted my own mask, rolled my eyes.
“See, you didn’t tumble,” he said.
The others finished and came to join us. We all sat together on a strut.
“Tek five, eh?” said Norman.
Silversleeve rolled a cigarette and lit it and breathed smoke and dust into himself and out into the dust again.
“That’s better,” he sighed. “That’s just lovely.”
He coughed, retched, smoked again.
There was a stench of urine and rot. A shaft of widening light shone down from the distant rectangular hole. It illuminated the dancing dust, the fluttering trapped birds, the quartet of filthy workers in the depths. It framed far-off sunlight and bright blue sky. I turned my face towards it and let the light and the image of the light pour into me.
A siren wailed.
“Break time,” said Norman. “Up we gan, then back we’ll come.”
We climbed the ladder towards the light. Climbed out.
Up there, men sprawled upon the deck, smoking, drinking mugs of tea.
I saw the shape of Dad far away. I waved, got no response.
“Look out!” called somebody nearby. “It’s the beasts of the deep come back to the earth!”
We sat at the edge of the deck and let our legs dangle over the river far below. The others smoked. Silversleeve indicated the sewage on the water, the floating dead birds and passing condoms.
“Just like the inside of your mind, Norm,” he said.
“No, it is not,” said Norman. “Me head is empty as an oil tank. Just rubbish and crap heaped up in it and loonies like you and me and Jakey crawlin roond inside.” He leaned towards Silversleeve. “Gan on, tap it, Silver. Thump it hard. Nowt but emptiness.”
Silversleeve gently rapped Norman’s skull with his knuckles. He grinned.
“Enj-joyin it, B-boff?” said Jakey.
“Aye,” I said, and said it again, for it was strangely true.
I looked at Norman, remembered him at the desk alongside me, remembered the shock of seeing his exercise book for the first time, seeing that nothing of what he saw made sense. It was just scrawl, random assortments of roaming letters and empty spaces with full stops stabbed down at the end of each line. The boy couldn’t hold the pencil properly, but gripped it in his fist like a knife and dragged it clumsily back and forth across the page. His lip would curl and his tongue hang out as he tried to write. His breath would slurp and snort in his throat.
One day Miss O’Kane appeared above us, massive in her faded green tweed jacket and brown feathered hat. She lifted Norman’s book between her thumb and finger, and let it dangle in the air.
“What should we do with a thing like this?” she said to the class.
No one spoke. The cane of Miss O’Kane lay still and silent on her desk.
“And what should we do with a boy like this?”
No one spoke.
“What do you think, Dominic?” she continued.
No reply.
“Come along, Dominic, what do you think?”
“Nothing, Miss,” I muttered at last.
She laughed bitterly.
“Nothing indeed,” she said. She sighed. “Then I will do your thinking for you. Norman Dobson,” she said, “have you looked at Dominic’s work? Have you seen what diligence and care and attention can produce? Have you seen what a good boy can do?”
Norman slumped. Miss O’Kane licked a silver star and pressed it down onto my book. Norman turned his head to look. The teacher laughed out in delight.
“Are you trying to copy, boy?” she snapped. “Are you trying to reap the benefits of another’s virtue?”
He didn’t speak. None of the others dared to speak. She took Norman by his ear, led him to her desk, bent him over it, and thrashed him with the cane of Miss O’Kane.
I remembered that. And I remembered the catechism test, but little more. We must have continued at Saint Lawrence’s together, but maybe in different classes. Maybe he was one of the crowd that gathered to play in the great football games that streamed back and forward on the playing fields above the pebbledashed estate. Maybe we’d knelt together at the altar rail in church, waiting for the Host to be pressed like silver stars onto our tongues.
“Do you remember Miss O’Kane?” I asked him now.
Norman twisted his face and laughed.
“Aye,” he said. “And I remember you. And I remember Miss O’Bliddykane and all the other Miss O’Bliddykanes.”
He spat towards the river.
“You passed, eh?”
I shrugged and nodded. The eleven-plus, he meant.
“Course you did,” said Norman.
The siren wailed. We all stood up and headed back towards the tank.
“I used to dream of stabbin her, killin her, stringin her up,” said Norman. “Hated her, and all the rest of them. What a waste of hate. They divent deserve it.” He smoked. “She’d say I’m in the right place now, eh, squirmin roond in muck?”
He pulled up his mask from where it dangled around his throat.
“And I remember your mother,” he said quickly.
I caught my breath.
“Aye,” said Norman. “I remember she was nice to me. Outside the school one day. She must’ve been waitin for you. She tapped us on the shoulder. ‘Hello, Norman,’ she said. She put a fruit gum in me hand. She was a good woman. She was kind to us. I remember her.”
He put the filthy mask upon his filthy face, told us to pick up our buckets and he led us down again.
Months-old sandwiches and pies. Discarded welding rods and broken glass. Wedges of steel, holey buckets, ruined boots, Evening Chronicles from six months back. Sodden
copies of Parade and Playboy and Daily Mirrors. Paintbrushes and half-empty tins of paint. Broken timbers, lengths of pipe, scrambles of wire and cables. Ripped overalls and shirts and torn tarpaulins, socks, snapped knives, hammers, twisted chisels. A scent of piss, of waste and rot. Dust and grit that’d been swept down and layered over everything. And dead sparrows. And a dead herring gull.
“D-disgusting,” said Jakey.
“They hoy it in cos they knaa there’s us to bring it oot,” said Norman.
“K-keeps us in work,” said Jakey.
“So let’s give thanks to them above. Thanks to yez all in the sunny world above!”
“Get on with it!” boomed Blister through the caulkers’ din.
“We’re doin it, Blister!” called Norman. “What do you think we’re doin? Sunbathin?”
He groaned.
“I hate it is the bliddy truth of it. I dae it aal day long, and I dae it in me dreams at neet, and I dae it when I’m waking up. Is this what lads is bliddy born for? Is it?”
“Yes, it is,” said Silversleeve, “if you’re the ones that’s born to be us and turn oot to be us.”
“Nae other w-way,” said Jakey.
Norman laughed.
“And that is bliddy dreadful, and it’s bliddy true. Haha! So mebbe it’s time to do a Joe Nelson.”
“Joe Nelson?” I said.
“Suicide Joe. A welder come to the end of his time. The ship’s aal ready to be launched. He checks the net has been took out, and in he jumps headbliddyfirst. Wallop and blam and broken bones and squirtin blood and there’s an end to it. Bang. Why wait that lang?”
Jakey laughed.
“Cos you’re a ch-chicken.”
“Squawk squawk!” went Norman, shuffling his non-existent feathers.
He turned his eyes to me.
“Different for you, of course,” he said. “What’ve you been born to be?”
I shrugged.
“Dunno.”
“What d’you want to be?”
“Myself.” It sounded pathetic down here in the tank. “Nothing.” I thought of feathers and I looked up at the distant square of sky and I laughed. “A skylark!” I drew on the flamboyant part of myself. “A tightrope walker!”