The Fire-Eaters

  “Hello, new kid,” he said when he was ten feet away. “I said hello, how d'you do, nice to see you.”

  Daniel stood calf-deep in the clear pool, sandals in his hand. He had a loose striped T-shirt on. His skin was tanned. He held his hair back, looked at us through clear blue eyes.

  “I said hello,” said Joseph. “Are you deaf or daft?”

  “Hello,” said Daniel.

  He bent down and tugged at another rock.

  “Are you pestering our crabs?” said Joseph. “Poking our starfish?”

  He picked up a fist-sized stone and lobbed it into Daniel's pool.

  “Joseph, man,” I whispered, but he took no notice.

  “Leave them poor little beasts alone,” he said. “What they done to you?”

  Daniel didn't look at us. He stepped out of the other side of the pool and started to walk away.

  “Are you a nance?” said Joseph. He sniggered. “You must be.” He nudged me. “He must be! Deaf and daft and a nance.”

  There was a drone of engines in the sky. Daniel looked up, but it was just a plane banking over the sea before it headed into Newcastle. He looked back.

  “I'm Joseph Connor!” said Joseph. “And this is me mate Bobby Burns! Watch your step, bonny lad. You'll never know when we're about.”

  Daniel walked on, waded homeward through the sea again.

  Joseph laughed.

  “What's wrong with you?” he said.

  “Nowt,” I answered.

  “Good. He's got to learn whose place this is. Hoy!” he yelled. “Nancy boy!”

  Daniel just walked on.

  Joseph took a sheath knife out of his pocket, took the knife out of the sheath and held it up. He touched the point and laughed through gritted teeth.

  “Howay,” he said. “Let's play war.”

  We went into the pines. The earth was soft, the light was dappled. It was a place where everybody loved to play, and it was a place where lots of kids went to war. Away from the footpaths there were holes and dens and trenches. Ropes dangled from the trees, some of them with nooses at the end. Kids' names were carved into the bark. The names went ages back, back to the time my dad himself was just a kid. Ever since anybody could remember, this was where kids played out battles against the Germans or the Japanese. The pines became the Somme, the Burmese jungle, the coast of Normandy, the streets of Berlin. Kids became cowboys or American Indians and stalked each other with guns and tomahawks. They turned into Christians and Muslims slashing each other apart during the Crusades. Kids were tortured, hanged, drawn and quartered. They had their hearts ripped out by Aztec priests, they were thrown to the lions by Ancient Romans, they were bludgeoned by cave dwellers wielding clubs. Some days the place rang with cries and screams and laughter: Kill! Get him! String him up! Die, you fiend!

  Joseph threw his knife and it thudded into a tree. He laughed.

  “Gan on,” he said. “Pull the knife out. Then try and get me.”

  I went to the knife, pulled it out, and suddenly he was at me, wrenching it from my hand, holding it to my throat.

  “Too slow, little Bobby,” he said. “I'd've had your throat cut before you knew it.”

  He laughed again.

  “Mebbes I'll be a commando and not a builder,” he said. “Travel. Adventure. War.”

  He stabbed the tree.

  “Got ya!” he said.

  We ran through the trees carrying fallen branches as if they were guns. We dropped into a trench. We peered over the edge. Through the trees we saw the people on the beach. We set up a mortar and cupped our ears as we set it off. We hunkered down and made the sounds of distant explosions. Then we peered over the edge again.

  “There's still survivors,” Joseph said, so we set the mortar off again.

  We played an hour or so like that, dealing imaginary death and mayhem to Keely Bay; then we sat together against the rough trunk of a pine. Joseph cleaned his knife, stabbing it time and again into the sandy earth until its blade was gleaming.

  “Kid got knifed at school last term,” he said. “One of the third-years. It's true,” he said when he saw my amazement. “A little cheeky kid called Billy Fox. Nowt dangerous. He just got it in the arm.” He put his knife back in its sheath. “Makes you think, though, eh.”

  We stood up and headed back.

  “Slog Porter from Blyth done it. He's a cracker. Really bloody scary. It's the last we'll see of him, I hope.”

  Closer to the beach, the smell of chips came from the café. Joseph breathed deep.

  “Bliddy lovely,” he said.

  He lit a cigarette.

  We passed a couple lying close together behind a windbreak. Joseph nudged me. Their tinny transistor played pop, then moved on to the news. The sound faded behind us.

  “Do you think there'll be another war?” I said.

  “A war?”

  “The Third World War. Atom bombs. The end of everything.”

  “Why, no,” he answered. “Me dad says we've grown out of all that stuff.”

  In the water, some kids were squealing that they'd seen a shark.

  “Mind you,” said Joseph, “if there is a war, I'll be there. A commando.” He lifted his knife and dived at a phantom in the sand. “Die, you fiend!”

  I was just wiping the sauce off my mouth after lunch when I heard cart wheels rumbling in the lane outside. Ailsa and her brothers and her dad went past the window. Their ancient pony, Wilberforce, was pulling their cart. Ailsa sat in the back, on top of a heap of coal. She leaned down and peered in and saw me there and waved. Her face was nearly as black as her hair and her eyes were sparkling bright.

  Mam laughed.

  “Coaly scamp,” she said. “Just like her mother was, God bless her soul.”

  Ailsa's face went out of sight, but the voice rang out.

  “Bobby! Howay, help us, Bobby, man!”

  I grabbed an apple and went after them and Mam yelled I'd better make sure I had a damn good wash before I came back in.

  They were just a few yards past the house. Ailsa's dad and her brothers Losh and Yak were walking.

  “Bobbeee!” Ailsa yelled when she saw me.

  She reached out a hand and I grabbed it and Yak shoved and soon I was up there with her.

  “Are you looking for work, lad?” said her dad.

  “Aye,” I said.

  He spat out a black stream from his black face.

  “Then you'll have some tanners in your pocket by teatime.”

  We trundled on.

  “We're hoying this off,” said Ailsa. “Then we're going in again.”

  The lane was all potholes and the wheels kept slipping and we rocked and slithered on the cold damp coal. She lay back like it was a mound of warm soft sand. I sat beside her. There were gannets and larks and gulls above us. A flock of pigeons clattered past.

  “Look at this, Bobby,” she said.

  She dug in a pocket and brought out one half of a broken metal heart attached to a rusted chain.

  She rubbed it with her fingers.

  “We're always finding little treasures in the coal,” she said. “Look, there's words on it.”

  She scraped them with a little penknife. She showed the words to me. We deciphered them together.

  Without my other half I am as nothing.

  She laughed.

  “What a tragic little tale there could be there,” she said. She put the half-heart in my hand. “Go on, it's yours. Daddy! Tell that silly Wilberforce to stop his rocking.”

  “Stop that rocking, horse!” her dad yelled, and we all laughed.

  We came to their house, an old redbrick place with rusting lean-tos all around. There was an ancient pickup truck and heaps of coal and scrap metal. Behind the house, an allotment garden ran toward the dunes. Huge flowers were blooming there. There were onions and carrots and potatoes, all in neat straight rows. There was a greenhouse filled with gleaming red tomatoes. There was a bright blue painted pigeon loft with its doors wide ope
n. The flock of pigeons clattered and wheeled above us. Chickens squawked and pecked in the yard.

  Ailsa jumped down and ran into the house and put a kettle on the gas. I helped the men to shovel the coal from the cart. We all drank mugs of tea, standing in a group outside the back door.

  “Your mam and dad OK?” said her dad.

  “Aye,” I said.

  “Not seen him down the Rat.”

  “He's not been getting out much,” I said.

  “No? He's working, though?”

  “Aye. But he's on holiday this week.”

  “You'll be off to the Riviera, then?”

  “Mebbe. Or mebbe we'll just go to Worgate again.”

  “Hahaha. That's where we're ganning and all. There or Worgarden.”

  He swiped his fist across his lips. He glugged his tea.

  “You know,” he said, “there was a time it looked like that dad of yours'd be setting up in competition.”

  “Aye. He's told me.”

  We grinned. It was the tale of how in his young days Dad got himself an old pram and a shovel and a sieve and started to try to get the coal, and how it led to nothing but jokes and laughter from Ailsa's dad's lot.

  “Aye,” said Ailsa's dad. “They were hard days, that's the truth of it. He didn't mean no harm. And he was called up pretty soon so it came to nowt.”

  He kicked a chicken from under his feet.

  “Tell him I've been asking,” he said, and he looked me in the eye. “He's a good man, that dad of yours. And a good woman is your mam. Now then, lads. And little lass. Let's get splashing. Wilberforce! You got any life left in them bones?”

  We went to the sea. I rolled my jeans up past my knees but it was useless. In seconds I was soaked. Ailsa's dad and brothers wore ancient chest-high waders. She was bare-legged.

  “Howay, man,” said Yak. “Get your bliddy keks off.”

  So I stripped down to my pants, threw my jeans onto the sand and plunged forward into the waves. I had a battered metal sieve. I shoved it down into the sand beneath the sea, let the waves sluice through it so that the sand fell through; then I tipped the black remains onto the cart. Ailsa's dad and brothers worked further out, with huge flat spades and massive sieves. Yak and Losh kept wading back with buckets full of coal.

  “Black gold!” sang Losh. “Come and buy our beautiful black gold.”

  “Hoy!” yelled Yak.

  “Aye!” I answered.

  “Why did the priest take a machine gun to church?”

  “I don't know!” I yelled. “Why?”

  “To make the people holy!”

  Ailsa worked with me and was faster and surer than me and she moved in rhythm with the waves. She slicked her hair from her eyes with strong wet hands.

  “You're doing great, Bobby boy,” she shouted. “Ain't he, Daddy? Ain't Bobby doing great?”

  “Aye!” laughed her dad. “A bit more time and he'll be nearly as good as his father was.”

  Afterward, Wilberforce pulled the cart from the sea. Losh put a head-bag full of hay on him. Seawater drained down through the coal, through the timbers of the cart, and soaked away into the sand. The men smoked. I sat on a stone beside Ailsa.

  “Joseph reckons you'll not be coming into school,” I said.

  She threw her head back.

  “Him!”

  “He reckons you might just try to go to his place.”

  “What does he know?”

  I shoved my toes down into the sand.

  “You going to go anywhere?” I said.

  “I might and I mightn't,” she answered.

  “You got your uniform?” I said.

  “Uniform!”

  Yak was watching and listening and grinning.

  “What's the point of it?” he said.

  “The point of what?” I said.

  “What's the point of lasses learning?” he said.

  I shrugged, couldn't say anything.

  “See?” he said. “No point at all. All they need is a canny lad with a bit of brawn and a bit of brain and a mind to make a bob or two.”

  He whistled, pondered, and gazed into the sky.

  “I wonder,” he said. “Is there any takers?”

  Then he and Losh rushed at us and lifted us up and threw us into the turning waves and I thrashed my arms and gasped for breath and blew out water and swam back to the shore at Ailsa's side and we lay there hooting and laughing on the sand, and it was wonderful.

  “They're teachers,” said Mam. “That's the story. At the university, they say.”

  “University!” said Dad.

  “And there's a daughter, but she's traveling. It's all a bit vague. She's called Pat and he's called Paul.”

  The three of us were at the window, looking out. Daniel and his parents were on the beach.

  “And Paul's got a brother that's an actor.”

  “Hm!” said Dad. He lit a cigarette and coughed.

  “He's on the telly sometimes. He was on Emergency Ward 10 last week.”

  Paul had a camera. He kept taking photographs— not of his family, but of the place. He pointed it toward our house and moved toward us and we moved back.

  “And Daniel'll be at school with you, Bobby. They were seen buying the blazer at Raymond Barnes.”

  “You spoken to him yet?” said Dad.

  I shook my head.

  “He might make a nice pal for you,” said Mam.

  She clicked her tongue.

  “Put that out,” she said to Dad.

  He rolled his eyes, but took a final drag and threw his cigarette into the cold grate. He coughed and swallowed.

  “What's he up to now?” he said.

  Paul was standing with his legs apart and the camera to his face again.

  “What on earth's he think he's seeing?” said Mam. She slicked her hair down. She laughed. “I'd've washed the windows if I'd known.”

  Paul took his photograph, then turned away, with the camera slung over his shoulder, and his hands in his pockets. The sky was huge and blue and empty: just the sun, the gulls, the pigeons. There was a trawler a half mile out, with gulls all around it, plunging for waste.

  Mam put her arm around me and kissed me.

  “That's for nothing,” she said. “Now get out from under me feet and let me get on.”

  “Howay,” said Dad. “Something to show you. That feller's just put it in me mind.”

  We went up onto the landing. He opened the door of the high cupboard. He stood on tiptoes but couldn't reach the top shelf, so he put his arms around my thighs and lifted me.

  “You're looking for a black book,” he said. “That old album thing. Remember? God knows where it is. Shove your hand under them blankets.”

  I rested on his shoulder and slid my hand in. There were boxes and tins and lumpy parcels.

  “Like a book,” he said. “Thick. Somewhere in there, I'm sure.”

  I pulled a square cardboard box out to clear my way.

  “Bugger,” he said. “We still got them things? Hoy that down and all.”

  I slid my hand further in, felt a book, dragged it. He saw its edge.

  “Aye,” he said. “Good lad. That's the one.”

  He opened them in my room, by the window. The cardboard box was first. It had a gas mask inside.

  “Thought we'd chucked these out years ago,” he said. “Here, give us your head.”

  It was black rubber, with straps to go around your head and with thick glass lenses for your eyes. There was a long snout-shaped piece that covered your nose and mouth and that had a metal filter at its end. He rubbed the lenses with his fingertips. He stretched the straps over my head and they caught in my hair and tugged. He pulled the snout over my face. I gasped. I had to suck for breath. The air that came was fusty and ancient. I goggled out through the cloudy lenses at his grinning face. My face suddenly grew hot. I sucked for breath again. I ripped the straps from my head and ripped strands of hair away with them. I pulled the snout away and ope
ned my mouth wide and breathed.

  “Aye,” he said. “Not much fun, eh?”

  He weighed the mask in his hand, remembering.

  “Every living soul had one of these,” he said. “Young and old, big and small. No one moved without one. We lived in fear and dread. When they coming? What they going to do to us? Then nothing happened, then we got used to it. Then they did start coming, and the bombs did start falling. There was no gas, though. Not that. Not the worst things we'd imagined.”

  Then he put the mask back down and pulled the book to us. When he started to turn the pages I knew I had seen them before, years ago.

  “I been saying for yonks I'll sort these out,” he said. “Look at the blinking state of them.”

  The photographs had come away from their thin mountings. They slid out from between the pages. All of them were black-and-white. All of them were faded. There he was, my dad as a little boy on the beach in wellingtons and shorts and a scruffy vest and a leaping mongrel at his side. There he was with Joseph Connor's dad, both of them kneeling by a smoking fire in the pines with bows and arrows in their hands and with seagull feathers in their hair. There he was with Ailsa's dad, teenaged and thin and hungry-looking, perched by the rock pools, smoking.

  “But these aren't the ones,” he said, moving on, turning a sheaf of pages until there he was again, in his army kit, cocking his thumb for the photographer with the jungle behind him and the Burmese sun beating down.

  He sighed.

  “A lad called Jackie Marr from Shields took that one,” he said. “That very morning a sniper's bullet went straight through his poor heart. Ah, well …” He turned the page. He grinned. “Now look at this, son.”

  Now I saw them, I remembered these as well: the snake charmer who played his pipes while a cobra rose from the basket between his feet; the little naked boy climbing away from a bunch of soldiers up a rope that seemed attached to nothing but empty air; the ancient turbaned man lying on his bed of nails in a seething marketplace; and then the wild man with painted stripes on his face, who glared full-face into the camera and had a sword stuck through his face from cheek to cheek.

  “Just like McNulty!” I said.