The Fire-Eaters

  I opened my eyes. The universe went on forever and forever and it was so empty and so silent and I seemed so useless. I lifted the half-heart given to me by Ailsa and held it in my palm.

  “Look after the fawn,” I whispered. “Don't let it die.”

  I went back to bed.

  I sighed and said what I knew I should say.

  “Forgive Todd. Forgive Lubbock.”

  But I knew that was useless too, because I hated them too much.

  I fell asleep again at last.

  “Hello, bonny,” said McNulty. I smelt the fire on his breath. “Come and help me, bonny boy.”

  We sat on stools at wooden benches in the biology room. All around us were pictures of animals opened up, with their muscles and hearts and lungs all exposed. Glass jars in glass cases held tapeworms and frogs and lizards. There was a story that somewhere in the school there was a human fetus, preserved like these animals in formaldehyde, but only sixth-formers were allowed to see. Above the door as in every room, Christ hung in agony on his cross.

  The teacher was a little gentle woman called Miss Bute. She tapped on her desk. She said she was going to teach us about pain. She put us into pairs. I was with Daniel. I had to draw the outline of my hand on white paper. I had to lay my hand on the desk in front of Daniel and close my eyes. Daniel had a needle. He had to touch the back of my hand with the needle. I had to say yes whenever I felt the needle. He had to mark the results on the outline of my hand. A cross showed where I had felt the needle's touch. A circle showed where he had touched me with the needle but I had felt nothing. When I opened my eyes I saw that there were many places where I had felt nothing at all.

  “It is a map of pain,” said Miss Bute. “There are places where you could almost draw blood and nothing would be felt. And there are places where the gentlest touch produces pain.”

  We had to change. Now I had the needle. Daniel had to close his eyes. I touched his hand, listened to his answers, marked his map of pain. All around us there were giggles and gasps and anguished cries.

  “Now then,” Miss Bute kept saying. “Act your age, children. Please settle down.”

  Catherine Wilkes yelled that she was bleeding. Dom Carney and Tex Wilson started to fight.

  I marked Daniel's reponses on the outline of his hand. I started to tell him about McNulty, how he could touch fire, how he could push a whole skewer through himself.

  “I saw him do it,” I said. “In Newcastle.”

  “It's mind over matter,” Daniel said. “You can control anything if you put your mind to it.”

  There was a crash and screams of laughter as Tex Wilson fell off his stool.

  “Children!” yelled Miss Bute. “This is not what I expect from you! Stop what you—”

  Todd came in from the corridor with his strap in his hand. There was silence. Todd looked coldly at Miss Bute.

  “What are you learning?” he asked us.

  No one spoke.

  He prodded Geraldine Pease with the strap.

  “What are you learning?” he said.

  “About pain, sir,” said Geraldine.

  A cold grin spread over Todd's face.

  “How appropriate,” he murmured. “Who are the ringleaders of the disturbance, Miss Bute?”

  Miss Bute looked back at him.

  “It was not obvious, Mr. Todd,” she said.

  He sighed. His cold gaze swept across us.

  “Miss Bute is a young teacher,” he said. “It is your job to be good to her.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Todd,” she said. “I am sure that things are now calm enough for me to…”

  He waved her words aside.

  “And it is my job to protect her,” he said. He smiled. “Do you understand the ancient theory of sacrifice, children?”

  No one answered.

  “It is that one—or two, perhaps—must be made to suffer for the good of all.” He paused. “Any volunteers?” He waited. He smiled. “Ah, well. Then I must choose.”

  He pointed with his strap.

  “I will take you.”

  It was Tex Wilson.

  “And you.”

  It was Daniel.

  “Come with me,” said Todd. “I do not wish to disturb Miss Bute's lesson any more. We will do what we must do outside. Continue your lesson, Miss Bute.”

  Tex and Daniel went to him, left the classroom with him. There was deep silence when the door was closed. Miss Bute continued to look at the closed door. There were tears in her eyes when she turned back to us.

  “Robert,” she said to me. “You must pair up with Dominic now.”

  Daniel sat with us on the bus home that day.

  “How many did you get?” said Col.

  “Four,” said Daniel. He showed us the dark marks crossing his palms. “Don't worry,” he said. “I'll get him back.”

  “Oh, aye?” said Col.

  “Yes,” said Daniel. “He can't get away with going on like that.”

  “Oh, no?” said Col. “He's famous for it, man. Sacred Heart's hard man. He's always done it and he always will and there's nowt nobody can do.”

  “What if your dad sees?” said Diggy.

  Daniel looked: What did Diggy mean?

  “Sees what?” he said.

  “The strap marks. If my dad saw I'd been belted, he'd give us another ploating hisself.”

  “But I didn't do anything, Diggy.”

  “That means nowt. He'd bliddy kill us, man.”

  “I bet Tex gets clouted,” said Ed.

  Daniel laughed and shook his head and sat back in his seat and looked at us all. I thought of his dad, with his jeans and leather jacket and his hair curling over his collar.

  “Maybe my dad should come and photograph your dad,” Daniel said to Diggy.

  “You haven't seen the mush on him,” said Diggy. “He'd break the bliddy camera. Me mother, now, she looks canny. But no. If anybody tried photographing her, they'd get ploated and all. Mebbes he'd better just keep out the way.”

  I got off with Daniel at the Rat. We walked down his lane together to the beach. I told him more about McNulty: the fire-breathing, the chains, the little sack for coins.

  “Me dad knew him from the war,” I said.

  “And he's come back in time for the next war.”

  “D'you think so?”

  “The Russians just exploded the biggest bomb the world's ever known. The explosion was six miles high. They say that they wondered if the explosion would ever stop, or if it would just keep on and on and never stop.”

  “It couldn't do that, could it?”

  “My dad says they're playing with things they don't understand. They don't know the forces they might unleash.”

  We approached his house.

  “Are you in a hurry?” he said. “D'you want to come inside or…”

  He toed the sand.

  I shrugged.

  “Aye,” I said. “OK.”

  There was no one in. He let himself in with his own key. There were boxes full of books in the hallway. He laughed.

  “We're still getting sorted out,” he said. “Look at them all. Books, books, books!”

  He got some biscuits out of a tin and we ate them in the room with the big window facing the sea. Plaster had been ripped off the walls of the room so the stone showed through. There was a thick cream carpet. There was a white record player on a wide shelf and a load of records.

  “We listen to music all the time,” said Daniel. “Jazz, pop, that sort of stuff. Do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Just the wireless sometimes,” I said. I chewed my biscuit and watched a trawler on the sea. I wanted to say that my mam sang a lot but I didn't. I wanted to find some common ground but I couldn't.

  “Do you play football or anything?” I said.

  “I'm a runner. I won the sprint in my school sports day. I was given a small silver cup.”

  “Sometimes we play up past the tip. You could come and join in.”
>
  “Maybe I could.”

  “You must've had loads of mates down in Kent, eh?”

  “Yeah. They said they'll come to see me, but it's not exactly near, is it?”

  He went to a shelf and started turning over some pictures.

  “Something to show you,” he said.

  He passed me a black-and-white photograph, a foot wide. It was our house, with a stretch of sand in front and the sky above with a few wispy clouds in it. Nothing else. It looked dead still. It looked ancient and new at the same time.

  “See them?” he said. “Look closer.”

  As I looked more closely, I saw the three faces beyond the front window, hardly visible, hardly there at all.

  “See yourselves?” he asked.

  “Aye.”

  We were like three pale ghosts, half in and half out of the darkness.

  “Have it,” said Daniel. “Go on, he makes loads of prints of the ones he likes.”

  I looked again. I saw the twist in the door frame, the dip in the roof ridge, the thin cracks in the front wall. I saw the three faces again.

  “Maybe it'll be one that gets into his book,” he said.

  I turned my eyes away. I breathed.

  “What else is there?” I asked.

  “Oh, lots of stuff.” He flicked through the prints again. “This one's his favorite so far.”

  He turned it over. It was Ailsa and her family in the sea. They were dark curved figures, dark as the coal that was heaped on the cart behind them, dark as Wilberforce, who stared gloomily toward the land. Ailsa stretched down with her hands toward the water. Her dad held a great bucket on his shoulder. Losh and Yak strode through the breaking waves with their shovels.

  “They look great, don't they?” said Daniel. “Dad says they look like ancient devils or something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like something from ancient tales. Half human. He says you'd only find them in a place like Keely Bay.”

  “You think we're all like that?”

  He shrugged. He looked down, but I saw the grinning in his eyes.

  I pointed.

  “That's Ailsa,” I said.

  “That stubby round thing? Is that the one that should've come to school but didn't?”

  “Aye.”

  “She must be stupid.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Yes. She's a waster.”

  “And that's her dad, Mr. Spink. And that's her brothers, Losh and Yak. And that's Wilberforce.”

  “Wilberforce!”

  “Aye. Wilberforce.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  I clenched my fists. I wanted to grab him and fight him there and then.

  “Look at the state of them,” he said. “How long have they been doing this?”

  “Forever.”

  “Bloody hell. What a life.”

  I was going to hit him when I looked out and saw Joseph out on the beach, at the shoreline, looking toward us. Daniel saw him too.

  “He's got him as well,” he said. “The jeans and the boots and the oily hair and the cigarettes. Says you'd only get somebody like him in a place like this. Another throwback.”

  “He's Joseph Connor,” I said. “He's my friend. He's worth ten of you.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Aye.”

  “That shows how stupid you are as well, doesn't it?”

  I raised my hands.

  “Are you going to fight me?” he mocked. “That's what you do up here, isn't it? Scrap and fight like animals.”

  He curled his lip. He raised his own hands, fists clenched.

  “Come on, then,” he said. “You think you can beat me easily, don't you? Come on, then. Prove it. You might be in for a surprise.”

  He laughed at me. I lowered my hands. I left the house. I went toward the sea. Joseph waited for me there. His face was cold.

  “What you doing in there?” he said.

  “Nowt.”

  “Nowt? Well, this is for nowt, then.”

  He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, then shoved me down. I knew Daniel would be watching as I sprawled at the edge of the sea like a half-human thing while Joseph walked away.

  When I got in, Dad was sitting there in the front room reading the Chronicle.

  “What you doing in?” I said.

  “Been to the doctor,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Nowt.”

  Mam came to the doorway.

  “It's nothing, Bobby,” she said. “He had a funny turn at work. But look at him. Fit as a lop.”

  There was a box of aspirin and the Gypsy's twist of paper and a half-empty bottle of Lourdes water on the sideboard.

  “Flu or something,” said Dad. “It's under attack from all quarters.”

  I showed them the photograph of the house and they laughed.

  “Fancy taking a picture of our house,” Mam said.

  “It might be in a book,” I told her.

  “Fame at last,” said Dad; then he caught his breath. “There's us, look, love.”

  Mam stared.

  “Well, I never,” she said. She laughed. “I should've done me hair.”

  “You cannot see nowt, man,” he said. “You'd need a bloody magnifying glass to make us out. Done me hair! Look at that roof, eh? Looks like it could cave in any minute.”

  He coughed and swallowed. Mam looked at him, then looked away. He took a deep breath and laughed.

  “Hey,” he said. “Look what else I dug out of that cupboard, son.”

  He reached over the side of his chair and lifted a hat up. It was a high brown felt hat with a wide rim. He put it on his head. One side of the rim was horizontal, the other was vertical. He saluted.

  “It's me Burma hat,” he said. He coughed again and couldn't get his words out for a while. “Not seen it since you were a twinkle in me eye,” he said at last.

  He held it out to me.

  “Smell it,” he said.

  I held it to my nose.

  “Smell deep enough and you'll smell the jungle and the war and the journey home.”

  I breathed. I tried to imagine the smells of such strange and distant things. I put the hat on my head and it fell down and hooded my eyes.

  “Was hardly more than a bairn meself when I first put that on,” he said.

  He coughed again. He recovered himself. He put the hat back on his own head. Then he got up and marched toward the window.

  “Ten-shun!” he snapped.

  He stood dead still, a silhouette against the sea and sky.

  “He's got to have a checkup at the hospital,” whispered Mam. “But don't worry, Bobby. He's fine.”

  My homework was about skin, its elasticity, its networks of nerve endings, its blood vessels and sweat glands and follicles, its loops and whorls, its textures, its colors, the way it reacts to heat and cold, the way it reddens and whitens, the way it trembles and creeps, the way it keeps the outside out and the inside in, but how the barrier is broken time and again by germs and sweat and biting insects and how easy it is to pierce, how easy it is to draw blood. I wrote a couple of pages. I drew a few diagrams. Then I stopped. I got my blazer and searched the seams. I found Mam's tacking pin. I sat in front of the Lourdes light and started touching the needle point to my skin. In the places where I felt nothing, I pressed harder until I could feel something. In one or two places, I drew tiny bulbs of blood. I pushed the needle into the hard skin at the edge of my thumbnail and found I could push it all the way through and feel no pain. I tried other places, but could tell that I'd quickly be in agony. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine being McNulty. I held an imaginary skewer and mimed pushing it from cheek to cheek. How could he do such a thing? I went downstairs. Mam and Dad were watching telly. I told them I was getting a drink of water. I found a box of matches and took them upstairs. I opened my window to let the smell out. I lit a match. I touched the flame with my fingertip and gasped with pain. But I found I
could run my finger through the flame and feel next to nothing. I practiced doing it slowly and more slowly. I tried to imagine being McNulty. I held a lighted match before my open mouth and drew it closer, closer. I flinched from its heat. I imagined taking a great blazing torch into my mouth. How could he do such a thing? I went to the little bookshelf on the landing. I found a picture of St. Sebastian with a dozen arrows in him and his eyes turned toward heaven. I read about saints who fasted and whipped themselves and went mad and spent years in wild places. Why did they do such things? What was the point of all that pain? I thought of Jesus writhing on his cross. What did it mean, that his pain had helped to save us? I went back to my room and watched night falling over the sea. The light turned, the sea turned, the stars came out. I breathed the night air. I wanted to stop being me, just for a moment, a second. I wanted to break free of my skin, to be the sea, the sky, a stone, the lighthouse light, to be out there in the gathering darkness, to be nothing, unconscious, wild and free.

  “Bobby! Bobby!”

  “Yes, Mam?”

  “Howay, son. Leave them books. I've put some cocoa on.”

  Another Sunday morning. I went to the quayside again with Mam but McNulty was nowhere to be seen. We drank hot mugs of tea. We watched the seagulls plunging from their nests on the underside of the bridge. We inspected the rainbow patterns on the surface of the river. Mam bought some scarves for the coming winter and as she passed the money over, she said, “There's often a man here. He breathes fire and…”

  The stall holder had a thick woollen coat on and thick gloves.

  “Oh, him,” she said. “The nutter. He's not been seen. Just as well, if you ask me. You call that entertainment? Should be strung up, if you ask me.”

  We took the lift up to the bridge again. The man inside remembered us. He giggled and showed us the entry in his notebook.

  “See,” he said. “You're written down. You really do exist.”

  He ushered us out.

  “Goodbye, madam,” he said. “Farewell, young sir.” He dictated our new entry to himself. “The return visit from a lady and her son …”

  We looked down from the bridge, but still no sign of McNulty. We walked back up into the city. We headed homeward in the bus. I looked out at the streets and then the fields and lanes, hoping that I'd see him. Mam hummed “Bobby Shafto” at my side.