The Tightrope Walkers

  “Oh. It’s for the party, is it? Then ye’d better get yerselves inside.”

  He slid great bolts and locks and pulled the gates. They groaned and clanked and screeched as they opened.

  “Howay in,” said Mr. Martin. “Mek yerselves at yem.”

  We started going through.

  “Tek care, though,” he said. “There’s some lads in here that’ll gobble ye up if ye don’t watch oot!”

  Bill led us all up ornate metal steps. We came to a wooden door with AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY printed on it.

  “Ready?” said Bill.

  “Yes,” we said.

  “Then come inside.”

  We went through the door. The others filed in behind us. We entered a huge room with wide windows that overlooked the yard. The men grinned as the kids gasped: the half-built ship outside, so huge, so dark, so close. It blotted out the river, obscured the opposite bank, filled half the sky, filled half the world.

  There were decorations strung across the ceiling, a bright-lit Christmas tree in a corner. There were framed drawings on the walls: splendid finished ships that now sailed the seven seas, some of them a century or more old. There were photographs of famous launches.

  The draughtsmen unrolled great sheets of paper for us on massive room-long tables. They bore drawings: ships and bits of ships; hulls and decks and funnels and anchors and chains and gantries.

  Bill stood with us and directed us to see.

  “See?” he said. “Everything must be drawn before it can be made. We draw every single step in every single stairway. Every water pipe, each single electric switch. We show where every single rivet goes.”

  Holly traced the lines with her fingertips. Everything was so clear, so accurate.

  “Proper art,” said Holly.

  Bill smiled.

  “Ah, no,” he said. “We’re copiers. We draw the plans, but we’re just followers of other plans. We draw the things we’re told to draw.”

  He laughed.

  “We draw bits and pieces, fragments. We make them exactly right. No room for any imagination.”

  He pointed through the window.

  “And the fragments turn to steel and men turn steel to ships.”

  We all looked out at the wondrous work.

  “And if we all do it right,” he said, “the ship goes out onto the sea and doesn’t sink. And then we move on to another ship.”

  The drawings were rolled up again. Sandwiches and cakes and lemonade and orange squash were brought into the room by waitresses in black-and-white and laid out on the tables.

  I chewed a ham sandwich. It was crustless and triangular. I drank a glass of orange squash.

  “Does somebody,” said Holly, “have the whole ship in their head? Every bit of it, right from the start, everything in order?”

  “I guess they must have an idea of it,” said Bill. “Not all the detail, maybe. But it must be like they have a vision.”

  We looked out at the ship again.

  “So that great metal thing outside started as something like a dream. And look at the damn thing now. Pretty solid, eh?”

  We went on eating, drinking.

  “Mebbe the dreamers are the true artists of this place,” said Bill.

  I kept looking out. Dark-dressed men lugged machinery and tools through the December winds, they clambered across frail-looking scaffolding, they crawled into gaping holes in the ship’s side, they bent to the decks like they were praying. I went closer to the window.

  “Looking for your dad?” said Bill.

  “Aye.”

  “He’ll be one of them with sparks flying all around him,” he said.

  But there were so many of them like that, and so many of them walking, crawling, squirming, praying. Was that him? Or that? Or that? They were like ghosts, like devils, like a living part of the ship itself.

  “No?” said Bill.

  I shook my head.

  “Mebbe he’s inside it,” said Bill.

  A fat man in a black suit entered. He spoke into a microphone. He was so very proud of us all, he said.

  He spoke directly to the children.

  “Are you proud of the work of your fathers, boys and girls?” he asked.

  “Yes!” was called.

  “Yes, indeed. Where would we be without them?” He snorted. “Without these fine artists, that ship out there could sink! And we don’t want that, do we, children?”

  “No! No!”

  “No indeed!”

  He told us he was thankful for the achievements of the past. So hopeful for the days that were to come. So delighted to see us here, the citizens and shipbuilders of the future.

  He pointed out towards the ship.

  “Look at that,” he said. “One of the great achievements of mankind. And it is made here, on this river, by us.”

  He raised a glass of champagne towards the ship, then towards the draughtsmen, then towards the children.

  “You should be very proud,” he said to us. “Will you be the ones who will help us build the ships of the future?”

  “Yes!” some called.

  Even with the windows closed, the din and clatter from outside were immense. Dark bodies in dark clothes in the deepening dusk. Soon they blended with the colour of the ship. Long fluorescent lights were turned on in the drawing office and spotlights began to shine outside.

  The ship became truly beautiful then, truly like a vision. The sparks from welding rods and caulking hammers were like fireworks. Strings of light dangled as on Christmas trees. Tiny jets of acetylene burned bright blue. Light shone out from trapdoors and portholes and holes and cracks and gaps. The sky above became deep red, and black smoke from braziers on the deck swirled across it. The dark figures climbed, clambered, slithered, emerged and disappeared.

  We all got a selection box with chocolates inside. I was given a biro with four colours in it. Holly’s gift was a little set of drawing pencils.

  We were told we had to leave before the workers were let out, or we’d be crushed in the stampede. We went back through the gates and walked uphill again. After five minutes we heard the grinding of the gates, and the hectic clatter of running men in heavy boots on cobblestones.

  “Run!” we giggled. “Run!”

  “Did it gan well?” said Dad when he returned home.

  He stood before the fire, warming his legs and backside at it.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “They looked after ye all reet?”

  “Yes.” I showed him the biro. “They gave me this.”

  “I seen you,” he said. “I seen you lookin out. I even waved at you.”

  I clicked the biro.

  “Did ye see me?” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  I wrote a green word, a black word, a blue word, a red.

  The lights flickered on our little Christmas tree.

  “You divent bliddy think so?”

  “No. I couldn’t make you out, Dad.”

  He spat into the flames, lit a cigarette, cracked a can of Export. He gulped as he drank. His throat crackled as he sucked smoke down into his lungs.

  “Dom said it looked beautiful, love,” said Mam.

  “Did he now?”

  He paused while he drank and smoked, then he came at me. He dragged me from the sofa, across the room, pushed me down onto the floor beside the fire.

  “Kneel!” he snarled. “Stare down into them bliddy flames.”

  He pushed my face close to the heat. With his free hand he lifted the steel poker and hammered it against the metal grate, faster faster, louder louder.

  “Francis,” said Mam, but he took no notice.

  “Listen to the thunder, boy,” he roared.

  I smelt the drink and tobacco on his breath, felt his rough hand on my neck.

  “Listen to the din and breathe the bliddy fumes!” he yelled.

  I could do nothing but what I was told.

  “This is what’s called being c
ruel to be kind,” he shouted. “This is what I bliddy do!”

  The heat of the fire began to scorch me.

  “How do you like it?” he said. “How do you bliddy like it?”

  “I don’t!” I said.

  “Do you think it’s beautiful now, then?”

  “No, Dad! No!”

  “Bliddy no!”

  He released me and I knelt up.

  “I’m a man,” he said, “who has taken great sea journeys and who has fought for freedom and who has come home to marry and to have a boy and to work for the good of the country and to believe in the future and now I crawl around ships in hail and sleet and I hammer at seams of steel inch by bliddy inch. I do it every day and I will do it every day until I’m done.”

  I backed away to Mam’s side.

  He showed me the scars on his hands, the rips in his clothes.

  “This is what I diy!” he said. “Never forget it, and never forget where you come from.”

  “He won’t, Francis. Will you, son? No matter how far you go.”

  “How far he’ll go! Mebbe he won’t go anywhere!”

  “He will. We have come far already, he will go further.”

  Dad cursed, grimaced.

  “But he has me in him. And he has his wretched grandfather in him. And all the mes and all the bliddy grandfathers.”

  “Don’t fret so, Francis. He’s clever. And there’s so many opportunities. . . .”

  “Opportunities for them like us to fall right back to where we started. There’s them that want it. They need us to build their ships and dig their coal and lick their boots and arses, but when things get tough they won’t give a thought to kickin us all back down again.”

  He threw his cigarette into the flames. He lit another.

  “I’m sorry, son,” he muttered.

  And he left us for the Iona.

  I got a knife that Christmas. A copy of a bowie knife, made on the sly by one of Dad’s mates in the yard. Wooden handle, ship-steel blade. Lots of the welders’ and caulkers’ sons had ordered them.

  Dad laughed.

  “Divent let the bosses know,” he said. “They’d have our guts for garters.”

  I wore it in its leather sheath on my belt. Dad said it looked great, but Mam said it made me look the opposite of me. She bought me books and pens.

  There was a card from Mrs. Charlton. A note inside praised my style and my cleverness.

  How proud your parents must be, she wrote. And how proud I am, too. Your story has pride of place on our library table, Dominic.

  There was a folded pound note with it.

  I spent it on pop and crisps and sweets and a single cigarette and match from Dixon’s newsagents. I held the knife in my hand as I smoked the cigarette in a narrow alley beneath the town square. I dreamed of being hard as Vincent McAlinden, of caring about nothing, and I coughed, gagged and spewed the crisps and sweets onto the concrete at my feet.

  I touched Holly’s tongue with mine. We were in Bill Stroud’s allotment, one of many beyond the upper limits of the estate, before the sloping playing fields began.

  Holly had paint and paper spread out on an ancient table by the greenhouse. The table’s cracked timber was hot in the sun. She was drawing me, painting me.

  “Keep still,” she said.

  Brilliant red tomatoes hung from bright green stems and leaves just inside the greenhouse glass.

  The sun glared on the glass, on us.

  Bill leaned down over an open cold frame, picked tiny weeds from among the cabbages growing in there.

  “Now this is proper art,” he said. “The work of skill and the imagination. A blending of the seen and never-been-seen-before.”

  He turned his face to the sun.

  “And this is the life,” he said.

  Skylarks singing, chickens clucking, kids yelling on the playing fields. The air was filled with the scents of earth, with the talk and laughter of the men in other allotments, with the endless engine din.

  Holly gave me sharp teeth and claws, a hunched and lumpen body. She dressed me in a long black coat. In some of her pictures I filled the space, in others I was a distant dark shape in a broad green landscape. The work was lifelike, dream-like.

  “Keep still,” she said.

  “What’s the point, when you make me nowt like me?”

  Bill laughed without turning to us.

  “She draws the inner you!” he said. “She draws an ideal you.”

  I left my bench. I dug in the earth with my knife. I stabbed a beetle, sliced a worm. I thought of going to play football with the lads. Sometimes these people tired me. I was just a kid. I wanted to run free with other kids, to yell, to fight. I wanted to fling the knife at something.

  Holly drew on. Bill had been teaching her since she was a baby, guiding her hands and fingers across the pages. Now she drew fluently, gracefully. Things she saw merged with things she dreamed, things she imagined.

  “She draws the beast within!” said Bill. “And the beast needs to be watered.”

  He opened a bottle of lemonade and we all glugged from it. We wiped away the droplets from our lips and chins.

  “Hungry?” said Bill.

  “Aye,” we said.

  “Then go and plunder those fruits in there.”

  He turned back to his weeds.

  We went into the greenhouse glare and heat. I could hardly breathe at first. Wasps and flies droned and rattled at the apex of the glass. Tall plants and brilliant fruit crowded against the walls and us. We reached into the plants, twisted warm tomatoes from their stems, weighed them in our fingers, lifted them, bit into them. I halved one with my knife, the sharp blade sliding smoothly through the skin and flesh. I gave her one half, bit into the other. So delicious. Juice and seeds dribbled from my lips. I swiped them with my fist, bit again, picked again, cut again, bit again. We laughed at the mess on each other’s faces. Suddenly we both leaned forward to lick each other’s chins and our tongues touched. We stepped back, caught our breath, stunned by the sudden soft electrifying roughness there.

  We turned our eyes away from each other. I closed them for an instant to retain the taste of her.

  Then a knocking on the glass. Bill beckoning: come quick!

  We hurried out.

  “There!” he said.

  Jack Law, striding on the footpath that ran alongside the allotments. Jack Law, heading towards the hills that were said to be his home. He moved swiftly, feet padding on the earth, hair bobbing in the breeze, little knapsack bouncing at his back. He moved swiftly away, on to the fields, heading upward.

  “Jack Law?” breathed Holly.

  “Jack Law,” breathed Bill.

  I often dreamed of him. Dreamed of being him, an explorer, a wanderer, without a home, with hardly anything at all.

  We watched him blur into the landscape that shuddered in the light.

  “Who is Jack Law?” said Holly.

  “No one knows,” said Bill. “A tramp, like all the other tramps.”

  “Mebbe it was the war,” I said, repeating what my mother had said one day.

  “Aye. Mebbe he simply couldn’t settle after it.”

  Holly drew him as he disappeared.

  Bill found the keys and closed the greenhouse door.

  We walked to the allotment gate.

  “He’s a good man, so they say,” said Bill. “He’ll do no harm to anyone, they say.”

  I was already beginning to write him in my mind.

  Today we saw the silent tramp, Jack Law.

  Jack Law. He’d been with us always, from the days I first remember. He lived nowhere, or nowhere that anyone seemed to know. Somewhere high up, it was said. Somewhere beyond the fields over the brow of the hill. Somewhere distant from rivers and ships and the din of engines and the stench of bones. Some said that he had no single resting place, that he slept whenever darkness fell, in whichever place he found himself. He was the fair-haired man in black with the rucksack on his back who s
eemed to be forever walking walking walking. Sometimes we’d see him striding uphill on weekend afternoons as we played football on the fields. We’d see him crossing the town square with a bag of bruised apples or broken biscuits in his hand. Only once did I ever see him sitting motionless, when I looked into the window of Dragone’s coffee shop and saw him at a table, gazing down at the mug of Horlicks between his hands.

  My mother said he was a figure to be pitied.

  Damaged goods, said Dad, twisting a finger at his temple to suggest Jack Law was mad.

  There were rumours that he had a sister in Canada who sent a little money for him each year. There were tales that he’d once started training to be a priest but the Church took a dislike to him and cast him out. Some said he had been wild forever, that he’d been thrown out as an infant, that he’d grown like an animal, without family or home, in the fields and woods of County Durham. They said that his body had grown but his mind had not. Some kids said that he’d had his tongue torn out in the war, that he’d seen sights so dreadful that he never dared speak of anything again. Some said that the only creatures he could communicate with were animals. They said he’d been seen sleeping in farm fields with cattle, whispering into the ears of ponies, singing with the birds. Once I heard a friend of my mother’s say that he must have chosen silence, that he lived in an attempt to be close to the earth and close to God, that he was some kind of saint.

  No children feared him. The dreams we had of him were all benign.

  Once, when I was small, Mam opened our door and there he was. He did not speak, he would not come inside. He stood waiting there as my mam prepared him a bottle of cold tea, a packet of cheese sandwiches. He must have known that I was just inside, watching from the foot of the stairs, but he would not raise his head, would not meet my eye. I saw the layer of dirt on his elegant hands and elegant face, the grass stains on his knees, the blue eyes shining, the thick fair beard, the waving, slightly matted hair. I saw that he was a handsome man. I wanted to go to him and ask something, anything, get him to tell me something of himself. I wanted to see his tongue and to hear what it said when it moved. I wanted to address him, to meet his eye and to explore the mystery of what was within him. But, like Jack Law, I dared not speak, dared not move. He was like a statue, framed by the doorway with his head bowed, like the statues we had in church, and maybe I was too. I stayed in the shadow of the little hallway while the sun between the houses poured down upon him. Mam came with the tea and sandwiches, and even then he did not look up. He bowed slightly, turned away and headed upwards through the estate.