The Tightrope Walkers

  “There but for the grace of God,” she murmured as he disappeared.

  Jack seemed so beautiful to me. Sometimes on dull afternoons in school, bored by trigonometry or stories of ancient saints, or trying to turn my thoughts from tales of Hell, I’d close my eyes and see him wandering through the town as if he wandered through myself. That’s the way to live, I’d think, to be footloose and free, to have nothing, to be Jack Law.

  We were in the allotment again when was saw the circus. It appeared like something in a dream, a line of coloured trucks and horse-drawn carriages and caravans making their way across the playing fields, shimmering in the sunlight. We heard the distant drone of engines, the creak of gears, the whinnying of horses. The convoy halted in an untidy circle on the grass. We held our hands as shields against the sun. We narrowed our eyes and strained to see. People spilled out from the carriages. Dogs and ponies and children began to run across the open spaces. And then the music started, familiar, hackneyed, unmistakable, wavering in the breeze on its way downhill to us.

  “A blooming circus,” said Bill. “How did that get here?”

  It only stayed a day or two. It was maybe during the summer holiday, maybe some half-term. We walked to it on a breezy day, a little bunch of kids of all ages from the estate. Mothers came with us. Other kids, other families walked across the great green spaces from other estates and from streets of terraced houses and Tyneside flats to gather at the red tent. There was a little zoo of beasts: goats and a llama and a group of tiny, gorgeously maned white ponies. And a pair of peacocks, and a green parrot in a silver cage that called out, “Hurry along! No time to waste.” I remember the feel of fur against my fingers as I reached into the little pens and cages, the feel of hot breath across my wrist, the smell of beast and dung and straw. Inside, the tent was like the night — tiny holes in the fabric letting in light like a million scattered stars. It must have been a sad and rundown thing but it seemed a thing of power, transporting us into an astonishing night while an ordinary afternoon passed by in our ordinary town outside.

  I sat with Holly on the hard bench. Tumblers performed. Dogs leapt through hoops of fire. A girl who seemed little older than Holly climbed a rope high towards the apex and danced above us in the air. Clowns sprayed us with water from the flowers on their lapels. The lovely ponies trotted round and round the ring under the guidance of a girl with broken feathers in her hair. A strongman in black trunks and white vest posed before us to show the mightiness of his biceps and thighs and chest, then lifted rocks and dumbbells and thumped himself with metal bars and allowed circus workers to jump up and down on boards laid across his chest. Rudolfo, I think he was called, for I remember a woman named Mrs. Thompson saying afterwards, Yes, he was indeed quite rude.

  The tightrope walker came on last. His rope was strung between two poles. He danced into the ring. He had a sky-blue cloak on his back. He too roamed the ring to show himself to everyone.

  He called out to us in an accent none of us suspected could exist in our world.

  “I am Gabrielli. I dare to do what no other dares to do. I dare to walk with nothing beneath, just empty space and then the hard and deadly earth.” He pointed up to the rope. “Do you believe I can do this thing, that I can walk from this point to this point and not fall?”

  “Yes,” Holly whispered. “Of course you can!” She grinned. “I bet he pretends he can’t. I bet he seems about to fall. I bet he makes it to the end.”

  “Yes,” I whispered too, but with less belief. I stared up at the narrow cord across the emptiness. How could a man do such a thing?

  “Can I?” Gabrielli called again. “I can’t hear you!”

  “Yes! Yes!” the young ones yelled.

  “Yes,” called Holly. “Yes, you can!”

  Gabrielli calmed down.

  “That is good,” he told us. “For if you truly believe in me, children, then I will not fall.”

  He threw his cloak into the gathering silence. He climbed up to his rope. A spotlight shone upon him and cast his silhouette onto the cloth above. An assistant stretched up to hand him a long balancing pole. He took the pole, weighed it between his hands, slipped them across it so that it was balanced, held it horizontally across himself, breathed deeply and stepped out.

  There were screams and cheers from the little ones. Adult voices hushed them.

  And so he walked, and yes, there was a moment when he swayed, when the rope seemed to lurch beneath him, when he leaned right over, when he truly seemed to be right on the point of tottering, but he corrected himself, and he didn’t fall.

  We cheered so loudly. He grinned in joy and triumph and relief. He posed for us with his chest held out.

  “Thank you, children!” he called. “You kept me safe. Now keep me safe again. Keep me on my tightrope.”

  And off he set again, and then again, and then again. The tent was small. It seemed that we could almost reach out to touch him, that we could almost guide him with our hands across the spaces above us. But we held him there with our breath, with our hope, with our faith. He walked, he teetered, he smiled. He didn’t fall.

  And he came to earth at last, leaping the final inches to the circus ring. He gathered up his cloak of sky.

  “Thank you,” he said again.

  He waved. And I was certain that he looked directly at Holly Stroud and me as he gave us thanks again.

  “Without you, children,” he said, “I am as nothing.”

  Then he went from sight into the darkness beyond the circus curtains, and the top-hatted ringmaster came in. There was a llama at his side. He held his arm around its peculiar neck as he spoke to us.

  “Did you enjoy our show?” he called.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “So who wants to be a strongman, who wants to be a trapeze girl, who wants to be a clown, a tightrope walker?”

  “Me! Me! Me!” was yelled by many voices.

  He held his ear to the llama’s lips.

  “Not you, you silly,” he said. “It’s only people who could do such things.”

  “Me!” was yelled again.

  “Me” was whispered by Holly Stroud.

  We went out into the shining day. Our eyes stung as they adjusted to the light.

  “We could do that, Dominic,” Holly told me as we headed back towards the estate. “We could be brilliant tightrope walkers.”

  She stepped across the earth as if it were nothing but a half-inch of rope across the void. She teetered, laughed, straightened again.

  “Couldn’t we?” she said. “We’re light, we’re strong, we’re young.”

  I thought it was a joke, but next morning she was at our door with a rolled-up washing line in her hands.

  “I’ve been dreaming about it all night, Dominic!” she said.

  The rope was useless. Too soft, too weak, too flexible. We couldn’t get it tight enough. We tied it to the drainpipe at the corner of the house, the other end to the drainpipe on the outhouse, a distance of four feet or so, two feet or so off the ground. But it sagged, sank. No way it could take the weight of one of us. So we tried again. We doubled the rope and tripled it and twisted it and hauled on it with all our might before we tied it. A little better, still no good. Holly fell, I fell.

  Someone called, “They’re playing monkeys!”

  A clutch of kids had gathered at the gate.

  Holly bowed to them. She shinned up the drainpipe and stood holding it with one hand. Slid one foot across the rope, then another, tried to stand up straight with her arms held wide, fell, turned the fall into a leap and thumped down onto the concrete.

  Applause from outside.

  She stepped onto the rope again and fell again.

  Mam came to the back door with her arms folded.

  “Gabrielli mebbe had a trainer,” she said. “Have you thought about that?”

  “Yes,” said Holly. “But I don’t think there are many tightrope-walking trainers in these parts.”

  “Indeed not,??
? said Mam. “But it looks to me that you should be using two ropes, one to walk on, one to hang on to.”

  I looked at her.

  “I’m not as daft as I might look. I’m quite a dancer, for instance. Ask your father. I know something about balance.”

  We took her advice and tried again.

  We tied the first rope again, just a couple of feet above the ground. Then we twisted together another rope and tied it from the end of the outhouse gutter to the drainpipe on the house wall. Mam got a stool from the house. Holly stood on it, reached up to the high rope and stepped onto the other. Both ropes jerked and swayed, but she stayed there, and they calmed, and she began edging sideways towards the outhouse, sliding her hands over the high rope, stepping foot over foot on the low one.

  She turned and went back to where she’d started from. Now she stilled herself, put one foot in front of the rope, flexed her legs gently, opened her hands so that they were hardly touching the top rope. Then dared to take both hands away and turned her fall into a leap of joy. She beamed and clapped her hands.

  “Just for the teeniest, tiniest second, I knew what it must feel like! Go on, Dominic.”

  So up I reached for the high rope, stepped onto the low, panicked, fell, cracked my knees. I kept on trying. Stepping up, stepping out, falling. Holly was getting the hang of it. She even achieved a two-second balance before she had to jump free.

  Then Mam walked on the rope, and what she said about her balance was true. She slid easily across between the drainpipes, and on the very first crossing, she balanced just about as long as Holly had.

  “Told you, didn’t I?” she said. “So maybe there is a tightrope-walking trainer around here.”

  We went on. We talked about using a balancing pole. I weighed a six-foot-long clothes prop in my hands and could feel that it didn’t have the weight for the job. It’d need to be something that pressed down upon the palms, something that felt as if it was falling itself.

  And the rope. It needed to be thicker, stronger, something that felt as if it pressed upwards, against the body’s downward force.

  We wrapped scarves around our knees and elbows. Kept having to tighten the ropes. Began to get a deeper sense of how it might feel to stay there, to walk there, to be free of trepidation.

  By the afternoon’s end, blood trickled from Holly and me. Even Mam had a bloody scrape on her knee.

  The kids kept coming to watch. Doreen Minto, an older girl from the far side of the ring of houses, stood with her mam beside the gate.

  “What’s the point of that?” shouted Mrs. Minto.

  “Good question,” said Doreen. “What’s the bliddy point of that?”

  “There is,” said Holly, “no bliddy point at all. And that is the bliddy point of it.”

  Doreen laughed.

  “And them two are reckoned to be the brainy ones!” she said.

  Then Vincent McAlinden was there, with Bernard at his side. Bernard squeaked some mockery. Vincent slapped him, and slapped him again. He watched us silently. Then went away, with his friend a footstep behind.

  Finally, we dabbed our knees with cotton wool soaked with Dettol. Mam made cheese sandwiches and we sat on the concrete with our backs against the pebbledash and ate there with the late sun falling upon us, and a blackbird singing somewhere in the back garden.

  Soon the working men began returning to the estate. They headed home to wives and families and dinners. Dad entered the gate. He had his jacket slung across his shoulder. His eyes were weary, his face was black, burns were spattered on his hands and wrists.

  “Been to war?” he said.

  “We’ve been tightrope walking!” said Holly.

  “Have you now?”

  “Me and all,” said Mam. “I was the trainer.”

  She kissed his cheek, brushed a spot of soot from it.

  Dad looked down at me.

  “Tightrope walking, eh? That’s a fine activity for a caulker’s son.”

  He stepped over it.

  “More like a thing to trip you up than a thing to walk upon,” he said, and went into the house.

  That night I dreamed there was a rope stretching from the deck of a half-built ship in the yard, over the school and the church, over the pebbledashed estate and the playing fields, a proper tightly fastened tightrope. I held a long, bending balancing pole and walked upward step by step by tremulous step, and the larks hovered and sang loudly around my head. I saw Vincent McAlinden watching me from the wasteland below. I turned my eyes from him. I would not fall off.

  Holly was bolder than I. She turned her eyes to Vincent. She stepped many times into his wasteland. She carried easel, paints, and paper.

  “Are ye not scared?” he’d ask her.

  “No,” she’d say.

  She told him she made pictures of him to show to her mam. She laughed when he said he could just go up the stairs and show himself in the flesh.

  She painted him with the knife in his hand, with his dog at his feet, with Bernard at his side. She drew him all alone wreathed in smoke from his fires and with his face shining in the light of the setting sun. She drew him close up to show the dark eyes, dark hair, dark pointed widow’s peak. Sometimes he looked exactly like Vincent, sometimes like a character from a storybook of ancient times — a Celtic warrior, an Apache brave, a Stone Age man. Sometimes his face was sunken, brutal, ugly, old. Sometimes it was strong and young, the face of a child.

  Sometimes, she said, his voice was low and guttural, sometimes softer, almost sweet.

  He asked her why I didn’t come with her. Too scared? I thought he’d hurt me? He stroked the edge of his knife blade. Was I mebbe scared he’d kill me?

  “I don’t think you’d kill anybody,” she told him.

  “There’s some would not agree with you. There’s some say I am bad and nowt but bad. Ye seen me kill a chicken. D’ye not think somebody that could do that could go on to kill a man?”

  “No. That was showing off. And there’s good in everyone.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Paint on.”

  She drew him as a tiny figure in a great wasteland. She drew the towers and bridges of a city far beyond. She drew the flocks of birds overhead. She drew the children at their skipping games and wrote the relentlessly repeated words that spiralled upwards from their mouths: January, February, March, April, Ma-ay . . . She drew herself with him, side by side with him against the pebbledashed estate. She drew herself at her easel painting him. She drew children who looked on in amazement to see Holly Stroud and Vincent McAlinden in such a strange formation.

  She told me that he asked how she could draw and paint like this when she was so young. She answered that children were capable of great things. Did he not know that?

  She said that one day Vincent came to her and asked if she’d give him a little kiss to thank him. She told him no. She gave him some of the pictures. He said he stuck them on his wall. She said he said he’d show them to his kids one day.

  “If I ever have any, that is,” he said.

  “If you ever do,” she said.

  “D’you think I ever will?” he said.

  “How would I know?”

  He laughed.

  “If I do have them,” he said, “it’d be good to have them bonny, just like you.”

  She turned away.

  “What d’ye think it’d be like?” he asked. “A bairn born of Holly Stroud and me?”

  Again he came in close and asked to kiss her. She said she told him he was showing off again, and she walked away.

  She took the best of the pictures to her mother’s shadowed room.

  “This is Vincent McAlinden,” she said.

  This one showed Vincent in the guise of an ancient chieftain. He wore animal skins. There were tattoos all over him. He bore a knife and an axe in his hands.

  “He’s a boy who lives just down the street, Mam,” Holly said.

  “Is he?” whispered her mam. br />
  “He’s older than me but still a boy.”

  Mrs. Stroud angled the paper to the light.

  “So,” she breathed. “There are still things like that out there?”

  October. My last year of primary school. Vincent and Bernard came to the door. There were a dog and a handcart at the gate outside.

  “Owt for the bonfire?” Vincent grunted. “Boxes, boards, broke old chairs?”

  “Owt that’ll burn,” smirked Bernard.

  Mam came to my side.

  “That time of year again,” she said. “Doesn’t time fly by!”

  “We’re ganna make it the biggest one in town, Mrs. Hall,” said Vincent.

  “Bliddy massive,” said Bernard.

  “And aren’t you getting tall, young Vincent?”

  “Aye, Mrs. Hall.”

  “And rather handsome, too.”

  He grinned. He winked at me.

  “You could come and help,” he said.

  Mam nudged me.

  “Yes,” she said. “Why not?”

  I gave no answer. Bernard sneered, Vincent shrugged, Mam smiled.

  We gave them a bag of our own kindling and a stool that had lost a leg.

  “Thank ye kindly,” said Vincent.

  They walked away.

  “You could join in,” said Mam. “It might be fun.”

  Bernard dropped the kindling and stool into the cart, then took the handles, leaned forward, lowered his head. Vincent slapped his arse, and Bernard shoved. Vincent waved and Mam waved back.

  “He’s not the monster of your dreams,” she said. “He’s growing up, like all you bairns. We have a duty to make sure that the Vincents of the world feel that they are part of us.”

  The bonfire on the wasteland grew. They spent weeks gathering material for it. They came to houses, they ripped branches from trees at the top of town, they got wooden boxes from Bamling’s fruit shop and the Co-op and Walter Willson’s. They stole wood from other bonfires, they snapped railing and fences in other parts of town. Somehow they found doors and floorboards and mattresses and a wooden bedstead and a battered armchair. They hauled them and pushed these in the handcart through the street. They built carefully. Vincent laid a ladder against the fire as it grew, so that he could haul the material to the top. They built neatly, carefully. They put the shapeless lumpy stuff inside, with planks and boards and branches on the outside, turning it to a tepee shape. It grew almost as high as a house. Quite an achievement, said Dad. Shows what lads like that are capable of when they have a proper job to do. I saw it was a place to play as well. One day I saw Vincent slipping into the bonfire, through a doorway made with boards.