The Tightrope Walkers

  The clutch that Holly and I were in, the clutch of seven or eight or so, we were the ones brought forward to the front of the class. We were the ones that got Miss O’Kane’s attention. We did comprehension and precis and we worked out how quickly a bathtub filled when a tap was running and a plug removed. We learned how to turn the word RISE into the word FALL with a single change of letter at each step. We learned the lines of kings and queens and popes. And we hated it. It was so dull, dull, bliddy dull. But we did it.

  Bill Stroud laughed at our complaints.

  “What would you like to do instead? Paint all day?”

  “Yes!” said Holly.

  “As would I. But I cannot. But for you, if you work hard now, and do the things that you are asked to, the world will be your oyster. You will be educated, you will have qualifications, you will be free of all impediments. You will explore your talents, and if it turns out as you wish it to, you will paint and paint to your heart’s content.”

  “I want to be a tightrope walker, too!”

  “Which you are, and which you will be.” He grinned. “Have you told Miss O’Kane about such ambitions?”

  “Ha!”

  The spring kept coming and making us glad. And we grew, we learned, we wondered. We knew our universe was endless. We knew that there was such a thing as evolution. We knew that our bodies were as the bodies of beasts were. We knew that we were as nothing in the chasms of space and time. We had begun to suspect there was no God. I quaked before that idea, but Holly simply laughed.

  “We are free!” she cried.

  We’d taken the test. We were waiting for the results. I was by the outhouse. Clouds streamed across the dead-straight edge of its roof, making it seem that the whole building toppled endlessly backwards. A summer morning and the air was cold. My breath condensed around me.

  I heard footsteps, and Bill and Holly Stroud were there. Bill carried a rolled-up cable in his hand.

  “It’s a proper tightrope, Dominic,” said Holly. “Made of steel. A wire.”

  Bill held it out to me. It was gleaming, grey-black. The filaments that formed it were wound beautifully around each other. It was half an inch thick. Each end was formed into a loop, with a tightening ratchet at one end. I took it from him, closed my hand around it, ran my hand across it. So smooth, such weight in it.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” said Holly.

  “Had it made in the steel shop,” said Bill. “Should be a perfect fit.”

  He took it from me, knelt down, told me to hold one end against the house, he held the other against the outhouse.

  “Yes,” he said. He showed me a pair of steel hooks. “Maybe your dad could put these in the wall for it, Dominic.”

  We stretched it out on the earth. We stepped along it. Felt the strength of it, the solidity of it. Then Bill lifted it, held it out between his hands, held it up across the sky. The clouds streamed and the cable seemed to sweep in the opposite direction, ready to raise Bill from the earth.

  “Imagine,” he said. “Some folk walk across canyons, across rivers, between buildings, with nothing but this between them and death.” He laughed. “But two feet up’s a decent place to start.”

  Dad came through the gate. He hesitated as it clanked shut behind him.

  “Hello, Frank,” said Bill, lowering the wire.

  Dad grunted a reply.

  “Thought we might ask you to do a little job,” said Bill.

  “Aye?” said Dad.

  “Aye. If you don’t mind. It’s for these tightrope walkers here.”

  “Bliddy tightrope!” said Dad.

  “Couple of hooks to put in, that’s all,” said Bill. “Keep ’em safe and secure while they’re dancing in the sky.”

  Dad took the cable in his hands and touched it like I had. His scarred hands were coarse against the smooth cold manufactured steel.

  “It’s lovely work,” he said.

  “Indeed,” said Bill.

  Dad didn’t look up.

  “If I carried out a thing like this they’d have me neck.”

  Bill said nothing.

  “There’s times they check our bags and pockets at the gate.”

  “I know that, Frank.”

  “That Hector Minton spat on Solly Hull and called him a thieving bastard. Fined him two days’ wages for two tins of paint. Joe Robson was chucked out for a hammer and a bag of nails.”

  “I know, Frank,” said Bill. “I don’t approve of it.”

  “Do you not? Where do the bliddy hooks go, then?”

  Bill crouched and pointed.

  “I thought about this high. I thought about just here. What do you think?”

  “Aye, that sounds just right. Shall I do it now?”

  “It’s not urgent. You’ll want your dinner maybe.”

  “No need for that to get in the way, Mr. Stroud.”

  “Bill. I just thought it might be nice to update the equipment and keep these two moving forward. The holes’ll need to be deep. The hooks’ll need to be really secure.”

  “Is that right? I’ll do it now.”

  He got a bag of tools from the outhouse. He drilled through the pebbledash with a crank drill. Tiny stones and mortar tumbled down. He drilled deep. He bent down and blew dust out from the hole, brushed its edges with his fingertips. He rolled some fibre filler to a point between his fingers then pushed it in. He forced it deep with his thumb, then with a piece of dowelling that he struck with a mallet. He kept filling until the fibre was at the surface, then carefully put the point of the hook to it and turned. The hook went tight and deep. He put his finger into it and pulled.

  “That’s not going anywhere,” he said.

  Then he checked with Bill — how high? exactly where?— and he did the other one. By now, Mam was watching from the doorway.

  He swept up the fallen pebbledash with a dustpan and brush. Stood up, hands on hips, looked down at what he’d done.

  “Nice work,” said Bill Stroud. “It’s a perfect horizontal, Frank.”

  Dad touched his finger to his brow.

  “Thank you, Mr. Stroud.”

  Bill opened a pack of cigarettes and held them out to Dad.

  “I’ve got me own,” said Dad.

  Both men lit up, breathed their smoke into the sky, and Holly and I fixed the wire. I ratcheted it tight. We fastened the top rope as before.

  “Look how straight it is,” Holly murmured. “Look how beautiful it is.”

  “You first,” I said.

  Mam brought the stool. Holly stepped onto it, reached for the top rope, stepped onto the steel.

  “Oh!” she gasped. “Oh, wait till you feel it under you, Dominic!”

  It moved ever so slightly as she stepped along it. A slight give and then a slight recoil. It shuddered if she trembled. She closed her eyes and stood dead still. She opened them and dared take her hands from the rope above. She balanced, swayed, then dropped.

  Then it was me. My turn to feel the narrow tight line below, the line that seemed to push me up as I pushed down, the line that made me feel for the first time that I might be able to do this thing.

  Mam applauded us all.

  “What a team!” she said. “And all for the benefit of two daft kids.”

  She walked the wire, of course, and showed again how fine she was, how balanced.

  Bill Stroud left us then. He told Dad he’d be going to the Queen’s Head tonight. Care to join him?

  Dad looked away.

  “Aye, mebbe,” he said.

  I knew he wouldn’t. I knew he’d be in the Iona with his mates. He went inside to eat. Mam went with him.

  Holly and I stayed till dusk, crossing and recrossing the wonderful wire. We praised each other, encouraged each other. We laughed, we smiled, we caught each other when it seemed we’d fall too hard. At times we held each other longer than we needed to. Vincent McAlinden appeared for a few moments at the gate. Holly waved, she moved a few steps towards him, she asked him if he’d like t
o try. He did not answer, just stared, with the red of the setting sun reflected in his eyes, then slowly turned and went away.

  “It’s his loss,” she said.

  The first stars started to appear above the estate. We lay down beneath the wire and stared at the firm black line that crossed the darkening reddening sky, the pale, hardly moving clouds, those first stars, those voids of space and time. We held each other’s hands, just two plain kids from a pebbledashed estate, astonished by the wondrous place in which they’d grown.

  We passed. We became pupils of the English Martyrs. The Norman Dobsons of the world were culled and sent down to Saint Tim’s.

  One evening in the first week, parents gathered with their children in the hall. I was in my brand-new uniform: grey, blue, black, with golden battlements upon the blazer pocket. Mam was in a pretty floral dress. Dad was in his only suit, thick navy serge, the one he wore for funerals. His white shirt collar was tight around his throat.

  The head teacher, Dr. Creel, stood before us with his deputy and his heads of department lined up on either side. Some of us may not appear to be the most privileged of children, he said. We must know that. But times were changing. It was our good fortune to be young in these days of optimism and growth. We had the opportunity to turn our disadvantages into privileges. We must work hard, we must develop an inner strength, we must reshape ourselves, we must become more than we appeared to be.

  “Hear, hear!” called out Bill Stroud at these words. “Hear, hear!”

  Afterwards there were cups of tea and slices of Battenberg cake. Holly moved easily among groups of new children. Her father shook the teachers’ hands so easily, spoke with them so easily.

  My dad blushed when Creel came to him and asked him, “Which is your child, sir?”

  Dad couldn’t look him in the eye. He pointed to me.

  “Dominic Hall,” said Mam.

  “Ah,” said Creel. “We have heard good things. An exceptional eleven-plus paper, we were told.”

  He reached out and shook my hand.

  His grip was firm, his skin was cold.

  “Welcome to our school, Dominic Hall.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You will grasp your opportunities here. I am sure of it.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me that you will grasp your opportunities.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Yes, sir, what?”

  “Yes, sir. I will grasp my opportunities.”

  “Good. It is best to state these things. It helps them to come true. And what ambitions do you have, Dominic Hall?”

  I did not know what to say.

  “Perhaps there is some dream, some vision, burning in your heart.” He laughed. “Or do you dream only of playing for Newcastle United, as so many boys of your age do.”

  “I don’t know, sir. Not that, sir.”

  “Maybe there’s a secret something that you confess to no one. Or maybe there is something that is hidden even from yourself. Whatever it is, wherever it is, we’ll help you to find it, and to state it, and help it to burn bright.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Good lad.”

  He shook my hand again.

  “We’ll make you proud of this boy, Mr. Hall, Mrs. Hall,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Mam.

  An English teacher, Mr. Joyce, asked did I like reading? I mumbled yes. He said that was excellent. He said that in the very first year we would be reading Conrad. Did I know him? I shook my head. One of our finest, he said. An artist in prose. “The Secret Sharer,” he said. I would love it, he was sure.

  “I hear that you’re something of a wordsmith yourself,” he said. “Is that correct?”

  I looked blankly back at him.

  “A whisper from your old school,” he said.

  He winked.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “we aren’t even aware of our own strengths, and the effects that we have on others.”

  He shook Dad’s hand.

  “Congratulations on your son’s success,” he said. “A credit to the whole family, I’m sure.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Dad muttered.

  He trembled as he spoke. I knew he couldn’t wait to get away.

  We stood close together. There were other inward-turning trios just like us. A couple of the other trios approached. Families like us, fathers who worked in the yard with Dad, welders and caulkers and electricians. The men passed cigarettes around, held them in cupped hands, smoked, tapped the cigarettes nervously on ashtrays, sipped coffee and tea, twisted their faces at each other with the embarrassment of it all.

  “I can’t bliddy believe it,” I heard Dad say. “A man like me, in a place like this, taalking to a man like that.”

  “Thanks to our bairns,” said one of his friends.

  “Aye,” said Dad. “Our bairns.”

  He glanced shyly at me, as if I’d become some alien creature to him.

  Holly laughed. She was with a music teacher. She started singing happily and the teacher’s face was wreathed in smiles.

  The school was red brick with a tarmac yard around it, then a broad field with a football pitch and running track. The teachers wore black gowns over dark suits, white shirts and ties. Several carried a black strap, which curled out from their top jacket pocket. These straps were used coldly, matter-of-factly, rather sadly. Why are you making such a noise, child? Put out your hand. How dare you look at me like that, boy? Put out your hand. Why are you not paying attention to what I say? Put out your hand.

  It was another Catholic school, so, yes, there were statues and crucifixes, but they were perched on shelves high up on walls, screwed to the wall above the stage used for assemblies. They were hardly ever mentioned. Prayers were said, but more brusquely than before. No lessons were drawn from them. Priests were to be seen in the corridors, and sometimes one of them led a recitation of Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Glory Bes in school assembly, but in their black clothes and their white collars, they carried an aura of loneliness, of ineffectiveness, and they seemed out of place here.

  The first terms passed by quickly. I learned to become a grammar school boy. I was polite to the teachers, I worked hard. I kept my shoes polished, my hair combed, my uniform neat. I did my homework diligently. I was praised for my attitude, my application, my cleverness. Unlike many others, I avoided the strap. I went to football trials and became the school team’s centre half. I went to lunchtime discos and danced to Chubby Checker. We were told that it was essential to play hard as well as to work hard, and that moral fibre must be matched to our intelligence.

  I learned about the rivers and mountains of South America, about the savage rituals of the Aztec priests, how they’d cut out the still-beating hearts of sacrificial girls and boys. I learned that different metals expanded and contracted at different rates, that frozen rubber tubing could be snapped like glass, that the exposed heart of a dead frog could be made to beat again by the simple application of a weak electric current. We did elocution and we learned about articulation and pronunciation. We were told that it was fine to retain an element of our own tongue, but it would be better to reach towards an accent more suited to the world beyond these local horizons. In speaking French, however, it could be beneficial to speak in Geordie. Say it as if you were a pupil at Saint Tim’s, we were told. Say it as you would to your pals on your estate. And we did so, and we giggled at the strange words attached to our familiar sounds. L’eau. L’oeuf. Le ruisseau. In class we read Conrad and the poems of Edward Thomas. We were told that Adlestrop, and all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, was beautiful. In the playground we searched D. H. Lawrence for cunt and John Thomas and Lady Jane, leafed through Henry Miller for fuck and prick. In second year, we were guided into Shakespeare by Joyce. He stared hard at those who repeated the dreaded word, Shakespeare, under their breath.

  “You think that Shakespeare is not for you?” he said to us. ?
??You think he is above you? Or, dare we say it, you think you are above him?”

  “Double, double toil and trouble,” said Holly.

  Joyce laughed.

  “Indeed,” he said. “And fire burn and cauldron bubble. Such language sings to all of us, no matter what our age.”

  He leaned forward, as if passing on some whispered secret.

  “Shakespeare, of all the greats, speaks to us in a common tongue. Fair is foul and foul is fair. Is this a dagger which I see before me? One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child. To be or not to be . . .”

  He paused, as many of us, half-consciously, murmured the true response.

  He smiled.

  “See? He is in all of us, whether we want him or not. But perhaps you simply think you are too young to be exposed to him? Then think of this. Shakespeare’s Juliet was little older than our Holly Stroud. Her beloved Romeo hardly older than you boys. And think of what those star-crossed lovers knew in their young lives. Love and death, children, before they’d hardly lived at all. And think of Macduff’s poor bairns, gone almost before they came into this troubled world. . . .”

  He stared at us.

  “You do not know the tale?” he said.

  He wandered through the aisles between the desks, leaning suddenly down to us as he passed by.

  “ ‘All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?’ ”

  The words echoed in the air and in my mind.

  I scribbled as he spoke them.

  O hell-kite. All my pretty chickens. One fell swoop.

  Joyce saw me scribbling. He grinned.

  He returned to the front.

  “Words,” he breathed to us all. “Words words words. Ha! Dismissed!”

  That night Dad was cursing, showing me the new marks on his skin. He lamented the bliddy gatekeepers, the fuckin foremen and these soddin scalds and burns.