Counting Stars

  Outside another tent, a woman has many veils draped upon her. She holds open a curtain to inner darkness, a sign above her promises Salome’s legendary dance.

  Little Kitten squeals at us: “Forty-two! Forty-two!”

  Dad asks, “Did you see my name in there?”

  I search my memory, try to see again the great mass of names and places and dates.

  He laughs, nudges me, breathes smoke into the air.

  “It was in there, that’s the main thing, even if it’s unreadable now.”

  I see many watching me, the boy who traveled in the Time Machine.

  Outside, there is the man wrapped in chains with a hatful of money before him on the grass. He struggles and squirms before his little crowd.

  Beneath the hawthorn we look up toward the cheeping chicks and I recall the shape of God.

  Dad watches me and grins as we walk on.

  “You enjoyed that, then?”

  He laughs.

  “Keep the secret, eh? Don’t forget.”

  Next morning Dad takes the girls to Felling Shore. I linger at home. I rearrange the eggs in my shoeboxes. I open the boxes of eggs that Dad has kept since his own youth. I match the eggs of the past with the eggs of the present: starling with starling, blackbird with blackbird, larky with larky, wren with wren. I can find no differences between them. My mother watches me and asks about my sadness. The light pours down upon us. I want to ask her about the loss of one who was formed in her own body. I want to ask her about the emptiness and angels that are all around us. I want to ask her why eggs are taken from clutches of more than three.

  We gaze at each other through the brilliant seething dust. She touches my cheek and smiles. We do not know that this is the year before my father dies.

  They return midafternoon. They laugh about the House of Death with its ghosts and bats, the little camel that they rode across the shore on. They shudder at the man who pushed skewers through his cheeks. They say that Little Kitten knows the ages of us all. We nibble coconut flesh and sip its milk. Colin sits with us in his yellow shirt. He tells us that last night he rode the Waltzer far into the dark. He taps a fast rhythm on the table, recalling a frantic song.

  Later I lie in the garden, in the glare. Dad works at the trellis and the borders and keeps watching me. Blackbirds fly into the hedges with food. I finger the dry soil, dream of a whole world slowly becoming dust, and shudder as the day begins to close.

  At dusk I am by the garden gate. I want to be carried through time, back into the hawthorn tree, back to the first ever time I nested. I want to be carried to the distant nest when the dying is done and we all are reassembled. Dad stands beside me. His hand is at the small of my back, pressing me gently forward. He smiles as he sends me out on the errand that he knows is necessary but will be in vain. I move down through the gathering dark. I hear the distant grinding of gears and engines. By the time I come to the shore I know that the convoy has traveled on, that Morlock, Corinna and the Time Machine have gone. I stand beneath the hawthorn. I see other figures at the fringes of the field, and understand that I am just one of several disappointed shades gathered on Felling Shore this night.

  Barbara’s Photographs

  THERE NEVER HAD BEEN MANY PHOTOGRAPHS of our sister Barbara. After she died, some well-meaning soul took away every photograph of her that existed. They have not been returned. Perhaps they have been destroyed.

  I seem to remember one picture of her sitting in a wicker cradle on the dunes at Alnmouth. There is sand and marram grass around her, the sea beyond. Our mother’s legs, in shiny stockings and strong shoes, enter from the edge of the photograph, and we see the fringe of the blanket she is sitting on. Barbara stretches out from the cradle and laughs toward the photographer, who is probably our father. This image, however, is confused in my mind with a similar photograph of Mary, the sister who came after Barbara, in what is probably the same wicker cradle on the green beside the sea at South Shields. And even as I write these words, I begin to wonder whether this second photograph is also misremembered, and that it is Margaret, the youngest of us all, and not Mary, who reaches out from the cradle.

  It was so long ago. We were all so young. Some of us were not even born. Memory, dream, desire, imagination have mingled through the years. How is it possible to bring this sister truly back to mind?

  What I see most of all is a little girl in the window of the pebble-dashed house in Thirlmere. She sits in her pram watching for me to come home from school. As I appear in the street and pass the window and enter through the gate, she sits up tall and claps her hands and laughs and laughs and there has never been such joy.

  It is possible, I suppose, that her photographs will be returned, and that the clarity of such images will be enhanced, though none of us expects it now.

  We each have our way of seeing her.

  We will go on forever remembering her, inventing her.

  Jonadab

  JONADAB WAS OUR GRANDFATHER’S PLACE, a place more impossible and distant than Timbuctoo.

  “Where you going?” we’d ask him.

  “Jonadab,” he’d say.

  “Where you been?”

  “Jonadab.”

  “But where’s Jonadab?”

  “Timbuctoo.”

  I’d seen Timbuctoo on the map, in geography. There it was in the African desert, tiny and exotic, a week’s camel ride through the blazing heat from the nearest town. But Jonadab wasn’t in the index of the atlas. It was nowhere. It was an invented place. It was a place to tease us, to halt our questioning, to silence us.

  At school we moved lesson by lesson through the world. We colored in the remnants of the Empire. We traced the routes of great explorers, we followed the missionaries and saints, we marked the places of conquest and conversion. We studied the longest rivers and the highest mountains. We learned the populations of major cities, the names of the seas and the plains. We studied the way of life of the Eskimo, the Pygmy, the Arab, the American Indian. We were shown the fringes of civilization, and we were told that beyond them lay wildernesses of heat and ice and savagery.

  And then one term Miss Lynch arrived and our studies came home. She was a small woman who drove a small white Fiat and who had teardrops of silver dangling from her ears. We watched her in assembly and saw how she didn’t say the prayers. We leaned over in our steel-hinged benches and looked at her legs. She told us that we were the center of all geography and the focus of all history. She said we were growing at the most privileged of times. We’d have been crawling through Felling Pit less than a century ago. We had a duty to understand our place in time, to keep History moving forward.

  She spread maps on her desk and invited us to stand around her. We gasped to see the names of our streets in print. We stabbed our fingers onto our own houses and gardens, we traced familiar pathways through familiar streets and parks and playing fields. We located the places of great fights and soccer matches. We followed bus and train routes through Gateshead and over the bridges into Newcastle. She showed the shafts going down into the coalfield and the places where ships were built. We saw the great curves of the river as it made its way to the North Sea, and I caught my breath and halted, for there, in tiny letters just beyond Felling’s boundary, was Jonadab Lane and then Jonadab itself: a small empty space on the banks of the Tyne.

  When she pinned the map to the wall I sat below it and drew my route. I carefully named the familiar streets I must take: Rectory Road, Chilside Road, The Drive, Sunderland Road. I sketched the graveyard and Memorial Gardens at Heworth. I marked the places where I would cross the railways and the bypass and go beyond Felling into Pelaw and then into the unknown fields below, until at the foot of my page by the crayoned blue river, I came to my map’s most distant and exotic point, whose name I went over time and again. Jonadab. Jonadab. Jonadab.

  Miss Lynch came to me and smiled.

  “You do this very well.”

  “Thank you, Miss.”

  Her e
yelashes were dark and curved. There was pale lipstick on her lips.

  “You come from a Felling family.”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  I showed her our house in Coldwell Park, then the other places we’d lived: Felling Square, Thirlmere, Felling Square again. I showed her our grandparents’ homes in Ell Dene Crescent and Rectory Road.

  “And where were the family before?”

  “Don’t know, Miss.”

  She smiled again.

  “You should ask about these things,” she said. “You should write down everything you find. Or the memory will be gone.”

  She moved among us. She kept returning to me. She watched me drawing, the pencil following the shapes my finger made as it moved across the map.

  “You won’t understand this,” she said. “When you travel through the place in which you were born, you travel through yourself.”

  I set off that Saturday morning. I put bread, cheese, fruit in a haversack. I put in my map and a notebook. I told our parents that Miss Lynch said it was my duty to understand my home, and that I was going to explore for a few hours.

  “Just in Felling,” I said.

  They laughed and said I’d hardly be lost, then.

  As I walked from the garden through the gate, Catherine called after me.

  “Where you going?”

  I grinned and looked back at her.

  “Jonadab,” I said.

  On Rectory Road our grandfather was watching from his window. He beckoned me over. I waved and walked on. I called that I was going to Jonadab and knew that he couldn’t hear. It was early spring and crocuses were growing in the verges beneath the trees on Chilside Road. The sun was drying the pools on the pavements left by last night’s showers. The distant river was gleaming between banks crammed with cranes and warehouses. The sea on the horizon was dark as ink. As I turned down onto The Drive I heard a voice calling me. I turned and waved again, to one of our aunts, one or other of the identical twins. I crossed the bypass at Heworth and paused on the high steel footbridge that trembled as the traffic roared beneath. I looked down across the graveyard and tried to distinguish our sister Barbara’s grave and tried to recall how she had been in life. I paused again in Pelaw, in the shadow of the huge CWS buildings that lined the road there. The clash of printing machines came from inside. I nibbled some cheese and looked at the unfamiliar faces passing by. I consulted my map, walked on, turned left at Bill Quay Park into a street that suddenly steepened in descending to the Tyne. There were a few rows of terraced houses, an area of waste ground before a pub, the wide expanse of the river, shipyards filling the opposite bank, ships as tall as St. Patrick’s church resting there. I found the small white nameplate with Jonadab Lane written in black, fixed to the wall of a low warehouse or workshop. The lane was uncared-for: broken tarmac, cobbles showing through, potholes filled with black rainwater. A slope of weeds and broken buildings hung over it. I followed it and it opened out into an empty area, a small rough field sloping to a six-foot drop to the water. Then there were factories and workplaces and houses stretching all the way to the city with its arched bridge.

  Three ponies were tethered to stakes, with their heads lowered to the grass. A boy and a girl sat on a pile of stones facing the river. A small fire burned beside them, its smoke rising languidly through the clear air. A bony mongrel was tied to the stones by a rope around its neck. It growled, and the children turned to me. They leaned closer together and muttered and laughed.

  “Who this?” the boy called.

  They laughed again and turned to face me.

  “Who this?” he repeated.

  They had long sticks in their fists like spears, the tips pointed and scorched. They had sheath knives in their belts.

  The boy jabbed his spear at me.

  “Ungowa!” he said. “Speak!”

  The girl stared. The dog growled again.

  “Is this Jonadab?” I said.

  “Not understand!”

  They laughed.

  The boy shouted, “Shove off home!”

  I stood there.

  The girl took her knife from its sheath, ran her thumb over the blade. The boy lifted his pullover, pointed to a scar that slanted through the right side of his stomach to his waist.

  “She do this with she knife.” He glared. “Understand?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “She mighty wild. You touch her and you finished. Where you come from?”

  I pointed back up the hill toward Felling.

  “Where your people?”

  I pointed again.

  They grinned at each other.

  “Him all all alone.”

  The girl ran her thumb on the blade of her knife.

  We watched each other.

  They were blond, blue-eyed, a little older than me. Tangled hair. Filthy faces. They wore jeans, broken shoes, ripped pullovers. A cooking pot and a kettle were on the blackened earth around their fire. Stuffed rucksacks and rolled-up blankets rested on the stones. Beyond them, sparks cascaded over the hull of a half-built ship. The crackle of welding rods and the voices of workmen calling to each other echoed on the water. Beneath everything was the endless low din of engines and machines, the sour scent of the river.

  I stood there and felt no fear.

  “Is this Jonadab?” I said again.

  I took the cheese from my pocket and nibbled it.

  “Him bring food,” said the boy. He beckoned me with his spear. “Ungowa! Ungowa!”

  I pulled the haversack from my shoulders and moved toward them. I showed them the bread, the cheese, the fruit. I squatted in front of them.

  “You live here?” I said.

  They laughed. The boy stamped on the earth.

  “This sacred ground,” he said, and he stuck his spear into it.

  He reached out and took some of the food. He broke some cheese and gave it to the girl. He pointed to me, to the food, invited me to join them. The girl giggled.

  “Mighty good,” he said. He pointed to a rock. “You sit, boy.”

  I ate the bread and the cheese. I opened a pomegranate with my penknife and gave each of them a section.

  “You’re brother and sister,” I said.

  She giggled again.

  “Last of our people,” he said. “Why you come here?”

  I shrugged.

  “Just to look.”

  “This sacred ground.”

  “And you live here?”

  “Many suns. Many moons. She and me. She mighty wild. Beware.”

  He turned his face away. The girl delicately picked out the pomegranate seeds with her fingertips. She raised her eyes and stuck her tongue out at me.

  “Mighty danger here,” he said. “Bad people come. At night we see ghosts that dance on water. Sometimes the dog kids come and watch us in the dark.”

  “Dog kids?”

  “Children got from woman and dog together. Paws for hands and feet and hair on backs and howls like babies crying. Fire keep them away from us. And the spirits of our people come watch over us.” He lifted his spear. “This dangerous place for you, boy. Mebbe time go home.”

  She raised her eyes. She nodded. I looked at my map.

  “It is Jonadab,” I said.

  I sketched the place in my notebook: the field, the stones, the broken buildings. I copied the graffiti that was carved into the stones around me: names and dates going back centuries. I thought of Miss Lynch and I built a settlement in my head: houses, a mill, a farm, stone walls enclosing a field of sheep, a little jetty joining Jonadab to the water.

  “Where do you come from?” I said.

  He contemplated.

  “Too many questions,” he said. He swept his arm toward the horizon. “Far far way, boy.”

  “Have you been here long?”

  He scowled, took a crumpled cigarette end from behind his ear, lit it in the fire and smoked. He passed it to the girl.

  “Bad people come, want to take her way from
me. We leave in the night. We bring horses. We ride many days to this holy place.”

  He turned his face away. They laughed.

  “We kill many,” he said. “Much blood has run from our knives. We mighty wild.”

  I was about to ask more, when he raised his shirt again, showed me the scar again.

  “Appendicitis,” I whispered.

  He stood over me with his knife in his fist.

  “So what you got, boy? What blood you had? What pain you had?”

  I contemplated my body, the meager grazes on its knees, the lack of scars. My easy breath. The easy beating of my heart. I shrugged.

  “Nothing.”

  His face was scornful.

  “Ungowa,” he said.

  He turned to the girl.

  “Show him,” he said.

  She pulled her hair back, showed a healed gash across her temple. She lifted her pullover, showed where an area of her lower back was distorted and discolored after burning. There were other burns, smaller, more recent, scattered on her skin.

  She glared with her blue eyes.

  “See,” he said.

  “What happened?” I said.

  He thrust his knife at me.

  “Too many questions. Touch,” he said.

  I laid my fingertip on the blade, felt the sharpness, how it would cut so easily.

  “See,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Much danger, boy. You think you safe, but always danger coming. Why you come?”

  “To look. To see.”

  “Ha. Ha.”

  He unfastened one of the rucksacks by the rocks. He took out a book, The Boy’s Big Book of Indians. On its cardboard cover was a young bare-chested warrior on a galloping pony. The pages inside were brittle and bleached. The faded print told of the tribes, the great plains, the freedom before the white man came. There were pictures of more warriors. There were herds of buffalo, villages of teepees, ferocious chiefs, beautiful women with babies.

  “Our people,” he said.

  I looked at the girl. She stuck out her tongue. He thrust the knife at me. I nodded.

  “You come look see here, boy.”

  He stood up, tugged my arm, took me to the final drop to the river. We squatted at the edge. Below us was the dark slowly moving water, its slimy surface, the waste it carried. The mud above the waterline was slick and shining, rainbows of oil shimmering upon it. The exposed earth higher up was cracked and crazed. He leaned over and tugged at the earth, lifted a thin splintered bone from it.