The Fire-Eaters (19 page)

BOOK: The Fire-Eaters

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I
f. If Kennedy or Khrushchev had given the order to launch the missiles that night … If some general in some bunker under the earth, or some commander of a submarine deep down in the sea, or some pilot of some plane, had gone mad with the pressure of it all and stabbed the launch button all alone … If some primitive computer had simply gone wrong …If the ships heading for Cuba had continued heading for Cuba. If…If… I'd not be sitting here beside the old Lourdes light writing the story. There'd be no record of what happened in Keely Bay during that autumn of 1962. Maybe there'd be no record of what happened anywhere in autumn 1962. Maybe there'd be nothing, no world at all, just a charred and blasted ball of poisoned earth and poisoned air and poisoned seas, spinning through the darkness and the emptiness of space. All of history gone. All the stories gone. No me, no you, no
anyone. But no one pressed the launch button. The ships turned back. We stepped back from the gates of hell.

All over the world, people behaved the way we did in little tattered Keely Bay. We trembled and quaked and were filled with dread. We shouted, No! Of course, there were riots and looting in some places. Even close to home in Newcastle there was fighting in the streets. A bunch of kids set fire to a newsagent's in Blyth. But most of us, as in Keely Bay, stayed together and fed each other and tried to love each other. Even those of us who believed in nothing prayed. We lit our fire. We told jokes, we dreamed, we cried, we slipped into our pasts and tried to look into our futures. And all the time the careless stars looked down and showed how tiny we were and how insignificant we were and how maybe we just didn't matter at all.

In the middle of that final night, McNulty performed for nothing, for no one. He didn't demand an audience, he didn't demand that they pay. He breathed his fire toward heaven and then he did the most lethal thing of all and breathed it back into himself.

By the time we reached him, he was already dead. The torches flickered like candles at his side. As we knelt beside him, we heard our names ringing fearfully through the darkness.
Bobby! Ailsa! Daniel!

I waved the torches and we saw their silhouettes approaching us, and soon all of us had shifted from the
blazing fire to the fire-eater lying all alone in death on the cold sand.

Mam closed his eyes.

“Poor soul,” she whispered.

She held me tight.

We gazed down at his skinny tortured body until the torches puttered out and I imagined opening him up, to see the inside of his body, the stillness and silence of it, the mysterious disappearance of its life.

There are other ifs, of course. If I hadn't gone with Mam to Newcastle's quay that Sunday… If Dad hadn't remembered the boat back from Burma … If McNulty hadn't come to Keely Bay… If I hadn't gone into the dunes with Ailsa to bring him out … If. But these things happened, and so he died, and so the story is as it is.

There was nothing we could do. We laid a blanket over him. We sat with him for a while. We prayed that he would have peace.

“Forgive me,” I whispered, so soft that nobody would hear; then we went back to the fireside and sat around the fierce hissing embers and waited for our dreadful night to end.

N
ow it all seems so long ago, and it's as if it happened in some different kind of time, in some different kind of world, almost as if it happened in a dream. But it happened in this world, to me and people like me, to people like you. It's part of history. It's all recorded. And McNulty lies in the little graveyard in Keely Bay. A simple little stone and a simple little message:
McNulty. d. 1962. Fire-Eater. God Bless
. And there are always posies of flowers there.

A couple of days after he died, I was with Mam and Dad at the table. We had rice pudding, creamy and sweet beneath its scorched skin. We mixed jam into it and sighed at such deliciousness. There was a knock at the door and we found Miss Bute standing there. She came in shyly, but when she sat with us her eyes began to burn with fire. “I just can't stand by and let this happen,” she said, and so another story started, of how
Daniel and I found our way back to school, and how Ailsa Spink joined us there, and how she turned out to be the brightest and boldest of us all.

And after Miss Bute had gone, Ailsa herself came, filled with passion and delight, calling my name as she ran to the door.

“Bobby! Bobby! Oh, come and see!”

So I left the pudding and went out to her and she took my hand and hauled me away. We ran across the beach and past the lighthouse headland and through the pines and to her house with its ancient lean-tos and its heaps of shining coal and its rich allotment garden.

“Look!” she told me, and she pointed into the fields that led toward the pitheads and the distant woodlands. “There, Bobby. Look!”

And my eyes adjusted, and I saw them there, the pair of deer, the stag and the doe. They stood before the nearest hawthorn hedge, fifty yards away.

“I watched them coming through the fields,” she said. “They been there half an hour now, just watching.” She grinned. “They come for their little'n, Bobby.”

We went to the garden shed and opened the door.

“Howay, little'n,” said Ailsa.

It stood up and walked out with us. It sniffed the air and jumped. We led it to the edge of the garden.

“Look!” said Ailsa. She pointed to the deer. “It's your mam and dad. They found you.” She laughed. We looked out at the hugeness of the land around. “God
knows how, but they've found you.” Ailsa put her hands gently on the fawn and guided it through the garden fence into the field. “Go on. Off you go, then.”

And so the fawn trotted through the field toward the grown-ups. It turned and took one last look at us.

“Just look how strong it's got,” said Ailsa. “It'll get through the winter now.” We waved. “Bye-bye,” we called, as the family made its way back home again.

“Sometimes,” said Ailsa, “the world's just so amazing.” I looked into her eyes.

“It is,” I said.

Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children's Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York

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eISBN: 978-0-307-52374-7

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