The Tightrope Walkers (18 page)

“Do you see the damage you’ve done today?” she said.

No answer.

“Oh, how you’ve wounded me.”

It was late at night when Dad came home. Mam and I had gone to our beds. I didn’t sleep. Heard him, his footsteps on the pavement. Then the click of the gate, the click of the door, the groan of his breath, his feet on the stairs, my mother’s call: “Francis? That’s you?”

No answer. My door opened, and he was at me.

He stank of beer, of cigarettes. His words were slurred, his actions slovenly. He punched me hard on my cheek. He pressed his hands around my throat. He beat my head against the pillow.

“My dad would have bliddy killed you,” he slurred.

“So kill me, then,” I grunted.

We writhed together on the bed.

“You must have done it!” I yelled at him. “You must have done the kind of things I’ve done!”

“Burgled? Pissed like a pig in somebody’s house? Killed an innocent beast? Who do you think you’re bliddy talkin to?”

We writhed and fought, our snot and spit and tears and blood upon us. Mam came in, begging him to stop. He took no notice of her. He seemed to want to beat me to death.

He just groaned at last and collapsed on me.

“Oh, Dominic,” he whispered. “What you done, my stupid boy?”

We slept together on my bed for a while.

When I woke up he was sitting on the bed’s edge. The moon shone through the thin curtains. His silhouetted face was turned from me.

“I’ll tell you what I did,” he said.

“There was two of us,” he said, “me and Mickey Carr, a Westgate lad. We were bairns, hardly older than you are, Dom. Who had the sense to send lads like us to fight a war? Who had the sense to send us to the jungle? Monkeys in the trees, and birds as bright as fire, and snakes and spiders. I was used to the banks of the Tyne. Mickey was used to the coalfields of County Durham. Jesus, it was hot. It was steaming bliddy hot. Sweat ran across your eyes and got to rot your feet if you weren’t careful. We stuck together, Mickey Carr and me, like good pals do. It was up to the likes of us to save the world, they said. We used to laugh, used to say that we were bliddy heroes. We didn’t go far that day. We never went far. Too damn dangerous to go too deep into the trees. The sarge told us what to do. Just have a little reconnoitre, lads. Stay where it’s familiar. Keep in sight. Keep looking back to check you ain’t gone too far. We only went a few short yards, and there he was, down in a little hole. Weird. We thought he was dead but turned out he was fast asleep. Kicked him. He shifted. Weird. A sleeping Jap. Didn’t know they had such weakness in them. He was just a kid as well. A kid like me, like you. Only difference was that smooth skin they have. Them clear eyes. Them slender bodies. Couldn’t tell if he was scared or not. He lay there looking up, then raised his hands. We didn’t believe him. Japs don’t do things like that.”

He paused. He lit another cigarette.

“And?” said Mam.

“We didn’t even look at each other, Mickey and me. We were on him before we thought, before we knew what we were doing, though we knew not to use guns, too loud. We stuck our knives in him. We just jumped on him and stuck our knives in him. Stabbed him. Like that. Stabbed him. Stabbed him.”

He smoked. He shook.

“We told the sergeant he was reaching for his gun,” he said. “ ‘Course he was,’ he said. ‘Good lads. Good brave bonny lads. Now get that blood off you.’”

He stared out at the moon.

“We killed him,” he whispered.

“You were scared,” said Mam.

“Terrified. And it was in a war. A bliddy war! Imagine what happens all around the world in bliddy war.”

“And think what he might have done to you, Francis.”

“Ha. Me son stole a fiver from the hallway of a house. He killed a pet rabbit. I killed a lad in cold blood that might have been myself and might have been my son.”

“It was war,” said Mam again.

“Aye, war. And the sergeant said that now we’d done it once, the next time would be easier.”

“And was it?” she said.

No answer.

“Was it, Francis?”

“You don’t want to know. You don’t know what you’ll do till you come to it. There’s lads walking round the streets today with tales to tell that they’ll never bliddy tell.”

Mam stroked his back. He lit another cigarette.

“Make sure such tales don’t enter your life, Dominic,” he said.

He drew deep, breathed out. Mam coughed.

“We buried him in a shallow grave,” he said. “Hard to dig in the jungle with so many tangled roots around. Next night we hear somethin growlin, snortin, diggin the lad back up again. Last I heard, Mickey was panel-beating, out Consett way. Listen to them bliddy howlin dogs. Let’s gan to sleep now, eh?”

We didn’t move.

“Who
are
you both?” sighed Mam at last.

“Your husband,” he whispered.

“Your son,” I said.

We sat like that in my little room as the sun rose over our pale and fragile estate.

“You never know with boys,” said Creel. “Such talent for disguise, for misdirection . . .”

I was with my parents in his office. He had a police report on his desk. He had my books, my recent marks, my school report.

“None of this seems to have affected his work,” he said.

He peered at me.

“How can that be?” he asked me. “But of course you do not know. Of course there
is
no answer.”

My parents sat awkwardly in hard upright chairs. I stood at their side.

“We are subject to great mysteries,” he said. “Are we not?”

“Yes, sir,” whispered Mam.

“Yes indeed. As I prepared for this meeting, Dominic, your English teacher talked of you with unbridled admiration — of an old essay on ‘The Secret Sharer,’ for instance. He even quoted you to me. ‘The sharer is a hidden element of the narrator’s self.’ That, from one who was so young. From one who has, to all appearances, continued to flourish under our care. One who is even the linchpin of our football team. But a strange deception has occurred. We have been prey to an illusion. And what are we to do with you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“And nor do I.”

He turned to Dad.

“We were once boys, Mr. Hall. What would have been done with us had our indiscretions been discovered? And Mrs. Hall, you who are of the more transparent section of humanity, what do you think should be done?”

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t think he knew what he was doing.”

“Can that — such an
extraordinary
that — be so? But what would that say of our morality? And we must ask, in this place with crucifixes nailed to the walls and priests roaming in the corridors, what would that say of sin? What would that say of goodness and of our intention to avoid all evil?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“And nor do I, Mrs. Hall. This is a place of education. Our purpose is to bring knowledge to the children in our care. Perhaps it would be better to tell them all day long about the things we do not know.” He stared at us across his arched fingertips. “But enough. Were we to ponder that, there would be no end to our pondering. Dominic, had charges been pressed, we would have had to cast you into the wilderness. But you received mercy. This must be a turning point. You must not do again the things that we know that you have done. And you must not do again the things which we do not know you have done.”

He smiled.

“There must be a punishment, I suppose. Do you approve of punishments, Mr. Hall, Mrs. Hall?”

“Mebbe there should be a lot more punishment,” said Dad. “He’s been let off by Mrs. Charlton. He’s been let off by the police . . .”

“And by you?” said Creel.

“My first thought was to thrash him, like my dad would have thrashed me, to within an inch of my life.”

“But you did not.”

Dad looked down.

“No, sir.”

Creel turned his eyes to Mam.

“What good would it do?” she whispered.

“Spare the rod, spoil the child. You don’t believe that, Mrs. Hall?”

“I know there’s enough pain in the world without inflicting more on our children.”

“And you,” said Creel to me. “What punishment would pay you back for your wrongdoings? What punishment would ensure that you do not transgress again?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

He reached below his desk and lifted a cane. It was three feet long, hooked at one end. He flexed it between his hands and peered over it into my eyes. He swished it through the air. He bared his teeth, he grimaced, he raised the cane and held it in the air above my head, as if about to strike.

He laughed.

“How easy it is,” he said, “for we teachers to strike dread into those in our care.”

He put the cane away again.

“I should like the boy,” he said, “to write for me. What say you to that, Mr. Hall?”

“I’d say he’s a lucky bugger. Sorry, sir.”

“Perhaps he is. Perhaps we could ask if that is a punishment at all. But maybe it is the best of all punishments — one that makes use of the sinner’s gifts, and that helps him to truly change. What do you think, Mrs. Hall?”

“I don’t mind, sir.”

“Well, then, Dominic Hall. I should like you to write an answer to the question which must engage us all: Is it possible for one human being to know and to understand another? Will you do that for me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good lad. And don’t just write, ‘I don’t know,’ though that indeed may be the only honest answer that any of us could give.”

I wrote about the mysteries of Jack Law and Mrs. Stroud. I told tales to explain the causes of Jack’s silence and Mrs. Stroud’s seclusion. I changed their names to protect them, wrote about them as if they were inventions. I wrote of wordlessness and singing and angels, of curtained bedrooms and bird-filled hawthorn hedges. And I wrote stories that rose from riverside hovels and pebbledashed estates, stories of poltergeists and ponies and bleeding statues, of children endlessly bombing Berlin and bayoneting the Japanese. In the midst of my writing one day, I looked up and saw Holly in the cracked and dusty street, looking up at me.

I put down the pen and went out.

“Hello, Dominic,” she said, so easily.

“Hello, Holly.”

We walked the crooked pavements.

She said she’d heard about what I’d done. I told her there was a lot more than she’d heard.

“I killed things,” I said.

She kept on walking.

“Birds,” I said. “Sparrows and robins and finches and crows.”

“Poor things.”

“And other things. A cat. A dog.”

“And how did it feel?”

“It felt OK.”

We walked rapidly towards the sunlit fields.

“It did,” I said. “It felt weirdly OK.”

“Exciting?”

“Yes. We stole things, too.”

“And was that exciting, too?”

“Yes. But not so much.”

We walked.

“We did other things, Holly.”

I took a long deep breath. I slowed my steps.

“Holly,” I said. “We kissed each other.”

She sighed, walked on, with sunlight burning in her hair, grass swishing underneath her feet.

“And we did other things,” I said.

“I don’t really want to know, not now. Mam says the music has been sweeter than ever in these past few weeks. She says the angels seem closer to the earth somehow.”