Counting Stars Read online

  I told her about the soldier.

  “Poor body,” she whispered. “Poor soul.”

  We didn’t use Miss Golightly for some time afterward.

  Mam still called on her, and came back with stories of how she was failing.

  It was my eleven-plus year. Dad said that I was carrying the dreams of the past, that I was a pioneer. Preparation at school was relentless: day after day of Maths Progress Tests and English Progress Tests and prayers that the hardworking would be rewarded. I took the examination at Jarrow Grammar School. There were scores of us there, ranked and registered in the yard by district and school and name. Ban the Bomb and great Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbols were painted on the corrugated roofs of the outside classrooms. Stern teachers stood around us like warders. Even in the toilets we were watched. I stood dazed in there, stared at myself in a cracked mirror, saw the baby and the boy in me, saw the images of my parents upon me. Someone yelled at me to move, to get out. As I stumbled past him he shoved me on my way.

  When I began to write in the regimented hall, in a silence broken by scared breathing and the padding feet of proctors, I began to be released. I knew, as Dad had said, there was nothing for me to worry about, that I would be rewarded.

  I passed, and the uniform was gray: gray flannel blazer with a badge of battlements and lances, gray flannel cap, gray shorts and socks. The blazer slopped down over my shoulders, the shorts kept slipping down across my hips. I stood at the center of the family and they smiled and giggled. Dad put his arm around me and said who knew what wonders time would bring. He took me around the town in his Austin. He burst in on our relatives and called down their congratulations upon me. They laughed at my shyness and pressed coins in my hand. They poured glasses of beer for Dad. His own father told me he’d seen it in me as soon as I was born.

  Dad took me to Miss Golightly to have tucks sewn into the shorts. He left me there and walked around the corner to the Columba Club. She beamed with joy, kissed my cheek, said she’d thought I’d left her.

  She stood me before her and tugged my uniform into place.

  She wore a battered cardigan. The flesh on her cheeks was sagging and wrinkled. There was a vague scent of urine in the house. When she began to tack my shorts with pins she trembled. When I felt her fingers on my skin, I thought of what Kev had said and I cursed myself for it. I sat with a towel around me while she held the shorts in her hands and worked with needle and thread. Spring light poured in from the street, fragments of silvery dust were buoyed upon it: I gazed around the little crowded room, at the photographs.

  “Miss Golightly,” I said. “What happened to the soldier?”

  She looked at me in surprise. I could see how her eyes strained to focus on me after staring at the needle point. She clicked her tongue, raised her eyebrows, laughed a little.

  “Death,” she said. She went back to her work. “That’s all. Just death.”

  I put the shorts back on. I stood before her. She touched my cheek.

  “How old now?” she asked.

  “Eleven.”

  We unwrapped sweets together and stood before the photographs.

  “My bonny boy,” she whispered.

  She sighed. She squeezed my arm. I felt how small beside me she had become.

  “You’ll be going off soon,” she said.

  She dreamt.

  “This is secret,” she whispered.

  She left me. I heard her footsteps on the stairs. She came back with a polished wooden box in her hands. She put it on the sideboard, lifted its lid with trembling hands, then took the jar out from inside and showed her baby to me.

  It was a fetus suspended in liquid. It was hardly longer than my thumb. There were buds of eyes and nose and mouth on its face, little half-formed hands raised to the chest, little knees raised to the belly. It rested upright with its spine gently arched as it curled in upon itself.

  “My little boy,” she whispered.

  She rested her palm upon the curve of the jar.

  “He would have been like you are.”

  We watched the baby in the liquid, the thin shaft of light falling upon him.

  “What’s he called?” I asked.

  “He would have been Anthony, like his father. But death happened in me too.”

  She put her arm across my shoulder. We were silent and we dreamt.

  “Do you see us in him?” she asked. “Me and my soldier?”

  Then Dad was knocking on the door. She put the jar back in the box. She kissed me and told me it was secret. When she let Dad in she told him what a fine lad I’d become. He laughed, and said hadn’t he just come from showing off about me in the Columba Club.

  I grew quickly that summer. I played in the blackout trousers. They faded, they tightened, the hems frayed and holes were worn into the knees. I played in the great soccer games on the high playing fields: dozens of boys from opposing streets rushing at the ball and kicking and cursing each other. I set off with my friends on expeditions into the Heather Hills. We carried knives and homemade spears and parcels of sandwiches. We looked down upon the new buildings rising in Felling Square. We squatted among the ruins of the old gun site, peered to the distant North Sea, reported bombers coming in. We lit fires and smoked cigarettes pinched from our fathers. Our bodies ached and tingled with sunlight, exhaustion, exhilaration. We lay close together in the warm long grass and talked of the journeys we’d take when we’d grown.

  Sometimes I came across Kev Golightly. He grinned at me and talked of the filthy old witch and asked if she’d been in my pants yet.

  I dreamt of Miss Golightly’s slackening flesh, of her dead soldier, of her baby in the jar. Often it began to grow, familiar features to appear in its face.

  Late August I went with Dad to buy new pens and a mathematics set. I put on the uniform again, felt how the blazer had become a closer fit. A bus pass naming my route was sent to me. The days were shortening fast. Earlier and earlier we looked down from the hills to the whole of Tyneside fading into the dusk.

  “That’s it,” we whispered on the final evening as we went back down.

  Miss Golightly’s heart gave out that October. A child who passed through Kitchener Street one morning saw her lying dead at the center of her living room. I went with my parents to the funeral. She lay in her coffin at the front of the church while the service was said. I knew that she would have already begun to decay and I tried to imagine her lying in there. I wore my uniform, and I fingered the last stitches she’d made for me, which would soon need to be undone. We spoke the prayers and sang the hymns for her. The minister said that she had left the troubled body behind and had been born again into glory. I said a private prayer that her soldier would be waiting for her. I heard her voice in me: Where am I? Where is he? and I cried, for I understood that their baby could not be there with her.

  Afterward, as we drove home in the Austin, Mam said she’d heard Miss Golightly’s family had been awful, already fighting to get their hands on the few things she’d owned.

  By then I’d heard teachers whispering that I was the best of my year. Dad said I had the world in the palm of my hand. Mam smiled as she unpicked Miss Golightly’s stitches, and asked where her little boy had gone. One evening Kev Golightly’s mother came to the door with a parcel. She said the old woman had written a note that I should have these. She scowled and told Mam it would take weeks to get rid of the clutter. She said you wouldn’t believe the things they’d found in there. She stood and watched as I unwrapped the photographs of the nurses and soldiers and of Felling as it was. She looked at Mam and raised her eyes and shook her head and hurried out into the night. Dad helped me to put the photographs up in my bedroom. I showed them Miss Golightly in her youth. I showed them her soldier. Together we picked out the familiar features of our town. I recalled Miss Golightly’s brightness, her gentle touch.

  In the evenings I sat beneath the photographs to work out my problems and write my compositions. I tried once to
write the story of a nurse, a soldier, a baby in a jar, but it came to nothing. I knew I wouldn’t get away with it.

  Autumn deepened, darkened. Frost came early. On Saturday mornings the soccer games on the high playing fields continued. Their ferocity was intensified by the cold and there were often bitter running battles on the sidelines. Below us smoke thickened in the still air over the town. White frost lay in the shadows. In the Heather Hills we lit fires and dropped potatoes into the embers. We wrenched thick sheets of ice from the ponds. We talked of girls and the bomb. We imagined that we were survivors after war, that waste and death were all around us.

  It was on a Saturday afternoon that I came upon Kev again. I was making my way home. I heard him calling my name, saw him coming toward me across the fields.

  “You won’t believe it,” he said.

  He took a haversack from his shoulder, took out the polished wooden box from inside.

  “You’ve seen nothing like it,” he said.

  He opened the box and took out the jar and held it toward me.

  “Look,” he said.

  I took it from him and held it to the fading light. I saw the half-formed features, the little legs, the little arms.

  “There was a note that it should be buried with her. Nobody’d touch it, though. My mam cried all night about it. My dad wouldn’t go near it. Said it was evil. Everybody thinks somebody else took it away.” He leaned close to me. “See?” he said. “They were right about the cow. A bloody witch.”

  The baby turned gently in the liquid as I moved it against the light.

  “You think it’s real?” he whispered.

  The baby’s flesh through the years had become darker, more opaque than ours, but I saw the outlines of bones and blood vessels. The outline of his skin was blurred, as if he had started to dissolve. He held up his hands as if to hold on to or fend off something.

  “He’ll be in Limbo,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “Where the souls of the unchristened go. You can be happy there. But you can’t know God, and you can’t be with the christened.”

  He grinned.

  “It’s even got a dick. If you tip it up you’ll see it.”

  “What you doing with it?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t know. I was going to get it out. I got the lid off, then I didn’t dare.”

  We stared at each other. He took the jar from me and started to unscrew the metal lid. We breathed deeply. There was a chemical scent as the lid came off.

  “I thought of you,” he said. “Soon as I got it.”

  We sighed and bit our lips. We watched his fingers reaching in. He grunted and recoiled, couldn’t do it. Some of the liquid slopped out on to the grass.

  “Stupid,” I said.

  I looked at the sky, the disappearing sunlight. I told Kev to clear off. I said I’d take the baby. We fought, rolling over on the frosty grass, but I was bigger than him and it was soon over. I held him by the throat and said he knew nothing about this. I said it was secret and I’d kill him if he told. I grinned and said there were spells she’d taught me. I grunted some mumbo jumbo and spat down onto the grass beside his face.

  “Stupid sod,” I said.

  I let him up. I threw the haversack at him. There were tears and blood on his face. I stepped toward him and he backed away. I put the lid back on the jar and the jar back in the box.

  “Go on,” I told him.

  I took my knife from my pocket and folded out its blade.

  He lurched away across the field. He kept cursing me, sobbing. I watched him, waited till he’d gone.

  I moved back up into the Heather Hills. The light was fading fast. I broke the ice on a pond. I found a sheltered grassy spot close by, beneath a hawthorn tree. I started to dig with the knife. After the icy crust the earth crumbled easily and I scooped it out with my fingers. I poured the liquid out of the jar, holding the baby back with the lid. I tore a strip of blackout from my trousers, laid it across my hand. I took the lid away and the baby tumbled out on to my palm. I reached into the pond, lifted some water, trickled it over the baby.

  “I name you Anthony,” I said.

  I prayed that the Devil would be defeated, that the baby would be acceptable to God, that he would be welcomed now. I stared down at him, touched him, his skin so smooth, so tender. I folded the cloth over him.

  “There you are,” I whispered, and placed him in the earth.

  I pushed the soil back and pressed the turf back into place and prayed again that my deeds on Earth might influence events in Heaven. I threw the jar and the box into the wilderness.

  I hurried back down through the dusk.

  In my room, I put my schoolwork aside. I still felt the weight and shape of the baby on my skin. As it faded, I began again to write the story of the nurse, the soldier and the baby in the jar.

  The Angel of Chilside Road

  THIS ROAD IS NARROW and tall trees grow from its verges. It leads upward from Heworth and Watermill Lane. It comes to a broad sloping field which in those days led to the colliery and then the Heather Hills and then the open sky.

  The week after our sister Barbara died she was seen walking hand in hand with Mam on this road toward the field. She was dressed in white and both she and Mam walked with a fluency which neither had in their lives, for Barbara had been an invalid child and Mam was already badly damaged by arthritis. It was late winter. They were beneath the trees. A light was burning from our sister and both of them were smiling.

  At that time we lived at the dark foot of Felling in a new neighborhood of gray pebble-dashed houses, called The Grange. We had moved there from our parents’ first home in Felling Square, a cold upstairs flat overrun with mice, which had been condemned. Our house was in a cul-de-sac, Thirlmere, which was entered from a long looped road called Coniston. This neighborhood was separated from the body of the town by the new bypass. From the garden at Thirlmere it was possible to stand on tiptoe and peer over the rooftops to the distant center of the town, the streets and parks, the playing fields, the Heather Hills, but there was no easy access to those places. It was in the house at Thirlmere that Barbara died.

  After she died, we soon began to move upward again. We returned to Felling Square, to the new flats that replaced those that had been demolished. Then higher, to Coldwell Park, where we stayed, close to Chilside Road. If our father had not died, it’s probable we would have ascended again, perhaps to the new houses built beyond the fields once the colliery had gone.

  Perhaps in our dreams we will always move closer to the sky, following the angel that was seen on Chilside Road that day.

  The angel was seen by Mary Byrne, mother of Michael, and resident of Watermill Lane. She gave her account to our mother, to whom it brought much comfort, who told our sister Catherine, who told it to us all.

  The Time Machine

  FELLING SHORE, EARLY MAY, the year before my father dies. The first time I’ve nested in years. I’m in an ancient hawthorn, with a hedge sparrow’s egg in my mouth. I hear birdsong, the endless din of the distant city, then a grinding of gears and engines, the crunch of wheels on damaged roads. I step higher onto a thin bough, and pull aside the tangled leaves. I see caravans and lorries coming down through the terraced streets, mounting the broken curbs onto the waste ground, entering this broad field above the Tyne. The tree that holds me quivers as I grip it tighter. Its thorns pierce my skin. I see the Waltzer and the House of Death. A sheep, a goat and a little camel lie in the same cage. I slip, the egg bursts on my tongue. I gag and spit. Salt and slime in my mouth. The shell ineffably fine. The ruined egg dangles from my lips. I grip a new branch, rebalance, stare out again. Through the hawthorn blossom I see the Time Machine return to Felling Shore.

  I climb down, squat in the shade of the tree. The convoy comes to rest. Children and dogs leap from its doors to the field. I spit and spit, wipe my mouth with my sleeve. Blood trickles from my hands. A group of the children come.
A little girl in a short frock with an Alsatian at her side points at me, then at the old shoebox at my side.

  “What’s in there?” she says.

  I open the box, show the eggs laid in neat rows on smooth sand. I touch them with my fingers, and name them.

  “Starling, larky, blackbird, wren.”

  I point up into the tree, to the nest deep in the foliage.

  “Hedge sparrow,” I tell her.

  I pick a fragment of shell from the tip of my tongue.

  “Give us an egg,” she says.

  I hold out the bright blue fragment to her.

  She laughs, grips the growling dog by its mane. Beyond her, men are already uncoupling trailers, throwing rods and girders down onto the grass, unrolling great sheets of canvas. I see the Time Machine, sky blue, with pyramids and flying saucers and fleshy pink women in bathing costumes painted on it, at the center the arched entrance with its beaded curtain.

  A skinny naked boy crouches before the eggs, shoves his finger into the sand. I clip his hand away.

  “Which one you from?” I ask the girl.

  “We tell your age for sixpence. Dad gets out of chains and sticks skewers in himself. Mam tells your fortune and shows her knickers to men after midnight.” She held her hand out. “Give us a penny, eh?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Little Kitten.” She shows her nails like claws. “You’re fourteen. Give us a penny.”

  I drop a coin in her palm and she giggles and spits then sets off to the river with the dog and her friends. Out in the field, older children are roaming now. A juggler spins knives. Elvis Presley’s voice starts to crackle and roar. I move out from the tree. The woman leaning against the Time Machine hails me as I walk by. She is blond, plump like the women in the paintings. I see how the name and the bodies have been painted time and again.

  “Yes, you, boy!” she calls.