The Tightrope Walkers Read online

  “To no harm,” she scoffed.

  “It’s natural,” he said. “Back then, princes and kings was shooting the tigers. Film stars was blasting at elephants. Us kids on the Tyne got rabbits and rats. We got crows and magpies. A few other things. Nowt wrong with it. Normal boys’ stuff, normal men’s stuff.”

  He spoke to me again.

  “In the army they said that in the real gunman there’s no difference between the gunman and the gun. Not a matter of how to do it right, but of how to feel it right. And it was the ones that could feel it right become the snipers, the sharpshooters. And even in the jungle they were cold as bliddy ice.”

  Mam clicked her tongue.

  “Such nonsense,” she said. “Give the gun back, Dominic.”

  “If you can’t watch this, then get inside,” he told her. “What d’you think’s going to happen, woman? We’re going to start slaughtering ourselves?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

  “Don’t call me stupid. Do as you’re told and go inside.”

  She sighed. She went inside.

  Dad winked at Vincent, winked at me.

  “Women!” he softly said. “They don’t get it.”

  I held the gun. I tried to imagine it being part of me. Tried to imagine being cold as ice and firing it at somebody, like the Japanese, or at Vincent McAlinden.

  Kapow! I said inside myself.

  “Die!” I breathed aloud.

  “Try a couple of shots,” said Dad. “Let’s see how you get on and then we’ll know how safe you’ll be. OK, Vincent?”

  “OK,” he said.

  Vincent took the sack from his back, took a box from the pack, took a pellet from the box. A little grey lead thing. He took the gun, snapped it open, placed the pellet into it, closed it again, passed it back.

  “There we are,” he said.

  “Now keep your finger off the trigger,” said Dad to me. “And point the barrel away from us. Safety first. It’s not exactly lethal, but it’d take an eye out. It’d go deep into your flesh. That’s right, Vincent?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Hall.”

  “Now,” said Dad, “what you going to shoot at?”

  I looked into the little back garden.

  “That half-brick there?” I said.

  He came to my back. He held my arms, he raised the gun, he put his head by mine and leaned against me.

  “Relax,” he said. “Look at the barrel, look at the brick. Stay calm, stay still. Imagine the pellet hitting the brick.”

  I felt his warm breath on my cheek, smelt the tobacco on him, felt his breathing, his heart.

  “Ready?” he whispered.

  “Ready.”

  He stepped away. I squeezed the trigger, the gun recoiled, dust spurted from the earth four feet from the half-brick.

  “That’s OK,” said Dad. “It’ll come. Another one, Vincent?”

  Vincent picked another pellet from the box.

  “Got plenty,” he said. He rattled the box. “Dozens of them, Mr. Hall.”

  I fired again. Closer this time.

  “Good lad,” said Dad. “I think you’ll be OK. You think he’ll be OK, Vincent?”

  Vincent nodded, and they grinned at each other. I imagined Dad’s thoughts as they did so: he’s just a lad, they’re both just lads. Better a lad like Vincent McAlinden with all his faults than the weird draughtsman’s daughter from across the street.

  He took the gun from me.

  “Can I?” he asked Vincent.

  “Aye,” said Vincent.

  Vincent passed Dad a pellet. Dad put it into the gun. He raised the gun.

  “That white pebble there,” he said.

  He fired, missed by inches.

  “Out of practice,” he said. “Do that in the jungle and it’s bliddy curtains. Give us another. Just one more, eh?”

  Another pellet. He put it into the gun, held the gun to his shoulder, swivelled so that the barrel pointed into the air. A crow flew over. He followed it, and I watched him, and I watched him pull the trigger, and couldn’t breathe. He missed again, but the crow in its flight jerked at the sound of it, veered off in another direction. I breathed.

  Dad held the rifle before his eyes, as if it were a thing of great substance, great beauty.

  “Them sharpshooters,” he said. “They were something. But even they were nowt compared to the bliddy Japs. Made of stone, were they. Still as death, silent as death, dead as death, for hour after bliddy hour till the moment comes. Then a single shot, a single invisible bullet winging through the trees, and one of your mates is gone. Just like that. And it’s like nowt at all has happened, but he’s dead and gone.”

  He and Vincent looked at each other again.

  “You’ll understand something of that, Vincent.”

  “Aye, Mr. Hall.”

  Dad passed the gun back to him.

  “You ever wish there was a war, Vincent?” he said.

  Vincent grunted in surprise, as if he’d never thought of such a thing. He put the sack on his back. He angled the gun over his shoulder.

  “Aye,” he said. “Sometimes I suppose I think I do, Mr. Hall.”

  Dad smiled. He patted me on the back.

  “Gan on,” he said. “Have a good day with Vincent. Mek sure to bring a rabbit or three for the pot tonight.”

  Holly was in her garden across the street, before her open front door. She was drawing or painting or writing. Something like that. She looked up from her work as we left the garden.

  Vincent groaned.

  “That one, eh?” he said. “That little lovely Holly Stroud, eh?”

  He walked on.

  “But keep your mind on higher things,” he said.

  We went uphill, across the waste, across the fields, to the place of the abandoned pits, to the place of rabbits and rats and rumoured foxes and rumoured ghosts and ghouls. We hid ourselves behind hawthorn hedges. We lay in the long grasses. Vincent saw a single rat and shot and missed. I saw a single rabbit and shot and missed. Weird. Some days this place seemed rampant with rabbits and rats, but not today. We sat at the foot of a hill of pit waste. He’d come prepared. He had a bottle of water and a pair of pork pies in the sack. He swigged from the bottle, then passed it to me. I wiped the rim with my sleeve. He laughed, asked if I was scared I’d catch the McAlinden germ. I felt myself blush. Joking, he said. He gave me a pie: thick crust, then amber jelly surrounding the ball of meat at the centre. I ate. I drank.

  He had some cigarettes, cork-tipped Park Drives this time. We smoked. I coughed.

  “Just do it like you’re breathing,” he said. “Divent force it. Just do it natural. You’ll learn.”

  “They kill you,” I said. “That’s what they’re saying now.”

  “Your dad smokes. My dad smokes. Everybody smokes. And ye got to die of something.”

  I tried again. My head reeled, again he said I’d learn.

  “And anyway,” he said, “it’s nowt but death.”

  We lay close together and the sun shone down.

  I heard the caulker’s din below, the endless tinnitus of this place.

  I saw the larks so high high up, and emptiness beyond.

  “You and that Holly Stroud,” he said. “You done owt with her?”

  “Owt?”

  “You knaa what I mean.”

  “No,” I murmured.

  I thought of just standing up, hurrying home again.

  “Get away from him!” said a voice inside me. “Stay with him!”

  “You seen her thing?”

  I whispered no.

  “I would have done if I was you.”

  He angled the gun into the air, towards the larks, but didn’t fire.

  “Kapow,” he softly said. “Kapow. Kapow.”

  We lay silent for a while. I played with the knife, slipping the blade into the turf, into the creamy soil beneath.

  “She’s lovely, she is,” he said.

  We moved on, seeking more prey. An
other rat, shot at and missed. Another rabbit, shot at and missed.

  And then he got a rat, which simply scampered to a halt as the pellet hit. Then I got a rabbit, from twenty yards away. I saw its skull in the sights, its twitching ears, I squeezed the trigger and the beast fell. We hurried to it.

  It lay in the grass below the brilliant sun. It trembled. Still some life in it.

  “Finish it,” said Vincent.

  But I couldn’t move. I just waited for the beast to be still.

  “Finish it!”

  Vincent grabbed my knife. He brought it down with force into the rabbit’s breast and it was motionless at last.

  He put his hand on my shoulder, as if to comfort me.

  “It’s OK,” he said.

  He picked up the corpse and dropped it into a sack. “The next one’ll be easier now.”

  He suddenly pointed.

  “Another one,” he said. “Quick!”

  I hesitated.

  “Don’t bliddy think!” he whispered. “Get it done.”

  I didn’t think. I fired. It fell.

  “Good lad!” he said.

  We hurried to it. Dead. Still.

  “Well done,” whispered Vincent at my side. “First proper kill.”

  I picked up the corpse. I held it between my hands. Still warm. Felt the weight of it, the way it draped itself across my fingers, gazed down at the wonder of its fur, perfection of its feet, the smudge of brilliant blood at its throat. Gazed at my trembling hands with the trickles of blood on them.

  “It’s nowt but a rabbit,” said Vincent.

  He took it from me and pushed it into the sack.

  “Chop off its head and chop off its feet,” he said. “Skin it and gut it and give it a wash. Into the pot with a couple of onions. Bliddy lovely.”

  He lit another cigarette and passed it to me.

  I smoked and coughed.

  He smiled, and held my shoulder again. There seemed to be tenderness in his fingers, in his voice.

  He seemed to be deep in thought for a moment.

  “It’s nowt but death,” he said. “Nowt but bodies. Knaa what I mean?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Bodies. Blood and bones and nowt inside. Even the priests’ll tell you the beasts’ve got no souls.”

  “They used to try to weigh them,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “They weighed bodies at the point of death. They said that when a body dies, it loses a tiny bit of weight. It proves that there’s a soul that leaves at death.”

  “Humans mebbe. Not poor little bunnies with lead slugs in ’em.”

  “Mebbe.”

  “Mebbe! D’you think Bernard had a soul that left him at his death?”

  “I dunno, Vincent.”

  “Me neither. You ever knowed anybody that’s died?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither, not till then.”

  He watched me.

  “Must be awful,” I said.

  “Aye, it is.”

  We were silent for a time.

  “Ah well,” he said. “Now kill a bliddy bird.”

  “Eh?”

  “A bird. There’s thousands of ’em.”

  He was right. There was an abundance of them. A hardly visible exultation of them high high above.

  And so we started on them.

  And unlike the rabbits and rats, the silly birds didn’t seem to know that they should stay away, even as we began to kill.

  A blackbird landed on a hedge nearby. Vincent raised the gun, I watched him aim and I said nothing. He fired, and the bird dropped from its perch, and there was a sudden fluttering in the hedge and around the hedge as other disturbed birds took frantically to the air, then settled again as silence and peace re-established themselves.

  I hardly breathed.

  “Kapow!” he whispered.

  We went to the hedge. There it was, the dead thing in the grass, the pellet buried somewhere deep inside it, but no sign of the violence that had been worked upon it, as if nothing had happened at all.

  “What a bliddy shot!” whispered Vincent. “Kabliddypow!”

  He licked his lips. He looked along the hedge. A little flock of sparrows, a family of them maybe. The kind of thing you hardly notice until you begin to see them as something for a kill.

  He quickly raised the gun and fired, but nothing fell. The birds scattered into the empty air, and then, the silly things, they came back down again.

  He shrugged.

  He shot again, he missed again, he shrugged again. Didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

  Birds were everywhere, flying over us, fluttering across the grasses, into the hedges.

  He passed the gun to me. I think I didn’t think. I raised it to my shoulder as my dad had shown me to. Tilted my head and peered through the sights, at nothing first of all. Then hawthorn, grass and weeds and sky. The distant dark sea, the place where the river entered the sea. A river lined with shipyards and half-built ships. All these things in a narrow focus, all these things as targets. I swung the barrel back towards the hedges. Sparrows, maybe the same sparrows, dancing upon the foliage a mere ten yards away. One settled, sang. I calmed. I breathed. Imagined that the gun was part of me, that I was part of the gun. Thought of Japanese snipers, still as death, silent as death, dead as death.

  Squeezed the trigger and the sparrow fell.

  Stopped breathing and the world stopped turning.

  I ceased existing until Vincent thumped me.

  “Fucking brilliant!” he said.

  We went again to see the new dead thing and there it was, with blood as red as my blood trickling from its throat.

  “What a shot!” said Vincent McAlinden. “That shut the bugger up, eh?”

  And then we started properly.

  We lay in the grass, as if we were at war, as if the birds were the enemy. Vincent became younger, more playful, more enthusiastic. I became older, more careless, more deadly. We passed the gun between us, took turns at loading, firing, missing, killing. I learned the feel of the gun against me, the heft of it in my hands, the sudden snap and whiz of the pellet breaking free and fleeing through the air, the recoil of it against the shoulder, the frustration of the miss, the satisfaction of the kill.

  Vincent counted. We got to five, we got to ten, we got sparrows, finches, a wood pigeon that fluttered frantically as it fell, and still the birds kept coming, coming.

  “Stupid bliddy things,” he said.

  We crouched, one knee upon the ground and one foot forward, as I’d seen soldiers do in comics, as I’d seen them pose as toys.

  We raised the gun into the air and fired at the flying birds. Much more difficult, much less success, but much more enticing. To catch a bird mid-flight! How skilled would that prove us to be!

  We missed, we missed, and then I got one.

  A crow, a great slow black thing with widespread wings, a large black target against the everlasting blue. I tracked it for a few seconds and then I fired. And oh the satisfaction when it simply stopped all living movement, when it tumbled through the emptiness towards the earth.

  I ran to it and picked it up.

  Still warm, dead still.

  Vincent hugged me, cursed me, praised my skill.

  “What a bliddy killer you are!” he whispered deep into my ear.

  He took the gun, he fired, he missed.

  And we went on, and yes we killed more birds mid-flight, to go with the ones we’d caught mid-feeding, mid-song.

  No larks. They were all too far away, all too tiny, all too unlike birds at all. And though Vincent raised the gun and indeed did aim and fire upon them, I allowed myself to watch him and to say nothing, for I knew there was no way for a little grey lead pellet to reach them up there.

  We grew tired as the sun began to fall.

  And the joy and satisfaction of it all began to fade.

  Just a few pellets left now.

  “We’ve used hundreds!” Vincent gasped. “A few
more each and then we’re done.”

  I killed another bird. He killed two.

  I loaded one of the final pellets, pointed it towards a sparsely growing hedge. A pigeon perched on a swaying branch there. I took aim. And the foliage parted, and the bird took flight and a face was looking directly back at me, a pale face, fair hair around it, mouth opening as if saying words.

  “Jack Law!” I whispered.

  “Jack bliddy nosey-parker Law,” said Vincent.

  Jack started moving forward. He held out his hands, showed the dead birds he held in both of them. He raised them up to show them to us, to show us what we’d done.

  His mouth kept opening, closing, as if saying something.

  He kept on coming to us.

  Vincent grabbed the gun from me. He raised it towards Jack Law.

  “Stay back,” he said. “I’ve telt you before, Jack bliddy Law. Go back!”

  Jack kept coming. I saw the feathers, wings, beaks, blood in his hands. I saw the horror in his eyes. I saw his mouth opening, closing.

  “We wouldn’t miss you, Jack Law,” said Vincent. “Nobody would fuckin miss you. Nobody would even notice you were fuckin gone.”

  He stepped forward. He pointed the gun towards Jack’s head. Jack kept coming.

  “See?” said Vincent. “He’s a lunatic. It’s likely all a big bliddy dream for him. Stay back. Stay bliddy back!”

  Jack stopped only when the gun was six inches from his eyes.

  “I’ll kill you, Jack,” said Vincent. “A pellet through the eye and to your brain. Or what there is of brain.”

  I couldn’t move, was as still as the two of them below the brilliant setting sun. I watched the two bodies, the handful of dead birds, the gun.

  “You know I would,” said Vincent very softly, very calm. “You of all others know I would.”

  A silence lasted minutes more, then Jack backed away at last, into the hedge. He turned his eyes to me before he disappeared. They widened, they were frantic for a moment.

  Then he was gone.

  “I should have fuckin done it,” said Vincent. “Straight into the bliddy eyes. Blinded him at least if not killed him. Then there’d be nowt for him to see as well as nowt to say. What right’s a lunatic like that to be here in the same world as us?”

  “He’s harmless,” I said.

  “How can you know what he thinks? How can you know what he gets up to? How can you know what he’s planning when he’s wandering the world alone?”