The Fire-Eaters (2 page)

She laughed.

“It'll shrink. I know it. But you'll look great. You'll be the proper little man.”

We ate hot beef sandwiches, smeared them with sauce and mustard, licked the juices that ran down our chins and across our fingers. We drank bittersweet sarsaparilla from a health stall. Then we moved away from
the stalls and walked right by the water's edge. It flowed ten feet below us. Seagulls hovered over the water and swooped for the scraps thrown by a bunch of children. The tide was turning and the center was all eddies and swirls and agitation. Mam kept laughing, holding her face up to the sun.

“I told your dad the day would brighten,” she said. “He's an old misery! All that autumn and winter nonsense!”

And she took my hand and hurried me forward. “Come on!” she said. “Let's ride a lift up to the sky!” The lift was inside the stone column of the bridge. We stood in the shade of the bridge's great steel arch. I spread my hands across its huge rivets. Traffic roared high above us. Nearby, a herring gull ripped at something bloody in a brown paper sack. A river bell rang, a distant ship hooted.

When the lift came down, there was a little man inside sitting on a stool.

“Come in, madam,” he called. “And you, young sir!”

He pressed his buttons and pulled his levers. I saw how he couldn't keep his eyes off her as we shuddered up toward the sky. On a shelf at his side were a Thermos flask, a sandwich box, and a notebook and a pen. He saw me looking.

“I keep a note of everyone,” he said. His eyes sparkled. “All my customers. Just for memory's sake.”

I wanted to reach out, lift the book, look inside, and he knew it.

“Ah, to you it would be simply boring,” he said. “It's nothing but dates and descriptions and weather reports.” He shrugged. “I must do something to fill my days of rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.”

He took the coin she handed him and opened the door with a flourish.

“Here we are, then. Farewell, madam. Farewell, young sir!”

We stepped out onto the platform of the bridge. As the doors closed, he was already writing.

“Beautiful bright lady,” I heard him say. “All dressed in red. Her quiet boy. September 2nd, 1962. Sunshine after rain.”

The lift door closed. Buses and trucks and cars trundled past us. There was a stink of exhaust smoke. Mam stood at the parapet and stared down toward the river and the market. I crouched beside her and looked through the metal palings. The river swirled. Seagulls flew below us. Down at the market's edge, we saw the crowd around McNulty. He was wrapped in chains. He writhed and jerked and struggled on the cobbles.

“Look at him,” she said. “The poor soul.”

She tipped her head forward so that her hair fell down in front of me. She leaned further and her upsidedown face came into view. She smiled at me from the
dizzying space outside the bridge. Then she laughed and started running. The red coat opened and rose around her like wings.

“Come on, Bobby!” she called. “Run! Race you to the other side!”

W
e walked back into the city. We waited for the bus beside the war memorial. The angel with her sword looked down on us. Struggling ranks of stone soldiers reached up to her. Someone had painted BAN THE BOMB in white across the densely packed names of the city's dead. In the bus I let Mam put her arm around me and we leaned together as we rattled past the city's edge. I tried to listen to her heart. She said the sky was beautiful, the way its blueness faded into countless shades of purple and orange and pink. She praised the fields, the hedgerows, the allotments, the pigeon lofts, the silhouettes of pitheads to the north. She gasped at the first sight of the distant glistening sea, at the rooftops of our Keely Bay.

“It's like …,” she said. “But who could catch such beauty?”

“You,” I murmured, much too softly for her to hear.

“You,” she said. “You're such a quiet one these days. What happened to our little laughing wild lad?” She squeezed my hand. “Not to worry. It's a stage. The laughing lad'll soon come back again. Oh, just look at Mister Organizer!”

There was Dad, waiting at the junction by the Rat, with his arm held high to stop the bus. She stamped her foot when she jumped down.

“Do you think we're too daft to get off at the right stop?” she said.

Then she giggled and kissed him.

“What a time we've had!” she said. “Markets and bridges and strongmen. Tell him, Bobby. Tell him what you did! Come on!”

We set off arm in arm along the lane toward the sea. We passed the post office, its window packed with fishing nets, comics, tin cars and soldiers, fake dog turds, buckets and spades. I gathered my thoughts.

“There was this man called McNulty…,” I started, but she butted in straightaway.

“Man?” She laughed. “Man? He was a devil, a demon, a rascal … and guess who he picked out from the crowd!”

We all laughed as she told the tale of the wild man with his skewers and chains, and of little quivering me, his helper. Then Dad was silent for a while.

“Small, black-haired, tattoos?” he said. “McNulty?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“I knew him.”

“You knew him?” I said.

“Aye.” He shook his head and stared into the empty sky. “But I thought he'd be surely dead by now.”

Mam looked at him, wide-eyed.

“Howay, then, mister,” she said. “Tell us the tale.”

He laughed softly. The lane opened out to the scruffy edge of the beach. There was a rutted turning circle for cars and carts. We walked through to the beach, where fragments of sharp coal mingled with the soft beige sand.

“Come on,”
said Mam.

“It was the end of the war,” he said. “All them years back. Nineteen forty-five, the year they let us come home. He was on the same boat as me, coming back from Burma. He was one of them that'd seen too much, suffered too much. It was like his brain'd been boiled. Too much war, too much heat, too many magic men. The man was such a mess. Little McNulty, eh? Fancy him lasting all this time.”

It was darkening. Stars came out. The lighthouse light began to turn. We walked toward the sea.

“He was the ship's fool. Mostly we put up with him, or laughed at him. His mind was all gone. Chants and spells and curses and dances. Them things he did with ropes and swords and fire. There was them that said he was a proper magic man. There was some that humored him or tried to care for him. It was clear he was going to
need looking after. But some of the blokes … There's no end to cruelty, is there? One morning I found him in a heap on the stairs with his clothes all ripped and his skull cracked and blood all over him. What's happened? I says to him. Nowt, he says. Nowt. But he's crying like a bairn. He flinches. When I touch him his eyes is like a little desperate dog's. And the whimpering he made …I found a nurse and he never flinched while she stitched him. He just stroked my arm and said I was a bonny bonny lad. Poor soul.”

“Wonder what brings him here now,” said Mam.

“God knows,” said Dad.

The lighthouse light turned. It became more brilliant as the daylight faded. We stood and breathed the sea air. We watched a late tern diving at the sea. Further along the beach, the sea coalers and their ponies dragged carts filled with coal from the sea. There was a girl's laughter and I peered toward it through the dusk. The air calmed. The sea calmed. It stretched like burnished metal to the dark dead-flat horizon. The lighthouse light became a beam that swept the sea, the land and then the sea again. We were silent and still. We hardly breathed, as if we didn't dare disturb such peace. Then Mam sighed at last. Dad lit a cigarette and drew deeply on it.

“Such a world we live in,” said Mam.

She smiled. She nudged Dad.

“So, Mister Chef,” she said. “What wonders have you prepared to welcome us home?”

“A banquet,” he said. “Come and see.”

We headed to our house above the beach. A light burned in the window. Pale smoke rose from the chimney.

“McNulty,” said Dad. “You'll have to take me, Bobby, show me where he was. Mebbe he'll be back in the same place again. Who'd believe it, after all these years.” He opened the little gate into our garden. He squeezed my arm. “He was always harmless, son. Don't be hexed by him.”

W
e had his little pasties hot from the oven, with carrots and potatoes whipped into a cream. He gave me half a glassful of his beer. There was rice pudding, sweet and rich beneath its scorched skin. We mixed jam into it and sighed at such deliciousness. The lights were low, the curtains open. Every minute the window filled with light. Dad's thoughts kept turning to the war, to his voyage home, to McNulty.

“Skin!” he said. “He said loads of stuff about skin. He said he'd seen men who dressed in the skin of a beast and became the beast. Men in lion skins snarling like lions. Men in antelope skins leaping like antelopes. Tiger skin, ape skin, snake skin. Put them on, he said, say the proper words, and you can turn to anything.”

I rubbed my hand. A mark was left where McNulty's tiny drops of blood had fallen. Or was it a mark I'd always
had? I fingered the coin he'd given me in payment. I recalled his breath, his skin, his deep dark driven eyes.

Dad lit a cigarette. His breath rasped as he inhaled. I cleared the table with Mam. In the kitchen, she crossed off yet another day from the calendar.

“Just another week till that new school,” she said, and she beamed at me.

The air grew cold. Dad threw more sea coal and lumps of driftwood onto the fire. I sat with him and watched TV. There'd been more nuclear bomb tests in Russia and the USA. President Kennedy stood at a lectern, whispered to a general, shuffled some papers and spoke of his resolution, our growing strength. He said there were no limits to the steps we'd take if we were pushed. Khrushchev made a fist, thumped a table and glared. Then came the pictures that accompanied such reports: the missiles that would be launched, the planes that would take off, the mushroom clouds, the howling winds, the devastated cities.

Dad spat into the fire. He cursed and lit another cigarette.

“This isn't enough for them,” he said. “This quiet, this beauty, this peace. Listen to them. They're animals, howling for blood.”

He inhaled.

“Maybe we should go far away,” he said. “Where none of their nonsense can ever reach us.”

“Australia!” called Mam.

She came through the door with my school uniform in her hands.

“Australia! That's what it was going to be. I'll take you away to where it's hot and clean and new. That's what he said. Australia, my love! A new life! Come on. Put this on, bonny boy. Let me make those changes.”

She drew me to her, put the blazer on me and giggled. She knelt beside me with pins gripped in her teeth. She snapped down my sleeves, turned up the cuffs to the level of my wrists, and tacked them with pins.

“Keep straight,” she kept saying. “You'll finish no quicker by jiggling about.

“Anybody'd think you'd be proud,” she said.

I sighed and rolled my eyes at Dad and watched the window and let her have her way. The heat of the fire scorched my legs.

“There,” she said. “Now let me look at you.”

She pushed me away and sat back on her heels.

“Fasten it up properly, then. That's right.”

I saw the tears in their eyes as they smiled at each other.

“Bobby,” she said. “Put it all on. Go on, love, with the new shirt. Go on. It won't take long.”

I stood there.

“Go on, eh?” said Dad.

In my room I stripped off my jeans and sweater and put on everything: the socks and flannel shorts, the
white shirt, the dark tie. I tied on the heavy black shiny shoes. And I replaced the blazer, the too-long, too-wide covering of black with golden battlements shining from its pocket.

“Oh, Bobby,” she whispered when I went back down. “Oh, Bobby. What a man.”

Then there came a knocking at the door. A deep voice called in from the dark.

“Bobby! You in, Bobby? You coming out?”

Mam's face darkened.

“Joseph Connor,” she said.

She looked at her watch.

“It's too late,” she said.

“Bobby!” Joseph called.