The Fire-Eaters (12 page)

Far off down a corridor, the bell rang.

“No homework,” said Miss Bute. “Just remember what you've seen.”

We filed out. Todd was outside the room, strap in hand. But we were quiet and subdued. He slid the strap back into his breast pocket. As we walked past him, Daniel murmured something.

“What was that, boy?” said Todd.

“Nothing, sir,” said Daniel.

Todd narrowed his eyes. Daniel walked on, close behind me. Out of earshot, he murmured again.

“Smile, please.”

I turned to look at him.

“I'll get our evil Mr. Todd,” he said.

He winked.

“Smile, please, Mr. Todd, sir.”

“P
sst! Psst!”

When I got off the bus that evening, Joseph was waiting for me.

“Psst! Bobby!”

He was in the hawthorn. I remembered how he'd shoved me down in the sand. How many times could I let him get away with it? I tried to walk by without acknowledging him, but he came out to me. He held my elbow.

“Bobby, man.”

I looked at him. He lowered his eyes.

“I know,” he said. “I shouldn't've done it.” He shrugged. “I didn't mean nowt, man. I just get carried away. You know that, man.”

“Do I?”

“Aye.” He gritted his teeth. “I'm just a stupid plonker, man. I'm sorry. OK?”

I shook my head. I knew I was about to let him get away with it again.

“How sorry?” I said.

“Dead sorry.”

“Dead dead sorry?”

“Aye.”

“Say it.”

“I'm dead dead sorry.”

“Bobby.”

“Eh?”

“Say, I'm dead dead sorry, Bobby.”

“I'm dead dead sorry, Bobby.”

“Sir.”

“Eh?”

“Say, I'm dead dead sorry, Bobby, sir.”

He grinned. We looked at each other.

“Hadaway and shite,” he said.

“Aye,” I said. “OK.”

He rubbed his hands.

“Right,” he said.

“That's done. I want you to come with me. Something to show you.”

“What is it?”

“Another incomer. A weird one.”

I knew that it must be McNulty.

“Where is he?” I said.

“I'll show you. Howay.”

We headed toward the beach, close together, shoulders bumping each other as we walked. He hung about
as I went into the house to drop my bag off and get changed. Mam and Dad were in the kitchen. Dad was on a stool with a cup of tea in his hand.

“You OK, then?” I said.

“Right as rain,” he said. “They took half an armful of blood. They looked deep into me lovely eyes, then deep into me throat. They stuck a torch in me lugs and a tube up me bum. And how many X-rays was it, love?”

Mam shoved a buttered scone into my hand.

“Seven,” she said. “Or was it eight?”

“So if there's owt to find, they'll find it, then they'll fix it. But there'll be nowt to find.”

I looked at them. They both looked away.

“I'm going out for a bit,” I said. “With Joseph.”

She clicked her tongue and shook her head, but she got another scone.

“Go on,” she said. “One for him and all, I suppose.”

I let her kiss me.

“Tea'll be on the table in an hour,” she said. “No later.”

I hurried out.

“She's a bliddy great cook,” Joseph said as he led me toward the lighthouse and the pines. “Remember them times I used to come for dinner?”

“Aye.”

“Them steak pies, man!”

He smacked his lips at the memory. We chewed the scones. We walked across the sand toward the lighthouse
headland. The tide was far out. There was a long line of jetsam left behind: heaps of seaweed, timber carved to smooth strange shapes, bits of net, fishermen's ropes, broken fish boxes, seashells, crab shells, desiccated starfish, bottles, a tire, a dead gannet, stones, pebbles, glinting glass. I reached down and picked up a leather shoe. It seemed something ancient, was stiff as a board, but with its pointed toe and its thin sole had probably been lost or thrown away just a few weeks ago. I slung it back toward the sea. I lifted a bone. It was dried and bleached and worn, but it was a mammal's bone, maybe a thighbone. I let myself imagine it was a bone from one of Ailsa's drowned sailors, then threw it also toward the sea. Joseph smoked and the scent of it mingled with the seaweed stench, the salt, the airy autumn smell of the sea. I threw stones, and watched the way they spun and curved and twisted in the air.

Then we crossed the stony headland and entered the pines.

“I know who you've found,” I said.

“You know him?”

“He's called McNulty. I told you about him. The strongman, the escapologist, the …”

“Him?”

“Aye.”

“So what's he doing here?”

“Dunno.”

Ahead of us were dunes, with the ancient holiday
shacks in them. Some of them were breaking up, sinking into the sand. Others were better preserved, with fresh paint, felted roofs, little fenced-off gardens. Their doors were locked and there were boards at the windows for protection against the coming winter. They were places that had been built by pitmen generations back, places for holidays beside the coaly sea. Several had names carved into their front doors: Buckingham Hut, Desandoris, Dunhewing, Worgate Manor. I knew that Daniel's dad had been among them with his camera, that they'd look like things of wonder in his book.

“Look,” said Joseph.

Smoke was rising, a narrow plume of it. We headed toward it. As we waded through the soft sand and the knee-high marram grass, I told Joseph what I knew about McNulty: the war, Burma, escapology, fire-eating.

“Fire-eating?” he said. “Always wanted to have a go at that.”

He struck a match and quickly pushed the flame into and out of his wide-open mouth. Then he lit a cigarette that crackled as he drew on it. He sucked the smoke deep down.

“Aaaaaah,” he said as the smoke seethed out again. “Lovely.”

Then he pondered.

“Mind you,” he said, “if he's really cracked we'll mebbe have to drive him out.”

“Drive him out?”

“There's bairns round here, Bobby. There's no telling what a bloke like him might do.”

“He's harmless.”

“That's what they always say. We'll see.”

We stooped as we got closer to the smoke. We climbed a hill of sand. We peered through the grass into a depression in the earth. There was McNulty, outside a half-ruined green-painted shack. He knelt in front of his little fire, feeding it sticks, and it glowed more strongly in the fading light. He drank from a little bottle. He nibbled at some bread. He crouched with his head on his knees and bobbed back and forward as if praying. He held his hands palm upward toward the sky. Then he sat cross-legged, eyes closed, dead still. The grass around him shifted gently in the breeze. High above, a single seagull screamed. The light continued fading. Then McNulty leaned forward and lowered his hands into the fire and let them rest there for a moment. Joseph gasped. Then McNulty lit a torch and breathed flames into the air, then seemed to breathe them in again, right into himself. “Beautiful,” whispered Joseph. Then McNulty turned and looked toward us. We slithered backward. But right away, McNulty was above us, standing there against the sky.

“You got to pay,” he said. “You got to pay!”

I stared full into his face, willing him to see me and know me. “Mr. McNulty,” I said, but Joseph dragged me away, and we ran, slipping and tumbling through the
sand. At the pines we stood gasping and giggling. Our hearts thundered. McNulty hadn't followed us. He was nowhere to be seen.

“Lock your doors!” yelled Joseph.

Then we hurried onward, and the sky above our heads was a storm of screaming gulls and the sea was roaring in again.

I
shoved meat and gravy into my mouth. The curtains were shut. The fire blazed at my back.

“Good time?” said Dad.

“Aye,” I said.

“Where'd you go?”

I shrugged and raised my hands: just out. I knew he wouldn't pry.

“Good lad. I see the dark's in your eyes tonight.”

He smiled.

“They're the best times, eh? Out with your mates in darkening nights. Winter coming on, chilly air, thumping heart.” He swigged his glass of beer. “They say that summer's best and mebbe it is in the long run, but there's nowt to beat the fun of summer's end and the turn to autumn. All that sense that things is doomed and all that gathering scariness.”

He laughed at himself.

“Listen to Mister Romantic,” said Mam. “What he means is there's nowt to beat a nice warm meal in a nice warm chair by a nice warm fire.”

She reached out and rubbed his stomach, then spooned vegetables onto his plate.

“Come on,” she said. “Eat up, man. You need your strength.”

“One time,” he said, and his eyes glittered as they turned toward the past, “one November, me and Ted Garbutt slept out all night in the dunes. Just a blanket and a slice of tarpaulin for each of us and a hunk of bread and a bottle of cold tea and the fire crackling and the ghostly tales we told each other. Hell, the ghouls and monsters we magicked with our words to roam the beach that night. They crept in the shadows of the dunes and whispered in the hissing of the flames and reached into our blankets with their claws and bony fingers. I can hear Ted still: There's a goblin in the fire! The way we screamed! And who knew where the laughter finished and the terror started?”

Mam rolled her eyes at me. She winked.

“He's in his dotage, son. It was all a long long time ago.”

He swigged his beer.

“Aye, it was. I'm glad we did them things, had times like that. There was hardship enough all around us but what did we care? We were bairns, free and easy. Who were we to know the war'd be so soon upon us?”

He coughed and retched, and held his hand to his chest, and tears flooded his eyes. He blinked.

“So you make sure you get your good times in, son. You never know what's round the corner.”

Later, he nodded off in his armchair. Mam and I looked at each other, said nothing. Then she opened the handbag she always kept by the side of her chair.

“You ever seen this one?” she said.

It was a photograph of her when she was young. It was so tiny. She laid it at the center of my palm. Just her face, the collar of a pale blouse, and a narrow border of white around her. It had darkened. It seemed as though it could have come from centuries ago.

“The fading's because of the heat,” she said. “He took it with him to Burma. He carried it in his tunic pocket against his heart. Mister Softie. He said it went with him always and everywhere.”

She smiled and stroked my hair.

“He said it was his lucky charm and it kept him alive. He said he knew that if he carried it with him he'd come home to me again.”

She looked up at me from the photograph, young and lovely, laughing eyes. I felt her breath on me.

“Do you know how privileged you are?” she said.

“Privileged?”

“Aye. It's not a word that many'd think of when they think of us. Privileged. To have a dad like him and be from a place like this and…”

She smiled.

“Aye,” I said. “I know.”

She took the photo from me, then leaned toward Dad. She kissed his cheek, then slipped the photograph into the breast pocket of his shirt.

“Look after him again,” she said.

I was going to tell her about McNulty then, but there were tears in her eyes and it didn't seem the right time. I went up to my room. I did my homework of remembering; then I gazed into the night and watched the moonlit breakers crashing on the shore. When I slept, I dreamed that McNulty crept through the dunes and entered the house and came upstairs to lie in bed with Dad. They whispered together about Burma; then the bed became a boat and they clutched each other tight as they rocked and reeled in the stormy sea that carried them toward another war.