The Fire-Eaters (5 page)

“Howay, man,” said Yak. “Get your bliddy keks off.”

So I stripped down to my pants, threw my jeans onto the sand and plunged forward into the waves. I had a battered metal sieve. I shoved it down into the sand beneath the sea, let the waves sluice through it so that the sand fell through; then I tipped the black remains onto the cart. Ailsa's dad and brothers worked further out, with huge flat spades and massive sieves. Yak and Losh kept wading back with buckets full of coal.

“Black gold!” sang Losh. “Come and buy our beautiful black gold.”

“Hoy!” yelled Yak.

“Aye!” I answered.

“Why did the priest take a machine gun to church?”

“I don't know!” I yelled. “Why?”

“To make the people holy!”

Ailsa worked with me and was faster and surer than me and she moved in rhythm with the waves. She slicked her hair from her eyes with strong wet hands.

“You're doing great, Bobby boy,” she shouted. “Ain't he, Daddy? Ain't Bobby doing great?”

“Aye!” laughed her dad. “A bit more time and he'll be nearly as good as his father was.”

Afterward, Wilberforce pulled the cart from the sea. Losh put a head-bag full of hay on him. Seawater drained down through the coal, through the timbers of the cart, and soaked away into the sand. The men smoked. I sat on a stone beside Ailsa.

“Joseph reckons you'll not be coming into school,” I said.

She threw her head back.

“Him!”

“He reckons you might just try to go to his place.”

“What does he know?”

I shoved my toes down into the sand.

“You going to go anywhere?” I said.

“I might and I mightn't,” she answered.

“You got your uniform?” I said.

“Uniform!”

Yak was watching and listening and grinning.

“What's the point of it?” he said.

“The point of what?” I said.

“What's the point of lasses learning?” he said.

I shrugged, couldn't say anything.

“See?” he said. “No point at all. All they need is a canny lad with a bit of brawn and a bit of brain and a mind to make a bob or two.”

He whistled, pondered, and gazed into the sky.

“I wonder,” he said. “Is there any takers?”

Then he and Losh rushed at us and lifted us up and threw us into the turning waves and I thrashed my arms and gasped for breath and blew out water and swam back to the shore at Ailsa's side and we lay there hooting and laughing on the sand, and it was wonderful.

“T
hey're teachers,” said Mam. “That's the story. At the university, they say.”

“University!” said Dad.

“And there's a daughter, but she's traveling. It's all a bit vague. She's called Pat and he's called Paul.”

The three of us were at the window, looking out. Daniel and his parents were on the beach.

“And Paul's got a brother that's an actor.”

“Hm!” said Dad. He lit a cigarette and coughed.

“He's on the telly sometimes. He was on
Emergency Ward 10
last week.”

Paul had a camera. He kept taking photographs— not of his family, but of the place. He pointed it toward our house and moved toward us and we moved back.

“And Daniel'll be at school with you, Bobby. They were seen buying the blazer at Raymond Barnes.”

“You spoken to him yet?” said Dad.

I shook my head.

“He might make a nice pal for you,” said Mam.

She clicked her tongue.

“Put that out,” she said to Dad.

He rolled his eyes, but took a final drag and threw his cigarette into the cold grate. He coughed and swallowed.

“What's he up to now?” he said.

Paul was standing with his legs apart and the camera to his face again.

“What on earth's he think he's seeing?” said Mam. She slicked her hair down. She laughed. “I'd've washed the windows if I'd known.”

Paul took his photograph, then turned away, with the camera slung over his shoulder, and his hands in his pockets. The sky was huge and blue and empty: just the sun, the gulls, the pigeons. There was a trawler a half mile out, with gulls all around it, plunging for waste.

Mam put her arm around me and kissed me.

“That's for nothing,” she said. “Now get out from under me feet and let me get on.”

“Howay,” said Dad. “Something to show you. That feller's just put it in me mind.”

We went up onto the landing. He opened the door of the high cupboard. He stood on tiptoes but couldn't reach the top shelf, so he put his arms around my thighs and lifted me.

“You're looking for a black book,” he said. “That old
album thing. Remember? God knows where it is. Shove your hand under them blankets.”

I rested on his shoulder and slid my hand in. There were boxes and tins and lumpy parcels.

“Like a book,” he said. “Thick. Somewhere in there, I'm sure.”

I pulled a square cardboard box out to clear my way.

“Bugger,” he said. “We still got them things? Hoy that down and all.”

I slid my hand further in, felt a book, dragged it. He saw its edge.

“Aye,” he said. “Good lad. That's the one.”

H
e opened them in my room, by the window. The cardboard box was first. It had a gas mask inside.

“Thought we'd chucked these out years ago,” he said. “Here, give us your head.”

It was black rubber, with straps to go around your head and with thick glass lenses for your eyes. There was a long snout-shaped piece that covered your nose and mouth and that had a metal filter at its end. He rubbed the lenses with his fingertips. He stretched the straps over my head and they caught in my hair and tugged. He pulled the snout over my face. I gasped. I had to suck for breath. The air that came was fusty and ancient. I goggled out through the cloudy lenses at his grinning face. My face suddenly grew hot. I sucked for breath again. I ripped the straps from my head and ripped strands of hair away with them. I pulled the snout away and opened my mouth wide and breathed.

“Aye,” he said. “Not much fun, eh?”

He weighed the mask in his hand, remembering.

“Every living soul had one of these,” he said. “Young and old, big and small. No one moved without one. We lived in fear and dread. When they coming? What they going to do to us? Then nothing happened, then we got used to it. Then they did start coming, and the bombs did start falling. There was no gas, though. Not that. Not the worst things we'd imagined.”

Then he put the mask back down and pulled the book to us. When he started to turn the pages I knew I had seen them before, years ago.

“I been saying for yonks I'll sort these out,” he said. “Look at the blinking state of them.”

The photographs had come away from their thin mountings. They slid out from between the pages. All of them were black-and-white. All of them were faded. There he was, my dad as a little boy on the beach in wellingtons and shorts and a scruffy vest and a leaping mongrel at his side. There he was with Joseph Connor's dad, both of them kneeling by a smoking fire in the pines with bows and arrows in their hands and with seagull feathers in their hair. There he was with Ailsa's dad, teenaged and thin and hungry-looking, perched by the rock pools, smoking.

“But these aren't the ones,” he said, moving on, turning a sheaf of pages until there he was again, in his army
kit, cocking his thumb for the photographer with the jungle behind him and the Burmese sun beating down.

He sighed.

“A lad called Jackie Marr from Shields took that one,” he said. “That very morning a sniper's bullet went straight through his poor heart. Ah, well …” He turned the page. He grinned. “Now look at this, son.”

Now I saw them, I remembered these as well: the snake charmer who played his pipes while a cobra rose from the basket between his feet; the little naked boy climbing away from a bunch of soldiers up a rope that seemed attached to nothing but empty air; the ancient turbaned man lying on his bed of nails in a seething marketplace; and then the wild man with painted stripes on his face, who glared full-face into the camera and had a sword stuck through his face from cheek to cheek.

“Just like McNulty!” I said.

“Aye. Just like McNulty. There were lots of them in those wild days. Fakes and fakirs and magic men. Dervishes and quacks. Miracle makers. We found them in the markets, on the roadsides, at the frontiers. Mebbe it was all the wars and disturbances that brung them out. And mebbe there was them among them that could work true magic and make true miracles come to pass. But poor souls like McNulty sat at their feet while the sun glared down and the bullets rattled and the
bayonets stabbed and the bombs fell and the sun blazed down and the skin got scorched and the brain got melted and the heart got broke. This is where McNulty comes from, son. From a mad mad time before your time, from a time of bloody blasted war.”

He opened my window, lit a cigarette.

“And I was there as well,” he said. “And for one as old as me it's not so long ago, and it drove us all a little mad and a little sad and left us all with partly broken hearts.”

He breathed smoke out into the air above the lane. He reached out and stroked my face.

“Must seem another age to you,” he said.

“Aye,” I said, and it did: so far away, so long ago.

The light was falling. I switched the Lourdes light on. I looked down at the black-and-white boys on the beach and in the pines, at the magic men. The photographs were like windows into ancient places. And my dad had been there. He read my thoughts.

“It'll be different for you,” he said. “You can do anything. You can go anywhere. The world is yours. You're privileged and free.”

We both turned our faces to the sky.

“As long as there's no war,” he said. “As long as there's no more of that stupidity.”

I reached into my pocket and touched the broken heart.

“Please, God,” I said inside myself. “No more bombs, no more wars.”

“Please, God,” said Dad. He put the gas mask back into its box, touched Mary's halo, then put his arm around me. “We can't be that stupid. Not again.”

I
nearly bumped into him behind the beach café. I was out thinking I'd find Joseph. We nearly hit each other but we swayed apart. He looked at me, then dropped his gaze.

“Oh,” he said. “It's you.”

“Aye.”

He started moving on.

“Joseph's all right,” I said quickly.

“Is he?”

“He likes to be tough, that's all.”

“Or stupid,” he muttered.

I took a step toward him.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

He started to move on again.

“We'll be going to the same school,” I said.

“Will we?”

“Aye. Yes.”

“Sacred Heart.”

“Yes.”

He tapped his foot on the café wall, knocking sand and coal out of his sandals.

“Me name's Bobby,” I said. “Robert.”

“Is it?” he said.

“Yes. And you're Daniel.”

He rolled his eyes.

“That's good to know,” he said.

“I live back there, look. That one.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

I was about to tell him where he lived, but I didn't. We looked at each other.

“Have you been here long?” he said.

“Forever.”