The Fire-Eaters Read Online Free PDF Page A

went out of sight, but the voice rang out.
    “Bobby! Howay, help us, Bobby, man!”
    I grabbed an apple and went after them and Mam yelled I'd better make sure I had a damn good wash before I came back in.
    They were just a few yards past the house. Ailsa's dad and her brothers Losh and Yak were walking.
    “Bobbeee!” Ailsa yelled when she saw me.
    She reached out a hand and I grabbed it and Yak shoved and soon I was up there with her.
    “Are you looking for work, lad?” said her dad.
    “Aye,” I said.
    He spat out a black stream from his black face.
    “Then you'll have some tanners in your pocket by teatime.”
    We trundled on.
    “We're hoying this off,” said Ailsa. “Then we're going in again.”
    The lane was all potholes and the wheels kept slipping and we rocked and slithered on the cold damp coal. She lay back like it was a mound of warm soft sand. I sat beside her. There were gannets and larks and gulls above us. A flock of pigeons clattered past.
    “Look at this, Bobby,” she said.
    She dug in a pocket and brought out one half of a broken metal heart attached to a rusted chain.
    She rubbed it with her fingers.
    “We're always finding little treasures in the coal,” she said. “Look, there's words on it.”
    She scraped them with a little penknife. She showed the words to me. We deciphered them together.
    Without my other half I am as nothing.
    She laughed.
    “What a tragic little tale there could be there,” she said. She put the half-heart in my hand. “Go on, it's yours. Daddy! Tell that silly Wilberforce to stop his rocking.”
    “Stop that rocking, horse!” her dad yelled, and we all laughed.
    We came to their house, an old redbrick place with rusting lean-tos all around. There was an ancient pickup truck and heaps of coal and scrap metal. Behind the house, an allotment garden ran toward the dunes. Huge flowers were blooming there. There were onions and carrots and potatoes, all in neat straight rows. There was a greenhouse filled with gleaming red tomatoes. There was a bright blue painted pigeon loft with its doors wide open. The flock of pigeons clattered and wheeled above us. Chickens squawked and pecked in the yard.
    Ailsa jumped down and ran into the house and put a kettle on the gas. I helped the men to shovel the coal from the cart. We all drank mugs of tea, standing in a group outside the back door.
    “Your mam and dad OK?” said her dad.
    “Aye,” I said.
    “Not seen him down the Rat.”
    “He's not been getting out much,” I said.
    “No? He's working, though?”
    “Aye. But he's on holiday this week.”
    “You'll be off to the Riviera, then?”
    “Mebbe. Or mebbe we'll just go to Worgate again.”
    “Hahaha. That's where we're ganning and all. There or Worgarden.”
    He swiped his fist across his lips. He glugged his tea.
    “You know,” he said, “there was a time it looked like that dad of yours'd be setting up in competition.”
    “Aye. He's told me.”
    We grinned. It was the tale of how in his young days Dad got himself an old pram and a shovel and a sieve and started to try to get the coal, and how it led to nothing but jokes and laughter from Ailsa's dad's lot.
    “Aye,” said Ailsa's dad. “They were hard days, that's the truth of it. He didn't mean no harm. And he was called up pretty soon so it came to nowt.”
    He kicked a chicken from under his feet.
    “Tell him I've been asking,” he said, and he looked me in the eye. “He's a good man, that dad of yours. And a good woman is your mam. Now then, lads. And little lass. Let's get splashing. Wilberforce! You got any life left in them bones?”

W e went to the sea. I rolled my jeans up past my knees but it was useless. In seconds I was soaked. Ailsa's dad and brothers wore ancient chest-high waders. She was bare-legged.
    “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.