The Fire-Eaters Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 oldalbum 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 armykit, 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