The Tightrope Walkers Read Online Free PDF

sure
she
would.”
    Mrs. Charlton. She lived over the hill in Low Fell. Once a week Mam cleaned for her. She brought back tales of a garden with apple and oak trees in it, of dark furniture, softly lit rooms, of high ceilings, of walls filled with books, two cars in the driveway.
    “Would you like that?” she said again.
    “Dunno.”
    “Dunno! Dunno! What a lad for your dunnos!”
    Mrs. Charlton sent us gifts: packets of teas with names like Darjeeling and Lapsang souchong; a tin of green olives that we nibbled suspiciously and spat straight out; a cracked green Oriental table lamp with a shade showing horsemen playing polo against a landscape of castles and domes and minarets.
    Each year she sent a birthday card.
    Happy Birthday, Dominic. To the lovely son of a lovely mother. Work hard, be good, I’m sure you will go far
.
    “Well, I do know,” said Mam. “She’d love it, and so would you. Get it finished and I’ll take it to her.”
    “OK.”
    I continued writing. I led the words into the empty space. This was new for me, to write for an unseen audience. I wrote about two boys who climb through the window of a huge abandoned house. They find a chest of treasure in the attic. They wonder if they can keep it. Maybe we should give it to the police, they say. And if no one claims it, it will be ours. They tell nobody. They turn the treasure into cash and buy beautiful houses for their families. But it’s just a dream, a trick of the mind. The two boys wake in their separate beds in their tiny houses, penniless as ever.
    I marked the last full stop with disappointment.
    I wanted to write a savage sweaty violent tale, the kind of tale that Vincent McAlinden might have made if he was interested in writing. But I could not do it. Because I was me? Because I wasn’t up to it? Too nice, too good? Because the tale was to go to a woman I’d never seen, to a house in Low Fell?
    Mam took it from me.
    “So clever,” she murmured.
    She gazed out at the sky and sang along:
    “ ‘Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly
,
    Blow the wind south o’er the bonny blue sea
.’”
    “Thank God there’s no war to send you to,” she said. “And thank God you won’t be going down into the yard.”
    She folded the story carefully, slid it into an envelope.
    “Who knows what you’ll come to do,” she sighed.
    She sang again:
    “ ‘Blow bonny breeze, my lover to me.’”

“She says it’s the angels,” said Holly.
    “Angels?”
    “She hears them, the sound of them singing within everything. She tries to sing with them.”
    We stood listening. A light breeze blew dust along the pavements, over our feet.
    “Do you believe her?” I said.
    “She says sometimes they’re far away and sometimes they’re very close. Sometimes they’re right here, with us, but we can’t see.”
    Today there were no words, just a weird wailing.
    “She says one day we’ll all be drawn to the heart of it and we will see the glory.”
    “The glory?”
    “Yes. She says the glory of Heaven is very close to us. She says the angels wish to share it with us.”
    “Do you believe her?”
    “She seems happy, Dom. She says she hears the music of the spheres, too. The music made by the stars and planets as they turn. She sometimes asks me to listen with her, but I can hear nothing.”
    “Why won’t she come out?”
    “She says someone has to be still, and to pay attention.”
    I listened. Engines, birdsong, breeze.
    “But sometimes I think she’s just dead scared,” said Holly.

I did go to the yard one Christmas, to the heart of all the sound, to see what I’d been rescued from. There was a party for the draughtsmen’s kids. As a single child, Holly could take a guest, and she chose me.
    She brought the invitation across the street: a gilt-rimmed card with a picture of three sailing ships upon it.
    “My dad got the secretary to type your name on it, Dom! Look!”

    “Master!” said Mam. “How exciting! Oh, doesn’t it look