The Tightrope Walkers by David Almond Read Free Book Online

the taste of her.
    Then a knocking on the glass. Bill beckoning: come quick!
    We hurried out.
    “There!” he said.
    Jack Law, striding on the footpath that ran alongside the allotments. Jack Law, heading towards the hills that were said to be his home. He moved swiftly, feet padding on the earth, hair bobbing in the breeze, little knapsack bouncing at his back. He moved swiftly away, on to the fields, heading upward.
    “Jack Law?”
breathed Holly.
    “Jack Law,” breathed Bill.
    I often dreamed of him. Dreamed of being him, an explorer, a wanderer, without a home, with hardly anything at all.
    We watched him blur into the landscape that shuddered in the light.
    “Who
is
Jack Law?” said Holly.
    “No one knows,” said Bill. “A tramp, like all the other tramps.”
    “Mebbe it was the war,” I said, repeating what my mother had said one day.
    “Aye. Mebbe he simply couldn’t settle after it.”
    Holly drew him as he disappeared.
    Bill found the keys and closed the greenhouse door.
    We walked to the allotment gate.
    “He’s a good man, so they say,” said Bill. “He’ll do no harm to anyone, they say.”
    I was already beginning to write him in my mind.
    Today we saw the silent tramp, Jack Law
.

Jack Law. He’d been with us always, from the days I first remember. He lived nowhere, or nowhere that anyone seemed to know. Somewhere high up, it was said. Somewhere beyond the fields over the brow of the hill. Somewhere distant from rivers and ships and the din of engines and the stench of bones. Some said that he had no single resting place, that he slept whenever darkness fell, in whichever place he found himself. He was the fair-haired man in black with the rucksack on his back who seemed to be forever walking walking walking. Sometimes we’d see him striding uphill on weekend afternoons as we played football on the fields. We’d see him crossing the town square with a bag of bruised apples or broken biscuits in his hand. Only once did I ever see him sitting motionless, when I looked into the window of Dragone’s coffee shop and saw him at a table, gazing down at the mug of Horlicks between his hands.
    My mother said he was a figure to be pitied.
    Damaged goods, said Dad, twisting a finger at his temple to suggest Jack Law was mad.
    There were rumours that he had a sister in Canada who sent a little money for him each year. There were tales that he’d once started training to be a priest but the Church took a dislike to him and cast him out. Some said he had been wild forever, that he’d been thrown out as an infant, that he’d grown like an animal, without family or home, in the fields and woods of County Durham. They said that his body had grown but his mind had not. Some kids said that he’d had his tongue torn out in the war, that he’d seen sights so dreadful that he never dared speak of anything again. Some said that the only creatures he could communicate with were animals. They said he’d been seen sleeping in farm fields with cattle, whispering into the ears of ponies, singing with the birds. Once I heard a friend of my mother’s say that he must have chosen silence, that he lived in an attempt to be close to the earth and close to God, that he was some kind of saint.
    No children feared him. The dreams we had of him were all benign.
    Once, when I was small, Mam opened our door and there he was. He did not speak, he would not come inside. He stood waiting there as my mam prepared him a bottle of cold tea, a packet of cheese sandwiches. He must have known that I was just inside, watching from the foot of the stairs, but he would not raise his head, would not meet my eye. I saw the layer of dirt on his elegant hands and elegant face, the grass stains on his knees, the blue eyes shining, the thick fair beard, the waving, slightly matted hair. I saw that he was a handsome man. I wanted to go to him and ask something, anything, get him to tell me something of himself. I wanted to see his tongue and