Free The Tightrope Walkers by David Almond Page A

had given up on the Norman Dobsons. No way a kid like that’d get the eleven-plus. Leave him to do his scrawl and mess and keep on spelling wrong and keep on adding and subtracting wrong. And fractions! What’s he going to turn out to be? A labourer in Reyrolle’s, a tank cleaner in the yard. What need of learning will he have there? Enough to count his meagre wages, enough to read the team sheet on a football programme, enough to listen to and bow down before the word of God. No need for deep understanding for any of that. No outcome for him and kids like him except Saint Timothy’s Secondary Modern. And anyway, in the end, what does God really care about the brains of Norman Dobson? Those of the simplest faith, the poor, are perhaps those that are dearest to his heart, those that will slip the most easily through that needle’s eye. Maybe it was an act of charity to allow the Norman Dobsons to stay dull.
    The clutch that Holly and I were in, the clutch of seven or eight or so, we were the ones brought forward to the front of the class. We were the ones that got Miss O’Kane’s attention. We did comprehension and precis and we worked out how quickly a bathtub filled when a tap was running and a plug removed. We learned how to turn the word RISE into the word FALL with a single change of letter at each step. We learned the lines of kings and queens and popes. And we hated it. It was so dull, dull, bliddy dull. But we did it.
    Bill Stroud laughed at our complaints.
    “What would you like to do instead? Paint all day?”
    “Yes!” said Holly.
    “As would I. But I cannot. But for you, if you work hard now, and do the things that you are asked to, the world will be your oyster. You will be educated, you will have qualifications, you will be free of all impediments. You will explore your talents, and if it turns out as you wish it to, you will paint and paint to your heart’s content.”
    “I want to be a tightrope walker, too!”
    “Which you are, and which you will be.” He grinned. “Have you told Miss O’Kane about such ambitions?”
    “Ha!”
    The spring kept coming and making us glad. And we grew, we learned, we wondered. We knew our universe was endless. We knew that there was such a thing as evolution. We knew that our bodies were as the bodies of beasts were. We knew that we were as nothing in the chasms of space and time. We had begun to suspect there was no God. I quaked before that idea, but Holly simply laughed.
    “We are free!” she cried.

We’d taken the test. We were waiting for the results. I was by the outhouse. Clouds streamed across the dead-straight edge of its roof, making it seem that the whole building toppled endlessly backwards. A summer morning and the air was cold. My breath condensed around me.
    I heard footsteps, and Bill and Holly Stroud were there. Bill carried a rolled-up cable in his hand.
    “It’s a proper tightrope, Dominic,” said Holly. “Made of steel. A wire.”
    Bill held it out to me. It was gleaming, grey-black. The filaments that formed it were wound beautifully around each other. It was half an inch thick. Each end was formed into a loop, with a tightening ratchet at one end. I took it from him, closed my hand around it, ran my hand across it. So smooth, such weight in it.
    “Isn’t it beautiful?” said Holly.
    “Had it made in the steel shop,” said Bill. “Should be a perfect fit.”
    He took it from me, knelt down, told me to hold one end against the house, he held the other against the outhouse.
    “Yes,” he said. He showed me a pair of steel hooks. “Maybe your dad could put these in the wall for it, Dominic.”
    We stretched it out on the earth. We stepped along it. Felt the strength of it, the solidity of it. Then Bill lifted it, held it out between his hands, held it up across the sky. The clouds streamed and the cable seemed to sweep in the opposite direction, ready to raise Bill from the earth.
    “Imagine,” he said. “Some folk walk across