“Alexander,” she whispers. “Here is a new visitor for you.”
She turns the boy’s head to Norman.
He is very pale. One of his eyes is not there at all. The other is very small, and it gleams, as if from a great distance. His mouth is red and crammed with uneven teeth. His legs and arms are shrunken, frail.
“The visitor’s name,” she whispers, “is…”
“Norman,” says Norman.
“Norman. Come closer, Norman.”
She looks at him.
“Surely you are not going to hesitate now, are you?”
Norman kneels beside them. May lifts one of Alexander’s small hands and rests it against Norman’s face. Alexander grunts. He squeaks.
“Yes,” murmurs May Malone. “Yes, I know, my love.”
She smiles.
“Alexander thinks you are very beautiful,” she says.
Norman stares into the tiny distant eye. He searches for the boy’s distant consciousness.
“And isn’t he beautiful, too?” says May. “Isn’t he?”
“Yes, Miss Malone,” says Norman at last.
“Good. And Alexander says that you are like an angel. Now say hello. Go on. He can hear you, even though it might seem that he can’t, just as he can see you.”
“Hello,” whispers Norman. “Hello, Alexander.”
Alexander squeaks.
“See?” says May. “He answers you. He is a boy, just like you. Can you see that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now sit beside him, Norman. Go on.”
Norman does this. Alexander leans against him.
“And he is getting older, just like you,” says May. “He needs a friend, just like you. And he needs to play.”
She sits on the edge of the bed, facing the two boys. She smooths her skirt over her knees and smiles.
“You’re lovely together,” she says.
Alexander suddenly turns his face upwards. There is a pigeon there, looking down through the skylight. Alexander’s mouth purses and he coos.
“Yes!” says May. “A bird! And look at the clouds, Alexander.” He slowly, hesitantly, raises his hands and he opens them over his head. They flutter and tremble in the air.
“See?” says May Malone. “He knows that the world is beautiful, Norman.”
Alexander trembles, and Norman can feel the excitement rushing through the boy as the bird flutters its wings above.
“Now,” says May. “I would like you to take him out, Norman.”
Norman catches his breath. He glances at the door and gets ready to run.
“Please do not leave us,” says May Malone. “Not now.”
She takes his hand again.
“Just take him out into the yard at first,” she says. “What could be so difficult about that?”
“Who’s his father?” Norman dares to say.
“You are a nosey bugger, aren’t you?”
“Sorry, Miss Malone.”
“Are you a churchgoer?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Those black-gowned bloody priests. They blasted me. Don’t let them blast you, Norman, with their Thou shalt nots.” She touches her boy’s head. “They said this angel is a devil. Never mind his father. Will you take him out?”
They help Alexander to rise from the sofa. May Malone opens the door. Norman holds Alexander’s arm and guides him out into the place where he’s only ever hidden in the dark. It is late afternoon. The sun is descending in the west. There are great streaks of red and gold across the sky. A storm of starlings sweeps over them from north to south. The city rumbles, the river bell rings, the lads’ voices echo from the green. Norman imagines walking towards them with May Malone’s monster at his side. He imagines the lads turning to him in amazement. He imagines May Malone watching them all from a bench near by. Alexander reaches upward, upward and he moans with joy. He leans against Norman and coos into his ear. May Malone watches from the doorway.
“See? It’s easy enough, isn’t it?” she says.
They soon go back inside. They take Alexander to his room and lay him down on the bed.
“He’s tired out,” said May. “But can you see how he is smiling, Norman?”
“Yes,” says Norman, for he can. The distant gleam of Alexander’s eye has grown brighter.
“He is as he is because he is as he is,” says May. “No other reason. And he is quite as capable of joy as any of us. More so, in fact.”
She leans towards Norman.
“You, for instance,” she says, “must stop being so sad. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Miss Malone.”
“Just open your eyes, Norman. The world is a strange and gorgeous and astonishing place.”
She looks at her watch.
“Now,” she says. “You will come back again, won’t you?”
“Yes, Miss Malone.”
“And you won’t tell anybody, will you? Not until we’re ready.”
“No, Miss Malone.”
“Good.”
She kisses his cheek. He says goodbye to Alexander, and she leads him to the door.
“Goodnight,” she says. “Until the next time. We will be waiting for you.”
Norman walks up Crimea Terrace below the astonishing sky. He keeps touching his cheek where May Malone’s lipstick is, where the memory of her lips is. He remembers the feeling of her red-fingernailed hand upon his. He keeps remembering Alexander’s trembles of excitement.
A man is hurrying down the street, with the rim of his trilby tilted over his eyes.
“Hello,” says Norman.
The man flinches, looks at the boy in astonishment, then he gives a broad grin.
“Aye, aye, lad,” he says, and he winks.
Norman keeps going. All the sadness is lifting away from him as he goes uphill, like he’s opening up; like he’s beginning to see this world for the first time.
“This story is filled with real people: my sisters Mary and Margaret; their friend Cathleen; Cathleen’s mother; my mother; my mate Tex Flynn; the footballers Dave Hilley and Alan Suddick. And I suppose, as the narrator is called Davie, I’m in it too. Of course, as soon as you start to write about somebody, you start to fictionalize them. The person in real life isn’t quite the same as the person in the tale. And the events in the tale, of course, never happened at all.
It’s set on a small estate where we moved when I was eleven, by which time I’d passed my 11-plus and was at grammar school in Hebburn. Until then we’d lived on the council estate beside the new bypass, and then in a new council flat close to Felling Square. Now we were in the first and only house my parents ever bought. It was a short walk uphill from the square, in a ring of semi-detached houses formed by two streets, Coldwell Park Avenue and Coldwell Park Drive. The neighbourhood in the story isn’t exactly like those streets. There was no gate in Cathleen’s garden that led to the park and the playing fields, but there needed to be one for the story, so I put it there. That’s a strange thing about writing stories – you put in something imaginary to make the whole thing seem more real.
I always loved football. For a time, I took a football everywhere I went. I dribbled it along the pavements, played keep-up in the back garden, kicked it about with my friends in the streets, on the patches of grass near our homes, in the fields around the town. Sometimes there’d just be a couple of us playing against a garage door, or a handful of us playing in somebody’s little garden. Other times, teams of twenty or more would charge across the fields above the town. At the best of times we’d play all day, until we could no longer see the ball, then I’d walk home through the gathering dusk and sleep, and dream I was playing again.
I was crazy about Newcastle United. I roared them on at St James’s Park. I collected photos, posters, programmes. I had a black-and-white scarf and a black-and-white hat. I used to go with my mates, Tex Flynn or Peter Varley, maybe, to watch the team training on Hunter’s Moor at Spital Tongues. Sometimes we jo
gged alongside them in the streets around St James. I remember one day trotting past the shops in Fenham for a few hundred yards with Colin “Cannonball” Taylor, a stocky left winger with the hardest shot I’d ever seen. He teased me, letting me think I could keep pace with him, then laughed fondly and pelted away. I kept scrapbooks with signed photographs and match reports in them. It was such a thrill to stand beside the players, show them my books, watch them sign their names. I used to dream of playing with them: taking a pass from Dave Hilley on my thigh before lashing it into the net, sending an inch-perfect cross onto Alan Suddick’s head.
I’d been brought up to believe that God was everywhere, and was always watching us. Maybe it’s inevitable that I’d come to write a tale like this, one that turns my boyhood heroes into saints, and in which God seems to wander into an ordinary Felling garden.
The story has gone through a number of incarnations and has been rewritten several times. This latest version, set in a time of snow and ice, seems to work best of all. But maybe it’ll seek another rewrite. Some stories seem never to be ‘finished’; seem always to be on the point of change.
A Tuesday morning at the start of the Christmas holidays. Deep fresh snow lay on the ground and the sun was blazing down but I was pretty fed up. I’d packed a flask of tea and some sandwiches and crisps. I had my photograph albums and autograph albums and pens. I was supposed to be going to Newcastle with Tex Flynn. The plan was we’d watch the United players training and get some autographs. In those days you could wander about on the training ground with them. You could jog with them through the streets. They were brilliant and famous, they played in front of thirty thousand fans every week, but there they were right beside us. They played keep-up, head tennis, penalties, shots. They were always laughing and playing daft tricks on each other, but suddenly one of them would do something that seemed impossible. Sometimes they’d let us join in. They’d fall down when we dribbled past them, they’d dive the wrong way when we took penalties. They’d pretend to be amazed by our tricks, to be terrified by the power of our shots. They didn’t keep the magic to themselves. One day Alan Suddick showed me how to swerve the ball with the outside of my foot. Dave Hilley told me it wasn’t power that made a great shot, it was timing. He spent more than ten minutes with me, passing the ball to me, telling me to fire it back. “That’s good, son,” he said. “You’ll get there. Practise, practise, practise, till you can do it without a thought.” Lots of lads went, especially in the holidays. We all had autograph books and albums packed with photos we’d cut out of the papers. The players were great. They all signed our books. Best wishes, they wrote, or Keep on kicking or Have a great life!
But Tex had gone down with flu, which seemed pretty weird. He’d been fine on Monday afternoon.
“Are you sure?” I asked his mam when she answered the door with the news.
“Sure?” she said. “You want to go and see him and catch it yourself?”
I looked past her into the shadowy hall. I thought of his bedroom above. It was just like mine: black-and-white stripes everywhere, stacks of old football programmes, photographs of the heroes pinned to the walls. I thought of him lying there, sweating and shivering and taking Beecham’s Powders and drinking orange juice and sniffing Vicks.
“But he was fine,” I said.
“Aye, he was, Davie. Till he got to playing football in a blooming blizzard. Till he got back here in the pitch-black freezing cold, soaking wet and shuddering. A fine Christmas he’s going to have, isn’t he?”
“Yes, Mrs Flynn.”
“Yes, Mrs Flynn! Huh! Anyway, they’ll not be training today, not if they’ve got any sense.”
And she said goodbye and shut the door.
I walked back home up Felling Bank. Not be training? Of course they would, just like me. I kicked a stone through the slush on the pavement. I dribbled it around the lamp posts and telegraph poles. I heard the crowd all around me, yelling me on. I heard them singing “The Blaydon Races”. In my head I said, “He’s beaten one man! He’s beaten two! Can he do it?” I sidestepped a little dog that came out of nowhere. I dropped my shoulder, slid on a patch of ice, swerved one way then another and flicked the stone through an open gate. I slithered to a stop and punched the air. I raised my arms to the sky. “Yes! Yeeeees! What a goal!” And the dog danced and yapped around me.
Back at home, in the garden, I kicked the snow aside, sat on the back step and swigged some of the tea. I told my mam about Tex.
“That’s the flu for you,” she said. “One minute you’re as right as rain, the next you’re a shivering wreck.”
“He was fine yesterday,” I said.
“Yes, but I don’t expect that playing football in a—”
“It was just a bit of snow!”
“And how would you like it, just before Christmas? The poor lad.”
She folded her arms and looked down at me.
“Now I hope you’re not going to be moping all day.”
I tugged my black-and-white scarf around my neck. I pulled down my black-and-white hat. I got one of my albums out. I’d just stuck some new pictures in. There was a brilliant one from the Pink: Dave lashing in the winner against Swansea City under the headline HILLEY SINKS THE SWANS. There was an even better one of Alan. He was horizontal, four feet off the ground. His eyes were bright with concentration. The ball had just left his head and was on its way to the goal. His arms were spread wide, just like he was flying. Alan Suddick. Dave Hilley. They could do anything.
I played with my new biro and dreamt I was a famous player. I imagined kids lining up in front of me. I scribbled my name fast on scraps of paper.
“That’s OK, son,” I murmured. “It’s a pleasure, lad.”
I drank my tea, chewed my sandwiches, crunched the crisps. My breath drifted in the icy air. Maybe Tex was just putting it on, I thought. Maybe he was going off the team. Maybe he was going off me.
Lads’ voices echoed across the roofs from the playing fields outside the estate.
“On me head! On me head!”
“Get stuck in!”
“Goal! Goal! Yeeeeees!”
I kept listening. Somebody was playing a trumpet somewhere. Somebody was banging a drum.
Mam came out again.
“You’re wasting a beautiful winter’s day,” she said. “There’s a million things you could do instead of sitting there and staring into space.”
“A million?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Like what?”
“You could go and play football with the lads. You could shovel some of that snow off the front path.”
“That’s two,” I said.
“You watch your lip,” she said. “One thing you could certainly do is stop staring at those daft pictures. There’s nothing special about those fellers. They’re people, just like you.”
She went back in. What did she mean, just like me? She hadn’t seen Dave Hilley dribble. She hadn’t seen an Alan Suddick free kick. These “fellers” could work miracles! I closed my eyes. I tried to feel like Alan when he smashed the ball into the net. I tried to feel like Dave when he left a defender sprawling in the dirt. I practised Dave’s signature until it was just like his. I wrote, To Davie. Best wishes, Dave Hilley on his picture.
“Thanks, Dave,” I said.
I said, “You’re welcome, son,” in Dave’s gentle Scottish accent.
I signed Alan’s picture, To Davie, a true fan. Yours in sport. Alan Suddick.
I winked like Alan did.
“No bother, lad,” I whispered.
I sat there, in the icy sunshine, in the dream.
Then there were footsteps and two of my sisters – Mary and Margaret – were there, wrapped up in their brown winter coats with wellies on their feet.
“What do you want?” I grunted.
Mary put her finger to her lips.
“Shh,” she said.
Mam waved at them through the kitchen window. They waved back.
/> “It’s a secret,” Margaret whispered.
I sighed.
“What is?”
They turned so that Mam couldn’t see their faces.
“God’s come,” said Mary.
“What?” I said.
“God’s come. He’s in Cathleen Kelly’s garden,” said Mary. “He was fast asleep and now he’s woke up and he’s sitting by the fish pond. Are you coming to see? Cathleen said you should, but nobody else.”
I rolled my eyes. What a pair.
“Please,” said Margaret. “And hurry up, before he goes away.”
I sighed again. Mam would have me shovelling that snow if I didn’t do something soon. So I stood up. I still had my album and my biro in my hand. Mam waved as we left.
We headed down towards Cathleen’s. I flung a couple of snowballs at some kids I knew across the street.
“How do you know it’s God?” I said.
“Cathleen says it must be,” said Mary. “She’s been saying loads of prayers since Jasper died. She’s been begging him to help her. And he’s sitting just where Jasper’s buried.”
“And he looks just like his pictures,” said Margaret.
“And he appeared like magic,” said Mary. “Out of nothing.”
“So it’s true,” said Margaret. “Isn’t it?”
I flung some more snowballs. How did I know?
We went into Cathleen’s front gate and down the side of her house and into the back garden. Cathleen was kneeling on a shopping bag in the snow beside the little fish pond with her hands joined. Mary and Margaret pulled their coats over their knees, knelt down beside her and joined their hands too, as if they were in church. Mary looked at me like she thought I should kneel as well, but I didn’t.
God was sitting on a folded blanket in the sunshine with his legs crossed. You could see how he’d shoved away the snow with his boots.
“This is Davie, Lord,” said Cathleen.
God looked at me and smiled.
He had dark skin and dark eyes. He wore thick orange robes and brown leather boots. He had a black cap on but you could see he was bald. He had a pot belly and a big white beard.
He raised a hand in greeting. I nodded at him.