Excerpt from The Tightrope Walkers by David Almond, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Blood again. I imagined it bleeding forever, all the blood in me draining away through this narrow opening.

I slept again, woke again, heard more footsteps, rapid, soft.

Dared to go to the window and look out through my hands.

It was no ghost, no monster.

It was the tramp Jack Law. He leaned forward as he passed quickly beneath the orange streetlights, heading towards the upper wasteland and the fields. His long fair hair, pale as the pebbledash, glinted in the moonlight, then he was just a shadow and then he was gone.

I lay back down."'Our Father,'" I started, "'who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thy . . .'

"I licked my bloodied fingertips again. Put my fingers to the wound, whose mark would be with me forevermore.

"Our Father," I began again.

Chapter 2

Who made you?

Why did God make you?

Kind Miss Fagan said that these were the most important things we'd ever learn. We must learn the answers word by word. We must commit them to our heart.

"Who made you, Dominic Hall?"

"God made me, Miss Fagan."

"There is no need to include me in your answer. Who made you, Dominic Hall?"

"God made me."

"Good boy. And why did God make you, Holly Stroud?"

"God made me to know Him, love Him and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next."

"Good girl. See how simple it is, children? We will learn a little every day until mistakes are made by none of us, until we can answer the most difficult questions deep inside the book. For we wish to have no blemishes on our souls, do we, children?"

"No, Miss Fagan."

"We wish to go to Heaven, don't we, children?"

"Yes, Miss Fagan."

"And we wish to please Miss O'Kane, don't we?"

"Yes, Miss Fagan."

"Yes, indeed. Now, put away your catechisms and we will make some words and pictures. Would you like that?"

"Yes, Miss Fagan."

And she'd take a stick of chalk and reach up to the blackboard and start to write. Her fingers were slender. Her movements were deft. She curved the marks and angled them, and spoke the let-ters as she wrote, then spoke the words the letters made, then left a space and went on to the next word and the next until she dotted a stop, then spoke the words again to let us hear the meaning and the beauty of it all. And then we copied what she'd done, to make the shapes and sense and sentences for ourselves.

The grass is green.
The sky is blue.
The yellow sun is in the sky.

"No need to rush," she'd say. "Stay on the line. Remember your finger spaces. That's good, that's so lovely, children."

She'd gently tap the shoulders of some of us and whisper that yes, we had it right. She'd lean down to the slow ones, sometimes take their hand in hers, guide their uncertain clumsy fingers into the right actions, the right marks.

"Yes," she'd murmur. "Well done. Practice makes perfect. Remember that."

She never lost her temper. Her classroom was benign. We sat on hard steel-and-timber benches bolted to steel-and-timbedesks. There was a crucifix high up on the wall behind Miss Fagan's desk, and the alphabet, and numbers from one to a hundred, and a painting of poor Saint Lawrence being roasted on a fire. Through the high windows, we saw the scudding northeastern sky, occa-sional songbirds flying past, tight flocks of rushing pigeons, and far away, for those of us who knew how and where to look, the tiny almost-invisible dots of distant larks.

Miss Fagan had us for our first three years.

I loved to be in there. I loved to copy the letters and make the shapes, to hear the sounds and rhythms, to see the visions that the words made in my brain. The ship sails. The bird flies.To write with chalk on slate. To be among the group allowed to write with dip pens, to dip the pen into my own little pot of blue ink, to write into neatly lined red exercise books, to copy prayers and hymns and Bible stories from the board, to dry the ink with bright white blot-ting paper. Infant Jesus, meek and mild, look on me, a little child. In the middle of the night He came to them, walking upon the sea, and told them, Do not be afraid. I loved the books we read.Here is Janet. Here is John.

The Tightrope Walkers Copyright © 2014 by David Almond. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.