Niall Williams - Boy in the World

NIALL WILLIAMS

For my son, Joseph

Title Page NIALL WILLIAMS Dedication For my son, Joseph Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Chapter Forty-Four About the Author Copyright About the Publisher

ONE

Iamu .

Strange sound. African sound .

Three syllables. Iamu .

In the brief stillness of morning the boy stood and studied himself in the mirror. Beneath a lank fringe of black hair his brown eyes examined their reflection, as if for secrets. The pale brown of his skin, the prominent angle where his cheek seemed now to emerge more clearly, the darkness of his eyebrows, the squat saddle of his nose, these things he considered. The secret the boy sought was who he was to become. With the fingers of his two hands he touched the skin about his jaw to see if there was sign yet of any beard.

Will I be bearded?

Maybe, maybe that roughening was something starting. He turned his head this way and that to look at himself sidelong.

‘I am you,’ he said aloud, turning back to face the mirror, allowing himself to pose with pretend confidence. But almost at once the boy in the reflection lowered his eyes and the confidence crumbled like a mask made of flour.

‘Are you all right in there?’ From just outside the bathroom door a man’s voice called hesitantly. And with even greater hesitation, as though the subject were one of tremendous delicacy, he enquired, ‘Are they fitting?’

‘Yes,’ the boy said. ‘Yes, they’re fine.’ But in fact the new shirt and jacket and trousers bought for his Confirmation that morning were still hanging off the towel rail.

‘Grand, grand. I’m not rushing you,’ said the man. ‘There’s plenty of time. But if anything needs adjusting. Oh, and I will do your tie, don’t worry about that, all right?’

‘Yes,’ said the boy, ‘fine, thanks.’ He could feel the pale grey eyes outside watching the door.

‘So, whenever you’re ready.’

The old man moved away. He himself was already changed into a white shirt and blue suit trousers, and the tight black shoes he wore only for weddings and funerals squeaked off into the kitchen. Through the house now he had last-minute jobs of preparation, counting chairs for guests later, arranging glasses and bottles, gathering stray items of clothing that he and the boy allowed to lie around the house in the ordinary course of their living.

In the bathroom the boy was standing with his two hands pressing down on either side of the sink, looking at himself. It was not because he was vain, not because he often looked at himself in this way, or because he thought himself in any way worth looking at. Rather it was the very opposite, because to himself it seemed he had until that very morning been almost invisible. He had not really thought about what he looked like, or whom he looked like, or what changes were happening in the map of his face. Nor had he thought about what lay ahead for him. Not really. But in the week at school just finished, with the preparations at their most intense, this was the thing the Master had emphasized.

‘You are not boys and girls any longer,’ he had said. He had a voice more aged than himself, sounds frayed and whispery from the smoking of his youth and the whiskey of his middle life. But still he could be firm. He knew a way of telling things that made the words seem important so that even those who paid no attention to spellings or History or Maths paid attention now.

‘You came into this school as boys and girls, but in a week you will be gone.’

There was a broken line of grins along the back row.

‘Yes. When you see me again, in a short time, in a very short time, you will think to yourselves: how old the Master has become. You will think, how very grey is his little bit of hair, how crooked and stooped he seems.’ Here the Master had stooped crookedly and peered out half-blind and the class had laughed. ‘He who once was so large and full of knowledge to me, so wise,’ he continued, ‘will be no more the Master but just an old man. Soon, very soon; in fact for some,’ and here he had looked directly at the boy, ‘this has begun to happen already; you will meet me and think how little that man knows, because you will quickly know so much more than me. And while you will become even smarter,’ again he singled out the boy, ‘I will become to you more foolish.’

The boy had thought to make some response to this, to deny it, but was too timid to speak out loud in front of the class.

The Master paused and angled himself against the seat of his stool, his two hands thrust deep in the pockets of his tweed jacket, his soft grey eyes travelling over the pupils one by one. ‘But this is no reason for sadness,’ he said. ‘No, no. I will not be sad. And you must not be sad. This is a cause for celebration, because it means this; it means the world is getting smarter all the time. And you will be the evidence of that, you will be the ones to save the world from the mess your parents have made of it.’

He allowed this phrase to settle over them, and it was to each of them as if these words were new clothes that they found themselves trying for the first time. Some were uncomfortable, some delighted and proud. The boy was not so sure. He looked at the large crinkled map of the world on the wall behind the Master. He had stared up at it for years in that classroom and knew his way from one country to the next with his eyes closed. But the world was a big place, and the idea of he and his classmates saving it from anything was hard to imagine. He looked along the wall at the posters they had made in preparation for the Confirmation, pictures of the Apostles with yellow crayoned flames touching their foreheads, and he was wondering if the flames burned and hurt when the Master continued.

‘Here, I will remain. And I will know that I have done a very good thing when you are gone from this school. I will have done what I can to teach you what I know. And we will have shared that important time, perhaps that most important time together. But now, you have arrived at a threshold, a doorway. When you leave in a week’s time, you will be leaving something important. Do you know what it is?’

Some hands were raised. Some guesses given: their school, their classroom, their desks with the names written underneath. But each guess the Master patiently dismissed.

‘No, no,’ he said at last, ‘the thing you will be leaving behind is your childhood.’

There had fallen a silence then, as if a gap opened in the air between the Master and the pupils.

‘Now the question you have to begin to ask yourselves is this: what kind of man or woman am I going to become?’

Again the Master allowed his question to hang in the air before them. Then, when he was sure it had begun to play in their minds, he added in a lighter tone, ‘Because of course to some passing by outside this might seem to be only a small country schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere in the west of Ireland. It might seem a quaint old place with a funny old schoolmaster …’