Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“I have not,” he said.

She caught her lower lip in her teeth. Though she was not much older than he was, her eyes showed an aging sorrow as if she knew that she was always doomed to be the fakery of love, its manner and appearance, but not its heart.

“You have a true love?” she asked him. Then quickly said, “No, don’t answer me, come here.”

And he did then. And she reached and touched him, and in an instant he forgot everything but her. She drew him down on the narrow bed and caressed him with such a ferocity that her movements could not be called caresses and the air in the room grew damp and white sweat might have dripped from the walls and the cracked ceiling. She loved him for two hours, then collapsed back on the bed, where suddenly she turned her head to the side and wept. It was an ancient if underused strategem and came from her own need to see him again. She did not know such performance was unnecessary with him. Tomas said nothing. Then, at the time when she feared he would be rising and pulling on his trousers and leaving his money by the door, he turned and stroked her hair.

She was a woman who did not believe anymore in the existence of tenderness. She had been a girl on the streets since she was fourteen years old. And when Tomas did not leave, when he lay there in the room that became cold as the night sky cleared, she asked him what he was doing.

“I love you,” he said.

She leaned up on her elbow. She drew the cover up across her breasts and shook stray hair from across her face to look more clearly at him.

“There is no need to lie,” she said.

“No. I am not.”

“You are,” she said, her voice turning hard and cruel from hard and cruel experience. “You think saying that to me you won’t have to pay me. You think I am some stupid witch.”

“I would give you everything I have in the world,” Tomas said.

“Pay me, then.”

“I have no money.”

The woman shrieked and kicked out at him and kicked again until he came out the other side of the bed.

“I knew it!” she screamed. “I knew it! A liar!”

The fierceness of her was a measure not of the loss, but of her own anger in having however briefly believed in his innocence. She hated him then for having reminded her of a world she knew long ago.

Tomas stood and told her that he had nothing, and she reached up and swung her right arm and caught him full in the face. His nose pumped a thick crimson.

“I love you,” he said, and stood there bleeding.

On this declaration, she let out a long wail and got up and beat him as if beating at the old lie of Love itself. Tomas did not move. He took her blows like proofs of something else and stood.

When at last she had surrendered and stopped in a wheezing breathlessness on the side of the bed, she heard with astonishment the handsome Foley repeat his vow of love. He stood there naked by the window and told her.

“Stop it!” she said. “Stop it!” And she held her hands over her ears and looked for a time like a young girl again. “Don’t even say that. Not you.” She turned away and looked at where the wall was flaked and cracked. “Do you know how many times I’ve heard men say that?” she said.

“This is me,” said Tomas. “I love you.”

She sighed and rolled back over on the bed so that she was near him. She looked at the beauty of his body and weakened. She looked at his softened sex and wanted to take it in her hands.

’’If you love me—”

“I do,” he blurted.

“If, I said”—she reached up a hand and touched his stomach and drew it away again—“if you love me, you will pay me,” she said, and watched him for the dodge she knew would be coming. A bell in the town rang two o’clock. She should have been out on the street again. She heard it and waited, then on the end of its second pealing heard Tomas Foley offer her his boots as payment.

“Here, I have no money. I will get some and bring it to you tomorrow,” he said. “These are good boots.”

She took them in her hands. “They are.”

“They show you,” Tomas said.

“I’d almost believe you,” she told him then, and with that he turned and walked to the door of that small room and picked up his clothes and put them on.

“They show you I love you.” He stood in his ragged trousers and held his shirt in his hand. He looked at her a final time. “What is your name?”

With his boots in her hands, the woman who through his eyes had seen herself again a girl in a time before the tarnishing of all such notions as truth and love said her name was Blath, meaning flower.

With their eldest brother lost in the seas of love, Finbar and Finan woke in the dawn with hunger eating at their insides. They opened their mouths on the damp air to see if the pangs might escape. They did not. They sat up and wondered what to do. With Tomas sleeping they seemed grown in stature and got up and stood with legs apart and stern faces as if serious-minded captains. They walked about to the horses and back. In manner they were restless and impatient. They looked for something to command. Finbar went over and pushed Teige roughly.

“What is it?”

“Wake up. We have to get food.”

Teige sat.

“Light a fire,” Finbar said.

“Yes, light a fire,” said his twin sharply. “We’ll catch some fish.”

They stood and watched him a moment, as if to see their command taking shape. Then they went and from the small collection of their things that were salvaged from the river took a ball of line and a pin bent hook shape and walked away to the water’s edge.

The morning opened with ponderous clouds of pewter coming eastward across the sky. Teige went to the horses and spoke to them and then gathered sticks of ash and twigs and dried leaves. All of us are like in a dream, he thought. As if nothing has happened and we are just here in this place by the woods. He went deeper within the trees then and walked across the softened brown floor of fallen pine needles and leaves long decomposed. He stopped and listened for bird-song and heard such whistled in the roof of branches above him. He stayed there with sticks in his arms and all seemed gone, for the place was so greenly empty. He thought of how easily he might be lost there, and then he thought of his mother. Quietly into the screen of trees he called to her. He said the name he had for her. He said it in such a manner as one might use to speak with ghosts or others invisible. Then he stopped and stood and listened as if listening deep into the air for the slightest footstep or noise in which might be traced her presence.

When he came out of the trees the twins were already waiting with two trout.

“Where were you? Come on, light the fire!”

They threw commands and showed off their catch and had an air of swagger.

When the fire was lit they cooked the fish. Tomas was sleeping. Teige went and threw the heads and tails to the swan that had not sailed away. The morning in that place beside the river moved slowly as the clouds came on and made dull the light. Thin smoke rose in furls. A veil of misted rain fell without seeming to be falling.

When at last Tomas woke he arched his back like a cat and caught the afterscent of trout.

“I could eat a horse,” he said.

“We need to go back,” Teige told him. “We have to find our mother.”

Tomas flushed. He looked away in the woods. “We need to stay here, move into the woods for a few days until I get us somewhere in the town,” he said.

“We’re supposed to be finding a place by the sea and then going back,” said Teige.