Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Well, we’re not. We’re staying here.”

“It was Father’s plan.”

“And he’s dead. So…” Tomas paused and in the rippling of the river water heard the name Blath, meaning flower. “I have to go. Make something there,” he said, and waved his arm at the edge of the wood. “I will be back later.” Then he went and took his horse and rode back toward Limerick town.

His brothers did not know what had got into him, but they were too afraid to ask. Secretly the twins were pleased at his absence and thought of things they could get Teige to do.

They sat there, abandoned again, then Finbar said, “We need to make a better camp by the woods.”

“Yes,” Finan agreed. “A good camp, a fort.”

“That’s what I said, a fort.”

They looked back at the trees. They knew stories of many that had disappeared in such forests, ones that had wandered off trails and vanished into the kingdom of fairies.

“At any moment something could come out of there,” Finan said.

They watched where the trees and their shadows met and dissolved in dark.

“It could, and it will,” agreed Finbar at last, drawing his knees up to his chest and turning to wait for when his prediction would come true.

While his brothers waited there that empty day, Tomas arrived back in Limerick. Along the route he had stopped at a number of cottages and stolen from cabins and yards what he could. He had an ax and a shovel and a number of irons. He had a blanket of coarse hair and wrapped in it a fire tongs and a number of empty blue glass bottles. For himself he had lifted the eggs from hens and sucked them dry. He had eaten wild blackberries that grew in tangles in the hedgerows three miles outside the town. By the time he had encountered the ragged traders who were camped on the edges of the market, he had the wild look of one unstable with emotion. The traders were travellers from all corners of the country, and they recognized at once the desperation in his bootless figure and the tainted air of stolen goods. Squint-eyed, fox-headed fellows, they poked with their fingers at the little assemblage of things wrapped in the blanket and, while considering their value, measured it against the value of betraying him to the law. Nevertheless it was with a handful of coins that Tomas rode on towards Limerick town. He tied his horse outside an empty cabin with fallen thatch and washed his face with fingertips wetted in a trough. In the daylight the town was less than beautiful. A dreary rain fell. In the side streets open sewers ran by broken footpaths and fouled the air. Tomas decided at once that their father had been right, the town was not for them, they would go to the sea. He hurried on, his feet cold and muddied. Small boys stopped baiting a rat and watched him pass.

He walked up the town to the place where he had met Blath the night before. But there were only two men worse for porter sitting on the street. One of them looked up at him and then grinned with an empty mouth.

“You’re lookin for ’em?” he gummed. His companion shuddered alive and dropped a loop of bloodied drool in the street.

“A woman,” Tomas said.

The first man began a laugh that became a cough. He coughed until his eyes ran.

“D’ya hear tha?” he said to the other. “A woma.”

“No no no, you want to see de man,” Gums said. “He’s over dare, forty tee, up tairs on the lep. He pays ya for yer teet, look.” The two men opened their mouths at the same moment and showed Tomas Foley their raw, inflamed gums empty of teeth. “Five pence the la.” They smiled, as if they had passed on to him some extraordinary felicity.

“The women will be here tonigh, after dar,” said the drooling man.

Tomas did not want to wait until darkness. He went directly to the room where he had made love the previous night, but the door was locked. He walked up the town and down again, and it was still not past noon. He weighed the coins in his pocket and briefly considered whether to buy food or boots. But in the end he did neither. He decided that he would give all the money to the woman called Blath because he had told her he would give her everything he had in the world, and she would give him back his boots. Then he would rescue her and take her with him back to his brothers and onward to the place where they were going to live by the sea. He did not include in the calculations that the rescue of Blath would in some way be the redeeming of other losses, too, the empty space that was his mother. But such existed too in the depths of his mind.

He walked up and down Limerick town. He saw fine coaches arrive and depart. He heard the talking of men in English. He watched a river rat run the length of the main street, chased by the small boys. He walked until his bootless feet ached. He walked the way a man walks when he is walking to meet a woman who is already lodged in the space before his eyes. Then, when he had reached the top of the town for the umpteenth time, had patted his horse, and spoken to it, he sat down and waited for darkness.

Years later, when life had hardened the last softness of him, when he was living in another country and those days would seem to take on a fabled unreality, he would think of that afternoon. It would come back to him like the younger ghost of himself, and he would be walking the streets of a town where none knew his history or name and suddenly that afternoon’s wait for the darkness would arrive in his heart like a spear.

If he could, he would have given a year of his life to move the clock forward four hours.

But as it was, the time was much longer. It was long enough for all of his childhood, boyhood, and adolescence to revisit him. All the battles of the small two-room house on the lord’s estate where his father had knocked him down to make him grow up. Tomas sat and was revisited by them all while his feet froze.

When darkness fell at last, he moved quickly down the cold pathway of the street. When he arrived at the place he had met Blath the night before, she was not there. There were other figures in the shadows. Tomas went up the steps of the house. In the doorway there stood a woman. He thought at first that she was wearing a mask, for her eyes and lips were painted and shone glossily beneath the lamplight.

“Love,” she greeted him.

But he was already past her. He was already bounding the stairs two at a time. He was already at the bedroom door itself and turning the knob that was locked, making him knock at the cheap door with such fierce insistence that it was instantly clear he was not going to turn away. He stood back and then thumped at it with his shoulder, and then again until it splintered down the centre and two boards fell apart and he pushed his way on into the room of Love.

The smells were the first thing to strike him. They were the smells of the night before, the smells he had lost on the ride back to his brothers and tried in vain to recover. Now the perfume assailed him. That there was another man in the bed with Blath did not arrive in his consciousness for a moment. There was a brief pause, a frozen nothingness. Then all proceeded as in bizarre phantasm and took the form of quickened nightmare, and Tomas Foley saw the arms of Blath lying by her sides and saw the man on top of her in his shirt. And she was trying to get up and get him off of her, and he was making a low moaning and hurrying as if in some desperation to finish even as he knew the other had crashed in the door. Then there was noise and cries of alarm and more people coming from rooms down the hallway. There was sudden pandemonium, floorboards creaking and some hastening away and others arriving down to where pieces of the door hung. But none of these mattered to Tomas Foley. “Stop stop,” he heard Blath say. He saw her fists come up and hit the man on his sides, but then Tomas swung and cracked open his head with a plank from the door. The crack was loud and sharp and the fellow fell sideways and blood shot on the wall and there were cries and shrieks and the very air of the room itself seemed to pulse and beat. Blath screamed and sat up and held to her the blanket, and she saw it was Tomas and was shaping some words to him when the painted woman arrived in the doorway with a pistol. The woman aimed at the broad back of Tomas and Blath shouted to her to stop and in the same instant still Tomas was dropping the plank and drawing from his pocket the money and spilling it on the bed. His breath was heaving. The bloodstain dripped on the wall. He wore the look of a man mad without comprehension yet of the violence and passion that had risen inside him.