Niall Williams - History of the Rain

So, if you like, do your own sex scene. You know you want to, as Tommy Marr said to Aoife O’Keefe the time of the Apostolic Social in Ryan’s. That was his come-on. That, half a can of Lynx deodorant, low-slung trousers that showed his Saint Bernard underpants in case of that saint she was a devotee and a big slow wink that was more or less the image of Haulie Roche the time he got the stroke. You know you want to .

Either way, please yourself. Doctor Mahon is here and we have to take our Intermission.

Fortunately, at that time, Ireland wasn’t in the world. So we weren’t in the World War. Old Roundrims came up with that. Brilliant, really. World War II was toirmiscthe , he said, which people had to look up but basically turned out to be verboten in Irish. Twitter went crazy, saying it was shameful and backward, but back then twitter was only spoken by birds. The thing is, Irish people don’t like to refer to a thing directly as Jimmy the Yank found out the time he came home, went into Burns Chemist in Kilrush and asked full volume for something for the blood coming out of his backside. There’s nothing direct about us. It’s not coincidence we have no straight roads, not for nothing we use the back door. People coming to our house sometimes parked in the yard and waited for my father to appear, so they weren’t really calling at all. So no, we weren’t in The War. We were in something else called The Emergency. No one else in the world was in it, just us. The Munich Bother as Paddy Kavanagh calls it (Book 973, Collected Poems , Martin, Brien and O’Keefe) didn’t bother us.

Grandfather wasn’t exactly courting material. For one thing he was old . He’d been born in 1895 and was now past forty. And for another he had been Off-the-Circuit since before Oriel College and had pretty much forgotten the existence of females of the human variety. (Curly ear hair, mad wiry eyebrows like tangled fishing line over rheumy eyes, and his version of the Reverend’s stippled jaw-mask offered in evidence.)

But it must have been something to do with the Big Catch, the last salmon, or his own private Emergency, because when Grandmother saw him, caught a sniff of Eau de Salmon and her heart went butterflies, he didn’t run out of there.

At that time Grandmother was going by the name Margaret Kittering. She was what in those days they called a handsome woman, in that gaunt angular long-necked Anglo-Irish way. I think it means you could see breeding . Like horses, you could see by the teeth, the jaw. Let’s take a look, her dentist must have said, and then just stood back and applauded. Anyway, whatever the breeding, the Kittering jaw met the Swain. (Later of course the MacCarroll made a cat’s melodeon of it. But that’s for a different volume, Teeth of the Swain , ed. D.F. Mahony.) Margaret’s other features of note were light-curled auburn hair, delicate ears and the small perfect Kittering nose that later swam downriver and landed on my brother Aeney.

Teeth, ears and nose, what more could a man want?

For her part Grandmother had that no-nonsense Headmistress thing that made her think this man could be Knocked Back into shape, he could be Straightened Out, and with her fine boneage and those awesome elbows Grandmother was a born Knocker and Straightener.

The extent of her task was made clear when Grandfather brought her back to Ashcroft House. When they came in the avenue and she saw it, the jungle of briars he hadn’t noticed, the broken windowpanes, the rooks making attempt number 576 to get back up the chimney, she didn’t allow herself any expression of dismay. In The Salmon in Ireland it says that once she finds a spawning ground the hen salmon is fiercely focused. She will assume a vertical position and fan her tail furiously to dislodge pebbles big as balls until she has made a suitable pit.

Only a small Oh escaped Grandmother when the wolfhounds bounded up to join them on the bed.

Another when she caught the salty whiff of Grandfather.

Another when she got a first peek at his Catullus.

Sorry, fecund.

Still, Kitterings do not shirk, no, they have that good German-English blood in them, and the First Round of Knocking and Straightening (which lasted until Germany said Mein Gott and surrendered) produced a daughter, Esther.

Rounds Two and Three produced Penelope and Daphne.

By that time, Grandfather’s — what Brendan Falvey called lions — must have been nearly exhausted. He’d started late. But he still lacked a son. And seeing his three daughters already on their way to becoming little Kitterings he must have felt he was seeing Swains disappear from the world. By then he was already locked in the first silent skirmishes with Margaret, moving a chair back where he wanted it, leaving open a newspaper he knew she wanted folded away, opening windows she closed, already engaging in the ding-dong, attack-and-retreat that was their marriage as he realised with a peppery gall that he was the one who had been hooked.

But in those days once you were wedded you were in Holy Deadlock, and in Ireland the priests had decided that once a man entered a woman there was No Way Out. The vagina was this deadly mysterious wrestler that could get you in a headlock, well, metaphorically-speaking, and then, boys, you were rightly stuck .

That Will Teach You, was Number One sermon at the time.

Number Two was Offer It Up.

And so, with no way out, following the floods of September that year (Books 359–389, Old Moore’s Almanacs . Volumes 36–66) and the catch of a Salmon weighing 32lbs, he gave it, as Jimmy McInerney says, one last shake.

My father was landed in May. He swam out after fourteen hours of labour, was not yet dried of the birthwaters when Grandfather Abraham appeared in the nursery like strange weather, jutted the Swain jaw to study his only male progeny, and asked: what weight?

And in that moment, like a pinch of salt, he passed on the Impossible Standard.

He calls his son Virgil.

Honest to God.

Virgil.

Abraham eschews saints and when he’s asked for a middle name for Virgil he considers only a moment before replying: Feste. (See Book 888, Twelfth Night , W. Shakespeare, Oxford Classics.)

Could have been worse.

Could have been Worm.

‘Fester?’ In the front pew Clement Kittering dispatches an eyebrow. (The Kitterings consider the Irish in general to be Decidedly Odd, but often Quite Charming, and this curious Abraham is gone native, is turned Irish.)

‘No dear. Feste.’

The moment the christening is complete Abraham startles Grandmother by taking the child from her. With quick leather shoeslap he bears my father down the aisle like a trophy. The boy is brought out and on the gravel apron before the front archway he’s raised towards the glowering sky of the County Meath.

It’s as if Abraham believes the old Reverend won’t have been able to stay away. He’ll have stridden across the stippled coals of Purgatory to see the new Swain, and to see if maybe this baby will be The Next Big Thing in holy world. Abraham holds his son and behind him like a murmuring river the congregation flows out and around the front porch, and the baby’s not crying, God love him, he’s not, he’s gazing up out of the intricate lacework of what looks like a mini-priest’s robe that Margaret had made for him, he’s sort of fluttering his eyelids with the breezes that are trapped there. And then to the Reverend, and for all and sundry to hear, Abraham declaims, ‘This boy will never step inside a church again.’

Uncle Noelie, who was not an uncle but a cousin, dressed for his death every night. One time he woke in the morning with a holy fright. (It was probably the fooking forestry that had surrounded him, unbeknownst, Sean Hayes says. You’ll hear words like that here, little bits of leftover Shakespeare. Unbeknownst. Unbeknownst to itself the Department had destroyed the countryside with pine trees. Unbeknownst, they’re going to do the same with windmills.) Anyway, Uncle Noelie woke up in a mortifying panic in his holey mouse-coloured underpants and vest, went to Patrick Bourke’s in the Square in Kilrush and asked for a funeral suit Best Quality and right enough they sold him the suit, shirt, tie, socks and shoes and asked who it was that had passed on.