Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Then he discovered the Pole-vault.

In St Bartholemew’s School for Boys (established 1778, Headmaster, Thomas Tupping, a man notable for nothing but having eight too many teeth and lips that never touched) Abraham took the Reverend’s restlessness to new heights, tearing down the runway with his lance and firing himself into the sky.

And that’s where he arrives in my imagination, my mad grandfather, a blur-boy of white singlet and shorts, short sharp hair, blue eyes, charging like a knight towards an invisible enemy. There’s no one watching. It’s just him after school on a grey afternoon. Blackbirds have settled on the playing fields. The bounce of his stride echoes in the pole. It’s not fibreglass but wood. The wind must think it’s a mast and he a sail too small for lifting.

His pace quickens, his knees lift, the blackbirds turn. Down the cinderway he comes, crisp crunch-crunch-crunch , man on the end of a stick. Mouth pursed out and open he blows a wind-note with each step, whuu-whuu-whuu , announcing himself, warning the air that he is coming. His eyes are locked on the concrete trap. It’s his entranceway. The pole lowers, wavers slightly. A hard clack is the last sound Grandfather hears on earth.

And here he is, Abraham in lift-off, his soul bubbling as he climbs, entering the upper air with perfect propulsion and ascension both. An instant and he no longer needs the pole. Hands it off. It falls to ground, a distant double-bounce off the solid world below. The blackbirds take fright, rise and glide to the goalmouth. Amazement blues my grandfather’s eyes. He’s at the apex of a triangle, a pale angular man-bird. His legs air-walk, his everything unearthed as he crosses the bar above us all. There is a giddy gulp of the Impossible and he sort of rolls over in the sky, pressed up against the iron clouds where God must be watching. His mind whites out. His body believes it is winged, has vaulted into some other way of being. Abraham Swain is Up There and Away, paddling the air above the ordinary and just for a moment praying: let me never fall to earth .

Mrs Quinty says I have Superabundance of Style and must trim back. She was once my English teacher and comes now Tuesdays and Thursdays from the Tech after she finishes. I’m on her rounds. I’m her Tuesdays with Ruth (and Thursdays). Because of me Mrs Quinty will be taking the bypass around Purgatory and shooting straight on into Heaven.

She predicts a Brilliant Career for me if I will only Trim Back.

I will also need to stay alive.

Before she comes upstairs to my room she has a few words with my mother about My Condition.

Mrs Quinty is a small tight bow. I mean, tight . Everything is to be kept neat and precise. But since the departure of Mr Quinty, a lorry driver with black curls who left our narrative some time previous, she now fears something secretly loosening in her all the time. To address this she frequently gives herself a little pull in, a little sharp tug on her blouse or jacket that goes unremarked in these parts because people know her circumstances and allow for oddities. If Mr Quinty had Passed On it would have been better. If he had Gone to His Reward. Mrs Quinty would cope; she suited widowhood, and had the wardrobe. But as it was, despite Tommy Quinty being heavily pregnant with eighteen years of Victoria Sponge, Lemon Drizzle, Apple Upside Down, Rhubarb Custard Tart and Caramel Eclairs, a brazen long-legged hairdresser called Sylvia in Swansea Wales managed to overlook the Collected Cakes and see only the black curls of the same Tommy.

He stopped in for a Do, Nan says, and he’s not Done yet.

Although everyone in the parish knows this since Martin Conway took the Under-Sixteen-and-a-Halfs over to a match, stopped in Swansea for chips and toilets and saw Tommy in an outrageous quiff, powder-blue blazer and white shoes, no one lets on to Mrs Quinty. As if by secret agreement it was decided Tommy Quinty would drop out of all conversation. Sometimes he’s in a whisper down in Ryan’s or a joke out at the Crossroads on the night of a forty-five drive when the tarts are served, but for the most part he has Left the Narrative.

But in doing so he left Mrs Quinty a chill. Also migraine attacks, tinnitus, inflammation of the ear, Eustachian catarrh, occasional left-sided deafness caused she will tell you by retracted membrana tympani, swelling of glands, lacunar tonsillitis, dizziness, disorders of the digestive system — All Sorts — and what she herself diagnosed as cheese-breath.

Mrs Quinty suffers. Of illnesses she has whatever is going. Her only hope is to keep the little bow of herself tight and teach on. The teaching keeps her going. When I was her pupil a hundred years ago her classes were notable for being the only ones in which absolute silence reigned. Even though her frame was diminutive and her dress sense very Costume Drama, everyone knew: you don’t mess with Mrs Quinty. She came in and the first thing she did was open the windows. It could be hail and gale outside. Mrs Quinty opened the windows. Then she took out these little wipes and wiped down the surface of the desk. That lady brought with her her own environment .

Still, the Tech was the last place you’d think she should be. The native population of that school was at no point under the control of Mr Cuddy. Perplexity at managing teenagers had given him a face like the letter Z and he kept it largely in his office where he pursued more available consolations by solving crossword puzzles. From school-life, one example: one Christmas week the crib was set up in the Assembly Hall, a life-size alabaster Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, two not-life-size camels, two lambs, one cow, one donkey, and three very Islamic-looking Magi. They were laid out on a bed of genuine hay (used) that Jacinta Dineen brought in her bag. Then, while Mrs Murphy in Room 7 was synthesising ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, Baby Jesus was kidnapped. A ransom note was left in the hay. It said: ‘We have Jesus.’

Mr Cuddy called in every student for questioning — Have you seen Jesus? — and eventually announced that unless Jesus was returned immediately there would be no Christmas Mass.

Baby Jesus did not return. He had not been seen on any of the school buses heading in the general direction of Kilrush or Kildysart or Ennis and so it was concluded: Our Lord was still in the Tech.

The First Years were recruited to help look for Jesus. Every desk, cupboard, locker was opened. But nobody could find Him.

Another note appeared in the hay. It said: ‘Stop serching’.

By this stage the whole school was on the side of the kidnappers and false sightings were announced hourly. Jesus was in the Chemistry Lab. He was in the Girls’ Changing Room before Games. He was taking French Oral with the Sub Miss Trigot.

That lad is everywhere, Thomas Halvey said.

Mr Cuddy decided to call the kidnappers’ bluff; he reversed himself and said Christmas Mass was going ahead anyway. He figured when the parents came in Baby Jesus would be back in his crib. The Mass would shame the kidnappers into surrendering their hostage.

It didn’t.

We all attended that Mass with the crib on the altar and, in the place of the Infant, a lamb on whose forehead someone had taped the word ‘Jesus’.

No, the Tech is the last place you’d expect to find Mrs Quinty. But somehow the teaching saves her from herself. In the classroom she’s invincible. It’s ordinary life she finds hard.

When Doctor Mahon asks her why she doesn’t retire from teaching on Medical Grounds her answer is: I have My Cross.

When she comes in downstairs Mrs Quinty rests her cross and asks my mother what I am on. Like Synge on Aran I hear the world through a neat knothole in my floor.