Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Twins are not rightly understood as a concept in the parish anyway; before us there were the identical twins Concepta and Assumpta Talty who somehow merged in the parish mind into the one, Consumpta; whichever one was met was called that and if both were together people said Hello Consumpta and the girls said hello right back. The parish can be odd like that. Mary Hegarty pushed a pram through the village for nine years after her son Seanie had died as a baby and not one person ever said, ‘Mary, your pram is empty,’ they just let it be and she went on wheeling her grief through the village and out the back roads by the river where all grief flows.

Down in Faha N.S. Mrs Conheedy was the principal. She had come over from some mountainy place in Kerry and all I’ll say is when I first met her I thought she was Mr Conheedy. I know it’s not polite but when you’re in my position with something in the blood you have Special Privileges, and number one is you can tell the truth. Mrs Conheedy had a face lumpy as a turnip and shoulders you could imagine her carrying a sheep on. There were no dentists where she came from. She was the last disciple of Crimplene, a sensible cloth that couldn’t wrinkle or fade, that defied both time and humanity and always looked the same. Her dresses had this big zip on the back of her neck. She always left it sticking up, a little square hole in it, like she had a secret hope that one day a hook would come down from the sky and get her. I certainly hoped it would. Jimmy Mac said she had Gone-into-Teaching because it was the only place where she could rule without reprisal; where she could give free rein to the awesome dimension of her need to crush things. Mr Conheedy it seemed had enjoyed this for the first three months of their marriage, but then had run off, Nan said, to try and find a female Mrs Conheedy next time round.

‘Ruth and Aengus Swain come here.’

‘Yes Miss.’

Aeney gave her the Winning Smile at Full Power. He tilted his head slightly so the quiff of his wondrous fair hair added to the effect of general adorableness. He went to Full Luminous. But it didn’t work.

‘Ruth, you will be in Miss Barry’s class; Aengus, you will be in Mr Crossan’s.’

We didn’t even look at each other. We didn’t say a word. We just stood there feeling the knife along our sides.

You can’t know. Maybe you can imagine in your head, but you can’t know. You can’t know what it feels like in your blood.

‘Miss?’

‘Go now, Miss Barry’s. Mr Crossan’s.’

‘Can’t I stay with my brother?’

‘No you cannot.’

‘Please Miss.’

‘There is no Please Miss. Miss Barry’s, Mr Crossan’s. Now. It will be for the better for both of you.’

I’ll never forget walking down that corridor after we came out of her office. I’ll never forget the clammy air and the blurred voices coming from the teachers inside the classrooms. It was like we had slipped from the world, like there was all this activity going on, half past ten on an ordinary Monday morning and everyone in their proper places behind doors except us. The corridor had these square dome skylights spaced along it and the sun fell down in actual beams that showed the dust and the particles of the otherwise invisible so you felt you were crossing someplace, but for just that while you were neither in one world nor the other. Sunbeam shade sunbeam. Shade. And maybe I was aware everything was changing and that I was losing my brother, that from that moment he would begin slipping away. Maybe in that walk down the corridor I could feel the days of summer falling away from us, the playing together in the fields behind our house, games of hay-hide, of Aeney and me climbing in the sycamore tree, of being in the Big Meadow, of me telling him Ruth’s Version of the books I was reading, of calling across the upper air at the top of our house, my sky-bed to his: Are you asleep yet?

Are you?

I reached over and took Aeney’s hand. I tried my trick of Making Everything Stop so it would stay just us, floating in a sunbeam, out of reach of change.

It seems to you such a small thing. Maybe you’re even in the Conheedy camp and believe it would be For the Better. It says so in many books, Separate the Twins.

But not in any books written by twins.

Mrs Conheedy came out of her office. ‘Ruth Swain, stop dallying. Into class now.’

I let go of Aeney’s hand. He looked at me. He smiled one of those brave smiles small boys smile. But he was afraid.

I remember feeling the cold handle of the classroom door. I remember Aeney walking past me down to Mr Crossan’s and his not turning back and my watching him go and thinking I love my brother and feeling this hopeless loss that I had no words for but later found in the fairy-tale word banishment .

Miss Barry was an angel. In total I had fourteen teachers in all my time in school. Only one was an angel.

I didn’t hear about Mr Crossan from Aeney that day. When he came out into the yard he stayed on the edge of a group of boys. They were pushing each other and being loud and he was trying to attach himself to them, just sort of walking along a little behind them, trying to find a glue he was just discovering he didn’t have. I didn’t have it either. Go down to any schoolyard at breaktime and look in and you’ll see. You’ll see the ones who have no Human Glue, who run out the first day with this perfect unrumpled optimism and trust, who still think of every boy and girl as their undiscovered friend and believe What Fun We’ll Have. And then, in the schoolyard, day one, there’s someone sprung from evil genes like Michael Mooney or Hen genes like Jane Brouder and they feel something off you, feel that field of difference you don’t even know you’re giving off, and boom you’re out, you can’t stick on. The group runs down the yard and you run too but it’s like the signal was given on a wavelength you didn’t receive in time so you’re a few steps back. Look at the pictures of Aeney’s class. You’ll see. It’s like he’s been photoshopped in and there’s this clean line around him, no Human Glue.

I watched him that day even as I was becoming The-Girl-with-Glasses. I was thinking Okay, if I am to be on my own island I’ll have Aeney come over and join me .

Swain Island would be fine with me. But when I went across the yard from Girls’ side to Boys’ to speak to him he turned away. He wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t be saved.

‘Separates from their shadow?’ Mrs Quinty says.

‘Yes.’

‘No. No, Ruth. I don’t think I know that one.’

If your blood is a river, where is the sea?

A central principle underlying Mrs Quinty’s Rules for Writing is that you have to have a Beginning Middle and End. If you don’t have these your Reader is lost.

But what if Lost is exactly where the writer is? I asked her.

Ruth, the writer can’t be lost, she said, and then knew she’d said it too quickly and bit her lip knowing I was going to say something about Dad. She pressed her knees together and diverted into a fit of dry coughing.

This, Dear Reader, is a river narrative. My chosen style is The Meander. I know that in The Brothers Karamazov (Book 1,777, Penguin Classics, London) Ippolit Kirillovich chose the historical form of narration because Dostoevsky says it checked his own exuberant rhetoric. Beginnings middles and ends force you into that place where you have to Stick to the Story as Maeve Mulvey said the night the Junior Certs were supposed to be going to the cinema in Ennis but were buying cans in Dunnes and drinking them in the Parnell Street carpark and Mrs Pender saw Grainne Hayes hanging off the salt-and-vinegar lips of some pimpled beanpole at The Height, wearing enough eyeliner and mascara to make her look like a badger in Disney and that micro-mini that wasn’t more than two inches of black-plastic silage wrap, all of which required they chose the historical form of narration and Stick To Their Story since she’d left the Hayes’s house earlier that evening in jeans and hoodie. But there’s a different kind of stickiness here, there’s the kind that gets inside your skin when you’ve been in the river and you come out and shower and dry off but it’s still there, and you know you’ve been in a river. Here’s the day Mam took Aeney and I to the circus. Duffy’s Circus had been coming to Faha since Duffy first bought a camel. They came annually in summer and set up in the GAA field, bringing with them a giant yellowy tent that smelled of magic when magic was elephant dung and hay and tobacco and that when erected was home to an exotic collection of flies moths and mosquitos, some of which I imagined orbiting the head of MelquÍades when years later I read my father’s yellow-paged copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Book 2,000, Gabriel García Márquez, Picador, London), the one that has A mi amigo V, que me ha ensenado un nuevo modo de entender la vida, Paco written inside it, but I never found out who Paco was or what new way of life V had shown him. Duffy’s came until their animals were dust, they came the year after that too when their camel was dust with two humps and whose performance consisted of a coarse hair skin you were allowed to rub and which felt exactly like the hairy couch the Mulveys bought from Broderick’s in Killenena. (Once Duffy’s was gone the Great American Circus came with stars and stripes painted on everything and accents of Pure Mullingar, but by then sadly I was Beyond Circuses.) Aeney and I sit in the front row. The trapeze is high above us. We lean back to look up at this glittering girl. She is maybe fourteen years old. We are seven. Cymbals are crashed together by the moustached barrel-shaped man we presume is Duffy, his face, like Mr Micawber’s after he had drunk punch, appears varnished . He cranes back to gaze above and then the girl walks across the upper air. We can’t see the line. She just walks across nothing, her arms extended for balance, her chin slightly raised, as though the Nuns were right and only perfect posture will get you into Heaven. She walks above us, pays no attention to the world below. Aeney turns to me and his eyes are wide with amazement. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say wow or god or d’you see her? He knows that with me he doesn’t need to. He just looks and smiles and I smile, and without for a second thinking of it he squeezes my hand one quick squeeze of just joy and then he lets go and we both look up at that impossible girl.