Niall Williams - History of the Rain

And then the moment twists, slides away from me, and is gone downriver. Down this narrative all manner of things will float. But not Mr Crossan. I’m sinking him here. And if God asks for cause I’ll give Him cause. I’ll give Him that two yards of bones topped with a sprig of ginger, that narrow-jawed rat-faced misery with the pinched whine for a voice, the head to one side growing wiry nostril hair as he looks down at who he’ll pick on for humiliation today; I’ll give Him the Pride and Prejudice of Mr Crossan, that skinny shiny-suited blister with the complexion of uncooked sausage who went into teaching so that he could belittle others, so that he could say: ‘Aonghus Swain, is that handwriting? Tell me. I can’t read it. Is it? IS IT?’

I’ve had stupid teachers, lazy teachers, boring teachers, teachers who were teachers because their parents were and they hadn’t the imagination to think of anything else, teachers who were teachers because of cowardice, because of fear, because of the holidays, because of the pensions, because they were never called to account, never had to actually be any good, ones who could not survive in any other profession, who were not aware they had trod on butterflies. But none of those compared to Mr Maurice Crossan. He was the one who first stamped on my brother’s soul. He was dark, as they say here. For those who want more of him visit the dark character of Orlick Dolge in Great Expectations and cross that with a ginger-headed weasel.

He’s not getting in here. He’s not in The Ark.

When the bell rang I waited by the gate for Aeney. When he came he didn’t want me to be me. He walked past and I knew not to say anything but to just step silently into his wake. When we came in Mam had the table set and one of those thin smiles mothers have when they’re hoping so hard for their children all day and the hope is kind of butting up against the fear and the foreboding and really they are this massive mess inside with this smile plastered on top.

‘Well? How was it?’

‘Fine,’ Aeney said.

That’s the thing about boys. Maybe just Irish boys. Boys have No Go Areas, they have an entire geography of places you can’t go because if you do they’ll crack open, they’ll fall apart and you won’t be able to put them back together, not ever. Girls know this. We know. Even love can’t reach some places.

Fine, Aeney said, when there was no way in the world he was fine. When fine was as far as you could be from a true description of what he was feeling. But that was it. That’s all he said, and Mam sort of bit her lip and poured us MiWadi and said she had his favourite, Petit Filous, for after. He ate his dinner. He didn’t want any Petit Filous. He went up to his room and shut the door. When I came up I asked him through the door if he wanted to learn our spellings together, he said no. I sat in my sky-room, he sat in his. Then I heard him crying. I heard it at first like it was choked breathing. Like when you’ve sunk in deep water and had the life terrified out of you and you come up into the air eyes wide and mouth gasping not sure if this is your last and you’re about to be dragged back down again. He sucked in spasms, then he moaned and made this sound that wasn’t like anything except the sound a spirit makes when it’s sundering.

‘Aeney, let me in. Aeney?’

But he didn’t answer. He just cried on, this hopeless hard retching as if the tears were shards and each one cut as it came out. He was sitting on the floor up against the door so I couldn’t get in and Mam was gone to take Nan to Murphy’s so I just sank down on the floor on the other side of the door and because of the force of his crying the door and the whole partition wall kind of gave a little, these jagged ebbs and flows, as if the whole upstairs was in a storm, and my brother was in another boat sailing away, and no matter how much I wanted to, no matter what I did or said I would never be able to get to him.

Mr MacGhiolla was a teacher. He was the one who taught my father about the King-Under-the-Wave. He had this old book of tales (Book 390, Hero-Tales of Ireland , Jeremiah Curtin, Little, Brown, Boston), a kind already out of fashion then, but which he employed to keep my father’s imagination greenly lit. He didn’t want my father doing just Shakespeare and Homer. I’m not sure if he explained to Virgil that Shakespeare was Irish (see Book 1,904, Ulysses , James Joyce, Bodley Head, London) and that in fact all great writers can be traced back here if you go far enough, but he instilled in him the belief that this was a country of unrivalled imagination and culture. He threw out mythological names his pupil had never heard of, each of them exotic bait he knew the boy would rise to. In the long room upstairs in Ashcroft where no one could hear, he spoke to my father in Irish .

Ireland had gone wrong at some stage, according to MacGhiolla. Some kind of spell had been thrown and the country began forgetting itself. It began turning into Lesser Britain was the gist of Mr MacGhiolla’s argument. Our history, our folklore and culture were being washed into the sea and must be defended. MacGhiolla was too passionate to worry about mixed metaphors. He was too passionate to worry about generalisations or broad strokes or let the rational get in the way of his argument. Neither was he bothered by the fact that his pale complexion was deeply unsuited to passion and blotched in disparate patches as he rose to his theme. He spoke standing, hands clasped when not released to fork his red hair with exasperation, eyes locked on the upper left air when not locked on Virgil and burning his point home. He spoke on rising toes, on rolling ankles, he spoke with forward tilt, with lifted shoulders, with forefinger pointing and fist punching. He did verbal pirouettes, he did elongated sentences, he let clauses gather at the river and foam until they found spittle release. He spoke hushed, he spoke his big points in whispers, then drove them in with urgent balletic waves of arm and extended eyebrow as he said the same thing again only louder. He was not then a guns and bombs nationalist. He was the more dangerous kind. He was a poems and stories one.

As proof of his impact, my father kept all the books Mr MacGhiolla gave him: Book 391, The Crock of Gold , James Stephens, Pan, London; Book 392, Irish Fairy Tales , James Stephens, Macmillan, London; Book 393, The Three Sorrows of Storytelling , Douglas Hyde, T. Fisher Unwin, London; Book 394, Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes , Kuno Meyer, Hodges, Figgis & Co., Dublin; Book 395, Silva Gadelica Volume II, Standish Hayes O’Grady, Williams and Norgate, London; and the tea-ringed Book 396, Cuchulainn: The Irish Achilles , Alfred Nutt, D. Nutt, London. From Mr MacGhiolla my father heard about the King who lived under the waves, about the Glas Gainach, the cow whose milk was almost butter. He heard about the Queen called Mor who lived in Dunquin and the herder who came from Under the Sea. Cathal the Son of Conor, the Black Thief, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Children of Lir, the Voyage of Bran.

For my father it was as if the world split open and out came this parade of The Remarkables.

If this was America they’d be Blockbuster material, there’d be CUCHULAINN VII in 3D by now with Liam Neeson in his long Star Wars hair, the Gáe Bolga instead of a Light Sabre, there’d be a side franchise for Oisín in Tír na nÓg and Diarmuid and Grainne would get a revamp as Greatest Love Story Ever and run for seven seasons as a daytime soap.

That material was deep .

And in all of it, in all of those tales, the hero faces impossible tasks.

And he triumphs.

With a brilliant student Mr MacGhiolla shone. It was simple: we are the storytellers. Imagination in Ireland was beyond the beyond. It was out there. It was Far Out before far out was invented in California, because sitting around in a few centuries of rain breeds these outlands of imagination. As evidence, think of Abraham Stoker, confined to bed until he was eight years old, lying there breathing damp Dublin air with no TV or radio but the heaving wheeze of his chest acting as pretty constant reminder that soon he was heading Elsewhere. Even after he was married to Florence Balcombe of Marino Crescent (she who had an unrivalled talent for choosing the wrong man, who had already given up Oscar Wilde as a lost cause in the Love Department when she met this Bram Stoker and thought: he seems sweet ), even after Bram moved to London he couldn’t escape his big dark imaginings in Dublin and one day further down the river he spawned Dracula (Book 123, Norton, New York). Jonathan Swift was only settling into a Chesterfield couch in Dublin when his brain began sailing to Lilliput and Blefuscu (Book 778, Gulliver’s Travels , Jonathan Swift, Penguin, London). Another couple of deluges and he went further, he went to Brobdingnag, Laputa, Bainbarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and. . Japan , before he went furthest of all, to Houyhnhnms. Read Gulliver’s Travels when you’re sick in bed and you’ll be away . I’m telling you. You’ll be transported, and even as you’re being carried along in the current you’ll think no writer ever went this Far. Something like this could only be dreamt up in Ireland.