Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Heaven’s specific physics and geography were Unknown, and that was the way it was meant to be.

Until you arrived.

Then, even if you were dim as bat-faced Dennis Delany who couldn’t learn the calendar and spelled his own name Dis, you suddenly understood. The entire workings of the mind of God suddenly became clear to you and you went Ah . Until then, it’s a Mystery.

‘I don’t believe in it,’ I said.

Mrs Quinty returned from Low Babies. ‘O Ruth.’

‘I don’t. Some days I just don’t. I think there’s no point in any of it. It’s just rubbish. It’s just a story. People die and they’re gone. They don’t see you and you never see them again. It’s just a story to lessen the pain.’

Mrs Quinty looked at me. She looked the way you look at a dog who fell in the river and only just made it back to the bank. ‘Maybe it is a story,’ she said at last. ‘But it’s our story, Ruth.’

By the end of that summer in Ashcroft my father had nearly run out of stories. He’d almost read his father’s full library and arrived at last at Moby Dick . The edition I have is a Penguin paperback (Book 2,333, Herman Melville, Penguin, London). It’s been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there’s that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you’ll see.

My father revisited Moby a lot.

Maybe it’s because there’s no other novel in the whole world that better captures the Impossible Standard.

The end of that summer in Ashcroft he was reading Moby , and then, one evening maybe because he was bored, maybe because he was in one of those mad chapters that detail the physiognomy of whales, he went and took down one of Abraham’s unused Salmon Journals, and shortly after, amidst the Havishammy dust and cobwebs of Ashcroft’s non-dining Dining Room, he began a novel. It was set on a ship in the sea.

Now it takes a certain twist of mind to be able to write anything. And another twist to be able to write every day in a house that’s falling down around you with a mother who’s working her way through the wine cellar and a moist Bank Manager who’s expecting At the very least, Mrs Kittering-Swain, a gesture .

My father had both twists. As Matty Nolan said about Father Foley, Poor Man, when he came back with the brown feet after thirty years in Africa, he was Far Gone. Virgil had that power of concentration that he passed on to me. He filled one Salmon Journal and started on the next. He went a bit Marcus Aurelius who (Book 746, Meditations , Penguin Classics, London) said men were born with various mania. Young Marcus’s was, he said, to make a plaything of imaginary events. Virgil Swain meet Marcus. Imaginary events, imaginary people, imaginary places, whatever you’re having yourself. Gold-medal Mania.

I suppose it was just pole-vaulting really, only with a smaller pole.

Point is, he was very Far Gone.

And that’s where he was when they came to take the furniture. Mr Houlihan didn’t come in person. He stayed out at the gates in his car, dabbing and moistening and peering in, blinking the rapid blinks of the obscurely guilty and finding he had chewed his lips into looking like burst sausages in an over-hot pan. Gaffney & Boucher it was that were sent. They parked the lorry in the Front Circle beside the fallen chimney and came in like long-necked birds calling various polite but unanswered hellooos through the house, both of them with the low-slung shoulders and downcast eyes of the deeply apologetic. Grandmother did not appear. They arrived in the foyer and began taking the gold mirrors off the wall. One screw wouldn’t loosen. It would only turn and turn, and Gaffney gave it elbow grease and Meath meatiness and broke a piece of the nineteenth-century artisan moulding getting it free. Boucher shouldered the front door and Ashcroft opened to the daylight for the first time in years. They took the long sideboard (leaving the twin China dogs on guard on the floor), the standing Newgate clock, the embroidered Louis chairs, the studded Chesterfield, four armchairs of stuffing various, huffing and puffing as they moved the long oak dining table that bashed against the door jamb and wouldn’t fit — sideways or backways or anyways, Phil; You’re right there, Michael — and at last had to be left just inside the dining-room door.

At teatime Virgil landed back in this world. He didn’t realise anything had changed until he came downstairs and crossed the front foyer and felt something under his foot. He bent down to pick up the piece of gold moulding. That’s when he saw the mirrors were gone. That’s when he saw the front doors were wide open. He called his mother. She failed to answer. He called her again, this time climbing the stairs, thinking we’ve been robbed and that this had happened when he was whaling just off the coast of Nantucket.

He knocked on Grandmother’s door. He called to her. When he opened the door he saw her slanted across the bed, one arm hanging over the side as if she’d been caught and pulled askew and then had either shaken free or been thrown back. Her face was lopsided, her lip pulled low on one side where the fish-hook had been.

A stroke is not the word for it, the philosopher Donie Downes says. It’s more a Wallop. It’s a flaming wallop somewhere in the inside back of your head. Bang! like that. And you’re switched off same as the Mains is down and you lie there in the Big Quiet silently cursing the closure of Emergency in Ennis General Hospital and hoping Dear God Timmy and Packy are coming. In Dan’s case everything returned to normal, TG, he says (Thank God), except for the compulsion to tell every passing soul in Ryan’s or Nolan’s, Hanway’s, the post office, going in or out of Mass, about the exact nature and dimension of his Wallop.

Grandmother did not recover. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. Maybe once she was transported out the front doors of Ashcroft and was loaded bumpily up across the fumy exhaust of the ambulance, rolled into the grim metal interior and strapped in place, her one imperious eye still good for glaring, maybe she realised she wouldn’t be getting any further in the wine cellar. She had the second stroke. In Faha the word that’s fatally attached to stroke is massive . This one was Massive. To her eternal mortification it was not in some private room with stacked goosedown pillows, elegant bedclothes, and attendants with proper accents. It was in the ambulance, stopped on a narrow bend somewhere near Navan, waiting for skittish young cattle to cross. Her son was sitting alongside her.

Three weeks after Grandmother died, Virgil too left Ashcroft. There was no natural place left for him to fit into the world.

He took Moby Dick and went by bus to Dublin. Two days later he stepped on to a Merchant Navy ship docked on the River Liffey.

Then he went to sea.

Back in the time when we were all seaweed, Tommy Devlin says, and adjusts himself on his seat for the long story.

Tommy Devlin is Nan’s cousin. He’s a strictly brown-trouser man. He’s an Irish Independent man. He’s a fist socked-into-his-hand man in Cusack Park when the boys from Broadford are putting points on the board. Now for you . Tommy’s History of the World is not written down but firmly fixed in his mind in the same way that Chocolate Goldgrains are the only biscuit, Flahavan’s the only porridge, and Fianna Fáil the One True Rulers (like all mythological heroes presently enduring a temporary period of exile).