Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘Where did you sail to?’ Aeney asked.

Dad lay between us on Aeney’s bed-boat. We were eight and in school had started doing Geography. At night-time Aeney took the Atlas to bed and before Mam called up Lights Out I joined him under the blue duvet with the white floating clouds on it and we looked at maps and took a kind of comfort from the way no matter how big a place was, if it was big as all of South America say, it still fitted inside a page. Aeney was a boy who dreamed. And so when he was looking at the maps you could sort of feel his brain whirring and you knew that afterwards in his sleep he’d still be travelling in those places.

‘Where did you sail to?’

Dad lies between us on top of the floating clouds, his long thin body a ridge of mountains that I can walk two fingers on. That April day when Mam first found him on Fisher’s Step he had D.H. Lawrence’s ragged reddish-brown beard, the one from the madly wrinkled cover of the Selected Poems (Book 2,994, Penguin, London), but we weren’t born until long after that, so by now his beard is silver and I can walk my fingers right up along his shoulders and over his collar into it and I get a good way into the softness of his beard before he makes a pretend snap and a shark sound and I scream and save my fingers for another while.

‘Where did you sail when you were a sailor?’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll tell you, but you mustn’t tell anyone.’

‘We won’t. Sure we won’t, Aeney?’ I lie, looking across at Aeney to make sure he won’t mention Seamus Mulvey.

Aeney shakes his head the way small boys do, with a kind of complete and perfect seriousness. His eyes are Os of wonder and gravity.

‘Tell us.’

‘Well,’ Dad says. ‘Do you know where the Caribbean is?’

Aeney flicks the pages of the Atlas. ‘Here.’ He holds it across the mountain ridge so I can see.

Dad smiles that smile he has that’s near to crying. ‘That’s right.’

‘Did you sail there?’

‘I did.’

‘What was it like? Tell us.’

‘It was hot.’

‘How hot?’

‘Very very hot.’

‘And why were you there? What were you sailing there for?’ Aeney wants to understand how you can get into a map that’s on page 28 of an Atlas.

‘Why was I there?’ Dad says.

‘Yes.’

My father’s eyes are looking straight up at the slope of the ceiling and the cutaway angle where the skylight is a box of navy blue with no stars. The question is too big for him. I will see this often in the years to come, the way he could suddenly pause on a phrase or even just a word, as if in it were a doorway and his mind would enter and leave us momentarily. Back then we thought it was what all fathers did. We thought that fatherhood was this immense weight like a great overcoat and there were all manner of things your father had to be thinking of all the time just to keep the overcoat from crushing him. ‘Well,’ he says at last, ‘that’s a long story.’

‘All right.’ Aeney props himself up on his elbow. One look at his face and you know you can’t disappoint him. You just can’t. Before they are broken small boys are perfect creations.

‘Well,’ Dad says. ‘I’ll tell you the short version.’

I move in closer. My head is against my father’s side. It’s warm in a way only your father’s body is warm and his shirt smells the way only your own father’s can. It’s a thing impossible to explain or recapture, because it’s more than a smell, it’s more than the sum of Castile soap and farm sweat and dreams and endeavour, it’s more than Old Spice aftershave or Lux shampoo, more than any combination of anything you can find in the press in his bathroom. It’s in the heat and living of him. It goes out of his clothes after three days. That’s a thing I learned.

But then I am not thinking of any of that. I press myself into the warmth of my father and his arm lifts and comes around me. His other arm comes around Aeney.

‘Well, it was a big-enough ship,’ my father begins. ‘It belonged to a Mr Trelawney.’

Aeney needs details. ‘What kind of man was he?’

‘A good man. But he couldn’t keep a secret.’

‘Why not?’

‘It was just his failing. But he had a cool head, so that was good. Anyway, he owned the ship and he came with us. And brought with him his friend, a Doctor Livesey.’

‘Was he good?’

‘He was. He treated everybody the same.’

‘That was good.’

‘Yes.’

‘What was the Captain’s name?’

‘Smollett. He was a good Captain.’

‘You need a good Captain. Who else?’

‘There were plenty. There was a Mr Allardyce, Mr Anderson, and Mr Arrow.’

‘They are all As.’

‘Quiet, Ruth. What was Mr Arrow like?’

‘Mr Arrow drank. Even though it was not allowed.’

‘Did he fall overboard?’

‘Yes. He fell overboard during the night when we got to the Caribbean. His body was never seen again.’

Dad allows a pause for Mr Arrow’s body to sink without trace.

‘There was also Abraham Gray.’

‘What was he like?’

‘He was a carpenter. At first I didn’t like him, and when you’re on a ship with somebody you don’t like that’s no fun. But then he did some good things and I saw a different side of him. And in the end he saved my life.’

‘Did he?’

‘He certainly did.’

‘How?’

‘That comes later. First, who else? There was John Hunter, there was Richard Joyce. And Dick Johnson. He always had a Bible with him. Everywhere he went. He thought it would protect him in the seas.’

‘And did it?’

‘He didn’t drown. But he got malaria.’

‘Was that bad?’

‘Yes, Ruthie.’

‘He died?’

‘He did.’

We pay our respects to Mr Johnson as he follows Mr Arrow into the dark.

‘George Merry, Tom Morgan, O’Brien. We never knew O’Brien’s first name. He was just O’Brien.’

‘Good?’ Aeney’s O eyes.

Dad makes tremor an invisible whiskey bottle at his lips. Poor O’Brien.

‘The Caribbean, you know, is not a place. It is many places. Islands. Some of them are so small they’re not even on that map. But all of them are beautiful. The water is this marvellous blue. It’s so blue that once you see it you realise you’ve never seen blue before. That other thing you were calling blue is some other colour, it’s not blue . This, this is blue. It’s a blue that comes down from the sky into the water so that when you look in the sea you think sky and when you look at the sky you think sea.’

Aeney and I lie there and realise we’ve never seen blue, and how amazing it must be, and for a while I try the difficult trick of seeing what I’ve never seen except through my father’s telling. I set him sailing in the very best blue I can imagine, but know that is not blue enough.

‘Close your eyes to see it,’ he says.

We both close our eyes. Just when I think I am seeing it he lifts his arms from around us and our heads slide back deeper into the pillow on Aeney’s bed. The bed rises as the mountain ridge goes away and my father eases himself off. I’m in the warm space that still smells like him and I’m thinking of sailing towards an island in the marvellous blue.

Aeney doesn’t want to imagine. He wants the real thing. He wants to be there. ‘Tell us more.’

‘I will,’ Dad says. ‘But just get to the island now. Just arrive. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about Mr Silver.’

‘Mr Silver?’

‘Shsh. Lie back.’

‘But who is he?’

‘His name was John. We called him Long, even though he wasn’t.’

My eyes are closed, but I can feel Dad pull the covers up around Aeney. His voice is quiet because he thinks Ruthie is already asleep. Very gently he pats Aeney’s head and at his ear whispers, ‘ He had a wooden leg .’