Niall Williams - History of the Rain

I look grey . I actually do. Mirrors should be banned, the same way Uncle Noelie banned the News. Both are enemies of hope. Uncle Noelie said he couldn’t take listening to the wall-to-wall Doom experts who were the Boom experts before, most of them like a dark neighbour secretly delighted to be part of an important funeral, and so, because the time called for extreme tactics and because your heart has to be sustained by something, he switched over to Lyric FM for Marty in the Morning and shook hands with Mozart. But you can’t switch off the mirror, it’s right there over the bathroom sink, it’s hard to avoid, and in it I’m grey .

‘Do I look grey?’ I asked Vincent Cunningham.

‘What?’ He did that thing people do when they hope a question will go away. He did his Robert De Niro, which is to smack three invisible bits of lint off the knee of his trousers, and then examine his fingers closely and frown at what only he could see there. If, like Mr Pecksniff, he had a hat he would have looked inside it for an answer.

‘Which word do you not understand? Grey? My face, does it look grey?’

‘No. No. Of course not.’

‘What colour would you say I look?’

‘Normal colour.’

‘That’s ridiculous. Obviously I’m not, never have been, and never will be normal .’

‘No but you know what I mean.’

‘Under my eyes. Circles. What colour?’

‘Normal.’

‘Vincent.’

‘Blue-ish.’

‘Blue-ish grey?’

‘Blue-ish pale.’

‘Which is what people call grey.’

‘If you don’t feel well maybe you should go to hospital.’

There were so many reasons why that was ridiculous I didn’t even begin. In the county hospital the Winter Vomiting Bug had arrived, the Autumn Vomiting Bug having presumably departed for Africa, greyness was not a condition with swift remedy, as my eating any amount of beef, lentils, beans, spinach, and double doses of Hi-Dose Iron tablets could already testify, and the fact that my insides at this point were a magical swings-and-slides playground for Pfizer, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, and the Star Trek-sounding folks at AstraZeneca, meant that I gave this suggestion only My Look.

‘Just admit it. I look grey.’

‘You do.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

I got less satisfaction than I had hoped. ‘My hair is like old straw.’

‘Ah, Ruth, no it’s. . Yes, yes it is.’

‘Thank you.’

If you’re feeling hopeless you want someone else to feel hopeless too. That’s one of the better contradictions in human nature. But Vincent Cunningham has one of those cork hearts that keep bobbing up when you try and push it under.

‘I’ll wash it,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Come on. I’ll wash your hair.’

‘Fly around the room first why don’t you?’

‘Come on, it’ll make you feel better.’

‘I’m not letting you wash my hair.’

He was already heading to the bathroom. ‘I’ll get the water ready.’

‘Vincent! Vincent?’ I could hear the taps running. It takes a while to get the hot water up here. My father put in the bathroom using a second-hand Reader’s Digest Guide for Homeowners (Book 1,981, Reader’s Digest, New York) he got from Spellissey’s in Ennis. The bathroom proved an arduous task, the book’s spine is broken on the water-warped pages showing Basic Home Plumbing and it appears that either my father or the original owner near-drowned the book in the attempt. You turn on the tap and nothing happens. When I was younger I used to imagine the water had to come from the river, and didn’t mind waiting because of the engineering miracle my father had worked. At first nothing happens; you turn the tap full on, and it’s as if you are being tested in a prime belief, that water will in fact come, and once you believe that you can actually hear this tiny suspiration escaping the spout which affirms your belief that soon the air will become water if you can just put up with standing in the cold a bit longer. The water runs cold for ages. It runs cold until you get to the place where you’re thinking there is no hot and then begins a knocking out of Macbeth . It’s somewhere in the house, but no one’s sure where. The knocking becomes a clacking behind the wainscoting and the pipes sound the way arthritis must feel, an achy resistance to fluidity, but at last you know your belief has paid off and the hot comes with a series of airy belches and a sudden splashy gulp of triumph.

Vincent came in carrying the bath towel. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘Right what?’

‘You’ll feel better.’

‘Gone insane, is that it?’

‘Yep,’ he said, hedge-hair high and mad eyelashes batting as he began to pull back the duvet. ‘Come on.’

‘Listen, Vidal, it’s not that I don’t appreciate. .’

He’d already got his arm around my back and under me. He was already finding out that I was lighter than he had imagined, that I had such little substance that for a moment he must have thought his arm had passed through me, that he had dreamt me, except if he had he probably wouldn’t have dreamt the grey skin or the straw hair or quite possibly the attitude. He held me up. I held on to him. ‘You’re mad,’ I think I said. I was too surprised for long sentences.

He had the wooden chair backwards against the sink, a towel double-folded as a neck support. The water was steaming.

‘Here.’

‘You’ll scald me.’

He seated me gently then lifted his arm away, pausing just a moment to see that I was still sitting there. Shoving up his sleeves, he turned to the sink.

‘Vincent.’ I had my back to him.

‘I know.’ He dipped his elbow.

‘No but?. .’

‘Now.’ He took my hair. ‘Lay back.’

‘Have you ever. .?’

‘Ruth, lay back.’

I put my head on the support. And now my hair was in the water. His hands were drawing the water to it, treating it the way they might treat the golden hair in a fairy tale. Then he was cupping and letting the water flow on to my head and dipping his hands and cupping again and letting flow again, in what was somehow now the most ancient and natural rhythm in the world, the flowing of water over a head. And I was leaning back and my eyes were looking up at him, but he was looking only at my hair and the job he was doing, and he had that look you see in boys and men when they are engaged in a task grave and intricate and vital. His fingers moved the shampoo through my hair. My head was a comforting hardness, I knew, a bone at last of substance, and he worked a foam against it, and then smoothed the length of my hair, sometimes letting the hair move between both his palms, sometimes one hand laying the soap and the second pooling water over it. It came over my brow and he apologised and I said it was all right but with a kind of supreme gentleness he dabbed my eyes with the towel end and then returned to the washing with the same intensely focused tenderness. By now there was nothing I could say. I lay there in the towel while he changed the water. Then he began the rinsing. Water did not feel like water. It felt like a dream of water flowing over me and I closed my eyes and felt Vincent’s hands and the water and the flowing and a kind of impossible sensation of freeing and pouring and cleansing, as if this was a baptism, simple and pure and fluent in grace, as if there were grounds for hope yet.

My father did not know how to drive. He had gone from the hothouse island of Ashcroft away to sea and bypassed the years when he should have learned. Mam knew how. She had learned in the big back meadow in her father’s cabless Zetor when she was eleven, sitting on Spencer’s lap, thrilling to the loud and bouncing propulsion across the open ground and the fact that you could go here, or there, or over there, just because you wanted. Mam drove the same way she walked, freestyle, also known as bumpily. She didn’t really go in for right- and left-hand lanes, which was fine this side of Faha where the road is cart-wide and Mohawked with a raised rib of grass and when two cars meet there is no hope of passing, someone has to throw back a left arm and reverse to the nearest gap or gate, which Faha folks do brilliantly, flooring the accelerator and racing in soft zigzag to where they have just been, defeating time and space both and making a nonsense of past and present, here and there. As any student of Irish history ancient and recent will know, we are a nation of magnificent reversers.