Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘Virgil, come in home.’

He smiled. That’s what he did, he smiled.

It was a rapture thing. But also, Swains are extremists.

Just like saints. And mad people.

‘There’s a bit more,’ he said.

‘You’re drowned.’

‘I’m fine.’

It was straight-down rain. It was washing his face. It was hopping off the shoulders of the ESB all-weather.

‘Virgil.’

‘I’ll get this cleared. Then that’ll be one job done.’

She looked down at him, her new husband, and looked back along the three-quarters of the drain that had been cleared but was not yet running. Dark patches of dug-out muck lay along the bank like a code, symbols in an obscure proving in mathematics that had progressed so far but was still short of conclusion, still short of anything being proven.

‘Are you going to be impossible?’ she asked. She knew the answer before he gave it.

Rain and ardour were glossing his eyes. ‘I think so.’

She had to bite her lip to stop herself from smiling. She had that falling-off-the-world feeling she often got around him, a feeling that came swift and light and was so unlike the weight of the responsible that had come into the house after her father had died that it felt like wings inside her.

‘All right so,’ she said. And then she turned and walked back across the puddle-meadow, three luminous bands on the back of her coat catching the last light and making it look as if in her tiers of candles were lit.

There was no boiler or central heating in our house then. There was the range and the fire and large pots for hot water. When Virgil came in evening had fallen. Nan was gone to the Apostolics. He stooped in under the rain-song on the corrugated roof of the back kitchen smelling prehistoric. ‘I freed it,’ he said.

‘Take off your clothes,’ Mary said. To escape the compulsion to embrace him, she turned to the four pots she had steaming.

He saw the stand-in tub on the floor.

‘Take off everything.’

When I read the white lily-scented paperback editions of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow (Books 1,666 & 1,667, Penguin Classics, London) that’s where I find them.

Mary dips and squeezes the sponge. Steam rises.

Virgil steps naked on to the flags of the floor.

Today when they carried me out into the ambulance Mam held my hand tight. I had my eyes closed. Timmy and Packy have got the hang of the stairs and the narrowness of the doors and there was no banging on jambs or jerkiness on the steps and when the rain touched my face I didn’t panic, and I didn’t open my eyes until I was strapped into that small space and we were moving. Then Mam dabbed my face two gentle dabs and took my hand in hers again, and I was glad of it, even though I’m not ten years old or even twelve. It’s because people are so perishable. That’s the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outwards from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there’s blurry bits, like you’re looking through this watery haze, and you’re fighting to see, you’re fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.

We were in Tipperary before Mam took her hand from mine.

Because this was going to Dublin again, because this was The Consultant, Timmy and Packy went Extra Reverential, and because Timmy could see I was paler and thinner than last time and because he knew I was Book Girl he tried to leaven literature into the conversation.

‘Ruth, tell me this. Wouldn’t Ireland win the World Cup of Writing?’

‘There is no World Cup of Writing,’ Packy told him, and then, discovering a hair of doubt across his mind, turned back to me and asked, ‘Is there?’

‘I know there isn’t,’ Timmy said. ‘But if there was, I’m saying. Do you know what the word IF is for?’

‘You’re some pigeon.’

‘If is for when a thing is not but if it was . That’s why you use If. If you didn’t use if then the thing would be. That’s the distinction.’

Packy’s response was to put the wipers up to Intermittent Four.

‘Most of life depends on If,’ Timmy said, going deeper.

Maybe a mile of road went by and he resurfaced with: ‘We’d have eleven World Class, wouldn’t we, Ruth?’

‘Living or dead?’ Packy asked, and when Timmy threw a glare across at him Packy shrugged and said, ‘What? I’m only saying. You need to know the rules.’

‘With writers it makes no difference.’

‘All right so,’ he said and started trying to think of the poems he’d done in school.

Timmy reached across and put us back on Intermittent Three.

‘Yeats is one anyway,’ Packy said.

‘Centre midfield,’ Timmy said.

‘That other one was a goalkeeper.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Your man, we did him for the Leaving.’

‘Who?’

‘The goalkeeper.’ Packy looked ahead into the rain for him. ‘Paddy Kavanagh.’

‘Was he?’

‘He was. I heard that once. Goalkeeper. Blind as a bat too. Who’s centre forward?’

‘Who do you think, Ruth?’ Timmy’s eyes were on mine in the mirror.

‘Both sexes?’ Packy asked.

‘What?’

‘Well if living or dead, then men or women, right?’

Timmy looked at him like a man who had just taken up golf, a wrinkle of perplexity across his brow.

‘What about your one who won the prize? Who’s she again?’ Packy went fishing for the name.

The rain was coming fast, sitting a long time on the windscreen between wipes so we sped sightless then saw then were sightless inside the rain again.

‘We’d have a good team all right,’ Timmy said. His eyes were back on mine. I looked away. I hadn’t the energy for conversation. I was feeling that kind of weakness you feel where you imagine there must be a valve open somewhere inside you. Somewhere you’re leaking away. It’s slow and silent but all the time something is flowing out of you, there’s a lessening and a lightening and sometimes you get so tired you don’t want to fight it, you just want to close your eyes and say all right then, go on, flow away .

‘Enright!’ Packy said. ‘That’s her.’

Timmy half-turned back to us, spoke through the sliding window. ‘Did you read that one, Ruth?’

Mrs Quinty had given me The Gathering , partly because it had won a prize and partly because it was a Serious Book by a Woman, and she wanted to encourage me, she wanted to say See, Serious Girls Can Win, but she would be afraid to say anything so direct so the book had to do the saying as books often do. I loved it, but the publishers had put this staring boy in black-and-white on the front of the paperback with only his eyes in colour and they were a piercing blue that I just couldn’t look at so I had to bend back the cover. Then when I got to page 71 where she writes about a man with an indelible watermark of failure I had to stop because of sinking.

‘How’s your own book coming, Ruth?’ Timmy asked. ‘Ruth wants to be a writer,’ he told Packy.

I didn’t want to be a writer, I wanted to be a reader, which is more rare. But one thing led to another.

I’m not writing a book, I’m writing a river, I wanted to say. It’s flowing away.

‘I think I need to sleep,’ I said.

Mam stroked my brow. Three soft strokes. ‘You go ahead,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes.’