Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Only her head didn’t come off.

It was only a small pop probably. Because she just rubbed her forehead and blinked her eyes and Dad said, ‘Jesus, I’m sorry.’

There were ten blank seconds maybe.

You only need to wait five.

‘Mary?’

Mam looked across at him. She stared, wide-eyed. ‘Have we stopped?’ she asked.

She let him think he’d hurt her another ten seconds then she punched his arm. ‘You’re mad, you know that? Mad.’

‘Starting and stopping are the hard bits,’ Virgil said. And he smiled.

When my father smiled it was like he had unlocked the world. It was that huge. It made you want to smile too. It made you want to laugh and then it made you want to cry. It was in his eyes. I can’t explain it really. There was this sense of something rising deep in him, and of shine .

Mam put her hands to her mouth and into them she laughed.

‘Come on,’ he said. He was already getting out of the car. In the movie version Mam’ll say, ‘Where are you going?’ but the dialogue is edited out here. Here there is only his figure become white as he takes off his jacket and leaves it on the driver’s seat. He’s out in the mizzling night rain. His shirt gleams. Across the field the river is black and slick. ‘Come on.’

I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never ever sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.

‘Come on.’ He takes her hand.

And now they are running.

I know that field. Years ago I went there. It’s rough and wildly sloping, hoof-pocked and rushy-bearded both. Running down it is bump and splash, is ankle-twist treachery. You get going and you can’t stop. You’re heading for the river. And you can’t help but scream.

Mam screams. Virgil yells out. And they charge down the dark to the river. The bank is plashy from long river-licking. The muck is silvered and without footprints. It sucks on their shoes. Virgil stops and pulls off his. Then he’s taking off his shirt.

‘Virgil?’

Then he’s taking off his trousers.

‘You’re not?’

The rain is already beaded on his hair. He looks up into the sky. Then he smiles at Mam, turns, goes three steps and dives into the Shannon.

She yells out.

He’s gone. He’s disappeared into the river. She looks at the place where he went in but it’s moving, and quickly she loses the spot, tries to refind it but she can’t. She imagines where he must be gone, the line the dive would have taken him, and she traces that as far as she can but it’s lost in the seamless dark. ‘Virgil?’

Nothing.

A rush of questions, like swimmers entered a sea-race at the same moment, splash-stroke in her mind. How long can you hold your breath underwater? How far can you go? Does a current take you? Is the Shannon deep? Are there river weeds? Malignant river-creatures? Can he swim ?

She looks out into the nothing. Then for no reason she can explain she turns and looks at his shoes on the bank. Empty shoes are the strangest thing. Look at a pair of anyone’s worn shoes. Look at the wear on them. Look at the scuffs and scratches. Look at the darkened heel-shine inside, where the weight of the world rubbed, the dent of the big toe, where the foot lifted. Tony Lynch who’s the son of Lynch’s Undertakers and who grew up a pallbearer says putting the shoes on the corpse is the hardest part. The empty shoes of someone who’s gone, there’s a metaphysical poem in there. You don’t believe me, look in Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Tango del viudo’ in the thin white Selected Poems (Book 1,111, Jonathan Cape, London) with the bookmark Alberto Casares, libros antigos & modernos, suipacha 521, Buenos Aires inside. ‘ Los mejores libros para los majors clientes ’.

Empty shoes. Weird, I know. But true.

Mam looks down at Dad’s shoes on the bank, and that’s when suddenly it hits her: he’s gone .

Her heart flips over. He’s gone .

My father is gone from this world and in the next moments my mother experiences the kind of dread foreknowledge widows in Latin American novels do, where black birds are sitting in the tops of trees and the wind rustles like black crêpe and smells like charcoal. He’s gone. His story is over.

That’s it.

The immense loneliness of the world after love falls upon my mother. She stands there. She can’t speak, she can’t shout out. She’s just taking this ice-cold knowledge inside her.

Then, forty yards downriver, Virgil comes up through the surface. He yells.

It’s not a yell of panic or fear but of joy, and at that moment my mother discovers that my father is a wonderful swimmer. He’s learned in deep waters and distant places and not only has he no fear he makes fear seem illogical, as if water and current and tide are all graces and a man’s movement within them natural as it is on earth. His stroke is unhurried. There is a kind of elemental delight in crossing the pull of the river, in feeling it, allowing it, resisting. He swims like he could swim for ever. I think he could. I think he can.

He comes back to her and holds his place in the water at her feet. ‘Come in,’ he says.

‘I could kill you.’

It’s not the reply he was hoping for. When I get around to writing it, it will not feature in Chat-Up Lines for Girls who Don’t Get Out Much .

She’s serious, and not serious. Her heart has not yet flipped back and she’s in the deep waters of realising that if he was gone her life would be over, which in my book is basically substance essence and quintessence of Love.

‘I’m sorry.’

She looks at him. He is naked. His upper body has the strange luminosity of flesh when most vulnerable. It’s that pale tone the holy painters use, the one that makes you think what the sound of the word flesh does, that it’s this thin-thin covering, flesh , and so easily it can be pierced.

‘I can’t swim,’ Mam says.

‘I’ll teach you.’

‘You will not.’

‘It’s not hard. Mary, take off your clothes.’ He is floating below her, his arms doing a kind of backward circling I’ve seen him do so he’s moving but not going anywhere.

‘You’re mad.’

‘I’m not.’

‘It’s freezing. I’m freezing right here.’

‘You get used to it. It’s lovely. Come on.’

‘I’m not going in.’

‘Then I’ll have to come get you.’

‘Don’t you dare.’

He puts his feet down, finds the mud floor of the Shannon, which is like a dark paste, tacky and cold, and he wades in to the bank.

‘Virgil!’ She’s watching him, she’s warning him, but she’s not running away.

He puts his hands up, leans forward, and like a strange white river-thing coming ashore flips himself up on to the bank.

‘Virgil! Don’t.’

He stands, the river runs off him, leaves a river shine.

‘Come on. I’ll show you.’

‘Virgil!’

‘You’ll love it.’

‘Don’t you touch me!’

He takes a step towards her. And because she doesn’t want to run away and she doesn’t want to go in the river, and because the whole scene is unscripted and mad, she bends down and takes his shoes and fires them out across the dark and into the water. The surprise in his face makes her laugh. Then she grabs up the rest of his clothes.

‘Mary!’

She throws them, shirt and trousers making briefly an Invisible Man, briefly winged, until he lands on the face of the river. Clothes-man floats seaward. They watch. It seems he’ll swim to the Atlantic. Then a twist in the current takes them; soundlessly my father’s clothes slide under and are gone.