Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Virgil looks at my mother.

She looks at him.

Then she laughs, and he laughs, and then he comes after her and she runs but not so fast that he cannot catch her. And when he does, her hands feel the chill slippery skin of him and she smells the river that is on him and in him and his kiss is a shock of cold becoming warm, river becoming man.

Nine months later, Aeney and I swam downriver and were born.

When I wake some parts of me are dead. My arms get under me during sleep. As if all night I have been doing backstroke, slow mill of arm over arm towards unseen destination until exhaustion arrives and I give up. I always wake with a feeling of things unfinished. I wake and feel these lumps under me and sort of wriggle to get them alive. Then the room and the house and the parish gradually assemble around me again and Mam looks in and says ‘Morning Ruth’ and lets up the blind on the skylight and opens it a crack so we can see and feel today’s rain.

Here, in what Shakespeare calls The Place Beneath, the rain that falls from heaven is not so gentle. If once, it’s definitely not twice blessed. Safe to say Dear William & his gartered stockings were never abroad in the County Clare.

‘How are you, pet?’ Mam sits on the edge of the bed. She pats and straightens and fixes the duvet and the pillows while she talks. She can’t help herself. My mam never ever stops. She’s just this amazing machine that somehow manages Nan and me and the house and keeps us all afloat. She’s on all decks, crewman, boilerman, purser, Captain. My mam is a miracle.

‘How are you feeling?’

I can’t say. That’s the thing. I can’t say how I am feeling because once I start to think what’s an honest answer to that? I lose my footing. There’s this huge dark tide and I feel O God and I can’t. I just can’t. I used to think that no one who hasn’t been inside your life can understand it. But then I read all of Emily Dickinson, the nearly eighteen hundred poems, and afterwards thought I had been inside her life in a way that I couldn’t if I had lived next door and known her. I’m pretty sure you could have sold tickets to see the look Emily gave if you asked, ‘How are you feeling today, Miss Dickinson?’

But I don’t want to be cold, or hurt Mam, and I don’t want to get into a discussion either, so I say, ‘I’m okay.’ And Mam smiles the smile that isn’t one, but has that patience and understanding and sadness in it, and from the pocket of her cardigan she takes the yellow and blue and white tablets and gives them to me. The water in the glass is room temperature, and on a single swallow the tablets vanish into me and taste like nothing, which, to anyone with even weak-grade imagination, is disconcerting. You want them to taste like something. You want them to be more substantial, and significant, in a way, though I cannot explain that.

‘Now,’ Mam says, ‘I’ll bring you up something in a little while.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’

She doesn’t get up for a moment. For a moment there’s something silent sitting between us and I know it’s the untold story of our family and it’s like this sea-mist has come up the Shannon and into the room and hangs nebulous and opaque and tastes of salt. Then Mam pats my legs under the duvet two gentle pats and she rises and goes.

From the moment we arrived, Aeney and I were noteworthy personages in the drama of the parish. First of all, we nearly weren’t landed alive. Mother being Mother, she took the perfectly practical no-nonsense approach to pregnancy and paid no heed to the powdered ladies in Mina Prendergast’s who began their stories by saying I don’t like to say but or to those who cast their what Margaret Crowe calls Asparagus at the fact that Mam was older than the Faha norm for having a first baby, and in boyfriend terms Dad was An Ancient. The fact that Mam seemed so happy, which in Irish Catholic translates into Doom Imminent, was another portent. The whole parish was waiting for The Delivery. It was not that anyone wished us harm; it was just that people like to be right. They like Next Week’s Episode to turn out exactly as they expected and to surprise them. Nurse Dowling came and measured Mam and leaned over to listen to us and said hello. We said hello back. We were perfectly polite. Only we spoke at the same time so she didn’t hear that there were two of us. Everything is Grand, just Grand, and after that we stopped listening to the World to Come and swam the warm swimming that takes you back to being seaweed.

The plan was that we were to be born in hospital. Ennis though had been Downgraded. One morning a vicious sausage heartburn twisted the Minister sideways at his mahogany desk and he had a pregnancy epiphany, decided no one was to be born on the outer edges of the country. Any more, the excellent Irish people would be born in Centres of Excellence. There would be none of these in the County Clare. There would be one in Limerick though, which at that time was a Centre of Fairly Alright, but if you lived in Kilbaha or out on the Loop Head peninsula you’d have a hundred-mile drive on roads the Council had given up to the mercy of the Atlantic which rightly owned them and was in the process of taking them back. Still, the hospital in Limerick was the intended setting for our long-delayed arrival in the narrative, and in the blue Cortina Virgil practised delivery-driving. He didn’t want to fail this. He had a sense of enormity, as if for every inch swelling in Mam’s belly there was growing around his heart a feeling of immensity, as if his life had reached a verge and this great leap was about to happen, and he would be ready. He made the car spotless, or as near as, given that some spots were actual holes. He went on his knees and took every weed out of the garden. He got new gravel for the gravel way and raked it smooth, then raked it smoother. One day he cleaned the kitchen windows and the bedroom windows and then The Room ones, then the kitchen ones again, going round the house the way Tommy Devlin says a cow circles before calving. He whitewashed the house, limey spatters flecking the clean windows, flecking his hands, face and hair which he had no time to clean because Mam’s cry came and when he ran in the door she had already slid down on to the floor before the fire and Nan had stood her still-smoking cigarette on end, pushed the kettle across to boil and taken down two blankets and three towels so the flagstones would be softer landing and to New Arrivals this world wouldn’t seem penitential.

In minutes the parish was on its way. Moira Mac, who had several PhDs in what, with unfortunate phrasing, her husband Jimmy called Dropping Babies, was there before Mam cried a second time. By the time Nurse Dowling came there was a full gathering of women in the kitchen, their men sitting outside on the windowsill, painting the mark of whitewash across their bottoms, smoking, watching the river running and wondering could that be fresh rain starting.

The labour lasted an age. The journey to Limerick was considered and dismissed. Still we didn’t make an entrance. Gulls came up the river. Clouds came after them. The word Complications leaked outside in a whisper. The men took turns to go round the corner and pee against the gable. Dad came out, strode right down the garden and out the gate, stood alone in the river view in commune with Abraham or the Reverend or the General Invisible, turned on his heel and without a word strode back in.

Young Father Tipp came, parked his Starlet the way priests park, on the outer edge, carried his missal low down and a little behind him the way Clint Eastwood carried his gun, like he’d only use it if he had to. He took the nods, said what names he knew — ‘Jimmy, John, Martin, Michael, Mick, Sean, Paddy’ — to the ground-mumble chorus of ‘Father’ and then stayed outside amongst them.