Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘Is there any. .?’

‘No, Father.’

‘Nothing yet, Father.’

‘No. Right.’

‘Could be a while yet, Father.’

‘I see.’

Eventually, to relieve Father Tipp of feeling spare , as Aidan Knowles says, Jimmy Mac asked, ‘Would you maybe say a few prayers, Father?’

And so they started up. A kind of human engine.

From where Aeney and I were it sounded like murmuring waves. Wave after wave. Which fooled us into thinking it was maybe the sea.

Mam screamed. Nan fecked the fecking Minister. The room heated under the scrutiny of the female neighbours, none of whom would chance but sidelong glances at Mam, all of them sitting Sufi Clare-Style, hands folded in their laps and eyes fixed faraway on the emerging plot. In the chimney the wind sang, the rain proper started, and finally, between prayers and curses, Aeney Swain swam, landing with some surprise not in the salty Atlantic but in the giant Johnson’s baby-oiled arms of Nurse Dowling.

We were notable personages in Faha, first, because of our birth, our natures being immediately established as precarious and untimely, and second, even as the blankets and towels were tidied, Mam was laid on the couch and the men called in for tea, we were notable for being unexpected twins. Briefly we enjoyed the celebrity reserved for the two-headed.

‘ Two? ’

We were not alike, but likeness is a thing expected of twins and expectations lean to their own fulfilment.

She’s very like him, isn’t she?

Spitting image sure .

Which, Dear Reader, is revolting. When I asked her Mrs Quinty gave the more polite interpretation saying that she thought it was not spitting but splitting image and that it came from splitting a piece of wood and matching the pieces perfectly, the join of the back of a violin say. But Vincent Cunningham says it’s spit and image , a person being literally both the fluid and picture of the other, which to an Engineer brain apparently makes perfect sense and is not disgusting at all.

Either way, we began as marvels. Faces peered in at us.

Can you tell them apart?

It is something to be innocent of your own marvellousness, to just have it, the way the beautiful do, and to bathe in the knowledge of being blessed. For me of course it did not last, but there was a time, and on good days I like to think some radiance of that entered me and no matter what happened after, no matter the pale thin face I see in the mirror, no matter these eyes, no matter the exhaustion and the sadness, somewhere inside it remains and there could yet be a time when what I feel is marvellous.

When Dad held us he could not speak. His eyes shone. I know I’ve said that. Reader, be kind. I have no better phrasing. It was like there was excess of shining in him. He kept filling up . Brimming. He lifted us in his arms and had to tilt his head skyward to stop the tears falling out.

When you are born into a great tide of love, you know it. Though you are only minutes old you know. And when you are days and weeks old and can only receive you know that what you are receiving is love. Aeney and me, we knew. We knew when we were being pushed in the big-wheel pram down the Faha road, when Mam and Dad’s faces, sun and moon, came and went over us, when we lay on the blanket in the kitchen and found a huge finger fitted into our tiny hands, and how by just holding tight you made a smile, we knew when we were in handknit jumpers laying on a blanket in the bog while Mam and Dad footed the turf, picked bog-cotton ticklers for our noses, when the cuckoo sang and Mam sang back to it, when she played butterflies under our chins, we knew and learned the strange and beautiful truth that being adored makes you adorable.

Vincent Cunningham comes up the stairs with Vincent Cunningham bounce. He’s off for Reading Week, which is the only thing not done that week.

‘What’s new?’ he says.

‘Well. I’m still here. Still in bed. Still exactly the same. So, that would be nothing.’

Turns out engineers don’t get irony.

‘Hair is good,’ he says. He puts his hands down between his legs and rubs the palms together in a kind of boys o boys way. ‘Your mam says you’ve had no breakfast.’

‘I have to wait an hour or I vomit.’

He tries to let that pass. He has to negotiate a route around the fact that I will be going to Dublin for a while, and he has to do so without mentioning illness. I watch the skylight. The clouds are closed doors in a hospital sky.

‘I couldn’t wait an hour,’ he says. ‘No way.’

‘Why? You’d die?’

I don’t really mean to be so, aspic. It just comes. And I have the face for it.

‘Still raining?’ I say at last to help him, like I can’t see it on his shoulders and on his hedge-cut hair and how always it makes the skin of his face so amazingly fresh-looking.

‘Still raining,’ he says, and then turns on me his great big Little Boy Smile and adds, ‘Wettest year since Noah.’

It was the brimming that brought my father to poetry. We were to blame. By the time we were born Virgil was already a familiar in the second-hand bookshops of the county, knew the floorboard groans under the twenty thousand volumes in Sean Spellissey’s in Ennis; the busted book boxes in the Friary that on them said Donal O’ Keefe, Victualler, but were filled topsy-turvy with donated paperbacks, Corgis and Pans mostly but also occasional mottled hardcovers with peeling-off From the library of nameplates; the backdoor bookshelves of Honan’s Antiques, where the volumes smelled of candles and Brasso; the haphazard find-it-yourself emporium that was Nestor’s where brandy-smelling books were thrown in for free if you made a purchase, explaining why on separate occasions Virgil bought the quarter-ounce, the half-ounce and the ounce weights that sit on the second shelf of the dresser; Mulvihill’s where deceased priests’ libraries were sold, all hardcovers; Neylon’s bar in Cranny which as draught-excluders had bookstacks in the windows and from which Our Mutual Friend was rescued, M. Keane written in blue biro on the flyleaf; Madigan’s in Kilrush into which the Vandeleur library dispersed and where Maurice Madigan guarded over it, wearing the moustache he got from his father, who got it from his back in the day when shoeshine brushes were a facial style of command.

Before we were born, Virgil knew them all. Perhaps because he did not go to university, perhaps because he felt a lacking which proved impossible to ignore, my father wanted to read everything. Because he could not afford new books, and because he disliked the temporariness of library loans, wanted to keep a book that mattered to him, he haunted the second-hand shops. If, as was rare, he read a book that he thought valueless he would bring it back to Spellissey’s or Honan’s and return it, in the kindest way letting them know the book was worthless, and suggesting he choose something else. I know because I have stood beside him at these mortifications, turning my shoe and pulling down from the hand holding mine while with his most reasonable voice he negotiated the unreasonable. These encounters were sweetened by the fact that after, in my father’s quiet triumph, we would go (literally) to Food Heaven, on the Market, for Chocolate Biscuit Cake, or take possession of one of the soft deep couches of The Old Ground Hotel, and there, while the fire heated the twin ovals in Virgil’s soles, and Mr Flynn flew up and down the hall addressing crises, we shared Tea for One and read with the leisurely disregard Jimmy Mac says is the hallmark of proper gentry.

The library that grew in our house contained all my father’s idiosyncrasies, contained the man he was at thirty-five, and at forty, at forty-five. He did not edit himself. He did not look back at the books of ten years ago and pluck out the ones whose taste was no longer his. So absorbed was he in the book he was reading that the library grew without his noticing. Though he needed new clothes, though his fashion sense evolved into Too Short Trousers, Mismatched Socks, The Patched and the Missing Button Look, Mam became his conspirator and on birthdays and at Christmas gave him not clothes but books. It was in her way of loving. She was selling brownbreads and tarts then, and would come from town with flour and bran, apples, raisins and rhubarb, and a paperback she’d leave by his plate for when he came in from the land.