Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘Is it poems he’s writing?’ she asked, with flawed grammar. She used a tone which implied poetry was something like impetigo, which had devastated the school when the Resettled came from Dublin and for three weeks turned our class into good casting for a leper colony. ‘Is it poetry ?’

The two of them looked at me with the exact same look.

‘It’s a story,’ I said.

Still the look.

‘It’s a story, like Black Beauty .’

That’s what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be a book I brought to school one day. I wanted it to be unsurpassably jaw-droppingly eye-poppingly amazing, a book Loved By Everyone, and somehow through that I would conquer my own oddity and might even be asked to add a middle Jane, which I had briefly decided I would consider but for the misfortune of the rhyme, Ruth Jane Swain, which suggested hooped dresses, wisteria on the veranda, and a haughtiness I personally could never aspire to.

The Janes stood and scrutinised me.

‘It’s a lie,’ Anne Jane said, triumphantly.

‘No it’s not.’

‘Yes it is. I can tell. It’s a lie.’

‘I’m going to ask your brother,’ God-forgive-me said.

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘He just doesn’t.’

‘Come on, Anne Jane. Let’s ask him.’

‘Yes, let’s.’

‘Wait.’

‘What?’

‘What?’

‘It’s not finished yet. The book is not finished yet.’

‘Your father’s not actually a writer, is he?’

‘Is he?’

‘Is he?’

That afternoon I walked home pulling overripe blackberries and throwing them into the ground, finding in the purple staining small consolation but adequate image. Aeney had run ahead. Aeney always ran ahead, was always happiest in speed and in any case would be no help in this. In me, exhausted from the defence of having a special father, had bloomed the first dark cloud of betrayal, a small but persistent whispering: I wish my father was not a writer . Why could it not have passed over? Why couldn’t somebody else’s father be a writer and mine a teacher or doctor or councillor?

I brought my frown into the kitchen.

‘Mam?’

‘Yes, Ruth?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right then.’

‘Only.’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s Dad writing? Is it poetry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you read his poems?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re not ready yet.’

‘You can still be a writer when you’re working on a book,’ I said.

‘Of course you can,’ Mam was working dusting flour. Her arms are basically flour and dough. If she’s not making bread in Heaven when she gets there it’ll be because Bread of Life doesn’t need flour and aprons are only for this world.

‘When will the book be done?’

‘I don’t know, Ruth. Some day.’

‘But soon?’

She paused, as if it was a thing she hadn’t considered, or hadn’t considered until that moment that I might want the book to appear, that in fact my whole status and future happiness and the happiness of all the world, Hello, actually depended on it.

‘Yes, I’m sure. Soon,’ she said. ‘Okay, pet?’

‘Okay.’

That eventually the poems would coalesce or coagulate, or whatever it is that poems do, was not in doubt. The pressures of brain, paper, pencil and time made it inevitable. Because the secret to writing, the entire syllabus, booklist, coursework, of Ruth Swain’s Master’s programme in Creative Writing is four words: Sit in the Chair .

Or, in mine and RLS’s case, Lie in the Bed .

There’s a book inside you. There’s a library inside me.

Sit down.

The words will come, the pages will gather. That’s it. Course over.

So it was just a matter of stabbing a pen into his heart, and putting in the time. And more and more that’s what he was doing. In the morning, my father’s eyes would be gone Japanese, extravagant puffed bags of sleeplessness making them narrow, his silver hair forked on the right-hand side where he had held his leaning head.

‘Was the writing good, Dad?’ was basically my version of Are we there yet?

‘You know you are the most wonderful girl in the world? Have I ever told you that?’

I nodded, full glob of Flahavan’s with honey swimming in my mouth.

‘No. I don’t think I ever have.’

‘You did!’

‘How can I have forgotten?’

‘You did already!’

‘No, no. I never did. But I will now. Do you know what you are? The most. .’

I had to finish his sentence. Otherwise he would keep at it. And although even then I feared those critics creeping behind the wainscoting or under the linoleum who would consider me a Sentimental & Exaggerated Character, I will admit I did say: ‘. . wonderful girl in the world.’

Go on, shoot me.

Once, when I got chickenpox, and had to be separated from Aeney, who never caught anything anyway, a bed was made for me beside Dad’s table and I was back for three nights in his night-composing. At first before writing he read. It was a warm-up. It was sort of like taking the pole down the cinderway, feeling the wind, trotting down to the vault and looking up at it. He read aloud from those writers that he knew were beyond him. When I got to Trinity I would understand they were his canon: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Hopkins, and of course Yeats. They were the bar. They were the ones laid out across the sky overhead if you were a sky person, the salmon if you were a sea one. Basically, The Impossibles.

My chickenpox nights, Virgil read Hopkins. (It was years later, when in the stale yeast-and-socks air of the Arts library I went in pursuit of Hopkins, that I came across GMH’s letter to Richard Watson Dixon, where he says: ‘My vocation puts before me a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else.’) Back then chickenpox Ruth was not sure her father was speaking English. Dappled things, couple-colour. Rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim . He spoke the lines aloud, plugged in to what Seamus Heaney called the powerpoint of Hopkins, and soon his head fizzed, fried, sizzled.

Transcendence is the business of poets. That’s what they’re for. They’re not like you and me. They have that extra bit that’s always ready for take-off. Poets understand why God didn’t give us wings: he wanted entertainment. He wanted us to aspire, to ascend. He wanted poetry.

My father could read a poem five or six times, more, over and over, reading quietly but intently, the lines like a ladder or a prayer rising until the time when he put the book aside and then was utterly quiet. He sat, leaned forward, stared at the page. I did not move. The room contracted. The rain and the rain-wind rattled the slates, whipped the loose wire from the TV aerial, whp whp , against the roof. It didn’t stop, whp whp whp , and in time became a charioteer who rode down the sky, whp whp , came in over the dark river that had swallowed the stars, and settled just above our house.

Slowly then, the slightest angling back and forth of his body that pressured the back legs of the wooden chair into a thin creak, my father rocked and began to hum. He picked up the pencil. He moved his whole body towards the page. I lay in my unsleep as the under-voiced hum turned to phrase. And though I had not words for it I knew that we were in Lift-Off, I knew that I was hearing the poem happen , that there was air under us and we were away, in some other place where marvels were and dazzlement common. I knew that nothing in the ordinary world was quite like this and I lay there, hoping the spots on my skin would not vanish for a time, for a time happy in the confluence of sickness and poetry.