Niall Williams - History of the Rain

When the book didn’t come, and didn’t come, I perfected my skill of Standing Alone in the yard. Silently I worked on my narrative voice. My dear Jane-sows. You are dunghills. Pissed-on nettles. Spews of vomit. Period pains. You are stuck-up vindictive ignorant pony-tailed piglets. I wish you misery and pimples, hair that will never come right, husbands with hairy backs and breaths of cauliflower .

(Later, in Editorial, fearing Mrs Quinty might think my narrator a bit Swain Extreme, and that use of Black Arts might be held against me in the next life, I amended that to the blessing Tommy Devlin says Mona McCarthy used after the exhausting three-day — two-geese, four-duck, five tart — visit of her American third cousins. She waved them a serene goodbye from the front door, said, ‘May God preserve them, at a distance.’)

Distance is something Swains do well.

Because I never made friends, because if you think about it making friends sounds fairly contrived and deliberate and sort of selfish, making your friends , and until the world taught me otherwise I’ll admit I always believed friends would somehow find me, would detect Ruth Swain-ness in the stratosphere and head out on their camels, I am used to being on my own. But now that I am imminently departing rounds of callers come to our house for A Last Look, or to Get Ahead of the Funeral, a local science.

The first was Baby Jesus.

He arrived unannounced at the front door. He did not ring the bell but lay just in out of the rain which by then was torrents. Mam found him when she was letting out Huck. Jesus was exactly the same as he’d been when he was kidnapped. There wasn’t a mark on him. He hadn’t aged a day. Mam let out a cry.

Well you would.

And she looked out the yard for who had brought Him. There was no one. Huck looked at Jesus and looked at Mam with dog puzzlement and then Mam said ‘Business Huck’ and he remembered what he had come out for and trotted diagonally to that bush Margaret Crowe calls the Anonymous to do the only Business being done in these parts now. Mam picked up the Baby Jesus. Then she saw how the river had risen. The lower edge of Ryan’s meadow was gone. The next five yards were a dull silver pocked with rain and pierced with rushes. All along our side the river had come up. She stood holding Jesus and looking at the rain.

Here in Faha, of rain we have known All Kinds, the rain that pretends it’s not rain, the rain that crosses the Atlantic and comes for its holidays, rain that laughs at the word summer , sniggers at the dry day in Ennis twenty kilometres away, hoots at what pours, streams, teems, lashes, pelts and buckets down. But this was different.

It had intent. That’s what Mam thought. And the intention was Flood.

Huck came back and looked at Mam and she said ‘Good Boy’ and let him back in to his place before the fire where he would lay his general ancientness and act as slipper-warmer to Nan. Mam brought Baby Jesus in.

‘Somebody’s left this,’ she said to Nan.

‘Give him to me.’ Nan took Jesus and dried his face, with biblical accuracy, only using a page of the Clare Champion .

‘There’s going to be a flood,’ Mam told her. But Nan was already saying her prayers. I could hear the murmurs rising as Mam came up to tell me.

When Jesus comes to your house there’s only one message: you’re doomed.

I hadn’t realised I was done for until that moment. That whoever had taken the Baby Jesus and kept Him ten years in what had to be pretty secret captivity for whatever Special Needs the kidnapper had, that they had decided that now I was the one who most needed His Presence was enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

‘Hellooooo?’ came up the stairs.

‘Jesus!’

‘Ruth!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Just me,’ said Mrs Prendergast, who had not in my lifetime visited our house, but now entered my bedroom wearing the flushed look of Mrs Peniston in The House of Mirth (Book 1,905, Edith Wharton, Everyman Library, London) who cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull.

Mrs Prendergast came in the door and stopped, relieved and holding her hands together so that we might get a better look at her and get her portrait right. ‘What dreadful rain,’ she said. ‘Mary,’ she gave my mother a hand then turned to me a little pained smile. ‘And how are you, dear?’

I’m not sure she expected an answer. She patted my bed, then held her hands together in more or less the exact replica of how I realised I had written Mrs Cissley when her Oliver had died and she had come to visit Abraham.

‘Sit down, Mina,’ Mam told her.

‘I won’t stay,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to see poor Ruth, and offer my best wishes.’

‘Sit. Please.’ Mam turned the chair around.

‘I won’t.’

‘Please.’

‘Perhaps just for a minute then.’ Mrs Prendergast drew the tails of her long tweed coat forward and like Mrs Peniston sat on, not in, the chair. ( Thank you, Edith .) The coat buttons were immense and green. Her hat was round and rimless, made of threaded rows of tiny beads and had a concertina effect, as if it had once been sat upon, which it seems is The Look in Limerick, if not Paris. To allow herself be taken in, and give gravity full play, she looked down, considered her tiny feet.

‘I’ll make tea.’

‘Oh no, not at all. Not at all, Mary. No no no.’

‘It’s no trouble.’

‘I wouldn’t hear of it. I just called to see poor Ruth.’

‘Hellooo?’ came up the stairs.

‘Come on up,’ Mam said.

‘Mary. Ruth. Mrs Prendergast,’ the Major Ryan said, entering and showering a fair bit of rain off his person. A big square man with a barrel-chest, he was a little bit Mr Hubble the wheelwright in Great Expectations , the one who had a sawdusty fragrance and always stood with his legs very wide apart, which in those trousers was disconcerting. Major Ryan had a boom voice he had to keep under restraint except during Lent when the plays were on. Now he went to whisper-power to ask, ‘How’s the little lady doing? All right?’

I was right there looking at him.

I was not and never have been The Little Lady.

‘Sorry now. I was just passing. Sorry,’ Mr Eustace said, coming in the door, stooping and craning, easing in past the Major. ‘Sorry now.’

‘Mr Eustace.’

His surname was an offence to him. ‘John Paul, please .’

I had only seen him in our house once before. You saw him that time you were first driving through the parish and he was standing in a doorway selling Life Assurance but noticed your car was not a Clare Reg. That time you probably didn’t realise his face was so white or that he was just perfect casting for Mr Sowerberry.

‘Sorry now. Sorry,’ he said, ‘just. Well.’ He looked at me like I’d already died. It was a Fondly Missed look, like I was The Departed and he was the Deeply Regretted By, setting his long black eyelashes to Down & Flutter and paying his respects with a letterbox mouth and palming his hands off each other. ‘Sorry.’

‘Can I come up?’ Monica Mac said. Monica has a quiet personality but compensates with loud lipstick.

My Last Day it rained visitors. It’s in the secret tactics of how to keep the patient from thinking of what lies ahead. But here it proves a country truth: it takes a parish to rear a storyteller.

And God bless them, they came. In No Particular Order, as they say on X Factor , Tommy and Breda, the Saints Murphy, who smelled of candles and left after Breda kissed my forehead and sneaked a set of opalescent rosary beads under my pillow, Finbar Griffin who I had never actually spoken to, who always wore the pained look of a man who had spent the day castrating bullocks, or was just the look of a man married to Mrs Griffin, Kathleen Quinn who had developed a gift for seeing personal insult everywhere and secretly thought she should have been offered the chair, Margaret Crowe who told Kathleen the weight suited her, big Jack Mannion who just came to the top of the stairs, gave me two thumbs-up, and went down again, because some things couldn’t be said in words, Seamus O’Shea who had been Customer Services in the bank before the economy took a haircut and who’d since opened a barber shop in his sitting room, Louis Marr who wore thin-legged bright-red trousers and Faha’s only flower-print shirt, was not gay, but just a bit fabulous, Charlotte, one of the Troy sisters, who brought impossibly beautiful flowers, Noeleen Fry, God Love Her, with the permanent scowl of a woman who couldn’t locate the bad smell in her kitchen, Eamon Dunne who had the original Bluetooth device, a Blue Tooth, which when he smiled communicated only one thing, awesome disregard for the opinion of others, the two thin Duffys who hadn’t a penny to their name now and survived mostly by watching afternoon cooking shows, the button-eyed Maurice Kerins who was innocent of everything except murder by accordion, Nora Cooney whose husband Jim, like Mr Skimpole in Bleak House , considered thoughts to be deeds, and that by thinking of paying a bill supposed it needed no further action, had in fact thought himself into enormous riches, pin-striped ownership of property in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, none of which made material impact on Nora’s plain green coat and worn-out muddy ankle boots.