Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘So proud of you,’ she said. She knew my battles and knew too that she could not fight them. Her eyes were so green. ‘Holidays!’

‘I know. I don’t believe it.’

‘A whole summer.’

‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

‘Do you want to get changed or will you eat first?’

‘Changed. Definitely.’

Nan was sleeping in her chair. I went upstairs and took off my uniform. Then I pulled open the skylight and because Aeney and I had promised it was what we would do on our last day I fired jumper blouse and pinafore out the window. Just like that they were gone, and with sudden lightness I jumped on the bed, and bounced, rising with implausible impossible happiness and bringing my hands to my face to catch my giggles.

I put on grey jeans and a yellow T-shirt that said ‘Always’. There was so much summer ahead of me I didn’t know what to do first. All the things I had thought of through March April May and June now jostled at the starting gate. How could I begin? How could one minute be Hell and the next Holidays? I lay on the bed and opened a book. I had all the time in the world to read now. And because I knew I had I didn’t. I went downstairs.

‘Will you have something now or wait for dinner?’

‘I’ll wait for dinner.’

Peggy Mooney came in the back door. ‘Mary,’ she said. ‘Ruth. Holidays today.’ She was a nervous woman at the best of times and she held her arms across herself, as if she was afraid some part of her would fly away. ‘Only that tomorrow is Sheila’s,’ she said, ‘and I was wondering, Mary, if I could get a few flowers for the altar.’

‘The wedding,’ Mam said. ‘Of course you can, Peggy.’ She wiped her hands down her apron.

‘O thanks. Thanks very much now, Mary.’

‘Don’t be silly. You didn’t need to ask. Come on.’

The clock of one day is not the same as another. We invented time to make it seem so, but we know it’s not. Things speed up and slow down all the time. The kitchen window was open. There were three flies in the ceiling. The new Clare Champion was on the table, still fresh and folded beside a white plastic bag of sliced ham Dad had brought from the village. Aeney’s cup and empty Petit Filou and spoon were in the sink. The oven was doing that ticking it does when the power has been turned off and the hot metal is contracting. The five-day pendulum clock tocked. The cold tap dropped a drip. Drp! like that, and then another, drp! , the way it always did because Dad was always going to fix it so that generally we took no notice, but right then I did. I was standing by the window and I turned the tap extra hard and looked at it until I was sure it wouldn’t drip. Then drp! , it did. Mam went through the garden with Peggy Mooney, cutting more flowers than were needed, a generosity of flowers bundled into Peggy Mooney’s arms that would make such display that ever after people would come to Mam for flowers, but right then I thought why is she giving away all our flowers?

Standing at the window I ate a piece of brown bread. I heard a tractor coming from Ryan’s and heard it going past and heard it until it must have turned out by McInerney’s. Then Peggy Mooney’s old car drove away with a passenger seat full of flowers and Mam came in.

‘You don’t know what to do with yourself, do you?’ she said, smiling.

‘Why did you give away all our flowers?’

‘Poor Peggy,’ Mam said. ‘They have nothing, and we have flowers.’ She ran the tap over her hands. ‘Dad will be home soon. He had to get a nozzle for the sprayer,’ she said, and turned off the tap, tea-towelled her hands, and the tap started dripping again.

‘Go find your brother,’ Mam said.

‘All right.’

There were more birds. That’s what I thought when I came outside. There were definitely more birds or the ones there were sang more. I went out around the haybarn and the haggard and all of it was sort of busy with birds. I went up to the gate and the stonewall stile and I called ‘Aeney?’ and the birdsong stopped or went elsewhere, and I went into the field that smelled rich and sweet because of the sunshine. The light had that kind of white dazzle you’re not yet used to if you’ve spent all of June in a classroom. The dazzle gave me these stray things moving in my vision, these little fissures or threads that some people call floaters and some fishhooks. They’re sort of what invisible would look like if it was visible and they just move down your seeing and if you follow one down to the end you think that’s the end of it but then there’s another one starting. Light causes it, or tiredness, or just contrariness of blood brain and sunshine. They start when they start and they stop the same.

I went down the field to the river. I knew where Aeney would be. I knew he would be running the beaten track with Huck, throwing sticks, or sitting down on the far side of Fisher’s Step with the fishing rod, believing that once they passed our bank the fish were catchable there. To prove in myself that these were the holidays I took my time. I told myself You have all the time in the world . I plucked random grasses and let them go. Ryan’s was in meadowing. If you stepped off the track the hay was high to your waist and in that sunlight even I thought it was beautiful. There were bees and flies and midges sort of flecking or flawing the air and that hum which was overtaken by the song of the river as you came to it.

I could see fifty yards along the bank now, to the point where McInerney’s bushes came down and blocked the view. The other way I could see to Fisher’s Step, and in neither way could I see Aeney.

It was just like him, to have gone somewhere new.

That’s how he was. He’d have tired of here and gone elsewhere.

Go and find your brother.

Why should I? He’d come home when he was hungry, and Aeney was always always hungry.

I stopped looking for him.

I walked along the bank and looked across at Kerry. ‘I have all the time in the world now,’ I said across the river, and then I watched the floaters and fishhooks descend.

In the distance there was the noise of a tractor, and that was lost inside the noise of another, and you knew there was coming and going happening somewhere and that everything ordinary and everyday was continuing the way the world continues around you and for just these moments you’re the still point at the centre.

Then I saw Huck.

He was a white gleam, sitting on the very edge of the bank up at the far end of Fisher’s Step.

‘Huck! Here boy! Huck!’

He didn’t move. It wasn’t surprising. He was Aeney’s dog. He just stayed there, sitting erect and facing the river, but something in his sitting passed into me. For whole seconds I didn’t move. I didn’t run. I just stood there and felt this departure , this separation. The air was buckled. The moment wouldn’t turn right. My heart was in my throat. Something had reached in and seized it and was now taking it out of my mouth. I think I cried out. But the sound was swallowed by the river. Then I was running and time was moving, lurching, too fast, so that soon it would be wrecked and pieces would break up and never come right so that here I am squatting down beside Huck and saying Where is he? Where’s Aeney? Find Aeney, good boy and Huck barks at the river and the suck hole and the water in it is twisting clockwise faster than clocks, and here I am running back through the meadow for no reason not taking the track except the reason that nothing makes sense and I am running in risen clouds of hay dust gold and choking and shouting help help though I know there is no help and here I am breathless in the kitchen where Dad is just home and the tap is dripping drp! and I’m saying He went in the river I know he went in the river and here is Dad diving in the river, and here the whole parish coming, and the Guards and the ambulance and Father Tipp and the summer evening hopelessly horribly beautiful and a hundred men carrying sticks to poke into the rushes and walking out along the length of the bank in the coming dark and being back there the next day at sunrise where Dad years ago had first stood and felt the sign and where now he had spent the night calling Aeney? Aeney? with hoarse terrible wretchedness and praying to God Please please O please and divers coming and the sun going away and Huck immovable from the spot as now hard and wild and with no mercy the rain came.