Niall Williams - History of the Rain

But you don’t die. You learn to sleep rocking yourself just a little, and making a little low hum no one hears but you, so that the night is never empty and like Peter Pan, un-ageing and evanescent, Aeney can come in through the skylight and you can tell him stories from the books you’ve read.

Your hand hurts from handshakes. Your eyes and your lips are dried out because the water has been wrung out of you and instead you’ve got this sour yellow anger swilling because why are all these people coming now, and why are they who never said his name before saying it now. None of them know him. None of them know his crooked smile from the inside the way you do, his yell jumping off the swing at the highest point, his crash and tumble and getting-up grin. None of them know it should have been you that drowned.

Somehow, you have no idea how, you survive.

Because you are not to die yet, because somebody needs to tell the story, somehow you survive.

We survive.

Maybe just so that we can hurt more. Maybe the finest sufferer is the winner. Maybe that was the plan for us. Maybe if we’d marched down to the river and thrown ourselves in that would have made a mess of our chapter in the Book of Swain. In my father’s black rain-mottled copy of the Bible the spine is broken on the Book of Job. Has thou not poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese is right there.

It became a long wet summer. I stayed indoors and saw no one but Mam and Dad and Nan. To get me out of the house Dad took me with him to town and we went to the bookshops. He did not say, ‘Read this, it will help you forget your sorrow over your brother,’ but he gave me books, and to avoid the eyes of others I kept mine in them.

The selfishness of children is absolute and perfect and for the progress of the world perhaps essential. I didn’t really wonder how my parents carried on, didn’t consider the quality of their quietness. If my mother watched over me with extra vigilance, fearful I might slip through some flaw between this world and the next, I felt it only as love.

That summer my father stopped writing. He still went to the table in the lamplight. He still sat leaned forward with his hand forking up the right side of his silver hair. But he did not pick up the pencil. From his room there came not a sound. Whether the inspiration couldn’t come, whether there ever was anything that could rightly be called inspiration and sometimes descended like a tongue of fire, whether it came and out of spite or hurt or anger he denied it access or outlet, whether he had any intention of ever writing anything again and went to the table at night the same way my mother went to Lough Derg to walk barefoot over the stones and let the hurt bleed out of her, I cannot say. He stopped, that’s all.

Mam was still just Mam. Yes, she’d cried, and yes she’d been wretched when the callers came and again at the time we had the Mass that Dad said he wouldn’t go to and she’d shouted at him, the only time I ever heard her, and in compromise Father Tipp said he’d say the Mass here in the kitchen and Dad said all right to that, and yes, she let her hair go tangled more often, but once the worst was over she had sort of recovered, if recovered is something people ever do. What I mean I suppose is that she carried on. Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out. The only changes in Mam were that now whenever she was in the village she went into the church to light a candle, and that since Peggy Mooney’s she was continually asked for flowers for the altar, and she obliged, and in the way customs form in small parishes soon it was clear that Mam would be cutting our flowers and bringing them into Faha church until the end of time.

I had a season to grieve, and then had to go to the Tech on my own. But the fact is grief doesn’t know we invented time. Grief has its own tide and comes and goes in waves. So when I went I was no more over it or out of it or any of the other absurd things whispered in my wake going down the corridors. For the first weeks I had a status above Julie Burns who had to have all her teeth removed, or Ambrose Trainer who had come from Dublin and had an infected nose piercing. My status was Half. I was The Other One. I was the one who had Half of Her Gone. In the toilets that mascara’d ghoul and Trainee Vampire Siobhan Crowley asked me, ‘Can you feel him? Over there, on the other side? Can you?’

Teachers too treated me with circumspection. My story had preceded me into the staffroom, and created that space around you that stories do. I moved from The Girl Who Wears Glasses to The Girl Who Had the Brother to The Girl Who Walked On Her Own to The Girl Who Read, parts I stepped into with alacrity and relief, relishing the solitude and soon somehow proving both adages, that our natures are incontrovertible, and we become what others expect.

Stories though wear thin after a time. In this world compassion is a limited commodity, and what is first considered appropriate so soon becomes annoyance. Why is she still like that?

She does it for effect.

She likes the attention.

She’s just so, odd.

As if wilfully, and to further confirm the indelible quirk of my own character, I loved poetry. Mrs Quinty, who was unlike Miss Jean Brodie In Her Prime in all things except seeing in some girls a flicker of intelligence, became aware of it when we read Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mid-Term Break’, the one where his brother dies, where in the second-last line we learn the bumper knocked him clear , and I said I liked that clear because it went with the classes to a close in the second line and though sad somehow clear had hope in it. Mrs Quinty did not know then that my father had prepared the ground, that I was already hum-familiar, or that I was drawn to poetry for reasons of mystery. She gave me the anthologies the sale reps brought her and which she had told them she would consider using. Small and taut and resolute she came down the classroom, placed one on my desk and said, ‘You might like to take a look in this.’ Just that. She did not edit, guide or censor. She didn’t go Teacher Mode, didn’t ask me to tell her what I thought or to write up a report or turn the gift into an exercise. She did the most generous and implausible thing, she gave me poetry.

Note to future Swains: reading a poetry anthology in the school yard, while it now has precedent and may appear natural and unremarkable to Swain-minds, is not best equipment for the vicious nightmare that is teenagehood. Reading poetry sealed my fate. In the Tech it classified as off-the-scale weird and left me in the same company as Kiera Murphy the Crayola-eater and Canice Clohessy, The Constipated, in whose unique case shit didn’t happen.

I lost the skill of dialogue. I was invited to no birthday party, except the time Mr Mulvihill, who had married an easterly wind called Irene, and to spite her, phoned to say he was inviting the whole year to his Sinead’s fourteenth.

I didn’t go, and I didn’t care. When I lost my brother I lost more than half the world. I was left in somewhere narrow as the margin, and in there, parallel to the main text, I would write my marginalia.

There are four of us in purgatory, a concept I didn’t believe in until I was in it. I am the youngest. Eleanor Clancy is the oldest. Like Miss Toppit in Martin Chuzzlewit she wears a brown wig of uncommon size. She says Ah pet to me and to the nurses and when they lift her out of bed her shins are sharp and look like they’ll snap so I look away. Mrs Merriman doesn’t speak at all now. She did when she came in, but now she’s too upset. She’s too upset to be here. She wants to remain in the actual world, where her Philip needs her and will not manage without her. She doesn’t want to be in this in-between place, which is neither here nor there. Mrs Merriman has the side with the wall and to it does her wailing, these high waily moans she tries to strangle coming out and that we pretend not to hear. Jackie Fennell is our cheerleader. She looks like one of those actresses they get for TV hospital dramas. There can’t be anything wrong with you when you’re that gorgeous. Jackie’s Lucozade is white wine smuggled in by Benny, so she can’t share it. But she could get me Green & Black’s chocolate or Glamour or magenta nail varnish if I wanted. We’re all here for something different. There are more things that can go wrong with you than you can shake a stick at, Timmy said.