Niall Williams - History of the Rain

I’ve a pain in my face telling you where it hurts, Mrs Merriman said.

My body which my dungeon is, RLS said.

The curtains are blue plastic and they come around in a single soft swish and when they do you know it’s Business.

Mr Mackey comes with Dr Naradjan to look at my results. Mr Mackey is The Top Man; he has the world’s most perfect suit and was either born in a new white shirt or can put one on without adding any human creasing. His only flaw is those ties with little symbols on them somebody pretended for a laugh would catch on. Today they are silver fishes.

‘I am quite concerned about these, Ruth,’ he says.

When it comes to that multitude covered by what Mina Prendergast with nineteenth-century-drawing-room manners calls Matters of the Heart , some women are practical. Some women see the hurt, consider the damage, and embark on a remedy right away. Some women have no hopelessness in them. They will surrender their beauty, sacrifice music dancing laughter, suffer heartache so profound there’s a clean hole right through the centre of them, but still they will not be defeated. My mother is one of these.

Mam knew that Virgil had stopped writing. She knew whatever had been turned on was now turned off, and after a time it was her natural reaction to go looking for the pliers and spanners and whatever to get it going again.

Washers maybe. Aren’t they a thing? I’m running a little short of time to fix my metaphors. Anyway Borges said writing is better when you leave your mistakes in. If Shakespeare had an editor we wouldn’t have Shakespeare.

The remedy, she decided, was in poetry. Mam had read pieces of some of my father’s poems, but they were always works-in-progress. It was always over his shoulder, bringing him a cup of tea, or telling him she was going to sleep, always just a glance and allowed always with the understanding that he was going to make them better. These were just drafts of the thing he was trying to get at. That was the thing about the poetry of Virgil Swain. You’ll already know that from his Swain-ness. You’ll already know a poem is the most impossible thing. It’s cruel and capricious and contains within it its own guarantee of failure. What you think you’ve caught in the poem today is not there when you go to look at it tomorrow. Under the spell of Mrs Quinty’s poetry anthologies I can admit I wrote some poems myself, and they were all brilliant until they were rubbish.

Mam had read bits, that’s all, and though she’s the first to say she knows one hundred per cent of precisely nothing about poetry, and considers just the fact of it, the construction, the craft, the art that has to go into it, a kind of astonishment in itself, she thought Virgil’s poems marvellous.

They were not love poems in any normal sense. They were not addressed to her, but in a more profound way they were for her . They were for her because they had sprung out of the life she had let Virgil into. There were Aisling copies full of them. Sometimes a whole copy would be filled with different versions of the same poem. The first pages would be maybe a single phrase, a line going across the page in mouse-grey pencil. Then the same line would be written again underneath, but this time altered slightly, maybe an added comma, or a word changed or the tense of the verb or there’d be the half of a second line added and overhanging. As if he’d pulled a little too urgently at the first line and it had come bringing with it the next, but the line had snapped and he’d lost it. He’d started on a new page, written the first phrase again. There’d be nothing else on that page. You’d know he’d spent the whole night just looking at it. There’d be pages with images that came to him, ones that he’d try variants of and reject, the grey mouse scratching a line through them. Other copies might have ten, twelve poems in them, whole and clean and perfect. He liked to write a poem out neatly when it was done, a single mistake, a spelling, a smudge of the pencil, an interruption from me maybe and he turned the page and wrote it out again. It was a way of testing it, I think, and in all tests the poems failed. They were not ready.

But then Virgil had stopped trying.

A poet who can’t write is a sad thing. You can see he’s fallen in the pit and the sand and the grime stick to his singlet and shorts. Because it’s his nature he still looks up, still sees the bar up there against the blue, but he has no way to ascend.

Mam decided the remedy was that my father needed the world to respond. He needed the living worldly equivalent of Abraham or the Reverend to read the poems and say Not bad, not bad at all , which would be the Swainish translation of some London editor’s Bloody marvellous . She had heard me tell of Mrs Quinty and the gift of the poetry anthologies, and so supposed Mrs Quinty was the only one in the parish to be trusted to open my father’s copies.

On Wednesday afternoons then, when my father was sent to Kilrush to get messages and the Tech took halfday to let the teachers, like warriors in the Iliad , bandage their wounds before the next day’s assault, Mrs Quinty came to our house. She brought her typewriter with her. Typewriters were already antiques by then. (In the Tech we did have six computers in the computer room; but holes being irresistible to boys, all had pencil-tops, paperclips, chewing-gum, balls of snot and other unmentionables stuck in their drives, blinked spastically, spent a whole class saying rebooting and were ageing virgins who had never Gone on the Internet, so Mrs Quinty decided computers were marvels for The Next Generation.)

She came in the back door carrying her typewriter in its own case.

‘Virgil is not to know,’ Mam said.

Mrs Quinty had already Had Her Disappointment as far as her husband Tommy staying in Swansea was concerned and was no stranger to keeping secrets.

‘Nobody can know, but us,’ Mam said, when she came back down from showing Mrs Quinty where to start and the tap tap tap ding was already going gangbusters if gangbusters is what poems go when at last in the ecstasy of release.

I wouldn’t tell. I knew this was love. I knew it was love with hurt in it and already knew that was the real kind. I knew this was Mam attempting to save Dad, and knew that in the clicking of the keys, crisp and cold and even (thank you, Wenceslas), Virgil Swain, poet, was becoming actual. In time he would come downriver into an anthology.

Except for its complications, as Barry Lillis says, the plan was simple. Mrs Quinty was to come on Wednesdays. Virgil would be sent on Messages to Brews in Kilrush, an emporium of everything, and after he could go to the library. Mrs Quinty was to work her way through the years of Aisling copies and type up only those poems that seemed to her complete. She was to put them back exactly as she found them. Before leaving she was to give Mam each Wednesday’s poems. She was to make no copies. She was to be paid each week an hourly rate from the money Mam kept inside Lester the China Dog who was discovered hollow when he lost his tail in a fall.

Mrs Quinty said she would take no payment. ‘It’s poetry,’ she said, eyes gone big behind the dust on her glasses and mouth tight and tiny.

‘If you won’t take payment you can’t type the poems.’

She took payment. (She kept every penny of it in a brown envelope in the top drawer of her mahogany bureau. That money was never spent, and later she gave it to me and I gave it to Father Tipp in Irish Christian-Pagan fashion, partly for prayers and partly for superstition.)

Mam took each Wednesday’s poems and put them inside the second copy of the phonebook Pat the Post had stuck in our hedge the time the phone company were trying to prove the expansion of their customer base. She did not read the poems and she didn’t let me read them. I think it was in case she had a change of heart, or in case the same thing happened to her that happened to Dad and she read them and found that after all they were not dreadful, but worse, average. She took the poems and fed them flat and singly into the phonebook. She laid them between Breens and Downes and Hehirs and O’Sheas and put the phonebook under her clothes in the bottom drawer. Each week more poems met the general alphabetised population of the County Clare, the whole enterprise taking on the timeless implausibility of fable.