Niall Williams - History of the Rain

He climbs up the side of the crater, into Round Two of Advance Retreat, and is shot clean through the centre of his forehead.

Next thing Grandfather knows he’s on a stretcher. He’s not in Paradise; there are no gold streets, no immortal wheat, not a single Cherub. Instead he’s in that bounce that I know too, when you’re tied into the stretcher and they carry you along and all you can see is the sky above moving backwards like you’re floating downriver and thinking how peculiar it is to be on your back moving through the world.

On good days it can be a bit Michelangelo, like you’ve drunk Heaven-Up I told Timmy and he liked that and said you’re a poet like your dad. On good days before a treatment when the sky is that blue and deep and you’re being borne along you feel you never saw it before, you feel it’s not a roof but a door and it’s actually quite open if you just take the time. That’s my revelation anyhow. No angels though. I’ve never gone the whole Sistine.

German-bandaged, Grandfather was carried back to British Lines. The red bloom soaked out from his chest like the Overdone Imagery Mrs Quinty says I use all the time.

I don’t give a Figroll, I should have said.

The thing is, it wasn’t what he was expecting. So the first phase is just this enormous surprise, this O that this is how the plot is twisting. Along he goes in the stretcher and he’s all the time expecting that he’s done, that if the pain would lessen he could just close his eyes and wake up in Thomas Traherneland. Because he does believe in a next life, his version is one of those blue-sky kinds with the light coming from behind huge white-puff clouds and saints kind of standing on them like very serene superheroes who’ve decided long wavy hair in the seventies was the look and a peach or apricot robe was quite comfortable in the weather up there. That kind of afterlife. Anyway, what with all the Latin and kneeling and candles Abraham’s pretty much got the passport. So there he is, blood crisping, eyelids kind of butterfly-fluttering, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison on his lips, and here are the hands of the angels coming to lift him up.

Only they’re a little rough.

That’s because they belong not to an angel but to a young medic called Oliver Cissley. Oliver’s so ardent it’s given him glossy eyes and fierce neck acne but he has come to war to save lives.

Grandfather is delivered to Cissley right there on a plate and so bingo! Young Oliver gets to work just as Grandfather is in that place between Living and Dying, between Fish and Fisherman, my father says, and Oliver thinks this is what he came for and starts whipping the bullets out — one, two, and actually yes, there, three — and hauling Abraham back from the Hereafter.

Grandfather is a Near Thing.

Which is no fun. Believe me.

Because for Grandfather then there was only Falling Back Down to Earth, which is not great and just plain awful for a pole-vaulting salmon.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

That’s pure MacCarroll. We have mixed metaphors and outlandish similes for breakfast.

When you transplant a little English language into a Clare Bog this is what happens, Miss Quinty.

Ruth Ruth Ruth.

It’s just so fecund.

Ruth Swain!

Grandfather survives. The War moves away and he stays behind. They give him a little time to recover and see if he can Take up Arms again but he can’t even Take up Hands. The holes in his chest and the soul-thick air of the battlefields of Boulogne join forces to give him pneumonia and next thing he’s on his way back to England without Messrs. Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul, all of whom are growing poppies in France, and he’s moved into a Home called Wheaton in Wolverhampton.

Years later my father tried to find him there, first by reading everything he could of World War One, then by leaving us one October and going by train, ferry and bus to Wolverhampton long after Abraham was dead and Wheaton Home had been turned into fifty-six apartments for people who didn’t see ghosts. I don’t think he found him, but when he came back Mam said he smelled of smoke.

Great-Grandmother Agnes is dead when Abraham returns. In those days you could die beautifully of Failure of the Heart, and that’s what she did, prayers said, palms together, close your eyes and bumps-a-daisy, another one for Greener Pastures, My Lord.

When the authorities ask Abraham of any living relatives he says he has none. A caustic shame is the natural by-product of the Impossible Standard.

So, at this stage in Our Narrative it doesn’t look great for my chances. (See Book 777, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , Laurence Sterne, Penguin Classics, London.)

(Has its advantages I suppose. For one thing, I won’t die at the end.)

Abraham has had his soul burned. That’s what I’ve decided. He’s had an Icarus moment, only English Protestant-style. Like all of England he has fallen the long distance from Rudyard Kipling to T. S. Eliot, which is a long way, and it left him with ashes on his soul. He was not worthy. He’s a Veteran at age twenty. So he sits in a fusty room with a narrow bed and a small window that gives a view of the fumy skies of Wolverhampton and starts smoking himself to death. He can’t believe he’s still alive. He’s God’s Oversight. He should have been the hasty three-and-a-half feet under the sunny sweet-scented fields of France where they put Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul together so they could get on with enjoying the hurdy-gurdy of the afterlife. Instead, Abraham Swain has been caught halfway, between worlds, and this is where he’s to stay the rest of his days.

He’s failed the Philosophy of Impossible Standard and so he lets his father believe he’s dead. He lives one of those quiet little lives no one notices, wearing brown trousers, walking to the shop, ‘Daily Mail today, sir? ’, chainsmoking through the horse-racing in the long dull afternoons.

And, Dear Reader, years pass.

But there’s always a Twist.

Remember Oliver? Well, here comes a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, who knocks with no nonsense on the door of Abraham Swain and sweeps into his room very much like Mrs Rouncewell in Bleak House (page 84, Book 179, Penguin Classics, London) from whom I have borrowed some of her character.

Mrs Rouncewell has had two sons, of whom the younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came back. Even to this hour, Mrs Rouncewell’s calm hands lose their composure when she speaks of him and, unfolding themselves from her stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner, as she says, ‘What a likely lad, What a fine lad, What a gay, good-humoured, clever lad he was!’

Only her name here is not Mrs Rouncewell, but Mrs Cissley. Her Oliver the very one that saved Abraham and who wrote letters to his mother from the Front — What a likely lad, What a fine lad — the poor woman’s hands fluttering about at the near mention of his name. And in these letters — ‘Look, I have them here’ — and indeed she does and dips in and takes from her large black bag a pale wing of pages smelling of peppermints.

‘This one,’ she says. ‘This one tells how he saved you. Abraham Swan.’

‘Swain.’

She lays the letter before him. Freed of it, her hands catch each other in mid-air and pull themselves down on to her lap into a moment’s peace. Then, while Grandfather reads of himself as the miracle Swan, head turned and squinting one-eyed to inhale, Mrs Cissley says: ‘His brother died young. Oliver was Our Hope.’

Slowly rises the Swain brow.

Mrs Cissley’s hands rise up off her stomach, catch each other, wring, twist, interlock, fly free and fall once more to her lap, leaving in the air an old-soap scent of despair that won’t wash away. Her face cannot accommodate the population of emotions. Some of them are pushed down on to her neck where they get together to set off a poppy bloom in the shape of France.