Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“Shaggit!”

He waited a moment. In his mind he saw the cancer moving like a shadow into a new, still healthy corner of his organs. The room darkened. The sky outside fell like the sea in thickened grey waves, as if the world was spinning upside down and the air was flooded and the light was lost. It was like night in daytime.

I don’t know if you are there, Philip Griffin said in a silent voice. I don’t know if you can hear me. But please let me live for another while. For my son.

He paused and hugged himself against the pain. Then added: If you let me live, I will try and do …

He couldn’t find the word.

I will try and do some … some act of goodness each day.

Philip Griffin waited, but nothing happened. The pain continued like a fierce storm that November afternoon, pain like rain, falling like a cold monsoon on the head of Dr. Hadja Bannerje in the car park of St. Vincent’s, where he missed his mother and promised himself to return to his father in Bombay at the end of his final residency, pain falling out of the grey heavens in a deluge of despondency and loss, until at last Nurse Grainne Mangan came into the ward and turned on all the lights, and Philip Griffin did not tell her to turn them off.

The icy grip of the Atlantic cracked Stephen like thin glass, and his cries flew as shards into the air. He was breathless as the dead and saw the night sky disappear into the foam of a wave passing over him. Underwater he was borne towards the shore, and at last stood up in the rolling tumble of the tide and screamed. He screamed as evidence of his own durability, trying to outcry the noise of the waves and to free his jaw from the frozen fingers of death. His hands shook wildly, and then, as the wind caught him, his knees did the same, convulsing him in tremors until he was a blurry out-of-focus figure on the sand and had to kneel down and put his hands out like a man trying to hold on to the spinning of the world.

It was an hour before he had dressed himself, drawing the clothes over his wet and sand-stuck body, and walking gingerly up from the sea onto the roadside like a new arrival on the planet. When he reached home he sat and played the Vivaldi disc, this time not resisting the image of the woman playing the violin, and wondering only how he was going to see her again.

The following morning Stephen went to school and made an appointment with Carol Blake, the secretary, to see the principal at the end of the day. At once Carol noticed a difference in him, and from the magazines in which she read widely was able to interpret all aspects of men’s motives and behaviour.

“Something up with him all right,” she told Eileen Waters later during their tea break.

“Really?”

“Oh yes,” said Carol, dunking her biscuit. “I’d say he’s in love.”

“Mr. Griffin? I hardly think so. With whom, for goodness’ sake?” asked Mrs. Waters, relishing the unexpected foray into the wildly improbable.

“Some man, I’d say.”

This news hit Mrs. Waters like two fists in the generosity of her stomach.

“A man?” she said.

“You can tell,” said Carol Blake. “I can tell, anyway.”

“Oh God.”

Eileen Waters leaned against her desk. News reports of sexual scandal and abuse in schools mottled in her mind, and she was suddenly stricken with visions of infamy. She took to her office. She could not sit down, she paced about, she plucked up her ruler like rectitude, and was still in a state hours later, when Carol Blake knocked on the door and introduced the figure of Mr. Griffin. The principal turned on him like a gunship and saw at once the confirming evidence of her own fantasy.

“Thank you, Carol,” she said. “Close the door.”

From the delicate manner of Stephen’s sitting it was apparent to Eileen Waters that Carol Blake was correct, and how she had not seen it before she did not know. In the moments before she spoke she chastened her own judgement severely and made a minute shaking of her head at how devious the world had become. Then she pursed her lips at the teacher and narrowed her green eyes to say:

“You have a problem, Mr. Griffin?”

“I want to take some personal time,” he said. His fingers were touching the desk, and his eyes were moving to the window.

Mrs. Waters moved her ruler forward an inch with both hands, tapping the two ends of it with her forefingers for the small comfort of something solid in the world. She felt her anger reddening beneath her makeup.

“I realize it’s inconvenient.”

“Yes, it is,” she spat out.

“I’m sorry.”

Righteousness lodged like a boiled sweet in her throat, and she coughed it forward, letting go of the ruler on the desk and seeing her right hand fly up before her.

“We are teachers. We are moral leaders in the community, Mr. Griffin. We have to think of the consequences of our actions. We can’t simply behave the way everyone else does. I hope that’s not what you think, because that’s not what I want, that’s not what I expect.” She paused and reloaded, drawing air through her nostrils, and was delivering what she hoped was the full broadside of her gaze when Stephen said:

“It’s because of my father. He’s dying.”

There was a stunned moment, a flattened instant of time during which the mind of Eileen Waters faltered and fell through the gape of her mouth onto the desk in front of her. There was a soft plop just barely audible to Carol Blake listening at the door outside, and then nothing. The principal could not speak, the top button of her blouse was too tight. She was looking down at her desk, which was swimming like wreckage on the watery uncertainty of the moment. She opened her small lips and tried to smile.

“I’m very sorry,” she whispered, and held on to the desk with her right hand. She was still grasping it a moment later when Stephen stood and left, walking out of the office and down the cool emptiness of the school’s corridors, an inch taller than he was before, the line of his trousers falling perfectly, not rumpled, and the slap of his shoes crisp with resolve.

An hour after school, in the falling darkness, Stephen called at the front door of Moira Fitzgibbon’s house. A small girl of about eight opened the door five inches and looked at him. When he asked for her mother, the girl stood motionless, as if she was looking at some strange colour radiating about the visitor. Then Moira Fitzgibbon was standing behind her, opening the door.

How one person’s life touches upon the edge of another’s and moves it like a wheel was a small mystery Moira had learned to accept since first hearing the story of Moses Mooney and his dream of a concert hall. So when Stephen Griffin appeared at her doorstep she sensed the role she was to play before she knew it and was not surprised when he asked her, please, to help him. Her husband was in the sitting room watching television. Cait, her daughter, was still standing in the hallway, gazing past her at the stranger, and Ciara was in the kitchen sprawled over the careful homework of six-year-olds. Like a set bomb, there would be ten seconds before one of them would call her, and so Moira did not invite Stephen in. She stepped forward and drew the door nearly closed behind her.

“I want to know where I can find her,” Stephen said. “The woman who played the violin. Gabriella Castoldi, her name is.”

“Who’s there, Cait? Who’s at the door?” Tom Fitzgibbon was calling from the sitting room. Cait’s face was pressed like a mask against the opaque glass of the door. “A man, Daddy,” she shouted.