This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  Either way I didn’t know what you reply to that. I didn’t understand yet my part as audience and hadn’t the skill of returns by which a story is moved. He glanced at me, but in the half-dark I concentrated on the potholes. We cycled on.

  ‘That was in Bogotá,’ he said.

  He was behind me, trying vainly to catch up. I said nothing. It was too fantastical for commentary. After a time, heard: ‘Colombia.’

  On the winding fall of the road by Furey’s we freewheeled, I nursed the brakes a bit and he came near enough alongside. ‘A bicycle is not faster than a bullet,’ he said, a little breathlessly. Again, I was found wanting.

  We left the bikes above by the forge and considered the village ahead of us. He seemed nervous of it. I think I noticed that. He peered down the crooked street but was not inclined to go further.

  Pubs in Faha were almost never lively, most were deathly, at their natural best after a funeral. Craven’s was nearest to the forge. It was not in the village proper, but on the fringe, as though to accommodate those coming from the west whose thirst could not endure another thirty yards. Its origins in desperation, its fixtures and furnishings were according.

  Christy was in the door before me.

  Dimness, dampness, an odour acrid and brown, through which was tangled the purple tongue of paraffin and a pall of smoke. The proprietor, a triple widow, was a woman whose name had evolved by general and her consent to Bubs, perhaps because of what Mick Roughan called her boozums, which were enormous, and had grown a counter to support them.

  From Bubs’s three marriages nothing had sprung but for Roo, a fawn three-legged dog that hopped, lived off scraps and spillage, and in whose hectic eyes, Bubs thought, the ghosts of the three husbands seemed to wrangle.

  The Parochial House had a housekeeper, Mrs Divine, and as was universal then, this was a risen station. Mrs Divine revealed nothing of the inside workings of the domain of her employers but by the clockwork of her nature it was known that once she left the Parochial House in the evening, the priests were abed, the strictures of Holy Week were relaxed and the pubs could reopen. Like shades then, hollow-eyed customers, who by day had adhered to the laws of fasting and abstinence, and had nominally given up the drink for Lent, now appeared and, with the constituent shyness of men exposing vulnerability, came sheepish to the counter and ordered with their eyes.

  When Christy and I came in, from helpless curiosity, customers drew minutely forward an instant, saw us, then drew further back than originally, interest in others perhaps the first of the many things extinguished by alcohol. Craven’s had glasses, they filled a shelf behind the bar and may have been washed once, but customers preferred bottles, and sat along the wall silently sucking, at bladder-intervals staggering out the back door where, licensed by nature, they urinated loose loops in the general direction of the river. As the evening drew on, some only got as far as the door, came back with trouser legs painted.

  ‘Missus,’ Christy greeted Bubs brightly.

  Bubs’s eyelashes lowered to half and came up again.

  ‘Two bottles of stout.’

  Bubs didn’t move. ‘You’re the electrics,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  She had the smallest eyes. They were bedded into a lumpen head, and not it nor any other part of her had moved an inch as she considered him. ‘I’m not wanting it,’ she said. Then she smiled. There are better smiles on deflated footballs. ‘I signed but I’m not wanting it now.’

  Christy nodded.

  ‘Why would I want it?’ she asked Salty Pepper, who had the gift of counter-apparition. Salty was an intelligent customer; by Aristotelian and Jesuitical reasoning he had ascertained that though Lent was prescribed as forty days and nights, the true measure between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday was forty-six, which showed Our Lord wanted human beings to have wriggle room.

  ‘Do I look like I could afford it?’ Bubs asked. ‘I’m a single lady, do you see?’ She rolled her head to one side, and, employing the antic that had ensnared the three husbands, raised the eyelashes to full and fluttered them.

  Christy escaped to a bench with two bottles of stout.

  After which, a blur.

  I know I did not drink the first bottle. His was gone in instants and, leaving me looking at mine, he went to the counter and came back with two more. There were certainly two more after that. I now had three waiting, and before the two after that I probably started not sucking, mind, just barely kissing my lips to the mouth of the bottle and sipping what seemed spewage, but by the tricks of acids and enzymes my stomach accommodated, and the two bottles after that were not so terrible.

  With the two after that, Christy started singing.

  Now, Craven’s was not that class of venue and the moment he stood and raised his voice the singing was already going past telling, past gossip, beyond that evening and right through the doors into Faha lore, not just because it generally went against Church teachings and practice during Holy Week, not just because it broke what passed for decorum (all places had their own propriety, and Craven’s was that it was a place of despair, it was where there was no further to fall, where you could hunker down and linger in the dark and because your company was like-minded and likewise afflicted you would not have to face the fact of how far you had descended); no, not just because it broke with a long-standing unwritten rule, you don’t sing in here, but because of the manner of the singing. Not only was Christy singing, he was singing with screwed-up eyes and fists by his side a ballad about love. He was singing it full-throated and full-hearted and before he had reached the second verse it was clear even to Roo the dog that a passionate truth was present in that place. It wasn’t only that this didn’t happen in Craven’s, it was that there was something raw in it, something deeply felt, that was, even to those who had descended blinking into the umbrae and penumbrae of numberless bottles of stout, immediately apparent and made those who first looked now look away.

  Christy sang. I cannot tell you how startling it was. If you believe in a soul, as I do, then my soul stirred. The song was not composed by Christy, but by the alchemy of performance, you felt it was.

  It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.

  So here it was, that quality, that life, in a man singing.

  Now, I’m not saying Christy was a great singer, or even a good singer. The world has enough critics, and technique, tone, pitch, and the rest were all rendered irrelevant by the fact that the singing stopped your heart. It reached in and seized it and didn’t let go. It said Listen, here’s a human being who has suffered for love. It said Here’s a heart aching, and that ache was large enough, urgent and familiar enough, for you all to feel it and by feeling participate in something you yourself were either too timid, closed or unlucky to have known personally, or had known in the long ago of your own innocence over which you had since grown the skin necessary to tolerate the loss and stay living.

  He sang. After the first few lines I couldn’t look at him. Nobody could look at him. It felt like an intimacy you weren’t entitled to, but knew it privileged you and you didn’t dare move in case you broke whatever had made it happen. He sang the love-song in a way that made you realise a reality that existed not outside but alongside and even inside the one you were accustomed to. It woke you up. And you thought that, by whatever contingency or circumstance, here was a man who had managed to escape the easy contempt for songs and stories of courtship and love that others used as a measure of maturity, as though thes
e were toys of youth. In that place that was doggedly, darkly masculine he made the air tender. I can’t say it any clearer.

  When the song ended, Christy sat down. There was no applause, not a sound from the dozen or so souls along the wall in the dark. He sat across from me. Like a man in the throes, his forehead was beaded with sweat. He pulled the back of his hand in a wipe across his lips. I didn’t say anything. I had no idea what to do. It was as if he was naked beside me. In the aftermath of the intimacy words seemed unwieldy, and so to close over the moment I did the only thing I could do. I went to the counter and got two bottles of stout.

  The two after that were probably the culprits.

  The two beyond them certainly, no question, no question at all now, because at that stage some of the shades started shuffling past, feet leaden and crêpe-like by turns, hands feeling for invisible handrails as they progressed from dark to dark out the door and intrepidly homeward. The last was Greavy the guard, who turned out to have been there since Mrs Divine left the Parochial House across from the barracks. In refutation of clocks, calendars, and what laws were passed in the distant capital, Guard Greavy preserved inside his person the authority of Closing Time, and when he arrived ponderously at the door and cast a sergeant look back at us Christy and I knew we had to get up and leave.

  Then we knew we couldn’t.

  Getting up proved aspirational. There was the idea of it, quite clear. Unmistakably clear now. There were hands placed on knees for push-off. There was a Right now. There was another when that failed to produce action. A Right so following. And still nothing. Between thought and verb a vacancy, not intended, but not grievous, just gently perplexed, and in that perplex the realisation that Craven’s was not in fact such a bad place at all, was downright comfortable in fact, in fact there were few places on this earth as agreeable. True? Too true. A person could stay here, could stay right here and be quite happy now, quite, for a very long time. What’s your rush? There’s no rush. All the problems of the world could be settled right here.

  Right.

  Will we go so?

  We would.

  At last, a gentle little rock back to assist propulsion upward, and then a crash as I came up and found the dimensions of the world awry and a table full of bottles in my way. The shatter opened Bubs’s bead eyes momentarily. Propped on the counter she was in the dream of the three husbands, found it the more compelling and closed her eyes again. Christy steadied me. Which is like saying I leaned on a wave.

  I believe I considered picking up the bottles and the glass. I certainly looked down at them, but the distance was enormous, and Christy had his arm hooked in mine and now sailed we gallants out the door.

  The night air was syrup. I gulped, gagged. As though air was a new element, or I was not in mine. My head was a cannonball, and now a balloon.

  The stars slid down the velvet sky. You could put them back in place by locking them in your gaze and lifting your head slowly, slowly up. Stay, stars. But look, between the buildings the river is rolling. It rides up the banks. Turn your head sideways to see and now the stars are sliding down again. Stars, get back up.

  Faha fast and not so fast asleep was a thing tender and serene, the twist of the village street like a child’s drawing, innocent of history and stain, every shop suspended, every house shut-eyed and blind and huddled to its near neighbour, the church august and grey and grave like a watchman.

  If only it would stay upright.

  The only moving things in the stilled scene, Christy and I sailed along. In the unstable of blood and brain, a galleon the image that came to me. The short and tall masts of us, the old man and the young, swaying. For reasons too profound or obvious, liquid flowing to loquacious, say, lines, that in school had been learned by heart and by rhythm fastened on to it, now flowed out of me: ‘“O up and spak an eldern knight, sat at the king’s right knee: ‘Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor, that ever sail’d the sea.’”’

  And like a chorus, Christy: ‘“That ever sail’d the sea.”’

  Felix Pilkington was Faha’s Shakespeare. He looked like Shakespeare and spoke like Shakespeare, as Faha imagined him. You could find these people then, remarkable originals, men and women who thrived on remoteness and kept alive the individuality of human genius. I can’t speak of now. A phenomenon, Felix was uncorrupted by success, or fame outside the parish, but could compose on the spot, in rhyme or iambic pentameter what’s your fancy, improvise poems for all occasions, do tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical. O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure, but even Felix Pilkington would have been challenged by the fluency of what flowed out of me, avid and a-sway then in Church Street, Faha.

  ‘“O my dark Rosaleen donotsigh donotweep thepriestsareontheoceangreen theymarchalongthedeep.”’

  ‘“Along the deep.”’

  What else I declaimed I am not sure. The poetry anthologies of two State examinations had been nicely grilled on to my brain. Most, happily, are there still. I am sure only that we were in the small hours of tomorrow, that Christy had my arm and by the north-less compass of the blind-drunk led us circuitously at last back to the bicycles.

  Coming from who knows what house dance, there ghosted past us two of the Donnellan sisters. A giggle bubbled out of one of them and the other hooked her arm and hurried them past.

  Christy shook his large head slowly and then said the thing that had not dawned on any Faha native: ‘This is a parish of magnificent women.’

  We stood, momentarily immobilised by this declaration. Then Christy put his arm on my shoulder and steered us onward.

  That we set off, that after attempts doughty and determined to mount the abstruse contraptions that were bicycles we finally rode off into the deep dark, was testament to the valour of the euphoric and the reasoning of brains banjaxed. But we went beautifully, mind. O beautifully. Smooth sailing. Christy and I, small and tall, old and young knights riding out the gentle fall the road takes out of Faha, so it seems the road itself encourages you to leave, and with no effort at all you’re moving away. The river on one side, rumpled fields the other. In them, statues of horses with starlit eyes, cattle still as cattle in toy farms. The immemorial scent of grass growing, the coconut of gorse, and the profound, moving, if momentary sense of absolute well-being.

  It is a freeing thing to flow into the dark. Now that I am entering my Fourth Age, the Age of Completion they call it, I think of that cycle ride and take courage from it. We could barely see the road we raced down. We came round the bend at Furey’s and past Considine’s discovering that blind cycling is its own art and into each instant compresses the knowledge of how to master it.

  ‘O ho now!’ Christy shouted.

  ‘O ho now!’ I shouted, both of us happy as heathens beneath the warm breath of the night sky and pedalling now in the boy hectic of blind momentum and nocturnal velocity so we missed the turn at Crossan’s went straight and straight on and straight in through Crossan’s open gate and across the wild bump-bump-bump and sudden su-su-su suck of their bog meadow where my front wheel sank in a rushy rut and I and a cry and a jet of brown vomit were projected out over the handlebars and flew glorious for one long and sublime instant before landing face-first in the cold puddle and muck of reality.

  11

  By the grace of new chapters, it was morning.

  God loves donkeys, and reserves for them a special clemency, so we awoke in the garret bedroom, face down and fully dressed on our beds, but without the memory of how we got there. I lay blinking in the chastened light as the world condensed to two certainties, one, the jelly of my brain had swollen too large for my skull, the other, I would never again drink alcohol.

  There is a universal recipe to the reaction on waking after such a night. It is one-part shame, two-parts rebuke, three-parts disbelief, and the rest is just pure astonishment. The inside of my mouth was sandpaper, my eyes on stalks. I felt as far fr
om myself as I ever had, but not without an element of thrill.

  Sometime maybe you’ve had the sense that something has arrived in your life, and what it is you can’t tell, but it’s as though a gate you haven’t checked in a while must have blown open, and without even going to look you know it has. You’ve no proof, nothing you can point to, but you know: something has blown open.

  Thatch has the density of a fairytale forest. Through its dark weave and wove there’s not a glimmer of light, but still you can tell when the sun is overhead. The roof is minutely alive and feels forgiving, as though it has lifted like an eyebrow towards the sky with surprise and welcomes back the all-but-forgotten. As I lay on the bed trying to improvise stratagems for raising my head without hurting my brain, I knew I had woken to a day of sunshine.

  I know now that, when you get to a grandfather’s age, life takes on the qualities of comedy, with aches. That morning Christy must have been feeling them, but he was up before me. He went to fully awake in an instant and showed no wear, nor any acknowledgement of the night past other than a wink at me as he went downstairs.

  Befogged and smarting, I lay in the bed and tried to recover some of what I had learned the night before. He was not an electric man as such, in that he had not joined the company as a young man and worked his way along the ferried ranks. I got that. Had he come from Munster? Did he say his father was a strong farmer? I may have misremembered that. He employed a throwaway style that I hadn’t understood yet was bait. His history was all gaps. He had taken to the road and then the sea, the theatre of that phrasing still with me, so he must have used it. While the greater world was at war, he was slipping through its sequestered quarters, travelling the North, Central and South Americas where he had been variously a cook, barber, carpenter, apprentice cobbler, merchant sailor, lumberjack, boat-builder, a bookstall man, and a hodgepodge collector of the earth’s idiosyncrasies – In Peru they eat a purple potato. In Valparaíso the ocean smells of flowers. They wear a hat on top of a hat in La Paz, Bolivia, I nearly left a toe there. Interspersed through them had been the names of women, of which, mid-alphabet alone, I think I could remember a Marie, a Magda, and a Monique.