History of the Rain

by Niall Williams

  ‘Ruth and Aengus Swain come here.’

  ‘Yes Miss.’

  Aeney gave her the Winning Smile at Full Power. He tilted his head slightly so the quiff of his wondrous fair hair added to the effect of general adorableness. He went to Full Luminous. But it didn’t work.

  ‘Ruth, you will be in Miss Barry’s class; Aengus, you will be in Mr Crossan’s.’

  We didn’t even look at each other. We didn’t say a word. We just stood there feeling the knife along our sides.

  You can’t know. Maybe you can imagine in your head, but you can’t know. You can’t know what it feels like in your blood.

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘Go now, Miss Barry’s. Mr Crossan’s.’

  ‘Can’t I stay with my brother?’

  ‘No you cannot.’

  ‘Please Miss.’

  ‘There is no Please Miss. Miss Barry’s, Mr Crossan’s. Now. It will be for the better for both of you.’

  I’ll never forget walking down that corridor after we came out of her office. I’ll never forget the clammy air and the blurred voices coming from the teachers inside the classrooms. It was like we had slipped from the world, like there was all this activity going on, half past ten on an ordinary Monday morning and everyone in their proper places behind doors except us. The corridor had these square dome skylights spaced along it and the sun fell down in actual beams that showed the dust and the particles of the otherwise invisible so you felt you were crossing someplace, but for just that while you were neither in one world nor the other. Sunbeam shade sunbeam. Shade. And maybe I was aware everything was changing and that I was losing my brother, that from that moment he would begin slipping away. Maybe in that walk down the corridor I could feel the days of summer falling away from us, the playing together in the fields behind our house, games of hay-hide, of Aeney and me climbing in the sycamore tree, of being in the Big Meadow, of me telling him Ruth’s Version of the books I was reading, of calling across the upper air at the top of our house, my sky-bed to his: Are you asleep yet?

  Are you?

  I reached over and took Aeney’s hand. I tried my trick of Making Everything Stop so it would stay just us, floating in a sunbeam, out of reach of change.

  It seems to you such a small thing. Maybe you’re even in the Conheedy camp and believe it would be For the Better. It says so in many books, Separate the Twins.

  But not in any books written by twins.

  Mrs Conheedy came out of her office. ‘Ruth Swain, stop dallying. Into class now.’

  I let go of Aeney’s hand. He looked at me. He smiled one of those brave smiles small boys smile. But he was afraid.

  I remember feeling the cold handle of the classroom door. I remember Aeney walking past me down to Mr Crossan’s and his not turning back and my watching him go and thinking I love my brother and feeling this hopeless loss that I had no words for but later found in the fairy-tale word banishment.

  Miss Barry was an angel. In total I had fourteen teachers in all my time in school. Only one was an angel.

  I didn’t hear about Mr Crossan from Aeney that day. When he came out into the yard he stayed on the edge of a group of boys. They were pushing each other and being loud and he was trying to attach himself to them, just sort of walking along a little behind them, trying to find a glue he was just discovering he didn’t have. I didn’t have it either. Go down to any schoolyard at breaktime and look in and you’ll see. You’ll see the ones who have no Human Glue, who run out the first day with this perfect unrumpled optimism and trust, who still think of every boy and girl as their undiscovered friend and believe What Fun We’ll Have. And then, in the schoolyard, day one, there’s someone sprung from evil genes like Michael Mooney or Hen genes like Jane Brouder and they feel something off you, feel that field of difference you don’t even know you’re giving off, and boom you’re out, you can’t stick on. The group runs down the yard and you run too but it’s like the signal was given on a wavelength you didn’t receive in time so you’re a few steps back. Look at the pictures of Aeney’s class. You’ll see. It’s like he’s been photoshopped in and there’s this clean line around him, no Human Glue.

  I watched him that day even as I was becoming The-Girl-with-Glasses. I was thinking Okay, if I am to be on my own island I’ll have Aeney come over and join me.

  Swain Island would be fine with me. But when I went across the yard from Girls’ side to Boys’ to speak to him he turned away. He wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t be saved.

  ‘Separates from their shadow?’ Mrs Quinty says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No. No, Ruth. I don’t think I know that one.’

  Chapter 15

  If your blood is a river, where is the sea?

  A central principle underlying Mrs Quinty’s Rules for Writing is that you have to have a Beginning Middle and End. If you don’t have these your Reader is lost.

  But what if Lost is exactly where the writer is? I asked her.

  Ruth, the writer can’t be lost, she said, and then knew she’d said it too quickly and bit her lip knowing I was going to say something about Dad. She pressed her knees together and diverted into a fit of dry coughing.

  This, Dear Reader, is a river narrative. My chosen style is The Meander. I know that in The Brothers Karamazov (Book 1,777, Penguin Classics, London) Ippolit Kirillovich chose the historical form of narration because Dostoevsky says it checked his own exuberant rhetoric. Beginnings middles and ends force you into that place where you have to Stick to the Story as Maeve Mulvey said the night the Junior Certs were supposed to be going to the cinema in Ennis but were buying cans in Dunnes and drinking them in the Parnell Street carpark and Mrs Pender saw Grainne Hayes hanging off the salt-and-vinegar lips of some pimpled beanpole at The Height, wearing enough eyeliner and mascara to make her look like a badger in Disney and that micro-mini that wasn’t more than two inches of black-plastic silage wrap, all of which required they chose the historical form of narration and Stick To Their Story since she’d left the Hayes’s house earlier that evening in jeans and hoodie. But there’s a different kind of stickiness here, there’s the kind that gets inside your skin when you’ve been in the river and you come out and shower and dry off but it’s still there, and you know you’ve been in a river. Here’s the day Mam took Aeney and I to the circus. Duffy’s Circus had been coming to Faha since Duffy first bought a camel. They came annually in summer and set up in the GAA field, bringing with them a giant yellowy tent that smelled of magic when magic was elephant dung and hay and tobacco and that when erected was home to an exotic collection of flies moths and mosquitos, some of which I imagined orbiting the head of MelquÍades when years later I read my father’s yellow-paged copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Book 2,000, Gabriel García Márquez, Picador, London), the one that has A mi amigo V, que me ha ensenado un nuevo modo de entender la vida, Paco written inside it, but I never found out who Paco was or what new way of life V had shown him. Duffy’s came until their animals were dust, they came the year after that too when their camel was dust with two humps and whose performance consisted of a coarse hair skin you were allowed to rub and which felt exactly like the hairy couch the Mulveys bought from Broderick’s in Killenena. (Once Duffy’s was gone the Great American Circus came with stars and stripes painted on everything and accents of Pure Mullingar, but by then sadly I was Beyond Circuses.) Aeney and I sit in the front row. The trapeze is high above us. We lean back to look up at this glittering girl. She is maybe fourteen years old. We are seven. Cymbals are crashed together by the moustached barrel-shaped man we presume is Duffy, his face, like Mr Micawber’s after he had drunk punch, appears varnished. He cranes back to gaze above and then the girl walks across the upper air. We can’t see the line. She just walks across nothing, her arms extended for balance, her chin slightly raised, as though the Nuns were right and only perfect posture will get you into Heaven. She walks above us, pays no attention to the world below. Aeney turns to me and his eyes are wide w
ith amazement. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say wow or god or d’you see her? He knows that with me he doesn’t need to. He just looks and smiles and I smile, and without for a second thinking of it he squeezes my hand one quick squeeze of just joy and then he lets go and we both look up at that impossible girl.

  And then the moment twists, slides away from me, and is gone downriver. Down this narrative all manner of things will float. But not Mr Crossan. I’m sinking him here. And if God asks for cause I’ll give Him cause. I’ll give Him that two yards of bones topped with a sprig of ginger, that narrow-jawed rat-faced misery with the pinched whine for a voice, the head to one side growing wiry nostril hair as he looks down at who he’ll pick on for humiliation today; I’ll give Him the Pride and Prejudice of Mr Crossan, that skinny shiny-suited blister with the complexion of uncooked sausage who went into teaching so that he could belittle others, so that he could say: ‘Aonghus Swain, is that handwriting? Tell me. I can’t read it. Is it? IS IT?’

  I’ve had stupid teachers, lazy teachers, boring teachers, teachers who were teachers because their parents were and they hadn’t the imagination to think of anything else, teachers who were teachers because of cowardice, because of fear, because of the holidays, because of the pensions, because they were never called to account, never had to actually be any good, ones who could not survive in any other profession, who were not aware they had trod on butterflies. But none of those compared to Mr Maurice Crossan. He was the one who first stamped on my brother’s soul. He was dark, as they say here. For those who want more of him visit the dark character of Orlick Dolge in Great Expectations and cross that with a ginger-headed weasel.

  He’s not getting in here. He’s not in The Ark.

  When the bell rang I waited by the gate for Aeney. When he came he didn’t want me to be me. He walked past and I knew not to say anything but to just step silently into his wake. When we came in Mam had the table set and one of those thin smiles mothers have when they’re hoping so hard for their children all day and the hope is kind of butting up against the fear and the foreboding and really they are this massive mess inside with this smile plastered on top.

  ‘Well? How was it?’

  ‘Fine,’ Aeney said.

  That’s the thing about boys. Maybe just Irish boys. Boys have No Go Areas, they have an entire geography of places you can’t go because if you do they’ll crack open, they’ll fall apart and you won’t be able to put them back together, not ever. Girls know this. We know. Even love can’t reach some places.

  Fine, Aeney said, when there was no way in the world he was fine. When fine was as far as you could be from a true description of what he was feeling. But that was it. That’s all he said, and Mam sort of bit her lip and poured us MiWadi and said she had his favourite, Petit Filous, for after. He ate his dinner. He didn’t want any Petit Filous. He went up to his room and shut the door. When I came up I asked him through the door if he wanted to learn our spellings together, he said no. I sat in my sky-room, he sat in his. Then I heard him crying. I heard it at first like it was choked breathing. Like when you’ve sunk in deep water and had the life terrified out of you and you come up into the air eyes wide and mouth gasping not sure if this is your last and you’re about to be dragged back down again. He sucked in spasms, then he moaned and made this sound that wasn’t like anything except the sound a spirit makes when it’s sundering.

  ‘Aeney, let me in. Aeney?’

  But he didn’t answer. He just cried on, this hopeless hard retching as if the tears were shards and each one cut as it came out. He was sitting on the floor up against the door so I couldn’t get in and Mam was gone to take Nan to Murphy’s so I just sank down on the floor on the other side of the door and because of the force of his crying the door and the whole partition wall kind of gave a little, these jagged ebbs and flows, as if the whole upstairs was in a storm, and my brother was in another boat sailing away, and no matter how much I wanted to, no matter what I did or said I would never be able to get to him.

  Mr MacGhiolla was a teacher. He was the one who taught my father about the King-Under-the-Wave. He had this old book of tales (Book 390, Hero-Tales of Ireland, Jeremiah Curtin, Little, Brown, Boston), a kind already out of fashion then, but which he employed to keep my father’s imagination greenly lit. He didn’t want my father doing just Shakespeare and Homer. I’m not sure if he explained to Virgil that Shakespeare was Irish (see Book 1,904, Ulysses, James Joyce, Bodley Head, London) and that in fact all great writers can be traced back here if you go far enough, but he instilled in him the belief that this was a country of unrivalled imagination and culture. He threw out mythological names his pupil had never heard of, each of them exotic bait he knew the boy would rise to. In the long room upstairs in Ashcroft where no one could hear, he spoke to my father in Irish.

  Ireland had gone wrong at some stage, according to MacGhiolla. Some kind of spell had been thrown and the country began forgetting itself. It began turning into Lesser Britain was the gist of Mr MacGhiolla’s argument. Our history, our folklore and culture were being washed into the sea and must be defended. MacGhiolla was too passionate to worry about mixed metaphors. He was too passionate to worry about generalisations or broad strokes or let the rational get in the way of his argument. Neither was he bothered by the fact that his pale complexion was deeply unsuited to passion and blotched in disparate patches as he rose to his theme. He spoke standing, hands clasped when not released to fork his red hair with exasperation, eyes locked on the upper left air when not locked on Virgil and burning his point home. He spoke on rising toes, on rolling ankles, he spoke with forward tilt, with lifted shoulders, with forefinger pointing and fist punching. He did verbal pirouettes, he did elongated sentences, he let clauses gather at the river and foam until they found spittle release. He spoke hushed, he spoke his big points in whispers, then drove them in with urgent balletic waves of arm and extended eyebrow as he said the same thing again only louder. He was not then a guns and bombs nationalist. He was the more dangerous kind. He was a poems and stories one.

  As proof of his impact, my father kept all the books Mr MacGhiolla gave him: Book 391, The Crock of Gold, James Stephens, Pan, London; Book 392, Irish Fairy Tales, James Stephens, Macmillan, London; Book 393, The Three Sorrows of Storytelling, Douglas Hyde, T. Fisher Unwin, London; Book 394, Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, Kuno Meyer, Hodges, Figgis & Co., Dublin; Book 395, Silva Gadelica Volume II, Standish Hayes O’Grady, Williams and Norgate, London; and the tea-ringed Book 396, Cuchulainn: The Irish Achilles, Alfred Nutt, D. Nutt, London. From Mr MacGhiolla my father heard about the King who lived under the waves, about the Glas Gainach, the cow whose milk was almost butter. He heard about the Queen called Mor who lived in Dunquin and the herder who came from Under the Sea. Cathal the Son of Conor, the Black Thief, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Children of Lir, the Voyage of Bran.

  For my father it was as if the world split open and out came this parade of The Remarkables.

  If this was America they’d be Blockbuster material, there’d be CUCHULAINN VII in 3D by now with Liam Neeson in his long Star Wars hair, the Gáe Bolga instead of a Light Sabre, there’d be a side franchise for Oisín in Tír na nÓg and Diarmuid and Grainne would get a revamp as Greatest Love Story Ever and run for seven seasons as a daytime soap.

  That material was deep.

  And in all of it, in all of those tales, the hero faces impossible tasks.

  And he triumphs.

  With a brilliant student Mr MacGhiolla shone. It was simple: we are the storytellers. Imagination in Ireland was beyond the beyond. It was out there. It was Far Out before far out was invented in California, because sitting around in a few centuries of rain breeds these outlands of imagination. As evidence, think of Abraham Stoker, confined to bed until he was eight years old, lying there breathing damp Dublin air with no TV or radio but the heaving wheeze of his chest acting as pretty constant reminder that soon he was heading Elsewhere. Even after he was married to Fl
orence Balcombe of Marino Crescent (she who had an unrivalled talent for choosing the wrong man, who had already given up Oscar Wilde as a lost cause in the Love Department when she met this Bram Stoker and thought: he seems sweet), even after Bram moved to London he couldn’t escape his big dark imaginings in Dublin and one day further down the river he spawned Dracula (Book 123, Norton, New York). Jonathan Swift was only settling into a Chesterfield couch in Dublin when his brain began sailing to Lilliput and Blefuscu (Book 778, Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, Penguin, London). Another couple of deluges and he went further, he went to Brobdingnag, Laputa, Bainbarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and . . . Japan, before he went furthest of all, to Houyhnhnms. Read Gulliver’s Travels when you’re sick in bed and you’ll be away. I’m telling you. You’ll be transported, and even as you’re being carried along in the current you’ll think no writer ever went this Far. Something like this could only be dreamt up in Ireland.

  Charles Dickens recognised that. He comes to Dublin August 25th 1858 for an imagination Top-Up. Stays in Morrison’s Hotel on Nassau Street (I know, scary that I know that, but I do. Roast Pork with apple sauce, Bread and butter pudding). He heads down to Cork four days later, checks in to the Imperial Hotel, where, according to the porter Jeremiah Purcell, the clock in the front foyer has been stopped at twenty to nine for about a year waiting on one of the Stokeses of Mac Curtain Street to come fix it. (Charles Dickens is a punctual man. He values punctuality above church-going. He stands looking at the clock. Jeremiah comes over and explains. She’s stopped. Charles looks at him. ‘She’s stopped?’ She is, Sir. Stopped. Wound, but won’t go beyond twenty to.) Next day Charles takes an early-morning carriage to Blarney Castle, which is dark stone and dreary on the day on account of the rain, and that place sets him thinking. He skips up the steps, gets a small bit drowned, but carries on, lays down and does the whole backwards lean-over-the-edge, osteopathy no-no, to kiss the Blarney Stone.