Swallowing the Sun

by David Park

  It’s done, it’s truly done and she’s here in this place where the past is cared for and preserved, where nothing is allowed to decay or be destroyed. He tells himself she’s safe now, held in the arms of a place that won’t let her be discarded on the pages of a tattered paper, or brushed aside into the faded yesterdays of people’s memories. She’s here for ever and the knowledge lifts a burden from his shoulders but as it lifts he feels a rush of weariness take its place – he feels more tired than he’s ever felt, every part of his body weighted like branches layered with the heaviness of snow. He has to rest or he won’t be able to go on, won’t be able to do the other things that need to be done, so he goes to the bed and sits on the end. The weariness is inside his head, straining against his temples. He suddenly sees her as his child again and she’s run too far ahead. He hears himself calling out: Stay where we can see you. Don’t go too fast or you’ll fall. If you run too fast you’ll fall and skin your knees. Wait there until I catch up. I’m coming. Hold on, I’m coming.

  He has other things to do, other things to finish, but if he’s to do them he has to be rid of this weariness, so he lies on the top of the bed and curls into a ball. He’ll only take a few minutes, just rest his eyes until he gets his strength back. The pillow is soft under his head and he lies and listens to the currents of sound that travel along the conduits and through the pipes, the sudden shards of noise that pierce the soft skin of the building. Then there is only the slow drift into sleep and with it a sense of release, of rest at the end of work, of things falling inexorably away and free-falling into a deep and distant valley.

  And at first his sleep is borne along on this sense of untrammelled release and he’s in the tepee with a flickering, flitting transfer of light projected on the screen of his naked body and he’s wearing a wind-stirred screen of leaves, or a white-ridged climb of waves and the world is turning and turning endlessly in the perfection of its orbit. Shoals of orange fish glide over beds of gold coins and then at some wordless command, the great water-wheels which stand fixed in the building below begin to turn after their century of stillness, and droplets of silver water glisten against the brass and shoot off the metal in whispering sprays. And each turn is accompanied by the rising voices of women who sing in the mills and their voices and the fall and sluice of water echo each other. Hands are claiming their stone axes and they slice the milky sap-filled branches of the trees and flints spark kindling into fire, at first a tiny puff of grey and then the crackle and shoot of flame that warms and stirs everything into life.

  A spark ignites the sleeping looms and the shuttles begin to fly, joining the rising chorus of voices. And in the glass cases all the pinned insects and the butterflies waken and flutter and ping against the glass. Polished pistons pound with the hiss and spurt of released energy. Everywhere there is the rising tide of light, running through the shadowy corridors and everything which is burnished by its touch throws off the shackles of sleep and quickens into the newness of its former life.

  Clack, clack, clack – the tiny, running feet in their best Sunday shoes shoot through the corridors as if a shot of electricity and these too are part of the awakening. So let her run through the galleries and the floors where everything is hers for the touch and let her pause only where her desire takes her. Let her ask her child’s questions, as many questions as she wants because here there’ll always be answers.

  ‘Where does the sun go at night?’

  ‘What are clouds made of?’

  ‘What would happen if two stars bumped into each other?’

  Questions that spin and spiral, each one as serious as her voice. Let her run, the clack of her heels, a pulse of this new life, a world that he, too, is part of, his very skin a screen for the turning world to show its once hidden self. So let her run, let her run ahead – he’ll follow the drum-beat of her heels wherever they lead. But now there’s something wrong – she’s got too far ahead, the sound of her feet are growing fainter, fading into the echoing shadows of distant corners. He tries to run faster but his feet are weighted and he’s slowing down, and the singing voices of the women are fading like the mist of the morning as the sun rises and strengthens. Everything is falling asleep again, everything is quenched and staunched. He tries to run faster, to catch her up as the quickening flames collapse and tumble into ash but he’s powerless to force his limbs into speed, so he calls out to her, calls again and again. Hold on, I’m coming. Wait there until I come. Please wait there for me. And when there is only the answer of silence his cries become more frantic, screeching like gulls against the engulfing darkness, their voices borne away on the rising fury of the storm.

  He’s reached the second floor and he thinks he hears her, searches around the glass cases but she’s not there and he stumbles on, calling and calling in a voice which is collapsing in on itself. He knows now where his steps are taking him but there’s nothing he can do to stop himself and in his dream he’s standing at the foot of the glass case where the young woman Takabuti sleeps, wrapped tightly in her linen dress, one hand and one foot exposed, her black wizened face with its walnut eyes looking at him as if awaiting his arrival. But when he looks again, it’s the face of his daughter and the lighting above his head is a relentless glare that washes her skin blue and cold. Then the light blinks and stutters out and when his eyes are able to see, he’s looking at the painted breast of the coffin where a beautiful young woman is kneeling with outstretched wings. It’s the goddess of the skies who wears the bright ball of the sun in her hair, who swallows it whole every night and then pours it out each dawn. It’s where the sun goes, he tells Rachel. It’s where the sun goes and she tells him she understands but then she’s fading from his sight and as hard as he tries to hold her image in his head, it’s drifting into the darkest spaces of the night where the stars are frozen and fixed in silence.

  The silence is inside his head. He has no voice to call her, to tell her all the things he wants to and she, too, has no voice as she travels ever further, out to the very edge of his memory. It is the terrible silence that shakes him with its shiver into the grey light of dawn which has started to snake through the gallery. He’s cold to the bone, and his whole body aches. He clambers slowly off the bed trying to stretch the pain and the coldness out of his body, blowing his breath into the frozen knobs of his hands. His throat feels sore and raw as if he’s been shouting and he needs something to drink but he pauses first to smooth the cover of the bed, brushing out the imprint of his body with the palm of his hand. The first edges of a hardening light slant through the windows and define the roof garden outside and as he goes to the glass he wants to go out, breathe in the air, try to warm himself with whatever heat the new day is able to muster.

  Also available by David Park

  The Truth Commissioner

  In a society trying to heal the scars of the past with the salve of truth and reconciliation, four men’s lives become linked in a way they could never have imagined. Henry Stanfield, the newly arrived Truth Commissioner, Francis Gilroy, recently appointed government minister, retired detective James Fenton and father-to-be Danny share a secret from their past that threatens to destroy the lives they have painstakingly built in the present.

  ‘Edgy and compelling … yields moments of heart-shivering beauty … a magnificent and important book’ Joseph O’Connor, Guardian

  ‘A fine, crafted novel, but it is also an important book … He sets out to examine what it means to be alive – and does so in fictions that are subtle, understated, not without a hint of menace and always courageous’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

  ‘We’re reminded that with writers like David Park, the novel can itself be a kind of truth commission’ New York Times

  The Big Snow

  Belfast, 1963: unprecedented snowfall smothers and muffles the city and its inhabitants. In a house with windows flung defiantly open, a wife dies before her husband can make his confession. Elsewhere, an old woman searches desperately for a
wedding dress in her dream of love. And in the very heart of the city, the purity of snow is tainted by the murder of a girl and as one man begins to unravel the dark secrets of the city, he knows he is in a race against time to find the murderer before the snow melts. With insight and compassion David Park peers into the souls of these ordinary people battling their secrets and desires.

  ‘A writer of startling grace and integrity … Park’s characters burn like the candles they light against [the dark], shivering but bright’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Bewitching … If you liked Ian McEwan’s Atonement, you will adore this’ Daily Mail

  ‘Luminously written intense and extraordinarily compelling’ The Times

  The Healing

  A man is shot dead before the eyes of his young son as they work together in the fields near their home. Another victim of the violence in Northern Ireland. In the city, a confused and frightened old man grieves for his own loss and for the shattered world around him. When the boy’s life becomes entwined with his own, the old man believes he has found at last in the silent child the instrument of healing.

  ‘Deserves to be numbered among the finest first novels of this or any other year’ The Times

  ‘A beautifully written story … sheer magically descriptive writing … the beauty of Park’s work lies in the simplicity of the telling, the exquisiteness of his language and a blazing tension’ lrish Indpendent

  ‘Park brings his celebration of language, and humanity, to every page’ Daily Mail

  Oranges from Spain

  Oranges from Spain is a collection of stories about of the trials of growing up in a community where tension, confusion and violence hold sway. Here, among other tales, a youthful seaside romance crosses the religious divide, a gang takes turns at the wheel of a stolen car, and an exceptional student stirs the resentment of her troubled teacher. Set in Northern Ireland against the background of the Troubles, these vignettes capture the spirit of adolescence in difficult times.

  ‘Writing I can only describe as magnificent’ Irish Times

  ‘One could recommend these stories for their author’s formal dexterity alone: what raises them above the common ruck, however, is his ear for the murmurs of the heart’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘David Park writes beautifully about growing up in Belfast – of childhoods under God and the gun. Somehow, against all the odds, his stories are gentle, vivid, life-affirming’ Christopher Hope

  www.bloomsbury.com/davidpark

  A Note on the Author

  David Park has published six novels, The Healing, Swallowing the Sun, The Rye Man, Stone Kingdoms, The Big Snow and The Truth Commissioner, and a book of short stories, Oranges from Spain. He was the winner of the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature and has twice been given The University of Ulster’s McCrea Literary Award. He lives in County Down with his wife and two children.

  By the Same Author

  Oranges from Spain

  The Healing

  The Rye Man

  Stone Kingdoms

  The Big Snow

  The Truth Commissioner

  Praise for Swallowing the Sun:

  ‘Park writes prose of gravity and grace, full of great looping rhythms and subtly recurring motifs … it is hard to think of a more skilful contemporary Irish novelist’

  Joseph O’Connor, Guardian

  ‘This is a superbly crafted and honed book’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘Swallowing the Sun does make you want to live each day better than the last, and bask under the possible sun of every moment. But it also leaves you with a choking sense of sympathy for those who cannot’

  Daily Telegraph

  Park has talent, depth and a wonderfully limpid prose style’

  Sunday Business Post

  Park has created a touching portrait of modern family life and a chilling account of a decent man failing to escape his past … All this is set out with a strong, clear voice that is universally affecting’

  Ireland on Sunday

  ‘Tragedy is expected, but no less heartbreaking for it … Superb’

  Ink

  ‘I loved this book. Technically brilliant and emotionally powerful, Swallowing the Sun thrills even as it breaks your heart’

  Glenn Patterson

  ‘It handles the familiar themes of memory, guilt and the legacy of a violent past with great dexterity and winning originality … It establishes beyond doubt that David Park is one of the most gifted writers in contemporary Ireland’

  Irish Times

  ‘This is a fantastic book: an original and thoughtful story, told with style and grace’

  Sunday Independent

  First published in Great Britain in 2004

  Copyright © 2004 by David Park

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square,

  London, WC1B 3DP

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 1 4088 3626 2

  www.bloomsbury.com

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