History of the Rain

Chapter 1

Back in the time when we were all seaweed, Tommy Devlin says, and adjusts himself on his seat for the long story.

Tommy Devlin is Nan’s cousin. He’s a strictly brown-trouser man. He’s an Irish Independent man. He’s a fist socked-into-his-hand man in Cusack Park when the boys from Broadford are putting points on the board. Now for you. Tommy’s History of the World is not written down but firmly fixed in his mind in the same way that Chocolate Goldgrains are the only biscuit, Flahavan’s the only porridge, and Fianna Fáil the One True Rulers (like all mythological heroes presently enduring a temporary period of exile).

Back in the time when we were all seaweed, he says, there was some seaweed already had the MacCarroll microbes or genomes or whatever and after that it was only a matter of time and creation.

Back then Ireland was down at the South Pole. So I’m thinking it would have been frozen seaweed of the sort Paddy Connolly started selling above in Quilty thinking in the Boom it would catch on like frozen yoghurt but hadn’t calculated on the power of the salt making your lips swell up like slugs in a wet June while you stood there sucking Quilty seaweed. But then the Bust came and the Japanese had the earthquake and the mini-meltdown and couldn’t eat their own and started sending delegations worldwide in search of good seaweed. A Mr Oonishi arrived in the County Clare, had a taste of frozen carrageen and went odorokuhodo yoi, which was boys o boys in Japanese, and the Connollys were back in business.

Sorry, drifting. It’s a river narrative. Once, we were all frozen seaweed.

Then, Tommy says, America split off of Africa, said See you boys later, and did the American thing, it went West.

Ireland of course did its own thing and went north. All of us were seaborne. Whatever microbes were paddling Ireland they were fierce stubborn and didn’t bother stopping at any of the sunnier climes, didn’t say Lads, what about the Canaries for a location? Didn’t say Madeira looks nice. No, they kept on, getting away from everyone, and would have kept going, Tommy says, except that Iceland had broken off above and was already in situ. The microbes were like the McInerneys who head off to Donegal each year, any number of children sardined into the back of the old Peugeot, three per seatbelt, and somewhere north of Claregalway dement their mother and father with Are we there yet. Enniscrone, County Sligo, is as far as they’ve ever made it. Tommy’s basic point: the microbes were getting restless by then. The sun had livened them up. Then the rain got them in a right stew. Suddenly we were bestirring ourselves.

Ireland came to a stop. And the seaweed-people started moving about on the land.

And some of them were MacCarrolls.

Because we were once seaweed we all long to get back there. That’s the premise. The sea is the Mother Ship. That’s the explanation for Kilkee Lahinch Fanore Ballyvaughan and all the bungalows built up and down the Atlantic coast. That’s the reason the planners couldn’t say it’ll look a bit mad and make the whole country look like we’re some kind of perverted sea-voyeurs.

So the seaweed people started moving around in the rain. Some of them, who resented their mothers, and figured out right away that the west was the rainiest part, went into the Midlands to vent their feelings and invent hurling. The MacCarrolls stayed where they were. They’d just about dried out when The Flood came, Tommy says.

‘And they all drowned?’ I asked.

‘Some of them survived,’ he said, ‘by becoming birds.’

‘That was clever.’

‘Others were swimmers.’

After The Flood withdrew things were grand for a time. Then the Partholonians came. They were already bored with sunscreen and deckchairs down in the eastern Mediterranean and arrived into Donegal on a salty gale, had a bit of Killybegs Catch, and headed south, where they met the Fomorians. The Fomorians were the misshapen one-eyed one-legged offal-eating hoppers who were peopling Offaly at the time.

Having only the one leg, they weren’t that great at fighting. The Partholonians made mincemeat and pale spongy bodhráns out of them.

By the year 520 Tommy says there were 9,046 Partholonians in Ireland. Then in one week in May a horde of midges came, brought a plague and wiped them all out.

Except for one.

Tuan MacCarrill survived by becoming a salmon.

Fact. It’s in the History of Ireland.

It’s not all that strange when you consider that story is written in the Book of the Dun Cow, which is Book Number 1 in Irish Literature and was written on the hide of Saint Ciaran’s favourite cow in Clonmacnois.

Not kidding.

Tuan survived by becoming a salmon.

Now, before you go saying those Irish, or Come off it, I will point out that though Tuan was maybe the first to use this method he was not the last. In the fat yellow paperback of David Grossman’s See Under: Love (Book 2,001, Picador, London), one of the few books in which my father inscribed his name (blue biro), Bruno Schulz escapes the Nazis by becoming a salmon. Check it out.

Anyway, years later (according to the hide of Saint Ciaran’s favourite cow), the salmon that was once Uncle Tuan was caught by a woman who ate him. It’s true. She caught him, ate him, and then, in the kind of plot twist you get when you’re writing on the hide of a Dun Cow, she gave birth to him again. He was a fine lad with distinctive red hair and salmon-coloured freckles, who had inside him the history of Ireland.

Not kidding.

The MacCarrolls were always into the stories. But first the stories were inside them.

Tuan MacCarrill had seen the Nemedians, the Partholonians, the Fir Bolgs and the Tuatha de Danann. The Tuatha de Danann were the followers of the Goddess Danu. They’d come to Ireland in long wooden boats and, tough men, burned them the moment they landed so there would be no turning back. Some of the locals looked up, saw this great boat-shaped cloud from the boat-burning and believed these fellows had sailed down from the sky.

‘The stories of them lads would fill all the libraries of the known world,’ Tommy said. But Tuan knew them all. He was the only one who could tell of the great battle against Balor of the Evil Eye, which was the first All-Ireland, but took place on the Plain of Moytura. The referee was a crow called the Morrigu. She whistled for the Throw-in and watched from a tree. When the last of the Fomorians were dead, the plain slippery with black blood and the ground underfoot spongy as figrolls in tea, the Morrigu blew up for fulltime.

Tuan MacCarrill had seen it first-hand. He was the first Embedded, the original Eyewitness Reports, a one-man Salmon News Corporation, he’d been there and seen that, getting fish-eyed Exclusives of everything from the Fomorians to the Fianna.

And so, because he’d been here since seaweed, he told the early history of Ireland to Saint Finnian of Moville, who, being a monk, had a quill handy.

It’s the way Tommy tells it.

If Ireland’s first historian had been a girl instead of a salmon-boy it would have been a different story. If the man writing it down hadn’t been a saint there’d have been other parts for women besides Goddesses, witches and swans.

So, there were seaweed people and sky people.

In time the seaweed people and the sky people found attraction in each other, and intermarried and became the Irish. That’s the short version. That’s why some of us are always longing for sky and some are of us are longing for the sea, and some, like my father, were both.

We’re a race of elsewhere people. That’s what makes us the best saints and the best poets and the best musicians and the world’s worst bankers. That’s why wherever you go you’ll see some of us — and it makes no difference if the place is soft and warm and lovely and there’s not a thing anyone could find wrong with it, there’ll always be what Jimmy the Yank calls A Hankering. It’s in the eyes. The idea of the better home. Some of us have it worse than others. My father had it running in the rivers of him.

The MacCarrolls stayed near the river. Beside the river there are two things you never forget, that the moment you look at a river that moment has already passed, and that everything is on its way somewhere else. The MacCarrolls weren’t poets. They were too stubborn for metre and rhyme schemes. They were knuckle- and knee-scrapers and collarbone breakers, they were long-hair growers. They were fisher and boatmen. They had a wild streak in them about the same width and depth as the Shannon and they had no loyalty to anyone but themselves, which was as it should be Tommy says, because Ireland then was in a complete dingdong between kings and clans and Vikings and Normans and whatnot and a lot of it was to do with O’Neills from Up North, which in Tommy’s narrative means Enough Said.

In any case, the MacCarrolls stayed out of all that. Because of the salmon-time that was in their bloodstream they had a fair bit of knowledge and they hadn’t forgotten the important thing the river had taught them: things pass. The place under their feet changed name a dozen times, but they stayed put.

A share of them got in boats and headed for the horizon. Stands to reason, Tommy says. Wouldn’t there be a restlessness in any man who was once salmon and floating seaweed?

There’s no arguing with that.

I wouldn’t argue with Tommy anyway. Mrs Quinty says three months ago when they brought Tommy to the Regional the surgeon opened him up, and then just closed him up right away again, as if Tommy Devlin had become The Book of Tommy and on every page was written Cancer. Afterwards, Tommy took his book home again to Faha and carried on regardless. He has a kind of Lazarus glow now. There isn’t a person in the parish would deny him anything.

‘My point,’ he says, ‘restlessness a natural by-product of salmon-ness.’

That’s why there’s MacCarroll cousins in Queens and White Plains and Lake View Chicago and Michigan and San Francisco and why there’s a Randy MacCarroll who’s a horse-breeder in Kentucky, a Paddy MacCarroll a sheep-breeder in Christchurch New Zealand, and Caroll MacCarroll who breeds the turtles in Bali.

But a share of them stayed in what became Clare too.

‘The family has a certain contrariness in it,’ Tommy says. ‘D’you see? From time to time the family would burst up in rows, one gang taking a position, the other gang taking the contrary, even if only for the virtue of being contrary, which is a peculiar twist in the Irish mind that dates back to sky and sea people. Some of the MacCarrolls would take a huff and splinter off over the mountains into Kerry or even, God Help us, Cork.’

What you had in the chronicle of the country then was a few centuries of a game of Rebellion-Betrayal, Rebellion-Betrayal, Uprising Put-Down, and Hope Dashed.

The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well.

The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well.

The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O’Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Éamon De Valera, Éamon De Valera again (Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler), Éamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fáil Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: Ah well.

In the Aeneid Virgil tells it as Sunt lacrimae rerum, which in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation means ‘They weep for how the world goes’, which is more eloquent than Ah well but means the same thing.

There were MacCarrolls on both sides each time. They were Pro and Anti in equal measure. The only thing you could be certain of with a MacCarroll, Tommy says, was that opinions were Strongly Held. It was a seaweed — salmon thing. Salmon aren’t reasonable. They’re the boys for going against the current.

‘Which holds a certain attraction for the Opposite Sex,’ Tommy says, using Capitals.

‘It does?’

‘Oh it does,’ he says.

That’s when he goes Old Testament and starts listing the Begetting. Cearbhall MacCarrill married Fionnuala Ni Something who begat Finn who married Fidelma Ni Something Else and begat Finan who married a Fiona and begat Fintan, and so on. When they emerge out of the seaweed-smelling mists of time they are still marrying and begetting, some of them have dropped the A, others the Mac and some have gotten above themselves and taken up the O, so there are MacCarrolls, McCarrolls, Carrolls and O’Carrolls, all of them with a seawide streak of stubbornness and a character composed of what Nan simply calls salt. Some of them have twelve in the family, one of the Ni’s wins Ovaries of the Year and gives the world eighteen MacCarrolls before sending the ovaries to the Clare Museum in Ennis and lying down on a bed of hay with a bucket of milk.

Tommy is hardcore into the folklore, he’s far gone in ceol agus rince as Michael Tubridy says, has printed his Boarding Pass and been literally Away with the Fairies several times, believing we Irish are Number One folk for lore and in fact in our most humble and affable selves most if not all of the history of the world can be explained. He does the whole MacCarroll seed and breed, draws short of And it Came to Pass, the way Joshua does it in the Book of Joshua but he gives it the same ring. Like some of the women I may have dozed off during routine rounds of begetting but I come back in time for my Grandfather Fiachra who, thanks to Tesco’s box-set, is played by young Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous when Spencer is a Portuguese-American fisherman called Manuel Fidello, and later by old Spencer Tracy when he plays Old Man in The Old Man and the Sea and gets an Oscar nomination, but the Oscar goes to the thin moustache of David Niven and that salty deepwater Irish melancholy settles for ever into Spencer’s eyes.

Grandfather Fiachra has the Spencer Tracy eyes and the Spencer Tracy hair that is this uncombable wavy stuff that makes it look like he has just surfaced into This World and has a last bit of silver sea still flowing crossways on his head. I never met him. Grandfather MacCarroll is in two black-and-white photographs in Nan’s room. In one of them he’s at his own wedding. He’s in the front porch of Faha church in a black suit with pointy gangster lapels. He’s big and barrel-chested and looks like there’s nothing in the world he won’t meet head on. Back then everyone looks serious. You get a shock when you find out he’s twenty-eight, because the suit and the look and the pose make him older than anyone that age now. There’s a smile around the corners of his mouth and something dancing in his eyes. He’s waiting for his Bride.

She’s a Talty.

Do I need to say more?

(Dear Reader, time is short, we can’t even open The Book of Talty, because if we did we’d get sucked out in that tide. We’d be Gone for Some Time and away into the stories of Jeremiah Talty who was a doctor only without a degree, Tobias Talty who kept a horse in his house, lived on apples and grew the longest beard in the County Clare, his sister Josephine who conversed with fairies, & brother Cornelius who went to the American Civil War and fought on both sides. We might never get back.)

Bridget Talty is coming to the church by horse and cart. She’s coming from fifteen miles away in Kilbaha by the broken road that’s in love with the sea. She’s sitting in that boneshaker beside her father in a wedding dress she’s fighting because she didn’t want to wear one, and has already thrown the veil into a ditch this side of Kilrush. They’re rattling along in sea-spray and salt-gale and suddenly the regular rain turns to downpour. It comes bucketing and her father says rain is good luck for weddings but she doesn’t answer him. She’s foostering with the buttons at the collar of the dress because they’re pinching out her breath and ping! one of them flies off, and ping! another. And she tugs back the collar and holds her head high, so soon face, neck and the upper curve of her breasts are all gleaming with rain and her hair is wild streels tumbling. When she arrives outside Faha church in the cart she’s this drowned heap, proud, beautiful and feckless as she gets off the cart, lands down into a fair-sized puddle, strides through it, muddied shoes and splattered stockings adding the final Bride-à-la-Talty touches as she comes through the church gates.

And standing there waiting, not at the altar but at the front door because that’s the way he’s doing it, Grandfather releases the Spencer Tracy smile around the corners of his mouth, sees the whole of his married life ahead, and thinks: Well now. This is going to be interesting.

The second photo is years later. It was taken by Martin Liverpool the time he was home for the Fleadh, Tommy says. Martin had been working on Merseyside ten years and came home with a touch of the John Hinde’s, the freckled folkloric, seeing Ireland in panoramic Technicolor and Kodak-ing every turf barrow, ass and child, so that when he went back to the sites he had the country kind of captured in snaps that he kept in small cardboard shoeboxes, taking solace from stopping time, and not admitting emigration had lacerated his heart. Martin Liverpool came past our house the day Grandfather was up thatching.

In the photo Spencer Tracy is still recognisable as Spencer Tracy, but his hair is white now. It tufts out from under the flat tweed cap. You can see his hair still has the waves but they’re softer. The big wild tides of his youth are gone. Already passed are the years of ruile buile, the shouting and roaring, the storming in and the storming out, the flying dishes, the sudden wordless reconciliations he always instigated because despite his toughness and salmon-streak Spencer was hopelessly sentimental the way only men can be. The birth of Mam, the years in this house when it had to accommodate two big hearts and minds bashing against each other and making fly the sparks in which the love happened, I can’t really imagine them. You can’t imagine your nan like that. She’s too Nan to accommodate younger versions. All I know is that before Bridget Talty became Nan, before she became guardian of Clare Champions and Watcher of the Fire, before she took to pretending deafness and day and night wearing Spencer Tracy’s cap, she was a young married woman who found herself to be fulltime baker of bread, washer of shirts, getter of turf, raiser of hens ducks and geese and that she did not mind any of it as long as she could have a pack of ten Carrolls Number One cigarettes and go set dancing in the evenings. That’s her legend in the parish. To Comerford’s, Tubridy’s, Downes’s, to Ryan’s, Daly’s and McNamara’s she went, as well as skipping across the fields to house dances, bringing her big bashful Spencer Tracy with her, crossing under kissing starlight, the two of them coming flushed in the back door on to flagged kitchens, doing the Caledonian, the South Galway and the Clare Sets, five Figures, with glistening faces and battering steps, Tops and Tails, shouting ‘House’ and dancing the world simple.

In the photo Grandfather has a white shirt with sleeves rolled, big coarse tweedy trousers the thatch won’t penetrate. The roof has two homemade-looking ladders hanging on it. They are hooked over the apex so it looks like Grandfather is heading up into the big bluer-than-blue sky. Martin Liverpool has given him a shout so he’s turned halfway up the ladder and now he’s in the perfect position, blue sky behind him and straight ahead the same sweeping Shannon river view that I have from the skylight. He doesn’t know his heart attack is on the way. He doesn’t know he has only time to get the thatch finished, the turf home, and two horses shod.

Jaykers God, Tommy says. But he was a fine figure of a man.

Ah well.

That’s where Tommy’s history ends.

But that’s not the end.

The next bit is the fairy tale.

There’s a day in April when it’s raining. The river is running fast. The girl whose father had died, whose mother raised her in the crooked house by the river, who grew up with that broken part inside where your father has died and which if you’re a girl and your father was Spencer Tracy you can’t fix or unhurt, that girl who yet found in herself some kind of forbearance and strength and was not bitter, whose name was Mary MacCarroll and who was beautiful without truly knowing it and had her mother and father’s dancing and pride in her, that girl walked the riverbank in the April rain.

And standing at that place in Shaughnessy’s called Fisher’s Step, where the ground sort of raises a little and sticks out over the Shannon, right there, the place which in The Salmon in Ireland Abraham Swain says salmon pass daily and though it’s treacherous he calls a blessed little spot, right there, looking like a man who had been away a long time and had come back with what in Absalom, Absalom! (Book 1,666, Penguin Classics, London) William Faulkner calls diffident and tentative amazement, as if he’d been through some solitary furnace experience, and come out the other side, standing right there, suntanned face, pale-blue eyes that look like they are peering through smoke, lips pressed together, aged twenty-nine but looking older, back in Ireland less than two weeks, the ocean-motion still in his legs but strangely the river now lending him a river repose, standing right there, was Virgil Swain.

Chapter 2

That’s us, from Seaweed to Swain.

I used the long run-up. You have to; otherwise the pole won’t carry you over.

It’s the way Charles Dickens does it in Martin Chuzzlewit (Book 180, Penguin Classics) where in Chapter One he traces the Chuzzlewits back to Adam and Eve. The MacCarrolls go back further. They go back beyond, Martin Feeney says.

The Swain are the written, the MacCarroll the oral. Ours is a history of tongue marrying paper, the improbable marrying the impossible. The children are incredible.

When I call my father Virgil Swain I think he’s a story. I think I invented him. I think maybe I never had a father and in the gap where he should be I have put a story. I see this figure on the riverbank and I try to match him to the boy I have imagined, but find instead a gristle of truth, that human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.

Nobody in our parish ever called my father by his name. They called him Verge. And one time I wrote that down along a page of my Aisling copybook, Verge, and thesaurus-ed to find Edge, Border, Margin, before I came to Threshold, and then I thought of it as a verb and got a shiver when I wrote Approach.

My father never really told us where he had been. Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go if we would find out the heart of a man, old Herman Melville says in my father’s copy of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Book 1,997, E.P. Dutton, New York), a book that has the smell of basement and on page 167 a tea-stain in the shape of Greenland.

The years between my father’s leaving Ashcroft and his standing on Fisher’s Step are lost. When you’re a child who has grown up on Adventure stories, who had Spencer Tracy for a Talty grandfather and a rushing river outside the door, there was a certain prestige in being able to announce in Faha N.S. that before he lived here my father was Gone to Sea. In a parish where the river opens into the sea the happy children dream of voyaging out, the sad of being sucked out, but either way the sea is magic central. Gone to Sea inspires a certain status. But the prestige was short-lived because I couldn’t expand beyond that phrase, because I got flushed when asked and because that little bug-eyed Seamus Mulvey kept following me around the yard singing ‘Where did he go? Where did he go?’ in that high strangulated whine all the Mulveys got from burning plastic bottles in their fire after the Council starting charging for recycling. ‘Did he go to Africa? Did he go to Australia?’ the round head of him bobbing side-to-side, the bug-eyes shining like sucked Black Jacks, singing scorn and teaching me the universal truth the human mind abhors vagueness, even a tiny mind like Seamus Mulvey’s.

Our father went to sea with Ahab and Ishmael. That’s a fact. But he didn’t find the whale. He came back with the same restless seeking inside him, and added to that a sense of things being infirm.

‘Where did you sail to?’ Aeney asked.

Dad lay between us on Aeney’s bed-boat. We were eight and in school had started doing Geography. At night-time Aeney took the Atlas to bed and before Mam called up Lights Out I joined him under the blue duvet with the white floating clouds on it and we looked at maps and took a kind of comfort from the way no matter how big a place was, if it was big as all of South America say, it still fitted inside a page. Aeney was a boy who dreamed. And so when he was looking at the maps you could sort of feel his brain whirring and you knew that afterwards in his sleep he’d still be travelling in those places.

‘Where did you sail to?’

Dad lies between us on top of the floating clouds, his long thin body a ridge of mountains that I can walk two fingers on. That April day when Mam first found him on Fisher’s Step he had D.H. Lawrence’s ragged reddish-brown beard, the one from the madly wrinkled cover of the Selected Poems (Book 2,994, Penguin, London), but we weren’t born until long after that, so by now his beard is silver and I can walk my fingers right up along his shoulders and over his collar into it and I get a good way into the softness of his beard before he makes a pretend snap and a shark sound and I scream and save my fingers for another while.

‘Where did you sail when you were a sailor?’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll tell you, but you mustn’t tell anyone.’

‘We won’t. Sure we won’t, Aeney?’ I lie, looking across at Aeney to make sure he won’t mention Seamus Mulvey.

Aeney shakes his head the way small boys do, with a kind of complete and perfect seriousness. His eyes are Os of wonder and gravity.

‘Tell us.’

‘Well,’ Dad says. ‘Do you know where the Caribbean is?’

Aeney flicks the pages of the Atlas. ‘Here.’ He holds it across the mountain ridge so I can see.

Dad smiles that smile he has that’s near to crying. ‘That’s right.’

‘Did you sail there?’

‘I did.’

‘What was it like? Tell us.’

‘It was hot.’

‘How hot?’

‘Very very hot.’

‘And why were you there? What were you sailing there for?’ Aeney wants to understand how you can get into a map that’s on page 28 of an Atlas.

‘Why was I there?’ Dad says.

‘Yes.’

My father’s eyes are looking straight up at the slope of the ceiling and the cutaway angle where the skylight is a box of navy blue with no stars. The question is too big for him. I will see this often in the years to come, the way he could suddenly pause on a phrase or even just a word, as if in it were a doorway and his mind would enter and leave us momentarily. Back then we thought it was what all fathers did. We thought that fatherhood was this immense weight like a great overcoat and there were all manner of things your father had to be thinking of all the time just to keep the overcoat from crushing him. ‘Well,’ he says at last, ‘that’s a long story.’

‘All right.’ Aeney props himself up on his elbow. One look at his face and you know you can’t disappoint him. You just can’t. Before they are broken small boys are perfect creations.

‘Well,’ Dad says. ‘I’ll tell you the short version.’

I move in closer. My head is against my father’s side. It’s warm in a way only your father’s body is warm and his shirt smells the way only your own father’s can. It’s a thing impossible to explain or recapture, because it’s more than a smell, it’s more than the sum of Castile soap and farm sweat and dreams and endeavour, it’s more than Old Spice aftershave or Lux shampoo, more than any combination of anything you can find in the press in his bathroom. It’s in the heat and living of him. It goes out of his clothes after three days. That’s a thing I learned.

But then I am not thinking of any of that. I press myself into the warmth of my father and his arm lifts and comes around me. His other arm comes around Aeney.

‘Well, it was a big-enough ship,’ my father begins. ‘It belonged to a Mr Trelawney.’

Aeney needs details. ‘What kind of man was he?’

‘A good man. But he couldn’t keep a secret.’

‘Why not?’

‘It was just his failing. But he had a cool head, so that was good. Anyway, he owned the ship and he came with us. And brought with him his friend, a Doctor Livesey.’

‘Was he good?’

‘He was. He treated everybody the same.’

‘That was good.’

‘Yes.’

‘What was the Captain’s name?’

‘Smollett. He was a good Captain.’

‘You need a good Captain. Who else?’

‘There were plenty. There was a Mr Allardyce, Mr Anderson, and Mr Arrow.’

‘They are all As.’

‘Quiet, Ruth. What was Mr Arrow like?’

‘Mr Arrow drank. Even though it was not allowed.’

‘Did he fall overboard?’

‘Yes. He fell overboard during the night when we got to the Caribbean. His body was never seen again.’

Dad allows a pause for Mr Arrow’s body to sink without trace.

‘There was also Abraham Gray.’

‘What was he like?’

‘He was a carpenter. At first I didn’t like him, and when you’re on a ship with somebody you don’t like that’s no fun. But then he did some good things and I saw a different side of him. And in the end he saved my life.’

‘Did he?’

‘He certainly did.’

‘How?’

‘That comes later. First, who else? There was John Hunter, there was Richard Joyce. And Dick Johnson. He always had a Bible with him. Everywhere he went. He thought it would protect him in the seas.’

‘And did it?’

‘He didn’t drown. But he got malaria.’

‘Was that bad?’

‘Yes, Ruthie.’

‘He died?’

‘He did.’

We pay our respects to Mr Johnson as he follows Mr Arrow into the dark.

‘George Merry, Tom Morgan, O’Brien. We never knew O’Brien’s first name. He was just O’Brien.’

‘Good?’ Aeney’s O eyes.

Dad makes tremor an invisible whiskey bottle at his lips. Poor O’Brien.

‘The Caribbean, you know, is not a place. It is many places. Islands. Some of them are so small they’re not even on that map. But all of them are beautiful. The water is this marvellous blue. It’s so blue that once you see it you realise you’ve never seen blue before. That other thing you were calling blue is some other colour, it’s not blue. This, this is blue. It’s a blue that comes down from the sky into the water so that when you look in the sea you think sky and when you look at the sky you think sea.’

Aeney and I lie there and realise we’ve never seen blue, and how amazing it must be, and for a while I try the difficult trick of seeing what I’ve never seen except through my father’s telling. I set him sailing in the very best blue I can imagine, but know that is not blue enough.

‘Close your eyes to see it,’ he says.

We both close our eyes. Just when I think I am seeing it he lifts his arms from around us and our heads slide back deeper into the pillow on Aeney’s bed. The bed rises as the mountain ridge goes away and my father eases himself off. I’m in the warm space that still smells like him and I’m thinking of sailing towards an island in the marvellous blue.

Aeney doesn’t want to imagine. He wants the real thing. He wants to be there. ‘Tell us more.’

‘I will,’ Dad says. ‘But just get to the island now. Just arrive. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about Mr Silver.’

‘Mr Silver?’

‘Shsh. Lie back.’

‘But who is he?’

‘His name was John. We called him Long, even though he wasn’t.’

My eyes are closed, but I can feel Dad pull the covers up around Aeney. His voice is quiet because he thinks Ruthie is already asleep. Very gently he pats Aeney’s head and at his ear whispers, ‘He had a wooden leg.’

Chapter 3

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

When Mary MacCarroll sees Virgil Swain on Fisher’s Step she doesn’t fall in Love right away. She falls in Curiosity, which is less deep but more common. She sees a man with a sunburned face and ragged beard and presumes he’s a fisher. She has come out of the house to clear her head and walked in the April rain without purpose or destination. Often she walked the riverbank. The Shannon is a masculine river. It’s burly and brown and swollen with rain. It shoulders its way out between Kerry and Clare with an indifferent force but when you walk alongside it down where the fields fall away and the line of the land is this frayed green edge you can get a kind of river peace. I used to love walking there. Running water is best for daydreams, Charles Dickens said, and he was right.

Mary sees the man and knows he’s a stranger. He is standing looking at the river the way only fishermen do. But she sees no rod or tackle, and as she approaches she has enough sense of her own beauty to expect him to turn to look at her.

He doesn’t.

She walks three feet behind him, and he doesn’t turn. She goes on down the bank, discovers a seed of curiosity is cracking in her, and opening now, unfurling a first feathered edge as she thinks he’s looking now and makes as though tossing her hair but is checking to see if his head has turned.

It hasn’t.

She is only eighteen but has already taken enough possession of the world to know her own impact in it. It isn’t vanity like Anna Prender in Kilmurry who’d be happy if you carried a full-length mirror alongside her or Rosemary Carr inside in Kilrush who Nan says is in love with her own backside, it’s a natural thing. It’s what happens in small places. It’s what happens when your father was Spencer Tracy and you come to Mass walking with your head MacCarroll high and have a kind of ease and grace that people notice. It’s what happens when the timbers of the Men’s Aisle groan under the forward strain as you come up to Communion, or the biggest male attendance in Faha church occurs the evening of the Feast of Saint Blaise when Father Tipp is going to bless your arched bare throat. Something like it is in a poem of Austin Clarke’s in Soundings which Mrs Quinty used to teach us in TY. The ‘Sunday in every week’ one.

She’s used to it, that’s all.

And he doesn’t turn.

Well that’s fine. She doesn’t really care. She walks on down the river to the end of Ryan’s and she crosses out over the place where the wire ends. She goes along by O’Brien’s and up to Enright’s, all the time the rain falling softly and all the time the seed feathering some more.

Who is he?

She stops to talk with one of the Macs who are out counting cattle and says there is a stranger back along the way, but she only gets a that right? in reply and that doesn’t satisfy the thing the Curiosity craves. It wants to talk about him. It doesn’t matter what is said as long as something is, as long as somehow the mystery of him gets out of the place inside where the feathering is madding now.

She goes back along the bank, back past O’Brien’s and Enright’s and over the wire into Shaughnessy.

There he is, in the very same place. He hasn’t moved.

This time she can look at him as she approaches. She can allow the Curiosity what it needs, it needs detail; the way in profile his hair looks roughly barbered, the way the beard runs down into his shirt collar, the way the sun and sea have early-aged him. Details: boots without laces, she has never seen boots like them, trousers foreshortened by long wear and knee-gathers, the shirt that had once been white, the jacket he wears, tan leather, square-cut, thousand-creased, both dark-polished and dulled by weather, the jacket which later she will learn he got in Quito in Ecuador and from which he cannot be separated. There’s a paperback book that’s too tall for the jacket pocket. (It’s the Collier Books edition of W.B. Yeats’s Mythologies, Book 1,002, published in New York, priced $4.95, and on the cover the poet is young and melancholic, forelock falling on to his left eyebrow. It’s the book that brought Virgil back to Ireland, the one that begins with ‘A Teller of Tales’ where WB says the stories in it were told to him by Paddy Flynn in a leaky one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare. It’s the one where he says In Ireland this world and the world we go to after death are not far apart. The tops of pages are river-and-rain-warped, the whole book buckled a bit from travel, age and pockets, but it’s a book that feels companionable somehow, if you know what I mean. In it there are many pages with lines underscored, or in some cases with just ascending wing-like Nike tick-marks next to a paragraph. Sometimes the marks have been made in different inks and therefore different times, so that in ‘Drumcliff and Rosses’ after Yeats tells of Ben Bulben and Saint Columba there’s a wavy black line under how he climbed one day to get near Heaven with his prayers, but in ‘Earth, Fire and Water’ there are two red strokes slashed down in the margin next to I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Between pages 64 and 65, ‘Miraculous Creatures’, there’s one of those old grey cinema tickets on which is printed Admit One.)

Mary hasn’t seen a man so still, she hasn’t seen a man with a jacket like that, with a book in his pocket.

She walks back towards him. He’ll say hello this time, she thinks. He’ll know it’s me. Somehow he’ll have seen me the first time without my knowing and this time he’ll turn and say hello.

Maybe he’ll just turn and nod, she thinks. But at least then she will see his face.

She goes along the track by the river, it’s muck-tacky with rain, heels of her boots sucking. She is ten yards from him, then five; then she is passing behind him. He hasn’t turned.

What is the matter with him?

If she reaches she could put her hand on his back. If she reaches she could shove him into the river, and for a flash moment she is the girl who will do it, who will suddenly stop and push her two hands into the small of his back and send him spinning into the Shannon.

What is the matter with him? Is he deaf or blind or just rude?

She goes ten yards past when she decides to turn and tell him that this is Matty Shaughnessy’s field and it’s private. Fifteen when she thinks no she won’t. Twenty when she thinks she will fall over, go the full Jane Austen, hurt her ankle and cry out, twenty-five when she’s too mad and won’t give him the satisfaction and thirty when she comes through the stile out of the field and looks back to see him still standing there.

‘There’s a stranger down at the river,’ she tells her mother. And that is a first relief. It’s relief just to say stranger because then he is already somebody, and she is already connected to him.

That’s how I see it anyway. That’s how I see it when I ask Mam ‘How did you first meet Dad?’ and each time she tells me the story of Not Meeting, of Passing by, and how it seems to me God was giving them every chance not to meet, and the singular nature of their characters will mean their stories will run parallel and never do a Flannery O’Connor. Never converge.

‘Is there?’ Nan says. She’s flour-elbows in this scene. It’s a bit Walter Macken meets John B. Keane because she’s breadmaking the loaves she sells in Nolan’s shop to keep them alive. Her dancing days are over and Spencer Tracy is on black-and-white reruns in her head now, but she knows this day is coming. You can’t have a daughter that beautiful and not know.

‘A stranger?’ she says. Nan is sharp as a tack and cute as buttons. She won’t look up from the dough but she’ll let her daughter get it out.

‘I don’t know who he is,’ Mary says.

‘No?’

‘No.’

Mary throws her coat on the door hook, sits to toe the heel of a boot.

Nan gives the dough thumbs. She gives it Almighty Thumbs. Her thumb knuckles stick out like shiny knobs from years of breadmaking. ‘What’s he like?’

‘I don’t know. I hardly saw him.’

‘Didn’t you?’

Mary goes to tend the fire, roughly rakes down the grate and assembles the embers in a little heap.

‘Tall, I suppose?’ Nan asks.

‘I think. I don’t know. I told you, I hardly saw him.’

Nan kneads the story some more. ‘What was he doing? In Shaughnessy’s, I wonder?’

Mary doesn’t answer. She’s not going to speak about him any more. ‘Nothing,’ she says, after a while.

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing. Just looking at the river.’

That night he’s with her in her bed.

Not in that way.

She’s lying in her bed with the curtains drawn and the window open because the April night is softer than tissue and because she can’t get enough air. She’s lying on her side facing the window and the room is loud with that song the river has when the rain is spring heavy and the Shannon flowing fast. She can’t sleep. He won’t let her. What was he doing there? Why did he not turn? She’s angry with him, which marks a deepening and keeps him there, as if already their relationship is a living thing and he is already someone with whom she can get angry. She moves on to her other side and puts the pillow over her ear. But it’s useless. Somehow the river is louder when you cover your ears. It’s like the sea in shells. You hear it in your blood. I used try to escape it with headphones when I told Mam I couldn’t bear to hear the river running any more and for weeks she tried everything, taping the vent in the skylight, hanging chimes made of shells, bringing up Dad’s music and playing it loud, but even J.S. Bach had to pause sometime and between his Movements the river sang and in the end I stood in my nightie and opened the skylight and screamed at it, which is neither great for your reputation or stopping river noise.

Mary’s angry at him. Then she’s angry at herself for even thinking about him. And so in the bed they are joined. It’s not an ideal relationship, but it’s a start. I have the same thing with Vincent Cunningham, so I know. She tells herself to forget about him, but if there’s one sure way not to forget something it’s to say Forget That.

Why is her pillow so lumpy?

Why is the sheet so twisted around her legs?

Why, why, why is there no air in April?

They have a hell of a night together.

In the morning the birds are singing with that extra-demented loudness they have in spring in Clare, they’re all ADHD and they’ve got this urgent message they’re trying to deliver but because God’s a comedian they can only speak it in chirrup. Mary comes into the kitchen. Nan is there already. Since her husband died she can’t bear being in the bed and sleeps in the chair so she’s up before the birds, the bread loaves that were out upside down overnight are now being tapped on their backs before Marty Mungovan who was sweet on Nan from her dancing days comes to collect them.

‘Morning,’ Nan says to her daughter.

But Mary goes straight out the back door and across the haggard to the hen run. She lifts and pulls open the mesh-wire gate and the hens raise an excited clucking. The older ones see that she’s bringing no margarine tub of Layers Mash and turn away and the younger ones in terror run into the wire and poke their heads through it, for a moment scrabbling at the ground for propulsion going nowhere but squawking mad because they know something unusual is happening. Which is true, something has happened. She crosses the Run and stoops in to the House and from the wooden crate that has Satsumas inked into it and a bed of patted-down hay she takes six eggs.

She comes into the kitchen and starts cracking them straight away into a bowl.

Nan knows enough of the human heart not to pass comment.

The eggs get beaten. They get beaten big-time. They get salted and peppered. Then they get beaten some more.

Then they get abandoned. She just stops beating them mid-whisk and leaves them and goes out the back door again, this time not going into the haggard but out the pencil-gravel way where the grass grows up through it in wet April and makes a kind of slug-road into the garden. She goes out the gate and walks with her arms folded across her and her green cardigan pulled over but not buttoned. She never buttons it. There’s something in her can’t stand confinement. It’s a MacCarroll thing. She walks down the road and Marty Mungovan passes her in his van coming to collect the breads and gives her the nod and she just inclines her head slightly in briefest greeting. She hasn’t brushed her hair, she hasn’t done one thing of all the things she might have done in getting ready to go and meet her future husband.

Because right then she’s just curious, she wants to know, that’s all. And she marches down the road that runs parallel to the river and takes its curves from it until she gets to Murphy’s gate and for an instant she hesitates, just one moment, just one moment in which she might say to herself what the hell are you doing? and turn back, just one moment which flies away into the mad chirruping of the birds, then she climbs the gate.

She sees him right away. He’s there, in the same place, in the same pose, watching the river in the same way.

Just the fact of it, just the strangeness and the stillness and the solidity of him of whom she’d been thinking all night, takes her breath. She’s aware her heart jumps into the side of her throat. She’s aware the ground has a spongy spring to it and the sky is huge. He’s there again, standing, looking westward. He’s there. It’s like the French Lieutenant’s woman in the The French Lieutenant’s Woman only in reverse, and with the river instead of the sea, but there’s the same inevitability, the same sense of things just about to go bang.

What’s he doing there?

Mary hasn’t worked out the next step. She didn’t really expect him to be there and came half in the hope that his having vanished again would free her of thinking about him. But now she has to figure out what happens next. She’s crossing the field to the mucky track again and she’s got her arms tighter around her and her head lowered a bit now, but she’s thinking Has he been here all night? And in that there’s madness and attraction both. Right then she doesn’t have the words to explain it. It’s like Colette Mulvihill over in Kilbaha who left The Church and took up Leonard Cohen and when Father Tipp asked her why she just said Mystery, Father, which was a blow to him because the Church had spent fifty years taking the mystery out of it so that now uncaught criminals like Kieran Coyne and Maurice Crossan could become Eucharistic Ministers and the Hosts arrive in a blue van from Portlaoise that says Maguire Bros, Clergy Apparel & Supplies, All Religions, right on the side and Wash Me Please in finger-writing underneath.

Mystery, Father, was about right.

Mary walks along the track. She’s not looking at him. She won’t. But she’s fallen so far in Curiosity there’s no way she’s going to be able to go home again until she’s found out something. Her mind is pulling at the mystery, and it’s flying past River-stalker, Inspector of Riverbanks, Surveyor of Soils & Erosion, Fisher-scout, Salmon-spy, Pathfinder, Priest, but it never gets to Man at the End of Living, it never gets to Man Who has Come to Drown, because she’s not yet acquainted with anything Swain. She doesn’t know about Grandfather Absalom waiting in the candles for The Calling or the pole-vaulting or the Philosophy of Impossible Standard. She doesn’t know poets can have ash in the soul, or that after so much burning there comes a time when there’s nothing left but blowing away or phoenix-rising. She hasn’t read Eileen Simpson’s Poets in their Youth (Book 3,333, Picador, London) or John Berryman’s The Freedom of the Poet (Book 3,334, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) or Peter Ackroyd’s Blake (Book 3,340, Vintage, London), Paul Ferris’s Dylan Thomas (Book 3,341, Dial Press, New York), Paddy Kitchen’s Gerard Manley Hopkins (Book 3,342, Carcanet Press, London) or any of the others my father gathered together in a mad company under the slope of the skylight where once the fire smoked and the hose soaked them all. She doesn’t know that he has seen much of the world, but she feels it. She doesn’t know he has come back to Ireland carrying a caustic disappointment in himself, that he feels is this all there is?, that his life has amounted to nothing, that nothing has happened but Time, and that now he has walked across Ireland Swain-style, fishing the rivers his father described, and is that most dangerous of things, a man looking for a sign. No sign had been seen, until yesterday, when he came to that spot in the river and for no reason that can be explained fell into the conviction that he was meant to be there.

He has no more idea of why than she does.

But he has that Swain ability to believe in the outlandish. The family has history in it.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks him. The thing is too big in her to get out delicately.

He doesn’t move. He’s been standing too still and too long and maybe he thinks it is his own mind asking. But then there’s the difference in the air. There’s something he can’t see but feels and he turns and looks at her.

The French Lieutenant’s woman’s face is unforgettable and tragic. Its sorrow wells out as naturally as water, Fowles says. And I think that’s what Mary sees too. He turns and she sees the sadness and right away she’s sorry for her bluntness and being so MacCarroll and she wishes she could wind the moment backwards.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise I shouldn’t be here.’

‘No,’ she says, a little too quickly. ‘It’s all right.’ Her arms are still about her and she rubs her hands a little back and forth on them as if she’s cold but she’s not cold.

‘I’ll go.’

But he doesn’t go. He uses the future not the present tense, and between those two is our life and history.

She feels him looking at her. She feels for a moment arrested by it, and in that arrest there’s danger and warning and dizziness, but mostly there’s the irresistible pull of when a pair of eyes are matched, because although she doesn’t know it yet here’s Love and Death in the same breath, here’s one of those moments upon which a story turns, and right now, just by the way she lifts her face and smiles, my mother is about to save my father.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘You can stay.’

(‘Mam, how did you meet Dad?’

‘I just met him.’

‘But how?’

‘He was just there. That’s all.’

‘There?’

‘Yes. He was just there.’)

I’ve decided it’s the Elsewhere in him that draws her. Like now, Faha back then was a parish of two minds. In one, there was nothing that happened anywhere in the world that was nearly as interesting or noteworthy as what happened in your own parish. To them travel was a waste of time and money. What would you be wanting to go there for? was delivered with such vinegar disregard that the legs were cut from under the very idea and to even consider travelling beyond the Faha signpost was evidence of some genetic weakness. To the others, there was nothing of any significance that ever happened inside the bounds of the parish. As proven by the RTE evening news, in which Faha had never appeared, the world happened somewhere else. Thus far the whole of human history had bypassed the parish and the sooner you could get on the N68 and out of it the sooner you could encounter actual life. It wasn’t until the Bust when those with Mindset One had no choice and all the tilers and painters and chippies and plasterers had vanished and the Under-21 team stopped existing altogether that Mindsets One and Two, Home and Away, started getting mixed up. Then girls like Mona Fitz and Marian Callinan set up Faha-in-Queens, Faha-in-Melbourne and started e-publishing versions of the parish newsletter with times of Mass in Faha, this week’s Epistle Readers, the WeightWatchers meeting, the Old Folks Cake Sale and the Under-14 fixtures, just so people could pretend they weren’t Elsewhere.

It’s the Elsewhere in Virgil Swain that draws her. He is a stranger. It’s the oldest plot. But it’s a good one. She tells him he can stay, as if it is in her power, as if she is somehow already in charge, and she’s decided the best way to hide her attraction to him is to deny it exists.

It’s in the Book of Women’s Stratagems.

She says he can stay and then she walks away.

But really they are already in a relationship. Already she’s thinking of the places he’s been and already she wants him to tell her, and that telling will be the first bridge between my mother and father. His stories will bring her across to him.

He stays in the village in the unofficial B&B that Phyllis Thomas opened when her husband left her for a Gourmet Tart in Galway. After three days he is no longer just a stranger but The Stranger, like a DC Comics version that’s drawn in purple or grey, because that was when the only strangers in the parish were there for funerals or weddings and there was no such thing as tourists in Faha and it was still twenty-five years before Nolan’s would start selling the Polish beer and the kind of bread that tastes like wood. He stays in the village and he walks the roads of the parish in a way that’s already noted as peculiar. Farmers don’t walk if they can take tractors. Men only walk if their cars are broken. Nobody back then walks just for walking. The only time there are Walkers on the road is when Mass is on. So Virgil is already building a mythology. He’s tall and quiet and the Readers of Character who occupy the tall stools in Carmody’s or prop on Mina Prendergast’s post-office windowsill before and after Mass are already tonguing their thumbs and flicking the pages of Who He Might Be.

Mary doesn’t know what to do with him. She knows she wants him in her day. She likes that he’s there, that if she goes out on her bicycle with eggs or bread she’ll see him somewhere. She’ll see his tall figure over a stonewall, see the looping stride, the long back, the uplift of his chin as he goes, that Swain angle, as if he’s always half-looking above.

And then he’s so quiet. And there is something irresistible in that.

They become what Dilsey Hughes from Dublin calls An Item.

It’s a walking item, mostly.

They walk. That’s what Mam says. They walk everywhere. Sometimes he doesn’t talk and she sticks these little barbed comments in him to get him to respond. She says something to get his seriousness to collapse and when it does she laughs and then he smiles and she feels this flood of warmth coming over her and she knows now this is more than curiosity, but she won’t say the word Love. He’ll have to say it first.

But now she’s afraid he might go. She’s afraid that one day she might wake up and he will be gone in the same way that he came.

So she sees if she can drive him off. The MacCarrolls have that little perverse streak in them. She’d rather break her own heart than have it broken. There’s an Irish logic to it. But maybe you have to be here a hundred years in the rain before you understand it. She tries Not Showing Up. That’s another stratagem. She’s mad to be out walking and bumping against him but she won’t let herself. She stays in the house and beats eggs. She keeps an eye to the window to see if he’ll come in the gate. But he doesn’t. He has the Swain thing where disappointment and hurt are first nature and he stands out by the river and feels the nails being driven into his heart.

Between the Swain thing and the MacCarroll thing it’s not looking great.

When I tell it to myself at this stage I’m worried for me and Aeney.

Because both of them are so good at suffering. Dad has come back to Ireland and believes that in Mary MacCarroll he’s found meaning. And I mean Meaning. Which in ordinary language is significant enough, but in Swain-song is pretty much the tops. He believes everything up to now has been pointless. What have I been doing? The voyaging, the high-walled seas, the lightless-night horizons, the fevers, sicknesses, the frizzled scorched skin of his brow and the tops of his ears, the sailings in and the sailings out, the whole kit and caboodle, the whole Boy’s Own, Melville and Conrad, conceit of it, all of it has been a running away, an avoidance of what has been flowing in his blood all the time, the sense that there is something I must do. And what must be done is in fact here, in this parish, by this river, with this woman.

I’m not an expert, but when a man finds Meaning in a woman it seems to me you know two things. One, you know you’re going Deep, and Two, you know this is the most high-risk kind of love there is.

For Mam the risk is already clear. She knows there will be no other Virgil Swain coming through Faha. She knows she has to stay there and take care of Nan because Mam has that good big heart of Spencer Tracy in her and she will never let you down. She’ll sacrifice whatever she has to. Some people are just that good, they have this soldier-saint part of them intact and it takes your breath because you keep forgetting human beings can sometimes be paragons. So she’s caught because she knows this is it. This is it. And despite every caution that the Central Council of the Faha Branch of the Irish Countrywomen Association might have offered, that a man not born in the parish, a man not born in the county, or even in The West, a man with no soil on his hands or cattle in his blood, would find it impossible to be happy here, Mam wants to believe he will love her enough to stay, and that once he does everything will be all right.

But she won’t ask him. She won’t go any further in the Book of Stratagems. There’s no summer dresses or lipstick or hairdos or perfume, no invitation to tea, no here’s a cake I baked or there’s a dance in Tubridy’s or I saw you fishing yesterday.

Nothing.

She waits and she suffers and he waits and he suffers, both of them like characters in a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter.

Chapter 4

I’m an incurable romantic, according to Vincent Cunningham.

Incurable anyway, I said.

Then I told him that the Latin word for waiting is pretty much the same as suffering, and he went Wow, like I was the keeper of Cool Things and if he could he would have kissed my Knowledge.

My father started fishing. Right down by Shaughnessy’s he started. Mary saw him in the morning when she went to collect the eggs. She stalled in the pen, heard the softest whish wrinkling the air and turned to see his line floating its question mark over the river. ‘He’s fishing,’ she told the hens, who were not indifferent to the news because she spared a few eggs that day.

You and I know that Virgil Swain was not going anywhere. We know he had that same Swain certainty his father had in the candles in Oxford. This is what I am meant to do. And that was unshakeable iron in him.

Faith is the most peculiar thing. It’s Number One in human mysteries. Because how do you do it? Where do you learn it? For the Believers it doesn’t matter how outlandish or unlikely the thing you believe in, if you believe it, there’s no arguing. Pythagoras’s early life was spent as a cucumber. And after that he lived as a sardine. That’s in Heraclitus. That’s what he believed. Beside the east bank of the River Cong in Mayo was a Monks’ Fishing House and the monks laid a trap in the river so that when a salmon entered it a line was pulled and rang a little bell in the monks’ kitchen, and although there were strict laws forbidding any traps nobody ever stopped the monks because they knew the monks believed the salmon were Heaven-sent and even unbelievers don’t want to tax Heaven. Just in case. That’s in The Salmon in Ireland. Bridie Clohessy believes her weight is all water, Sean Conway believes the Germans are to blame for most things, Packy Nolan that it was the red M&Ms gave him the cancer. With faith there’s no arguing.

Virgil Swain believed this was the place he was meant to be. This was the place of which, when I imagine him lying fevered and delirious below decks in the West Indies, or landed in Cape Town and gone ashore with whoever were the real-life versions of Abraham Gray and John Hunter and Richard Joyce, he was dreaming.

It was not so much that it was Faha itself. It was this bend in the river.

River bends have their own potency. Ever since some hand wrote a river flows out of Eden rivers and Paradise are pretty much inseparable. If you’re reading this in Persian think Apirindaeza, in Hebrew Pardes. As far as I can make out there are rivers in every Paradise. Though not always fishermen. Bishop Epiphanius in 403 ad had an epiphany and decided Paradise had in fact two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, but whether these flowed into or out of Paradise was not clear and Augustine made this even more confusing by saying a river flowed out of Paradise and watered Eden, which led to serious problems because according to all maps of Paradise that meant the water had to flow upwards. A conundrum until John Milton solved it by explaining that paradisiacal water defies gravity. We are all looking forward to that.

So, for my father it was this bend in the river.

It was probably only the land from here to McInerney’s and Fisher’s Step, the water thick and wide and the feeling of imminence that the river is about to meet the sea.

So the truth is he didn’t fall in love either, he fell into Faith, which was onetime maybe the Champions League of Love until the sponsors pulled out and now it doesn’t get coverage any more. It’s still in poetry though. That’s where you find faith. I’ll get to that later.

Virgil Swain stayed and fished. He out-waited the length of time it took for Mary MacCarroll to defeat her doubts and start thinking that maybe he was The One. Maybe he wouldn’t be going away.

The first time Dad stepped inside this house he had a salmon with him.

It wasn’t as odd as it sounds. Mam had seen him catch it. She’d seen the non-catching first, the days he spent casting the line and catching a large amount of nothing so that in the village the story was Your Man had nothing on the end of his line, no bait (or hook according to Old Brouder), that he was escaped from somewhere, or was Simple, and was hoping the salmon would catch him.

Mam had seen him and knew he was fishing. She’d seen the way he went about it, the rhythmic rituals he had, the musclework of back and forearm, the interplay of rod and line, pulling and unreeling, that little freeing of shoulder he did before casting into what was above him. She’d seen the fishing going on for days, the actual vigil it was as he stood there, remarkable both for persistence and patience, and the sort of trancelike state it seemed you could get into when you were a man hooked into a river.

But she didn’t know Virgil was trying to catch his father.

She didn’t know that once he stood on the mucky bank at Shaughnessy’s and the hook went into the water he had to plant his feet to stop the tide of regret pulling him in. He knew he was on the threshold of real life, that real life was just behind him up in our house and that here was an Impossible something he was going to do. And now he was stricken by the urging of some kind of basic human need: he wanted to tell his father. He wanted to say Dad because he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually said that to Abraham when he was alive. Dad, I’ve found what I’m going to do. I’m going to do what you couldn’t do. I’m going to make happiness. And I’m going to make it here.

Abraham didn’t reply. But maybe he looked down and saw the candles burning in his son’s eyes because right then and there Virgil caught a salmon.

To you, Dear Reader, this may not seem a Major Plot Point. But to those of us versed in Swaindom, we know it was a blessing.

If you’re like Mona Boyce, who has the narrowest nose in the parish and is permanently engaged in the science of hairsplitting, you’ll say it was a sea trout. But I know it was a salmon.

Nan looked at him in the doorway. He was a jumble of angles. If he wasn’t cradling the salmon his arms would be too long. His hair and face were wet and his eyes glossed with a dangerous amount of feeling. ‘Mary!’ she called over her shoulder, not taking her eyes from him. ‘Mary!’

Mam had come in only moments before him. She’d seen him lift the fish in the sky and had come home running. She’d come in and gone to the blurry grey-speckled mirror in the bathroom and had a fight with her hair. She tousled it loose and it laughed at her, then she tied it up too tight and it felt like a hand had grabbed her from above and was pulling the top of her head off, then she released it again and patted it like it needed reassurance and if it got enough it would sit just right, for just this once, please.

‘Mary!!’

When she came out Dad was still standing in the doorway with the salmon and Nan was still looking at him, like there was a language barrier, like between Swains and MacCarrolls there was this ocean, which of course was true because Swains were basically English and MacCarrolls Irish and I am the child of two languages and two religions, and the most male female and the oldest young person to boot.

‘Hello,’ she said. In my version she said it the Jane Austen way, like he was Captain Wentworth and they were in Lyme Regis and a covering of coolness was needed in case she just went over and grabbed him by the wet jacket and started kissing him, for although they’d Gone Walking, which was the first step on the road to intimacy, this was another step altogether, this was coming inside the house and meeting Nan.

‘I caught one.’

‘At last,’ she said.

He looked at her, but he didn’t move.

The thing that was moving was Nan’s mind. She was flicking the pages fast, like when you read every third paragraph to try and get ahead of the story. Nan stood looking at the two of them looking at each other. ‘I’ll cook it, so,’ she announced.

Sometimes when I’m lying here and the day outside is that warm mugginess we get in wet summertime, when you know the sun is shining somewhere high above the drizzle but all we have is this jungle-warm dampness thronged with midges, my mind goes a little García Márquez-meets-Finn MacCool and when Nan cooks the fish by the fire the whole house becomes imbued with salmon-ness and foreknowledge. The whole history of us fills the air.

Virgil is to sit at the table.

‘Sit at that table,’ Mary says. She’s all business. She has that no-nonsense practicality of a countrywoman and in a flash she’s back and across the kitchen with mugs, plates, cutlery. She’s filling the milk jug from the larger jug, sawing into a loaf, plating slices, feeding turf to the fire, and at no time looking at Virgil Swain.

He sits. In Spencer Tracy’s chair.

‘That was my husband’s chair,’ Nan says, taking the head off the fish.

‘I’m sorry.’ He shoots up like he’s been stung, stands in the perplex of the moment until Mary says, ‘It’s all right, go on, sit.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sit.’

‘Will I take this. .?’

‘Sit.’

He sits back down but on the very edge of the chair. His trouser legs are dark flags to his thighs, boots leaking the river, and down the slope of the floor run two little streams of his arrival in their lives.

‘Not a bad fish,’ Nan says, head-down and doing serious industry with the knife.

It is in fact an incredible fish. It’s an Elizabeth Bishop fish and can be found in her Collected Poems (see Book 2,993), but Nan believes that praise is a forerunner of doom. The head and tail go in a pan with butter and salt. They spatter out the possibility of conversation. Then Mary carries them on a plate, calls ‘Sibby Sibby Sibby’ at the front door, and although I’ve never met a cat in Clare not called Sibby this one knows it’s her and comes from where all day she sits on the roof of the henhouse watching the Hens Channel. Virgil can see Mary through the window. He watches the way her hair falls as she bends to the Sibby, her dress holding the line of her knee, her fingers playing on the cat’s head and confusing it into choosing between two pleasures, wanting the caress and the salmon at the same time.

Mary comes back in. She doesn’t look at Virgil as she passes. She has the air of having so much to do. The air of Feeding the Guest. It’s a country thing. Maybe it’s an Irish thing. The Welcome is more important than anything else. You can be dying, you can have no money in the bank, your heart can be breaking from any number of aches, but still you have to lay the Welcome. Feed the Guest. Tomatoes have to be sliced, lettuce run under the tap and dabbed dry, three leaves on a plate. A scallion. Are there boiled eggs? There are. Bread, butter, salt. Whatever is happening in your life is of no consequence when you have to do the Welcome.

‘You sit,’ Nan says to Mary. She isn’t used to being Cupid. This is her first and only go and she’s that bit rough.

‘I’ll get napkins.’

Nan gives her the look that says Napkins? which is in subtitles only MacCarrolls can read.

Do they have napkins?

They do. They are paper Christmas ones. Mary puts one on each plate. Then she turns and presses her hands together and looks at the kitchen like there must be something more she could bring to the table. ‘You want something to drink,’ she says. It’s not a question. ‘We have Smithwick’s.’ She looks to Nan. ‘Don’t we?’

‘There’s a bottle of Guinness.’

‘Smithwick’s or Guinness?’

Her face turned to him makes his answer choke at the base of his throat. ‘Actually. . just water would be fine.’

That’s when Nan turns. That’s when she knows this is a story she hasn’t read before.

‘Just. . water. If. .’ The words are trapped somewhere.

Both of the women look at him. What is he going to say? If you have any?

‘I don’t drink.’ He lends it the tone of apology. ‘When I was at sea there were many. .’ That’s all he says. That’s the whole story. He lets the rest of it tell itself. There’s a moment of stillness while that story passes. Fighting the salmon-head Sibby makes the plate rattle on the flagstone outside. ‘Just water would be lovely.’

‘Water,’ Nan says to her daughter and turns back to tinfoiling the salmon.

Mary fills the big white jug with the blue bands on it. She fills it too full and lands it with a topspill on the table in front of him.

‘Lovely,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’ He doesn’t just mean the water. There is this thing about him then, this quality that I imagined when I sat in lectures on Edmund Spenser or Thomas Wyatt, an old-world gentlemanly chivalry and courtesy about Virgil Swain, as if everything that comes to him in those moments is so unexpected and marvellous that what he feels is grace.

‘You sit now,’ Nan says, still not quite managing the Cupid.

And because once the table is set and there’s absolutely nothing left in the press that can possibly be put out — cold-slaw, Colman’s mustard, pepper, ketchup — the next bit of The Welcome is to sit and ask How do you like it here?; Mary pushes her palms twice down her dress, jabs her fingers into her hair, gives up, crosses the kitchen, sharply pulls back the chair opposite him, and asks, ‘So, how do you like it here?’

‘Very much.’

‘Good.’

That exhausts the dialogue. She realises she hasn’t folded the napkins and takes hers and begins to press it in halves. Virgil does the same. Both of them are useless at it. Maybe evenness is a thing intolerable to love. Maybe there’s some law, I don’t know. She lines up the halves of hers, runs her forefinger down the crease. When she picks it up the thing is crooked. So is his. She undoes the fold and goes at it again, but the napkin wants to fall into that same line again and does so to spite her, and does so to spite him, or to occupy both with conundrums, or to say in the whimsical language of love that the way ahead will not be a straight line.

She doesn’t give up, and he doesn’t give up. And in that is the whole story, for those who read Napkin.

Mary and Virgil are sitting by the set table at the river window, Nan’s folded Clare Champion is on the sill, and at the fold there’s this ad saying The Inis Cathaigh Hotel for Weddings, so maybe Nan has more of sly Cupid in her than she is given credit for. They sit and look out at the all-knowing river rushing past and the Sacred Heart light is burning red overhead and the smell of the salmon rises and takes the place of conversation.

It’s not a fish smell like Lacey’s where since Tommy lost the job they only eat mackerel and out-of-date Lidl bread, or the Creegans, who since the buildings stopped live off river eels, and like the Zulus Dickens saw in Hyde Park and said were fair odoriferous; it’s this warm pink insinuation into the air. It’s lovely and gentle and penetrating and smells of the supernatural. To my mind that cooking salmon is pretty much the Swain version of the Thurible, and Nan has become the Thurifier, pokering the turf into life, turning the fish, peeling back the foil to check the progress, revealing the pink flesh and releasing a great waft of the impossible.

And I think right then Virgil looks at her. He looks across the table and when she feels him looking she flushes pink and warm and keeps her eyes on the river outside. She’s looking at the river and he’s looking at her looking at the river and there’s no way back for him now. This is his life right here, the salmon is telling him. This is it, the salmon says, and because the salmon is knowledge and knows everything Virgil knows it’s true. The air itself is changed, and what seemed impossible, that he might stop travelling and stop seeking a better world somewhere else, is suddenly not only possible but inevitable and here, in this woman’s face, it begins.

‘That’s done now,’ Nan says, licking the burn on her finger, and ferrying the fish to the table.

Chapter 5

You can’t really imagine your parents kissing. I can’t anyway.

You can’t imagine your own origin, the way you can’t imagine the beginning of the world. Not everything can be explained, is a standard Swainism. You just can’t imagine the consequences that led to you, or imagine those consequences not happening. You can’t imagine the world without you because once you do everything else takes on this kind of temporary sheen like breath blown on a window. I know I shouldn’t even be thinking of this, but maybe it’s because like Oliver in Chapter the First of Oliver Twist I am unequally poised between this world and the next. That’s my excuse anyway. You can’t imagine your own origin. It’s like this mysterious source or spring somewhere. You know it happened; that’s all.

Mam and Dad married in St Peter’s Church, Faha, and had a dinner after in the Inis Cathaigh Hotel, Kilrush. The Aunts were the only guests of the groom, and all of Faha came for the MacCarrolls, filling the Bride’s Side pews to bursting and giving the church the perspective of tilting to starboard. Though Mam didn’t know it yet, their wedding day was my father’s first time in a church since his own christening. He had never been confirmed, but Father Mooney, not a big believer in paperwork, a lover of roast beef, and in his last year before retiring into the saintly surrounds of Killaloe, supposed the certificate was on its way in the post and went full steam ahead.

It was a noted wedding in the parish memory. I think it was because Dad was still that DC Comics figure, The Stranger, and because none of the men in the parish could believe that Mam hadn’t chosen one of them. Long before the Consecration, before the head-bowing part when the Bride and Groom are up there kneeling together and there’s this sense of Something Big happening, men’s hearts were already breaking. Bits of longing and dreams were cracking off and sliding away the way Feeney’s field did into the sea. Father Mooney must have felt it, this giant ache that filled his church. In the Men’s Aisle there were some with prayerhands clasped knuckle-white, cheeks streaked with high-colouring, thin nets of violet, and their Atlantic blue eyes boring down into the red-and-black tiles hoping for an Intercession. When it didn’t come they did what men here do and by midnight had emptied the bar at the Inis Cathaigh and the emergency crates and barrels that were brought up from Crotty’s.

Mam didn’t care. She was only thinking here is my life, here it was beginning, and although she had only heard the vaguest bits of the Swain story, only knew a few paragraphs of different chapters, she didn’t mind. When she was a girl, Mam had some wildness in her. She had a bit of the Anna Karenina thing, not in the Other Man sense but in the way Anna longed for life with a capital L. I’ve read Anna Karenina (Book 1,970, Penguin, London) cover to cover twice, and both times couldn’t help thinking that in that largeness of heart, that capacity for feeling and desire and passion, there’s some kind of holiness. I’m with Anna. She’s the greatest woman character ever created and the one I most wish would come up the stairs and sit by the bed and tell me what to do with Vincent Cunningham.

Mam took a leap. That’s the thing. She took a leap with a man who had no employment or apparent friends, whose sisters were strange gazelles in long wool coats with fierce buttons, a man whose mystery was encapsulated in the phrase Away at Sea, who had come back for no reason other than to find her. She couldn’t possibly know she would be happy with Virgil Swain, not really. But she was the daughter of Spencer Tracy, and there was something in him she trusted. She couldn’t have explained it. It was a mystery. But she believed in it. It’s that MacCarroll thing, Tommy says, belief in mystery. It’s well known. He married his Maureen because they ran out of crisps in Cusack Park and she had a bag.

The honeymoon was one night in Galway.

When they came back Nan had prepared The Room. Dad moved in with the baffled deepsea shyness of a character just arriving in a story already underway. He had the awkwardness of an alien. It was his first home, but it wasn’t his. Like Mr Lowther in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Book 1,980, Penguin Classics, London) he’d never be quite at home in his own home. There were MacCarrolls in the stones, MacCarrolls in the rafters, MacCarrolls up the chimney. And then there was Nan.

In those first weeks he had to sail around her. The kitchen was hers. She was already in it when he woke. She was still in it when they went down to bed in the evening. The first sounds of morning were the leaden thump of the bread dough.

‘Morning, Bridget.’

He sounded like an American to her. She took a puff on her cigarette. ‘Morning.’ She couldn’t get around his name yet.

He had to stoop to look out the deep-sill window. ‘Not raining,’ he said.

‘Yet.’

‘Would you like tea?’

‘I’ve had tea.’

‘I’m going to make some for Mary.’

Thump. She flipped the dough on its back, knuckled its swollen belly, picked up the cigarette and gave it another puff. Because she hated the sight of butts, because she associated them with the men with Italian accents who always got shot first in the black-and-white movies, Nan had already developed the ability to smoke cigarettes entire without losing a fragment of ash. After the first few goes she smoked upwards, turning her head sideways and in under the cigarette chimney-style so the little tower of ash balanced off her hand and never fell.

Virgil moved the kettle from the side of the range on to the hot plate, and stood, heating his hands that didn’t need heating, his eyes travelling the shelves, the walls, the dresser, taking in everything, the small silver trophy one of Grandfather’s greyhounds won an age ago in Galway, the little stack of Memoriam Cards standing face out with the memory of the latest Late, the plastic Infant of Prague, the twist of brown paper holding unused carrot seeds from Chambers’s in Kilrush, the Sacred Mission Fathers calendar with the one picture of black African children, the Saint Martin de Porres one that was never used with a picture of Peruvians and permanent January, the ESB bill standing upwards in a mug so as not to be forgotten, the three white porcelain eggcups with miniature hunting scenes that were a gift from Peggy Nottingham and were never used for eggs but hoarded thumbtacks and sometimes hairclips and two spare red Christmas lightbulbs, a whole history of things that made Our House.

Everything was already in place; that was the thing. If he opened a drawer in the dresser he’d find it crammed with what appeared to be rubbish — dried-out Crayola markers, worn-down stubby pencils, tangles of string, rubber bands, playing cards with the Seven of Diamonds and the Three of Spades missing, a single red battery, a round flat box of hard sweets long stuck together, a golfball, a tiny screwdriver that came in a Christmas Cracker, matchbooks, a yoyo, a mouth organ — things unremarkable except in the aftermath of death when they take on themselves a portion of haunting.

Where would he fit in this house?

The kettle began to boil. ‘Are you sure you won’t have tea?’

‘That’s not boiled. Leave it boil a while.’ She didn’t look up. The dough was surrendering. ‘What are you intending to do?’

‘To do?’

‘Here. For a living.’ With full forearm force, bang! she flung the dough down on to the floury table.

‘Well, there’s the land,’ Virgil said.

‘The land is bad. You’re not a farmer.’

‘I could learn.’

The kettle was at full steam now, an urgent plume racing to ten o’clock, but he didn’t lift it.

‘Do you know anything else?’ She didn’t look up. She gave the kneading the thumbs.

What did he know?

He knew Ahab, he knew Mr Tulkinghorn, he knew Quentin Compson and Sebastian Flyte and Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Bovary and Alyosha Karamazov, he knew Latin Declensions and French Verbs, Hernán Cortés, Euclid, Knots, the Capitals of the World, how to parse a sentence, how to live on tinned food and powdered milk, he knew what the sun looked like in the eveningtime in December off Punta Arenas, how the wind off Cape Town carried the scent of sage in spring, he knew tides and tempests, he knew there was an island in Cuba called La Isla de la Juventud that bore exact resemblance to the geography of RLS’s Treasure Island, but Virgil Swain did not know anything he could do in the County Clare.

Nan worked the dough into a rough circle, and then with the base of her hand chopped a cross into the top. ‘The land it will have to be then,’ she said. She rubbed her hands together, balling crumbs she slapped off her palms. ‘I’ll have tea, so.’ She drew on the last of the cigarette, turned on the tap and doused the ash, looked out the window at the haggard and the haybarn with the three panels hanging loose. ‘If you’re making it.’

Irish people hate to lose face. That’s Number One dictum. That’s why the Bust was what Kevin Connors called an unholy show, and why the whole nation was mortified at the carry-on of the bankers and developers. Not so much because it happened, but because everyone in the world now knew that it had happened and we were once again Those Irish. We’ll bear anything in the privacy of our own homes, as long as the world doesn’t have to know.

How Public, like a frog, is dear Emily’s version (Book 2,500, Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, Faber & Faber, London).

So, right then and there, Nan decided that if Virgil Swain was going to be a farmer he wasn’t going to be one that people would laugh at.

She opened the kitchen door, shouted, ‘Mary, come get your tea!’ and told Virgil, ‘Come with me.’

They went out on the acres, Nan in cuff-down wellies and hooded green army coat, Virgil in a too-long woollen jumper under the leather jacket and the low fishing boots that were already drinking mud before they crossed the Fort Field. They went in sinking Suck Mode, each step announcing itself, a kind of spluck-splosh procession that scattered the blackbirds back up into the rain and down into the next field, Nan travelling faster because she knew how to do the swaying-hip swing, dip and recover that people here know is how you walk these wet river fields, which means you don’t step down you sort of roll across them, which is great for waterland walking but maybe the reason the parish is Number One in Clare for hip replacements. She spoke curtly as she went. ‘The drain on the western corner needs clearing every month.’ It looked like it hadn’t been cleared in years. ‘A wet spring and you can’t travel this field till August.’ It had several silver ponds in it. ‘This is The Big Meadow.’ ‘This is the Small Meadow. My husband cut it by hand.’ She took him across every inch of the land in which we grew muck puddles, rushes and occasional grass. He didn’t say anything. They climbed the wall into Lower Meadow, because the gate was no longer attached to the pier, was tied with twine and looped with crazy brambles. He offered her his hand but she didn’t take it, stepped in front of him and crossed with goat nimbleness, turned to look back when she heard the clatter of falling stones as he came after. In the Bog Meadow she showed him the four cows. She called ‘Hup!’ to them on the top of the stile, maybe to alert them that here was the new farmer, to have them do that whole-body-shiver thing horses do and present their best profiles. But whether from the mesmerism of the rain, the dullness of having several stomachs full of twisted mulch or the fact they were wearing brown-stockings of mud to their hocks, the cows were in cow stupor and didn’t move. ‘That’s our stock,’ Nan said.

Virgil looked at them. He had no clue what to say. The rain that was not called rain was falling on both of them. The river was running the way it is always running to get away and there was a little edgy breeze coming across from McInerney’s to remind you the back of your neck was wet. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.

Now that was not what Nan expected. She had no answer for that. She looked at him.

But Virgil was already away in the Philosophy of Impossible Standard. In a way, it helped that the land was as bad as it was. It meant that here he would not only have to Out-Wiltshire Wiltshire he would also have to Out-Ashcroft Ashcroft. So the effect was not to discourage him, it was the contrary. I may be the only one who thinks that here in Muck-and-Drizzle land is the least-like-paradise place there is in the whole country, but even so you’d have to say it was going to take dreaming.

‘That’s all of it,’ Nan said, with the kind of low voice people use at the end of a long confession when everything terrible has been told. ‘We’ll go back so. Mary will be up.’

‘I’ll stay here. I’ll be back in a while.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘I know. But I’d like to.’

His eyes were dangerous. That’s what Nan must have thought. They had that look that told you they were seeing more than you were.

‘If you’re sure.’ She didn’t look at his eyes.

‘I’m sure.’

‘Right so.’

She hip-swung her way back across the fields. When she came in to the questions in her daughter’s expression in the kitchen, she said, ‘He wants to stay out.’ And in a single moment the two of them shared a look that said those things in silent mother-daughter language that would take a hundred books and more years to tell.

After the hens and the ware and the ashes and the peeling, Mary went out to find him. She was afraid his heart was cracked. She was afraid the reality of the place would have overwhelmed him, that she’d find him under a dripping hedgerow in a distant corner ready to announce they couldn’t make a life there. Then she saw him. He was on the far edge of the Bog Meadow inside a silver nimbus.

It was a trick of the light. Wanting to make his first impression on that landscape he had come upon a length of barbed wire buried in the grass. He’d started to pull it up and found that time and nature had firm holds. But he’d persisted in the way only my father could. The hopeless was his domain. He just kept at it. Barbs bloodied his fingers. One tore a long meandering scar on the back of his hand that years later Aeney and I said was like a river and my father said which river and we said the River Virgil. At last the grass made a resentful ripping and surrendered the wire. He’d worked his way along it then, finding the forgotten bounds, lifting the rotted sticks that were once the fence posts. But as he did, the wire freed from tension began to coil and tangle behind him. It was the way God played with my father. Even a small success was mercilessly pursued by failure. He’d gone back to try and straighten out the wire and by the time my mother saw him he was standing inside it, the coil shimmering glints in the rainlight and my father this soaked figure laughing in the trap of the practical.

I think she knew then he wasn’t giving up.

‘You look drowned,’ she said.

That evening Virgil went out after dinner to check on the cows. That, he knew, was an important part of farming. Just before darkness, Check on the Cows. If you’re getting some idea of my father you’ll already know he had no idea what to check for except their actual presence. If they were standing he pretty much thought they were okay. If they were lying down he’d Hup! a few times to get them to stand and then walk away, leaving the same ladies wondering why they were gotten up and wearing the cow expression of People are Puzzling. That first evening, while Mam and Nan did the dishes, he went across the fields. Darkness was falling. He was used to sea-dark which is darker than any. What he wasn’t used to was the sense of things flying invisibly above him. He had the impression the air was full of nightblack cloths, shreds, rags, falling out of the heavens. But not landing. With impossible swiftness one swooped, arced, vanished, and another came. He ducked, raised his hand over his head, and then realised the air was thronged with bats.

I know them. I’ve seen their grandchildren. They go home into this tiny hole in the angle of the eaves at McInerney’s. More come out than go in, which has always been true of McInerney’s house. I’ve grown up in the country, bats don’t frighten me. But Virgil’s blood was chilled, as if bats were a portent, as if he was being reminded right then paradise isn’t going to be easy, there’s darkness in the world, and instead of coming back across the field he clambered out over the crooked gate on to McInerney’s road.

The gravel underfoot was helpful. The bats didn’t overfly the road. He walked between the high shoulders of the wild fuchsia.

Then he saw the torches.

In the wide deep dark we have in Faha a single torch can be seen a long way. These were dozens. They were a lighted river, winding out from the village, thinning in places, thickening in others, but all coming towards our house.

Virgil’s first thought was guilt. Father Tipp says the two signs of saints are guilt for no reason and being caught in a constant tide of undeserving. I think my father thought he deserved what was coming. I think he knew he had taken the most beautiful girl in the parish and so his first thought was They are coming for me.

He’d been away, remember. He’d been on the sea with his imagination a long time, and in that imagination this was the kind of thing that happened in William Faulkner, they came with torches. They let their disapproval out in fire. They were going to come and burn down our house.

But this was not a few men.

This was everyone. The whole parish was on its way.

He stood in the road. That’s the thing that gets me in this story. That’s the thing that surprises me when I force Tommy Devlin to tell it. Virgil just stood in the road. He didn’t come running to tell Mam and Nan, didn’t rush in, bolt the door, push the table up against it cowboy-style and say Injuns. He stood in the road and waited and that river of lights kept coming.

When the river turned the corner near Murphy’s he saw it was not made of men. They were figures out of phantasm, Tommy says. He enjoys that word. Phantasm. Some had cone heads and misshapen bodies. Some had masks and were huge tall women with dresses that couldn’t button over bosoms. Some were white and mountain-shaped, a sheet thrown over them, others in sacks and straw, their faces blackened. There was not a single recognisable human being.

When the river turned the corner near Murphy’s it saw Virgil Swain.

And it stopped.

To stop a river that long is not easy, and so all the way back along it there was jostling and pushing and a great murmuring that rose and went along the length. The murmur didn’t materialise into language proper. But there was a chorus of shshshshshshshshshsh and then Virgil was standing a hundred yards from our house face to face with a figure whose head was a wicker cone that rose to eight feet.

‘Turn back,’ my father said. He said it just the way Spencer Tracy would have, because, although outnumbered by three hundred and twenty-seven to one, he wasn’t going to let them come burn down the house.

Coney shook his head. The river wouldn’t turn back but wouldn’t say why either. Cone Head didn’t want to give himself away. That was the bit that made it difficult. He shook the cone more eloquently. The whole front row of cone-heads shook theirs. There was a whole lot of shaking going on.

‘Turn back!’ my father shouted out over the entire river, which was swelling and thickening now at the headwaters. Masked figures were pressing forward to see what was happening.

‘Turn back. Go home!’

There was more head-shaking, gestures of confusion and refusal. But still none would speak.

And I suppose it might have remained a stand-off but for Mam calling ‘Virgil!’ in this hard whisper behind him. ‘Virgil!’ He turned to look back at her and she was waving frantically for him to come to her. ‘They’re our bacochs,’ she said. ‘Straw Boys. They’re here to celebrate our wedding.’

Virgil looked at the river that was made of the men and women of the entire parish in what varied ingenious and bizarre disguises they could manage, and he saw that some were carrying not weapons but fiddles and bodhráns and he took a step backwards, and then another, and Mary put her hands over her mouth to hold the laughter but it was giggling up in her eyes and she took his hand and they ran the last of the way back along the road and in the gate and were in the house just moments before the river poured in after them.

Chapter 6

Are you there?

Days like this when I wake and feel more tired than I did when I went to sleep I can’t quite believe in you.

Dear Reader, are you a figment?

It’s hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You’re all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you’ll feel better and you won’t wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life out of you drip by drip while you slept. The whole country is living in the future now. We’re in this Terrible Time but in the future we’ll be all right again. We just have to keep hoping. But Moira Colpoys got first-class honours in her Social Science degree and Mrs Quinty says she sent out a hundred CVs in Dublin, every and any kind of job, got only one reply and when she went to the interview there were three hundred people and two hundred of them had been working for ten years and so yesterday Mr and Mrs Colpoys took her to Shannon and by now she’s arriving in Perth and tomorrow she’ll start looking to find the Davorens who she doesn’t really know but they’re from the parish and went out there last year and got a start in a tyre factory. The Colpoys are both in their sixties and she’s their only. Mrs Quinty says when Mr and Mrs Colpoys stopped into Maguire’s for petrol and milk on the way back they looked ten years older. They’re just going to hope things improve, Mrs Quinty says. They have that big damp old house they rattle around in, the one that looks like a tall grey shell and was my first model for Miss Havisham’s Satis House and has already been robbed twice since the Bust, and in there they’ll be, wearing three pairs of socks and sitting close to the fire, and hoping.

To have hope you have to have faith. That’s the crazy bit. You have to believe things could get better. You have no idea how exactly, but somehow. It’s a blindness thing, faith. But I seem to see too much. I lie here in the boat-bed when I wake up. I’m supposed to call Mam right away so she’ll come and pull open the curtains and use her best cheery voice to banish any gloom, but some days I don’t. I wake and feel the exhaustion of morning. I wonder where I go from here, and how any going could possibly happen, and look across the room at all the books and I wonder if maybe I am doing what I set out to do, if maybe I am finding my father.

I look grey. I actually do. Mirrors should be banned, the same way Uncle Noelie banned the News. Both are enemies of hope. Uncle Noelie said he couldn’t take listening to the wall-to-wall Doom experts who were the Boom experts before, most of them like a dark neighbour secretly delighted to be part of an important funeral, and so, because the time called for extreme tactics and because your heart has to be sustained by something, he switched over to Lyric FM for Marty in the Morning and shook hands with Mozart. But you can’t switch off the mirror, it’s right there over the bathroom sink, it’s hard to avoid, and in it I’m grey.

‘Do I look grey?’ I asked Vincent Cunningham.

‘What?’ He did that thing people do when they hope a question will go away. He did his Robert De Niro, which is to smack three invisible bits of lint off the knee of his trousers, and then examine his fingers closely and frown at what only he could see there. If, like Mr Pecksniff, he had a hat he would have looked inside it for an answer.

‘Which word do you not understand? Grey? My face, does it look grey?’

‘No. No. Of course not.’

‘What colour would you say I look?’

‘Normal colour.’

‘That’s ridiculous. Obviously I’m not, never have been, and never will be normal.’

‘No but you know what I mean.’

‘Under my eyes. Circles. What colour?’

‘Normal.’

‘Vincent.’

‘Blue-ish.’

‘Blue-ish grey?’

‘Blue-ish pale.’

‘Which is what people call grey.’

‘If you don’t feel well maybe you should go to hospital.’

There were so many reasons why that was ridiculous I didn’t even begin. In the county hospital the Winter Vomiting Bug had arrived, the Autumn Vomiting Bug having presumably departed for Africa, greyness was not a condition with swift remedy, as my eating any amount of beef, lentils, beans, spinach, and double doses of Hi-Dose Iron tablets could already testify, and the fact that my insides at this point were a magical swings-and-slides playground for Pfizer, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, and the Star Trek-sounding folks at AstraZeneca, meant that I gave this suggestion only My Look.

‘Just admit it. I look grey.’

‘You do.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

I got less satisfaction than I had hoped. ‘My hair is like old straw.’

‘Ah, Ruth, no it’s. . Yes, yes it is.’

‘Thank you.’

If you’re feeling hopeless you want someone else to feel hopeless too. That’s one of the better contradictions in human nature. But Vincent Cunningham has one of those cork hearts that keep bobbing up when you try and push it under.

‘I’ll wash it,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Come on. I’ll wash your hair.’

‘Fly around the room first why don’t you?’

‘Come on, it’ll make you feel better.’

‘I’m not letting you wash my hair.’

He was already heading to the bathroom. ‘I’ll get the water ready.’

‘Vincent! Vincent?’ I could hear the taps running. It takes a while to get the hot water up here. My father put in the bathroom using a second-hand Reader’s Digest Guide for Homeowners (Book 1,981, Reader’s Digest, New York) he got from Spellissey’s in Ennis. The bathroom proved an arduous task, the book’s spine is broken on the water-warped pages showing Basic Home Plumbing and it appears that either my father or the original owner near-drowned the book in the attempt. You turn on the tap and nothing happens. When I was younger I used to imagine the water had to come from the river, and didn’t mind waiting because of the engineering miracle my father had worked. At first nothing happens; you turn the tap full on, and it’s as if you are being tested in a prime belief, that water will in fact come, and once you believe that you can actually hear this tiny suspiration escaping the spout which affirms your belief that soon the air will become water if you can just put up with standing in the cold a bit longer. The water runs cold for ages. It runs cold until you get to the place where you’re thinking there is no hot and then begins a knocking out of Macbeth. It’s somewhere in the house, but no one’s sure where. The knocking becomes a clacking behind the wainscoting and the pipes sound the way arthritis must feel, an achy resistance to fluidity, but at last you know your belief has paid off and the hot comes with a series of airy belches and a sudden splashy gulp of triumph.

Vincent came in carrying the bath towel. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘Right what?’

‘You’ll feel better.’

‘Gone insane, is that it?’

‘Yep,’ he said, hedge-hair high and mad eyelashes batting as he began to pull back the duvet. ‘Come on.’

‘Listen, Vidal, it’s not that I don’t appreciate. .’

He’d already got his arm around my back and under me. He was already finding out that I was lighter than he had imagined, that I had such little substance that for a moment he must have thought his arm had passed through me, that he had dreamt me, except if he had he probably wouldn’t have dreamt the grey skin or the straw hair or quite possibly the attitude. He held me up. I held on to him. ‘You’re mad,’ I think I said. I was too surprised for long sentences.

He had the wooden chair backwards against the sink, a towel double-folded as a neck support. The water was steaming.

‘Here.’

‘You’ll scald me.’

He seated me gently then lifted his arm away, pausing just a moment to see that I was still sitting there. Shoving up his sleeves, he turned to the sink.

‘Vincent.’ I had my back to him.

‘I know.’ He dipped his elbow.

‘No but?. .’

‘Now.’ He took my hair. ‘Lay back.’

‘Have you ever. .?’

‘Ruth, lay back.’

I put my head on the support. And now my hair was in the water. His hands were drawing the water to it, treating it the way they might treat the golden hair in a fairy tale. Then he was cupping and letting the water flow on to my head and dipping his hands and cupping again and letting flow again, in what was somehow now the most ancient and natural rhythm in the world, the flowing of water over a head. And I was leaning back and my eyes were looking up at him, but he was looking only at my hair and the job he was doing, and he had that look you see in boys and men when they are engaged in a task grave and intricate and vital. His fingers moved the shampoo through my hair. My head was a comforting hardness, I knew, a bone at last of substance, and he worked a foam against it, and then smoothed the length of my hair, sometimes letting the hair move between both his palms, sometimes one hand laying the soap and the second pooling water over it. It came over my brow and he apologised and I said it was all right but with a kind of supreme gentleness he dabbed my eyes with the towel end and then returned to the washing with the same intensely focused tenderness. By now there was nothing I could say. I lay there in the towel while he changed the water. Then he began the rinsing. Water did not feel like water. It felt like a dream of water flowing over me and I closed my eyes and felt Vincent’s hands and the water and the flowing and a kind of impossible sensation of freeing and pouring and cleansing, as if this was a baptism, simple and pure and fluent in grace, as if there were grounds for hope yet.

Chapter 7

My father did not know how to drive. He had gone from the hothouse island of Ashcroft away to sea and bypassed the years when he should have learned. Mam knew how. She had learned in the big back meadow in her father’s cabless Zetor when she was eleven, sitting on Spencer’s lap, thrilling to the loud and bouncing propulsion across the open ground and the fact that you could go here, or there, or over there, just because you wanted. Mam drove the same way she walked, freestyle, also known as bumpily. She didn’t really go in for right- and left-hand lanes, which was fine this side of Faha where the road is cart-wide and Mohawked with a raised rib of grass and when two cars meet there is no hope of passing, someone has to throw back a left arm and reverse to the nearest gap or gate, which Faha folks do brilliantly, flooring the accelerator and racing in soft zigzag to where they have just been, defeating time and space both and making a nonsense of past and present, here and there. As any student of Irish history ancient and recent will know, we are a nation of magnificent reversers.

In the lower cabin which was once the Original House of the MacCarrolls and then became the Cowhouse and then the Carhouse there was a pale blue Ford Cortina. In the early evenings after the farming and before the light died Mam took the key and drove them west along the rim of Clare. Both of them favoured edges. They liked to follow the Shannon seaward, see the end of land on their left, and where current and tide met in choppy brown confluence. Their destination was, like Ken Kesey’s bus, Further. They went like escapees, Mam employing that driving style that was basically blind faith, speed and innocence, hurtling the car around bends, ignoring cracked wing mirrors, whipping of fuschia and sally, birds that shot up clamouring in their wake, hitting the brakes hard when they came around a corner into cows walking home.

I like to picture them, the blue Cortina coming along the green edge on Ordnance Survey Map 17, Shannon Estuary, one of many dog-eared and crinkled maps that for reasons obscure are all pressed between Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (Book 1,958, Penguin Classics, London), David Henry Thoreau’s Walden (Book 746, Oxford World Classics, Oxford) and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (Book 1,304, Grove Press, New York). On the map there are four different tones of blue for the river, High Water Mark, Low Water Mark, and 5 and 10 Fathoms. I’ve looked at it a long time, the way the green of the land seems to reach out, even off the edge of the page, so that the most western point, Loop Head, doesn’t fit, and is in its own little box on the top. They go everywhere along the southern shore, different evenings to Labasheeda, Knock, Killimer, Cappa, into Kilrush and out again, to Moyasta and down left around Poulnasherry Bay, to Querrin and Doonaha, taking roads that end at a gate on the river, reversing, into Liscrona and Carrigaholt, down to Kilcreadaun Point where Virgil wants to go but the road won’t let him, on again, summer evenings all the way down to Kilcloher for the view there, back up again, into Kilbaha, and finally, racing the sunset to get to the white lighthouse at the Head itself where the river is become the foaming sea. There is no further.

On those drives Virgil felt light, felt illumined. He’d look at Mary and his heart would float. That was the kind of love it was, the kind that radiates, that begins in the eyes of another but soon has got into everything, the kind that makes the world seem better, everything become just that bit more marvellous. Maybe it was because he’d been at sea so long; maybe it was because he was realising how lost he had been and that now here real life was beginning; maybe it was because he was feeling rescued.

Virgil sat in the passenger seat, his eyes on the fields, the ascent and arc of birds, the glassy glints of the river, the broadening sky.

And he looked at things.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but there’s no other way to say it. My father could fall into a quiet, arms folded across himself, head turned, eyes so intently focused that you’d know, that’s all. We would anyway. Strangers might see him and think he’s away in himself, he’s lost in some contemplation, so still and deep would he get, but in fact he was not away at all. He was here in a more profound way than I have the skill to capture. My father looked at things the way I sometimes imagine Adam must have. Like they were just created, an endless stream of astonishments, like he’d never seen just this quality of light falling on just this kind of landscape, never noticed just how the wind got caught in the brushes of the spruce, the pulse of the river. Raptures could be little or large, could come one after the other in a torrent, or singly and separated by long dullness. For him life was a constant drama of seeing and blindness, but, when seeing, the world would suddenly seem to him laden. Charged is the word I found in Mrs Quinty’s class when we did Hopkins, and that’s a better way to say that in those moments I think the world to him was probably a kind of heaven.

He’d see in quiet, and then would come the release.

‘Here, stop. Here.’

Mary looks across at him.

‘We have to go down here.’

She bumps the car on to the ditch. Parking is not in her skillset. Virgil is already out the door. ‘Come on.’

She hurries after him. He reaches back and catches her hand. They cross a field, cattle coming slowly towards them as if drawn by a force.

‘Look, there.’

The sinking sun has fringed the clouds. Rays fall, visible, stair-rods of light extending, as if from an upside-down protractor pressed against the sky. The river is momentarily golden.

It lasts seconds. No more.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she says.

‘We shouldn’t miss these.’

‘No. We shouldn’t,’ she says, looking at him and trying to decide for the hundredth time if his eyes are blue like the sky or blue like the sea.

I’m guessing Mam knew right away this wasn’t a farmer. I’m guessing that if she wanted a farmer she could have chosen from a martful. But maybe she didn’t know he was a poet.

He didn’t know himself yet. He wasn’t thinking of poetry yet.

Having devoted himself to seeing as much of the world as he could, my father now employed the same devotion here. He did exactly what his father would have done. He threw himself into the work on the land. Straight off he demonstrated that he had a genius for making nails go crooked; also an expertise in bending one prong of the fork, blunting hayknives and breaking the handles of spades. Things just went wrong for him. He went out to clean a drain in the back meadow, hacked at the grass till he could see and then clambered down into the rushy sludge.

I, you will already have deducted, am inexpert in farming matters, but I do know that in our farm stones were gifted at finding their way into the very places where no stones should be, weeds were inspired in their choice of Mam’s flowerbeds, and black slugs the size of your fingers came from the river at night on the supposed invitation of our cabbages. Basically, at every moment our farm is trying to return to some former state where muck and rushes thrive. If you look away for one moment in summer your garden will be a jungle, one moment in winter it will be a lake. It’s from my mother that I have the stories of my father’s first attempts at farming. When I was younger and she told how hard it was I wondered if stones, weeds and slugs didn’t fall from the sky, if there wasn’t a sign on our door, or if the Reverend wasn’t somewhere up there pacing Up-jut across the heavens, spying us below, saying here, I’ll send this. This will try him.

Virgil stayed in the drain all day. He worked the spade blindly in the brown water, brought up slippery planes of muck he slathered on the bank so the stained grass along the meadow showed his progress. He thought nothing of spending an hour freeing a rock, two digging out the silted bottom. Why drains clog at all I am not sure. Why when the whole thing has been dug out and the water is flowing it just doesn’t stay that way I can’t say. I don’t know if it happens everywhere, if something there is that doesn’t love a drain — thank you, Robert Frost — or if Faha is a Special Case, if in fact it’s a Chosen Place where God is doing a sludge experiment he couldn’t do in Israel.

When the handle of the spade snapped he worked using just the head, rolling his sleeves but dipping beyond that depth, the rain coming in after a long time at sea and letting itself down on the back of the man stooped below the ground. The cows gathered and watched. In the late afternoon Mam came out in one of the oversized ESB all-weather coats everyone in Faha procured when they started building the power station and she told him he’d done enough for today. Down in the ditch he straightened into a dozen aches, his hair aboriginal with mud, face inexpertly painted with ditch-splash, eyes mascara’d. By rain and drain his clothes were soaked through.

‘Virgil, come in home.’

He smiled. That’s what he did, he smiled.

It was a rapture thing. But also, Swains are extremists.

Just like saints. And mad people.

‘There’s a bit more,’ he said.

‘You’re drowned.’

‘I’m fine.’

It was straight-down rain. It was washing his face. It was hopping off the shoulders of the ESB all-weather.

‘Virgil.’

‘I’ll get this cleared. Then that’ll be one job done.’

She looked down at him, her new husband, and looked back along the three-quarters of the drain that had been cleared but was not yet running. Dark patches of dug-out muck lay along the bank like a code, symbols in an obscure proving in mathematics that had progressed so far but was still short of conclusion, still short of anything being proven.

‘Are you going to be impossible?’ she asked. She knew the answer before he gave it.

Rain and ardour were glossing his eyes. ‘I think so.’

She had to bite her lip to stop herself from smiling. She had that falling-off-the-world feeling she often got around him, a feeling that came swift and light and was so unlike the weight of the responsible that had come into the house after her father had died that it felt like wings inside her.

‘All right so,’ she said. And then she turned and walked back across the puddle-meadow, three luminous bands on the back of her coat catching the last light and making it look as if in her tiers of candles were lit.

There was no boiler or central heating in our house then. There was the range and the fire and large pots for hot water. When Virgil came in evening had fallen. Nan was gone to the Apostolics. He stooped in under the rain-song on the corrugated roof of the back kitchen smelling prehistoric. ‘I freed it,’ he said.

‘Take off your clothes,’ Mary said. To escape the compulsion to embrace him, she turned to the four pots she had steaming.

He saw the stand-in tub on the floor.

‘Take off everything.’

When I read the white lily-scented paperback editions of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow (Books 1,666 & 1,667, Penguin Classics, London) that’s where I find them.

Mary dips and squeezes the sponge. Steam rises.

Virgil steps naked on to the flags of the floor.

Chapter 8

Today when they carried me out into the ambulance Mam held my hand tight. I had my eyes closed. Timmy and Packy have got the hang of the stairs and the narrowness of the doors and there was no banging on jambs or jerkiness on the steps and when the rain touched my face I didn’t panic, and I didn’t open my eyes until I was strapped into that small space and we were moving. Then Mam dabbed my face two gentle dabs and took my hand in hers again, and I was glad of it, even though I’m not ten years old or even twelve. It’s because people are so perishable. That’s the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outwards from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there’s blurry bits, like you’re looking through this watery haze, and you’re fighting to see, you’re fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.

We were in Tipperary before Mam took her hand from mine.

Because this was going to Dublin again, because this was The Consultant, Timmy and Packy went Extra Reverential, and because Timmy could see I was paler and thinner than last time and because he knew I was Book Girl he tried to leaven literature into the conversation.

‘Ruth, tell me this. Wouldn’t Ireland win the World Cup of Writing?’

‘There is no World Cup of Writing,’ Packy told him, and then, discovering a hair of doubt across his mind, turned back to me and asked, ‘Is there?’

‘I know there isn’t,’ Timmy said. ‘But if there was, I’m saying. Do you know what the word IF is for?’

‘You’re some pigeon.’

‘If is for when a thing is not but if it was. That’s why you use If. If you didn’t use if then the thing would be. That’s the distinction.’

Packy’s response was to put the wipers up to Intermittent Four.

‘Most of life depends on If,’ Timmy said, going deeper.

Maybe a mile of road went by and he resurfaced with: ‘We’d have eleven World Class, wouldn’t we, Ruth?’

‘Living or dead?’ Packy asked, and when Timmy threw a glare across at him Packy shrugged and said, ‘What? I’m only saying. You need to know the rules.’

‘With writers it makes no difference.’

‘All right so,’ he said and started trying to think of the poems he’d done in school.

Timmy reached across and put us back on Intermittent Three.

‘Yeats is one anyway,’ Packy said.

‘Centre midfield,’ Timmy said.

‘That other one was a goalkeeper.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Your man, we did him for the Leaving.’

‘Who?’

‘The goalkeeper.’ Packy looked ahead into the rain for him. ‘Paddy Kavanagh.’

‘Was he?’

‘He was. I heard that once. Goalkeeper. Blind as a bat too. Who’s centre forward?’

‘Who do you think, Ruth?’ Timmy’s eyes were on mine in the mirror.

‘Both sexes?’ Packy asked.

‘What?’

‘Well if living or dead, then men or women, right?’

Timmy looked at him like a man who had just taken up golf, a wrinkle of perplexity across his brow.

‘What about your one who won the prize? Who’s she again?’ Packy went fishing for the name.

The rain was coming fast, sitting a long time on the windscreen between wipes so we sped sightless then saw then were sightless inside the rain again.

‘We’d have a good team all right,’ Timmy said. His eyes were back on mine. I looked away. I hadn’t the energy for conversation. I was feeling that kind of weakness you feel where you imagine there must be a valve open somewhere inside you. Somewhere you’re leaking away. It’s slow and silent but all the time something is flowing out of you, there’s a lessening and a lightening and sometimes you get so tired you don’t want to fight it, you just want to close your eyes and say all right then, go on, flow away.

‘Enright!’ Packy said. ‘That’s her.’

Timmy half-turned back to us, spoke through the sliding window. ‘Did you read that one, Ruth?’

Mrs Quinty had given me The Gathering, partly because it had won a prize and partly because it was a Serious Book by a Woman, and she wanted to encourage me, she wanted to say See, Serious Girls Can Win, but she would be afraid to say anything so direct so the book had to do the saying as books often do. I loved it, but the publishers had put this staring boy in black-and-white on the front of the paperback with only his eyes in colour and they were a piercing blue that I just couldn’t look at so I had to bend back the cover. Then when I got to page 71 where she writes about a man with an indelible watermark of failure I had to stop because of sinking.

‘How’s your own book coming, Ruth?’ Timmy asked. ‘Ruth wants to be a writer,’ he told Packy.

I didn’t want to be a writer, I wanted to be a reader, which is more rare. But one thing led to another.

I’m not writing a book, I’m writing a river, I wanted to say. It’s flowing away.

‘I think I need to sleep,’ I said.

Mam stroked my brow. Three soft strokes. ‘You go ahead,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes.’

‘We’d beat the Brits anyway,’ Packy said. Then, after a time, he added, ‘Of course they’d have Shakespeare.’

And after another while: ‘And Charles Dickens.’

And after another while: ‘And Harry Potter.’

The Consultant says we need to take a more aggressive approach. He says the Stage of Monitoring is over. I will need to stay for an extended period. He prefers Dublin to Galway but the choice is ours. There will be two stages of treatment, remission induction therapy and post-remission therapy. I will need a venous access device, he says. Interferon-Alpha has to be injected daily. The side effects may be fevers, chills, muscle aches, bone pains, headaches, concentration lapses, fatigue, nausea and vomiting.

But he is very positive. Very.

We need to go home and prepare ourselves. He’ll see me in a couple of weeks’ time.

Then we’ll start to turn back the tide on this thing, he says.

Chapter 9

Astonishingly, after sex my mother did not become pregnant. She may have been the only woman in Ireland not to. At that time women got pregnant by wearing short skirts and high heels. High heels were notorious for it. Kilrush was virtually all high-heel shoe shops.

That first year the whole parish was waiting for Aeney and me to show up. The women in the Women’s Aisle, convinced that the real reason Mary had married The Stranger was that she was already Expecting, were chancing sidelong glances during the Consent-creation as Margaret Crowe calls it to see if there was a curve like a river bend coming in my mother’s wool coat. The men in the Men’s Aisle were intentionally looking away, because men’s dreams die with slow stubborn reluctance and denial is a strong suit in these parts; She-isn’t-married, she-isn’t-married running like a bass line in low hum into the candle vapours.

Aeney and I were still out at sea.

In the meantime my father’s farming went poorly. Our cattle were unique in being able to eat grass and get thinner. They added to this a propensity for drowning. One drowned is bad luck, two is the devil himself, three is God.

But God (or in Freudian, Abraham) wasn’t going to beat Virgil. My father took every setback as a trial, doubled the lines of wire, re-staked the fence, then made a double perimeter along the river when he came out one morning to see a whole portion of it, posts and wire both, had been pressed forward into the water. The following night he camped out in the field. He sat hunkered in a greatcoat in the rain, peering through the dark for the ghost-shapes of the cattle, listening inside the running of the river for the approach of hooves. He would not be defeated. Not another beast would drown even if it meant he had to camp there every night. When at last he saw the bruise of dark upon dark that was a cow coming to the fence he stood and waved his arms wildly and hallooed. The cow jolted out of its cow-dream and looked at him like he was the one was mad.

‘Back! Go on! Back! Hup! Hup!’

The old cow didn’t move, so determined was she in drowning.

Virgil had not thought to bring a stick.

‘Hup! Go on! Hup!’

Still she stood there, her eyes wilding a bit looking past him at the river and puzzling on why he was not letting her pass. She swung a half-step around to see if that would placate him.

It didn’t. Virgil smacked his hand on her backside, ‘Hup!’, and in surprise she kicked out both hind legs, a not undainty lift and back-flick that caught him on the shin and buckled him. He was lying on the ground beside the wire before his brain had time to tell him she had broken his tibia.

The cow still had her backside to him. Now others of the herd approached through the dark.

Were they all come to drown? He grasped on to his shin with both hands, pressing, as if he could squeeze the parts together, but the pressure only shot the pain deeper. He roared out. And maybe because the cattle knew the sound of pain or because they had been distracted on their way into the river, or because cows can’t keep two thoughts in their head at the same time, they stopped. They stood and watched him. After a while one of them got the idea there was maybe sweeter grass over in the far corner where she had been an hour earlier and where there certainly was not but she went anyway and the others in cow fashion followed and that night none drowned.

My father crawled back across the field. He banged on the back door because he could not stand to get the latch.

The following afternoon, when Virgil’s leg was set and he was seated in two chairs inside the window, Jimmy Mac called in to see him. He listened to the full account of our cattle that were bent on drowning. Then he nodded slowly, scratched at the starter beard he always wore except on Sundays. ‘It wouldn’t be,’ he said, ‘because they’re looking for water to drink, would it?’

My father told that story. Like all the stories he told it was against himself. He was never the hero, and from this I suppose we were to learn a kind of grace, if grace is the condition of bearing outrageous defeat.

One year he decided to put the Big Meadow in potatoes. I think that’s how you say it, to put it in potatoes. The principle was simple. You bought the seed potatoes, you opened the drills, popped in the seeds, closed them again. For each seed you had bought there would be a minimum tenfold yield. Maybe twentyfold if the year came good. Tommy Murphy had a Cork cousin with a harrow. The cousin had moved to Clare and was only just making the adjustment. He came and stood on the wall and looked over into the field. ‘There’ll be a few stones,’ he said. ‘They’ll need picking.’

Turns out he had the Cork mastery of understatement. Who knew one field could harbour so many stones? If they were laid out end-on-end there would be no field. If you were of an Old Testament bent like Matthew Bailey you’d suppose the stones rained each night from the sky. Maybe they did. Or maybe every farmer in the parish had already dug out their stones years ago and dumped them in our fields when the MacCarrolls were wistfully watching the Atlantic and sucking seaweed. It turns out we had a world-class collection. There were top stones, mid-stones, deep stones. Then there were rocks.

Virgil gave his back to them. The skin of the tops of his fingers too, the joints of both thumbs, the exterior knuckles of both hands, the balls of his knees. He’d be out before the birds in the March morning, stamping heat into his wellingtons, letting himself out the back door, breath hawing, ear-tips freezing as he crossed up over the opened field to the top corner where he sank to his knees, having decided kneeling was a better method than bending. He scrabbled at the ground, picked out stones, tossed them towards the barrow, dawn rising to the hard mournful clack clack that startled the magpies until it became habitual and they came and took the worms that had risen without realising what the birds knew, that men opened ground in Spring and potatoes went in around St Patrick’s Day.

What does a man think of when he’s all day on his knees in a field beside the river? I have no idea. I suppose it would have occurred to some that maybe the field was unsuitable. But like me, in matters farming my father was an innocent, and so I’m guessing he just supposed this was what it meant to work the land. If you’re a Latin reader, take a break here, have a read of Virgil’s Georgics, written about 30 bc, and you’ll see that Virgil had his troubles with farming too. But he didn’t have our stones. On our farm there were always too many stones.

My father filled a barrow to the brim and shortly discovered he had invented a new ache, straightening. He went to hoist the barrow handles, and had a blinding insight out of Archimedes: stones were heavy, ground was soft. He couldn’t push it. The wheel sank.

‘Only the birds witnessed your father’s ignominy,’ he told us. ‘Taking stones back out of the barrow again.’

Instead of the barrowing he decided to make mounds, conical clamps of stones at the edge of furrows. They are still there. The grass has overgrown them and so they make our back meadow look like an artist installation or a green sea with frozen wave caps rising. They are a monument to the Potato Years, I suppose. Mac’s cattle use them as backside-scratchers.

Virgil devolved a Swain Method. Day after day he went along on his knees taking out the stones. Then he went along on his knees putting in the seed potatoes. His hands were like old maps. Every wrinkle and line had some of our field in it. When he had the seeds in, Murphy’s cousin came back and covered them. The cousin stood on the wall after, my father a curved C-shape beside him. ‘This place is nicely cursed with stones,’ the cousin said in Corkish. He gave this insight air and time, then he threw a curt nod towards the now invisible potatoes and added the Pagan-Christian Superstition-Blessing combo we use here to cover all bases, ‘Well, may they be lucky for ye. God bless ’em.’

God, it turns out, is not a big fan of potatoes in Ireland. It may be unfinished business between Him and Walter Raleigh. Maybe, like tobacco, the potatoes were never supposed to have been brought to this part of the world. Maybe God hadn’t put them here in the first place because He knew what He was doing and they were supposed to stay in South America. They definitely weren’t meant to come to this country. That much is clear. If you recall He’d already sent a pretty major message to that effect. Stop Living on Potatoes, Irish People, was the gist of it. Catch Fish was the follow-up, but it didn’t take.

Still, two weeks before Easter my father’s first potatoes had sprouted. Mary came to the back gate and looked out at her husband inspecting the ridges, and in the green shoots I’m guessing she saw a vindication. He was not mad, he was just a dreamer. Men are much bigger dreamers than women anyway. That’s a given. Read Nostromo (Book 2,819, Joseph Conrad, Penguin Classics, London), read Jude the Obscure (Book 1,999, Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, London), read as far as my father and then I got to, page 286, Volume One, in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (Book 2,016, Doubleday, New York), read the 1975 Reader’s Digest Condensed History of the World (Book 1,955, Reader’s Digest, New York), and tell me men aren’t dreamers. But this was a good dream. Maybe it was the best dream, the original one, that a man and woman could live together on a piece of land beside the river, the dream that you could just be. Although every windowsill-sitter outside the post office had said MacCarroll’s field wasn’t suitable to grow five acres of potatoes, there the potatoes were. Mary entered the kitchen like a dancer. Her mother was knuckling dough. ‘They’re growing,’ Mary said.

Nan knuckled the dough some more.

‘They’re growing,’ she said again. ‘The potatoes.’

‘My bones are telling me I don’t like the weather that’s coming,’ her mother answered, and slipped her mouth in under the ash tube.

It wasn’t rain exactly. It was weather that descended like a cloud. It was there in Holy Week, a fog that was more than a fog and a mist that was more than a mist because it was dense like a fog and wet like a mist but was neither and was neither drizzle nor rain proper. It came between the land and the sky like a blindness. It just hung there, this mild wet grey veil through which the river ran and escaped. But the potato stalks relished it. Maybe because it was a kind of South American jungle weather, maybe because it was mythic like them, the potatoes flourished, rising quickly towards the promise of May. My father was out with his spade, mounding earth against the sides of them, thinking nothing of the weather that was sticking to him or the fact that for forty days the field hadn’t seen the sun.

It was a triumph. Despite the weather the blossoms came. My father had a shining shook-foil dazzlement in him, that extra-ness of light or energy or just life which Aeney and I would come to know so well. Literally a kind of brilliance, I suppose. You saw it on him and in him. He had to find ways to let it out and he hadn’t found the poetry yet.

It was another week before Virgil saw the blight.

The neighbours knew it before him. Maybe the whole country did. But nobody wanted to say. As Marty Keogh says, we can be fierce backward about coming forward. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news. Maybe they think that if no one picks it up and bears it then the bad news will rot away where it is, which Marty thinks not a bad thing and might have saved us from the Bust only for the fact that we were paying the lads on the radio to tell us we’re doomed. In any case, the potato stalks started withering. Virgil went out one May morning, the drizzle cloying, the birds I suppose with diminished eloquence, and at last saw what was blatant. He didn’t at first think it was blight. Although it was raining and had been raining and would continue to rain, he thought it looked more like drought. The green of the leaves was dulled as if from an absence of water. He took a leaf in his hand. It was in the softness of dying and curled instantly to a crêpe consistency. He stayed out in the field. He tramped up and down the ridges. He had not sprayed against blight because it simply had not occurred to him. Because he was in that innocent or ignorant state depending, where you believe God is good and hard work alone will bring reward.

The stalks blackened overnight. It turns out there was a given wisdom that potatoes beside rivers are doomed, and that wisdom was aired generally now, only not in my father’s company. He dug up a plant. Beneath it were potatoes smaller than stones. They were savagely acned. When he held one in his hand he could press his thumb through the pulpy heart.

He did not call the Murphy’s cousin. He did not tell anyone but my mother, and that afternoon went out with the barrow and began singlehandedly to dig up the five acres of that failed crop. It took days. The cattle in the next field over watched as he mounded the stalks. The mounds smelled like disease. They had to be burned. But they would not. Twisted tubes of the Clare Champion flared and went out. He walked into the village and bought kerosene from Siney Nolan who sold it to him with grave lowered eyebrows and knew but did not say What do you need that for?

The following year he tried the potatoes again.

This time he sprayed.

This time there was no blight.

This time it was river worms that destroyed them.

Those potatoes were all right, Mam said, when she told it. Aeney and I were maybe ten. All of us were at the table. A large bowl of floury potatoes had summoned the story.

‘The way I remember it, those potatoes were all right,’ she said. She looked closely at one she held upright on her fork, ‘If you cut around the worms.’

I screamed and Aeney ughed and Mam laughed and Dad smiled looking at her and letting the story heal.

‘Mammy!’

‘What?’

‘Don’t say that word,’ I said.

‘What word?’

‘Worms worms worms,’ Aeney said, scratching the table with the wriggling fingers of both hands, quoting but not exactly performing Hamlet.

‘There’s nothing wrong with. .’

‘Don’t!’

‘As long as you cut around them,’ Mam said.

I screamed again and Aeney came at me with the worm fingers and slimed them gleefully along my neck. I scrunched my chin down which is, I know, pathetic Girl’s Defence, Baby Edition, but all I could think of given that my brain was all worms. And he kept doing it, which in my experience is Typical Boy. Anyway, next thing, Dad had come with his two hands palm-to-palm like snappers and whop! He’d golloped up Aeney’s worms. He kept them imprisoned in his snappers and Aeney yelled and Dad laughed and I was saved and in turn now laughed at Aeney captured in Dad’s hands. Somehow the worm-ruined potatoes had become this happiness, somehow the years-ago hurt had transformed, and I think maybe I had a first sense then of the power of story, and realised that time had done what Time sometimes does to hardship, turn it into fairy tale.

Chapter 10

And still we were not born.

Your narrator, you may already have grasped, is not gifted in matters chronological. Chronos, the God with the three heads who split the egg of the world into three even parts, and started the whole measuring-out business, never appealed to me.

Neither did the DC Comics version Vincent Cunningham says is right cool.

Aeney and I were not yet on the horizon of this world. Sometimes I like to think we were in another one, having just a wonderful time. I like to think not of The World to Come but of The World That Came Before, for which so far in Literature I have found no descriptions. There is something in Edward Joseph Martyn’s peppermint and mothball-smelling Morgante the Lesser (Book 2,767, BiblioBazaar, South Carolina) but it’s more a World Elsewhere really. When Mr Martyn wasn’t helping W.B. Yeats found the Abbey Theatre he squeezed in a little time to do the bit of writing, and in this he describes the perfect world of Agathopolis. In Agathopolis Mass is attended every morning after everyone has a good thorough full-body wash. After Mass you sit around on grandstands and watch military reviews.

Unreal.

Here’s a better one. Think of any of your favourite characters, and then picture them in the time before they entered the story. They existed somewhere, in a World Before. Hamlet as a small boy. (Hamlet Begins in the Warner Brothers version.)

Macbeth as a teenager. (Out of his pimples The Dark Prince Rises. Sorry, fecund.)

Anna Karenina in school. She probably had someone like Miss Jean Brodie in her prime for a teacher not Mrs Pratt who we had and who, like Miss Barbary in Bleak House, never smiled and because I was Plain Ruth Swain told me I shouldn’t rule out the nuns, she herself who had a gawky face on her that Tommy Fitz proved by Google was identical to a Patagonian Toothfish.

In the World Before This One, Aeney and I were waiting. We knew there was longing for us. We wanted to come. But once we did we knew that time was going to start and that meant time was going to end too, so we hung out in distant seas a while longer. We didn’t mean any harm. And anyway the story wasn’t ready for us yet. There are precedents. It’s ten chapters before Sam Weller appears in The Pickwick Papers (Book 124, Penguin Classics, London), nineteen before Sarah Gamp arrives in Martin Chuzzlewit (Book 800, Penguin Classics, London). But Mary and Virgil were losing hope of ever having children. My father was certain it was his fault. Thanks to the Reverend and thanks to Abraham he had the Swain genius for finding fault in himself. He came up short of the Standard in everything. What it was like to live with that inside you, what it meant to be subject to the constant duress of failing the Impossible, to aspire and fall, aspire and fall, to flick between the cathodes and anodes of rapture and despair, I can only imagine. I don’t aspire. My hope has a small h. I hope to get to the end.

Because, first-off, Mary was a woman, and secondly because she was a MacCarroll, Mam took the news of being unpregnant stoically. She didn’t go do-lally. She didn’t drama-queen. Maybe she knew about the Late Arrivals thing, or maybe Mam just has more faith.

In the evenings after work Virgil would go out in a long buff-coloured coat he had brought back from somewhere in Chile, the one that was split deep up the back so you could ride vaquero-style, that had two tails that flew out and in a crosswind came up like wings. He walked miles along the riverbank. It was chance. It was a fluke of biology. That was all. Don’t be stupid. There was no message, no meaning in it. It was not a Judgment.

But it felt like one.

To save my father from himself my mother took him dancing; Nan’s set-dance addiction had gone down the bloodstream and transmogrified into Jive in Mam at which Virgil was hopeless but did anyway because it made her smile and he was addicted to that. His long frame sole-shuffling was not exactly dancing. Elbows crooked, arms out, he seemed to be doing The Coat-hanger. By living in Ashcroft with Mother Kittering he had missed out on that whole stage of development where bad clothes, peer pressure and pimples combine to teach you how to mimic the cool people. My dad literally had no clue. But Mam didn’t mind. Everything about him was evidence of something special, when special was still a good word.

They went to plays in halls. They went to the Singing Club. They went to the Kilrush Operatic Society’s production of The Bohemian Girl at the Mars Theatre, with Guest Artists (all of whom have sung at Covent Garden, the flyer says. It lies folded inside the yellowed dog-eared and generally dirt-smelling copy of John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, Book 2,601, Corgi, London). One night they went to see Christy Moore who sang with shut eyes the Christie Hennessy song that became Virgil’s favourite because in it was the line ‘We’d love to go to Heaven, but we’re always digging holes’ which my father said summed up we Irish and was more profound than Plato.

Back then same as now the sea-salty village of Doonbeg had the best amateur-drama group, that parish was all theatre, and they went there to see John B. Keane’s Sive, and afterwards my mother came out moved and upset. They went across the street into the graveyard and stood a time in the starless dark waiting for the sorrow to pass. She held her arms across herself and he wrapped his around her. They didn’t speak about the play. They didn’t talk out the upset the way they would if we moved the scene to America. My guess is that something in the play had caused her to think about having a daughter and that had led to thinking maybe it was true that they were not going to have children. When Mam gets upset she goes quiet. A whole battle goes on inside her, but unless you know her eyes you can’t tell.

Dad knew. It was his fault. That’s the default Swain position. The indelible watermark of failure. He wanted to apologise. But he wouldn’t know where to begin. He held on to her. They stayed in the quiet of the graveyard as the hall emptied and the audience went to Tubridy’s and Igoe’s, they stayed long enough so the seagulls that slept inland there on the grave of the two Dunne boys that drowned in the Blue Pool had become accustomed to them.

Then Dad said, ‘Come on.’ He led Mam back to the car. Even though he didn’t drive he was Keeper of the Keys, and this time he got in the driver’s seat.

Reader, you’ll think she said, ‘But you can’t drive.’

And he said, ‘I’ve been practising,’ or, ‘It doesn’t look too hard.’ Or any better dialogue you’d care to add here.

But I don’t think she said anything at all.

Then they were driving out of Doonbeg, Dad using that jerky pedal-down pedal-up technique he always had so the Cortina went down Church Street in spasms of hesitation, indicator flashing first left then right as he tried to find the windscreen wipers and at least see what they were going to crash into.

Maybe everybody got out of the way. I don’t know. I can’t drive. I can’t imagine how you do it. How you go around bends without knowing if there is going to be somebody standing there, if there mightn’t be someone who has fainted in the road like Mrs Phelan say, or that idiot boy of the Breegans who likes to stand in traffic. I can’t imagine how I’d progress at all, how I’d ever have the confidence to just trust that it would be all right, that the unexpected wouldn’t happen, because in fact that’s all that does happen.

Virgil had no such problem. He drove leaning forward, hands at ten and two hooked over the steering wheel, mouth tight, eyes fixed on the illumined way. He went faster than he realised. He was not like the Nolan brothers who took corners at a hundred, did the Olympic Rings in doughnuts on the Ennis Road and whose driving skills were mostly testament to a childhood devoted to Pac-Man, and who, Thank the Bust, Kathleen Ryan says, are sharing their talents with the people of Australia now. But he was a wild driver. It was as if he was determined to race her away from the place where the sadness was, as if the Cortina were chariot and horses both and something grave was in pursuit. He drove the way the blind might drive, by faith, ignoring white lines, hurtling away from the Atlantic and heading south by zigzag, sweeping aside veil after veil of mist until they came out on the familiar, the dark slick waters of the estuary. Virgil drove the car up on to the ditch. For a moment he must have thought that would do to stop it. He didn’t actually apply the brakes and the car bumped along aslant, two wheels up on the grass and Mam shouting ‘Virgil!’ And a louder ‘VIRGIL!’ (which certainly startled Publius Vergilius Maro in the Afterlife where I picture him in the sheet-toga Seamus Nolan wore when age eight he gave a sort of boxing interpretation to who he called Punches Pilot in Faha N.S. production of The Nativity. Publius though had probably managed to gather some young lads around him and was telling them about the Trojan War, again, and stalled mid-dactylic a little proud because somebody from Faha down in Earthworld was calling his name). They went jouncing along the bank, the car whipping bits of hedge, dipping in hollows, rising on crests before Dad thumped what he discovered were the brakes and Mam screamed, was jolted forward, and Pop! smacked her head off the windscreen the way the doll figures do in the Road Safety ads.

Only her head didn’t come off.

It was only a small pop probably. Because she just rubbed her forehead and blinked her eyes and Dad said, ‘Jesus, I’m sorry.’

There were ten blank seconds maybe.

You only need to wait five.

‘Mary?’

Mam looked across at him. She stared, wide-eyed. ‘Have we stopped?’ she asked.

She let him think he’d hurt her another ten seconds then she punched his arm. ‘You’re mad, you know that? Mad.’

‘Starting and stopping are the hard bits,’ Virgil said. And he smiled.

When my father smiled it was like he had unlocked the world. It was that huge. It made you want to smile too. It made you want to laugh and then it made you want to cry. It was in his eyes. I can’t explain it really. There was this sense of something rising deep in him, and of shine.

Mam put her hands to her mouth and into them she laughed.

‘Come on,’ he said. He was already getting out of the car. In the movie version Mam’ll say, ‘Where are you going?’ but the dialogue is edited out here. Here there is only his figure become white as he takes off his jacket and leaves it on the driver’s seat. He’s out in the mizzling night rain. His shirt gleams. Across the field the river is black and slick. ‘Come on.’

I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never ever sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.

‘Come on.’ He takes her hand.

And now they are running.

I know that field. Years ago I went there. It’s rough and wildly sloping, hoof-pocked and rushy-bearded both. Running down it is bump and splash, is ankle-twist treachery. You get going and you can’t stop. You’re heading for the river. And you can’t help but scream.

Mam screams. Virgil yells out. And they charge down the dark to the river. The bank is plashy from long river-licking. The muck is silvered and without footprints. It sucks on their shoes. Virgil stops and pulls off his. Then he’s taking off his shirt.

‘Virgil?’

Then he’s taking off his trousers.

‘You’re not?’

The rain is already beaded on his hair. He looks up into the sky. Then he smiles at Mam, turns, goes three steps and dives into the Shannon.

She yells out.

He’s gone. He’s disappeared into the river. She looks at the place where he went in but it’s moving, and quickly she loses the spot, tries to refind it but she can’t. She imagines where he must be gone, the line the dive would have taken him, and she traces that as far as she can but it’s lost in the seamless dark. ‘Virgil?’

Nothing.

A rush of questions, like swimmers entered a sea-race at the same moment, splash-stroke in her mind. How long can you hold your breath underwater? How far can you go? Does a current take you? Is the Shannon deep? Are there river weeds? Malignant river-creatures? Can he swim?

She looks out into the nothing. Then for no reason she can explain she turns and looks at his shoes on the bank. Empty shoes are the strangest thing. Look at a pair of anyone’s worn shoes. Look at the wear on them. Look at the scuffs and scratches. Look at the darkened heel-shine inside, where the weight of the world rubbed, the dent of the big toe, where the foot lifted. Tony Lynch who’s the son of Lynch’s Undertakers and who grew up a pallbearer says putting the shoes on the corpse is the hardest part. The empty shoes of someone who’s gone, there’s a metaphysical poem in there. You don’t believe me, look in Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Tango del viudo’ in the thin white Selected Poems (Book 1,111, Jonathan Cape, London) with the bookmark Alberto Casares, libros antigos & modernos, suipacha 521, Buenos Aires inside. ‘Los mejores libros para los majors clientes’.

Empty shoes. Weird, I know. But true.

Mam looks down at Dad’s shoes on the bank, and that’s when suddenly it hits her: he’s gone.

Her heart flips over. He’s gone.

My father is gone from this world and in the next moments my mother experiences the kind of dread foreknowledge widows in Latin American novels do, where black birds are sitting in the tops of trees and the wind rustles like black crêpe and smells like charcoal. He’s gone. His story is over.

That’s it.

The immense loneliness of the world after love falls upon my mother. She stands there. She can’t speak, she can’t shout out. She’s just taking this ice-cold knowledge inside her.

Then, forty yards downriver, Virgil comes up through the surface. He yells.

It’s not a yell of panic or fear but of joy, and at that moment my mother discovers that my father is a wonderful swimmer. He’s learned in deep waters and distant places and not only has he no fear he makes fear seem illogical, as if water and current and tide are all graces and a man’s movement within them natural as it is on earth. His stroke is unhurried. There is a kind of elemental delight in crossing the pull of the river, in feeling it, allowing it, resisting. He swims like he could swim for ever. I think he could. I think he can.

He comes back to her and holds his place in the water at her feet. ‘Come in,’ he says.

‘I could kill you.’

It’s not the reply he was hoping for. When I get around to writing it, it will not feature in Chat-Up Lines for Girls who Don’t Get Out Much.

She’s serious, and not serious. Her heart has not yet flipped back and she’s in the deep waters of realising that if he was gone her life would be over, which in my book is basically substance essence and quintessence of Love.

‘I’m sorry.’

She looks at him. He is naked. His upper body has the strange luminosity of flesh when most vulnerable. It’s that pale tone the holy painters use, the one that makes you think what the sound of the word flesh does, that it’s this thin-thin covering, flesh, and so easily it can be pierced.

‘I can’t swim,’ Mam says.

‘I’ll teach you.’

‘You will not.’

‘It’s not hard. Mary, take off your clothes.’ He is floating below her, his arms doing a kind of backward circling I’ve seen him do so he’s moving but not going anywhere.

‘You’re mad.’

‘I’m not.’

‘It’s freezing. I’m freezing right here.’

‘You get used to it. It’s lovely. Come on.’

‘I’m not going in.’

‘Then I’ll have to come get you.’

‘Don’t you dare.’

He puts his feet down, finds the mud floor of the Shannon, which is like a dark paste, tacky and cold, and he wades in to the bank.

‘Virgil!’ She’s watching him, she’s warning him, but she’s not running away.

He puts his hands up, leans forward, and like a strange white river-thing coming ashore flips himself up on to the bank.

‘Virgil! Don’t.’

He stands, the river runs off him, leaves a river shine.

‘Come on. I’ll show you.’

‘Virgil!’

‘You’ll love it.’

‘Don’t you touch me!’

He takes a step towards her. And because she doesn’t want to run away and she doesn’t want to go in the river, and because the whole scene is unscripted and mad, she bends down and takes his shoes and fires them out across the dark and into the water. The surprise in his face makes her laugh. Then she grabs up the rest of his clothes.

‘Mary!’

She throws them, shirt and trousers making briefly an Invisible Man, briefly winged, until he lands on the face of the river. Clothes-man floats seaward. They watch. It seems he’ll swim to the Atlantic. Then a twist in the current takes them; soundlessly my father’s clothes slide under and are gone.

Virgil looks at my mother.

She looks at him.

Then she laughs, and he laughs, and then he comes after her and she runs but not so fast that he cannot catch her. And when he does, her hands feel the chill slippery skin of him and she smells the river that is on him and in him and his kiss is a shock of cold becoming warm, river becoming man.

Nine months later, Aeney and I swam downriver and were born.

Chapter 11

When I wake some parts of me are dead. My arms get under me during sleep. As if all night I have been doing backstroke, slow mill of arm over arm towards unseen destination until exhaustion arrives and I give up. I always wake with a feeling of things unfinished. I wake and feel these lumps under me and sort of wriggle to get them alive. Then the room and the house and the parish gradually assemble around me again and Mam looks in and says ‘Morning Ruth’ and lets up the blind on the skylight and opens it a crack so we can see and feel today’s rain.

Here, in what Shakespeare calls The Place Beneath, the rain that falls from heaven is not so gentle. If once, it’s definitely not twice blessed. Safe to say Dear William & his gartered stockings were never abroad in the County Clare.

‘How are you, pet?’ Mam sits on the edge of the bed. She pats and straightens and fixes the duvet and the pillows while she talks. She can’t help herself. My mam never ever stops. She’s just this amazing machine that somehow manages Nan and me and the house and keeps us all afloat. She’s on all decks, crewman, boilerman, purser, Captain. My mam is a miracle.

‘How are you feeling?’

I can’t say. That’s the thing. I can’t say how I am feeling because once I start to think what’s an honest answer to that? I lose my footing. There’s this huge dark tide and I feel O God and I can’t. I just can’t. I used to think that no one who hasn’t been inside your life can understand it. But then I read all of Emily Dickinson, the nearly eighteen hundred poems, and afterwards thought I had been inside her life in a way that I couldn’t if I had lived next door and known her. I’m pretty sure you could have sold tickets to see the look Emily gave if you asked, ‘How are you feeling today, Miss Dickinson?’

But I don’t want to be cold, or hurt Mam, and I don’t want to get into a discussion either, so I say, ‘I’m okay.’ And Mam smiles the smile that isn’t one, but has that patience and understanding and sadness in it, and from the pocket of her cardigan she takes the yellow and blue and white tablets and gives them to me. The water in the glass is room temperature, and on a single swallow the tablets vanish into me and taste like nothing, which, to anyone with even weak-grade imagination, is disconcerting. You want them to taste like something. You want them to be more substantial, and significant, in a way, though I cannot explain that.

‘Now,’ Mam says, ‘I’ll bring you up something in a little while.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’

She doesn’t get up for a moment. For a moment there’s something silent sitting between us and I know it’s the untold story of our family and it’s like this sea-mist has come up the Shannon and into the room and hangs nebulous and opaque and tastes of salt. Then Mam pats my legs under the duvet two gentle pats and she rises and goes.

From the moment we arrived, Aeney and I were noteworthy personages in the drama of the parish. First of all, we nearly weren’t landed alive. Mother being Mother, she took the perfectly practical no-nonsense approach to pregnancy and paid no heed to the powdered ladies in Mina Prendergast’s who began their stories by saying I don’t like to say but or to those who cast their what Margaret Crowe calls Asparagus at the fact that Mam was older than the Faha norm for having a first baby, and in boyfriend terms Dad was An Ancient. The fact that Mam seemed so happy, which in Irish Catholic translates into Doom Imminent, was another portent. The whole parish was waiting for The Delivery. It was not that anyone wished us harm; it was just that people like to be right. They like Next Week’s Episode to turn out exactly as they expected and to surprise them. Nurse Dowling came and measured Mam and leaned over to listen to us and said hello. We said hello back. We were perfectly polite. Only we spoke at the same time so she didn’t hear that there were two of us. Everything is Grand, just Grand, and after that we stopped listening to the World to Come and swam the warm swimming that takes you back to being seaweed.

The plan was that we were to be born in hospital. Ennis though had been Downgraded. One morning a vicious sausage heartburn twisted the Minister sideways at his mahogany desk and he had a pregnancy epiphany, decided no one was to be born on the outer edges of the country. Any more, the excellent Irish people would be born in Centres of Excellence. There would be none of these in the County Clare. There would be one in Limerick though, which at that time was a Centre of Fairly Alright, but if you lived in Kilbaha or out on the Loop Head peninsula you’d have a hundred-mile drive on roads the Council had given up to the mercy of the Atlantic which rightly owned them and was in the process of taking them back. Still, the hospital in Limerick was the intended setting for our long-delayed arrival in the narrative, and in the blue Cortina Virgil practised delivery-driving. He didn’t want to fail this. He had a sense of enormity, as if for every inch swelling in Mam’s belly there was growing around his heart a feeling of immensity, as if his life had reached a verge and this great leap was about to happen, and he would be ready. He made the car spotless, or as near as, given that some spots were actual holes. He went on his knees and took every weed out of the garden. He got new gravel for the gravel way and raked it smooth, then raked it smoother. One day he cleaned the kitchen windows and the bedroom windows and then The Room ones, then the kitchen ones again, going round the house the way Tommy Devlin says a cow circles before calving. He whitewashed the house, limey spatters flecking the clean windows, flecking his hands, face and hair which he had no time to clean because Mam’s cry came and when he ran in the door she had already slid down on to the floor before the fire and Nan had stood her still-smoking cigarette on end, pushed the kettle across to boil and taken down two blankets and three towels so the flagstones would be softer landing and to New Arrivals this world wouldn’t seem penitential.

In minutes the parish was on its way. Moira Mac, who had several PhDs in what, with unfortunate phrasing, her husband Jimmy called Dropping Babies, was there before Mam cried a second time. By the time Nurse Dowling came there was a full gathering of women in the kitchen, their men sitting outside on the windowsill, painting the mark of whitewash across their bottoms, smoking, watching the river running and wondering could that be fresh rain starting.

The labour lasted an age. The journey to Limerick was considered and dismissed. Still we didn’t make an entrance. Gulls came up the river. Clouds came after them. The word Complications leaked outside in a whisper. The men took turns to go round the corner and pee against the gable. Dad came out, strode right down the garden and out the gate, stood alone in the river view in commune with Abraham or the Reverend or the General Invisible, turned on his heel and without a word strode back in.

Young Father Tipp came, parked his Starlet the way priests park, on the outer edge, carried his missal low down and a little behind him the way Clint Eastwood carried his gun, like he’d only use it if he had to. He took the nods, said what names he knew — ‘Jimmy, John, Martin, Michael, Mick, Sean, Paddy’ — to the ground-mumble chorus of ‘Father’ and then stayed outside amongst them.

‘Is there any. .?’

‘No, Father.’

‘Nothing yet, Father.’

‘No. Right.’

‘Could be a while yet, Father.’

‘I see.’

Eventually, to relieve Father Tipp of feeling spare, as Aidan Knowles says, Jimmy Mac asked, ‘Would you maybe say a few prayers, Father?’

And so they started up. A kind of human engine.

From where Aeney and I were it sounded like murmuring waves. Wave after wave. Which fooled us into thinking it was maybe the sea.

Mam screamed. Nan fecked the fecking Minister. The room heated under the scrutiny of the female neighbours, none of whom would chance but sidelong glances at Mam, all of them sitting Sufi Clare-Style, hands folded in their laps and eyes fixed faraway on the emerging plot. In the chimney the wind sang, the rain proper started, and finally, between prayers and curses, Aeney Swain swam, landing with some surprise not in the salty Atlantic but in the giant Johnson’s baby-oiled arms of Nurse Dowling.

We were notable personages in Faha, first, because of our birth, our natures being immediately established as precarious and untimely, and second, even as the blankets and towels were tidied, Mam was laid on the couch and the men called in for tea, we were notable for being unexpected twins. Briefly we enjoyed the celebrity reserved for the two-headed.

‘Two?’

We were not alike, but likeness is a thing expected of twins and expectations lean to their own fulfilment.

She’s very like him, isn’t she?

Spitting image sure.

Which, Dear Reader, is revolting. When I asked her Mrs Quinty gave the more polite interpretation saying that she thought it was not spitting but splitting image and that it came from splitting a piece of wood and matching the pieces perfectly, the join of the back of a violin say. But Vincent Cunningham says it’s spit and image, a person being literally both the fluid and picture of the other, which to an Engineer brain apparently makes perfect sense and is not disgusting at all.

Either way, we began as marvels. Faces peered in at us.

Can you tell them apart?

It is something to be innocent of your own marvellousness, to just have it, the way the beautiful do, and to bathe in the knowledge of being blessed. For me of course it did not last, but there was a time, and on good days I like to think some radiance of that entered me and no matter what happened after, no matter the pale thin face I see in the mirror, no matter these eyes, no matter the exhaustion and the sadness, somewhere inside it remains and there could yet be a time when what I feel is marvellous.

When Dad held us he could not speak. His eyes shone. I know I’ve said that. Reader, be kind. I have no better phrasing. It was like there was excess of shining in him. He kept filling up. Brimming. He lifted us in his arms and had to tilt his head skyward to stop the tears falling out.

When you are born into a great tide of love, you know it. Though you are only minutes old you know. And when you are days and weeks old and can only receive you know that what you are receiving is love. Aeney and me, we knew. We knew when we were being pushed in the big-wheel pram down the Faha road, when Mam and Dad’s faces, sun and moon, came and went over us, when we lay on the blanket in the kitchen and found a huge finger fitted into our tiny hands, and how by just holding tight you made a smile, we knew when we were in handknit jumpers laying on a blanket in the bog while Mam and Dad footed the turf, picked bog-cotton ticklers for our noses, when the cuckoo sang and Mam sang back to it, when she played butterflies under our chins, we knew and learned the strange and beautiful truth that being adored makes you adorable.

Vincent Cunningham comes up the stairs with Vincent Cunningham bounce. He’s off for Reading Week, which is the only thing not done that week.

‘What’s new?’ he says.

‘Well. I’m still here. Still in bed. Still exactly the same. So, that would be nothing.’

Turns out engineers don’t get irony.

‘Hair is good,’ he says. He puts his hands down between his legs and rubs the palms together in a kind of boys o boys way. ‘Your mam says you’ve had no breakfast.’

‘I have to wait an hour or I vomit.’

He tries to let that pass. He has to negotiate a route around the fact that I will be going to Dublin for a while, and he has to do so without mentioning illness. I watch the skylight. The clouds are closed doors in a hospital sky.

‘I couldn’t wait an hour,’ he says. ‘No way.’

‘Why? You’d die?’

I don’t really mean to be so, aspic. It just comes. And I have the face for it.

‘Still raining?’ I say at last to help him, like I can’t see it on his shoulders and on his hedge-cut hair and how always it makes the skin of his face so amazingly fresh-looking.

‘Still raining,’ he says, and then turns on me his great big Little Boy Smile and adds, ‘Wettest year since Noah.’

Chapter 12

It was the brimming that brought my father to poetry. We were to blame. By the time we were born Virgil was already a familiar in the second-hand bookshops of the county, knew the floorboard groans under the twenty thousand volumes in Sean Spellissey’s in Ennis; the busted book boxes in the Friary that on them said Donal O’ Keefe, Victualler, but were filled topsy-turvy with donated paperbacks, Corgis and Pans mostly but also occasional mottled hardcovers with peeling-off From the library of nameplates; the backdoor bookshelves of Honan’s Antiques, where the volumes smelled of candles and Brasso; the haphazard find-it-yourself emporium that was Nestor’s where brandy-smelling books were thrown in for free if you made a purchase, explaining why on separate occasions Virgil bought the quarter-ounce, the half-ounce and the ounce weights that sit on the second shelf of the dresser; Mulvihill’s where deceased priests’ libraries were sold, all hardcovers; Neylon’s bar in Cranny which as draught-excluders had bookstacks in the windows and from which Our Mutual Friend was rescued, M. Keane written in blue biro on the flyleaf; Madigan’s in Kilrush into which the Vandeleur library dispersed and where Maurice Madigan guarded over it, wearing the moustache he got from his father, who got it from his back in the day when shoeshine brushes were a facial style of command.

Before we were born, Virgil knew them all. Perhaps because he did not go to university, perhaps because he felt a lacking which proved impossible to ignore, my father wanted to read everything. Because he could not afford new books, and because he disliked the temporariness of library loans, wanted to keep a book that mattered to him, he haunted the second-hand shops. If, as was rare, he read a book that he thought valueless he would bring it back to Spellissey’s or Honan’s and return it, in the kindest way letting them know the book was worthless, and suggesting he choose something else. I know because I have stood beside him at these mortifications, turning my shoe and pulling down from the hand holding mine while with his most reasonable voice he negotiated the unreasonable. These encounters were sweetened by the fact that after, in my father’s quiet triumph, we would go (literally) to Food Heaven, on the Market, for Chocolate Biscuit Cake, or take possession of one of the soft deep couches of The Old Ground Hotel, and there, while the fire heated the twin ovals in Virgil’s soles, and Mr Flynn flew up and down the hall addressing crises, we shared Tea for One and read with the leisurely disregard Jimmy Mac says is the hallmark of proper gentry.

The library that grew in our house contained all my father’s idiosyncrasies, contained the man he was at thirty-five, and at forty, at forty-five. He did not edit himself. He did not look back at the books of ten years ago and pluck out the ones whose taste was no longer his. So absorbed was he in the book he was reading that the library grew without his noticing. Though he needed new clothes, though his fashion sense evolved into Too Short Trousers, Mismatched Socks, The Patched and the Missing Button Look, Mam became his conspirator and on birthdays and at Christmas gave him not clothes but books. It was in her way of loving. She was selling brownbreads and tarts then, and would come from town with flour and bran, apples, raisins and rhubarb, and a paperback she’d leave by his plate for when he came in from the land.

Perhaps because my father had discovered that, despite the weather, there was some profound affinity between the Deep South, Latin America, and the County Clare, on his shelves in various editions are almost all of what Professor Martin called the dangerously hypnotic novels of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez. Dickens is the only other whose work is so present. Prompted perhaps by his own name, Virgil liked the epic quality, the messiness of generations, the multitude of figures drifting in and out and the certainty that time was not a straight line. Ever since Ashcroft he liked to be lost in a book. It was firstly the Elsewhere thing. It was the pull of other worlds that, though he would jab Up-Jut at me for saying so, went all the way back to The Reverend. Old Absalom, Old Shave-Shadow, was the forerunner because there was something in a Swain that was drawn out of this world, something that made them Look Up or Out or Over and which at its best was somewhere between pole-vaulting salmon-sense and Robert Louis Stevenson Syndrome and at its worst resulted in the Reverend’s ignoring wife and child to go graveyard-walking under starlight and becoming addicted to beeswax candles.

But it was also nourishment, a thing I only came to understand later.

So yes, Virgil liked to be lost in a book, and he read with the smallest rocking of his upper body, a kind of sea-sway that if you listened hard because you were laying in his lap and were supposed to be asleep was accompanied by the thinnest murmuring. I was already The Twin Who Doesn’t Sleep (which, Dear Reader, is an out-and-out lie. I did sleep, in fact, slept sweetly and soundly, beautifully actually, but only when held, which is not weird but perfectly sensible and if you don’t believe me you haven’t read your Hamlet and should sit in a corner and do some deeper thinking about the Undiscovered Country then you too will want to be held while sleeping. So, please) so I was on his lap and could hear the steady sound of his reading. It’s not that he mouthed the words. It’s that they sort of hummed in him. It’s like there was a current or a pulse in the page and when his eyes connected to it he just made this low low thrum. John Banville would know the word for it, I don’t. I only know the feeling, and that was comforting. I lay in his lap and he read and we sailed off elsewhere. Dad and I went up the Mississippi, to Yoknapatawpha County, through the thick yellow fog that hung over the Thames or in through those dense steamy banana plantations all the way to Macondo. We went in the large lumpy blanket-covered Sugan boat-chair that was placed in by the Stanley range where our cribs were put to keep us warm and where Aeney slept like the Pope Nan said but I cried and was lifted, swaddled in West Clare Tropic, sucked my tiny thumb and was ready for departure.

I fell asleep in strange places. Dear Emily said there is no frigate like a book to take us away, and as I told Vincent Cunningham even though Emily couldn’t put a straight parting in her own hair and had a face that Never Saw the Sun she was World’s Number One Explorer of the Great Indoors, and in that too she was right. Dad and I went some places, and because some things, most things in my experience, are more vivid when you haven’t seen them, I know Mississippi better than Moyasta.

What none of us realised and what at first of course Virgil didn’t realise either was that the library he was building would in fact become a working tool, a consultancy, and that it was leading somewhere.

He had no intention of writing.

He loved reading, that was all. And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure.

How could you even start? Read Dickens, read Dostoevsky. Read Thomas Hardy. Read any page in any story by Chekhov, and any reasonable person would go ah lads, put down their pencil and walk away.

But Swains and Reasonableness, you already know, are not best acquainted. And anyway the certainty of failure was never a Swain deterrent. (See: Pole-vaulting.) Besides, I think there was already something in my father that wanted to aspire. It was pre-set in the plot, and only waiting for the day when the brimming would reach the point of spilling.

Aeney and I were that day.

First he went outside. He went out through the nods and mumbles, the drizzle-heads, the Well-Dones and the Good-Mans, marched down to the river which was sort of his version of church and tramped along at Reverend-pace, wordless and grave and impossibly full, rain veils billowing the way old Richard Kirwin tried to convince me once was how angels appear in Ireland, between sky and earth this vaporous traffic.

Virgil couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that we were born, that he was a father. It’s not that he was ignorant of biology, or that for months my mother hadn’t carried us with MacCarroll aplomb. She had. The whole parish knew that at least one of us was coming, and though our sex was polled variously, Mam carrying-to-the-front, to-the-side, to-the-other-side, depending on personal bias, political affiliation and glasses prescription, there was never a doubt that Virgil was about to be a father. But still our arrival was a shock. The moment we appeared in the kitchen, Aeney pink, shining and wondrous, I hairy, Virgil’s life was changed. And he knew it. It was risen up. That’s the part you have to understand. I suppose it may be so in all fathers, I don’t know. It was a sort of epiphany, Ecstasy even, which as far as I can tell has more or less disappeared out of life now ever since the Church went wonky and sport took over the terrain of Glory. But if you cross your Swain & Salmon lore, add in a little of the lonely depths of Virgil when he was a boy, you’ll come to it.

At the plashy bend just past Ryan’s wet meadow, there where they have the bockety homemade sort-of-jetty where for reasons private the Ryans keep loops of baler twine, rope and buckets, he stopped, turned his face to the sky. He had to breathe. Joy was a huge balloon inflating in his chest. Or a white flame scorching it. Or a dove rising. I wish I was a poet.

Point was, he couldn’t contain it.

He was a father. And in the same instant, by the curious calculus of the heart, he missed his own father. It was not Abraham himself but a better, kinder interpretation, an Abraham that had not existed except as possibility, but who now took over the role as in my father was proven the truths the New Testament is more humane than the Old and the world looks joyous to the joyful.

He wanted to shout out. He wanted to wave his hands in the air, to halleluiah, do a few steps, go Big Gesture, the way Burt Lancaster does in the video of The Rainmaker which Mrs Quinty gave me and which I can’t give back because the machine ate the tape when Burt went spittle-spraying and just a tinsy-winsy little bit Over the Top.

None of which, thank the Lord, Brothers and Sisters, Virgil actually did. What he did was stand beside the river.

That’s where he found the rhythm.

There were no words at first. At first there was a kind of beat and hum that was in his blood or in the river and he discovered now somewhere in his inner ear, a pulsing of its own, a kind of pre-language that at first he wasn’t even aware he was sounding. It was release. It was where the brimming spilled, in sound. To say he hummed is not right. Because you’ll suppose a tune or tunefulness and there was none, just a dull droning inside him. He went up and down the riverbank. He went the way Michael Moran the Diviner goes when he’s going round and round a source, head bent and almost holy, shoulders stiff, serious neck-crane like Simon the Cross-carrier, wispy hairs on the back of his neck upright and all of him attentive to an invisible elsewhere.

Virgil walked the rhythm the river gave him. Over and back. Back and over. Lips pressed shut now, brow like a white slab, eyes watery and in a way unseeing. And now he was tapping. Three fingers of his right hand against his thigh, da-dumda dumda dum dum-da. The ground softened and mucked under the weight of the not-yet-poem, was printed and overprinted, boot-marks rising little ridges, small dark river waves, as he tramped and hummed and heard the hum turn into a first phrase.

He had something.

Was it wonderful? Was it like the moment the fishing line tautens in the stream and what was slack becomes a clean and perfect angle of intercourse? Was there that same electric flash of feeling, a zap! eye-startle, muscle-tension, torsion of body to river? Did the urgency and unsettledness and rapture crash-combine, did his whole spirit cry out? Did he think yes, here, I have one!

And was it wonderful?

Well, at the time I was one hour and twenty minutes on the planet and mostly concerned with figuring out how there was two of me. But in the coverless edition of The Compleat Angler (Book 900, Chatto & Windus, London) that smells not so much of fish but certainly of yearning, Izaak Walton says angling is just like poetry, and so that’s how I picture it. He had one.

I’ve read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they’re all do-lally and they’re all different. There’s Gerard Manley Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I’m-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. Philip Larkin, writing from Belfast to his Dearest of Burrow-dwellers, My Dear Bunny, told how he bought a shilling’s-worth of mistletoe and was walking home with it to his flat, feeling jolly and like the reformed Scrooge, then noticed that the dark-coated, to-the-chin-buttoned, people of Belfast were all staring at him, the Blossom Carrier, as if they expected at any moment he might erotically explode.

They are a parish of peculiars, poets. But they all generally agree, a poem is a precarious thing. It is almost never landed clean and whole in one go. Virgil had a bite, one phrase, that’s all. But he wouldn’t let it go, and because poetry is basically where seeing meets sound, he said the phrase aloud now. He said it aloud and tramped it along the riverbank, said it again the moment he finished saying it and found in repetition was solace of a kind. In the dull consistency of the beat was that universal comfort babies know and people forget. He teased the line, waiting for the next movement. When it didn’t come he said the first line over. He didn’t give up. The sensation was so new and in it the certainty that this was something that he kept at it, and was still crossing over and back on the mucked strip beside the river when Father Tipp came looking for him in order to arrange the date for the baptisms.

Father Tipp was glad to see my father was praying. He heard the murmuring on the breeze, saw the head-bent pacing, and was consoled that though Virgil Swain was not a frequenter of his church fatherhood had now returned him to God. This would make easier the task that had troubled him in our kitchen, namely how to save Aeney and my souls before his annual holiday home to Tipperary.

Not knowing the fields Father Tipp missed the track, crossed Ryan’s not Mac’s, and so laboured through muck and plop, waving an arm at my father that he might see him and shorten the journey. But Virgil saw nothing, so absorbed was he in his prayers, and Father Tipp had to carry on, neat black Clarks size sevens having a little brown baptism of their own and the heat of his effort bringing the midges.

‘Hello? Hello there?’

He did another big drowning-man wave, smacked too late the first triple bites on his forehead.

‘Virgil? Hello?’

Still my father didn’t see or hear him. By the time Father Tipp crossed the loose rusting wire on random sticks the Ryans favoured as fencing, catching his inner trouser leg a twang, he could hear the praying and thought what he was seeing was Pentecostal.

Father Tipp was still young then, Shock and Awe still belonged to the vocabulary of the cloth and the Church was not yet in the toilet as Sean Mathews said. He was still inclined towards the miraculous, and came along the bank believing he was seeing what in fact he believed. Or believed that he believed. It’s a vicious circle.

‘Virgil?’

My father didn’t stop. He kept on, pacing and repeating, pacing and repeating, until, with a purple flush of authority, Father T stepped at last into the way of the poem. ‘A word?’ he said, hands behind his back, eyebrows up and face pinched, more or less exactly the way Timothy Moynihan did in Faha Hall when he was playing the Vicar in that English farce and Susan Brady opened the door with her knickers in her hand.

Father Tipp realised in an instant the awfulness of his intrusion, knew when he saw my father’s eyes flash, Virgil stopping sharp, falling silent. There was a moment of acute diffidence, as though they were high-standing bishops of different flocks. Because by then he knew that what he had heard was not after all a prayer.

‘Father.’

Briefly the priest considered his shoes, and the moment he did the toes of them lifted slightly from the suck muck and his heart fell. West Clare was just not Tipperary. ‘I was wondering if I might have a word?’

‘Yes, Father?’ My father looked dazed.

Father Tipp compensated for self-consciousness by bubbling. ‘Well, isn’t it marvellous? It is. Marvellous now. Twins. You had no idea, I’m told? No. No but marvellous now.’ A penance of midges came to his brow. He went after them with a white linen handkerchief. ‘Warm, isn’t it? Close. Terribly close.’

The two men stood and considered the closeness. ‘Not good this time of year the farmers tell me,’ Father Tipp said, and ran a finger round the inside of his collar.

Silently my father was repeating the phrases of the poem just departing.

‘Not that I understand why exactly,’ the priest said. He kept the hanky handy. Father Tipp was and still is a man skilled in the art of avoidance, black-belt level at the cryptic, but the heat of what he had to propose was making a glistening Here Midges landing strip of his forehead. ‘They’re not like this in Tipperary,’ he said and dabbed, letting the sorrow of his exile air before chancing a first proper glance at my father. ‘Momentous day for you. Of course it is. Of course it is.’ He watched the river run. ‘Yes.’ The midges took a moment to regroup. This time they came to his moisture moustache. He flicked the hanky at the air as if giving a kind of general dispensation.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I’ll be off. Just wanted to say my congratulations.’ He didn’t risk a handshake, but turned, took three steps and shot one hand upwards so his departing benediction was backwards. ‘God bless.’

He got five yards down the bank when he stopped, shook his head in this performance of contrariness, and turned back. ‘I nearly forgot,’ he said. ‘The baptisms?’

‘What?’

‘I’m actually away week after this. How will we? I wonder. No. Could we maybe? No. No no. I suppose not. Only. .’ A black diary had appeared in his hand. ‘We couldn’t. .?’

‘We’ll do it now,’ my father said.

‘What? No. That’s not. .’

But before he could finish his sentence my father had taken one of Ryan’s buckets and, slurp, dipped it in the river to clean it out, slurp, dipped it again, and was now carrying it slapping and brim-spilling back across the field towards the house.

Or so the mythology goes.

‘Virgil, no. I didn’t mean. There’s no need for. .’

‘We’ll do it now,’ my father said again. He was already past the priest, going the easier track home, and Father Tipp was already hurrying after, already wondering what the hell had happened, in the confusing cloud of his midges trying to figure out where in his strategy the error had occurred. ‘Stop! Wait a minute,’ he called, knowing that my father would not stop or wait a minute.

‘I won’t do it,’ the priest said.

‘Then I will.’

And he would. That was one thing Father Tipp said he knew. Everyone in the parish knew Virgil Swain enough by then to know that when he made a decision, no matter how ill-advised, mulish, in fact ass-backward as Seanie the Yank says, he stuck to it. So as Father Tipp came scampering after him he had to change tack, hurry through the broad headings of the Act and its Consequences: on the one hand the fact that this would mean the baptisms were done, on the other it would not be in the church; on the one hand he would be enlisting two more into the Faith, on the other this man had a bucket of river water. On the one hand so more or less did John. On the other-other, if word ever got to the Bishop.

‘I think I have holy water in the car.’

Whether my father was afraid that we would not survive until the priest returned from his holidays, whether he was saving us from an afterlife of wandering among the unblessed, had over-Dante-ed on the short fat green-backed edition of The Divine Comedy (Book 999, Modern Library, New York) that has M.P. Gallagher, Rome written on an unposted envelope inside, whether it was in compliance with Abraham’s thinking or in defiance of the Reverend’s, whether it came abruptly out of the fracture and loss of the poem, whether the poem itself was to be about river-birth and renewal and the priest’s question had been trigger for the outlandish fact of it, I can never decide.

When Father Tipp went to his car the plastic bottle of Holy Water was empty. He’d been over-liberal at Prendergast’s the day before. When he came in the front door to tell them he’d send to the Parochial House for more he came face to face with the chastening truth that there is a tide in things, for Ryan’s bucket was in the centre of the flagstone floor, my father was kneeling, cradling Aeney in his arms, and the waves of praying were just waiting for his blessing to dip us into the brimming water.

Nearly twenty years later, still in exile and sitting up here in the attic room beside the bed, that’s how Father Tipp told it. Lest I fear our baptism sub-standard in religious terms, he added that no sooner had he started proceedings than there was a general shuffling among the gathered witnesses pressed tight and pretty much steaming inside our kitchen. Everyone closed in around us, everyone wanted to see. It was as if our story was already being told and was moving the hearts of Faha, making people think These two will need help, for right then there was an opening of shirt buttons, a rummaging in handbags, in wallets and coat pockets, a general flurry of rooting about, and then, as the river water was being scooped from the bucket, into our swaddling on the kitchen floor came assorted Miraculous Medals, rosary beads, Memorial cards, brown and blue and green scapulars of various antiquity (and body odour), two Padre Pios, two Pope John Pauls, one Little Flower, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Patron-of-the-Missions card, several (because we had been Lost & Found) Saint Anthonys, one Saint Teresa of Ávila, Patron of Headache Sufferers, and from the handbag of Margaret Crowe a sort of crouched-down Lionel Messi-looking Saint Francis of Assisi, all of them well-worn and used and in our first moments in this world falling around Aeney and I now like holy human rain.

Chapter 13

My father used Aisling copybooks. He wrote in pencil. Like Robert Lowell (and Margaret Hennessy, who looked like she had been returned to Faha after abduction by aliens), he often put his head to one side, as if one ear was leaning towards a sound that was not yet in this world. He hummed. He also tapped. I was afraid of sleep. I lay in his lap, small as a sonnet, and just as difficult.

He sat and hummed. Then suddenly he leaned across and I was lost in the deep coarse smell of the river-fields in his jumper and heard, somewhere invisibly above, the soft rubbing sound of pencil on paper.

He leaned back, hummed what he had written. We rocked on.

Aeney had no jealousy in him. I think at first he didn’t know he was a twin. It is different for boys. Boys are born as masters of the universe, until a bigger master knocks them down. I cried; Aeney slept. I was picked up and carried out from where our cots were in Mam and Dad’s, taken up the steep stair that RLS would be delighted to know was called a Captain’s Ladder, on to the little landing and into the chill space that Before Conversion was then the attic and later Aeney’s and mine. Up here, spilled pool of light and stack of books, was my father’s pine table and chair. Up here by the bar-heater he wrote the first poems with me on his lap. When I woke in the mornings I was back in my cot, and felt, well, composed. My brother did not care. Even when later he discovered I could not sleep unless held, when he sometimes woke and looked across and his sister was vanished, he appeared unperturbed. Maybe he wasn’t that attached to me. Maybe he had a finely developed and fearless sense of the world to come, or had the unshakeable confidence of the first-born, that first landing in the plump arms of Nurse Dowling, which had informed him that things would be all right. The only fracture in this, the only inkling of otherwise was what only I knew, the way Aeney’s hand in sleep went to his sleeve or the label of his pillow so that he was always holding on to something and never adrift.

Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know. In our family it was unremarkable that my father had no income, that he hummed above the ceiling, only went into a church when there was no Mass on, fished religiously, had a book permanently sticking out of his pocket so his pockets were always torn at the edges, or to himself sang undervoice and off-key what I didn’t know then was the Psalms. It was not curious that he liked jam with sausages, was no more odd than Nan sitting on Clare Champions and smoking up the chimney or Aeney’s craving for salt on everything, cornflakes, hot chocolate and cake. Nothing in your own family is unusual.

I think nothing of it on the morning the Tooth Fairy has come to be brought by my mother out in the not-quite-rain to find my father, and to find him waiting for a cow to calve while reading aloud. It’s the dirty white paperback of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (Book 1,112, Avon Books, New York) but back then I think it’s a story for the cows.

‘There she is!’ The book goes into his pocket. He kneels down to me. Always in happiness my father seemed on the point of tears. I thought it normal. I thought every adult must have these huge tides of emotion rising. Every adult must feel this wave of undeserving when they kneel down and see the marvel of their children.

‘Did she come?’

I smile my crooked smile, hold out the shining coin.

‘Let me see. Well well well. Isn’t that something? Will you give me a loan?’

I will. I offer it, but he presses my hand closed inside his.

‘You hold on to it for now, Ruthie,’ he says. ‘But I’ll know where to come if I need it.’

The colour of his eyes deepens with feeling and he has these twin clefts either side of his lips where feeling is checked. ‘You must have been very very good to get that much. Did you see her?’

I didn’t.

‘Do you know I think I did hear something,’ my father says. ‘It was very late. I was awake and working and I heard this gentle whh whh whh.’ He blows three times to make the wings of the Tooth Fairy as she circles and then descends upon our house. Whh whh whh. ‘She must have folded her wings then because I didn’t hear her inside the kitchen, and the wings would have knocked against things, wouldn’t they?’

They would.

‘But the latch. That’s why I heard the latch. I was wondering about that. It made just the softest clack, must have been when she was going down to your room. You didn’t see her at all? But you felt her maybe?’

I did. I do now.

I nod my solemn five-year-old nod and fly up into the air in my father’s arms. He turns me around in the sky above him, which is where I want to be always, but cannot, and must take succour in the knowledge that though human beings can’t fly soon I will lose more teeth.

When Mam takes me back across the meadow, rain-starred, gummy, dizzy, my father is back reading Blake to the cows.

One day we get a dog, a golden retriever my father christens Huckleberry. He’s not golden but white, which is the best kind I tell God-forgive-me the Bitch of the Brouders when she says your dog is a fake. Aeney and I take Huckleberry down to show him the river and to tell him not to drown. He’s puppy-manic and piddle-happy, scampering on the end of our blue baler-twine leash like his dream-legs are longer than his real ones. Aeney runs with him, and I run after, realising instantly that Huck is to be Aeney’s dog, that in a way inexplicable unless you’ve known it, they recognise each other.

Huck will not swim. He may be able to, we don’t know. We throw sticks into the water thinking to fool him into having his retrieving instinct override his desire not to get wet, but he just sits and in the deeps of his brown eyes the sticks float away down the river.

My father says we should skip our homework, we should take him to the beach, and we all load into the Cortina and drive to Kilkee. Huck loves the car. He loves to be moving. He sits up and looks out and Aeney winds down the window that later won’t wind up but has to be fingertip-pulled and then pressed the last inch. I think Huckleberry knows we’re going to the sea. I’m thinking he smells it and is already working out his strategy, How To Avoid The Sea.

That’s the kind of mind I have.

It’s still the time when dogs are allowed to run free on beaches. The Minister for Poo hasn’t been elected yet. So when we come down on to the big horseshoe beach Aeney lets Huck go and Huck goes running like he’s never run before, like sand and shore and sea-wind are marvels particular for dogs. He runs and you feel joy. You can’t explain that. He runs head out and ears back, like he can’t get to where he is going fast enough, like his blood remembers beaches from a world before and what beaches mean is freedom. Aeney tears after him. He yells Huck! Huck! and is not dismayed when Huck doesn’t slow, but runs on regardless, arms flying, carefree in the way we all want to be but suppose only exists in fairy tales, the pair of their prints briefly present in the sea-washed glare of the gone-out tide.

‘Swim, Ruthie?’ Dad asks, though he knows I won’t. Then he is in his brown trunks walking towards the ocean and Mam and I are standing, the way girls always are, watching, holding the clothes, peering into the distance, first for Aeney, and then into the far-out sea for Dad.

One sunny birthday we get a horse, a grey mare, who because Dad’s wrestling Homer at the time he calls Hippocampus, which in mythology was part-dolphin part-horse and part-bird, could go speedily on land sea and air, none of which dear Hippy actually managed in her lifetime. A man called Deegan brings her from Kilrush in a horsebox behind his dusty old Mercedes. Hippocampus is going by the name of Nancy and keeping her mythological powers under deep cover.

Mr Deegan gets out of his car says great day great day thank God and smacks his hands together. He wears a small felt hat. He wishes Aeney and I happy birthday and asks us aren’t we the lucky ones. This is a lovely quiet horse for you, he says. Oh Jeez she is. He releases the catches either side of the horsebox and makes a shout of Hup! as he lets down the back. Mam is standing beside the cabin with her arms folded and this held-in smile she reserves just for Dad, for when he has done something she thought impossible. Nan is at the kitchen window scowling her opinion of horse-dealers. Mr Deegan goes inside the box and unties Hippy and maybe because of the drowse of the drive or the torment of flies she has had to ignore, she does not move.

‘Hup now, hup. Come on. Come on, young lady.’ Hippy backs down the ramp with stiff-legged reluctance, comes down into our yard and turns out. Her eyes spook a little until Aeney tells Huck to be quiet.

‘There now, take a look at your horse,’ Mr Deegan says. ‘She’s a classy lady, this one.’ He pats her neck, harder than I would have, but Hippy doesn’t seem to mind.

‘What do you think of her, Ruthie?’ Dad asks.

‘She’s lovely.’

‘Will you pet her?’

‘She likes to be petted,’ Mr Deegan says. ‘Oh Jeez she does.’

‘And she’s quiet?’ Mam asks him.

‘Very quiet, Mam.’ Mr Deegan has a broken china smile. Because by horse-dealer’s instinct he knows Mam is harder to impress than Dad he clicks his fingers on an idea. ‘I’ll show you how quiet,’ he says, and then he crouches down and gets in under the horse, so that he is actually in there, squatting sitting-room-style between her four legs. ‘It rains you can always shelter under here,’ he says. ‘She won’t mind.’ He holds a hand out towards me. ‘Want to have a cup of tea in here? I’ll ring for service.’ He tugs twice on her tail. Hippy doesn’t mind. She doesn’t move.

I, who by age eight am already fearful of all cattle and beasts general, who have already decided the natural world is a misnomer, think this is the best horse there ever was. This is Hippy the Wonder Horse. I take Mr Deegan’s hand and go in under her. So then does Aeney.

‘Will she have babies?’ Aeney asks.

‘Foals they’re called,’ I tell him.

‘Will she have foals?’

‘Please God,’ Mr Deegan says. ‘Please God.’

And I think I know then this will be a day I will be remembering. I know it even before Aeney and I get the giggles under there and cannot stop ourselves, and Hippy doesn’t mind or move and the giggles get worse, and they spread to Mam who passes them to Dad in the form of the smile she releases now, because Virgil is wonderful, because somehow, she doesn’t know how, he has got us a horse for our birthday.

It doesn’t matter that Hippy was never actually ridden, that she just stood in the field, and grazed and wanted to be petted, that when we came home from school I petted her because I had read Black Beauty and wanted a good part if Hippy wrote her own autobiography, that Aeney lost interest in her when she wouldn’t go and instead he went river-hunting with Huck for whatever it is that boys hunt. It didn’t matter that months later when Tommy the vet came and examined her he explained that Hippy was approximately a hundred years old, stone deaf, and was employing all of her energy just to stay standing, that my father’s softheartedness had been trod on, that he had paid twenty times what she was worth out of money he didn’t have, somehow none of that matters now, for in these pages now here we are on that hot birthday, my brother and I, giggling mad beneath the mythological horse and making the mark in my heart that says I was happy here.

Chapter 14

There is a scene I love where a brother and sister meet after many years and little communication. They meet in an arranged café in mid-afternoon. The light is dying and the city outside rumbles softly in the complacent time before rush hour. The café is unexceptional and quiet. She comes first, sits at the far end, a table facing the door, nervous in her buttoned raincoat. The waiter is an older man. He leaves her be. The brother enters late with the look but not the words of apology. He kisses her cheek. They sit and the old man brings them teas they do not want, two pots, strong for him weak for her. It is long ago since they said each other’s names aloud, and saying them now has the extraordinary shyness of encounter I imagine on the Last Day. At first there is the full array of human awkwardness. But here is the thing: almost in an instant their old selves are immediately present. The years and the changes are nothing. They need few words. They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word family. So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love.

I cannot remember what book it is in. But it’s in this one now.

Chapter 15

Writing of course is a kind of sickness. Well people don’t do it. Art is basically impossible. Edna O’Brien said she was surprised Van Gogh only cut off one ear. Robert Lowell said what he felt was a blazing out, flashes, nerve jabs in the moments the poem was coming. I myself have had no blazing out, and don’t suppose it’s all that good for your constitution. To stop himself from taking off into the air Ted Hughes had to keep repeating over and over Beneath my feet is the earth, some part of the surface of the earth. The thing is, writing is a sickness only cured by writing. That’s the impossible part.

Once he had started proper, my father never stopped. He was always writing. That’s what I understand now. There was no rest, no pause. It was not that he only wrote when the dishes were cleaned and cleared away in the evening, when he went off alone to the table in the pool of lamplight. It was not that he only wrote when he had the pencil in his hand. It was that whatever part of his brain brought the rhythms and the sounds, whatever part of his mind saw things in the everyday not-really-beauty that was here around our land and the river, that part had clicked On and gotten stuck. There are two things, Tommy Devlin says, that are the mark of genius: one is non-stop buzzing in the brain, the other seeing the next move when there is no next move. He was speaking about Jamesie O’Connor hurling for Clare back in the day but the non-stoppedness is right. There’s seeing in it, and there’s transformation. Things are seen differently to what they are. Not that they are always better or brighter necessarily. It’s not like Bridie Clohessy whose vision was blurry coming from WeightWatchers and mistook Declan Donahue for the Archangel Michael, or Sheila Shanley who took a notion after her husband died, woke one morning and decided to paint everything Buttermilk, walls, windows, stairs, threw out everything she owned that was not a creamy off-white, and became a one-woman effulgence show. Sometimes things are darker, worse, and with inexplicable torment you hear the gulls, whose complaints are complex and constant when they come in over Cappa with cries crazy it seems from banishment.

I didn’t understand that my father’s brain could not rest, or that when he was out in the fields, driving us to town, or sitting to tea, all the time there were words, rhythms, running like one of those programs that don’t shut off somewhere in the back of the computer. All the time there was gathering this sense of mission.

Once people got to hear about it in the mystical way that people of Faha can hear a person taking off their underpants and are the ne plus ultra in the Intelligence & Surveillance league, once word was out that Virgil Swain was writing poetry, there were two immediate first reactions; the men’s: that it was his own fault for marrying Mary MacCarroll; the women’s: her own fault for marrying The Stranger. But after that initial wave had passed a third reaction came and endured, a quiet awe and respect reserved for someone who had chosen such a serene and perfectly impractical career as that of Poet. We’re like that as a people. We can’t help but admire a bit of madness. Even Tommy McGinley was quietly admired despite the kind of hit-on-the-head mouth-open expression he got from eating cork, after hearing on RTE it was the main ingredient in Viagra, and not what they actually said, that the main ingredient was made in Cork. No, in Faha a bit of madness is all right. So, people started giving us books, books they had read and ones they knew they would never read, books that were left to them, books that were bought because they were the cheapest things at church sales, books that came free with newspapers, books that were found in trunks and attics whose titles and binding and print combined to say this is a serious book and to which the finders in our parish invariably responded by thinking: Virgil Swain.

‘This is a book for an intelligent man,’ JJ said, handing over Yeats’s Essays and Introductions (Book 2,222, Macmillan, London) before sitting a while in our kitchen, big hands on his knees, genial eyes smiling and that kind of lovely old-fashioned gentle courtesy you can find in the older people in Faha. After a time he nodded to the fire and added, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a poet.’

Of course my father hadn’t exactly chosen poetry. But it was always rising in him; that’s what you get if you read your Abraham Swain and know your The Salmon in Ireland.

At first I didn’t even know that it was poetry. Dad was working, that’s all. I knew it was writing, and I knew it was humming. When you’re young you’re protected by a cloud of vagueness. How our whole household actually worked, how the farming progressed, how many bread loaves were baked and sold, eggs trayed and delivered, how in fact we survived at all — I had no idea. I never wondered, never asked. I may have heard a cow had died, a pine marten had raided our hens, that the car was resting this week, but because Mam was basically Genius Level Ten at guarding her children I never computed these facts, never added them up with Nan mending our mended clothes, Aeney’s trouser legs being let down and let down until they couldn’t be let down any more, fish for dinner again, or the large earthenware jar of coins my mother kept in the window.

Then one day the cloud lifted. In Miss Brady’s class I answered that my father was a writer.

‘Really? That’s wonderful, Ruth.’

I had said it out loud for the first time, a writer, and felt a little ascension myself.

‘Where are his books so?’ God-forgive-me, the Bitch of the Brouders asked, because her father, Saddam, was our leading celebrity and she wasn’t going to be dethroned from Best Father.

I had no answer, Ascension Ends with Crash Landing running in a Breaking News banner across my forehead. Then Miss Brady said, ‘You can be working on a book and be a writer.’

But later when I was standing alone in the yard and trying hard To Look Normal Jane Brouder crossed over with that hideous Anne Jane Monaghan who had only added her middle Jane out of some Cool Girls thing, who believed herself the model for Miss Perfect in the Mr Men series but who I voted Girl Most Likely to Be Lady Macbeth, who later, after her mother had paid a dozen tutors to more or less crow-bar off the top of her head and stuff everything they knew in there, got six As in her Leaving and is now in teacher-training polishing her dictator skills.

‘Is it poems he’s writing?’ she asked, with flawed grammar. She used a tone which implied poetry was something like impetigo, which had devastated the school when the Resettled came from Dublin and for three weeks turned our class into good casting for a leper colony. ‘Is it poetry?’

The two of them looked at me with the exact same look.

‘It’s a story,’ I said.

Still the look.

‘It’s a story, like Black Beauty.’

That’s what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be a book I brought to school one day. I wanted it to be unsurpassably jaw-droppingly eye-poppingly amazing, a book Loved By Everyone, and somehow through that I would conquer my own oddity and might even be asked to add a middle Jane, which I had briefly decided I would consider but for the misfortune of the rhyme, Ruth Jane Swain, which suggested hooped dresses, wisteria on the veranda, and a haughtiness I personally could never aspire to.

The Janes stood and scrutinised me.

‘It’s a lie,’ Anne Jane said, triumphantly.

‘No it’s not.’

‘Yes it is. I can tell. It’s a lie.’

‘I’m going to ask your brother,’ God-forgive-me said.

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘He just doesn’t.’

‘Come on, Anne Jane. Let’s ask him.’

‘Yes, let’s.’

‘Wait.’

‘What?’

‘What?’

‘It’s not finished yet. The book is not finished yet.’

‘Your father’s not actually a writer, is he?’

‘Is he?’

‘Is he?’

That afternoon I walked home pulling overripe blackberries and throwing them into the ground, finding in the purple staining small consolation but adequate image. Aeney had run ahead. Aeney always ran ahead, was always happiest in speed and in any case would be no help in this. In me, exhausted from the defence of having a special father, had bloomed the first dark cloud of betrayal, a small but persistent whispering: I wish my father was not a writer. Why could it not have passed over? Why couldn’t somebody else’s father be a writer and mine a teacher or doctor or councillor?

I brought my frown into the kitchen.

‘Mam?’

‘Yes, Ruth?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right then.’

‘Only.’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s Dad writing? Is it poetry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you read his poems?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re not ready yet.’

‘You can still be a writer when you’re working on a book,’ I said.

‘Of course you can,’ Mam was working dusting flour. Her arms are basically flour and dough. If she’s not making bread in Heaven when she gets there it’ll be because Bread of Life doesn’t need flour and aprons are only for this world.

‘When will the book be done?’

‘I don’t know, Ruth. Some day.’

‘But soon?’

She paused, as if it was a thing she hadn’t considered, or hadn’t considered until that moment that I might want the book to appear, that in fact my whole status and future happiness and the happiness of all the world, Hello, actually depended on it.

‘Yes, I’m sure. Soon,’ she said. ‘Okay, pet?’

‘Okay.’

That eventually the poems would coalesce or coagulate, or whatever it is that poems do, was not in doubt. The pressures of brain, paper, pencil and time made it inevitable. Because the secret to writing, the entire syllabus, booklist, coursework, of Ruth Swain’s Master’s programme in Creative Writing is four words: Sit in the Chair.

Or, in mine and RLS’s case, Lie in the Bed.

There’s a book inside you. There’s a library inside me.

Sit down.

The words will come, the pages will gather. That’s it. Course over.

So it was just a matter of stabbing a pen into his heart, and putting in the time. And more and more that’s what he was doing. In the morning, my father’s eyes would be gone Japanese, extravagant puffed bags of sleeplessness making them narrow, his silver hair forked on the right-hand side where he had held his leaning head.

‘Was the writing good, Dad?’ was basically my version of Are we there yet?

‘You know you are the most wonderful girl in the world? Have I ever told you that?’

I nodded, full glob of Flahavan’s with honey swimming in my mouth.

‘No. I don’t think I ever have.’

‘You did!’

‘How can I have forgotten?’

‘You did already!’

‘No, no. I never did. But I will now. Do you know what you are? The most. .’

I had to finish his sentence. Otherwise he would keep at it. And although even then I feared those critics creeping behind the wainscoting or under the linoleum who would consider me a Sentimental & Exaggerated Character, I will admit I did say: ‘. . wonderful girl in the world.’

Go on, shoot me.

Once, when I got chickenpox, and had to be separated from Aeney, who never caught anything anyway, a bed was made for me beside Dad’s table and I was back for three nights in his night-composing. At first before writing he read. It was a warm-up. It was sort of like taking the pole down the cinderway, feeling the wind, trotting down to the vault and looking up at it. He read aloud from those writers that he knew were beyond him. When I got to Trinity I would understand they were his canon: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Hopkins, and of course Yeats. They were the bar. They were the ones laid out across the sky overhead if you were a sky person, the salmon if you were a sea one. Basically, The Impossibles.

My chickenpox nights, Virgil read Hopkins. (It was years later, when in the stale yeast-and-socks air of the Arts library I went in pursuit of Hopkins, that I came across GMH’s letter to Richard Watson Dixon, where he says: ‘My vocation puts before me a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else.’) Back then chickenpox Ruth was not sure her father was speaking English. Dappled things, couple-colour. Rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim. He spoke the lines aloud, plugged in to what Seamus Heaney called the powerpoint of Hopkins, and soon his head fizzed, fried, sizzled.

Transcendence is the business of poets. That’s what they’re for. They’re not like you and me. They have that extra bit that’s always ready for take-off. Poets understand why God didn’t give us wings: he wanted entertainment. He wanted us to aspire, to ascend. He wanted poetry.

My father could read a poem five or six times, more, over and over, reading quietly but intently, the lines like a ladder or a prayer rising until the time when he put the book aside and then was utterly quiet. He sat, leaned forward, stared at the page. I did not move. The room contracted. The rain and the rain-wind rattled the slates, whipped the loose wire from the TV aerial, whp whp, against the roof. It didn’t stop, whp whp whp, and in time became a charioteer who rode down the sky, whp whp, came in over the dark river that had swallowed the stars, and settled just above our house.

Slowly then, the slightest angling back and forth of his body that pressured the back legs of the wooden chair into a thin creak, my father rocked and began to hum. He picked up the pencil. He moved his whole body towards the page. I lay in my unsleep as the under-voiced hum turned to phrase. And though I had not words for it I knew that we were in Lift-Off, I knew that I was hearing the poem happen, that there was air under us and we were away, in some other place where marvels were and dazzlement common. I knew that nothing in the ordinary world was quite like this and I lay there, hoping the spots on my skin would not vanish for a time, for a time happy in the confluence of sickness and poetry.

Chapter 16

When the book didn’t come, and didn’t come, I perfected my skill of Standing Alone in the yard. Silently I worked on my narrative voice. My dear Jane-sows. You are dunghills. Pissed-on nettles. Spews of vomit. Period pains. You are stuck-up vindictive ignorant pony-tailed piglets. I wish you misery and pimples, hair that will never come right, husbands with hairy backs and breaths of cauliflower.

(Later, in Editorial, fearing Mrs Quinty might think my narrator a bit Swain Extreme, and that use of Black Arts might be held against me in the next life, I amended that to the blessing Tommy Devlin says Mona McCarthy used after the exhausting three-day — two-geese, four-duck, five tart — visit of her American third cousins. She waved them a serene goodbye from the front door, said, ‘May God preserve them, at a distance.’)

Distance is something Swains do well.

Because I never made friends, because if you think about it making friends sounds fairly contrived and deliberate and sort of selfish, making your friends, and until the world taught me otherwise I’ll admit I always believed friends would somehow find me, would detect Ruth Swain-ness in the stratosphere and head out on their camels, I am used to being on my own. But now that I am imminently departing rounds of callers come to our house for A Last Look, or to Get Ahead of the Funeral, a local science.

The first was Baby Jesus.

He arrived unannounced at the front door. He did not ring the bell but lay just in out of the rain which by then was torrents. Mam found him when she was letting out Huck. Jesus was exactly the same as he’d been when he was kidnapped. There wasn’t a mark on him. He hadn’t aged a day. Mam let out a cry.

Well you would.

And she looked out the yard for who had brought Him. There was no one. Huck looked at Jesus and looked at Mam with dog puzzlement and then Mam said ‘Business Huck’ and he remembered what he had come out for and trotted diagonally to that bush Margaret Crowe calls the Anonymous to do the only Business being done in these parts now. Mam picked up the Baby Jesus. Then she saw how the river had risen. The lower edge of Ryan’s meadow was gone. The next five yards were a dull silver pocked with rain and pierced with rushes. All along our side the river had come up. She stood holding Jesus and looking at the rain.

Here in Faha, of rain we have known All Kinds, the rain that pretends it’s not rain, the rain that crosses the Atlantic and comes for its holidays, rain that laughs at the word summer, sniggers at the dry day in Ennis twenty kilometres away, hoots at what pours, streams, teems, lashes, pelts and buckets down. But this was different.

It had intent. That’s what Mam thought. And the intention was Flood.

Huck came back and looked at Mam and she said ‘Good Boy’ and let him back in to his place before the fire where he would lay his general ancientness and act as slipper-warmer to Nan. Mam brought Baby Jesus in.

‘Somebody’s left this,’ she said to Nan.

‘Give him to me.’ Nan took Jesus and dried his face, with biblical accuracy, only using a page of the Clare Champion.

‘There’s going to be a flood,’ Mam told her. But Nan was already saying her prayers. I could hear the murmurs rising as Mam came up to tell me.

When Jesus comes to your house there’s only one message: you’re doomed.

I hadn’t realised I was done for until that moment. That whoever had taken the Baby Jesus and kept Him ten years in what had to be pretty secret captivity for whatever Special Needs the kidnapper had, that they had decided that now I was the one who most needed His Presence was enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

‘Hellooooo?’ came up the stairs.

‘Jesus!’

‘Ruth!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Just me,’ said Mrs Prendergast, who had not in my lifetime visited our house, but now entered my bedroom wearing the flushed look of Mrs Peniston in The House of Mirth (Book 1,905, Edith Wharton, Everyman Library, London) who cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull.

Mrs Prendergast came in the door and stopped, relieved and holding her hands together so that we might get a better look at her and get her portrait right. ‘What dreadful rain,’ she said. ‘Mary,’ she gave my mother a hand then turned to me a little pained smile. ‘And how are you, dear?’

I’m not sure she expected an answer. She patted my bed, then held her hands together in more or less the exact replica of how I realised I had written Mrs Cissley when her Oliver had died and she had come to visit Abraham.

‘Sit down, Mina,’ Mam told her.

‘I won’t stay,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to see poor Ruth, and offer my best wishes.’

‘Sit. Please.’ Mam turned the chair around.

‘I won’t.’

‘Please.’

‘Perhaps just for a minute then.’ Mrs Prendergast drew the tails of her long tweed coat forward and like Mrs Peniston sat on, not in, the chair. (Thank you, Edith.) The coat buttons were immense and green. Her hat was round and rimless, made of threaded rows of tiny beads and had a concertina effect, as if it had once been sat upon, which it seems is The Look in Limerick, if not Paris. To allow herself be taken in, and give gravity full play, she looked down, considered her tiny feet.

‘I’ll make tea.’

‘Oh no, not at all. Not at all, Mary. No no no.’

‘It’s no trouble.’

‘I wouldn’t hear of it. I just called to see poor Ruth.’

‘Hellooo?’ came up the stairs.

‘Come on up,’ Mam said.

‘Mary. Ruth. Mrs Prendergast,’ the Major Ryan said, entering and showering a fair bit of rain off his person. A big square man with a barrel-chest, he was a little bit Mr Hubble the wheelwright in Great Expectations, the one who had a sawdusty fragrance and always stood with his legs very wide apart, which in those trousers was disconcerting. Major Ryan had a boom voice he had to keep under restraint except during Lent when the plays were on. Now he went to whisper-power to ask, ‘How’s the little lady doing? All right?’

I was right there looking at him.

I was not and never have been The Little Lady.

‘Sorry now. I was just passing. Sorry,’ Mr Eustace said, coming in the door, stooping and craning, easing in past the Major. ‘Sorry now.’

‘Mr Eustace.’

His surname was an offence to him. ‘John Paul, please.’

I had only seen him in our house once before. You saw him that time you were first driving through the parish and he was standing in a doorway selling Life Assurance but noticed your car was not a Clare Reg. That time you probably didn’t realise his face was so white or that he was just perfect casting for Mr Sowerberry.

‘Sorry now. Sorry,’ he said, ‘just. Well.’ He looked at me like I’d already died. It was a Fondly Missed look, like I was The Departed and he was the Deeply Regretted By, setting his long black eyelashes to Down & Flutter and paying his respects with a letterbox mouth and palming his hands off each other. ‘Sorry.’

‘Can I come up?’ Monica Mac said. Monica has a quiet personality but compensates with loud lipstick.

My Last Day it rained visitors. It’s in the secret tactics of how to keep the patient from thinking of what lies ahead. But here it proves a country truth: it takes a parish to rear a storyteller.

And God bless them, they came. In No Particular Order, as they say on X Factor, Tommy and Breda, the Saints Murphy, who smelled of candles and left after Breda kissed my forehead and sneaked a set of opalescent rosary beads under my pillow, Finbar Griffin who I had never actually spoken to, who always wore the pained look of a man who had spent the day castrating bullocks, or was just the look of a man married to Mrs Griffin, Kathleen Quinn who had developed a gift for seeing personal insult everywhere and secretly thought she should have been offered the chair, Margaret Crowe who told Kathleen the weight suited her, big Jack Mannion who just came to the top of the stairs, gave me two thumbs-up, and went down again, because some things couldn’t be said in words, Seamus O’Shea who had been Customer Services in the bank before the economy took a haircut and who’d since opened a barber shop in his sitting room, Louis Marr who wore thin-legged bright-red trousers and Faha’s only flower-print shirt, was not gay, but just a bit fabulous, Charlotte, one of the Troy sisters, who brought impossibly beautiful flowers, Noeleen Fry, God Love Her, with the permanent scowl of a woman who couldn’t locate the bad smell in her kitchen, Eamon Dunne who had the original Bluetooth device, a Blue Tooth, which when he smiled communicated only one thing, awesome disregard for the opinion of others, the two thin Duffys who hadn’t a penny to their name now and survived mostly by watching afternoon cooking shows, the button-eyed Maurice Kerins who was innocent of everything except murder by accordion, Nora Cooney whose husband Jim, like Mr Skimpole in Bleak House, considered thoughts to be deeds, and that by thinking of paying a bill supposed it needed no further action, had in fact thought himself into enormous riches, pin-striped ownership of property in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, none of which made material impact on Nora’s plain green coat and worn-out muddy ankle boots.

They kept coming.

There may have been a schedule nailed up on our front door.

The black-and-white Frank Morgan who played Professor Marvel then The Gatekeeper, The Carriage Driver, The Guard and finally the Wizard of Oz looked in the open window and said: ‘I just dropped by because I heard the little girl got caught in the big —’

Sorry. Fecund.

After a first general enquiry about my health, conversations ran over and back above me, unbounded. A universal truth is that in the company of an ill person people speak of illness. Hereabouts Illness-tennis is played by masters. No sooner did someone serve a burst gall bladder — A Tony Lyons in Upper Feeard, cousin to Eileen who was a McDermott and had the Hospital Bug — than they got a backhand pancreatic cancer, with topspin — Sean O’Grady of the O’Gradys beyond in Bealaha, not the one who was married to the one of the Kerry Spillanes who had the red hair and went off with the Latvian, the other one, who had the arm after the accident, was going out for it must have been on to ten years with that wonderful Marie of the O’Learys, had already survived a family so numerous that two of them were named Michael, and the father who went into Crotty’s pub in Kilrush and woke up in Paddington, him.

‘Is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

The true masters were all women. From what I could tell, Bless-us-and-save-us, poor man generally signalled the end of a set.

The men, because of their higher nature Vincent Cunningham says, were generally more squeamish, spoke of matters National, Meteorological and Agricultural, from which I learned that on Clare FM Saddam said Green Shoots of Recovery had been seen, to which Jimmy Mac added, coming out of his own backside, that the rain was biblical and had just officially Gone Beyond a Joke, that Father Tipp was going to say a Mass for Dry Weather, and that Nolan’s bull had sore back feet and so, much as he wanted to, he couldn’t incline himself to Do the Business.

But before they left, all of them, one way or another, told me that I would be grand just grand, you wait and see; some undercut their own statements of confidence, or supplied the grounds for it, by adding they would be lighting candles and praying for me.

They came and went the way Irish people do, like ones doing rounds on what they hope is Holy Island under the unknown chastisements of the rain.

When they went downstairs I expect they saw Nan holding Baby Jesus and had this inner O shit feeling but which in Mrs Prendergast came out as O my goodness.

By then Mam was too worried to have dialogue. The river was coming across the field.

Jimmy Mac stood in the kitchen; ‘Jesus,’ he said. But he was looking out the window. And when he turned back he told Mam, ‘We’ll get sandbags,’ and was gone out the back and wellying across the tongue of water coming in the drive before she could say thank you.

He came back in his tractor in fifteen minutes, a transport box of sand and cab full of empty 10-10-20 bags and any number of McInerneys, most of who were not believers in coats. By rain-telegraph Mickey Culligan and Finbar Griffin came too, my Gentleman Callers, sputter-roaring their tractors out into the river-field and using whatever you use to reopen the drain that never drained and to make these brown scars across the field to delay the progress of the flood, each of their tractors going bogging good-o, little Mickey Mac said with ten-year-old glee, eyes polished and nose dripping free and clear and unheeded when he came in to say they were going to sandbag our front door now. The first of the bags thumped down a minute later, then the next, as men and boys passed the windows, swinging over and laying in the bags, working tenacious and resolute, with a kind of uncomplaining Clare defiance and goodness, putting a pause on the river, and whether saving me or Jesus at that point immaterial.

Chapter 17

I cannot sleep.

Tonight it seems impossible that anyone sleeps. How can they?

My blood aches.

The rain won’t stop. It just won’t, it’s like the sky is irreparably holed. I think it can’t keep up like this, I think nowhere does it rain like this, soon, soon it will ease, and when it doesn’t, when it just keeps on hammering, I think of Paul Dombey hearing the tide and thinking it is coming to take him and saying ‘I want to know what it says, the sea. What is it that it keeps on saying?’ and I sit up in bed and hold on to my knees and close my eyes and rock slowly back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until it comes to me clear and sure so that somewhere inside my rocking and my darkness I know that what the rain is saying is Sorry.

That day it was not raining. We got a half-day for the holidays and ran out into summer when summer was still a word plump and generous and there was actual sunshine and time was impossibly deliciously luxuriously long and the idea of summer stretched out ahead so that now as you entered it you could not imagine it ever ending. The whole school ran out the school gates, schoolbags bouncing on backs, and last watercolour paintings buckling a little in the hands holding them. There was pushing and yelling getting through the gate. Parents were standing by their cars. Noel McCarthy was in his mini-bus, the window down and the radio letting Martin Hayes’s fiddling float-dance over us.

Aeney ran; I didn’t. He always ran. I’d like to say it was because he knew he was finished with Mr Crossan, I’d like to give a reason, but the truth is he ran just for the sake of running and I suppose for freedom. His fair hair went round the corner.

I let the school go. When I saw Vincent Cunningham had stayed waiting outside the gate I said, ‘Go home. I’m not walking with you,’ and he said ‘Okay’ like I hadn’t hurt him and ran on. I walked around the yard pretending to look for something and when everyone was gone except the teachers who were having holiday coffees and doing whatever teachers do in empty schools I walked out the gate. I walked with what I hoped was the reserve and maturity befitting Our Last Day, the end of Primary. Aeney and I were done. We would not be back there.

The cars were already gone, the road returned to that quiet it kept all day except for at nine and three o’clock. I walked the bend for home. The air was warm, the fuchsias so full of buzz you imagined if you stopped and looked, as I did, that you would see nothing else but bees. But you didn’t see them. Hum and drone were just there, like an engine of summer, tirelessly invisibly turning. I took my time because time was suddenly mine. I had been waiting for this day all year. I had been waiting for it ever since I realised that Aeney and I did not belong in the school, that Aeney maybe belonged in no school, and that without intention I had read myself away from girls my age and was in the true sense of the word, Alien, other. That Secondary school would be better, that there I would encounter like-minded girls, Serious Girls, as Mrs Quinty said she hoped to find, was then not in doubt, in the same way that at the end of Secondary I would cherish a brief confidence that in Third Level things at last would be different and intelligence and oddness found to be normal.

I dawdled. I plucked a buttercup and rubbed out its yellowy heart on the tartan pinafore which I had always, always hated, flushing a little with the thrill of staining with impunity and the anticipation of seeing my uniform thrown in a corner. It was my slowest walk home ever. When I came in the back door Mam said, ‘Well,’ and came and hugged me. ‘You did it,’ she said. ‘That’s the end of that.’

She held on to me longer than my new status would allow in the future, but right then I did not resist, my head in against her, and coming around me warm and deep and smelling of bread the many things that are contained in the word mother. I think I knew it was a hug I would remember always.

‘So proud of you,’ she said. She knew my battles and knew too that she could not fight them. Her eyes were so green. ‘Holidays!’

‘I know. I don’t believe it.’

‘A whole summer.’

‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

‘Do you want to get changed or will you eat first?’

‘Changed. Definitely.’

Nan was sleeping in her chair. I went upstairs and took off my uniform. Then I pulled open the skylight and because Aeney and I had promised it was what we would do on our last day I fired jumper blouse and pinafore out the window. Just like that they were gone, and with sudden lightness I jumped on the bed, and bounced, rising with implausible impossible happiness and bringing my hands to my face to catch my giggles.

I put on grey jeans and a yellow T-shirt that said ‘Always’. There was so much summer ahead of me I didn’t know what to do first. All the things I had thought of through March April May and June now jostled at the starting gate. How could I begin? How could one minute be Hell and the next Holidays? I lay on the bed and opened a book. I had all the time in the world to read now. And because I knew I had I didn’t. I went downstairs.

‘Will you have something now or wait for dinner?’

‘I’ll wait for dinner.’

Peggy Mooney came in the back door. ‘Mary,’ she said. ‘Ruth. Holidays today.’ She was a nervous woman at the best of times and she held her arms across herself, as if she was afraid some part of her would fly away. ‘Only that tomorrow is Sheila’s,’ she said, ‘and I was wondering, Mary, if I could get a few flowers for the altar.’

‘The wedding,’ Mam said. ‘Of course you can, Peggy.’ She wiped her hands down her apron.

‘O thanks. Thanks very much now, Mary.’

‘Don’t be silly. You didn’t need to ask. Come on.’

The clock of one day is not the same as another. We invented time to make it seem so, but we know it’s not. Things speed up and slow down all the time. The kitchen window was open. There were three flies in the ceiling. The new Clare Champion was on the table, still fresh and folded beside a white plastic bag of sliced ham Dad had brought from the village. Aeney’s cup and empty Petit Filou and spoon were in the sink. The oven was doing that ticking it does when the power has been turned off and the hot metal is contracting. The five-day pendulum clock tocked. The cold tap dropped a drip. Drp! like that, and then another, drp!, the way it always did because Dad was always going to fix it so that generally we took no notice, but right then I did. I was standing by the window and I turned the tap extra hard and looked at it until I was sure it wouldn’t drip. Then drp!, it did. Mam went through the garden with Peggy Mooney, cutting more flowers than were needed, a generosity of flowers bundled into Peggy Mooney’s arms that would make such display that ever after people would come to Mam for flowers, but right then I thought why is she giving away all our flowers?

Standing at the window I ate a piece of brown bread. I heard a tractor coming from Ryan’s and heard it going past and heard it until it must have turned out by McInerney’s. Then Peggy Mooney’s old car drove away with a passenger seat full of flowers and Mam came in.

‘You don’t know what to do with yourself, do you?’ she said, smiling.

‘Why did you give away all our flowers?’

‘Poor Peggy,’ Mam said. ‘They have nothing, and we have flowers.’ She ran the tap over her hands. ‘Dad will be home soon. He had to get a nozzle for the sprayer,’ she said, and turned off the tap, tea-towelled her hands, and the tap started dripping again.

‘Go find your brother,’ Mam said.

‘All right.’

There were more birds. That’s what I thought when I came outside. There were definitely more birds or the ones there were sang more. I went out around the haybarn and the haggard and all of it was sort of busy with birds. I went up to the gate and the stonewall stile and I called ‘Aeney?’ and the birdsong stopped or went elsewhere, and I went into the field that smelled rich and sweet because of the sunshine. The light had that kind of white dazzle you’re not yet used to if you’ve spent all of June in a classroom. The dazzle gave me these stray things moving in my vision, these little fissures or threads that some people call floaters and some fishhooks. They’re sort of what invisible would look like if it was visible and they just move down your seeing and if you follow one down to the end you think that’s the end of it but then there’s another one starting. Light causes it, or tiredness, or just contrariness of blood brain and sunshine. They start when they start and they stop the same.

I went down the field to the river. I knew where Aeney would be. I knew he would be running the beaten track with Huck, throwing sticks, or sitting down on the far side of Fisher’s Step with the fishing rod, believing that once they passed our bank the fish were catchable there. To prove in myself that these were the holidays I took my time. I told myself You have all the time in the world. I plucked random grasses and let them go. Ryan’s was in meadowing. If you stepped off the track the hay was high to your waist and in that sunlight even I thought it was beautiful. There were bees and flies and midges sort of flecking or flawing the air and that hum which was overtaken by the song of the river as you came to it.

I could see fifty yards along the bank now, to the point where McInerney’s bushes came down and blocked the view. The other way I could see to Fisher’s Step, and in neither way could I see Aeney.

It was just like him, to have gone somewhere new.

That’s how he was. He’d have tired of here and gone elsewhere.

Go and find your brother.

Why should I? He’d come home when he was hungry, and Aeney was always always hungry.

I stopped looking for him.

I walked along the bank and looked across at Kerry. ‘I have all the time in the world now,’ I said across the river, and then I watched the floaters and fishhooks descend.

In the distance there was the noise of a tractor, and that was lost inside the noise of another, and you knew there was coming and going happening somewhere and that everything ordinary and everyday was continuing the way the world continues around you and for just these moments you’re the still point at the centre.

Then I saw Huck.

He was a white gleam, sitting on the very edge of the bank up at the far end of Fisher’s Step.

‘Huck! Here boy! Huck!’

He didn’t move. It wasn’t surprising. He was Aeney’s dog. He just stayed there, sitting erect and facing the river, but something in his sitting passed into me. For whole seconds I didn’t move. I didn’t run. I just stood there and felt this departure, this separation. The air was buckled. The moment wouldn’t turn right. My heart was in my throat. Something had reached in and seized it and was now taking it out of my mouth. I think I cried out. But the sound was swallowed by the river. Then I was running and time was moving, lurching, too fast, so that soon it would be wrecked and pieces would break up and never come right so that here I am squatting down beside Huck and saying Where is he? Where’s Aeney? Find Aeney, good boy and Huck barks at the river and the suck hole and the water in it is twisting clockwise faster than clocks, and here I am running back through the meadow for no reason not taking the track except the reason that nothing makes sense and I am running in risen clouds of hay dust gold and choking and shouting help help though I know there is no help and here I am breathless in the kitchen where Dad is just home and the tap is dripping drp! and I’m saying He went in the river I know he went in the river and here is Dad diving in the river, and here the whole parish coming, and the Guards and the ambulance and Father Tipp and the summer evening hopelessly horribly beautiful and a hundred men carrying sticks to poke into the rushes and walking out along the length of the bank in the coming dark and being back there the next day at sunrise where Dad years ago had first stood and felt the sign and where now he had spent the night calling Aeney? Aeney? with hoarse terrible wretchedness and praying to God Please please O please and divers coming and the sun going away and Huck immovable from the spot as now hard and wild and with no mercy the rain came.

Here is the place where the ground was soft and his feet slid down.

Here is the brown suck hole where the river comes around and swallows itself.

Here is Aeney’s rod, found in the rushes.

Here, three days later, his right sneaker.

There, my shining brother was gone.