History of the Rain

Chapter 1

‘There is no Heaven. How can there be? Think about it. For starters, if all the good people there have ever been are already there, how big would it have to be? Second, what a social nightmare. It’d be like all the good characters in all the books in the ultimate library of the world left their books, stepped out of their stories and were told just mingle. Anne Archer and Jim Hawkins, Ishmael and Emma Woodhouse. How mad would that be? Dorothea, say hello to Mr Dedalus. What could they possibly say to one another? It’d be excruciating.’

Vincent Cunningham just sat there looking down. His mother died when he was eight, about six months before he proposed to me for the first time, and, like The Monkees, he’s a Believer. He has Heaven the Standard Version that we learned in school pretty much tattooed on his soul. It’s wings and angels for him, plenty of harps, which I personally can’t stand, and those white cotton clouds that have no rain in them but let you lay back like lounge chairs so you can have your feet up and watch the saints come marching in.

‘Sorry, but there is no Heaven,’ I whispered. I didn’t want Mam downstairs to hear. I think in a vague way Heaven sustains her and that, although she doesn’t want to consider the detail and she’s too busy just trying to keep us afloat in this world, she’s sure it lies ahead, like Labasheeda when in the river-fog the road is blind.

Vincent Cunningham said nothing.

‘Okay, say there is. Tell me then, in Heaven who cooks the food?’

His hazelnut eyes came up to me. ‘There’s no food. You’re never hungry.’

‘Thirsty?’

‘No.’

‘That’s disappointing. What’s TV like?’

‘Ruthie.’

‘Is Heaven God’s Most Boring Idea? Is that why He keeps it out of sight?’

‘It’s not boring.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘You don’t need to do anything. You’re just happy.’

‘Well, I won’t see you there so. I won’t be going. Thank you.’

‘You can’t say no to Heaven.’

‘I just did.’

It took him a moment. ‘RLS believed in Heaven,’ he said. ‘You said so.’

‘That was Vailima, Samoa.’ It was a quote from RLS my father had written on the back of an envelope that I found inside his American copy of Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths (Book 2,999, New Directions, New York): The endless voice of birds. I have never lived in such a heaven. RLS. Because of its strangeness, because it was in my father’s hand, and because found writing has a curious potency, I had showed it to Vincent. ‘You think when we die we go to Samoa? What should I pack?’

‘You’re terrible.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. No. Yes.’

‘Look, I have an advantage over you. I’ve thought it through. There is no Heaven. So, I’m just saying, if you’re expecting to see me there, if you’re thinking once you arrive and get over the preliminaries — Hi Peter, wings, harp and whatnot — that you’ll head out and find me and propose, let me just say you’ll be disappointed.’

He didn’t say anything to that. The eyelashes went down. I was cruel to continue, but you already know I did. ‘The tunnel of light people say they see? Just your peripheral vision shutting down. Your brain dies with floods of light. It’s not a place, it’s just chemistry. You’re the engineer, I’m the Swain. I’m the one supposed to be partial to the outlandish. Nobody believes Milton’s Heaven, nobody believes Dante’s. When Dante arrived he said his vision was greater than his speech, so he stopped describing, thank you very much, which tells you he didn’t believe it. Not really. Because even Dante knew, there is no Heaven.’

That, I thought, was the end of it. I’d turned my hurt around to hurt him and he looked down at his long-fingered hands and said nothing. He was wearing his socks, his wellies downstairs after crossing the flood. The socks made him look defenceless, the way they do on boys. The rain drove down on us, the skylight streaming. I wished the night hadn’t been so long. I wished I’d slept.

‘All right,’ Vincent said, ‘let’s say it’s just a story.’

And he’d got me there. He knew it. You could tell from the look on his face. ‘It’s just a story,’ he said, ‘but, Ruth, you believe in stories.’ He smiled that smile he’s planning to use on Saint Peter. ‘All it takes is a leap of faith,’ he said. He actually said that, knowing that if there was one thing Swains know, it was how to leap. ‘Take the leap.’

Then we both heard Timmy and Packy come in downstairs. They said something about the flood and where they had had to leave the ambulance, and how now they were planning to stretcher me across the water. Mam came up the stairs. Vincent Cunningham stood in his socks and looked that look that wanted to say Ruth, you won’t die, you won’t, but because Mam was there it didn’t come out in words. ‘Well,’ he said, and then shot up his right hand, palm out, a sort of paused wave or Stop or I Swear and I saw his eyes were shining and knew he wanted to grab me up in his arms and probably actually kiss me but he just said, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ Then he turned and was gone and to Vincent Cunningham I did not get to say goodbye.

After the river took him Aeney became huge. He was big as the sky. He was in every corner of our house. He was at the kitchen table for every meal, came and went on the stairs, blew down the chimney in smoke, rattled the windows, and rained without end. He kept his clothes in the chest of drawers, his mug in the press, his wellies at the back door. He was everywhere. He was in Huck’s brown eyes looking at you with grave and patient and exhausted asking. He was in his schoolbag thrown in the corner and gathering a pale sheen of dust, the creases first like wrinkles and then the whole of it, solemn and undisturbed, laying on the floor and becoming ghost. Aeney was on the road running. He was pulling blackberries in blackberry season. He was in the cuck-oo of the cuckoo that could never be seen but was somewhere on the top of the highest tree, looking down and singing its two-note song that could be joyous or plaintive depending. He was in Treasure Island. He was at our birthday, bigger and sadder for being present but not having presents. He was first one awake at Christmas, last one to come inside the year it snowed. He was in the final visit of the Aunts. He was in the fields and in the village and at the sea. He was in the river.

The only place he was not was in Faha graveyard.

You think you won’t survive it. You think there’s a crack right down your face and down your body and it’s so deep the pieces of you will fall apart in the street when someone says his name. You think it can’t be true, you think it was a bad dream and you’ll wake up any moment. You think it can’t have been as simple as that. Why one day, that day, did it just happen?

And why is the world continuing? How can it? How can the radio be on and the kettle coming to the boil? How can the hens need to be fed?

You go to bed and you lie there and you listen across to his room for him. You listen for the way he breathes when he sleeps and you don’t, the pulse and breath and clock of him, that was annoying sometimes but was just over there, had been since always, had been since before this world, and now the emptiness of it pulls at you and wants to suck you away and you think Okay let me die tonight I don’t care.

But you don’t die. You learn to sleep rocking yourself just a little, and making a little low hum no one hears but you, so that the night is never empty and like Peter Pan, un-ageing and evanescent, Aeney can come in through the skylight and you can tell him stories from the books you’ve read.

Your hand hurts from handshakes. Your eyes and your lips are dried out because the water has been wrung out of you and instead you’ve got this sour yellow anger swilling because why are all these people coming now, and why are they who never said his name before saying it now. None of them know him. None of them know his crooked smile from the inside the way you do, his yell jumping off the swing at the highest point, his crash and tumble and getting-up grin. None of them know it should have been you that drowned.

Somehow, you have no idea how, you survive.

Because you are not to die yet, because somebody needs to tell the story, somehow you survive.

We survive.

Maybe just so that we can hurt more. Maybe the finest sufferer is the winner. Maybe that was the plan for us. Maybe if we’d marched down to the river and thrown ourselves in that would have made a mess of our chapter in the Book of Swain. In my father’s black rain-mottled copy of the Bible the spine is broken on the Book of Job. Has thou not poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese is right there.

It became a long wet summer. I stayed indoors and saw no one but Mam and Dad and Nan. To get me out of the house Dad took me with him to town and we went to the bookshops. He did not say, ‘Read this, it will help you forget your sorrow over your brother,’ but he gave me books, and to avoid the eyes of others I kept mine in them.

The selfishness of children is absolute and perfect and for the progress of the world perhaps essential. I didn’t really wonder how my parents carried on, didn’t consider the quality of their quietness. If my mother watched over me with extra vigilance, fearful I might slip through some flaw between this world and the next, I felt it only as love.

That summer my father stopped writing. He still went to the table in the lamplight. He still sat leaned forward with his hand forking up the right side of his silver hair. But he did not pick up the pencil. From his room there came not a sound. Whether the inspiration couldn’t come, whether there ever was anything that could rightly be called inspiration and sometimes descended like a tongue of fire, whether it came and out of spite or hurt or anger he denied it access or outlet, whether he had any intention of ever writing anything again and went to the table at night the same way my mother went to Lough Derg to walk barefoot over the stones and let the hurt bleed out of her, I cannot say. He stopped, that’s all.

Mam was still just Mam. Yes, she’d cried, and yes she’d been wretched when the callers came and again at the time we had the Mass that Dad said he wouldn’t go to and she’d shouted at him, the only time I ever heard her, and in compromise Father Tipp said he’d say the Mass here in the kitchen and Dad said all right to that, and yes, she let her hair go tangled more often, but once the worst was over she had sort of recovered, if recovered is something people ever do. What I mean I suppose is that she carried on. Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out. The only changes in Mam were that now whenever she was in the village she went into the church to light a candle, and that since Peggy Mooney’s she was continually asked for flowers for the altar, and she obliged, and in the way customs form in small parishes soon it was clear that Mam would be cutting our flowers and bringing them into Faha church until the end of time.

I had a season to grieve, and then had to go to the Tech on my own. But the fact is grief doesn’t know we invented time. Grief has its own tide and comes and goes in waves. So when I went I was no more over it or out of it or any of the other absurd things whispered in my wake going down the corridors. For the first weeks I had a status above Julie Burns who had to have all her teeth removed, or Ambrose Trainer who had come from Dublin and had an infected nose piercing. My status was Half. I was The Other One. I was the one who had Half of Her Gone. In the toilets that mascara’d ghoul and Trainee Vampire Siobhan Crowley asked me, ‘Can you feel him? Over there, on the other side? Can you?’

Teachers too treated me with circumspection. My story had preceded me into the staffroom, and created that space around you that stories do. I moved from The Girl Who Wears Glasses to The Girl Who Had the Brother to The Girl Who Walked On Her Own to The Girl Who Read, parts I stepped into with alacrity and relief, relishing the solitude and soon somehow proving both adages, that our natures are incontrovertible, and we become what others expect.

Stories though wear thin after a time. In this world compassion is a limited commodity, and what is first considered appropriate so soon becomes annoyance. Why is she still like that?

She does it for effect.

She likes the attention.

She’s just so, odd.

As if wilfully, and to further confirm the indelible quirk of my own character, I loved poetry. Mrs Quinty, who was unlike Miss Jean Brodie In Her Prime in all things except seeing in some girls a flicker of intelligence, became aware of it when we read Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mid-Term Break’, the one where his brother dies, where in the second-last line we learn the bumper knocked him clear, and I said I liked that clear because it went with the classes to a close in the second line and though sad somehow clear had hope in it. Mrs Quinty did not know then that my father had prepared the ground, that I was already hum-familiar, or that I was drawn to poetry for reasons of mystery. She gave me the anthologies the sale reps brought her and which she had told them she would consider using. Small and taut and resolute she came down the classroom, placed one on my desk and said, ‘You might like to take a look in this.’ Just that. She did not edit, guide or censor. She didn’t go Teacher Mode, didn’t ask me to tell her what I thought or to write up a report or turn the gift into an exercise. She did the most generous and implausible thing, she gave me poetry.

Note to future Swains: reading a poetry anthology in the school yard, while it now has precedent and may appear natural and unremarkable to Swain-minds, is not best equipment for the vicious nightmare that is teenagehood. Reading poetry sealed my fate. In the Tech it classified as off-the-scale weird and left me in the same company as Kiera Murphy the Crayola-eater and Canice Clohessy, The Constipated, in whose unique case shit didn’t happen.

I lost the skill of dialogue. I was invited to no birthday party, except the time Mr Mulvihill, who had married an easterly wind called Irene, and to spite her, phoned to say he was inviting the whole year to his Sinead’s fourteenth.

I didn’t go, and I didn’t care. When I lost my brother I lost more than half the world. I was left in somewhere narrow as the margin, and in there, parallel to the main text, I would write my marginalia.

Chapter 2

There are four of us in purgatory, a concept I didn’t believe in until I was in it. I am the youngest. Eleanor Clancy is the oldest. Like Miss Toppit in Martin Chuzzlewit she wears a brown wig of uncommon size. She says Ah pet to me and to the nurses and when they lift her out of bed her shins are sharp and look like they’ll snap so I look away. Mrs Merriman doesn’t speak at all now. She did when she came in, but now she’s too upset. She’s too upset to be here. She wants to remain in the actual world, where her Philip needs her and will not manage without her. She doesn’t want to be in this in-between place, which is neither here nor there. Mrs Merriman has the side with the wall and to it does her wailing, these high waily moans she tries to strangle coming out and that we pretend not to hear. Jackie Fennell is our cheerleader. She looks like one of those actresses they get for TV hospital dramas. There can’t be anything wrong with you when you’re that gorgeous. Jackie’s Lucozade is white wine smuggled in by Benny, so she can’t share it. But she could get me Green & Black’s chocolate or Glamour or magenta nail varnish if I wanted. We’re all here for something different. There are more things that can go wrong with you than you can shake a stick at, Timmy said.

I’ve a pain in my face telling you where it hurts, Mrs Merriman said.

My body which my dungeon is, RLS said.

The curtains are blue plastic and they come around in a single soft swish and when they do you know it’s Business.

Mr Mackey comes with Dr Naradjan to look at my results. Mr Mackey is The Top Man; he has the world’s most perfect suit and was either born in a new white shirt or can put one on without adding any human creasing. His only flaw is those ties with little symbols on them somebody pretended for a laugh would catch on. Today they are silver fishes.

‘I am quite concerned about these, Ruth,’ he says.

When it comes to that multitude covered by what Mina Prendergast with nineteenth-century-drawing-room manners calls Matters of the Heart, some women are practical. Some women see the hurt, consider the damage, and embark on a remedy right away. Some women have no hopelessness in them. They will surrender their beauty, sacrifice music dancing laughter, suffer heartache so profound there’s a clean hole right through the centre of them, but still they will not be defeated. My mother is one of these.

Mam knew that Virgil had stopped writing. She knew whatever had been turned on was now turned off, and after a time it was her natural reaction to go looking for the pliers and spanners and whatever to get it going again.

Washers maybe. Aren’t they a thing? I’m running a little short of time to fix my metaphors. Anyway Borges said writing is better when you leave your mistakes in. If Shakespeare had an editor we wouldn’t have Shakespeare.

The remedy, she decided, was in poetry. Mam had read pieces of some of my father’s poems, but they were always works-in-progress. It was always over his shoulder, bringing him a cup of tea, or telling him she was going to sleep, always just a glance and allowed always with the understanding that he was going to make them better. These were just drafts of the thing he was trying to get at. That was the thing about the poetry of Virgil Swain. You’ll already know that from his Swain-ness. You’ll already know a poem is the most impossible thing. It’s cruel and capricious and contains within it its own guarantee of failure. What you think you’ve caught in the poem today is not there when you go to look at it tomorrow. Under the spell of Mrs Quinty’s poetry anthologies I can admit I wrote some poems myself, and they were all brilliant until they were rubbish.

Mam had read bits, that’s all, and though she’s the first to say she knows one hundred per cent of precisely nothing about poetry, and considers just the fact of it, the construction, the craft, the art that has to go into it, a kind of astonishment in itself, she thought Virgil’s poems marvellous.

They were not love poems in any normal sense. They were not addressed to her, but in a more profound way they were for her. They were for her because they had sprung out of the life she had let Virgil into. There were Aisling copies full of them. Sometimes a whole copy would be filled with different versions of the same poem. The first pages would be maybe a single phrase, a line going across the page in mouse-grey pencil. Then the same line would be written again underneath, but this time altered slightly, maybe an added comma, or a word changed or the tense of the verb or there’d be the half of a second line added and overhanging. As if he’d pulled a little too urgently at the first line and it had come bringing with it the next, but the line had snapped and he’d lost it. He’d started on a new page, written the first phrase again. There’d be nothing else on that page. You’d know he’d spent the whole night just looking at it. There’d be pages with images that came to him, ones that he’d try variants of and reject, the grey mouse scratching a line through them. Other copies might have ten, twelve poems in them, whole and clean and perfect. He liked to write a poem out neatly when it was done, a single mistake, a spelling, a smudge of the pencil, an interruption from me maybe and he turned the page and wrote it out again. It was a way of testing it, I think, and in all tests the poems failed. They were not ready.

But then Virgil had stopped trying.

A poet who can’t write is a sad thing. You can see he’s fallen in the pit and the sand and the grime stick to his singlet and shorts. Because it’s his nature he still looks up, still sees the bar up there against the blue, but he has no way to ascend.

Mam decided the remedy was that my father needed the world to respond. He needed the living worldly equivalent of Abraham or the Reverend to read the poems and say Not bad, not bad at all, which would be the Swainish translation of some London editor’s Bloody marvellous. She had heard me tell of Mrs Quinty and the gift of the poetry anthologies, and so supposed Mrs Quinty was the only one in the parish to be trusted to open my father’s copies.

On Wednesday afternoons then, when my father was sent to Kilrush to get messages and the Tech took halfday to let the teachers, like warriors in the Iliad, bandage their wounds before the next day’s assault, Mrs Quinty came to our house. She brought her typewriter with her. Typewriters were already antiques by then. (In the Tech we did have six computers in the computer room; but holes being irresistible to boys, all had pencil-tops, paperclips, chewing-gum, balls of snot and other unmentionables stuck in their drives, blinked spastically, spent a whole class saying rebooting and were ageing virgins who had never Gone on the Internet, so Mrs Quinty decided computers were marvels for The Next Generation.)

She came in the back door carrying her typewriter in its own case.

‘Virgil is not to know,’ Mam said.

Mrs Quinty had already Had Her Disappointment as far as her husband Tommy staying in Swansea was concerned and was no stranger to keeping secrets.

‘Nobody can know, but us,’ Mam said, when she came back down from showing Mrs Quinty where to start and the tap tap tap ding was already going gangbusters if gangbusters is what poems go when at last in the ecstasy of release.

I wouldn’t tell. I knew this was love. I knew it was love with hurt in it and already knew that was the real kind. I knew this was Mam attempting to save Dad, and knew that in the clicking of the keys, crisp and cold and even (thank you, Wenceslas), Virgil Swain, poet, was becoming actual. In time he would come downriver into an anthology.

Except for its complications, as Barry Lillis says, the plan was simple. Mrs Quinty was to come on Wednesdays. Virgil would be sent on Messages to Brews in Kilrush, an emporium of everything, and after he could go to the library. Mrs Quinty was to work her way through the years of Aisling copies and type up only those poems that seemed to her complete. She was to put them back exactly as she found them. Before leaving she was to give Mam each Wednesday’s poems. She was to make no copies. She was to be paid each week an hourly rate from the money Mam kept inside Lester the China Dog who was discovered hollow when he lost his tail in a fall.

Mrs Quinty said she would take no payment. ‘It’s poetry,’ she said, eyes gone big behind the dust on her glasses and mouth tight and tiny.

‘If you won’t take payment you can’t type the poems.’

She took payment. (She kept every penny of it in a brown envelope in the top drawer of her mahogany bureau. That money was never spent, and later she gave it to me and I gave it to Father Tipp in Irish Christian-Pagan fashion, partly for prayers and partly for superstition.)

Mam took each Wednesday’s poems and put them inside the second copy of the phonebook Pat the Post had stuck in our hedge the time the phone company were trying to prove the expansion of their customer base. She did not read the poems and she didn’t let me read them. I think it was in case she had a change of heart, or in case the same thing happened to her that happened to Dad and she read them and found that after all they were not dreadful, but worse, average. She took the poems and fed them flat and singly into the phonebook. She laid them between Breens and Downes and Hehirs and O’Sheas and put the phonebook under her clothes in the bottom drawer. Each week more poems met the general alphabetised population of the County Clare, the whole enterprise taking on the timeless implausibility of fable.

The poems gathered.

When Mam went to bed at night she knew they were right there in the bedroom. She could feel them. I could feel them. If I tried hard and closed my eyes tight and listened into them beyond the rain I could hear them.

I know, weird. Believe what you like. (See: Religions.)

That the book would soon be real, that a slim grey volume with by Virgil Swain on it would come in the post, was not in doubt. Nor that it would be greeted with wonder. I of course had no idea, and still have no idea, and I expect will probably never have an idea, of how business and money works, and how it would or could work in relation to something as impossible as poetry. But it seemed a natural expectation that once the book was published things would improve for us, and something would be healed.

After six Wednesdays, Mrs Quinty came down the stairs and said, ‘That’s the last of it.’ She stood and gave herself a little tightening tug. The poetry had kept a cold at bay for six weeks.

‘There’s a good-sized book,’ Mam said.

‘There is.’

Then Mrs Quinty wrinkled her nose to lift her glasses upward and asked, ‘What will you call it?’

Mam hadn’t got that far. ‘Poems?’

Mrs Quinty stood back, pressed her hands together, and allowed that suggestion to wilt in the daylight. ‘Perhaps something. . better?’ she said.

They stood in the kitchen either side of the perplexity. I was at the table with the Explorations anthology, the one that was used before the Department became afraid of being unpopular with fourteen-year-olds, the one that set the bar high, the one that had Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ in it, Hence loathed Melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born. I looked up. ‘Is there any poem longer than the others?’

‘There is,’ Mrs Quinty said. With her middle finger she pushed the glasses to full magnifying. ‘There is one. It’s about. .’

She didn’t need to say Aeney.

‘It’s called “History of the Rain”.’

Five minutes later the complete History of the Rain was stacked on a sheet of white tissue paper that had come inside a cardigan box from Monica Mac’s Drapery. It smelled of lilies or Monica Mac’s lily spray. Mam folded the tissue paper over the poems. You could see the title through it. I held the fold closed while Mam slipped a thin green ribbon underneath and brought it up and over and tied the bundle and pressed the bow flat so it would seem less pretty.

‘There now,’ she said. She looked at me and smiled the sad smile of our complicity and her eyes had that look of Please God in them. Maybe just because these were poems, or maybe the same way chocolate grows in your mind in Lent, now that they were there in front of us we had a kind of, I don’t know, reverence about them. We wrapped them again in brown paper and tied the package with string.

‘You have the handwriting, Ruthie,’ Mam said, showing me the publisher’s address that Mrs Quinty had found for her. ‘You do it.’

I wrote it careful as anything. I wrote it the way my father would have. Then Mam and I took our coats and walked to the village. I carried the poems inside my coat away from the rain.

Maureen Bowe was in Mina Prendergast’s. Maureen was a woman whose range of opinion and depth of pronouncement were not, as Edith Wharton might say, encumbered by illiteracy. But I liked her. She lived in a two-room house with three fly-cemeteries hanging from the ceiling, had left school at fourteen but had Yoda-Level understanding of the world, in particular her rights and the workings of social welfare. Maureen could be fun to listen to, but we were burdened with hope and did not enjoy the delay.

‘Mary. And Ruth,’ she said, turning her giant self around with one elbow still holding her place on the counter.

‘Maureen.’

She waited to see if we would offer anything for her to comment on.

‘Will it ever stop?’ she asked. The rain had almost exhausted comment. ‘I have a leak. Back kitchen. Tom Keogh that built it. A flat roof about as useful as wallpaper.’ For a moment she let the leak drip in her mind and then added: ‘I think there’s a grant out of flat roofs now.’

Mother and I said Really? How wonderful for you, only not in words.

Maureen swung around on the axis of her elbow. ‘That grant’s still on the go, is it, Mina?’

Mrs Prendergast preferred customers to conversation, and said the last post would be going shortly.

Once the door had closed and we were alone in the self-possessed but subdued majesty of Faha post office, Mam told Mina Prendergast we had a package for London.

Mrs Prendergast adhered to best practice and did not ask what it was. She took the package and weighed it. Being poetry it weighed almost nothing. That was the thing I thought of, the lightness, the non-mass of it, how the scales of the real world hardly registered it. Mam and I watched the package being ferried over, faintly regarded, and flipped back on to the counter.

Mrs Prendergast opened the stamp book, ran her fingers down the back of a sheaf before selecting The One. She tugged it free, dabbed it in the pink concave pad that looked like Aunt Daphne’s powder puff, affixed it with gravity. ‘To London,’ she said.

And that was all. She didn’t add a question mark. Mrs Prendergast wasn’t asking, just stating, she would be clear on that. It was none of the Post Office’s business. But because London was said, and because in a place like Faha in the dead middle of a wet afternoon just the fact of sending something to London had a certain gravity, and that gravity was something in which it was natural that Faha itself would like to share, because every place liked to feel it was a place that could have something important to send to London, and because the London, without the question mark, just sort of hung there invitational and alone and grammatically incomplete, Mam said, ‘It’s poetry.’

She didn’t mean to. She regretted it the moment the word poetry was out and dragonflying around the post office. I looked to make sure the door was closed.

‘I see.’

‘Actually, Mrs Prendergast, I wonder if I could ask a favour?’

‘Yes?’

‘When a letter comes. From London.’

‘Yes?’

‘Could I ask you to tell Pat to hold it here for us?’

We were Swains. We were already in the embossed paisley-print parish roll-book of Odd. Mrs Prendergast pursed her postbox lips but I think Aeney and Our Grief passed through.

‘I’d like it to be a surprise,’ Mam said.

In the background I gave Mrs Prendergast my Forlorn Ruth, my Child of Doom, my cheeks of hollow disport and madly magnified eyes.

‘I see.’

Then the door opened and Maureen Bowe was back. ‘There is a grant,’ she said, more or less exactly the way you’d say There is a God.

With model discretion Mrs Prendergast slid the package along the counter into Outgoing and to my mother made a nod that did not require movement of her head but happened in her eyes only.

The poems were gone.

Mam and I came out into the rain. To all appearances the world was as we had left it — in Church Street Martin Sheehan’s tractor pulled over ass-out and impassable while he spoke out the window with one of the Leahys, Old Tom standing with his bicycle in the crossroad, waiting to direct the no-traffic, Centra having Centra delivery, Nuala Casey squinting out at nothing, John Paul Eustace doing his door-to-door — but we knew it was not. We walked home breathing the thin air you breathe when your heart has moved up into your throat and you want to believe that maybe yes, Emily was right and Hope is a Thing with Feathers, and is flying up out of you right now. The feathers are coming out your mouth and your eyes are O’s watching it rise above the hedgerows and the dripping fuchsia, above the treetops and the electricity lines and the rain, crossing Ryan’s and the Major’s and ours, and making its way right now to London.

‘You won’t tell?’ Mam said. ‘I know you won’t,’ she answered, and she looked away, both of us small and quiet, and maybe as close as we could ever be in this life.

Mrs Prendergast intended to tell no one. She only told Father Tipp because poetry seemed in the realm of prayer, and, because his heart was already at capacity with secrets, Father Tipp only told his housekeeper Orla Egan, and Orla Egan only told Mrs Daly when she was doing her floors windows and etceteras on the Tuesday afternoons because she was helpless to resist revealing her privileges within the priest’s house and liked to have something to say that was not concerned with dirt Dettol Flash and Windowlene. So, because the marvellous is in short supply, because in sharing it a shine comes and reflects well on the ordinary, soon there was no one in Faha who didn’t know Virgil Swain’s poems had gone to London.

Except for Virgil Swain.

The way I see it, it was generous and heartfelt. As big Tom Dempsey says, Irish people are appallingly good at giving. So there was not only the first response — A book? — and the universal follow-up — Am I in it? — there was a shy pride, a prayerlike hope, and among adults a quiet but widespread gladness, as if in our parish poetry had become congregational.

Chapter 3

How long does it take for someone to see your soul?

Let’s say there are soul-seers. Let’s say that’s their business. Let’s say they’ve been anointed-appointed for this single task. For souls they’ve got the Zenith Standard. They’ve got Paragon guidelines, Excellence Exemplars. They’ve got Pinnacle sunglasses, perfect vision, and those amber close-fitting 1970s Star Trek suits. Their whole reason for being is to look for these souls. They’ve got their instructions. They’re moving out and they’re all the time on Alert, Transporters set on Ready.

Dazzlement is what they’re after.

Like shining, from shook foil.

They’re looking for ones who have given themselves to what is most intensely seen and felt, ones who because of their natures could not see and feel it without wanting to be closer to it, whose own nature could be a kind of restless yearning, who became oddities, lived in margins, who had before them a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else, so that disappointment was keen and constant, their hair turned silver and their eyes the blue of the sea and the sky.

Let’s say the soul-seers go to their work each day.

Let’s say they focus their beams.

How long would it take to find him?

Because Mrs Quinty had the necessary attributes for playing a minor character, and could remove herself from scenes, my father did not notice that she had been at his table and typed his poems. In matters of his personal space he was not particular. Like Ted Hughes, for a poem he would have squeezed himself into a corner. He did not notice the copies had been touched because he was not thinking of readers. He knew the poems were so far below Readers that that never entered his head. That’s what I understand now. I understand that he bore them mostly out of the spirit of chastisement, not unlike Thomas Dawes whose failings were secret until he fathered a whole family of cross-eyed sons, each one better at crashing cars than the one before, and only one of whom was sometimes sober.

Virgil still went to his table in the evenings. He still read with voracious appetite, the fat, second-hand, 1,902 pages of The Riverside Shakespeare (Book 1,604, Houghton Mifflin, Boston) becoming a kind of bible, but he did not pick up the pencil. He did not take-off.

Although you never really know what your parents are feeling, although you can’t quite enter the world as them and see it from inside their eyes, I knew my father was lost, and like Mam I too wanted to rescue him. Maybe some part of it was that I wanted that moment in the future when Prospero says to Miranda, Thou wast that did preserve me, but mostly it was just love.

I thought by asking him to write me a poem whatever was stalled inside him might restart.

‘Will you?’

His long body was twisted in the chair, face angular, silvery beard climbing up his cheeks. His face was composed now, but his eyebrows were these mad wispy filaments, like the way Sean Custy’s fiddle strings curl off the fiddle head, or Paudie O leaves the extra bits of wires when he’s wired something, as if a reminder that music and electricity were live things and could not be contained.

‘Doesn’t have to be a long one,’ I said.

Two deep creases came either side of his mouth. ‘I’m sure I can find a poem written to a Ruth.’

‘That’s not what I want. I want yours.’

He turned to the table covered in books, pushed a hand up the side of his beard. It made the slightest crackle. He pulled it down across his mouth. Beside The Riverside Shakespeare was Tolstoy’s Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Books 2,888 & 2,889, Penguin Classics, London) as well as the green American hardcover of Seamus Heaney’s Poems 1965–1975 (Book 2,891 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York), the white paperback with the black and white photograph of Robert Lowell holding his glasses and leaning to his left beneath the scarlet title Selected Poems (Book 2,892 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, London), John Donne in a mad black hat and with arms folded on the cover of the fat John Donne, The Complete English Poems (Book 2,893, Penguin Books, London), But, besides all of these, the book my eye fell on was the small white paperback of W.B. Yeats’s Selected Poems (Book 3,000, Pan Macmillan, London) because it was open on ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and because across the page my father had written something in tiny black ink, as if with the poem or the poet he was in dialogue.

At last my father looked back at me. ‘What would you like it to say?’

‘I don’t mind.’ I thought I was being helpful. I didn’t understand the problem, the agony and mystery of it. I didn’t understand then as I do now. I didn’t understand that what he wanted in his poems was Life, and that he couldn’t summon it. Suddenly the air in the room was close, the rain louder, and I knew I had brought him to a naked place. I had brought him where Swains always end up, in the white glare of their own failure. But I would not stop. ‘Will you?’

He turned fully towards me and he took my hands. ‘Will you write one for me?’ he asked.

His eyes held me. They held me in a way I will never forget, not because of the blueness or the river depth or the shine, not because of the sadness or the defeat but because it seemed right then that in his eyes was a whole history of yearning and in asking me to write he was passing it to me.

‘Mine will be bad,’ I said.

‘But you’ll write me one?’

‘I will if you will. So, will you?’ I shook his two hands for an answer. ‘Please? Promise?’

‘Do you promise?’

‘I promise. Now, say “I promise to write something for Ruth.” ’

‘I promise to write something for Ruth.’

In the meantime, we waited. We waited for London to write back. Mam dropped in to the post office; Mrs Prendergast gave her ‘No’ with her eyes, and didn’t let on that everyone in the queue knew what Mam was waiting for, and that everyone had perfect confidence the news would be good. Because Faha is like that. People like a home victory. Unlike Tommy Tuohy, who enjoys cursing Man U, the team he supports, people here are generous once something goes outside the parish. They want it to do well. They supposed that, London being London, there was a fair mountain of poems to be got through and it might take some time, but they knew. They knew because my father was Virgil Swain, and because now that they thought about it, he was more or less exactly what a man who had a book of poetry sent to London should look like.

Although no one but Mrs Quinty had read his poems, my father became Our Poet.

I only discovered this because Vincent Cunningham has a heart soft as cooked cabbage, and because as my serial proposer he often came to our house. He came without invitation, appeared in the kitchen, not exactly in the same way the smaller McInerneys did — eating a second dinner at our house after the free-for-all, fork-your-spuds-from-the-bowl, Go! dining chez McInerney — but quiet and courteous, as a friend of Aeney’s and one familiar with loss. Mam of course loved him. All mothers did. They swam right into the place where his mother was dead, and they thought What a nice boy and how neat he always looked, his shirt collar just right inside his round-neck jumper and his hands always clean. Like all the best people, he only ever took tea at the third invitation.

After one such visit he asked me, ‘Would you like to walk along the road, Ruth?’

‘No.’

‘Ruth, walk Vincent some of the way home.’

‘He knows the way.’

‘Air will do you good.’

‘I have air. Look. Nice. Air.’

‘It’s all right, Mrs Swain. She’s right. I know the way.’

Good people are just horrible. You just want to shoot them.

‘All right, yes! I’d love to walk along the road.’

Walking Along the Road is the Faha equivalent of going to the cinema or the mall or the bowling alley in the real world. Vincent thought the road just marvellous altogether.

‘I can’t go any faster,’ I said, ‘So if you want to go ahead that’s fine.’

‘No, no. This is fine.’

I walked slower. But you can’t lose a fellow like Vincent Cunningham, he slowed right down. The rain was not rain he took any notice of. ‘Ruth,’ he said, ‘I’m hoping it’ll be soon.’

I mistook his meaning. I was in Middlemarch then, maybe I was dreaming he was Mr Casaubon, whose proposal Dorothea should have stamped on. But before I could say anything, he said, ‘Your dad’s poems. I hope he’ll hear soon.’

I did not hit him. Let me put that to bed.

I did not grab his ear and pull him to me and say ‘How do you know?’

Maybe my expression did. I am not responsible for my face.

‘I just wanted to say, I’m hoping it’ll be soon,’ he said.

Chapter 4

It was not soon. Soul-seeing in London was on a go-slow. Mam and I held our breath, and although, from both sides of our family, I had advantages in holding breath underwater, most days I knew we were drowning a little bit more. One day Mrs Hanley came. She was a small brown-eyed terrier with the plainspoken forthrightness of Cork people. Mrs Hanley had buried her husband, but it had taken nothing out of her. She got on with it, she said. The exact opposite of Eileen Waters, who had so far in this life successfully avoided making a direct statement, Mrs Hanley liked to hit a nail on the head. Now she was running the FAS scheme for the unemployed, and because she knew London had still not replied, and because like everyone else she wondered how we were living, by way of asking she told my father he had to join. The scheme was for the betterment to the parish so technically anything he could offer would be eligible.

What he offered was Yeats.

It wasn’t a joke.

I suppose he couldn’t resist. I suppose large dreams sailed their galleons into his brain and he had that kind of brain where strange is just normal in a bit of a storm. That Mrs Hanley agreed to it was maybe the more remarkable.

I can’t remember who said it, but it’s true that whenever anyone reads Shakespeare they become Shakespeare. Well, the same is true for Yeats. Take an afternoon. Sit and read his poems. Any, it doesn’t really matter. Spend an afternoon, read out loud. And as you do, sounding out those lines, letting the rhythms fall, following some of it and not following more of it, doesn’t matter, because gradually, without your even noticing it at first, just softly softly, you rise.

You do. Honest. Read poetry like that and human beings become better, more complex, loving, passionate, angry, subtle and poetic, more expressive and profound, altogether more fine.

That’s what I learned from my father.

He was given a room in the back of the hall. Six classes. He needed the money but expected no one to come.

When he came in the front door of the hall there were people looking to find extra chairs. They didn’t say We’re here because you’re the poet who has the book gone to London, they didn’t say We’re sorry your son died or You have to keep hope alive. A higher form of English is practised in Ireland, and direct statement is frowned upon. Nods were passed as Virgil came in. Nobody took their eyes off him as he settled the Collected Poems on the desk, and in an instant, trait undiscovered until now but inescapable as his bloodstream, he lifted his chin like the Reverend, and began.

My father’s teaching style was as improbable as his nature. He stood behind the desk and looked out over the faces peering up at him. He allowed a pause that felt like a prayer, that felt like he was going to attempt this and he had no idea what he was going to say or how he was going to say it or if he even could begin. Then he began. He paced, back and over in the narrow space left to him by the chairs, back and over (six steps), speaking loud and clear off the very top of his head, which was above all of ours, and which it was not difficult to believe was just then exploding. He used his hands sometimes while he read, a kind of downward cutting, sharp, a chop, like that, and sometimes he’d say a line and be taken by the quality of it. He’d repeat it in a softer voice and you knew right then, right at that moment, he was discovering newness in it, and even if you didn’t know what exactly that was you knew you had arrived in a different country from the one outside that was just now discovering it was bankrupt.

The classes were theatre. They were not a one-man-show in the sense of either structure or performance, did not have any clear sense of progression, did not have pauses, did not adhere to any notion of making points or playing to the audience, but they were electric and before they were done were already becoming part of parish legend: You won’t believe it, but once in Faha.

Even on those four times I got to go and was stacking the chairs later for Colm the caretaker — Eight in a stack, no more no less — I knew there would be times in the future when someone would look shyly at me and acknowledging wonder with a gentle toss-back of their head say, ‘Do you know, I was at the Yeats.’

The more you hope the more you hurt. The best of us hope the most. That’s God’s sense of humour. Back then I hoped the soul-seers were coming to Clare. They were putting on their sunglasses, locking in the coordinates and setting out from Russell Square. Because, as Father Tipp said, there’s a religious twist — which may actually be an insoluble knot — in my imagination, I lent them the mute mystique of the Three Wise Men and dreamed them arriving, if not quite on camels then certainly with amazement in their eyes.

At night I prayed one prayer: Tomorrow.

Tomorrow let the word come.

I prayed to God, found God unsatisfactory because He had no face, and prayed then to Aeney. There was Swain logic to it. Lying under the skylight at night I pictured the prayers of the whole world rising. (TG there were time-zones or they would all be heading up around the same time, and Prayer-Traffic Control would be. . Sorry, fecund.) I pictured them rising off rooftops, ascending against the rain, millions of them, vague and particular, a nightly one-way traffic of human yearning, and I thought surely they couldn’t all be heard? Surely they became just noise? How could He listen to that? Even just from Faha there would be the McCarthys, who had a Nan gone to the Regional, Mrs Reid, whose Tommy was having his heart opened, Maureen Knowles who had the bowel, Mr Curran, Sean Sugrue, Pat Crowe, all in Condition Uncertain in Galway, Patricia the Dolan’s mother who was starting chemo in the Bons. And those were only the ones I had heard. So, because Aeney was that part of me that was already in the next life, because he was fair-haired and blue-eyed and generally adorable, I decided he could be our Ambassador. He could carry the word and so to him I prayed.

Come on, Aeney.

But Aeney was elsewhere, and after four months of waiting Mam had me write a letter of enquiry.

‘We want something polite but firm,’ she said. ‘Maybe they need a slight push. We want to know if they are interested or if we should offer the book elsewhere.’

I wrote it neatly on blue letter paper. Or we shall send the book elsewhere. Mam signed it. When she put it in the envelope the flap wouldn’t stick. We never sent letters. The envelope was probably ten years old. She put it under The Return of the Native and pressed down. But still the glue wouldn’t hold.

Sometimes you have to defy the signs. ‘Go down to Mac’s and see if they have an envelope.’

Moira Mac was doing what she always did in this life, washing clothes. She had no envelopes, but took a Holy Communion card out of its white one and gave me that. I brought it back inside my cardigan. At the kitchen table I addressed it. ‘Say a prayer,’ Mam said.

The more you hope the more you hurt.

You drop a letter in a Holy Communion envelope in the postbox and already you are waiting for a reply. Human beings were built for response. But human nature can’t tolerate too much waiting. Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow, T.S. Eliot said, and that was the principle that inspired texting, that came up with the shortest possible time, basically as fast as Sheila Geary’s two thumbs could hammer ILY on a tiny keyboard and get Johnny Johnston’s ILY2 back, so that between emotion and response now there wasn’t all that much shadow.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are.

After the Yeats classes my father returned to writing. He had been renewed. A white electric urgency flashed in him. For the first time he broke his own rule about only writing after the work on the farm was done, and now he was at his desk when I woke and there again when I came home and there when I went to not-sleep at night. It was a flood of new work. It was pouring into and out of him quickly, swift turbulent river. His pencil dashed across the paper now, worked itself down to a soft stub. When the lines were blurry as if underwater the pencil was quickly pared, soft whoo-whoo, the parings blown, and the writing raced on.

‘Dad?’

Inside the hum he couldn’t hear me.

‘Dad, Mam says dinner’s ready.’

He wrote faster than I had ever seen anyone.

‘Dad?’

I broke the hum. He fell silent, and at last pulled back out of the poem, pencil still in his hand. I had the sense of his unplugging, and that it was both arduous and somehow regretful.

‘Yes?’ he said. Then again, ‘Yes.’ As if recollecting that Mam and I and dinner existed.

He ate little, and to remedy this Mam tried various stratagems, cooking his favourite, salmon of course, buttered & honeyed carrots with peas and potatoes, telling me a clean plate was the best way of thanking her, or announcing that she had ruined the dinner and was sorry that it was probably inedible, just to make him feel I must try this for Mary.

By the end of the week Mam decided it was best to keep a plate in the oven. He would come down when he was ready. We shouldn’t disturb him. My mother has a natural kind of grace, which is basically wisdom.

Many plates of charred food were taken from the oven, but I never heard her complain.

We were still waiting for the reply from London, but now it seemed less vital. Aeney had done it, I decided. He’d gotten the poems turned on and now they were coming in a way that did not seem humanly possible. My father was not wrestling with these. Even though I was not getting to read them, I knew. I knew from the moments of goodnight when I stood behind him waiting for his kiss on my forehead, when I watched him, humming and rocking, pencil flashing across the page, I knew that these were different, these were his life’s work. He still crossed out, wrote a line and rewrote it, sounding it that way he had where the sound and rhythm were present but you could not make out the words. He still turned the page fast and began on a fresh one.

But now there was joy in it.

As I have said, I’ve read every book I can find about poetry, how it’s made and why it’s made and what it means that men and women write it. I’ve read T. S. Eliot’s On Poetry and Poets (Book 3,012, Faber & Faber, London), Poems of John Clare’s Madness (Book 3,013, Geoffrey Grigson ed., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), Robert Lowell: A Biography (Book 3,014, Ian Hamilton, Faber & Faber, London), Jeremy Reed’s Madness, the Price of Poetry (Book 3,015, Peter Owen, London), and the basic message is, poets are different to you and me. Poets do not escape into other worlds, they go deeper into this one. And because depths are terrifying, there is a price.

The price at first was thinness. My father forgot food. In a different biography it is here that he would turn to drink. It is here he might have considered recourse to the methods of Johnny Masters who started drinking early in the day so that by evening the world became tolerable. But because at Paddy Brogan’s wedding my father had drunk a glass of whiskey and shortly after thought people were trees, he knew drink would take him away and not towards the thing he wanted to capture.

He grew thin. His arms grew longer. Inside the open collar of his white shirt there were ropes and cords of tendons in his neck. His shoulders were sharp and made of the shirt a sail.

I do not mean to say he ignored us. Certainly he did not intend to, and there were moments when, like discovering a butterfly on the back of your hand, he stopped in the kitchen, looked at me the way no one else ever did. It was a look that loaned you some of what he was seeing, a look that made you feel, I don’t know, transfigured.

‘Hey, Ruthie.’ He swept me into his embrace. I pressed myself into that shirt and held on and for those moments forgave what I didn’t yet know would need forgiveness.

There were other times, times the suddenness in him took my hand and my mother’s hand and brought us out into the garden where the rain that was not called rain was falling softly and where he said, ‘I will make things better for us,’ and Mam said, ‘We are fine, Virgil, we are fine.’ A time when he let out a roar upstairs and came bounding down and clapped his hands hard. One clap, like that. Then another, louder, CLAP, so that even Nan looked, and I said, ‘Are you done?’ And he smiled and his eyes were shining the way eyes only shine in love-stories and he shook his head and he laughed. He had to catch the laugh with his hand, and then he touched the top of my head. ‘I am going to make things better for us, Ruthie,’ he told me, and went back up the stairs again and soon was humming once more.

We had an engine, a dynamo in our house, and its output was pages and pages of poems. A week passed, then another, and another. He was still writing, and writing it seemed was not the vexing toil it was when I tried to compose my promised poem, but a wildly improbable fizz. It was giddy and swift and surprising. It was plugged in and all-powerful, a blind mad rush that came not linear nor logical nor even reasonable but with the unruly irrepressible quality of life in it, the kind of writing Gabriel García Márquez meant when he said the sheer pleasure of it may be the human condition which most resembles levitation.

And our house rose with it.

How could it not? For a time our house left behind the ordinary world. I had only a vague sense that in the news the country was actually sinking. Greece had already sunk. Spain was sinking, so was Portugal. Whole bits of Europe were returning to seaweed. Our country was on what Margaret Crowe called tender hooks, waiting to see if we’d have a Soft Landing. We would, said the Ministers, just before we didn’t. But really I didn’t notice. The economy, like fine weather, was something that happened in Dublin. Honestly, until the Poles left, I didn’t know we had one. Gradually the Lidl and Aldi bags were coming (Mrs Prendergast called them Ly-dell and All-dee), and the croissants were departing. Shops were closing. In Ryan’s Tommy McCarroll said he’d put his money in the Absolute Idiots Bank and now felt like an absolute idiot. Francie Arthur’s fifty-euro notes started smelling like mattress, and then the Maguires were gone to tile Australia, Pat and Seamus and Sean Walsh to dig holes in Canada, Mona Murphy was selling her furniture in her front garden and Johnny Doyle at Doyle’s Auctioneers was like Young Blight in Our Mutual Friend, who, to create an impression of industry, spent his days filling his appointment book with made-up names, Mr Aggs, Baggs, Caggs and yes, let me see, at two sharp, Mr Daggs.

But I was unaware of this, unaware the country was moving into a time where only story would sustain it. Our house was a house in fairy tale, unaware it was in a kingdom of disenchantment. Maybe if you could take away the front walls, maybe if you could lift off the roof of any house and see the actual life in it, the parts that are not, never were, and never will be In Recession, the parts that are people trying to live and trying to do better and be better, maybe then every house would seem magical. In our house the magic was white-hot. My father was on fire. We knew it was not normal, but normal was never a Swain consideration. Everyone adapts inside their own story. That’s the world. In ours the rain fell and my father stayed up in the roof writing poems. The rain was a big part of it. In the coverless second-hand edition of The Power and the Glory (Book 1,113, Penguin Classics, London) that belonged once to an Isobel O’Dea, Ursuline Convent, Thurles, Graham Greene says the rain was like a curtain behind which almost anything can happen. And that’s right. But if you haven’t lived in it, if you haven’t looked out day after day into those pale veils, haven’t heard the constant whispering of the rain that you know cannot be voices, cannot be souls, sodden and summoning, then you cannot know the almost anything that can happen.

My father was filled with zeal. It is a word I have never used, zeal, because it sounds somehow inappropriate in ordinary life. But that’s what it was. That’s what the quality of animation and focus amounted to. And the zeal was this white fire coming and going on our stairs, was in the bluest eyes and the untucked white shirt and the running of hands over and back on the crown of his head, white fire.

So in a way it was no surprise when I was woken by smoke.

It was in my eyes burning, and when I turned on the light a thick grey cloud of it came across the ceiling. I couldn’t move. I watched it from my pillow with perfect stillness, the way I might have watched Santa or the Tooth Fairy or God if I had caught any of them unawares when I was meant to be sleeping. The smoke travelled curiously, by which I mean it was the curious one and came across the ceiling considering the cool dark glass of the skylight and then curled to come further down into the room. I snuggled down. I breathed into the pillow. I wasn’t sure if the smoke was there for me or would pass on and go out under the door. I wasn’t sure if I had already died and Purgatory was as promised, only with your own pyjamas.

Nobody else was moving. From the house there was not a sound. So the fire was a dreamt one until I was choking.

The smoke descended. It came into my throat and lodged and burned. It took the walls and the ceiling and the skylight and made blind and amorphous the room so that soon there was no room. There was only smoke. My eyes stung and I closed them tight and pulled up the duvet, surprised that I was to die under it and not in the river like my brother.

‘Aeney?’ I whispered. ‘Aeney?’

But Aeney didn’t answer. The smoke was taking its time. It was letting me think In here I will be okay while slowly in a smoke-way it devoured the room. It found the open drawers of my dresser, found my clothes, found my go-gos and my clips-jar and my hairbrush. For a moment I pictured the floor and the walls being gone and the roof too and my bed standing alone and surrounded by flames in this ardent sky. For a moment I was thinking levitation, that the smoke was a summons only and I was in the sky and soon I would hear the Reverend.

For one perfect moment I had no fear. I was already dead.

I eased the duvet down an inch, the better to hear Him.

But the smoke that was everywhere entered me and I heard only my own gasp and ratchet and cough. I pulled back the duvet, only it didn’t pull back. I got up out of the bed, but only in my mind. I felt my way through the smoke and ran out the door and called ‘Dad? Dad?’ and woke the house before the fire took us all, only I had passed out and discovered too late the difference between dreaming and dying.

In jump-cuts then: being borne down the stairs; my father’s arms; our house in smoke-disguise; flames in the mirror leaping; Nan and Mam in the front garden in their nightdresses; O Ruthie; Huck lying in the grass and whimpering; cars and tractors with headlights on; Jimmy Mac, Moira Mac with blankets; the hose, the buckets, the running; the voices.

Because it was beside the river, because it was damp and soggy and owned body and soul by the rain, our house did not burn down. It smouldered.

The cause of the fire was not Pentecostal, it was not zeal. It was more mundane. The chimney had caught. Fire travelled in through the old stonework, eventually feeding on the ancient upper timbers until it met the resistance of the dripping slates. Before the Kilrush fire brigade got there the fire was out, but because they had come they gave the insides a thorough blast. Water went up the chimney. It dripped from the rafters after. Stubborn black pools settled on the flags and on the shelves, in the teacups and the saucers and the glasses, on the seats of our leather armchairs and under the linoleum in the bathroom, the last of the pools remaining a week and only leaving when it was certain from then on our house would be irredeemably stained and for ever smell of fire and water.

Mam and Nan and I went to Mac’s. Three of their boys came out of one room so I could have it. I think I was still in shock. I was still uncertain about being saved. I lay in the bed that was warm and hollowed from McInerneys and for the umpteenth time tried to fathom why Swains were chosen for disaster.

Chapter 5

It would have been easier if we had been struck by lightning. It would have made a kind of sense, would have allowed those of a certain mind to take charcoal comfort in our being singled so. It would have been easier if I wrote My father caught fire. Or The poems exploded or What was in him reached the point of combustion.

Because I know that is what actually happened. I know it cannot have been just random.

We want the world to have a plot.

A chimney fire is not a plot.

Your brother drowning by chance is sad, but to tell it sheds no light and lends no meaning.

What happened is what happened. Things were consequent only in the sense that they followed. Although as they did, I knew we were becoming story. I knew ours was a family waiting for a teller. But where was the meaning?

For ten days Mam and Nan and I stayed at McInerney’s, and my father worked restoring the house. Faha is good in a crisis. He had help from everyone, but mostly Jimmy Mac and the Major who left aside whatever they normally did in order to carry outside the insides of our house, stack it in the haybarn, and cover it in grey canvas by night.

After a week I went back to school, and for a while added to my aura the grandeur of conflagration. I did not exploit it. A nimbus is ungainly in a classroom. In any case I had nausea, dizziness and floaters and feared a smell of singe.

Then one day, a day damp and indifferent as any other, a day without the slightest heralding, a day with nothing about it that said This day, I came into Mac’s and asked Mam how our house was coming.

‘It’s coming good,’ she said, ‘we’ll be home soon, Ruthie.’

Disbelieving, I went back to see.

My father was not in the house. The front and back doors were open. I want to say there was music playing. I want to say the tape deck was on and Mozart was playing. I want to have it blasting out, large and joyous and triumphant. I want the whole house to have been filled with music. But there was none, and I am not ready yet to go that far into story. The house was empty, the floors and all damp surfaces covered in Clare Champions so it seemed a place of words. I went out the back and around the haggard and up to the wall of the river meadow.

My father was down by the place where Aeney had drowned. He was standing perfectly still, Huck beside him.

‘Dad?’

He only turned the second time I called. And when he did his face fell into that soft creased smile, but his eyes were the saddest I had ever seen them.

‘Hey, Dad. Hi.’

Maybe we all have momentary foreknowledge, which although of little practical use seals our hearts just enough to bear what’s coming. I turned to the river and saw the pages. Through the rain-mist of my glasses I saw them as white-caps. They were small, already distant, and sailing west in the swiftness of the current. I didn’t believe they were pages and then knew they were the poems, and knew the answer he was going to give me when I asked why.

‘They were no good, Ruth.’

I didn’t say anything. A better Ruth would have gone after them, a Ruth not afraid of the river. I stood silently by. I watched the poems go, and felt a laceration, which was partly my own but partly too my father’s, for I knew what throwing them into the river had cost him. I knew Abraham and the Reverend were right there. I knew he had failed the Impossible Standard and believed at that moment that everything he had done had been a failure. He had lost his son to the river, and then almost all of us in a fire that he was not even aware had been moving through the house while he had continued writing a poem he now considered useless.

I think I knew then that a letter would come from London, that Mam would open it in the corner of Faha Post Office. That I would watch her read it and hear the sharp intake of her breath and then take the letter from her and read Dear Mrs Swain, we thank you for your letter. We are sorry to say we have no record of ever receiving History of the Rain.

We moved back in to our house. My father was hushed, like a man with ashes in his soul.

Eloquent in his own way, Father Tipp brought a set of Yeats left to him by a cousin in Tipperary who was unaware of his taste. These were the hardcover Mythologies, Autobiographies, Essays & Explorations and Collected Poems (Books 3,330, 3,331, 3,332 & 3,333, Macmillan, London), each of which I later discovered must to my father have had an air of peculiar prompting, because though they had gone elsewhere about the world on their inside flyleaves they bore stamps in green ink that said ‘Salisbury Library, Wiltshire’.

‘They need a finer mind than mine,’ the priest said.

My father took them with chin-tremble and head tilted to the ceiling to keep his eyes from spilling. Everything now was bigger than saying.

‘Thank you, Father,’ he said.

If wings could come they were coming then. In the three days that followed, while he sat in Aeney’s sky-room and read Yeats, my father was ascending.

On the third day I came home from school into the kitchen and called ‘Hello’ up to him. He did not answer. I climbed the Captain’s Ladder through the smells of fire and rain. I said, ‘Dad, I. .’

And that’s all I said, because there, at his desk under the skylight, in the pale gleam of the rain, my father was dead.

Chapter 6

Taking you down.

That’s what the nurses say. Tomorrow, Ruth, we’ll be taking you down.

Mrs Merriman was taken down but she did not come back up. I have Mr Mackey so I am In Good Hands. I have said I don’t want details. I don’t want medical language. I don’t want a venous access device in here, or Interferon therapy or acetaminophen or arsenic trioxide or all-trans retinoic acid. I don’t want them in my pages. I want mine, like Shakespeare’s first folio, to be To the Great Variety of Readers, from the Most Able to Him that Can but Spell. (You kno who you ar.) I don’t want mine suffocated by science. I want mine to breathe, because books are living things, they have spines and smells and length of life, and from living some of them have tears and buckles and some stains.

Mrs Quinty has come up to Dublin. I told her not to, I told her when I was leaving there was no need, and that if you believe illness is everywhere the last place you should visit is a hospital. But that woman, though small, is irrepressible. She came into the ward like a short fat bird, buttoned coat, blue handbag and tighter-than-ever hairdo. Mam hugged her and Mrs Quinty said, ‘Don’t, I’m all wet,’ and then she looked at me and put a hand, flat, against her breastbone, pat, just like that, as though lidding what was open.

‘Dear Ruth,’ she said, and, after regaining herself, ‘Goodness. Do they not know how to fix up a pillow?’

Mrs Quinty brought the parish with her. She brought cards and well-wishes, news of candles and prayers, and then, mindful not to burden her visit with concern, recounted stories; Danny Devlin had taken his toilet out and thrown it in his front garden ahead of the toilet tax, said he’d knock his chimney ahead of the chimney tax, and brick in his windows before they came taxing daylight. (A country that understands the potency of imagery, the memory of our bankers, Mrs Quinty said, was to be enshrined in perpetuity in septic tanks.) Kevin Keogh, though he had about as much love for her as a small donkey, had surrendered at last and married Martina Morgan. The government, believing itself attuned to the pulse of the nation, had proposed abolishing the Senate, just as the Senate, Mikey Lucy said, were about to propose abolishing the government. Sean Connors had written from Melbourne and told his father he missed being with him at the silage, and in mute desolation Matt Connors had taken a poss of it, put it in a padded envelope and brought it to Mina Prendergast for posting, silage being for the Connors what the smell of coalsmoke was to Charles Dickens, and guava to Gabriel García Márquez, the indelible imprint of home.

All paradises are lost. The Council, Mrs Quinty said, has given up the ghost. The roads are going away. The windmills are coming. In the ghost estate, in disgust at the failures of promise, two of the Latvians have constructed an artificial paradise out of drugs and alcohol and raised a flag of Germany.

The river has continued to rise. It took the graveyard, left tombstones standing upright in the Shannon, then it came up Church Street for the church, and Mary Daly, who was still kneeling praying like in T.S. Eliot to the brown God, had to be ferried out just as she was starting to levitate or drown, depending on who was telling it. Our house, home to too many metaphors, had become metaphoric and needed a bailout. The McInerneys were at it.

‘You’ll only hear it from others so I might as well tell you,’ Mrs Quinty added, and pursed her lips and sat a little more erect to announce: ‘Mr Quinty has returned.’

The way she said it you knew she was still deciding what to do with him. Mam and I looked elsewhere.

‘Stomach ulcers,’ she said, with not entirely disguised pleasure, and left it at that.

Mrs Quinty is the only living person who read History of the Rain. When it was gone, and I asked her to remember it, she could not. Because of the haste, and the need to be undiscovered, the typing not the poems had taken her attention. She would touch her lip then put her hand out in front of her as if the words were coming, as if a speech bubble was forming, but no, she’d say, she would not do my father an injustice and give me a misremembered line.

In the white paperback of Yeats’s Selected Poems, beside ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, I read the two lines my father had written. Why did you take him? And Why does everything I do fail? And from those questions I understood Virgil Swain was applying the Impossible Standard to God.

I cannot say that my father had faith in God. The truth is that he had something more personal; he had a sense of Him, the Father of the Rain. The poems, the raptures and the despair I have come to think of as part of a dialogue; they were expressions of wonder and puzzlement, a longing for ascension and an attempt to make endure in this world a spirit of hope. So in my mind, day by day, the poems became greater for not existing.

This was the truth I clung to when the report into his death came back, when we were told my father had had a tumour curved like a hook in the parietal lobe of his brain. The tumour was embedded, and had been growing for some time, the Doctor said. The way he said it I knew he thought it explained the raptures, the ecstasies that produced the poems. The tumour explained everything. The tumour was the whole story. And right then I knew that that was the wrong story and that I would have to write the truth.

That Vincent Cunningham is unreal.

Who takes a bus from Faha to Ennis — that foul fumy rattling boneshaker Dennis Darmody, who has the look and personality of a corkscrew, drives kamikaze around Blind Faith bends — who takes that, and then stands waiting for the Ennis-to-Dublin, whose passengers are all Free-Pass pensioners who go up and back not because they have business in Dublin but because they have free-passes and wiped-out pensions, who buys the Day Return when the journey is four hours each way, when they haven’t ten euro to their name, when they should be studying for exams, and half the country is under water? Who brings Quality Street?

Vincent Cunningham comes squelching down the hospital corridor in wet sneakers and stands at the ward entrance with a general drowned look. If I said ‘Go away’ he would. He would take the bus back again, and, inconceivably but truly, he would not resent it.

‘Mrs Quinty says I will not die.’

It was not my best greeting, but time was short. This is my last Aisling. I was fasting and anxious and sounds were blurry and my style was breaking up.

Vincent Cunningham sits in my visitor seat. Mam is gone downstairs with Mrs Quinty. Across the way Jackie Fennell looks at him and raises her perfectly curved perfectly plucked eyebrows and passes me the most unsubtle of nods.

‘Of course you won’t,’ Vincent says.

‘I cannot, according to Mrs Quinty, because in my writing there is such life.’

I also cannot because Alice Munro says the whole grief of life will not do in fiction. You can’t have so much sorrow — readers will throw the book against the wall.

‘You won’t,’ Vincent says again. But the way he says it sends this deep furrow down between his eyebrows and I know he’s only saying it.

‘But if I do.’

‘You won’t.’

‘Vincent Cunningham.’

He swallows his objection. He is pleased and abashed to hear me say his name. ‘Yes?’

‘If I do, two things.’

‘Two things.’

‘First, you know what to do with all my pages?’ Have I said, his eyes are the kindest? He has shaved for the journey, plastic blue Gillette that makes his cheeks look quite polished. Really, there’s a shining in all of him. ‘You remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘What’s second?’

‘Second is actually first. Second, is that you should kiss me.’

I may have been floating. I had the feeling I was floating.

‘I do not think that if I am going to die,’ I said, ‘I should die without having been kissed.’

Only through story can we tolerate death.

How else can we forgive God?

I asked my father to write me a poem. He never quite did. But he left a handwritten will that was witnessed by John Paul Eustace and in it he gave the details of the life assurance he had been paying, and in it he said: ‘For Ruth, my books.’

Just that. For Ruth, my books.

On the day I could bring myself to go in and look at them, a library of books burned and drowned but undestroyed, I saw that on his desk was The Salmon in Ireland and folded inside it was a page in his handwriting. On the top it said: for Ruth Louise Swain. And underneath, at random angles, were words and phrases, some underlined, some overwritten, and others crossed out, a scattering trying to become a gathering.

Here: My father climbed the sky.

Here: from cinderway ascend.

Salmon-ascent, struck out then written again then crossed out again.

Spire/Aspire.

Leap leap the

On the right-hand side in a pencilled circle: Tommy okay. Beneath it: Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul.

Leap

In a small rectangle: ‘We’re going fishing.’

Here: Fish/Fly and Water/Sky

Ever the light that lures and eludes/ ever the

On the left-hand side a gently curved question mark that could be a fishing line but is in fact a bend in the river

Leap

Only in love the light ascending/

And last, in the faintest leaden grey, his hand hardly pressing the words into the page: I will make things better.

And that’s all. In fragments for me, the impossible poem of him.

So in a way he kept his promise.

And here, in my way, I am keeping mine.

If I am dead my pages will be put with his page and pressed inside The Salmon in Ireland and Vincent Cunningham will bring them to the River Shannon and throw them in.

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book did not and does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.

Because here is what I know: the rain becomes the river that goes to the sea and becomes the rain that becomes the river. Each book is the sum of all the others the writer has read. Charles Dickens was a writer because his father had a small library and because solitude was not lonely with Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. Each book a writer writes has all the others in it, so there’s a library that’s like a river and it keeps on going. My book has in it all the books my father read, and in that way his spirit survives, as mine does, because although impossible there is a communion between readers and writers, and that though writers write and fail and write and fail again the failing is what counts, being against the current and making the leap, and his leap and mine lands him impossibly here now where he walks towards a sparkling river, and where a man with flowing hair and vivid eyes comes to meet him. RLS greets him with a raised hand and welcoming expression and in softest accent calls the name Virgil. RLS has a warming smile, a quick wit and a hundred stories to tell. The ground is new grass, the air almost tender because air in the afterlife is and is so sweet and as my father breathes it in he cannot believe this place or this company, both of which are made better by being impossible. Impossible too the quicksilver brilliance, the sun-bounce and shine of the River Shannon. Impossible the birds, so many and so joyful. Impossible the sky, blue and bluer now, with butterflies, while all the time the two men bear onwards along the riverbank. Impossible that RLS hums now, humming a not-yet-line of a not-yet-poem. Impossible that my father does the same, and that to him RLS glances his shone dark eyes and in them there is such recognition and joy that both now go humming, a sound somewhere between bird and man, otherworldly in this one but natural in that, impossible too that my father looks down the bank and sees ahead of them how that place, a bend in the river, has become familiar and his breath is shortened and his heart quickened because here is Uncle Noelie in his good suit coming and he looks better than he ever looked in this life, his All-Ireland winning look, and he waves in recognition and points back along the bank where my father sees the fair head of a boy and he has to take the leap and believe in the impossible now because though he blinks and palms his forehead the boy does not go away and Aeney becomes clearer and clearer and is not yet looking but, contentedly, patiently, fishing that river in the afterlife. And RLS stops and says, ‘There now,’ in that softest Scottish accent, drawing back his hair with one hand, and smiling, his whole demeanour radiant from X marking the spot and treasure found. ‘Your son,’ he says.

And, impossibly, my father sees that it is. Aeney turns and sees too. He lays down the fishing rod. He runs the way he has always run, that way of running that seems a natural expression of human grace, and he comes to Dad who comes to him and wraps his arms around him and lowers his head into the golden hair and they hold to each other impossibly long, long, longer still, and in their embrace is all our story, past present and to come, in it is the knowledge that Mam will be all right and that though she will be lonely and sad she will take comfort in the candles where one day in Faha church she will sit up with the clear and absolute certainty her husband has found her son, in that embrace is the knowledge that I will at last go into Remission and begin to get better, that I will return home, that, impossibly, I, Ruth, will write this book, that Mrs Quinty will type my pages, that you will read them, that Vincent Cunningham will come calling, for conversation and slightly salty kisses, and that one day, impossibly, he will take me walking for my first time out the front door and I will go to the river with him and not fear water or sky, not fear failure or doom because I will know somehow we can come through, and our story is of enduring and aspiring and that it is enough to keep hoping and to keep telling stories, for each other and about each other, collaborating in the elaborate history of ourselves so that in stories we exist, knowing that in this world in this time enduring is all our victory, but victory nonetheless, and I Ruth Swain will know that love is real and forgiveness complete because, at last, unimaginably, implausibly, impossibly, the rain will have stopped.