History of the Rain

Chapter 1

The longer my father lived in this world the more he knew there was another to come. It was not that he thought this world beyond saving, although in darkness I suppose there was some of that, but rather that he imagined there must be a finer one where God corrected His mistakes and men and women lived in the second draft of Creation and did not know despair. My father bore a burden of impossible ambition. He wanted all things to be better than they were, beginning with himself and ending with this world. Maybe this was because he was a poet. Maybe all poets are doomed to disappointment. Maybe it comes from too much dazzlement. I don’t know yet. I don’t know if time tarnishes or polishes a human soul or if it’s true that it’s better to look down than up.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That’s how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.

In Faha everyone is a long story.

You anything to the MacCarrolls over in Labasheeda?

To begin you must be traced into the landscape, your people and your place found. Until they are you are in the wrong story.

My mother is MacCarroll.

I was thinking that. But you are. .?

Swain. Ruth Swain.

Swain?

We are our stories. The River Shannon passes below our house on its journey to the sea.

Come here, Ruthie, feel the pulse of the water, my father said, kneeling on the bank and dipping his hand, palm to current, then reaching up to take my hand in his. He put our arm into the cold river and at once it was pulled seaward like an oar. I was seven years old. I had a blue dress for summertime.

Here, Ruthie, feel.

His sleeve darkened and he rowed our arm back and let us be taken again, a little eddy of low sounds gargling as the throat of the river laughed realising what a peculiar thing was a father and his daughter.

When it comes to Clare, when it passes our house, the river knows it is nearly free.

I am plain Ruth Swain. See me, nineteen, narrow face, MacCarroll eyes, thin lips, dull hazelnut hair, gleamy Swain skin, pale untannable oddment, bony, book-lover, reader of so many nineteenth-century novels before the age of fifteen that I became exactly too clever by half, sufferer of Smart Girl Syndrome, possessor of opinions and good marks, student of pure English, Fresher, Trinity College Dublin, the poet’s daughter.

My History in College: I came, collapsed, came home again. Home — hospital, home — hospital, the dingdong of me. I have had Something Amiss, Something Puzzling, and We’re Not Sure Yet. I was Fine except for Falling Down. I have been Gone for Tests, Not Coming Right, Terrible Weak, Not Herself, and just A Bit Off, depending on the teller and whether loud or whisper, in Nolan’s shop or on the windowsill of Prendergast’s post office after Mass. For the record, I have never been Turning Yellow, never been complaining of the bowels, intestines or kidneys, never been spotted, swollen, palsied, never wetting, bleeding, oozing, nor, God-forgive-me, Bitch of the Brouders, raving. Mine is not the story. I am plain Ruth Swain, bedbound, here, attic room beneath the rain, in the margin, where the narrator should be, between this world and the next.

This is my father’s story. I am writing it to find him. But to get to where you’re going you have to first go backwards. That’s directions in Ireland, it’s also T. S. Eliot.

My father was named Virgil by his father who was named Abraham by his father who once upon a time was the Reverend Absalom Swain in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Who the Reverend’s father was I have no clue, but sometimes when I’m on the blue tablets I take off into a game of extreme Who Do You Think You Are? and go Swain-centuries deep. I follow the trail in reverse, Reverends and Bishops, past the pulpit-thumpers, the bible-wavers, the sideburn and eyebrow-growers. I keep going, pass long-ago knights, crusaders and other assorted do-lallies, eventually going as far back as The Flood. Then in the final segment, ad-breaks over and voiceover dropped to a whisper, I trace all the way back to God Himself and say Who Do You Think You Are?

We are Swains. I read an essay once where the critic complained there was a distance from reality in Dickens’s characters’ names. He didn’t know Dickens couldn’t sleep. That he walked the graveyards at night. He didn’t know Moses Pickwick was a coach-owner in Bath, or the church register at Chatham lists the Sowerberry family, undertakers, or that one Oliver Twiste was born in Salford, and a Mr Dorrett was confined in the Marshalsea prison when Dickens senior was there. I know, weird that I know that. But if you lie in bed all day with nothing but books you won’t be Class One Normal yourself, and anyway Swains don’t do Normal. Open the phonebook for County Clare. Turn to S. Run your finger down past Patrick Swabb the hurling chemist in Clarecastle and Fionnuala Swan who lives by the vanishing lake in Tubber, and before you get to Sweeney there we are. Between Sweeney and Swan we’re the only entry, between the Bird King and the last daughter of Lir: Swain. The world is more outlandish than some people’s imaginations.

My actual great-grandfather I never met, but because of him the Swain side of the family are what Nan Nonie calls Queer Fish. Out of the mists of my night-time unsleeping I sometimes see him, the Reverend. He too cannot sleep and walks away from a shadow church at marching pace, striking out past a graveyard where the headstones tilt like giant teeth and the stars are bared. He cannot get where he is going. His burden is an intense restlessness that will not let him lie down, and so while his lamb-wife Agnes sleeps on the very edge of their bed the Reverend walks the night. He walks twenty miles without pause. From him escapes a low murmuring hum that may be prayers. Hands behind his back, he is like a man with Business Elsewhere, and none of those he passes, lost souls, rumpled shades, dare delay him. He has the Swain jaw, the sharp up-jut, the grey beard-line that though he shaves twice daily remains like a half-mask he cannot take off. I see him, pacing out past the yew tree in the churchyard. What his business is, where he goes to meet it and how exactly it is transacted are all enfolded in the mystery of ancestors. He can only be followed so far. Above the tree I sometimes throw a fistful of stars, hang a crescent moon, but for my moon and stars the Reverend does not pause; he paces on into the dark, and then is gone.

Just a brief shiver of great-grandfather.

What the Reverend bequeaths to our story is the Swain Philosophy of Impossible Standard. In the year eighteen hundred and ninety-five he leaves it to his son at the christening, dipping the boy into the large cold name Abraham, and stepping back from the wailing, jutting the jaw. He wants his son to aspire. He wants him to outreach the ordinary and be a proof to God of the excellence of His Creation. That is how I think of it. The basis of the Philosophy of Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can’t ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do. You have to keep polishing your soul ahead of Entering the Presence. Something like that.

And Grandfather Abraham began polishing straight away. By age twelve, nineteen hundred and seven, he was a medal magnet. For Running, One Hundred Yards, Two Hundred Yards, Long Jump, Hop Step and Jump, Grandfather was your man.

Then he discovered the Pole-vault.

In St Bartholemew’s School for Boys (established 1778, Headmaster, Thomas Tupping, a man notable for nothing but having eight too many teeth and lips that never touched) Abraham took the Reverend’s restlessness to new heights, tearing down the runway with his lance and firing himself into the sky.

And that’s where he arrives in my imagination, my mad grandfather, a blur-boy of white singlet and shorts, short sharp hair, blue eyes, charging like a knight towards an invisible enemy. There’s no one watching. It’s just him after school on a grey afternoon. Blackbirds have settled on the playing fields. The bounce of his stride echoes in the pole. It’s not fibreglass but wood. The wind must think it’s a mast and he a sail too small for lifting.

His pace quickens, his knees lift, the blackbirds turn. Down the cinderway he comes, crisp crunch-crunch-crunch, man on the end of a stick. Mouth pursed out and open he blows a wind-note with each step, whuu-whuu-whuu, announcing himself, warning the air that he is coming. His eyes are locked on the concrete trap. It’s his entranceway. The pole lowers, wavers slightly. A hard clack is the last sound Grandfather hears on earth.

And here he is, Abraham in lift-off, his soul bubbling as he climbs, entering the upper air with perfect propulsion and ascension both. An instant and he no longer needs the pole. Hands it off. It falls to ground, a distant double-bounce off the solid world below. The blackbirds take fright, rise and glide to the goalmouth. Amazement blues my grandfather’s eyes. He’s at the apex of a triangle, a pale angular man-bird. His legs air-walk, his everything unearthed as he crosses the bar above us all. There is a giddy gulp of the Impossible and he sort of rolls over in the sky, pressed up against the iron clouds where God must be watching. His mind whites out. His body believes it is winged, has vaulted into some other way of being. Abraham Swain is Up There and Away, paddling the air above the ordinary and just for a moment praying: let me never fall to earth.

Chapter 2

Mrs Quinty says I have Superabundance of Style and must trim back. She was once my English teacher and comes now Tuesdays and Thursdays from the Tech after she finishes. I’m on her rounds. I’m her Tuesdays with Ruth (and Thursdays). Because of me Mrs Quinty will be taking the bypass around Purgatory and shooting straight on into Heaven.

She predicts a Brilliant Career for me if I will only Trim Back.

I will also need to stay alive.

Before she comes upstairs to my room she has a few words with my mother about My Condition.

Mrs Quinty is a small tight bow. I mean, tight. Everything is to be kept neat and precise. But since the departure of Mr Quinty, a lorry driver with black curls who left our narrative some time previous, she now fears something secretly loosening in her all the time. To address this she frequently gives herself a little pull in, a little sharp tug on her blouse or jacket that goes unremarked in these parts because people know her circumstances and allow for oddities. If Mr Quinty had Passed On it would have been better. If he had Gone to His Reward. Mrs Quinty would cope; she suited widowhood, and had the wardrobe. But as it was, despite Tommy Quinty being heavily pregnant with eighteen years of Victoria Sponge, Lemon Drizzle, Apple Upside Down, Rhubarb Custard Tart and Caramel Eclairs, a brazen long-legged hairdresser called Sylvia in Swansea Wales managed to overlook the Collected Cakes and see only the black curls of the same Tommy.

He stopped in for a Do, Nan says, and he’s not Done yet.

Although everyone in the parish knows this since Martin Conway took the Under-Sixteen-and-a-Halfs over to a match, stopped in Swansea for chips and toilets and saw Tommy in an outrageous quiff, powder-blue blazer and white shoes, no one lets on to Mrs Quinty. As if by secret agreement it was decided Tommy Quinty would drop out of all conversation. Sometimes he’s in a whisper down in Ryan’s or a joke out at the Crossroads on the night of a forty-five drive when the tarts are served, but for the most part he has Left the Narrative.

But in doing so he left Mrs Quinty a chill. Also migraine attacks, tinnitus, inflammation of the ear, Eustachian catarrh, occasional left-sided deafness caused she will tell you by retracted membrana tympani, swelling of glands, lacunar tonsillitis, dizziness, disorders of the digestive system — All Sorts — and what she herself diagnosed as cheese-breath.

Mrs Quinty suffers. Of illnesses she has whatever is going. Her only hope is to keep the little bow of herself tight and teach on. The teaching keeps her going. When I was her pupil a hundred years ago her classes were notable for being the only ones in which absolute silence reigned. Even though her frame was diminutive and her dress sense very Costume Drama, everyone knew: you don’t mess with Mrs Quinty. She came in and the first thing she did was open the windows. It could be hail and gale outside. Mrs Quinty opened the windows. Then she took out these little wipes and wiped down the surface of the desk. That lady brought with her her own environment.

Still, the Tech was the last place you’d think she should be. The native population of that school was at no point under the control of Mr Cuddy. Perplexity at managing teenagers had given him a face like the letter Z and he kept it largely in his office where he pursued more available consolations by solving crossword puzzles. From school-life, one example: one Christmas week the crib was set up in the Assembly Hall, a life-size alabaster Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, two not-life-size camels, two lambs, one cow, one donkey, and three very Islamic-looking Magi. They were laid out on a bed of genuine hay (used) that Jacinta Dineen brought in her bag. Then, while Mrs Murphy in Room 7 was synthesising ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, Baby Jesus was kidnapped. A ransom note was left in the hay. It said: ‘We have Jesus.’

Mr Cuddy called in every student for questioning — Have you seen Jesus? — and eventually announced that unless Jesus was returned immediately there would be no Christmas Mass.

Baby Jesus did not return. He had not been seen on any of the school buses heading in the general direction of Kilrush or Kildysart or Ennis and so it was concluded: Our Lord was still in the Tech.

The First Years were recruited to help look for Jesus. Every desk, cupboard, locker was opened. But nobody could find Him.

Another note appeared in the hay. It said: ‘Stop serching’.

By this stage the whole school was on the side of the kidnappers and false sightings were announced hourly. Jesus was in the Chemistry Lab. He was in the Girls’ Changing Room before Games. He was taking French Oral with the Sub Miss Trigot.

That lad is everywhere, Thomas Halvey said.

Mr Cuddy decided to call the kidnappers’ bluff; he reversed himself and said Christmas Mass was going ahead anyway. He figured when the parents came in Baby Jesus would be back in his crib. The Mass would shame the kidnappers into surrendering their hostage.

It didn’t.

We all attended that Mass with the crib on the altar and, in the place of the Infant, a lamb on whose forehead someone had taped the word ‘Jesus’.

No, the Tech is the last place you’d expect to find Mrs Quinty. But somehow the teaching saves her from herself. In the classroom she’s invincible. It’s ordinary life she finds hard.

When Doctor Mahon asks her why she doesn’t retire from teaching on Medical Grounds her answer is: I have My Cross.

When she comes in downstairs Mrs Quinty rests her cross and asks my mother what I am on. Like Synge on Aran I hear the world through a neat knothole in my floor.

‘Is her mouth very dry? Mine was terribly dry.’

‘Did you bring any cake?’ Nan calls from her seat by the fire. Nan is Mam’s mam, she’s a Talty, ninety-seven or ninety-nine, is shrunk to a doll-sized grandmother with large hands and feet. She has what Margaret Crowe calls the All-Simons, which is basically a refutation of the invention of time; all time is the same to Nan, she has that most remarkable of skills, the habit of living, and has it so perfected now that death has given up and gone away. In her Foxford blanket and ancient pampooties Nan is part-Cherokee, part-Mrs Markleham in David Copperfield. Mrs Markleham was the one who was nicknamed The Old Soldier, a little sharp-eyed woman who always wore the one unchangeable hat. Mrs Markleham’s was ornamented with artificial flowers and two hovering butterflies; Nan has the same sharp eyes and hers is a man’s tweed cap. It’s flat and old and faded, but plays a part later on.

‘How is she doing today?’

‘No change, really,’ Mam says.

As politeness dictates, the conversation goes on, but we have no time for it. Mrs Quinty tightens up and brings herself up the stairs. Thirteen steep steps, more a ladder than a stairs proper, rising from the up-slope of the flagstones across from the fire and up over the dresser. For a woman with so many illnesses she has a firm step, even carrying her cross. Here she comes.

‘Now,’ she says when she enters the room. She says it as though she’s bringing herself into focus, or as if to herself she’s announcing her own landing in this bedroom with the big rough handmade bed, the skylight and the three thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight books.

It allows her to regain her breath, to consider the racing of her heart, some murmurous inner pulsing — gall bladder? — and to adjust her eyes to entering the sky.

‘Now.’

There’s the pale gleam you have to get used to up here, especially because of the rain. The rain streams down the skylight so it looks like we’re under a river. In the sky.

‘Now, Ruth.’

‘Hello, Mrs Quinty.’

And while she gets her breath, Dear Reader, get acquainted. See how compact she is. See her pinched face, tight to the chin, as if Life was a very narrow thing you had to get through. Pointed, sharp-looking knees, charcoal skirt to shins, grey tights, shoes size six, laced, polished but puddle-dulled by the weathers of west Clare and by crossing our yard, mouse-coloured blouse with top button concertinaing together some flaccid cords in her throat and lending her voice that tendency towards — Sorry, Mrs Quinty — squeak, black cardigan with general dusting of chalk, tiny linen handkerchief in the sleeve at the ready. Her hair is a bun — sad reminder of Tommy the Cake-man who took all her Sweetness — her lips, where are her lips? There’s the faintest remnant of them, a trace-line of not quite pink, her cheeks powdered, an all-over De Valera Comely Aged look that was very popular when it first appeared behind the yellow cellophane in the window of MacMahon’s Drapery in Faha. Glasses of round rims make huge her eyes and in them you see fear and goodness. People here are good. They’re so good it takes your breath away. It’s the kind of goodness that shows best when something goes wrong. That’s when they shine. They’re mad and odd as cats on bicycles but they’ve been shining around our family now since Aeney. And none more so than Mrs Quinty.

Mrs Quinty, meet the Reader.

Mrs Quinty needs reading glasses but has not brought them. Instead she takes off her regular glasses to look at you.

While she does I sit pillow-propped and wonder about her surname. I wonder if they were Quincy not Quinty once, and some relation, say in 1776, say boarding a ship for the New World, hurried his handwriting, blotted his C to a T, or maybe he lost an eye, was nicknamed Squinty, and dropped the S on his return to Proper Life, Call me Quinty, or maybe was someone grand and founded Quincy Massachusetts but was later driven out in scandal, or maybe they were people called Quin and there was one signed himself T who. .

Less, Ruth. Less.

Mrs Quinty hands me back the most recent pages of my book. I only give her the ones in which she doesn’t feature. I write like a man and I’m a bit Extreme, she has told me previously. I am that anachronism, a book-reader, and from this my writing has developed Eccentric Superabundance of Style, Alarming Borrowings, Erratic Fluctuations, and I must Must lose my tendency to Capitalisation.

Once when I answered that Emily Dickinson capitalised, Mrs Quinty told me Emily Dickinson was not A Good Example, that she was a Peculiar Case, and the way she said it you knew she regretted it right away because there was a little flinching around her mouth and you could tell she had already joined the dots and remembered Swains are pretty much the definition of peculiar. And so I never did ask her about what it meant to write like a man.

Two-handed, Mrs Quinty lifts the glasses free of the minor parsnip of her nose, holds them just in front of her and scrutinises the dust gathered there. Rain makes bars of light and dark down her face and mine, as if we’re inside the jail of it.

Mrs Quinty draws out her handkerchief, polishes, scrutinises again, finds more of the dust or smears school-life produces and cleans further. ‘What have you been reading, Ruth?’

I have already eaten all of Dickens — Pickwick to Drood. I can tell you why Charles Dickens is the greatest novelist there ever was or will be and why all great novelists since are in debt to Great Expectations. I can remember things you’ve forgotten, like when Pip drank so much tar-water he went around smelling of new fence, or when Mr Pumblechook was proud to be in the company of the chicken that had the honour of being eaten by the new gentleman Pip. I read that book first in the class of Miss Brady over in Faha N.S. where there was this wire-rack library with rag-eared paperbacks donated by parents, along with a full set of Guinness Book of Records 1970–80. But it wasn’t until Mr Mason when I was fourteen that I understood it was the Best Book Ever.

I’ve read all the usuals, Austen, Brontë, Eliot, Hardy, but Dickens is like this different country where the people are brighter, more vivid, more comic, more tragic, and in their company you feel the world is richer, more fantastic than you imagined.

But right now I’m reading RLS. He’s my new favourite. I like writers who were sick. I like it that my father’s first book was Treasure Island, a small red hardcover Regent Classics (Book 1, Purnell & Sons Ltd, Paulton, Somerset) with the stamp on the inside page: Highfield School, First Prize.

I like it that Robert Louis Stevenson said that to forget oneself is to be happy, that his imagination sailed him away into adventures while his body was lying in his bed with the first stages of consumption. I like it that he called himself an inland castaway, and that as a young man he decided he wanted to go walking around some of France, sleep out à la belle étoile with a donkey he christened Modestine and who, he wrote, ‘had a faint semblance to a lady of my acquaintance’ (Book 846, Travels with a Donkey, Wadsworth Classics). I know that lady too.

I myself am going to write Travels with a Salmon when I get further downriver.

I want to tell Mrs Quinty all this, but just say: ‘Robert Louis Stevenson.’ And then, by way of passing comment, add, ‘I want to read all these books.’

‘All?’ She looks around at them, in proper terms my father’s library, but really just the enormous collection of books he accumulated which has now been brought up to my room and stacked from the floor to where the angle of the skylight cuts them off.

‘They were my father’s. I’m going to read them all before I die.’

Mrs Quinty doesn’t approve of any mention of dying. From her sleeve she takes the handkerchief and applies it with a light brushing to beneath her nose where the deadly word may be lingering. She catches what must once have been her lower lip in her top teeth. There is a little pinking, a flush of feeling that the powder on her cheeks cannot camouflage. She looks at the wild stacks, the ones that rise behind the others, so it seems we are in a sea and there are waves of books coming towards the boat-bed and somewhere in there my father has gone.

She doesn’t quite know what to say.

‘I don’t quite know what to say,’ she says.

‘That’s all right, Mrs Quinty.’

Against the cresting of emotion she tightens herself a bit more. She pulls in her narrow shoulders and presses her knees together and she actually seems to go in a little. I am sorry for upsetting her, and allow a time when we both just sit here, me in the bed and she beside it, and we let the sounds of the rain take the conversation away.

‘Well now,’ Mrs Quinty says, giving herself a little tug. ‘That is a lot of rain.’

And neither of us speaks again for some moments, we just sit up here in this sky-room flowing with rain. Then I turn to Mrs Quinty and nod towards the books that all smell of fire and rain and I tell her, ‘I am going to read them all because that is where I will find him.’

Chapter 3

I left my boy-blur in the air.

Always, you’ll be glad to know, from his vaults Grandfather landed; but always with an unsayable disappointment.

He excelled at the school of Mr Tupping and so was quickly moved to another. The Standard rose. He was moved ahead a year, and still excelled. He came home on holidays with glowing reports but the Reverend was in his church or out seeking the few roads in Wiltshire he hadn’t foot-stamped yet. The Philosophy allows for only one result: we fail the Standard. We suck small hard-boiled stones of disappointment in everything. The Swain face is narrow and, in the case of my aunts, seems to chew its own cheeks.

Abraham went to Oxford to Prepare for Life, which was the Reverend’s term for what Abraham was to do while waiting to get The Call. He was to go up to Oxford and read Classics — which were not in fact the red hard-covered James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (Book 7, Regent Classics, Somerset), the fat full water-swollen Oliver Twist (Book 12, Penguin Classics, London) that has come unglued at Chapter the Forty-Fifth, ‘Fatal Consequences’, and smells amazingly like toast, or even Tolstoy’s Master and Man (Book 745, Everyman edition, New York) which belonged once to someone who left no further mark on this world other than the peculiarly rigid handwriting with which he wrote belongs to Tobias Greaves on the flyleaf of that stiff paperback. It turns out that Classics meant none of these but a lot of Greek and Latin in slim matching volumes in red or green hardcovers with glossy cream pages intent on sticking together and sealing themselves for good.

Read and wait; that was the plan.

God had a good few clients in those days and He hadn’t had anyone invent mobiles or texting yet so it took time to get around to calling them each individually at whatever they were doing, so you just had to wait. The Vocation would come in due course; the Reverend was sure. Abraham was going into the Ministry. After all, Soul-polishing was the family business.

So my grandfather waited. He read his load of Latin. He found one of the venerable poles they had there in Oxford and with it he reached New Heights.

You’d think that with him being so often that bit nearer the sky, and having that big-hint name, Abraham, he’d have gotten The Call right away. It was like he was knocking at the door. I suppose God might have thought it was a bit forward of him. He might have thought Abraham had a case of the Mickey Nolans who Nan says thinks three fingers of hair gel and pointy shoes makes him The Chosen One. Ever since it worked on Pauline Frawley, hoisting her skirt up four inches in the Ladies in Ryan’s before going out to shake her altogether in front of him to TJ Mooney’s version of Neil Diamond, he’s convinced he’s God’s Gift.

Well, anyway, turns out God had enough gifts right then, and didn’t have any great need for Abraham Swain. There was Grandfather sitting in the library all morning reading his lyric verse in Latin, his Catullus and Horace and getting on first-name basis with the Hendecasyllabic, the Lesser and Greater Asclepiad, the Glyconic, those boys, and in the late afternoon vaulting himself like an offering up against the damp skies of Oxford, as if he was shouting Helloooo Lord.

But no, The Call didn’t come. The Almighty Fisher wasn’t fishing.

I suppose the son of a different Reverend might have faked it, might have gone home and said yes Dad, He hooked me Wednesday, but my grandfather was a Swain, and he expected perfectly clear and personal communication because the whole Philosophy is based on the notion that one thing alone is for certain: God meets the Standard.

When He calls you you’re Called.

And so my grandfather couldn’t lie. He thought maybe The Call would come in a church and so he spent a fair bit of time in the evening candles. And from his kneeling intensity some soul-absorption must have happened, genetically unmodified, because our family has paid a small fortune to chandeliers Rathbone & Sons, Dublin, and we have the only house in Faha whose curtains smell of candle wax.

(I thought I should call our village something else. I spent a whole week writing names in the back pages of an Aisling copy. Musical ones like Shreen, Glaun, Sheeda, mysterious ones like Scrapul, meaningful ones like Easky, which is fishy, or Killbeg, which is basically Small Church. I was going to use Lisnabrawshkeen which is the village in the skinny white paperback of The Poor Mouth (Book 980, Flann O’Brien, Seaver Books, New York) and has the opening line ‘I am noting down the matters which are in this document because the next life is approaching me swiftly’ but every time I said Lisnabrawshkeen I felt I was spraying a little speech impediment at the reader. Lisnabrawshkeen. I was afraid of using Faha because if these pages get out in the world there’ll be right roolaboola, not because of scandal, not because of outrage, but because everyone will try to find out if they’re In It. In these parts to be in a book is still something.

‘Will I get a mention?’ Father Tipp asked me, sitting in beside the bed, tugging both knees of his trousers to protect the crease and, in the Good Cause of Less Ironing, giving display to the scariest three inches of white shin you ever saw. That priest is a lovely man, but his skin is seriously white.

To be Left Out of the Narrative is catastrophe altogether.

What did you do to her to be Left Out? I can imagine the long faces, like the man in Pickwick who found fly buttons in his sausage.

Irish people will read anything as long as it’s about them. That’s what I think. We are our own greatest subject and though we’ve gone and looked elsewhere about the world we have found that there are just no people, no subject as fascinating as We Ourselves. We are simply amazing. So, even while I’m writing these words in my copy, there’s a whole throng, Allens Barrys Breens Considines Cartys Corrys Dooleys Dempseys Dunnes Egans Flynns Finucanes Hayes Hogans and — don’t even begin the Macs and Os — all angling over my shoulder in the bed here to see if they’re In.

The Ark.

Sit back. Leave room. If I live I’ll get to you all.)

God couldn’t get to Abraham Swain, but He sent a message. He sent it queerways through a nineteen-year-old called Gavrilo Princip who was waiting by the bridge over the innocent River Miljacka in the city of Sarajevo. The message went loudly from Gavrilo’s gun into the passing head of Archduke Ferdinand and from there out through the mouth of Lord Kitchener in England. It was a fairly blunt system actually, download speed slower than Faha dial-up, but one hundred thousand men a month got the message and signed up to fight For King and Country. My grandfather heard it in a crowded room in Oriel College where pale young men with no practical knowledge of the world but the gleaming white foreheads of those who handled beautiful ideals voted en masse to join the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. They poured out into the night afterwards, the starlight, the spires, Mr Alexander Morrow, Mr Sydney Eacrett, Mr Matthew Cheatley, Mr Clive Paul (these and all The Fallen listed in the index of Book 547, The Gleaming Days: History of the Ox & Bucks, Oxford), all of them feeling like jumping, like dancing, as if for each a weight had been replaced by a lightness, as if that’s what it meant, Light Infantry. You signed your name on the line and you felt a little lighter, a little ascension. Life was not so heavy after all. Now you only had to go and tell your parents.

Abraham prepared his speech on the train. He wrote out separate Key Phrases on different pieces of paper and laid them on the table. The problem was The Swain Way allowed for no vanity. He couldn’t say: I have to Save My Country. He couldn’t say: God wants me to do this more than that. It couldn’t be that becoming a soldier was in any way better than becoming a Reverend.

A sticky wicket, Alexander Morrow said.

Abraham decided he’d go with Not Yet. God didn’t want him to go into the Church just yet, first there was this war business, Father, and it would be vain and self-serving if he thought himself better than others.

He’d use The Swain Way against itself.

He got off the train and walked up past the graveyard and the tilting tombstones with that look of Elsewhere. This is the thing about the men in this family; they all look like they are on some Secret Mission. They’re here with you and doing the ordinary everyday but secretly all the time some part of them is away, is thinking of their mission. It’s the thing women fall in love with, the elusive bit that they think they can fish back out of the deep Swain pool. But that’s for later. I’ll get to Women & Swains later.

Abraham told his mother Agnes and she excused herself from the room the way ladies did those days so she could go and Have a Moment while a wolf ate her heart.

The Reverend came in and jutted his jaw.

‘Abraham?’

‘Father.’

Maybe the Reverend knew right then. Maybe that was all it took. The Swain men aren’t great for talk. What I imagine is the darkening of the Reverend’s shave-mask, the cold fish-glitter of his eye, narrow-nosed inhale as he realises this is his punishment for imagining Abraham would be The Next Big Thing in Holy World. He turns away to the long window, clasps one hand in the other, feels the chill of the Presence and begins to pray that his son will leap to a glorious death.

Preface

Let me begin by stating what, although perhaps evident to even the most inexperienced of anglers on their first day in this country, nonetheless deserves repetition here: Ireland is a paradise for the salmon-fisher. The plenitude of her rivers, the particular clarity of her waters and the undiminished beauty of her topography all combine towards the creation of the fisherman’s idyll. Indeed in certain weather it may seem that every part of this country is lake and stream and the angler can hardly journey a few miles without encountering waters teeming with salmon or sea trout. In times of flood from numerous miniature rivers fish freely ascend. Wet weather, which is usually plentiful, suits most rivers best and if the angler is properly attired and of sturdy character there is no reason why salmon-fishing in Ireland should not provide him with an experience as close to angling paradise as can be found anywhere.

It is the intention of the author that herein shall be a complete description, drawn from personal experience, of all of the salmon rivers of Ireland. We shall provide detail of the most noteworthy runs, annual close times, dates when netting may be plied, rods plied, as well as the best Irish salmon flies, tacklemakers, etc etc. While this alone would constitute all that is required of an angler’s guidebook it is the author’s belief that it would be remiss if this were all when writing of salmon in Ireland. For in this country to the salmon is attributed a magical character. Here it is not forgotten that he is in a figure of two worlds, both fresh and salt water, mystical, mythic, and in many eyes no less than an alternate God. It is not only that the salmon strives after the impossible, not only that he seeks to be a creature of air as well as water, but that in moments of startling beauty and transcendence he achieves just this. Nor is such appreciation confined only to salmon-fishers. The Irish admire the heroic and all who endeavour against outrageous odds. To give but a flavour, a small boy in Galway or Limerick or Sligo will tell you the story of Fionn MacCumhaill as if it were yesterday’s news. Fionn speared the Salmon of Knowledge, he will tell you, at the falls at Assaroe on the Erne. The salmon had derived its knowledge from eating the hazelnuts that dropped in the stream and now from the salmon Fionn learned that to make a poet you need: Fire of Song, Light of Knowledge and the Art of Recitation, thereby for ever sealing salmon and poetry in the Irish mind. All of which the author believes can only serve to enrich the salmon-fisher’s experience in Ireland. There shall therefore be occasional anecdotes, fragments of lore, superstition and belief, all of which in this country are inextricably entangled, not least because in Ireland Saints and Salmon have for a long time been on first-name basis.

Now, having followed the advice of Richard Penn, Esq. whose twin-volume Maxims & Hints for an Angler and Miseries of Fishing (John Murray, Albemarle St., London, 1833) have long been indispensable to the present author, namely ‘when you commence your acquaintance with a salmon, allow a brief period for introductions’, it is time to delay no more but take a steady stance, survey the river, breathe, and cast.

Chapter 4

People are odd creations, this is my theme. None odder than Swains.

On the fourteenth of August 1914 the 2nd Battalion of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry landed at Boulogne, France.

What happened next I imagine sometimes when I am brought out of the county by ambulance. When the Minister redrew the map of hospitals in Ireland, calling them Centres for Excellence, she forgot about Clare. It’s often done. We’re neither one thing nor the other, neither South nor West; we’re between the blowsy tramp of Kerry and the barrel-chested Galwegians, both of them dolling up, dyeing their hair and pushing to the front. So, if in Clare you have Something, as I have, you have to be brought out.

Timmy and Packy come for me. Timmy has flaming orange hair and the Hurling bug and if you give him the slightest encouragement he’ll let you enjoy samples of his throat-singing. Packy’s mother has done the impossible and made him think he’s good-looking, but they’re lovely really. We go without the siren but there’s still that smell that is the opposite of sickness but makes you think of it anyway. And there I imagine him, Grandfather Swain in France.

Nobody now living was there. That’s the thing. But a lot of them are in the pages of books. My grandfather is inside the skinny smoky copy of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (Book 672, Fawcett paperback, New York), in the stern stiff-feeling pages of The Guns of August (Book 1,023, Barbara Tuchman, Macmillan, London) and the buckled second-hand Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War One (Book 1,024, John Ellis, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore), books my father read to see if he could find his father.

Here is the long tall stretch of Abraham. He’s in a trench, cold rat-run muck-puddle, suck and splash, cigarette smoke and then stillness. He believes he is there for a purpose, that he was called for this and he waits in the line for the word to come. The waiting is the worst for someone like him. He’s got all that mind, all that inner country he keeps going around in, mines and craters, caverns and dead ends. Mind has Mountains, that’s in Gerard Manley Hopkins (Book 1,555, Poems & Prose, Penguin, London). Or, put another way, there’s a man, Gerry Quinn, lives under the shadow of Croagh Patrick in Mayo and says he goes up the mountain most days and when they asked him on the radio why he does it he said at this stage that mountain’s part of me. In Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen it comes out as ‘I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me.’

There in the trenches our Abraham goes up and down those inner mountains bigtime.

What am I supposed to do with this life? is a common Swainism. It’s just about embedded under the skin and the way the hook is you can’t pull it out, it just makes things worse. So Grandfather Abraham wriggles on the question and waits for the word. When the command comes, when Captain John Weynsley Burke appears in the trench looking all dry-cleaned and Dad’s Armyish and says, ‘Cigarettes out, chaps. Today I’m going to get you medals,’ Abraham does not hesitate. He doesn’t think there’s German guns waiting to fire on him or that the next moment might be his last. He trusts that This Is It, O boy, he trusts that there is a purpose, however blind and mysterious, and it’s pulling him in now. He can hardly breathe with the swift tow, the sense of the Great Fisher getting him on the line, and the free feeling of just going, of release. He’s filled with a sudden bright-red bloom of elation. He tosses his ciggy, shouts out, and into the air already streaming with German gunfire he leaps.

Zip zip zip the bullets fly into him.

He sees the tears in his uniform and thinks: that’s interesting.

But he keeps going.

Then he sees the blood coming. Why is that?

Because there’s no pain yet. There’s too much adrenalin and rhetoric in his bloodstream. There’s whole chunky paragraphs of What it Means to King and Country. Never mind God. There’s fine speeches still pumping up along his arteries, principal and subordinate clauses, the adjectival, the adverbial, in gorgeous Latinate construction and hot breath. It’s the Age of Speeches. There’s exclamation marks doing needle dancing in his brain, and so he gets twenty yards into the war.

Zip zip zip. Splash muck-puddle splash.

He looks sideways and sees Haynes, Harrison, Benchley, spinning backwards like they’ve been hooked, invisible lines whipping them off their feet and into the Next Life. It’s very Spielberg. Only without the John Williams soundtrack.

Grandfather’s running on. God bless him, Auntie D says when she tells it, as if she’s still not sure he’ll make it through her narrative and any of us will ever be born. The way she tells it, sitting bolt upright in Windermere Nursing Home, Blackrock, room at maybe thirty degrees which is the way the Filipino nurses like it, I’m not sure I will be.

Abraham’s leaking now, a sticky slather of blood gathered at his belt, but he’s still running and getting ready to fire his First Shot of the War. His rifle is wavering, they haven’t really explained this bit, that running & shooting is quite different to standing & shooting and that running & shooting while being shot at is for obvious reasons, chaps, not taught at all. It’ll come to you; don’t worry, men.

Grandfather doesn’t see any Germans. Germans being Germans, they’ve taken a practical approach and decided to keep their heads down and their guns up. It’s more technik than the valiant British method of running at bullets.

So, as Abraham is about to fire in the general direction of where there might be Germans, zip! another rip comes in his uniform just below the heart and instantly whop down he goes.

And that’s it for Grandfather.

There’s a Gap.

A white space in which he’s gone from the world.

I know what that’s like too, when the last thing you feel is the pinch in your arm and this might hurt just a little and you’re off into the wherever depending on the length and breadth of your imagination. My father has a whole section of his library just for this. Here’s Thomas Traherne (1637–74), poet, mystic, entering Paradise (Book 1,569, The Faber Book of Utopias, John Carey, Faber & Faber, London): ‘The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. . the dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The Gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through the gates, transported and ravished me. . The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And the young men glittering and sparkling angels; and maids, strange and seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing were moving jewels.’

Paradise has actual gates?

Thank you, Thomas. We’re back: Grandfather’s dead in a hole in the ground.

It’s a bomb crater. The artillery boys have had fun blowing holes in France and some of the holes like this one are deep. He’s down there on his side, his mind doing last-minute preparations for the Afterlife, when the whole attack above retreats and the Germans take their turn to advance.

It’s like Dancing in Jane Austen, Advance and Retreat, only with guns and mud. The German attack passes Grandfather’s Hole.

But one German sees Grandfather move below and he jumps down. He does. He jumps down into the hole. And he whips out his bayonet.

It’s in this thin little protective scabbard that keeps the blade clean. What Grandfather sees is a flash of light. He pulls out his pistol.

Only his arm isn’t working so that doesn’t actually happen.

He tries again, thinking pull out your pistol, but there’s only this torso-wriggle in the mud, and now the German is closing in on him. Grandfather’s looking at his arms telling them to wake up but he sees his whole chest is this tacky darkness and he realises the bayonet is the least of his worries.

The German is standing over him, full sky behind his head, and knife in his hand.

And then, flat German face perspiring, eyes intelligent and calm, he leans down to Grandfather and does the most remarkable thing; he taps Grandfather twice on the shoulder.

‘Tommy okay,’ he says. ‘Tommy okay.’

Then he takes the bayonet and cuts a strip of cloth and with swift efficiency ties a tourniquet round Grandfather’s arm. He opens his pack of Whatever-To-Use-if-Shot that the Germans have given their soldiers and he splashes some on Grandfather’s chest wound.

He looks at his handiwork a moment. Being German there are no loose bits. He nods. Grandfather sees the eyes he is to remember all his life.

‘Tommy okay,’ he says.

Then the German soldier goes back to War.

He climbs up the side of the crater, into Round Two of Advance Retreat, and is shot clean through the centre of his forehead.

Next thing Grandfather knows he’s on a stretcher. He’s not in Paradise; there are no gold streets, no immortal wheat, not a single Cherub. Instead he’s in that bounce that I know too, when you’re tied into the stretcher and they carry you along and all you can see is the sky above moving backwards like you’re floating downriver and thinking how peculiar it is to be on your back moving through the world.

On good days it can be a bit Michelangelo, like you’ve drunk Heaven-Up I told Timmy and he liked that and said you’re a poet like your dad. On good days before a treatment when the sky is that blue and deep and you’re being borne along you feel you never saw it before, you feel it’s not a roof but a door and it’s actually quite open if you just take the time. That’s my revelation anyhow. No angels though. I’ve never gone the whole Sistine.

German-bandaged, Grandfather was carried back to British Lines. The red bloom soaked out from his chest like the Overdone Imagery Mrs Quinty says I use all the time.

I don’t give a Figroll, I should have said.

The thing is, it wasn’t what he was expecting. So the first phase is just this enormous surprise, this O that this is how the plot is twisting. Along he goes in the stretcher and he’s all the time expecting that he’s done, that if the pain would lessen he could just close his eyes and wake up in Thomas Traherneland. Because he does believe in a next life, his version is one of those blue-sky kinds with the light coming from behind huge white-puff clouds and saints kind of standing on them like very serene superheroes who’ve decided long wavy hair in the seventies was the look and a peach or apricot robe was quite comfortable in the weather up there. That kind of afterlife. Anyway, what with all the Latin and kneeling and candles Abraham’s pretty much got the passport. So there he is, blood crisping, eyelids kind of butterfly-fluttering, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison on his lips, and here are the hands of the angels coming to lift him up.

Only they’re a little rough.

That’s because they belong not to an angel but to a young medic called Oliver Cissley. Oliver’s so ardent it’s given him glossy eyes and fierce neck acne but he has come to war to save lives.

Grandfather is delivered to Cissley right there on a plate and so bingo! Young Oliver gets to work just as Grandfather is in that place between Living and Dying, between Fish and Fisherman, my father says, and Oliver thinks this is what he came for and starts whipping the bullets out — one, two, and actually yes, there, three — and hauling Abraham back from the Hereafter.

Grandfather is a Near Thing.

Which is no fun. Believe me.

Because for Grandfather then there was only Falling Back Down to Earth, which is not great and just plain awful for a pole-vaulting salmon.

Chapter 5

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

That’s pure MacCarroll. We have mixed metaphors and outlandish similes for breakfast.

When you transplant a little English language into a Clare Bog this is what happens, Miss Quinty.

Ruth Ruth Ruth.

It’s just so fecund.

Ruth Swain!

Grandfather survives. The War moves away and he stays behind. They give him a little time to recover and see if he can Take up Arms again but he can’t even Take up Hands. The holes in his chest and the soul-thick air of the battlefields of Boulogne join forces to give him pneumonia and next thing he’s on his way back to England without Messrs. Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul, all of whom are growing poppies in France, and he’s moved into a Home called Wheaton in Wolverhampton.

Years later my father tried to find him there, first by reading everything he could of World War One, then by leaving us one October and going by train, ferry and bus to Wolverhampton long after Abraham was dead and Wheaton Home had been turned into fifty-six apartments for people who didn’t see ghosts. I don’t think he found him, but when he came back Mam said he smelled of smoke.

Great-Grandmother Agnes is dead when Abraham returns. In those days you could die beautifully of Failure of the Heart, and that’s what she did, prayers said, palms together, close your eyes and bumps-a-daisy, another one for Greener Pastures, My Lord.

When the authorities ask Abraham of any living relatives he says he has none. A caustic shame is the natural by-product of the Impossible Standard.

So, at this stage in Our Narrative it doesn’t look great for my chances. (See Book 777, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne, Penguin Classics, London.)

(Has its advantages I suppose. For one thing, I won’t die at the end.)

Abraham has had his soul burned. That’s what I’ve decided. He’s had an Icarus moment, only English Protestant-style. Like all of England he has fallen the long distance from Rudyard Kipling to T. S. Eliot, which is a long way, and it left him with ashes on his soul. He was not worthy. He’s a Veteran at age twenty. So he sits in a fusty room with a narrow bed and a small window that gives a view of the fumy skies of Wolverhampton and starts smoking himself to death. He can’t believe he’s still alive. He’s God’s Oversight. He should have been the hasty three-and-a-half feet under the sunny sweet-scented fields of France where they put Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul together so they could get on with enjoying the hurdy-gurdy of the afterlife. Instead, Abraham Swain has been caught halfway, between worlds, and this is where he’s to stay the rest of his days.

He’s failed the Philosophy of Impossible Standard and so he lets his father believe he’s dead. He lives one of those quiet little lives no one notices, wearing brown trousers, walking to the shop, ‘Daily Mail today, sir?’, chainsmoking through the horse-racing in the long dull afternoons.

And, Dear Reader, years pass.

But there’s always a Twist.

Remember Oliver? Well, here comes a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, who knocks with no nonsense on the door of Abraham Swain and sweeps into his room very much like Mrs Rouncewell in Bleak House (page 84, Book 179, Penguin Classics, London) from whom I have borrowed some of her character.

Mrs Rouncewell has had two sons, of whom the younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came back. Even to this hour, Mrs Rouncewell’s calm hands lose their composure when she speaks of him and, unfolding themselves from her stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner, as she says, ‘What a likely lad, What a fine lad, What a gay, good-humoured, clever lad he was!’

Only her name here is not Mrs Rouncewell, but Mrs Cissley. Her Oliver the very one that saved Abraham and who wrote letters to his mother from the Front — What a likely lad, What a fine lad — the poor woman’s hands fluttering about at the near mention of his name. And in these letters — ‘Look, I have them here’ — and indeed she does and dips in and takes from her large black bag a pale wing of pages smelling of peppermints.

‘This one,’ she says. ‘This one tells how he saved you. Abraham Swan.’

‘Swain.’

She lays the letter before him. Freed of it, her hands catch each other in mid-air and pull themselves down on to her lap into a moment’s peace. Then, while Grandfather reads of himself as the miracle Swan, head turned and squinting one-eyed to inhale, Mrs Cissley says: ‘His brother died young. Oliver was Our Hope.’

Slowly rises the Swain brow.

Mrs Cissley’s hands rise up off her stomach, catch each other, wring, twist, interlock, fly free and fall once more to her lap, leaving in the air an old-soap scent of despair that won’t wash away. Her face cannot accommodate the population of emotions. Some of them are pushed down on to her neck where they get together to set off a poppy bloom in the shape of France.

‘You see, he’d want it to be you,’ she says, her hands clasped back-to-back in a reverse of praying, an exhale of peppermint into his smoke.

Grandfather’s face is white, as if he has an instant’s foreknowledge, as if the announcement that is coming has already reached him, like the little shudder in the phone before a text comes proper.

Mrs Cissley can hardly bear to say it, can hardly bear to let out the words because with them will go the last remnant of the long-dreamt future of her Oliver. The hands clasp a moment longer, holding to hope in Wolverhampton. ‘My husband,’ she says, and her tongue touches some bitterness on her lower lip. ‘My husband owned the Falkirk Iron Works.’ The bitterness is also inside her right cheek. The tongue presses there, the lips tighten and whiten. ‘Two million Mills grenade bombs. He made a fortune from the war.’

Mrs Cissley makes no movement but her eyes widen.

‘There are lands in Ireland,’ she says at last, ‘a house and lands. They were. .’ She can’t say it. She just can’t. Then she shakes her head and the name falls out, ‘. . for Oliver.’ And at that her handclasp is undone, the hands open, and the soul of her son flies away.

Chapter 6

‘Rain today, Ruthie!’ Nan shouts up through my floor from her place by the hearth downstairs.

She knows I know. She knows I am up in the rain here and watching it weep down the skylight.

‘Rain today, Nan!’ I call back. She cannot come up to my room any more. If she came up she’d never get down. ‘When I go up the next time, I’m staying Up,’ she says, and we know what she means.

Days like today the whole house is in the river. The fields are wrapped in soft grey tissues of weather. You can’t see anything but you hear the water flowing and flowing as if the whole country is washing away out past us. I used think our house would float away out of the mouth of the County Clare. Maybe it still will.

But to keep it in place today I’ll write it here.

Come west out of Ennis. Take the road that rises past the old tuberculosis hospital that Nellie Hayes was in once for months and seventy years later said she remembered seeing blue butterflies there. Drive up the hill, get caught behind Noel O’Shea’s bus as it drags ahead and what Matthew Fitz calls the Scholars are waving back at you and making demented faces that recall their grandfathers.

Turn down left, pass the big Boom houses, seven-bathroom monuments to that time, take a sort of right and suddenly the road is narrow and the hedgerows high since the Council stopped cutting them, and you’re in a green tunnel, winding down and away all the time. That’s what you’ll feel, away, and your wipers will be going because the rain that is coming is not hard or driving but a kind you can’t quite see falling but is there all the same. It started raining here in the sixteenth century and hasn’t stopped. But we don’t notice, and people still say Not a Bad Day though the drizzle is beaded on the top of their hair or in the furrows of their brows. It’s a mist like the old no-reception on the black-and-white television Danny Carmody had and didn’t rightly tune in because he didn’t want to pay the licence, kept just a Going Blind Channel he watched up close in which the figures moved like black dots in white and the licence man said was still television so Danny took the TV out into the garden and said he didn’t have a TV in the house. Well that’s what we live in, that’s what you can see, mouse-grey air seeping, so already you’re thinking this is some other world, this place in the half-light that isn’t even half, not really, not even quarter.

You head along and you know the river is somewhere down here. You’ll feel you’re descending towards it, river in a green underworld. And the drizzle kind of sticks to the windows so the wipers don’t really take it and the fields seem lumpish and bunched together the way you imagine green dancers might if they fell under a spell and lay down. That’s how I think of it, the slopes and slants, the green dips and hills on either side of you.

But keep coming. Keep coming. Stay with the river fields. Where you see the estuary wide and thickly flowing you’ll have a sense of things being sucked out to sea, and you won’t be wrong. There’s a bend called The Yanks because three different sets of them crashed there looking sideways in river-awe. Mind yourself. But keep coming. You’re in the Parish now, about which nothing is more eloquent than the first sentence in Charles Dickens’s first book: ‘How much is conveyed in those two short words — “The Parish!” (Sketches by Boz, Book 2,448, Penguin Classics, London). This is Faha parish, not fada, meaning long, or fado, meaning long ago, though both are true, not fat-ha, an over-eaters stand-up place, or fadda, as in Our Fadda who Art in Boston, though far and father are in it too, Faha, which one half of the parish politely calls Fa-Ha, and the other, who don’t have time for syllables, make of it a kind of elongated bleat of the note that follows do-re-me, Fa.

There are no signposts to Faha. When the Bust came and Ciaran, the first of the Crowes, had to emigrate he took the signpost out by The Yanks with him. His brother, Tom the tiler, took the one on the road from Killimer. After that it became a custom. Faha went elsewhere. There are signposts to it all over the world, but none in Ireland.

You’ll come to the village first. The Church lets you know someone got there before you and said Jesus, but that’s what you’ll be thinking. (Gee, if you’re reading the American edition.) You’ll be looking at the crooked twist of the main street, the only street, and the way church and street both tilt down towards the Shannon. It’s a street falling into a river. The church is heading sideways. None of the shops are in a line. They’ve all half-turned their backs on each other, as if centuries ago each one was built out of a fierce independence, shouldering its way in and setting up overnight. Each one tries to take the best view so that the street which is Main, Shop and Church Streets all rolled into one is a ragged westward-facing curve hugging the river. It wasn’t until after the village was built that the shop-owners realised they would all be annually flooded.

Next to the church there’s Carty’s, the funeral parlour. They’re the one with the brass handles on the door, the opaque glass with the Celtic crosses in it, and, inspired touch, the plate of Milky Mints inside the door. Jesus Mary and Joseph Carty is a barrel-chested man with Popeye-arms he keeps crooked as he walks. Looks like a Lego-man, only rounder. He got his name from calling down the Holy Family on all occasions. Jesus Mary and Joseph at the Minor matches against the hairy-legged Kilmurry Ibrickanes, Jesus Mary and Joseph at the price of petrol, at the bankers, the developers, at everything ever proposed by the Green Party, Jesus Mary and Joseph. But don’t worry he’s sweet and has big-man gentleness and restrains himself during the service.

Somewhere standing at a doorway will be John Paul Eustace. He’s the fulltime Life Assurance man, part-time Epistle reader, Eucharistic Minister. Long and skinny, green eyes, narrow nose, oval face that can’t be shaved cleanly, topped with a cowlick of brown hair he tried to dye blonde the time he thought girls would go for it. He has thin lips he keeps wetting and the whitest hands in the county. He’ll note you passing. That fellow couldn’t be fattened, Nan says, which is a curse in Nan language. Navy suit, clipboard in hand, Mr Eustace — Oh call me John Paul, please — stands three inches shorter than his height as he stoops in your doorway. He goes round the houses and drives out the townlands collecting five euros a week for the unforeseen. He has perfected an apologetic air. He’s sorry to be calling, it’s that time again. He never used to call to us, then Dad must have signed us up and he started coming. He’s a threshold man, a door-stepper, who commiserates, lets slip who has taken ill, who has Not Long Left, and who has Nothing to Leave Behind, God help us. Is Mr Swain at home at all?

In case you’ve fallen out with Carty, at the other end of the village is Lynch’s funeral parlour. There you can exit the world through Toby Lynch’s sitting-room-turned-undertakers. Toby turns off the television and lays a doily over it when he has a corpse, except that time during the World Cup. In my mind he’s played by Vincent Crummles, Theatrical Impressario in Nicholas Nickleby (Book 681, Penguin Classics, London). A lovely man, as they say hereabouts. A lovely man. Toby does the make-up for the Drama Group during Festival season and so Lynch’s is a good choice if you like a little Red Number Seven and Brown Number Four on your cheeks or are planning on making a Good Entrance in the next life.

If you get past Death and enter the village proper you’ll pass Culligan’s Hardware that’s no longer a hardware shop and MacMahon’s Drapery that’s no longer a drapery since Lidl came to Kilrush and started selling Latvian wellingtons for nothing and blue one-piece overalls that make the farmers look like they’re Nuclear Waste inspectors. The shops still have the names over the doors though and Monica Mac still has some leftover stock in her front sitting room which she sells to select clients who can’t countenance living without being à la Mode MacMahon, which basically means ‘Washes like a hanky’ Mam says.

Hanway’s Butchers is an actual shop. Martin Hanway too is a lovely man, huge hands, he’s one of those farmer-butchers who have their own animals in the fields out back and on warm wet fly-buzzing days in June he leaves the back door open and you can see next month’s chops looking cow-eyed at the stall. I turned vegetarian when I was ten. Nolan’s Shop doesn’t say Nolan’s over it, it says SPAR in garish green, but no one calls it that. You ask someone where Spar is you’ll get blankety blank, as Tommy Fitz says. Despite the Boom and despite the Bust, Nolan’s are hanging on. They survive on selling sweets to the scholars and Clare Champions to the pensioners. Sometimes they have out-of-date cornflakes and Weetabix on Special and get a run on customers who don’t believe in time. Since we decided to impress the Germans and save the world by abolishing plastic bags in Ireland there’ll be any number of customers trying to balance eggs milk carrots turnips cabbage and bread loaves in their arms coming out the door.

The village has three pubs, all of which the Minister for Fixing Things Not Broken wiped out when the drink-driving laws changed and petrol stations started selling Polish beer. Clohessy’s, Kenny’s and Cullen’s are all ghost pubs now. They have about seven customers between them, some of whom are still living. Seamus Clohessy says one roll of toilet paper does for a month.

At the end of the village there’s the Post Office which is no longer a Post Office since the Rationalisation, but following the edict Mrs Prendergast refused to surrender her stamps. Back in the day when Mina Prendergast first got the position from the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and moved into High Office as Postmistress of Faha, she felt a little ascension. She was officially lifted just a few inches above everyone. She started wearing open-toed shoes and hats to Mass, Nan says. And, as Mrs Nickleby said of Miss Biffin, that lady was very proud of her toes. To which there was nothing more that needed saying. The Prendergasts were The Quality, and even though they were living in the rainy forgotten back-end of the country they proved what Edith Wharton said about a defeated people who are without confidence in their own nature, they will cling to the manner and morality of their conquerors. So the Prendergasts had the doilies and the little embroidered napkins and proper teacups and saucers and these tiny teaspoons that you’d need about five scoops with to stop the Earl Grey tasting of ladies’ bathwater. They had the BBC. For Mina the Post Office was proof that she was just that little bit Upper. So taking the stamps from her was out-and-out devastation. She wouldn’t countenance it. And she didn’t. So now the shoes coat and hat ensemble goes to Kilrush weekly and buys stamps, comes back, lays them on the counter and opens for business regardless. Let the Minister run the rest of the country, Mina Prendergast is running Faha PO until the end of this life.

Next to the Post unOffice is Father Tipp’s, the dilapidated Parochial House that was once Grimble the land agent’s, a big imposing two-storey, ten empty rooms commanding the river view where Father Tipp dilutes the pain of exile in Clare by indulging in buttered Marietta biscuits and horse-racing, lives with a fine collection of mahogany, an almighty congregation of mice.

Last house out the road, with footpath, flowerbed, pedestrian crossing and streetlight in front, is the wrought-iron and stone-fronted magnificence of our Councillor, whom pretty much everyone calls Saddam after he went on the trade mission to Iraq. As I live and breathe, Barney Cussen said when the Councillor came into Ryan’s, if it isn’t Saddam. The Councillor didn’t object. A vote is a vote. And it was better than Leatherballs. He had a bald head by twenty-two which gave him a passing impression of intelligence and resulted in him being consulted on all manner of things. Some people become what others think of them, that’s what I’ve decided. So, once the Councillor started getting asked his opinion, fatally he became convinced of the existence of his own intelligence. You ask him a question you get a paragraph. He is focused intently on fulfilling his mandate, he’ll tell you, nodding slow and shrewd and narrowing his eyes to the distance behind you, as if his mandate is all the time trying to escape his focus.

End of the village is the graveyard; it’s crooked and dark and slopes to the river which is always trying to rise and take it, but it’s convenient for the church and means that dead parishioners never have to leave the parish, can enter the next world without having to learn new customs.

You’re out the end of the village now. Take a right and bear left at the Y and you’ll come to a cross. A right at the cross and a left that doesn’t look like a proper left but is more broken-down rough cut by the place Martin Neylon with six pints in him singing ‘Low lie the fields’ climbed the ditch in his Massey Ferguson the time of the ice, widening the road at no charge and leaving his own mark on history in the name Neylon’s Bend.

You’ll feel lost, which is all right, and you’re the only car now which is good because the road is only that wide and you have to slow down anyway behind Mikey who in his turned-down wellies is walking his Ladies, eighteen milking cows, along in front of you. He’ll know you’re behind him and in a salute he’ll sort of raise the bit of black pipe he uses to welt the backsides of those same ladies but he doesn’t turn around or turn the cows in to the side because they’re walking bags of milk those girls and it’s their road too and they graze the bits of grass that grow along the ditches but on the dung-slathered sight of their hanging udders you’ll swear you’ll never drink milk again.

So you travel along at cowspeed and you’ve time between the wipers coming and going to see the houses near the road and the ragged fields that fall down the valley to your left and because it’s summer when you come there’s the yellow gorse bushes that we call furze and when I was small used think was furs. It sort of glows in the fields and because you’re not a farmer you’ll think it’s lovely and not that it shows how poor the land is. You’ll think those patches of rushes are just shading or some other kind of grass they grow here and because you’re driving at cowspeed behind Mikey you’ll have time to look across and now you’ll see this gleam that is the River Shannon and you’ll feel the sense of an ending.

But be careful, the river can take you. It has its own mesmerism, and Mikey is turning the cows into the shed ahead of you and he’s raising his black pipe again that is thanks and apology and acknowledgement that you’re here with us, in our time in our rain.

Drive on a bit further now, stay with the river on your left and follow it towards the sea. Feel the quickening. Look across at the Kingdom looking over at you with a kind of Kerry contentment, and you’re in our townland now. Watch out for various figures bundled in coats and hats, ditch-trawlers in early senescence out trying to gather sticks for the range since the cutbacks came to pay the bankers.

Pass the house of the Saints Murphy, Tommy and Breda, they do our praying for us. Both of them are in the Premier Division of praying and sometimes because we’re such heathens — well, except for Nan who’s a kind of Pagan-Catholic — Mam goes down to them and asks them to say a few Our Fathers or Glory Be’s for us and they do. Tommy and Breda are in their seventies and they have this lovely manner that’s Old Ireland, and you feel sort of quiet in their company like when the choir is singing at Christmas. Tommy is a gentle man and he loves Breda with a kind of folklore love. She’s losing her hair now and bits of it land in the dinners she cooks and the scones she bakes, but Tommy doesn’t object, he sees the hairs and eats away. He loves her too much to say a thing. They sit evenings sipping tea with their high-visibility vests on, kind of glowing neon yellow the way saints should. Tommy and Breda weren’t blessed with children but they have nine laying pullets and any amount of free-range eggs. They’ll give you half a dozen if you stop. But you can’t right now.

Pass the Major Ryan’s and Sam his suicidal dog who’s running out and trying to get under your wheels. The Major’s name derives not from any military career but from the quantity of Majors cigarettes he smoked, right-hand fingers tuberous gold, chest a mazy fibrous mass, and his voice that low husk that caused every audience to crane forward as one in Faha the time of the amateur-drama productions. The dog has been trying to kill himself for seven years, hasn’t managed it yet.

That figure ahead of you is Eamon Egan, fattest man in the parish and proud of it, wouldn’t walk the length of himself, Nan says. Posterboy for the anti-famine look, in the county’s largest navy suit he sits propped on his front wall. Give him a nod, he’ll scowl back because he doesn’t know you and for the rest of the evening he’ll be demented tracking around in his big head playing a game of: who’s the stranger?

You’ll pass the young Maguires who were both in the bank and both lost their jobs in the Bust and are now living in Egan’s mother’s place trying to grow vegetables in puddles. Next door is McInerney’s, smiling Jimmy who’s no oil painting Nan says and never heard of dentistry but discovered the secret to successful marriage was not teeth but Quality Street because he’s fathered fourteen children on Moira and keeps the National School going. Like Matthew Bagnet in Bleak House, Jimmy will tell you he leaves control of everything to his wife. Where Mrs Bagnet was always washing greens, Moira McInerney is doing the same only with underpants. Those’ll be McInerneys under the hedge, or on the ditch, or kicking a ball over your car, some of them pushing the prams of others or flying around on buck-wheeled bikes, and not one of them with a care in the world or even noticing it’s raining.

You pass on and you think that’s the end of the houses. The road nearly touches the river.

Then look, a last house. You’re here.

According to Assumpta Elliott, our house is no great shakes. She was one of the Rural Resettled who came down from Dublin to populate us but then discovered what wind coming up the river off the Atlantic felt like, couldn’t get used to walking slantways or being rain-washed and, Great Shakes herself, Unsettled back again. I like our house. It’s a long low farmhouse with four windows looking over a small garden of Mam’s drowned flowers. Out back are the three muck fields where our cows paddle in the memory of actual grass.

The house faces south, as if its first MacCarroll builders had the stubborn optimism of my Mam and believed there would maybe be some sunlight sometime. Or maybe they wanted it to have its back to the village, which is about three miles away. Maybe they were making a point, or had that little distance in them that used get me into trouble in school when The Witches Mulvey made out I thought I was better than everyone, that I was Snoot Ruth, which to tell the truth I didn’t mind so much, and anyway it was only because I had vocabulary.

You come in the front door and within three feet you’re facing a wall — the MacCarrolls weren’t the best at planning. You have to turn right or left. Right brings you to The Parlour.

Once The Parlour was the Good Room, preserved for the possible visit of His Holiness or John Francis Kennedy, whoever made it first, complete with The Good Armchairs set at angles appropriate for polite conversation before the tiled fireplace, upon which sit Chester and Lester, china dogs that came one Christmas from my Swain aunts and which in my daydreams often scampered alongside me when I went off with The Famous Five for ginger beer — second-hand Enid Blytons were a speciality at Spellissey’s in Ennis, they were your First Books once and you were to graduate from Enid into Agatha, Blytons to Christies, because books were Mysteries, the whole of life a Whodunit, which is kind of MacCarroll Deep if you think about it.

But don’t, because Look, there’s a glass case with assorted other ceramics, tiny cream Belleek bell with tinier shamrocks, brass Celtic cross, miniature Virgin Mary who, First Miracle of Faha, transformed herself into a plastic bottle with blue cap-crown, a Waterford Crystal clock without battery, never had a battery because it was beautiful and didn’t need to also tell you that beauty and everything else passes — thank you, Mr Keats — and to the left of this a glass-topped table with embroidered doily and tile coaster of Lourdes should His Holiness wish to put down his pint. Once, this room was the sanctum saculorum, the fiddly-dee fiddly-dorum, the Havisham Headquarters of our house, the great untouched — and often undusted — that was kept for special occasions which, like good fortune, to our family never arrived. Then Nan Nonie moved in and a bed was put in one corner of the room — His Holiness would understand — and a belted trunk of her clothes which was always open and because she preferred Flung to Folded lent an air of lewd display that might have challenged His Holiness a little, to say nothing of her Po.

Eventually The Parlour became Nan’s Parlour then just Nan’s. There she keeps her Complete Collection of Clare Champions, an ever-expanding series of yellow mountains of newspaper in which is recorded the full entire life of the county, which means that if you had the time you could start upstairs here reading the exploits of some lads in Troy and work your way through all recorded civilisation right up to the savage blow-by-blow of the Saint Senan’s Under-14s two days ago. The Champions are an inexhaustible chronicle of everything that happened here in Nan’s lifetime. She never goes back to reread it, never does any old-style finger and blackened-wet-thumb googling, flicking the pages to find something. It’s enough that the papers passed through her hands once, that once she lived through that particular week. Now their physical presence filling up the room is a kind of testament to her enduring, to the River of Time and her unsinking through it. That’s how I’ve come to think of it anyhow. No one pays it any mind, or thinks it the least bit odd. That’s the thing about Faha. When Lizzie Frawley was pregnant with an imaginary child, and for fifteen months sat sideways in Mass to accommodate an invisible bulk which she’d sometimes tap gently, no one said a word.

Isn’t Odd nearly God, as Margaret Crowe says.

Because the house is four rooms, each the depth of the building, Mam and Dad had to cross Nan’s to get to their end room. Their room is basically a cave. The entrance is four feet thick by five feet high, a little stone passageway Dad had to duck through to get inside. It was years before he stopped banging his head.

I still call it Mam and Dad’s room.

We are not Well-Off, we’ve never been Well-To-Do, never Upwardly Mobile or Going Places. A poet is upwardly mobile in a different sense, but it doesn’t butter your bread as Tommy Devlin says. Without explanation, I’ve always understood there was a reason Dad never ever bought new clothes, why he wore shoes with oval-shaped holes in the soles, why Mam cut his hair, why she cut mine, why there was a jar on the kitchen window where coins were kept and why the stock of them went up and down depending. I understood that my father only bought second-hand books, that he could go to Ennis in a tweed jacket of Grandfather’s and come back without it but with the Collected Poems of Auden (Book 1,556, Vintage, London), Grandfather’s jacket now in the front window of the Ugandan Relief Shop on Parnell Street. I understood there was a story inside the story, understood that once Grandfather Swain’s money was gone there was literally nowhere else for money to come from. My father would never accept Government Grants, Headage payments for cattle, or Unemployment. I am not unemployed. So as you go forward it won’t be money you’ll be seeing. It’ll be the unsung genius of Mam who performed the Second Miracle of Faha and kept the family afloat and this roof over our heads.

Go back to the front door now, turn left, and enter The Room. The floor slopes down towards you to let the mop-water flow out the front door — a feature the MacCarrolls should have trademarked and sold to IKEA, the Crooked Floor, not only for the convenience of cleaning, ladies and gentlemen, but because once you stand up the tilt takes you towards the door; the house encourages you to leave, to go out in the world. There is the wide hearth on your right, maybe ten feet for those who need particulars, with the dresser across from it. The fire is on the grate on the floor and there’s turf burning. In our chimney there’s always smoke rising. Mam never lets it go out. When she goes to bed at night she lifts the last sods with the tongs and places them under the grate where the fire sleeps until she knocks it glowing awake in the morning. It’s an old MacCarroll tale I think. Some pisheog or lore I may have once been told. Something to do with spirit in the house and not letting the hearth cool completely. Mam is a horde of such things, wild bits of MacCarrollisms; for most of the time she has learned to keep them under cover, but if you stay long enough and watch her carefully, watch this beautiful Clarewoman with the brown eyes and the loose long tussle of her wavy brown hair, the indomitableness in her bearing, simple country pride and courage, you will see them sometimes, things about magpies, about blackbirds, about going in front doors and going out back doors, about May blossom or hearing the cuckoo out of which ear or picking foxgloves or cutting holly bushes.

Nan’s chair with cushion consisting of recent back issues of the Clare Champion is right inside the hearth. Nan waits for the Champion on Thursday and when the Simons aren’t in full swing she goes straight to Deaths and Planning, which is basically a super-condensed version of Life’s Plot, ‘Johnny Flanagan’s building’ and ‘Johnny Flanagan’s dead’ only breaths apart.

The Room uses the dresser as a bookcase. Top shelf has these leatherbound editions of classics that came gifted from the Aunts. I smelled them long before I read them. I think they must have been my first soothers, me raw-cheeked and teething and crying and Aeney teething too and not crying, Mam looking around the Room for something to quieten me, grabbing Marcus Aurelias and plunging him up to my red cheeks. Hardy, Dickens, Brontë, Austen, St Augustine, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Butler, I gummed and smelled my way into Literature.

Below this shelf are these big dinner plates on display, they’re wedding china that came from Aunts Penelope and Daphne some years before Lester and Chester. They were very china-giving aunts, which was of course secret warfare because the more they gave the more you had to find some place to display the stuff. We had china in boxes in the cabins that we couldn’t sell because it had to be taken out when The Aunts arrived. There isn’t much else in the room, a couple of armchairs and some wooden seats and what in Faha they call a form pronouncing it fur-um but which in the rest of the world is a bench.

At the back of The Room there’s the New Kitchen, just fridge and cooker and things all in the one small space with a galvanised-iron roof that is rusting orange on the inside and sings when it rains. It’s been New now for twenty years.

There’s a narrow stairs that rises from the front of The Room up and over the dresser. At the top is my room. You come in and the ceiling slants — MacCarrolls are all angles, angels if you’re dyslexic — so if you’re above five foot one and a half you stand at a tilt till you reach the skylight and then you can straighten a bit.

My bed and Aeney’s had to be built up here. One day Dad went out and came back with the timber. It had large dark holes in it where bolts had been removed. I think it came from Michael Honan who knew Dad didn’t have the money and to whom Dad promised to give Two Days when Michael was doing silage. That’s trade, Faha style. My father leased himself out and we got beds. He came home with these big heavy beams and brought them up the narrow stairs. Dad wasn’t a carpenter, but because of the Swain Philosophy he believed it shouldn’t be beyond him to make beds, and so he sawed and banged and sawed and banged for three days above our heads, letting little snows of sawdust down through the floorboards into our tea below. Aeney and I were forbidden to go see until the bed was done, but from the noise of the effort you could imagine that up there Dad was in mortal combat with his own limitations. It wouldn’t come right for him.

How hard could it be to join up four pieces of wood?

Well, if you didn’t want wobble, pretty hard it seemed.

He kept putting longer and longer screws in. The legs were the worst. Four legs wouldn’t support the weight evenly so he made two spare ones and added these but still the bed rocked and he was still falling short of Impossible Standard until Mam told him I was hoping it wasn’t going to be too solid but would still have a little give because I liked to rock myself to sleep.

This was always Mam’s role, to show Dad he was all right, to redeem him from the place he kept pawning himself into. So at last we went up the narrow stairs and saw: what he had made were more boats than beds, but I loved it, this big heavy sky-boat I still sail.

When I’m gone, when I’ve sailed away, it will have to be sawed apart to get it out. If you’ve been to Yeats Tower in Gort, restored by Mary Hanley (Hail Mary full of Yeats’s Martin McGrath said on our school tour), you’ll see his is the same, made at the top of the winding stair, too big to ever bring down again. They haven’t sawed it up. Not even the minister who’s driving the artists out of Ireland would dare saw up WBY’s bed, my father said. There’s no mattress though, just this big empty frame so it’s the best ghost-bed you’ve ever seen. WBY sleeps there sometimes still, probably September to May when the river rises and the tower is closed to poetry tourists and he needs a little more soul-polishing from the sleety winds of Gort.

Well, anyway, here you are, that’s the setting. That’s the way Balzac does it in Eugénie Grandet (Book 2,017, Penguin Classics, London).

Chapter 7

Lands, a house, some money, Mrs Cissley said. She wore the cheapest perfume but compensated by wearing an enormous quantity.

Which, Dear Reader, is stifling.

There follows a small gap in our narrative.

Do a little work here yourself, I’m on medication. Pick up from that scene in Wheaton, ash on his trousers, grey light, cramped little setting for a resurrection. You go ahead.

Doctor Mahon is here to see me.

As they say on RTE, there may be interruptions to service due to Ongoing Works.

Abraham arrived in Ireland.

I think maybe it was because there were no Swains here. This was a tabula rasa. I think he came to Meath and took over the farm because he decided it was a calling of some kind and he had come around to believing in Out of the Blue. Impulsiveness and Swains are close cousins, not removed. We head off in a burst in some direction thinking this is it only to find ourselves nowhere.

Vision and blindness, that’s us in the Short Version.

Contrariness too. Grandfather came to Ireland just as anyone remotely Anglo went in the opposite direction.

That just raised the Standard. Grandfather decided that in Meath he would out-Wiltshire Wiltshire. He would make a better place to show his father and then one day invite the old Reverend over and say Behold. It’s a Paradise Complex. (I was going to do Psychology in college but then I read that Freud said Psychology was no use for Irish people, we’re either Too Deep or Not Deep at all.)

The Paradise Complex means you keep trying to make heaven on earth. You’re never satisfied. And that’s the crux, as the Philosopher Donie Downes says. See also: The Jerusalem Syndrome.

Grandfather couldn’t take the easy option. He couldn’t close his eyes and come up with one of those imaginary paradises of which there are so many accounts in my father’s library. Here’s Lucian in his True History of the Isles of the Blessed (Book 1,989, Utopias of the Mind, Crick & Howard, Bristol) who said he’d seen a town made of gold and streets paved with ivory and the whole encircled with ‘a river of superior perfume’. It never got dark there, and it never got light, but was in perpetual twilight and permanent springtime. Vines in paradise fruited once a month according to Lucian. There were 365 waterwells, 365 honeysprings, 7 rivers of milk, 8 rivers of wine (sorry, Charlie, no chocolate factory) and the people wore clothes of cobwebs because their bodies were so insubstantial. Look in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI (Book 1,000, trans. J. W. Mackail, Macmillan, London) where he talks about the Elysian Fields. What about heading there, Granda?

There are any number of imaginary gardens, most of which though were pooh-poohed by Sir Walter Raleigh, who after all that voyaging probably had what Mina Prendergast channelling Shakespeare called an unbuttoned scent, but whose ego was capacious enough to write The History of the World. Sir Walter pointed out that Homer’s description of the garden came from Moses’s description, and that in fact Pindar, Hesiod, Ovid, Pythagoras, Plato and all those chaps were actually a bunch of plagiarists who added to Old Moses their own Poetic Adornments. The real heavenly garden was copyrighted to Moses, and that was that. The rest was poppycock, Your Majesty.

Thank you, Walter, have a cigarette.

No. Grandfather wasn’t taking any route into the Imaginary. It was too easy. This was going to have to be actual grass-and-stones Paradise.

So Abraham laid Meath up against the Impossible Standard and began moulding the place into the dream version. He was going to do the So-Like-Paradise-You-Won’t-Believe-it’s-Not-Paradise kind of thing. Maybe there was already Something There to Work With, as that witch with the yellow highlights Miss Donnelly said to my mother at a parent — teacher meeting. Even so it can’t have been easy.

First of all he was, you know, an Englishman.

And as I said there weren’t exactly a whole load of those coming one-way to Ireland those days. The first Tourist Board was still meeting in some little room in Merrion Square and working on the posters and slogans. Civil War Over, Come Visit. We won’t kill you. Promise. Second, he was, sshssh, Not Belonging to Our Church (O Divine Lord) and third, after his Oxford education he didn’t know one side of a cow from the other. (Reader, there are sides. When I was five Nan showed me. She carried a three-legged stool and plonked it down next to Rosie, head-butting in against Rosie’s side and reaching in for the udder. You go from the opposite side and Rosie will break your wrist. Such a cow.)

The thing is, the Philosophy has a No Complaint clause. You can’t cry out and you can’t say this was a dreadful mistake.

You have to just do better.

And so that’s what he did.

It took years, but eventually Grandfather got Ashcroft House & Lands into a condition of Absolute Immaculacy, and sent his invitation to the Reverend.

I am alive. Come on over and visit, only in fancier English.

Then he waited.

The Reverend was already Old Testament ancient by now. In my mind he blends into Herbert Pocket’s father in Great Expectations, Old Gruffandgrim, banging with his stick on the floor for attention. The Reverend had already used up whatever life was in his body by putting up the big mileage of hurrying Elsewhere and so by this stage he was mostly parched paper over thin little struts. He couldn’t believe Our Lord hadn’t taken him Up yet. Honest to God. He was all prayed up and confessed, boarding pass printed, and waiting in the priority queue. Sweet Jesus come on, as Marty Finucane shouts in Cusack Park whenever the hurlers are feeling the effects of forbidden Saturday-night Guinness and firing the sliothers wide into the Tesco carpark.

But no Sweet Jesus showed up.

(If you went to the Tech, you’ll spot a theme.)

The Reverend lived on, thought a little more deeply about life being purgatory, and banged on the floor with his stick.

When at last he got the letter he lifted old Up-Jut and did some nostril-narrowing. It wasn’t attractive. He squinted through the snowy dust of his spectacles to read his son’s name and when he saw your son Abraham he had to squint harder.

There it was: your son Abraham.

He thought all this time his son was in Heaven interceding for him.

He thought Abraham had gone there in the first rank of Dead Heroes from The Great War and by now probably had the skintone of those creamy alabaster plaques they have in the big Protestant churches.

But no, he was in Ireland.

Sweet Jesus come on.

Now, I’m not going to say it was because the Reverend thought mucky Irish ground would give him foot rot, nor that it was because he couldn’t say the word Ireland without distaste, though both were probably true. Despite the efforts of the Tourist Board, Ireland in those days was not in Top Ten Countries to Visit, and for English people it was all but verboten as the Pope would say. Ireland? Catholics and murderers, the Reverend would have thought. Ungrateful blackguards, we had not the slightest appreciation for the eight hundred years of civilised rule of His Majesty and to show our true colours once the English had departed we’d set about killing each other with hatchets, slash hooks and hedge shears.

Ireland? Better that Abraham was in Hell.

Pursuing the image, the Reverend posted the letter through the grille of the fire and began some shallow breathing. The damp boggy idea, Ireland, sat on his chest.

Within a week he was dead.

Amen to him.

Awomen also, as Denis Fitz said half a second after the congregation at midnight Mass before in Faha we moved midnight to half nine.

Grandfather’s response to the Reverend’s refusal to visit and subsequent death took an original form; he stopped believing in God, and started believing in salmon. Plans in this world were pointless. Pointless to have imagined he could ever have fulfilled his father’s dreams or achieved the Impossible Standard.

Grandfather forsook the world for fishing.

In fairness, perhaps there was a deeper point; perhaps secretly it was to out-Christian the Reverend by going back to basics: to Peter the Fish, to Paul the Church, is that how it goes? I’m not great on the Bible, though we have a nice one (Book 1,001, King James Edition), black and soft with the kind of feather-light pages they only use in bibles, as if paper for bibles can only come from this one place, and the pages are thinned down to a fineness that feels holy somehow so that even turning them is kind of sanctifying. Either way, whatever the reason, the Salmon it was. Grandfather stopped all work on Ashcroft House & Lands, walked out the French doors, went down across the lawn, called the workers together and to the collected jawdrops and head scratches told them stop, stop trimming the hedges boys, no more mowing the hay, pack up, go home.

There’s a photograph of Grandfather when he’s about thirty-five. He’s in a white shirt buttoned to his chin and his face has an expression of wild impatience. His lips are so tight you’d think he was afraid he’d dribble out some awful medicine if he cracked them. He resents the moment of the pose, he wants to escape it, that Elsewhere business again, and already in his chin you can see the Reverend coming. You can see the angle of the nose, the furrow between the dark eyes, and you know the old man is arriving in his skin. There’s going to be no way to escape him.

But Grandfather is going to try. Yes sir. He’s going to apply the What-would-my-father-do to everything, and then choose the opposite. So, instead of settling down into the dull acceptance of midlife, instead of comfortable complacence and respectability, he takes his rods and strides out the gates of Ashcroft accompanied by two bounding wolfhounds. He leaves the house to its own devices, which means weeds, mould, mushrooms in the basement, broken panes in the upstairs bedrooms, flies, snails, mice and a family of trapped rooks.

He begins on the two Black Castle sections of the Boyne River. In the notebooks he kept of his catch there are brackets beneath the salmon he caught and the name Mr R. R. Fitzherbert.

For duties to His Majesty I suppose, maybe for going away and getting Him something nice, the Virgin Islands or something, The King had given Mr Fitzherbert all the fish that passed there — To you the fish, to you the chips, same as the Bible only English-style — and my grandfather was scrupulous enough to record which of Mr Fitzherbert’s salmon he took, and with which flies.

I have his Salmon Journals, which were the workbooks for his book. They are here in my father’s library, pressed flattish between Don Quixote (Book 1,605, Vintage Classics, London), a kind of genius Spanish miracle, and Salar the Salmon (Book 1,606, Henry Williamson, Faber & Faber, London), a book so good that reading it you feel you’re in a river. Each journal is carefully kept, blue marbling inside and blackly leatherbound like a Lesser Bible. The first time I opened one I felt indecent. I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it’s, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? as Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don’t. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of the writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership.

I know, I know. I’m not an e-person or an iPerson. Maybe I would be if we weren’t in the five per cent. The Minister says the whole country is Broadband now, except for maybe five per cent. Hello? We’re not even Narrowband. And what with having a predilection, as Thomas Halvey says, for the nineteenth century, I’m older than old-fashioned, I know. No, whatever way they built Faha down in a hole beside the river, we can’t get Broadband. We still get calls from somebody in the Philippines offering us Best Internet Deals ever. We let them talk to Nan. She can keep them on for an hour. It’s a sort of granny-sitting.

But look, here is one of my grandfather’s Salmon Journals. Feel that. Smell that. The pages have a water warp, a buckled edge like a river wave. The paper is a heavy old stock smooth under your hand. Some pages clump together as if the recording was made in rain. The handwriting is neat and done in blue ink that is now faded lavender.

SALMON

Week of June 12th, 1929

18lbs 6oz (Jock Scot)

19lbs 4oz (Blue Jock)

15lbs 11oz (Collie)

14lbs 8oz (Collie)

21lbs 3oz (Gudgeon)

It goes on, pounds and pounds of fish, page after page of pale ink. I wondered what Mr R. R. Fitzherbert thought of Abraham taking all his salmon. Maybe he didn’t know. He lived in Nottinghamshire. I have wondered if my grandfather ate them all, if the Swain jaw was partly a fish-face, and I’ve pouted at the mirror for half an hour one afternoon when I first became sick just to see if I could see the salmon leaping out in me.

For how long can a man go fishing? I asked Mrs Quinty, but she thought it was some cloaked reference to Tommy and the Hairdresser, that once Tommy had caught Sylvia he’d get tired or bored or not be able to sustain himself as Phyllis Lillis says, you know, in what Hamlet calls Country Matters. But what I was actually asking was: fishing. How long could my grandfather be happy getting up in the morning heading out with his rod to go fishing?

Because, Dear Reader, that’s all he did.

He fished for salmon.

He pretty much let the house and grounds go Rackrent (Book 778, Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth, Penguin Classics, London). From the first salmon of the season to the last weary fish returning upriver in the autumn Abraham Swain was there, standing thigh-deep in the river proper, a little swirl of broken water in his wake and his line laying soft swished question marks in the air overhead.

Even the wolfhounds became bored. When they saw him lift his rods they would trot back across the front hall and flop down, their great hair and bone masses immovable and hearts conflicted in the classic dog dilemma of loyalty to their master and knowing he was do-lally. Grandfather let them be, and the hounds commenced what was to be the business of the remainder of their lifetimes, chewing to straggling ropes the various oriental carpets and, when these proved too fibrous a diet, laying sideways and gnawing jag-toothed the pitch-pine floorboards.

Grandfather didn’t give two flying figaries. He had lost all care for this life which he believed random and meaningless, a constant proof but small comfort he found in those salmon that passed and those that were caught.

In our family history there are few stories told of this time.

Grandfather Fished just about sums it up.

He chose fecklessness as a first response. Let God or the Devil show up if they existed. He was away fishing. Nothing of the struggles then of our emerging nation, nothing of Old Roundrims, Old Gimlet-eyes, our Spanish-American First Irishman who was shaping His Country, nothing of the darkening politics of Europe touches Grandfather’s life. He lives his own solitary unconfinement until April 19th 1939 when there is the last entry midway through Salmon Journal XIX.

It reads:

26lbs (worm)

The Salmon in Ireland

because here the confluence of fact, story and legend make for cloudy waters. Salmon derives from the Latin salire, to leap. It was Cattalus of course who likened the leaping salmon to an erect phallus, a version of which survives in Ireland in a story told to me by an ancient fisherman in the County Westmeath. In this story the mother of Saint Finan Cam is said to have been prompted by a bodiless voice to go swimming in a river after dark. While swimming in mid current, apparently unawares, she became impregnated by a salmon.

One imagines the surprise.

How the salmon achieves the leap has down the centuries been variously explained. By holding his tail in his mouth according to the seventeenth-century poem ‘Poly-Olbion’ by Michael Drayton.

. . his taile takes in his teeth, and bending like a bowe

That’s to the compasse drawn, aloft himself doth throwe.

That the height of the leap may be linked to a female presence is not perhaps as fanciful as might first appear when we consider that in 1922 Georgina Ballintine landed a 64lb salmon out of the River Tay. The local fishermen, who had been labouring without success on the very same run, attributed the catch to the fact that female essence, as it were, had rubbed off on the bait and this had brought the salmon erect and leaping to her.

All of this by way of getting to my point that it is a fact drawn from the author’s experience in Ireland that with temperature rising salmon become distinctly more active,

Chapter 8

That worm had a lot to answer for, Nan says.

In our house we have videos and a video player and a collection of fairly ancient big cassettes of old films recorded off the TV in the time when that was the coolest thing ever. So, in the movie version of Grandfather & the Worm, black-and-white, William Wyler directing, Sam Goldwyn producing, Grandfather is played by Laurence Olivier aged thirty-five. It’s September 1st, 1939. There’s a big grey sky with dark clouds moving to the Oscar-winning orchestral arrangements of Alfred Newman. The river is fast and there’s a storm coming. We see other fishermen in the minor cast shake their heads and go home. But Laurence walks past them. He’s drawn to it — the sudden pulsing of Arnold Kisch’s bass lets you know A Big Moment is coming.

Laurence steps off the bank into the river.

Close-up of the water curving up over the top of his boot, a little unsteadiness as the river floor shifts underfoot, but he wades further out and casts.

Boom goes the thunder.

Boom boom goes the score. It’s as if somebody knows that elsewhere Germany’s just starting to invade Poland.

And then the rain comes lashing down.

Close-up of Laurence’s face, rainwashed and fierce, equal parts concentration and looneytunes.

He’s to his waist in the river. We know now he’s probably thinking about Merle Oberon, he wanted Vivien Leigh but she was turned down and is Gone with the Wind, so he’s got Oberon which isn’t a great name for romance seeing as how he’s thinking Oberon was King of the Fairies (Book 349, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, W. Shakespeare, Oxford Classics) and I’m going to have to kiss the King of the Fairies, which is a problem until he remembers fortunately he has played that role and so it’ll sort of be himself he’s loving and, well, he can manage that.

The sky is that big angry grey-black that’s MGM’s speciality and which they can somehow make look blacker and broodier still. And whoa those violins are playing faster now and look! he’s got a salmon on the line. The rod tenses and bows and the rain-machine guy is told give it your almighty best, or whatever that is in MGM-ese, and you can picture Mervin Olbacher, conductor, leaping up and whipping that baton at those violinists. He’s not a big man but boy he’s put elbow into it. He’s put hair-toss and sweat into it. So it’s rain-music-river, all Full On and up to ten, up to eleven as Margaret Crowe says, when Laurence pulls and sways and hauls this great silver salmon up into the air. Bass drum, bass drum, batons, Mervin. More, more.

Sweet Jesus, shouts Marty Finucane. You’ve never seen the like.

Jesus Mary and Joseph, says Jesus Mary and Joseph Carty.

MGM Props have outdone themselves this time.

Boys o boys. That’s a Big Fish.

(‘Big enough, Mr Goldwyn?’ ‘No such thing as too big.’)

And it lands, splash.

Sorry, take that again.

It lands SPLASH back down in the river and the whole of Laurence is tugged forward and he’s in this battle of strength now, both hands on the rod as it gets pulled horizontal, forearms quivering and mouth that twisted grimace Laurence does brilliantly when he’s daring God and man and William Wyler to say he’s not the finest actor that ever was.

There’s more, there’s a whole tugging and groaning, there’s flashes of lightning and Laurence giving it the full welly, but the studio decided that was enough, and cuts to the salmon being reeled in.

It’s hard to tell in the film just how big it is though. The assistant director thought maybe there should be other fish he’d caught earlier and Laurence could lay this alongside for comparison, but nobody listened and it was decided you’d just believe this was the Big One if the score and the lighting and the sound effects and Laurence’s acting told you so.

Anyway, here he is getting to the riverbank. He climbs up, falls down, the rain still beating, and he unhooks the fish, holds it for its weight. Crikey, look at that. It’s Number One Salmon, that’s what Props has been told, and they’ve had three rejected and to make their point that this was ridiculous they’ve brought this outlandish one and that got the Thumbs-Up.

So there it is. Man and Salmon. And whatever knowledge is in the fish somehow transfers to him. Whatever secrets of the world, what mysteries of chance and concurrence, of power and force and ultimate surrender, enter him, and Grandfather lets the salmon back into the river. He lets it back and lies flat and exhausted and he’s sort of crying for all that has failed in his life and for the failure of God to show up, and the rain pours down into his face; the Lighting Gaffer throws a switch and Mervin sweetens the score so even if you’re looking into your popcorn you know that up there on the screen your man’s in the throes of something like revelation.

Next shot he’s walking across the fields.

He’s walking into town. It’s Trim in the County Meath, but this being Hollywood it’s not even going to look like the Ealing Studios version, especially because to spare the make-up the rain has stopped.

Anyway your eyes are on my grandfather played by our man Laurence. He walks into town and up to this big house where Merle is just about done with Make-Up and Costumes. We can’t have her say any of the lines here because of copyright infringement but if imagination fails and you’re not in the Five Per Cent you go ahead and download them.

Fizz. Bang. Sizzle.

That’s not Germany entering Poland. That’s Grandfather & Grandmother in Trim Manor the evening of the Big Catch, September of 1939.

(Unfortunately the Censor cut the love scene. At that time there were no love scenes in Ireland. Most people thought kissing was sex. Tongues were penises. Only allowed out for communion. Which, unsurprisingly, proved very popular.

You don’t believe me look up the Irish Committee on Evil Literature, say hello to those boys. There were no women allowed in Censorship. Some members of the Committee were secretly hoping there’d be No Women Allowed in Ireland, which would be fine, except for the vexed issue of ironing.)

So, if you like, do your own sex scene. You know you want to, as Tommy Marr said to Aoife O’Keefe the time of the Apostolic Social in Ryan’s. That was his come-on. That, half a can of Lynx deodorant, low-slung trousers that showed his Saint Bernard underpants in case of that saint she was a devotee and a big slow wink that was more or less the image of Haulie Roche the time he got the stroke. You know you want to.

Either way, please yourself. Doctor Mahon is here and we have to take our Intermission.

Fortunately, at that time, Ireland wasn’t in the world. So we weren’t in the World War. Old Roundrims came up with that. Brilliant, really. World War II was toirmiscthe, he said, which people had to look up but basically turned out to be verboten in Irish. Twitter went crazy, saying it was shameful and backward, but back then twitter was only spoken by birds. The thing is, Irish people don’t like to refer to a thing directly as Jimmy the Yank found out the time he came home, went into Burns Chemist in Kilrush and asked full volume for something for the blood coming out of his backside. There’s nothing direct about us. It’s not coincidence we have no straight roads, not for nothing we use the back door. People coming to our house sometimes parked in the yard and waited for my father to appear, so they weren’t really calling at all. So no, we weren’t in The War. We were in something else called The Emergency. No one else in the world was in it, just us. The Munich Bother as Paddy Kavanagh calls it (Book 973, Collected Poems, Martin, Brien and O’Keefe) didn’t bother us.

Grandfather wasn’t exactly courting material. For one thing he was old. He’d been born in 1895 and was now past forty. And for another he had been Off-the-Circuit since before Oriel College and had pretty much forgotten the existence of females of the human variety. (Curly ear hair, mad wiry eyebrows like tangled fishing line over rheumy eyes, and his version of the Reverend’s stippled jaw-mask offered in evidence.)

But it must have been something to do with the Big Catch, the last salmon, or his own private Emergency, because when Grandmother saw him, caught a sniff of Eau de Salmon and her heart went butterflies, he didn’t run out of there.

At that time Grandmother was going by the name Margaret Kittering. She was what in those days they called a handsome woman, in that gaunt angular long-necked Anglo-Irish way. I think it means you could see breeding. Like horses, you could see by the teeth, the jaw. Let’s take a look, her dentist must have said, and then just stood back and applauded. Anyway, whatever the breeding, the Kittering jaw met the Swain. (Later of course the MacCarroll made a cat’s melodeon of it. But that’s for a different volume, Teeth of the Swain, ed. D.F. Mahony.) Margaret’s other features of note were light-curled auburn hair, delicate ears and the small perfect Kittering nose that later swam downriver and landed on my brother Aeney.

Teeth, ears and nose, what more could a man want?

For her part Grandmother had that no-nonsense Headmistress thing that made her think this man could be Knocked Back into shape, he could be Straightened Out, and with her fine boneage and those awesome elbows Grandmother was a born Knocker and Straightener.

The extent of her task was made clear when Grandfather brought her back to Ashcroft House. When they came in the avenue and she saw it, the jungle of briars he hadn’t noticed, the broken windowpanes, the rooks making attempt number 576 to get back up the chimney, she didn’t allow herself any expression of dismay. In The Salmon in Ireland it says that once she finds a spawning ground the hen salmon is fiercely focused. She will assume a vertical position and fan her tail furiously to dislodge pebbles big as balls until she has made a suitable pit.

Only a small Oh escaped Grandmother when the wolfhounds bounded up to join them on the bed.

Another when she caught the salty whiff of Grandfather.

Another when she got a first peek at his Catullus.

Sorry, fecund.

Still, Kitterings do not shirk, no, they have that good German-English blood in them, and the First Round of Knocking and Straightening (which lasted until Germany said Mein Gott and surrendered) produced a daughter, Esther.

Rounds Two and Three produced Penelope and Daphne.

By that time, Grandfather’s — what Brendan Falvey called lions — must have been nearly exhausted. He’d started late. But he still lacked a son. And seeing his three daughters already on their way to becoming little Kitterings he must have felt he was seeing Swains disappear from the world. By then he was already locked in the first silent skirmishes with Margaret, moving a chair back where he wanted it, leaving open a newspaper he knew she wanted folded away, opening windows she closed, already engaging in the ding-dong, attack-and-retreat that was their marriage as he realised with a peppery gall that he was the one who had been hooked.

But in those days once you were wedded you were in Holy Deadlock, and in Ireland the priests had decided that once a man entered a woman there was No Way Out. The vagina was this deadly mysterious wrestler that could get you in a headlock, well, metaphorically-speaking, and then, boys, you were rightly stuck.

That Will Teach You, was Number One sermon at the time.

Number Two was Offer It Up.

And so, with no way out, following the floods of September that year (Books 359–389, Old Moore’s Almanacs. Volumes 36–66) and the catch of a Salmon weighing 32lbs, he gave it, as Jimmy McInerney says, one last shake.

My father was landed in May. He swam out after fourteen hours of labour, was not yet dried of the birthwaters when Grandfather Abraham appeared in the nursery like strange weather, jutted the Swain jaw to study his only male progeny, and asked: what weight?

And in that moment, like a pinch of salt, he passed on the Impossible Standard.

He calls his son Virgil.

Honest to God.

Virgil.

Abraham eschews saints and when he’s asked for a middle name for Virgil he considers only a moment before replying: Feste. (See Book 888, Twelfth Night, W. Shakespeare, Oxford Classics.)

Could have been worse.

Could have been Worm.

‘Fester?’ In the front pew Clement Kittering dispatches an eyebrow. (The Kitterings consider the Irish in general to be Decidedly Odd, but often Quite Charming, and this curious Abraham is gone native, is turned Irish.)

‘No dear. Feste.’

The moment the christening is complete Abraham startles Grandmother by taking the child from her. With quick leather shoeslap he bears my father down the aisle like a trophy. The boy is brought out and on the gravel apron before the front archway he’s raised towards the glowering sky of the County Meath.

It’s as if Abraham believes the old Reverend won’t have been able to stay away. He’ll have stridden across the stippled coals of Purgatory to see the new Swain, and to see if maybe this baby will be The Next Big Thing in holy world. Abraham holds his son and behind him like a murmuring river the congregation flows out and around the front porch, and the baby’s not crying, God love him, he’s not, he’s gazing up out of the intricate lacework of what looks like a mini-priest’s robe that Margaret had made for him, he’s sort of fluttering his eyelids with the breezes that are trapped there. And then to the Reverend, and for all and sundry to hear, Abraham declaims, ‘This boy will never step inside a church again.’

Chapter 9

Uncle Noelie, who was not an uncle but a cousin, dressed for his death every night. One time he woke in the morning with a holy fright. (It was probably the fooking forestry that had surrounded him, unbeknownst, Sean Hayes says. You’ll hear words like that here, little bits of leftover Shakespeare. Unbeknownst. Unbeknownst to itself the Department had destroyed the countryside with pine trees. Unbeknownst, they’re going to do the same with windmills.) Anyway, Uncle Noelie woke up in a mortifying panic in his holey mouse-coloured underpants and vest, went to Patrick Bourke’s in the Square in Kilrush and asked for a funeral suit Best Quality and right enough they sold him the suit, shirt, tie, socks and shoes and asked who it was that had passed on.

Which, I’m sorry, is just weird. Passing on. It’s not even grammatical. It just hangs there, vague and inconclusive. It’s like saying he went up to.

Passed on to where, exactly?

Anyway, the outfit was for his own funeral. Uncle Noelie came home, laid the suit shirt and etceteras on the bed, the shoes beneath. All day he worked his few fields in his farming trousers boots woolly jumper and what-have-you, but when he went to bed at night in that small farmhouse he put on the suit shirt and tie, left the shoes, laces undone, below, then he lay out, hands-joined, posed, so if he died in the night he’d be dressed for Departure.

Joe Brogan passed his house most days on his way to the buildings back in the time when there was buildings happening and between them down in The Crossroads one evening they’d worked out that Uncle Noelie was to open his curtains when he woke and that way there was no need for Joe to come in to check on him. He could just drive by, because, both bachelors, they weren’t intimate on that level, there’d be no calling in, no need for tea and goldgrains, they were both clear on that, none of that, no, there’d just be this business of the curtains because Uncle Noelie had related his two mortal fears. The first was Not Being Found, of Mouldering Away, Sean Hayes says (and you’d moulder faster in among all those trees). How long you would be mouldering would depend on whether you went to Mass or not. Not because of mystical preservation but because if you were a Regular you’d be missed after two Sundays. There’d be that gap in the back of the Men’s Aisle where you stood with the Head-downers. That was the unsaid secret advantage to church-going. But if you were an Irregular like Uncle Noelie then who knows, you could be Not Found until the trees fell through the roof and some of the Hourigans came in to rob the place.

The second fear was Being Found. If you were taken unawares, if you were found in what Nan calls your All Together, then the shame of that, the thought of the whole slew coming poking around your kitchen nosing into the front bedroom and seeing you with your what Mona Moynihan calls croissant just sort of sitting here, would be enough to ruin the first several weeks of your time in Heaven.

So Uncle Noelie came up with his plan. Each night he pulled the curtains, combed the little bit of hair crossways on the front of his head, put on the suit and lay out on the bed ready for take-off.

And it worked too.

It worked two ways. It worked first that when he woke up in the morning in the suit and he realised he wasn’t at his own funeral he smiled. He smiled that lovely small round nut face of his and thought how well he looked and what a surprise it was no woman had ever found him. He rose and undressed with the sort of secret knowledge of his Happy End ahead. And it worked too because when one morning Joe Brogan drove by and the curtains were closed Uncle Noelie was only Gone a short while, and later that evening Mrs Quinty told my mother he made A Beautiful Corpse.

I was thinking about Uncle Noelie today when I was in the Regional. I was thinking about being Gone and wondering where Gone was and what it would be like and what the weather there would be. It’s a thing you just never hear, the weather in the next life.

On the one hand it can’t be raining there all the time.

But then if you were an African maybe that’s what you’d be hoping for.

On the other hand if it was blazing hot like it was that one summer when Nan went salmon-coloured and couldn’t stand up for falling down, Mick Mulvey started sporting the sombrero and olive-oiling himself and Father Tipp had to ask Martin Malone to stop wearing the micro-shorts to Mass, well that would be no fun at all. Irish people would be a freckled show in a sunny Heaven.

Just before Doctor Naradjan came in to do my Check-Up I was starting to wonder if you can only get to Heaven if you believe in it. Is it like Santa, where once you stop believing he stops coming? I know, thinking too precisely on th’event, but when you’re lying in bed with your body going nowhere your mind sort of heads off. Anyway, just for a minute then I had maybe a glimpse of Ruth’s Version because I was seeing Uncle Noelie in the Good Suit walking across his own fields and none of the forestry was there and across the river the hill fields weren’t thumping with windmills and it was just the right kind of All-Ireland weather in September. Noelie’s hair was still combed crossways and he had his teeth so he was smiling natural and he was back in a better version of his own familiar place. He was carrying a small Clare flag for the hurlers like he knew this year with Davy the lads were going to do it, and he was coming closer and I knew he had something he wanted to tell me and I tried to say his name out loud but I couldn’t because I was in a ward in the Regional and I lost belief or vision or whatever and the whole scene sort of passed into nothing, the ground unreal and the story failed.

Chapter 10

A salmon egg dropped from waist-height will rebound, quite in the manner of a tennis ball.

I thought you’d want to know that.

My father wasn’t immediately aware of any burden on him.

Perhaps on Sunday mornings when Grandmother led the girls to church in Trim, that formidable line of what Nan calls the Polished Shoe Brigade, Head Girl material each one, marching up to that front pew in pleated wool coats with natural imperiousness and sitting so astonishingly upright because Nan says something in the breeding meant they had no backsides, perhaps then he wondered. He was left to himself in the house, and played Orphan.

He read. He read everything he could find. He loved books about explorers. Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Francis Drake, Hernán Cortés. The names alone took him away. I see him looking up from a page, it’s the strange deadened quiet I know on country Sunday mornings when the Christians are at Mass and you feel so other that you have to occupy your time or you fear the Old Testament God himself will come up the stairs and say YOU! The rain is streaking down the long rattling windows of Ashcroft. The unfired chimneys are singing. He reads of those ships sailing into the New World and after a time he looks up and to no one but his own imagination says, ‘Hernán Cortés,’ which is maybe the only time anyone has said that name aloud in the County Meath but works as a kind of super-economy SwainAir flight to take him into the Aztecs. He can feel the sun scorch his brow. Those ancient oak floorboards of Ashcroft are a softly swaying deck, arriving under an azure sky, creaking in the surprise of the sudden furnace, discovering salt in all its wounds. And he says ‘Vasco Núñez de Balboa’ and in that damp room in the dead Sunday morning my father becomes the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.

One Sunday in the attic Virgil found his father’s rubbery black gasmask. When he put it on he became an alien, sucking breath through the heavy nozzle filter and crawling along the floorboards like he was a creature out of his element or newly landed on the planet. He loved that. He loved the strange privacy of being different. He loved the secret life inside him and could stay there in that inner country all day. What he thought of not going to church he never said. He never went. That was that. And when Aeney and I were old enough to realise this was a little odd, and that no one in Faha had a father who played Mozart at full volume to the river while the rest of us went to Mass, it was just another small piece of the puzzle we already knew: our father was a genius.

Eventually, Virgil was sent to Highfield School to Mr Figgs. Figgs was a bald low-sized little sneeze who came from Brighton and was soon dismayed to find Irish weather the perfect seedbed for headcolds. His face was never free of his handkerchief. It dabbed, wiped, rubbed and received the sniffled sneezed and blown expressions of the Figgs nostrils. Still, Figgs knew his figures, knew language too, and quickly saw that Virgil Swain had Serious Potential. To save him from contamination from the Dolts he put my father in the front row next to the Sniffleodeon that was his own desk. While the Michaels and Martins, the Tommys and Timothys of Highfield got about the business of educating each other through Advanced Ink-drinking, Higher Thumping, Desk-kicking, Flicking snot and/or spitballs into the miry curls of the boy up front, Mr Figgs taught my father in a conspiratorial whisper. His handkerchief he lay on the desk at the ready. Across a pale nimbus of free-associating germs he craned his damp pink face and spoke Algebra.

My father took the bait. He liked being singled out. You’ll already know he liked feeling that he was rising. He didn’t mind the hook in his mouth. Beneath the curls the head hummed. The class he left in his wake. At breaktimes he stayed in, avoided games of War in the yard, and Figgs opened a little further the doors of his mind.

And what a mind it was. It devoured everything. Figgs could not believe his luck. He took my father’s first name as a hint and tossed him a piece of the Aeneid. My father leapt and took it. A little Horace (Book 237, Horace’s Odes, Humphrey & Lyle, London), a book whose cover is neither paper nor card but a kind of amazing amber fabric that makes the softest whisper when you flick it, a snippet of Cicero (Book 238, Cicero’s Speeches, Volume I, Humphrey & Lyle, London), burgundy card-covers, stiff and formal, and smelling of asparagus, some Caesar’s Gallic Wars (Book 239, De Bello Gallico, Volume I, Humphrey & Lyle, London) which Father Tipp thought was Garlic Wars, and I didn’t correct him, it made no difference. My father devoured them all. He read at the same rate and with the same enthusiasm as the other boys excoriated their nostrils.

Nor was Latin his only excellence. On language and literature his brain fired. Figgs fed him poetry. Gave him Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and, while working his own nose behind the fumigate flag of his handkerchief, watched as Hence loathed Melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born worked its way into my father’s imagination.

Each day my father carried home the neatest copies ever written, each page scored with so many half-winged ticks of Mr Figgs’s Merit Marks it appeared a coded language of flight. And it was too. It said: This boy is ascending.

What it might also have said was: This boy has no friends.

But back in those days nobody read those parts. Child psychology hadn’t reached Ireland yet. Not that it has exactly left the starting blocks now either. Seamus Moran, whose wiry black hair all migrated to his knuckles after he ate out-of-date tinned sardines, told my mother once that his son Peter was Special Needs. ‘You know, Authentic.’

‘Mr Figgs says Virgil is an excellent student,’ Grandmother tells Grandfather one wet evening in March.

See two studded-leather wingback armchairs, battle lines, either side of the fire, two table lamps, twin amber glows. A large room with high ceiling, long sash windows, a floor rug of brown and orange, once thick and vibrant but now flat and lifeless with a going-threadbare patch where the hounds lie their drool-heads sideways before the hissing fire, logs are burning but not satisfactorily. Rain somehow spits down the full length of the chimney. The room smells of damp and smoke, that particular combination Grandmother believes is Ireland and against which she combats day and night with several purple squeeze-ball perfume bottles, shooting little sprays at the enemy with only momentary success, but impregnating her with a permanent cheap air-freshener scent as the ultimate triumph of Ireland over Kitterings.

Grandfather sits one side of the fire, Grandmother the other. Without television, they do a lot of that. Watching-the-fire is Number One on the TAM ratings back then. Grandfather smokes his cigarettes to the butt and looks in the fire at Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul in the Next Life. He’s pure Swain like that, the distant, the invisible, the depths, all big draws for the Swain mind. And he’s arrived at that place where he wishes the Germans had been a bit more efficient and aimed two inches to the right and found his heart.

‘What did you say?’

‘At Highfield. Mr Figgs says Virgil is excellent.’

History repeats. That’s all there is to it. Patterns keep coming back, which either shows that people aren’t that complex or that God’s imagination just kept bringing Him back to these same obsessions. Maybe we are a way for Him to work things out with His Father.

Now that’s Deep.

Anyway, it’s not the Narrator’s weakness at characterisation. It’s that Grandfather is turning into Great-Grandfather.

He shifts his long legs back from the fire. Unbeknownst to him, the soles of his boots have been cooking nicely, and as he withdraws the long pole-vaulting legs and places the feet there’s a little singe-surprise, a little dammit sting, but he won’t betray it and give his wife that little I-told-you victory. Though Sarsfield, the more loyal of the hounds, raises an eyebrow in concern, Grandfather won’t let on. He just hears the word excellent and, as they said in those days, his hackles are raised. ‘Excellent? How is he excellent?’

He hates to hear it said out loud. That Swains never, ever, ever, praise each other openly, nor are they comfortable hearing other people praise them, is a dictum. They want their children to be excellent, to be beyond excellent, and invisible.

But, at the same time, the last thing Grandfather can tolerate is that any excellence of Virgil’s is claimed to be Kittering. It’s enough that Grandmother has scored three for her side already.

‘Generally. Excellent generally,’ she says. And then, out of that haughtiness she has, what in Flaubert is called froideur, and what in the Brouders is just Class-A Bitchiness, she adds, ‘He takes after my father.’

Phrase isn’t out of her mouth when Grandfather is walking his hot bootsoles to the door.

‘Virgil? Virgil, come down.’

Ashcroft House has two floors. (A Developer lives there now, but as Margaret Crowe says he bankruptured himself.) The upstairs rooms are too large for children and my father’s has a bed and table at opposite ends.

‘Virgil!’

He raises his head from Tennyson (a gorgeous red-covered gilt-edged edition, Book 444, The Works of Alfred Tennyson, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1 Paternoster Square, London, inside which there is a bookmark, Any Amount of Books, 56 Charing Cross Road). He’s in ‘Idylls of the King’. There likewise I beheld Excalibur, before him at his crowning borne, the sword that rose from out the bosom of the lake. But on his father’s calling of his name his heart leaps. He has that small boy adorableness and rushes down the big stairs. He opens and closes the door to the Drawing room swiftly and as a result sucks a great purgatorial pall of smoke out over his parents.

Margaret shoots off a spray.

‘Tell me. School, Virgil? How is it?’ Abraham asks.

My father has no idea he’s a cannonball. He has no idea he’s being readied, rolled in, prepared to be fired at his mother.

‘Good.’

‘Good?’

My father nods. ‘I like it.’ He smiles the big-eyed-boy adorable smile I will see in Aeney.

‘I see.’

‘It seems he’s very good at Latin. So Mr Figgs says,’ offers Grandmother. She has a way of speaking about you that makes you seem elsewhere. She allows a pause, before throwing to the window an under-her-breath: ‘Just like my father.’

‘I see.’ Abraham is backside-to-the-fire, hands behind back, chin at up-jut. ‘You find it hard, Virgil?’

‘No.’

‘I told you, Abraham. He’s excellent.’

Grandmother wasn’t great at smiling. She never got the hang of it as an expression of contentment. She approached the smile from the wrong end and started with the lips. The lips pulled back and up a little at the ends, but the eyes were saying something different.

The smile does it for Grandfather. There’s a moment he’s looking at Virgil and suddenly his blood stops. A chill comes up his back. It’s the same chill he had that night in Oriel College. It’s the chill that in three seconds is followed by a flush of heat and the flash of illumination. He’s helpless to stop or resist it. He’s looking at his son and in him he’s seeing Meaning, he’s seeing here’s the reason he fell wounded in the hole, here’s the reason Tommy’s okay, because although he’s fought against it ever since the Reverend died, although he’s tried to believe that in this life there’s nothing to believe in, in the end Swains can’t escape their nature.

‘Virgil,’ he says, ‘you will not be returning to Highfield School.’

Spray-spray. Spray-spray-spray. ‘What are you talking about, Abraham?’

‘That school has nothing more to teach him.’

‘Don’t be silly. How will he learn?’ She does the smile again. This time she adds an eyebrow in the manner of the Colonel.

Grandfather won’t have it. He won’t have eyebrows like that aimed at him. ‘That’s the end of it,’ he says and fires the full chin back at the raised eyebrow.

She gives him both eyebrows; he gives her the nostrils.

He’s taking Virgil over for himself, and that’s that. Let Grandmother have the girls — she already has — he will take Virgil. He will have one proper Swain. My father will be the reason the bullets missed Abraham’s heart. He will become The One.

For a more profound insight into the problem from a salmon’s perspective, see Mr Willis Bund’s Salmon Problems and The Life of the Salmon (Books 477 & 478, Sampson Low & Co., London). For my perspective, read on.

While his sisters went to school, a parade of tutors came to Ashcroft House for my father.

Some days when I am Poor, when I haven’t the energy to lift myself on the pillow, when the rain washes down the skylight and I want to sleep for ever, they visit.

Mr O. W. Thornton.

Mr J. G. Gerard, Mathematician.

Mr Ivor Naughton, Latin, Greek & Classics.

The young Mr Olde.

The old Mr Ebbing.

Mr Jeremiah Lewis.

They are walk-on parts. Each of them was hired and eventually fired once they made the fatal flaw of declaring Virgil brilliant.

Only one, Mr Phadraig MacGhiolla, makes a lasting impression. He’s the one who brings the folktales. He’s the one in the too-tight black suit with the up-forked red hair and fiery eyes of a nationalist who speaks Irish mythology. Teachers don’t always know when they’ve lit the torch paper. But MacGhiolla knew. He knew he’d entered Virgil Swain’s imagination and held up a flame when he told him of a boy who fell in love with a girl called Emer who said he could not have her unless he completed Impossible Tasks. The boy was sent to study warcraft in Scotland under the tutelage of the female warrior Scathach-the-Shadow. Scathach-the-Shadow was about twenty centuries ahead of Marvel Comics. Gaming was in the early development stages back then. One in every two gamers died. Being Scottish and a warrior meant that Scathach was ferociousness itself. She didn’t have a Console, she had a hawk with talons. The boy was sent to her to learn how to achieve the impossible, and when he did, when Scathach had brought him up through all the Levels, showed him all the Cheats, and listed him on the Roll of Honour as All-Time Number-One Player, he came back and entered the fortress where Emer was guarded.

He entered it by going upriver against the current.

The method he used was salmon-leaps.

Not kidding.

Virgil tried it out for himself. One day he sneaked out the back door into the rough tufted grass that looked like a green sea behind Ashcroft. He put his hands down by his sides, straightened himself to salmon-slimness, sucked in as much breath as he could and then, with face turned to blue sky, he blew hard, arching his back into bow-shape, and tried to leap upward.

Maybe it did work. Maybe he’d inherited something from the pole-vaulting legs. He felt sure there’d been some take-off. Definitely more than if he just jumped. Yes, there was definitely some ascent.

That was the beginning. And MacGhiolla, Son of the Fox, knew. What he didn’t know was that his own position was guaranteed the day he told Grandfather that Virgil was hopeless in Irish History, Culture & Language.

In the meantime, between husband and wife battle proper was commenced. Knocking and Straightening long over, Grandmother now took to a new field; she would not be outdone by Grandfather and so marshalled the girls into various endeavours of high achievement.

Piano was a particular favourite. Esther, Penelope and Daphne were each instructed by a Mrs Moira Hackett whose sense of humour was no longer intact and who personally had no music in her but employed the Irish Academy ruler-on-knuckles method to significant effect. The three girls were soon able to perform like upright porcelain pianists, backs a perfect plumb-line, shoulders squared, and only the curved claw-shapes of their fingers moving, producing a kind of flawless mechanical music only a little worse than the cheapest wind-up musical boxes. One evening when Abraham returned from fishing he was called in to the drawing room to hear three sequential versions of Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu.

My father began the piano the next day.

His three sisters were all started on the violin.

Chapter 11

We pause here because The Narrator has to go to Dublin.

In general, I no longer go outside. It’s hard to explain. Unless you’ve felt it yourself, once you hear that you think Oh-oh, you look away but you think She’s bonkers, a little case of the Do-Lallies here, because who doesn’t go outside? Well, excuse me, I don’t. Get over it. Once I returned from university I had this dread pressing in on my chest. If I got to the front door my legs stopped working. That was it. I couldn’t breathe. I’d turn back in and sit on the arm of Nan’s chair. But the feeling didn’t pass. Glasses of water, air, deep breaths, blowing in a brown paper bag that had been emptied of onions, arm-pinches, Vicks inhaler, hot water with Vicks, more air (fanned Clare Champion), more water (sparkling), vinegar, a squirt of lemon, and a mouthful of whiskey, made no difference, neither did the little parade of the parish’s amateur psychiatrists who came and sat on the bed and played a game of Questions-with-no-Answers. What is it you are afraid of, dear?

Please.

But now I have to go to Dublin. For Timmy and Packy this is a Big Day. Uniforms are ironed, boots cleaned, and Hair has met Comb. It’s like we’re going up for the All-Ireland, only instead of a team of lads in those too-short shorts and shin-high socks they wear in GAA, I’m going to be facing The Consultant.

In a secret room somewhere long ago, Jimmy Mac says, the leaders of the Medical Profession decided the best way to turn consultants into millionaires was to only have about four for the whole country. Once they had the four the doors were locked. So it takes about ten years to get to see one. Consultants are mystical as Magi, but in inverse, you have to travel to them. You have to be in Serious Condition to be sent, and if you are it’s pretty much the end of the yellow brick road. Mary Houlihan in Knock was three years buried when she got called. Her husband Matty said he’d a right to dig her up and bring her corpse, only Dignam the ticket inspector in Ennis probably wouldn’t allow her the free pass.

I come down the stairs in the stretcher. I’m trying to breathe all the time but it feels like I’m underwater.

‘It’s okay, love,’ Mam says. ‘It’s okay.’ Her hand takes mine at the bottom of the stairs, and with Timmy holding up the top and Packy the bottom we sail out the front door.

The sky is huge and jellyfish-grey and there’s no light in it at all. There’s just this watery expanse leaking drops as we go down the garden to the ambulance.

Timmy and Packy have the inside of it shining. Mam sits beside me. You can see the bravery in her. You can see how she will not be defeated, how the world has thrown sadness after sadness at her and knocked her down and she’s still getting up, she’s older than she was and there’s these few silver hairs coming at her temples and her eyes have that extra deepness of knowledge that makes her more beautiful in a kind of lasting way. It’s like she’s this eternal Mother, my mam, this wall around me, holding back the sea that keeps coming for me. I can see it in her eyes. I can see the way she’s hoping so hard that this might be the time, this might be Help Coming.

She’s hoping and trying not to hope at the same time.

And that’s the saddest thing.

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it’s definitely a Thing with Claws.

We drive out of Faha for Dublin when the fields are just waking to today’s rain. Today it’s a soft silveriness that Packy says suits Intermittent 4 on the wipers but Timmy thinks should be 5. They talk the whole way. If we were driving to Moscow they’d talk the whole way there too.

I’m okay inside the ambulance, because somehow it’s not the world.

Conversation follows the road. While we’re still in the parish the talk is all Faha. It’s Martin & Maureen Ring whose daughter Noelle has gone off with one of the Muslims of Mayo, the Ballyhaunis Meat Men. It’s the bachelor Brothers Hayes, who are in their sixties, who each buy a copy of the Champion even though they live together in the same three-room bungalow. The brothers have a teabag mountain outside the front door, a giant steaming mound that’s supposed to be composting in the front bed but is resisting because of the rain Timmy says, lends the air at their front door a bit of a tang of India in monsoon season. If we have a flood there’ll be a tea-Ganges heading down to McCarthy’s.

The talk is of the Apostolic Works whose workers are all women in their eighties now and who still meet in Faha N.S. seven o’clock on the evening of the First Tuesday, carrying their glowing Ever-Readies along the road like genuine Illuminates and making the decision now to team up with the troop of the Legion of Mary whose Legionnaires are down to two. It’s the news that when Sean & Sheila Maguire came down to Faha graveyard Wednesday to dig up her grandfather that got buried in the wrong grave they found an actual snake slyly slithering between Ciaran Carr’s plot and that of the woman he was meant to marry, Una Lyons.

We pass Dan Byrne in his black suit and string vest out by the Cross. A big believer in the visuals, Dan lost his shirt on bank investments sometime after the Banks passed their first Stress Test.

The dogs in the street knew the country was cooked, Packy says. Because of me he won’t say fooked.

The Nationwide got narrow, Timmy says.

We get out on to the Ennis road and down to Icarus at the Roundabout. He’s in the conversation for twenty miles. Icarus used to be inside at the Market but flew over to Greece for a bit and came back not the better for it, Packy says. He needed a bit of hammering. He’s not gold enamelling or anything, he’s not the full Byzantium, but he’s Clare’s best Greek and people are kind of fond of him, even if a naked man with arms out and legs akimbo was a bit much for the youth. People didn’t take kindly to his wings getting dinted. He’s erected now in the centre of the Rocky Road roundabout with the CCTV because Packy says The Lads would have him for melting if he was out there without the Eye on him.

‘They would,’ says Timmy. ‘He’s better there anyhow.’

‘He is.’

‘When he was in The Market the scholars from Flannan’s were always putting the traffic cone on his head.’

‘They were.’

‘One time he had a bra and panties.’

‘I didn’t see that.’

‘One time they strapped a traffic cone over his. .’

‘I remember that all right.’

‘Flannan’s lads.’

‘Good hurlers though.’

‘They might do it this year.’

‘They won’t.’

‘You have no belief. That’s your problem.’

The National Conversation takes the new motorway all the way from Ennis to Dublin and between those shallow naps you have in seatbelts I hear: Why the country is destroyed; why the last crowd were the worst crowd to ever run this country; why bankers should be locked up and criminals let out; why we’ll never see the like again.

The best thing we could do, Packy says, is cut ourselves free.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Just what I said. The best thing we could do as a country. Just cut the rope. Cut the rope and sail away.’

The Consultant doesn’t have an office. He has Rooms. He has some really nice furniture. All his magazines are this month’s. And they have no creases in the covers. When you’re waiting for the Consultant you don’t really want to read about the Ten Best Places to Eat by Moonlight.

I sit with Mam and we wait. I get so tired I can’t even

The piano-playing Aunts come to visit us after Aunt Esther dies. I am eleven years old. Their visit is announced well in advance, the Aunts are very Old School like that. I think they imagine it’s proper to send word ahead so that the maids and servants can start fluffing floors and polishing pillows. They imagine there must be buffing to be done. I think it’s well-intentioned but Nan won’t credit it. She believes my father’s sisters are powdered witches sent from the east with the sole aim of denigrating the people of the west.

Unlike everyone else who uses the back door, the Aunts come in the front. They make the latch of the kitchen door seem a contrivance of intentional backwardness.

Here they are:

‘Hellooo? Hellooo?’

They peer in and at the same moment both angle back their heads, as if they have taken a position a little too close to a panoramic screen. They are tall and big-boned and look like men playing women’s parts in a play by Oscar Wilde.

‘Nan, Verge’s sisters are here,’ my mother says loudly.

But Nan already knows, and furiously pokers the fire to try and smoke them back out. Nan here is The Aged P only with more mischievousness than Mr Wemmick’s in Great Expectations, the only book of which my father kept two copies (Books 180 and 400, Penguin Classic & Everyman Classics editions, London), both of which I have read twice, deciding each time that Great Expectations is the Greatest. If you don’t agree, stop here, go back and read it again. I’ll wait. Or be dead.

Grandmother Bridget, the Aunts call her.

‘Grandmother Bridget, hello!’ they call out.

Nan doesn’t reply but flaps the Champion at the fire and sends out a great curling cloud of smoke.

In reprisal, by way of commentary on Nan’s deficit and I suppose in testament to the superiority of their side of the family genetic, and the east of the country in general, the Aunts smile their full fierce perfect teeth.

‘O and here’s Ruth. Little darling Ruth. Come here, my dear, let us look at you. There is such intelligence in that face, isn’t there, Daphne? And what an interesting dress, dear.’

Another great pall of turfsmoke.

‘Now, Ruth, come and tell us everything. Let us look at you.’

What is it they see? I am thin but not of the sylph kind, more the gawky lanky kind which may be what constitutes the Swain Beautiful but feels Rangy Ruth to me. My knees are actually sharp. At that age I am officially Waiting for My Chest. The Chest Fairy is on the way from Boozoomia or somewhere and all the girls in my class are going to sleep at night in their own state of Great Expectation, waking up and checking: is that it? — throwing their shoulders far back and breasting the world, as if the task of womanhood is to balance the weight that lands on your chest and could easily topple you over.

Which in a way I suppose is true.

Anyway, The Chest Fairy passes me by. I’m still Waiting. So when the Aunts look at me there can’t be much that impresses.

I’ve learned that you can never see yourself as another person does. You can never really know who you are for them, at least not until much later. That’s what I think now. I stand and look at my aunts. They have amazing coats and dresses. Their dresses are of a woven cloth on which patterned flowers in subdued colour have been embroidered the way I’ve only seen on wallpaper. Their coats have huge black buttons and when they hand their coats over they are heavy as blankets and smell like cupboards.

‘I’m sure you’re best in your class, Ruth, aren’t you? Good girl, good girl. You’re such a bright girl you will just grow up and dazzle. Won’t she, Daphne? She’ll dazzle.’

‘Dazzle dazzle dazzle.’

‘Mother says you like to read. Do you?’

I do.

‘Of course you do, because you’re so bright, you little angel. If your grandmother was alive she’d — No. No, Penelope, I’m not. I’m not no.’

‘Handkerchief?’

‘Thank you, Penelope.’

‘We’ve brought you a present, dear.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s just for you.’

It’s a hardcover of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and on the inside front page there’s this little oval black and white picture of her with a baby’s bonnet on her head and a kind of ironic smile like She Knows. Jane knows what stupid insensitive people there are in the world and that’s what is behind every word she writes. Look at her portrait, She Knows. I think Dear Jane had a bit of the Impossible Standard herself although maybe it wasn’t even that impossible, maybe it was just some kind of decency and awareness she was expecting.

‘It’s Jane Austen, dear,’ Aunt P says.

‘What?’ Nan asks from the fire.

‘JANE AUSTEN,’ Aunt roars.

‘EXHAUSTING?’ Nan bellows back. ‘YES,’ and starts the Aged P nod.

Neither of my aunts, I am convinced, ever drank tea from a mug. The china cups are out for them.

They are a pair in the world, the two of them, and trade in exchange one to the other an entire currency of startled, dismayed and disapproving looks. The world fails the Impossible Standard constantly. Sometimes I imagine a whole gallery of their failed suitors, scrubbed jowly farmers of Meath, tweeded-up and cow-licked down, sent up to evenings in Ashcroft. The Meath men have surnames like Castlebridge, Farns, Ainsley. The sisters kill them off afterwards with cutting remarks. One sentence will do for each one.

‘Those hands he has.’ Castlebridge.

‘Did he seem to mumble terribly, dear? Could you, I couldn’t understand him. But perhaps you’re fond of him?’ Farns.

‘Actually I’ve never seen a fork used quite like that.’ Ainsley.

Pursed mouths, raised chins, arched eyebrows: each sister destroys the other’s suitors like she’s scissoring paper dolls. They find none up to standard. Their souls select their own society as the best and they become the pair they are.

‘Is that a?’

‘Tart,’ Mam says.

‘Tart. Pie, yes. I see. Apple?’

‘Rhubarb.’

‘Rhubarb. Well, well. Rhubarb, Daphne.’

‘Yes. Rhubarb.’

From care, or meanness as Nan says, the aunts are thin women. When they lift the cups of tea they do so with thumb and forefinger only, the other three fingers an extended fan for balance and grace. They lean ever so slightly forward and, eyebrows raised and lips tightened to the smallest puckered nub, sip the startling dark brew my mother has made.

‘Rhubarb? Well well, Daphne.’

Dad arrives late. He comes into the kitchen in his wellingtons and there is sudden excitement. His sisters fly up like ravens.

‘O Virgil.’

They flutter about him a few moments — ‘Virgil, are you getting thin? What is this you are wearing?’ — and show their love in questions.

My dad is easily embarrassed.

That man is an ocean of emotion, Jimmy Mac said.

Knowing the aunts were coming, Mam has everything just as tidy as can be. She’s put a load of things away inside the dresser, she’s hidden the tea-towels we usually use and taken out these cream ones I’ve never seen; for the duration of The Visit the Normal Life of our house has been tidied away. I like it in a way. There’s a sense of occasion. So here’s my dad standing in his wellies and he can see how tidy the place is even as his sisters circle. He can see all the effort Mam and I have made and his eyes have that kind of shining they get when the feelings are these waves rising in his heart.

‘O Virgil, are you getting thin?’

My father was always thin and his hair was always silver. His eyes were the bluest blue, the way the water looks when in the sky over it you think you can see Heaven. In my mind the thinness and the silveriness and the blueness were all connected.

‘He is getting thin, isn’t he, Daphne?’

Aunt D twitches her beak. She wants to be nicer than her sister; she wants to speak to her brother in his world, and so all the way across Ireland she has considered what she will say. Now she makes this high, brow-pencilled smile and asks: ‘How are your cows doing, dear?’

Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy; you can only go to the borders; you can look in but you cannot enter. This is something I have learned. All this time Aeney is sitting in the narrow stairs that go up over the dresser to our bedrooms. He broke his leg falling from the sycamore and is perched up there, his cast out in front of him, and he’s watching and listening. He has a smile people describe as winning, a winning smile, a smile that wins you to him no matter what, you just love him.

‘Oh now, Aon-us,’ Aunt P says. She can never get the hang of his name and wants to say Aeneas and Aengus together and she’s a little surprised he’s been there all the time but she’s not cross because you can’t be cross with Aeney, you can’t be cross with that smile. You see that golden hair and that smile and some part of you is sort of quietened, like you know he’s different somehow. I don’t mean that in the way some people do, like it’s a bad thing, I mean just the opposite, like you feel a little awe, a little O my God. You look at him and you think golden boy.

‘Oh now, there you are. Come down here and tell your aunts all about you.’

We drove for four hours to see The Consultant. We saw him for thirty-three minutes.

Something in your blood is wrong, he said.

Then we drove back across the country in the ambulance, Mam holding my hand, and Timmy and Packy not talking at all. The daylight was all gone and the road was this long winding river of yellow headlights going home towards the west. When we passed Tipperary we were back in the rain.

Chapter 12

Your blood is a river.

Chapter 13

The drizzling dawn of my father’s fourteenth birthday, Abraham appeared in the big draughty bedroom and shook his son awake.

‘Come on.’

Virgil dressed at top speed, was down the stairs and in the kitchen in no time, buttoning his last buttons as his father finished packing their lunch, a hodgepodge of bread, spread, pickles, cheese and apples.

They stamped into wellingtons, Abraham shook the tin box of flies, gave a kind of up-flick of his head and went out the front door, Grandfather banging it to so the bang fired into his daughters’ dreams upstairs and startled a flush of blackbirds off the front lawn.

It was one of those perfectly still mist-laid mornings, the fields wearing that silver drapery in imitation of Heaven, the air smelling green, sticky new leaves unfurling, and father and son with rods skyward heading for the river. I leave them on that road a while, soft clump-thud of their boots, metal-clasps jinglejangling on Grandfather’s shoulder-bag. They’re a good way gone when Grandfather says: ‘Arma virumque cano.’

He doesn’t slow down, doesn’t break stride or look sidelong at his son.

My father is not sure he’s heard. Grandfather’s pole-vaulting legs carry him in two strides what takes Virgil three. He’s always a little in the old man’s wake. He looks at Abraham who is not looking back but marching on. And without question or comment Virgil replies: ‘Troiae qui primus ab oris italiam.’

And away they go, playing a little game of Aeneid and cutting across the fields of the County Meath.

When he’s had his fill of the Latin, Grandfather says, ‘ “O that this too sullen flesh. .” ’

And Virgil gives him back ‘ “. . should melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew. .” ’ He knows the five soliloquys spoken by Hamlet. He can go from the sullen flesh to the rogue and peasant slave to how all occasions. He’s learning the four in Macbeth.

Not once does Grandfather stop. He doesn’t look sideways at his son nor show any outward marvel at him but somewhere inside, somewhere in the Swain Unreachable, out in the unknown deeps where that part of him that was once a gleaming youth in Oriel College, somewhere there I know his spirit leaps.

Fat Meath cattle, tongue-tearing the first right succulent grass of spring, look up and watch Hamlet & His Father passing.

My father is in a new version of Heaven. He hasn’t time to consider it yet, whether he is happy because he is hastening along the road with his father as day breaks, or just because he was asked to come and that now this is actually happening, or because he has been asked for a speech from Shakespeare and the phrases are coming like a long golden thread out of his mouth even before he has time to think of them. The words are there, and flow, as he works hard to, and now matches the long pole-vault strides of his father.

In some ways my father’s whole life is in this moment. In this are all the years ahead, all the poems, all the rapture and the yearning and the grief too.

Abraham makes no comment, but my dad knows. He knows he is being heard. He knows this is a kind of perfection, and everything — the morning light, rods over shoulder, glistening fields, the thick and intense gaiety of the birdsong — enters him and leaves this permanent shine far down in his spirit. He knows it. And I think that for just these moments, the two of them hurrying to the river for the first casts, leaving the world behind, crossing the fat fields of the Fitzherberts to the dark rush of the waters, for just these moments Virgil Swain meets the Impossible Standard.

When Grandfather comes back to Ashcroft that evening he draws a sheaf of pages from the top drawer of his desk, dips his pen, and writes the first sentence of The Salmon in Ireland: ‘Ireland is a paradise for the salmon fisher.’

Chapter 14

When my father told it, they caught a salmon that day.

I think it is an imagined one, but I didn’t say so.

From the look on my face he could tell. ‘O Ruthie, you don’t believe anything,’ he said and crumpled his face to a small boy’s dismay.

I do, Dad. I do. I believe everything.

‘Ruth,’ Mrs Quinty says. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Her face is smaller, her eyes larger than ever. She keeps them wide open to hold all her tears. In them is the news of my blood gone wrong.

‘It’s all right, Mrs Quinty.’

‘Life is so unfair.’

There’s nothing I can say to that. Life is unfair is in History of Swain, Volumes 1 through 20. It’s not only unfair it’s outrageous. It’s harder than anything you could imagine and on top of that It Makes No Sense. God calls you and then changes His mind. Germans shoot at you then save you. You try and die quietly and someone gives you a fortune.

‘I’ve brought you this,’ she says.

It’s a cassette of The Shawshank Redemption.

(Have I told you I have TV up here? Jimmy Mac ran the wire up through the floorboards so I could watch Home and Away. And even though I’m The Smart Girl and was studying Thomas Wyatt — they flee from me that sometime did me seek — and Philip Sydney and the whole Gartered Stocking Brigade of Poets I still like going Down Under to those beaches in Sydney. It’s the only time I see the sun.)

‘Thank you, Mrs Quinty.’

‘I haven’t seen it myself, but Mrs Quinlavin says it’s good. She showed it to the Transitions and it kept even them quiet.’

‘Because it’s about an impossible escape.’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘maybe it won’t be any good.’

‘Mrs Quinty?’

‘Yes, Ruth?’

‘Did you ever hear of a story where a character separated from his shadow? He separates from it and spends the rest of the story trying to catch back up to it. Something like that?’

About a month after the Aunts visited a package arrived in the post, brown paper, neatly tied string, and inside it the mixed company of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell and a rather bulky, I might say contented, Thomas Hardy lying between them. I read them all, read them one by one with a kind of constant hunger as if they were apples that fed and made you hungry at the same time. I don’t mind saying I loved nothing as much as having those books upstairs in my room. Maybe it was because I knew they were Swain, maybe because it was true that deep down I was Snoot Ruth and didn’t want to be MacCarroll or because there was something kind of appealing about the Philosophy of Impossible Standard so that when you were told these books were beyond you it meant those were the very ones you wanted to read, and did read. What Sister Margaret-Mary in Kilkee did for Mass-going, I did for reading, World Champion Standard. When I was eight and Mum took me to Ennis to get my first pair of glasses the very first question they asked was Does she read a lot? like it was A Sign, like it said Smart Girl right there on your face, and when I got them and wore them to school you’d swear I was Little Miss Porcelain-face — Jane Brouder who had elected herself Mother Hen of our class, and who at age eight had an encyclopedic knowledge of Things That Could Go Wrong With You, sort of cordoned me off and screamed at anyone who came within ten feet of me: ‘Mind! She’s got glasses!’ I was just that bit more delicate than the others, or less vain or more posh or something, because there were others who couldn’t see well, others you saw squinting or looking into the copy next to them when there was something to be taken down from the board, but either they wouldn’t allow their beauty compromised by the thick brown-rimmed glasses the Mid-Western Health Board had decided was the best anti-boy device they could think of, or their parents didn’t think seeing was so important for girls.

In Faha it was easy to be different. One time the aunts sent me yellow satin slippers and when I wore them to Mass you could feel the whole church noticing and Mary Maloney thinking Protestant Shoes and Swain Notions and making her whole self shudder a little in her good coat as she coughed on this great hairball of resentment until between the Offertory and the Consecration she found solace in the idea that the slippers would be filthy in a day. I saw her. I knew. I am the kind of girl who notices. But that wouldn’t have stopped me wearing them. I’m that much a Swain anyway. I’m that much like my dad with whatever stubbornness foolishness or willpower he had to have to arrive here with a name like Virgil Swain, Latin-speaker, when the first question anybody back then asked would have been just — Swain? That would be enough. In that would be the whole story. It wouldn’t be like now with the Kwietcowskis and the Secas and the Pawlavs; back then the worst thing would have been to say: Not Related. When you’re different you’ve got two choices. You can stand out or you step back.

I was already different because I was a twin. Funny how you can say that: I am a twin.

Not I am one of twins, but I actually am A Twin.

Like there’s two of me all the time, this other one right here beside me whether you can see him or not.

Or as if you’re saying, I’m a Half.

Twins are not rightly understood as a concept in the parish anyway; before us there were the identical twins Concepta and Assumpta Talty who somehow merged in the parish mind into the one, Consumpta; whichever one was met was called that and if both were together people said Hello Consumpta and the girls said hello right back. The parish can be odd like that. Mary Hegarty pushed a pram through the village for nine years after her son Seanie had died as a baby and not one person ever said, ‘Mary, your pram is empty,’ they just let it be and she went on wheeling her grief through the village and out the back roads by the river where all grief flows.

Down in Faha N.S. Mrs Conheedy was the principal. She had come over from some mountainy place in Kerry and all I’ll say is when I first met her I thought she was Mr Conheedy. I know it’s not polite but when you’re in my position with something in the blood you have Special Privileges, and number one is you can tell the truth. Mrs Conheedy had a face lumpy as a turnip and shoulders you could imagine her carrying a sheep on. There were no dentists where she came from. She was the last disciple of Crimplene, a sensible cloth that couldn’t wrinkle or fade, that defied both time and humanity and always looked the same. Her dresses had this big zip on the back of her neck. She always left it sticking up, a little square hole in it, like she had a secret hope that one day a hook would come down from the sky and get her. I certainly hoped it would. Jimmy Mac said she had Gone-into-Teaching because it was the only place where she could rule without reprisal; where she could give free rein to the awesome dimension of her need to crush things. Mr Conheedy it seemed had enjoyed this for the first three months of their marriage, but then had run off, Nan said, to try and find a female Mrs Conheedy next time round.

‘Ruth and Aengus Swain come here.’

‘Yes Miss.’

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

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

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

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

‘Miss?’

‘Go now, Miss Barry’s. Mr Crossan’s.’

‘Can’t I stay with my brother?’

‘No you cannot.’

‘Please Miss.’

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

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

Are you?

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

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

But not in any books written by twins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Separates from their shadow?’ Mrs Quinty says.

‘Yes.’

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

Chapter 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well? How was it?’

‘Fine,’ Aeney said.

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

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

‘Aeney, let me in. Aeney?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

That material was deep.

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

And he triumphs.

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

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

Reader, he does, even the World’s Most Bountiful Imagination, the Inimitable, needed a little of the Irish. And it works too; Charles Dickens isn’t back in London two days, size 8 walking brogues not yet dry by the fire, overcoat still smelling of turf smoke and Clonakilty blood pudding, when he begins ruminating on a dark stone house. He sits in his study, says to himself: twenty minutes to nine. Stop the clocks. Twenty minutes to nine. That’s all it takes. That detail is all he needs. Good man, Jeremiah. Thank you, Stokeses of Mac Curtain Street. Because now, Boz O Boz, Charles sucks a segment of orange in attempt number 37 to clear his palate of the Cork fry, spits a good-sized pip, ping, into the metal bin beside his desk, picks up his quill and creates Philip Pirrip.

‘Is that true, Ruth?’ Mrs Quinty asked, eyes enormous and brows lifted, missing altogether the point of stories.

For three years Mr MacGhiolla came to Ashcroft. The mark he left on our narrative was in my father’s mind. He made my father believe this was a country apart. He made him think it could be Paradise. And Mr MacGhiolla was the one who first inspired Virgil to think of writing.

Everything that followed flowed down the river from that.

Did you ever see how fast a river runs?

Maybe you did. Maybe you stood once on the banks in late springtime when the rains are running off the hills and the whole country is sort of flowing away faster than anything you can imagine. Maybe when you were small like Aeney and me you pulled the branches off ash trees and threw them on to the Shannon just to watch the whish and pull of the riverwaters, the way the branch landed on the moving world and went faster than your eye told you it could, faster and swirlier, bobbing and twisting before easefully floating just for a bit and going under and coming up again black and slick and smaller now flowing away off into the for ever after.

Grandfather Abraham went to meet the Reverend one afternoon in June when the salmon were running. He had finished writing The Salmon in Ireland the previous evening and sent it, wrapped in brown paper and tied with fishing line, to Messrs Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, Broadway House, 68–74 Carter Lane, London, E.C. He walked out with the inner lightness of an author who has delivered. He wore a green tweed with flap pockets, cast into the river at Rosnaree, began his heart attack, and entered the Afterlife just after his fly was taken.

Chapter 16

I have a suitor. His name is Vincent Cunningham.

Because I have Something, because I am Plain Ruth Swain and Snoot Ruth and bedbound and read too much, because I don’t go outside, because I am the pale untannable oddment of a freckled river child and there could be no right reason for a suitor as sweet as Vincent Cunningham to choose me, you might already have supposed there is something wrong with him. There is. He’s got that thing Mr Quayle has in Bleak House, a power of indiscriminate admiration. To him everything is a little bit luminary. Everything is fantastic and I it seems am beautiful.

That’s just mad.

As Margaret Crowe says, That boy is Un-real.

He first proposed to me when I was eight. Having little time during Small Break, and the yard of Faha N.S. not being listed on Most Romantic Spots for Lovers in Ireland, he chose the direct approach.

‘Ruthie, will you marry me?’

‘No.’

Like with Estella, and cream crackers, I thought it best to just snap his heart across. Otherwise there are all these messy fragments. To underline my position I added a deep frown, a shocked shake of my head, a sharp turn on my patent-leather shoes and the quickest possible walk across the yard.

But Vincent Cunningham being Vincent Cunningham he took encouragement in that, and set out off on a course of Distant Loving, which I think is in Ovid, and in the Primary School Edition must include putting Lovehearts in your pencilcase, tangled daisies in the pocket of your duffelcoat and writing the Adored One’s initials on the inside of your wrist where the lads won’t see it during Football.

He proposed again when he was ten, only slightly less directly. This time we were walking home from school. At least I was walking in the direction of home, he was walking in the exact opposite direction of his, a fact of which I took no notice at the time.

‘Ruthie,’ he said, ‘when we’re older, do you think you’ll like me?’

‘No.’

He nodded his Vincent Cunningham nod, like he’d expected that answer, like Ovid had already covered that and counselled the next approach should be: ‘Okay.’

Just that, and Walk Alongside Her in Perfect Quiet, which to give him credit he did beautifully right until we got to our gate and then he blew it by going pink-faced and frowny and boy-combustible, toeing a little urgent hole into the gravel, studying the excavation and not looking up as he said, ‘Well, I’ll love you.’

‘Vincent Cunningham.’

‘Yes?’ His eyes didn’t come up. They too are brown as hazelnuts. But he kept them down, reviewing the hole he’d made.

‘Don’t be silly.’

I didn’t mean it to sound like that. Some things happen before you’ve thought them through, the way Seamus Mac slashes the flowers off the fuchsia with a length of hydro-air pipe when he’s going for the cows. The smashed red blossoms are strewn all along the road making you think that’s why they call them Tears of God.

‘Okay,’ he said, like he was saying Fair Enough, and it hadn’t mattered at all, and he had to hurry home anyway because there was an Under-12s match in the park that evening, which there was and at it I heard later he played Out of his Skin, throwing himself into tackles, Most Valuable Player and whatever other medals they give out, until one of the over-age Quilty lads came over and broke his leg.

After that his suiting went underground. In the Tech when it was discovered I was in fact useless, Nul Points, in Maths, he came to the house and gave me classes. His knees tried to do some suiting then. So did his Pythagoras. Because Vincent Cunningham helped Dad on weekends and in the summer holidays and because he could drive a tractor at fourteen he was in and out of our house and yard and only sometimes would he let loose his Ruth-I-Want-To-Marry-You look, the way smouldering boys can, just to let me know it was still there. It was a little W.B. Yeats Syndrome who, until he was fifty, proposed to Maud Gonne every couple of weeks even though she said no way no how, was addicted to unsuitables, and her name was Maud.

So now here we are, Vincent Cunningham grown streaky tall with mad long eyelashes over the hazelnuts, a nature sweet as anything, and two years of Engineering among the micro-skirts in Galway failing to budge him from his eight-year-old certainty.

The thing is, the more he pursues his line of admiration and wonder and general sweetness the more I find myself being sour. It’s part Swain-contrariness, part Estella Syndrome. I can’t help myself.

‘I look like. . I don’t know what I look like. What do I look like?’

‘You look beautiful.’

‘There are no beautiful women writers.’

‘Yes there are.’

No there aren’t. Well, except for Edna O’Brien, who is actually a kind of genius and gained my undying admiration when she said plots are for precocious schoolboys (Book 2,738, Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, 7th Series, Secker & Warburg, London).

‘Here, look at Emily Dickinson,’ I said, and showed him the passport-sized photo on the back cover of the Collected Poems. ‘Her face, two prunes in porridge.’

‘I don’t know, I think she looks nice,’ he said.

‘Nice?’

‘She does. She looks interesting.’

Reader, pick any Brontë. Any one, doesn’t matter. What do you see? You see intelligence, you see an observer, you see distance, you don’t see beauty. Look at Maria Edgeworth, Mrs Gaskell. Look at Edith Wharton, she’s Henry James in a dress. Henry called Edith the Angel of Devastation, which is not exactly Top Score in the Feminine Charms department. Agatha Christie is a perfect match for Alastair Sim when he was playing Miss Fritton in the Tesco box-set of the old St Trinian’s. You can’t be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you’re beautiful people will be looking at you.

‘I don’t care. You are beautiful,’ Vincent Cunningham says, and with those three words firmly keeping his place in the Least Likely Irishman. Even I think I must have invented him.

‘You’re a hopeless idiot.’

‘I know.’ He smiles. He sits here beside the bed and his whole big face just beams. It’s ridiculous how happy he can be. It runs in the Cunninghams. His father is a Stop-Go man for the Council. Johnny Cunningham appears around the county wherever they’re doing roadworks, sets up with his big red and green lollipop and when he makes the traffic flow he gives a thumbs-up and shines the same smile. For some people the world is just heaven.

Vincent was in the same class as Aeney once. He sat behind him in Mr Crossan’s, and for a while became his only friend. He’s thin and made up of angles. If you had to draw him using only straight lines you could. Even his hair is straight. It’s a little brown hedge rising evenly off the top of his intelligence. According to him I brought him to Literature. He says it like it’s this far-distant place and there was no way he would find out how to get there if it wasn’t for me talking about some book I’d read and him going off to find it. Of course once I knew that I started intentionally mentioning some of the Obscures. That’s part MacCarroll and part Impossible Standard. I’d say I read a great story by Montague Rhodes James, ‘A School Story’ (Book 555, The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, Oxford), which told of a man found dead in his bed with the mark of a horseshoe on his forehead, and Vincent would head off, driving Eleanor Pender potty in the Mobile Library until she tracked it down and he’d read it and come hurrying back up the stairs here to say you were right Ruth, that was a good one.

‘Which one was that?’

‘ “A School Story”. You remember. The horseshoe on the forehead.’

‘That one? I’ve forgotten all about that one. I’m reading Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett now.’

Goodness provokes bitchiness. It’s mathematical. It’s somewhere in the human genes. Any number of lovely people are married to horrible ones. Read Middlemarch (Book 989, George Eliot, Penguin Classics, London) if you don’t believe me. There’s something in me that can’t just let it be. Goodness is a tidy bow you just can’t help wanting to pull loose.

Besides, there’s the added complication: I’m not well. If I wasn’t, if I wasn’t the Number One Patient in the parish from the family that has already been visited by Doom, would he still be coming calling? Am I Vincent Cunningham’s path to Sainthood? You see, you just can’t trust goodness.

Sometimes after he’s gone I’ve wondered what it would be like to slip into a different story and actually end up being Mrs Vincent Cunningham. You know, Chapter XXXVIII, ‘Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had, he and I, the parson and clerk were alone present.’ (Book 789, Jane Eyre, Penguin Classics, London.)

Cunningham is a bad surname, but it’s not dreadful. Not as bad say as Bigg-Wither. Mr Bigg-Wither (not kidding) was Jane Austen’s suitor. He fell in love with the sharp bonnet-pinched look, was very partial to one flattened front hair curl, and tiny black eyes. He pulled in his person and fluffed out his whiskers to propose to her.

Now that took courage. You have to grant him that. Proposing to Jane Austen was no walk in the park, was in the same league as Jerry Twomey proposing to Niamh ni Eochadha who had the face and manners of a blackthorn. Still, Bigg-Wither went through with it. He got out his proposal.

And Jane Austen accepted. Honestly, she did. She was fiancé-ed. She did her best impression of a Jane Austen smile then retired straight away to bed. Up in the bed she lay in her big nightie and couldn’t sleep, not, surprisingly enough, because of the bonnet, but because of the suffocating way the name Bigg-Wither sat on her. That, and the thought of giving birth to little Bigg-Withers.

The following morning when she came down to him negotiating his toast and marmalade in past the whiskers, she said, ‘I cannot be a Bigg-Wither,’ or words to that effect, the engagement was off, and all the world’s Readers sighed with relief. Because a happy Jane Austen would have been useless in the World Literature stakes.

One day, to advance his suitoring, Vincent leaned forward to the bed, raindrops sitting on the hedge of his hair, and told me that Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved nurse was a Cunningham.

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there’s something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: ‘When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.’ And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That’s the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world.

For Vincent, bringing me the news of the Cunningham connection was the same as bringing me chocolates. He sat there by the bed looking as happy as, well, a Cunningham. He’d been reading up on RLS (as an engineer Vincent used the Internet; it’s slow and dial-up here, the minister is still Rolling Out broadband, but he must be Rolling It Out around his own house, Paddy Carroll says) and it had taken Vincent hours but he’d gathered up a fair bit of RLS knowledge and even learned off a bit of The Land of Counterpane in which RLS is sick in bed and plays with toy soldiers in an imaginary world on his blankets.

‘Aeney had soldiers,’ he said. ‘I remember them. He kept them in a biscuit tin. And he had a farm in there. Do you remember? Little plastic cattle and horses and pigs and things.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘He had fences too, didn’t he, and. .’

I didn’t say anything.

‘I’m an idiot,’ he said after a little while.

Give me credit. I know this is when I’m supposed to say, ‘No, Vincent, you’re not, not at all,’ and take his hand nineteenth-century-style and let the moment be a little bridge between us, but of course I didn’t. You can’t go encouraging the Vincent Cunninghams of the world because the truth is boys can fall deeper in love than girls, they’re a lot bigger and heavier and they can fall much further and harder and when they hit the ground of reality there’s just this terrible splosh that some other woman is going to have to come along and try to put back into the bottle.

‘RLS,’ he said, getting back to safer ground after another while. ‘The chest wasn’t great with him.’

Clare people don’t like to be too blunt.

‘He had tuberculosis, Vincent,’ I said (Book 684, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, two volumes, Thomas Graham Balfour, Methuen, London). My father only had a falling-apart second-hand Volume Two, a book that has been to sea, has water-buckled pages, two Chapter Fours, and smells of Scotland.

‘Still, he bought four hundred acres in Upolu, Samoa,’ Vincent said. The Cunninghams are addicted to looking on the bright side.

‘He fell in love with a Fanny,’ I told him.

He allowed that a moment.

‘When he went to live there he took the name Tusitala. It means Teller of Tales,’ he said, smiling like this was a deeper layer of chocolates.

‘So did Keats.’

‘Took the same name? Wow.’

‘Loved a Fanny.’

‘Oh.’

The rain tattooed the skylight while his brain went back a few Windows on the search, then he remembered: ‘He was supposed to design lighthouses.’

‘His father did.’

‘So he was a sort of engineer really,’ he said triumphantly, having completed his own feat of mental engineering, connecting Vincent Cunningham to RLS and so to me. This kind of thing doesn’t feature in Ovid, but it will in Vincent’s Way if I ever get to write it.

He was just too happy-looking then so I said, ‘He hated engineering.’

There was no coming back from that. He sat quiet for a bit and I lay back against the awful pillows and thought Ruth Swain you’re horrible. And the rain fell some more and Vincent studied his hands in his lap, until at last I said: ‘When he died on the island on Samoa they cleared a path through the jungle all the way up to Mount Vaea so that he could be buried on the summit and see the sea. So I suppose there was some engineering in that.’

And Vincent said, ‘Ruth Swain,’ just that, just Ruth Swain, and he shook his long head like I was a wonder of some class and his face broke into this big smile he has like something was mended or Hope Renewed or I’d actually kissed him.

Un-real.

Chapter 17

My father loved Aeney more than anything in the world. I’m allowed to say that. I’m not saying it out of hurt or disappointment or to undo some twist in my heart. I’m not saying it in a Bitch-of-the-Brouders God-Forgive-Me way, back of the hand covering the mouth, eyes wide and a hot whisper spreading some viciousness sideways into the world. I’m saying it because it’s true and because you’ll need to understand that. Aeney was a magical boy. I knew. We all knew. Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this Ah, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling why am I so ordinary?, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.

Aeney’s shining started Day One. He swam down the River Mam ahead of me and when he was landed he landed in the amazed wet eyes of my father. He was lifted gleaming in the gentling giant arms of Theresa Dowling, District Nurse, and she said There now and smiled the big dimple smile she has even though Aeney had started crying. He cried as if crying was a language he alone knew and in it there was something urgent he needed to say. Not the bumping rocking in the plump boat-hams of the District Nurse, not the view he was carried to of the swirling Shannon, not the first super-delicate cradling of Dad nor the warm damp breast of Mam stopped him. In the family legend, Aeney cried until I swam downriver after him, until Theresa Dowling said Oh and out I came, Australian front-crawling, red and gasping and apparently particularly hairy. Then he stopped.

Because, just like his father, our father was not young when we were born, there was an extra-ness to the joy. It’s not that we were unexpected, it’s that until his children were in his arms he hadn’t actually gotten further than the imagining of us. He was a poet, and the least practical man in the world. And a baby is a practical thing.

Two babies, well.

Right away Aeney was better at things than me. He knew the first skill of babies, Put On Weight, and thrived into early handsomeness before he was one year old. He was the kind of baby people peered in at. He was Number One Baby at Mass. Our first Christmas Maureen Pender wanted him to play Jesus on the altar, and he only lost out because Josephine Carr on the committee disqualified him saying Jesus was not a twin and put forward her tiny three-year-old Peter who God Bless Him she must have been feeding birdfood because he ended up not growing at all, playing the Faha Jesus until he was five, and is a trainee jockey above in Coolmore now.

Aeney had the golden hair nearly right away. His eyes blued. We both have the same eyes, but his grew blue as our father’s, as if he’d swam up through some underworld Mediterranean and some of it glinted still in the pools of his eyes.

How do you capture a brother as elusive as Aeney? How do you capture someone who was always slipping away?

His favourite foods, apples, Cheddar cheese, purple Cadbury’s Roses, Petit Filous.

His favourite colour, red.

His favourite sound, the singing of the cuckoo when it came, and which he always wanted to be first to hear, and for which he would go hunting by Ryan’s and McInerney’s, but would always be beaten by Francie Fahy who held the title: First in Faha to Hear the Cuckoo. But as Jimmy Mac says, Francie had family connections there.

Aeney’s favourite clothes, a pair of muddy blue no-brand runners whose laces were so stained you couldn’t tell they were once white except for the places beneath the eye-hole flap, a pair of khaki trousers whose knees Nan patched so many times they looked padded, a red jumper that was two sizes too big for him and which he wore holding the cuffs that came halfway down his palms. The cuffs frayed from being held and every so often Mam trimmed back the strands. He wore the jumper again and they frayed again and she trimmed them again but she never threw it out. He liked holding on to something. When he was small he held the label inside his pillowcase when he slept. Only I know that. I was not a sleeper. His hand in sleep searched to find it. He would take the label between thumb and forefinger and just move it slightly against itself, over and back, as if the smallest friction was sufficient, as if with that he knew he was still in the world.

His favourite thing to do, run. He’s a flier, Mr Mac said the year he formed the new Community Games Committee and decided Faha was going to be Put on the Map. Aeney was going in the Under-Eights on Honan’s field.

At that stage it was generally presumed that I was not someone who was going to Put Faha on the Map and so once the races started I was to share with Dympna Looney the important job of Holding the Ribbon at the finish line, which I didn’t think very important but my father said was Homeric, and though I didn’t know what that meant it made me feel a little flush of importance.

‘Breasting the ribbon, Ruthie,’ he said, ‘you’re the line between one world and another.’

He could say things like that. He could say things no other dad could say, and because parents are mysterious anyhow, because they belong in another world, you don’t ask, you just nod and feel you’ve entered a little bit into the mystery yourself.

The field was lined with these triangular flags Margaret Crowe had cut out of a pale-blue bolt of Virgin Mary cloth she’d got from Bowsey Casey’s and Rory Crowley had hand-painted a big lop-sided oval on the cow-plopped field. There, various of our able-bodied were desporting themselves as Homer says, which in this case meant doing Serious Stretches and running back and forth in little show-offy dashes they’d seen on RTE Olympic coverage with Patrick Clohessy alongside doing demented Jimmy McGee commentary into an empty Coke bottle. The whole clan of the McInerneys were there, tearing around like brown-nosed bluebottles, no hope that a single one of them would ever run in a straight line.

In order to put Faha on the map the entire parish showed up. Jesus Mary and Joseph Carty, Father Tipp, Monica Mac, Tommy Fitz, Jimmy Mac, the Major, the Saint Murphys, Vincent Cunningham and his father Johnny, John Paul Eustace in his navy suit, even Saddam. Everyone gathered in good-humoured admiration of their own seed and breed as Marty Mungovan says. Honan’s cows were exiled to a rushy wasteground where a loose string of electric fence kept them, looking on with mournful moo-faces or maybe they were cow-smiling that the plenitude of their dungs in the running track had supplied the setting with bountiful midges and flies. In Faha Community Games you ran with your mouth closed.

Dad was always awkward in scenes like this. He was a Swain and Swains are not for joining in. They’re not part of the General Population somehow. There’s this little remove, this stepped-back quality that means Dad is going to be the one over at the edge of the field. While Mam is in there helping out, getting Mona Halvey’s wheelchair across the tufted ground, selling Draw tickets, filling little plastic cups with MiWadi and trying to keep the McInerneys from drinking them all before the games begin, Dad is over on his own, he’s in red corduroy trousers that are seriously baggy and bunch at his waist where the belt tries to make them fit, he wears two shirts instead of a jacket. His silvery hair is grown long and occasionally wild strands fly in the wind. But he doesn’t care at all. He has a book with him. It’s going to appear to those who don’t know him that he doesn’t want to be part of this, that he holds himself apart on purpose and that it comes from the fact that he’s not one of them.

The truth is, he’s not one of anything or anyone. It’s not pride, it’s not even a choice. There’s a skill he doesn’t have, and as he stands on the edge of the field his heart must fall a little when he looks up from a page and realises his children don’t have it either.

Aeney is having his paper number pinned on. Mr Mac is down on one knee telling him tactics for seven year olds. I’m getting ready to unroll the ribbon when Jane Bitch of the Brouders, God-forgive-me, says tell your brother not to win. Noelie Hegarty is to win because his baby brother Sean died. She has her little entourage with her, a white ankle-sock brigade of holy head-tossers. Their aim is to out-nun Mother Teresa.

‘I’ll tell him no such thing.’

‘Then I will,’ she says, and flounces across the field to him.

I’m holding the ribbon taut when Aeney comes running. I can see the wild delight in his eyes. He’s ahead of the rest of the field, legs flashing so superfast you think he’ll have to fall down, running so quickly that everyone watching him smiles. You can’t help yourself. He’s going so fast his number flies off. There’s actual July sunlight glancing off his hair. The whole parish roars him on. He’s coming up the not-so-straight straight, chest out and his little arms flashing, and he can see me just ahead holding the ribbon. Ribbon-holders are not supposed to cheer, but inside the roar I do a little go on Aeney go on Aeney and the ribbon wavers a little until Dympna gives me her future-headmistress look and tugs it taut.

And then Aeney’s going in slow motion.

Slow and slower still.

And Noelie Hegarty is coming up alongside him.

And Noelie Hegarty is going past him.

Come on Aeney.

But he doesn’t. Noelie Hegarty breasts the ribbon.

Afterwards, Jane Brouder goes and says something to Aeney, she talks to him like they’re New Best Friends, and then she walks past me, pout-and-button nose raised to ten o’ clock and ass eloquent.

Dad said well done to Aeney. He said it quietly, firmly, and the way he looked at him he seemed to be seeing deeper, as if the two of them shared some secret and it was a Swain thing.

The following year Aeney didn’t run. He only liked running on his own after that, after that he only ran by the river. Dad never said Aeney, you should take part in races, or You have to, he never said a thing, never showed any disappointment, but, years later, folded carefully in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, I found the creased rectangle of Aeney’s paper number that had fallen off that day.

Aeney preferred outdoors to indoors. He didn’t freckle, he tanned, which if you ask me is a clear sign of being Chosen. It’s up there with perfect hair and teeth that actually fit inside your mouth. Aeney climbed every tree he could find. I think it was Jim Hawkins Syndrome, wanting to be Up Top in the crow’s nest in the Hispaniola. I’d stand below on the ground and watch him work his way up into the big chestnut at the gate into the Long Meadow. If the tree didn’t end, if there wasn’t a highest branch, I think he’d be climbing upwards still. That’s my brother. I’d lose him in the leaf canopy and then be sitting below reading a book, every so often craning my neck to look up the way you look when a bird disappears into a tree but sings still. He wasn’t a bird though; often out of the treetop I’d hear this sudden clatter and quick-snapping and a cry, all instantaneous, and I’d drop the book and shout out his name and look up and not see him but see the tree come alive somewhere above, a flutter of leaves descending, a white-snapped branch sailing down, and Aeney unseen coming crash spin grab-falling through the upper greenery, a kind of antic acrobatics bred in certain boys in which danger is neither seen nor felt. He falls fifteen feet inside the tree, but clings on somewhere, I see only the blue runners dangling for a moment, pedalling the air until they find the branch.

‘Aeney? Aeney, are you okay?’

I hear him laughing. Up in the tree he’s laughing. Then he calls down, ‘Yeah.’ And he climbs upwards again. He climbs like he’s in his own inner Duffy’s Circus and somewhere up here is the glittering girl. He climbs until he must be out in the sky and see the river from above.

God, Pauline Dempsey said, has His hand on certain people’s shoulders.

He’d be better covering knees, Nan said.

Despite Nan’s knee-patching, by the time Aeney was seven both of his knees bore raised wrinkly scars in crescent shapes. He showed me but he didn’t care. Blood-crusted, pebble-embedded, skin-flapped, and often an iodined purplish blue, on his knees were written his adventures. I thought of that one day years later in Mrs Quinty’s class when we read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about the tremendous fish. The fish had escaped many hooks but bore their marks. He was caught at last. (Book 2,993, Collected Poems, Elizabeth Bishop, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.) But that fish was old.

The first time Dad took Aeney fishing Dad didn’t know what was going to happen. I was asked if I wanted to go, but by then I was already working on my Twin Theory, that if one twin loves the outdoors the other loves the indoors, one likes books the other music, one red the other black. The back pages of my copies had whole lists. So when Aeney said yes to fishing I said no. I didn’t know then the history of salmon in the Swains, I hadn’t seen Grandfather’s Salmon Journals, read The Salmon in Ireland, or thought my ability to remember everything, to amass knowledge, was in any way connected to fish.

My father by that stage was already Elsewhere. He was already writing the poems that were coming into his head now like weird butterflies in March, already farming the fourteen acres of the worst land in Ireland, growing rushes and puddles and rearing the thinnest Friesian ladies to ever make an appearance at Clare Marts. I should have known something when he took out the fishing rod. I should have seen in the way he assembled it, the way he stood in the front garden practising a cast, throwing a line through the midge-veils trying to hook the invisible, that salmon fishing was serious business.

So too was starvation. You have no money but you have a river full of fish passing your front door. You figure it out.

Dad loved Aeney more than anything, but he couldn’t show it. He just couldn’t. There’s a Code for fathers in Ireland. Maybe it’s everywhere, I don’t know, I haven’t cracked it. My father followed the Code. He was careful about his children, he didn’t want to ruin us though somehow felt sure he would. He thought Aeney and I were marvels but he didn’t want to make a mistake. Maybe he thought Abraham was watching. So he’d probably thought about it for a long time before he came in from the casting and decided he should go fishing with Aeney. Dad could be sudden like that. He couldn’t help it. It’s the nature of Poets. You don’t believe me, look up William Blake, say hello to those impulses, go meet Mr John Donne in a dark church some time, spend a summer’s day with young William Butler, Ace Butterfly-catcher.

Dad shook Aeney awake early in the morning, said, ‘Come on.’

I lay in my boat-bed listening to them whispering downstairs at breakfast, the soft rubbery stamping as they put on their wellies, the small rattle of the tin container that held the flies, the hard fallback clack of the latch when they went out the door.

I should have gone.

At that moment I knew I should have gone. But I was addicted to my own cleverness and wouldn’t go round twin theory.

In families it’s hard to trace the story. If you’re in it the Plot Points aren’t clearly marked. You don’t know when things turn until much later. You think each day is pretty much as dull as any other, and if there is something happening it’s not happening in your family and it’s definitely not happening in Faha. You think your own oddness is normal. You think Nan harvesting a lifetime of Clare Champions is normal. You think having a grandfather who published a book but didn’t want his name on it is normal, having a father who wants to be a poet but has to be a farmer, who has no clue about farming, and won’t publish any poems, all Normal.

My father and Aeney didn’t catch a salmon that day. They caught some other fish. The thing that happened was not about the catch. It wasn’t about a father and son standing on the Shannon riverbank, it wasn’t Now listen here, Son, it wasn’t directed by Robert Redford or lit gorgeously like A River Runs Through It, it wasn’t that my father opened his heart and said I think my life has been a colossal mistake, that every poem I write fails, that we have no money, or that Aeney told him he had a secret crush on Jane Brouder. What happened was at first neither discernible nor understood.

It was just this: that day my brother Aeney fell in love with the river.

Chapter 18

When Grandfather Abraham was gone Grandmother had a brief moment of Victory, as if by outliving him she could lay down her cards and declare that she’d finally won the Game of Marriage. It wasn’t until the long evenings of the following winter, hounds gnawing on the stringy twines of the Indian rug and developing the first stages of what my father said was curry-scented incontinence, sash windows rattling like denture laughter, and the fire blowing down these great black puffs, that she realised he might be the one laughing now.

The aunts were away in the kind of school where books are balanced on your head. Esther, the eldest, would graduate in a year and go directly into The Bank. It was how it was done in those days. If you were smart and proper like Esther and could wear a skirt and blouse and had been trained by a crack squadron of nuns to sit perfectly upright and keep your knees together and your hair in a really really really tight bun you could be Mr Enright’s Secretary. You could live in a flat in Rathmines and own a Raleigh Ladies’ Bicycle, spend your evenings with Persil washing powder and a Philips steam iron and head into Dublin in the mornings fresh as Palmolive. The Sixties were starting then, but not in Ireland. Maybe the Ministers were thinking of Rolling Out the new era but they had to run it by the Censorship Board, and anyway Aunt Esther was always a few decades behind. Poor thing, she was of a nervous disposition and couldn’t bear the thought of things not being just so. Mr Enright never had a pencil out of place. Banks in those days were pretty much like churches; you put on your best clothes to go into them, and a Banker was a Very Good Catch. Aunt Esther had her hopes I suppose, but Mr Enright realised he’d ruin a perfectly excellent secretary by marrying her. Instead he chose the deeply unsuitable daughter of the bank’s president and took up golf. Aunt Esther attended the wedding. When I think of her I think of her as the tall girl in the back of the wedding photos, the big-boned one with the abashed air who has tirelessly shopped for just the right dress for the occasion but who says Yes of course when the photographer suggests maybe a better position for her would be in the third row. Aunt Esther attended a lot of weddings, I think, and only gradually did the corroding disappointment of the world work its way into her soul. Hope, you see, takes a long time to die. When we visited her in St Jude’s, the nursing home that would later change its name to Windermere and eventually welcome Aunt Daphne, Aunt Esther had to hold on to her hands tightly they shook so much. She wore a pale-blue cardigan and white blouse with the cuffs just showing and a white linen handkerchief pressed in next to her left wrist. She couldn’t keep her head still, it sort of juddered like these bolts of electricity were hitting it but she kept fighting them, she kept trying to keep herself still and proper and Receive her brother’s children because that was the right thing to do and I just stood there with Aeney beside our father seeing Dad’s eyes glass up and thinking it was pretty much the definition of Impossible for a woman suffering this badly to have such grace.

Daphne and Penelope had each other. They were never a problem to Grandmother. They were their own mini-company and, as I said, from early on they Selected their own Society and shut the door.

But what was Grandmother to do with Virgil? Without his father she feared her son would, well, I’m not sure what she feared exactly, but considering Abraham and considering The Reverend, maybe it was safe to suppose something Swain-odd. By that stage Ashcroft was in the first stages of dilapidation. It’s another truth universally acknowledged that a woman without a husband suddenly notices the frailties of her accommodation. She knew it hadn’t happened overnight but she woke one morning and noticed that dry, wet and medium damp rot had settled throughout the house, that paint was leaving the upper walls of the drawing room in alarmingly large bubbled flakes, the floorboards in the foyer were being eaten at their ends, the piano lid had a subtle but certain buckle and the guest-room chimney was lying out in the middle of the Front Circle. So while she figured out what to do with Virgil she told him to attend to these.

That was Grandmother’s style. Attend to these please, Virgil. And off out the door with her, doing the Kittering version of Queen Victoria, and keeping her nose tilted up just enough to keep breathing in sweet denial.

Clearly she had never met my father.

Two things were certain. One, that he would set about the tasks with that fierce boy-concentration I remember seeing in Aeney, and two, that he would fail hopelessly. Still, he banged and sawed, he painted over the dark stains coming on the walls and he stuffed the gaps between the window sashes with newspaper.

Ashcroft was in a time warp. I’m not sure it was even in this country. Whenever my father told of it the story was always in bits and pieces, fragments he’d drop into some telling, but the moment I heard them I was already creating the imagined version. The version where the boy is expected to become the man in the big house that’s falling down and where these beefy Meath-men Gaffney and Boucher come up the drive with ladders tied to the top of their van and scratch their heads that there are still people living like this in Ireland. The men are served tea and biscuits in the back kitchen, but they’re served it in Aynsley china cups with hairline cracks in them. My father does the serving. He’s Little Lord Swain I suppose. His clothes come from Switzers in Dublin which is Top Notch but they’re threadbare and wrong-sized, and to Messrs Gaffney and Boucher eccentric. He wears slippers inside the house and out and his red-stockinged toes peek through. He has three layers of shirt, some with collars some without, none tucked in. He has that English kind of hair that is too unruly for a comb and is now speckled with paint but he seems not to mind in the slightest. While he brews the tea on the Aga the men talk of things in Meath and my father stands reading a book. He has no idea what they’re talking about, they may as well have been telling the news from Brobdingnag. I’ve looked for this scene in Elizabeth Bowen (Book 1,365, The Last September; Book 1,366, The Death of the Heart, Anchor, New York) and in William Trevor (Book 1,976, The Collected Stories, Penguin, London) and Molly Keane (Book 1,876, Good Behaviour, Virago, London) and in Birchwood (Book 1,973, John Banville, W.W. Norton, New York) but I’ve never quite found it, and so have to believe my father didn’t invent it, it must be true; he stands reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, holding the book in his left hand while with his right he pours the tea, his eyes not leaving the page. This act stops the men’s talk. Oddball they expect him to be, he’s a Swain in Ashcroft, but tea-pouring and Hemingway has a certain skill to it they recognise. That’s what Lost-in-a-Book looks like they’re realising, and they have a kind of natural countrymen’s appreciation. When Boucher asks my father why he’s not at school Virgil doesn’t stop reading, he’s feeling the pain of Jake Barnes and the fascination of Lady Brett Ashley. He’s standing in the damp basement kitchen of Ashcroft on an overcast summer’s day but he’s on his way to the boiling-hot bullfights in Pamplona, and so without taking his eyes from the page says, because I’m going to be a writer.

Teenage boys can be insufferable with certainty. It’s true. It’s their horror moans, Margaret Crowe says.

But Virgil was right in one way. There was no point in his going to school. He’d have to pretend he didn’t know as much as he did. School in Ireland back then was pretty much a priest and civil-servant factory depending on your proclivities. Rejects were sent into trade, because money and making money were generally frowned upon. If you failed at the Higher Subjects and didn’t show any skill at Maths and Latin you were sent into Commerce, which was basically a dirty word back then. I guess it took half a century to reverse this, to get to the place where the Maths and Latin boys were the lower division and a newsagent like Seanie O could buy four hotels in Bulgaria and like a Lesser Dictator drive through Faha in a black-windowed Land Rover. Either way my father was not going to school.

But he was next to useless around the house. For a time Grandmother didn’t notice, or she pretended not to. To keep him busy she gave him chores.

‘The banister, Virgil, will you see to it?’

‘Virgil, the door to the guest room on the upper landing,’ she said in passing, handing him the porcelain knob that had come off in her hand.

Things like that. They were strangers to each other and were living in the big vacuum that came after Abraham. It happens in the Bible too, a big character leaves and there’s a natural hole while God figures out who He’s going to send on next. In the Bible Abraham dies when he’s 175 years old. He was a good character and God didn’t want to let him go. After a while He sent on Esau. He was a doozie. When he first came forth, it says, he was red all over like a hairy garment.

I’m just saying.

Dad was able to fix nothing but between chapters he tried. There was just him and his mother rambling around in the big house then.

‘Virgil, be a dear and bury Sarsfield.’

History had turned violent again and Mr MacGhiolla with a special gleam in his eyes had departed for the North. He left my father books with trapped strands of red hair and a faint sulphuric whiff of nationalism trapped within the pages.

My father and his mother lived on in dust and dilapidation, ate little nothing meals of Branston Pickle on toast, tinned kippers, the unfortunately named Bird’s Custard, and had BBC radio crackling on in the background. Grandmother didn’t believe things should have Eat Before dates. She didn’t believe things went off until well after you had cut off the blue parts and the parts that were furred, and even then there was always a portion that was perfectly fine, Virgil. Perfectly fine. Eat Before dates were all nonsense as far as she was concerned, a conspiracy of shopkeepers to fool the less discerning into purchases. Here was some Marmite that was supposed to be gone off a year ago. But it was Perfectly Fine. Marmite cannot go off, Virgil. Her shopping was virtually non-existent, and without speaking of it there developed inside Ashcroft a strategy of improvisation; you looked in the cupboard and you chose a tin of something, you opened it and sniffed. If you were still standing you went ahead. There was still a large wine cellar, and Grandmother began on the oldest bottles, reasoning, like your narrator, that she could be dead before she reached the present. In Abraham’s study my father found a vast supply of cigarettes, and in the autumn evenings when he read Hemingway at the top of the stairs under the one bulb that was replaced he took up smoking, and almost at once arrived by his father’s side in the battlefields of France.

One summer’s day a banker called Mr Houlihan, for whom I always see Mr Gusher in Bleak House, a flabby gentleman with a moist surface, rang the non-ringing doorbell. He attended a while, turned to consider the fallen chimney in the Front Circle, turned back, dabbed his forehead to no effectiveness, chewed the blubbery excess of his lower lip, rang the non-ringer again, looked up at the ruined majesty of Ashcroft, looked down at the polish of his shoes, knocked on the knocker peremptorily, three firm raps as befitted his station, attended once more, dabbed once more, and was in the process of his third attempt when Virgil came round the side and told him that door didn’t open any more.

Virgil was wearing his pyjamas under a too-big blue blazer of Abraham’s. He brought Mr Houlihan down the steps and in through the basement, passing through the kitchen where Purvis the cat licked the Branston lid and four empty bottles of milk of various period soured the general air, then up the back steps, Mr Houlihan’s shoes squeaking, taking care to put no weight on the fourth from top, arriving into the gloom of the windowless corridor where a lightless lightbulb hung, Virgil leading with the confidence of the blind in a world gone blind, Mr Houlihan feeling his way with a moist horror.

Circuitously then, they arrived in the front hall just inside the same front door and Virgil said, ‘I’ll get Mother.’

Mr Houlihan attended and dabbed and considered the aspect. He had not been inside Ashcroft before. As a boy he had once climbed the orchard wall. He’d once viewed the exotic kingdom it was from the wild grass of the Long Meadow, and once, walking home from the Brothers, Abraham had driven past him in the dusty old Humber that was such a dark brown it looked plum. But now here he was, in Ashcroft, on the bank’s business. He gave a firm down-tug to the bottom of his jacket. Dampness foreshortened it. He chewed at his lips and blinked. In the front hall were two tall mahogany chairs against the wall either side of the front door. They were chairs that no one ever sat on. They were the sort of excess furniture people had in houses like that. These were wedding gifts, one-for-Him, one-for-Her sort of thing, His and Her Majesty kind of chairs with stiff backs and faded embroidered seats that some seamstress had done in the early Louis times. They were the sort of thing French people love, because they’re beautiful and completely impractical and because only French derrières could ever really fit in them. When I saw the Hers one day in Aunt Daphne’s I couldn’t imagine an Irish backside ever sitting on it.

But Mr Houlihan’s did. Perhaps overcome by the anxiety of the occasion, perhaps to escape the squeak of his shoes which seemed to undermine his authority, Mr Houlihan sat up onto the chair.

No sooner had he landed then he realised the proportions of the chair were more decorative than human because his feet did not touch the ground.

‘Mr Houlihan,’ Grandmother boomed.

Grandmother’s English heritage meant that she had that Empire voice, that come-out-of-your-grass-huts-and-give-us-your-treasures-for-our-museums kind of voice. The woman could boom. It was seriously terrifying. Even years later when my father imitated her and she seemed part Margaret Thatcher and part horse Aeney and I were still frightened.

She boomed out his name and walked ahead of him into the drawing room. She didn’t say How do you do and she didn’t ask his business, she just led on. There’s a certain kind of presumption that comes with Kitterings. They can’t help it. They expect people to follow in their wake. Mr Houlihan scrambled to get down out of the chair and followed in his squeaking shoes.

Grandmother took the best seat at the top of the dining table, the window behind her so she was statuesque and mostly bust.

Like Mr Gusher, Mr Houlihan found his moistness getting excessive. He shone. Shining was in itself not problematic and could be interpreted as passionate. But then shining produced a general appearance of actual wetness.

‘Are you hot, Mr Houlihan?’

‘Not at all, no thank you, Mrs Swain.’

‘Kittering-Swain.’

‘Excuse me. Mrs Kittering-Swain. Well, perhaps yes, just a bit. Warm, actually. Hot. Yes. Is it hot in here?’

‘I don’t believe it is.’

The drawing room in summer produced flies. Though the long windows were never opened and my father had stuffed the gap between the sashes with newspaper, the flies found their way. Perhaps they came down the chimney. They lived in the middle air between floor and ceiling and though many died and remained on the floor until dust there always seemed what my father called a general population. Within five minutes they had found the moist peeled onion that was Mr Houlihan. No sooner had he opened his case and taken out a slim file and said, ‘The actual finances, Mrs Kittering-Swain,’ than he had to start batting away at the first of them.

Flies did not dare approach Grandmother.

‘The finances?’

‘Yes, well, Mr Swain didn’t actually. .’ Houlihan ducked below a bluebottle. He paused, gnawed some more on the rubbery consistency of his lower lip. ‘The mortgage that he took on the house. .’ The bluebottle came back at him.

And so it went on. Years later my father made a pantomime of it. He lay on the bed and Aeney and I played the flies. We buzzed our fingers through the air and sought out the florid face of Mr Houlihan as he tried to tell Grandmother that Grandfather had borrowed against the house and not repaid a penny. We flew into Mr Houlihan’s mouth as he asked her to agree to a repayment schedule he had drawn up. We screamed with laughter when Mr Houlihan swallowed a fly and coughed and spat and flapped his fat hands and made big wide bulbs of his eyes. We tickled Mr Houlihan in the place below his ribs where he was helpless to stop and couldn’t finish his sentences except to cry out But the money, Mrs Kittering-Swain, the money! and then he fell off the bed crash! on to the floor and was silent and Aeney and I giggled a bit and then got worried and looked over the edge and down to where Dad lay, his face soaking wet with laughter or tears we couldn’t say.

Chapter 19

Where are you, Aeney?

You slip away from me as you always did. Where are you?

Chapter 20

‘Mrs Quinty, can you see the earth from Heaven?’

‘O now, Ruth.’ Mrs Quinty pulled herself up a bit tighter and clutched the balls of her knees.

‘Can they see us? Right now? Through the roof or through the skylight? What do you think?’

Mrs Quinty doesn’t really like to say.

‘I don’t really like to say, Ruth.’

‘But what’s your opinion?’

‘I really don’t think it’s right to talk about it. And I’ll tell you why.’

‘You believe in Heaven?’

Mrs Quinty took a little sharp inbreath, like the air was bitter but medicinal and had to be taken.

‘Well, can you or can’t you see what’s happening here when you’re there?’

Mrs Quinty made dimples of dismay. She gave herself a little tightening tug and glanced towards the door where she could see into Aeney’s room where Mam had all the washing hanging on chairs and stools because there’s no drying outside now and because despite the rain up here in the sky-rooms is the driest place in Faha and though it looks like a kind of ghost laundry, like that description I read in Seamus Heaney of spirits leaving their clothes on hedges as they went off into the spirit world, like Aeney’s room is this secret Take-off Launching Pad, it’s practical. Mrs Quinty kept looking in there while working her way up to an answer. Maybe she was thinking of an official response. Maybe she was doing her own inner mind-Google and really for the first time looking up Heaven. She didn’t have to go Pindar, Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, Pythagoras, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas. She didn’t have to open some of those books of my father’s, the ones that came from a monastery sale and smell like frankincense or blue cheese, De laudibus divinae sapientiae of Alexander Neckham, the Weltchronik of Rudolf of Ems, the translated Le Miroir du Monde of Gauntier of Metz, composed 1247, who located Paradise precisely ‘at the point where Asia begins’. All those writers who got themselves in a geography-bind trying to explain how it was that Paradise didn’t get washed away during Noah’s Flood. Or those who had to explain that when Heaven was generally considered to be above us that was when they thought the world was flat. Because for the Departed say in, I don’t know, Australia, if they went Up to Heaven they’d likely come up in Leitrim, which might be Paradise to wet-faced welly-men from Drumshambo but would be a holy fright, as Tommy Fitz says, to sun-loving sandal-wearers from Oz. No, Mrs Quinty didn’t have to go from Saint Brendan to Dante, all she did was turn the shining eyes to the rainlight and she was back in Low Babies in Muckross Park College, Dublin, one rainy afternoon looking at a picture of holy people standing on clouds and a white nun saying: ‘Now, girls, this is Heaven.’

Heaven’s specific physics and geography were Unknown, and that was the way it was meant to be.

Until you arrived.

Then, even if you were dim as bat-faced Dennis Delany who couldn’t learn the calendar and spelled his own name Dis, you suddenly understood. The entire workings of the mind of God suddenly became clear to you and you went Ah. Until then, it’s a Mystery.

‘I don’t believe in it,’ I said.

Mrs Quinty returned from Low Babies. ‘O Ruth.’

‘I don’t. Some days I just don’t. I think there’s no point in any of it. It’s just rubbish. It’s just a story. People die and they’re gone. They don’t see you and you never see them again. It’s just a story to lessen the pain.’

Mrs Quinty looked at me. She looked the way you look at a dog who fell in the river and only just made it back to the bank. ‘Maybe it is a story,’ she said at last. ‘But it’s our story, Ruth.’

By the end of that summer in Ashcroft my father had nearly run out of stories. He’d almost read his father’s full library and arrived at last at Moby Dick. The edition I have is a Penguin paperback (Book 2,333, Herman Melville, Penguin, London). It’s been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there’s that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you’ll see.

My father revisited Moby a lot.

Maybe it’s because there’s no other novel in the whole world that better captures the Impossible Standard.

The end of that summer in Ashcroft he was reading Moby, and then, one evening maybe because he was bored, maybe because he was in one of those mad chapters that detail the physiognomy of whales, he went and took down one of Abraham’s unused Salmon Journals, and shortly after, amidst the Havishammy dust and cobwebs of Ashcroft’s non-dining Dining Room, he began a novel. It was set on a ship in the sea.

Now it takes a certain twist of mind to be able to write anything. And another twist to be able to write every day in a house that’s falling down around you with a mother who’s working her way through the wine cellar and a moist Bank Manager who’s expecting At the very least, Mrs Kittering-Swain, a gesture.

My father had both twists. As Matty Nolan said about Father Foley, Poor Man, when he came back with the brown feet after thirty years in Africa, he was Far Gone. Virgil had that power of concentration that he passed on to me. He filled one Salmon Journal and started on the next. He went a bit Marcus Aurelius who (Book 746, Meditations, Penguin Classics, London) said men were born with various mania. Young Marcus’s was, he said, to make a plaything of imaginary events. Virgil Swain meet Marcus. Imaginary events, imaginary people, imaginary places, whatever you’re having yourself. Gold-medal Mania.

I suppose it was just pole-vaulting really, only with a smaller pole.

Point is, he was very Far Gone.

And that’s where he was when they came to take the furniture. Mr Houlihan didn’t come in person. He stayed out at the gates in his car, dabbing and moistening and peering in, blinking the rapid blinks of the obscurely guilty and finding he had chewed his lips into looking like burst sausages in an over-hot pan. Gaffney & Boucher it was that were sent. They parked the lorry in the Front Circle beside the fallen chimney and came in like long-necked birds calling various polite but unanswered hellooos through the house, both of them with the low-slung shoulders and downcast eyes of the deeply apologetic. Grandmother did not appear. They arrived in the foyer and began taking the gold mirrors off the wall. One screw wouldn’t loosen. It would only turn and turn, and Gaffney gave it elbow grease and Meath meatiness and broke a piece of the nineteenth-century artisan moulding getting it free. Boucher shouldered the front door and Ashcroft opened to the daylight for the first time in years. They took the long sideboard (leaving the twin China dogs on guard on the floor), the standing Newgate clock, the embroidered Louis chairs, the studded Chesterfield, four armchairs of stuffing various, huffing and puffing as they moved the long oak dining table that bashed against the door jamb and wouldn’t fit — sideways or backways or anyways, Phil; You’re right there, Michael — and at last had to be left just inside the dining-room door.

At teatime Virgil landed back in this world. He didn’t realise anything had changed until he came downstairs and crossed the front foyer and felt something under his foot. He bent down to pick up the piece of gold moulding. That’s when he saw the mirrors were gone. That’s when he saw the front doors were wide open. He called his mother. She failed to answer. He called her again, this time climbing the stairs, thinking we’ve been robbed and that this had happened when he was whaling just off the coast of Nantucket.

He knocked on Grandmother’s door. He called to her. When he opened the door he saw her slanted across the bed, one arm hanging over the side as if she’d been caught and pulled askew and then had either shaken free or been thrown back. Her face was lopsided, her lip pulled low on one side where the fish-hook had been.

A stroke is not the word for it, the philosopher Donie Downes says. It’s more a Wallop. It’s a flaming wallop somewhere in the inside back of your head. Bang! like that. And you’re switched off same as the Mains is down and you lie there in the Big Quiet silently cursing the closure of Emergency in Ennis General Hospital and hoping Dear God Timmy and Packy are coming. In Dan’s case everything returned to normal, TG, he says (Thank God), except for the compulsion to tell every passing soul in Ryan’s or Nolan’s, Hanway’s, the post office, going in or out of Mass, about the exact nature and dimension of his Wallop.

Grandmother did not recover. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. Maybe once she was transported out the front doors of Ashcroft and was loaded bumpily up across the fumy exhaust of the ambulance, rolled into the grim metal interior and strapped in place, her one imperious eye still good for glaring, maybe she realised she wouldn’t be getting any further in the wine cellar. She had the second stroke. In Faha the word that’s fatally attached to stroke is massive. This one was Massive. To her eternal mortification it was not in some private room with stacked goosedown pillows, elegant bedclothes, and attendants with proper accents. It was in the ambulance, stopped on a narrow bend somewhere near Navan, waiting for skittish young cattle to cross. Her son was sitting alongside her.

Three weeks after Grandmother died, Virgil too left Ashcroft. There was no natural place left for him to fit into the world.

He took Moby Dick and went by bus to Dublin. Two days later he stepped on to a Merchant Navy ship docked on the River Liffey.

Then he went to sea.