Boy and Man. Niall Williams

Josie, sorry. My Josie’s a saint, aren’t you pet? Yes, pet.’

      The Master took his mug and balanced it on the book.

      ‘My point is, real as real they are,’ Ben said. ‘That’s my point.’

      ‘Shsh now, my programme’s back,’ Josie said somewhat abruptly, and regretted her abruptness, and without turning from the screen reached over and put her hand near her husband’s.

      And so they all remained that evening before the television and the fire, sipping strong tea, the husband and wife in the dance of relation, and growing tired in the ordinariness of time. Across from them the older man, like a visitor from another domain, sat with quiet politeness and the vague look of someone hearing everything explained in a foreign language.

      The country singer introduced a guest, Michael Tubridy, the traditional flute player. A tall man with glasses and a brown suit, he appeared bashful in the studio, as if out of his element. He said the piece he would play was an old air with many names but he knew it as ‘Bruach na Carriage Baine’, Bank of the White Stones. He lifted the flute to his lips and played, and when he did he himself seemed to vanish; instead there were western fields at evening, soft rain falling, cattle standing. There was light turning slowly grey and stone walls glistening and the long deep quiet of the land. Grass damp and heavy darkened. Small winds moved, but nothing else. The slow air, both beautiful and mournful, on its melody brought to every room that ghost-scape. The music was ancient and spell-like and while it lasted nothing else was. Josie put her head against Ben’s shoulder. He shut his eyes. Then, a final long note and the air was ended.

      The Master suddenly stood up, as though he had been told something of great importance.

      ‘You all right, Joe?’ Ben asked.

      The Master was standing before the television, and again his chin trembled and he struggled, making a small moan. He balled his fists against his sides and tilted his head upward, as if to keep whatever rose in him from falling out. He turned and left the room.

      The bedroom that was his was small and spare. The ceiling sloped along one side of it where a skylight opened to the night. There was a narrow table and a three-drawer chest. There was a picture of the beach at Inch in Kerry, a long pale tongue of sand and foaming sea. On the table was a black-and-white photograph of him and his wife, Mary, taken on their wedding day. He came into the room and put the book on the bed. Then stood into the skylight and looked out at the rectangle of stars. He did this to compose himself. He was aware of his trembling and tried to breathe through it. He was strange to himself now. He had had to accept so much that was unacceptable. Here he was in this room in a house not his own in a life that didn’t seem his own either. ‘You are here to get better,’ was what Ben Dack kept saying to him whenever he showed upset. ‘You are here to get better.’ But he was not getting better. He was the same, one day after the next. He had whole parts of himself that were blank. He looked at the picture of Mary and sometimes he could remember her. He could remember a dress, pale green and yellow buttons, and the backs of her legs as she turned to walk ahead of him into some room. But then he couldn’t remember her face. Or he had her face in front of him as he woke up, her face as it was in sleep when she was lying beside him, but he could not get his memory to open her eyes. What was the sound of her voice? He tried to hear it, tried to make up phrases she must have said to him, tender or not, tried to put back together a morning, a breakfast, or when he came home after school at four o’clock and what did she say to him? What was her phrase?

      The vacancy in him was a torment. It meant there was nowhere for feeling to harbour. It was one thing to suffer loss, but even grief nurtures the heart. He was a man standing at the skylight waiting for something, anything, to return. Even when he wept, he did not know clearly why. So often he had asked himself, What if I don’t get better? What if this is what there is? I should have died. I was meant to die, and by chance didn’t. So?

      Now the moon and her stars sat in the mild night. He studied their stillness. His breathing steadied. Through the skylight he could look across the night valley, the dark rumple of field and hedgerow. He could make out the far horizon by the few lights of the farmhouses. He tried to remember the names of those people. He had most likely taught their children. But if the knowledge was there, he couldn’t summon it; instead there suddenly came to him some of the names of stars and constellations. Out loud he said, ‘Vega in Lyra. Hercules. Cygnus and Aquila. Auriga, Arcturus in Bootes, Ursa Major. Pegasus.’ And these may have been words in any language, he may have spoken to an invisible other, but that they suddenly came to him gave him comfort.

      Below, a murmur rising through the floorboards, the rosary began. It was still a nightly ritual in that house. It had been since Ben Dack and Josie were married, and was broken only briefly one year when they had discovered they couldn’t have children. There had been six months. Then without announcement one night Josie had begun the ‘Hail Mary’ and Ben had slipped to his knees before the fire and it was back in their life. They prayed it with soft voices and heads half in sleep. They prayed it as if it was not second nature but nature itself, and though they knew that elsewhere in the country it had all but passed into folklore, they ringed the prayers one after the other and let them climb where they might.

      So it was, if you had passed that house that night on the narrow road that ran past three small farms, the sheds and hay barns and yards with tractors, the slatted houses of restless cattle anxious for the grass of April, you came to a long farmhouse with a light on downstairs and the heads of a man and woman praying the midnight rosary, while above them a skylight was open and a man was peering outward into the dark.

      The dark he stared at was himself, and now into it some glimmer that had come from the music. He used to play that air. ‘Bruach na Carraige Baine’. He used to play that on the flute. And this moved him profoundly, and he tried to rescue from the dark an actual scene when the boy might have played, tried to remake it for himself. What room? In the school? Or in the house? Upstairs in his bedroom was it? And he crossed to the bed and picked up the copy of David Copperfield and took out the clipping with the picture again and stared at it hard and he tried to combine the flute and the picture and see the boy playing. It was just there. It was just in that place beyond where he could picture it. He played that. I know he played it. And the return of that sliver of knowledge was like a shard jabbed into his forehead and he wanted to pull it out and press it further at the same time. He shut his eyes and tried to hum the melody. He put his two hands into the wiry white of his hair. Near-remembering was unbearable. He got a foothold on a mossy step and then slipped back into nothingness. For an hour, longer, he tried to find something solid in the half-memory of the music, something in which he could find solace. He played it more than once. When did he play it? When? Remember you fool. Remember. Come on. Don’t forget him. Don’t.

      The images all fell as he grasped for them. The ache was unendurable and he went from the room and down the stairs where the lights were already out and Josie and Ben gone to bed. He went to the dresser where there was a small metal stand for keys and from these he took the one marked ‘Joe’s Car’ and he let himself out through the back door.

      The night was velvet, a soft mild dark. He crossed the yard where Ben had parked the lorry facing outward for the morning and in the hay barn he saw the yellow car that he had been told was his but that he could not remember. It had been repaired since the crash but only occasionally driven by Ben, to keep the engine alive he said. The Master opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat. He sat awaiting epiphany, but none came. The cold damp of the interior, the cracked places in the plastic of the dashboard, the missing cigarette lighter, the twine-tied winder of the passenger window; he looked at the clues of each but they led him nowhere. Did I smoke once? Did I tie that twine?

      He held the steering wheel to see if he could find his own hands there, but there was nothing. Then he turned the key. He put the car into gear and released the handbrake. There was something in that, in the feel of the release. Wasn’t there? Wasn’t there something familiar about that?

      He couldn’t be sure, and he couldn’t bear any longer the nearness of