Boy in the World. Niall Williams

mention of God or the strangeness of the night or the still vivid visions of his nightmare, the man responded by lessening his hold slightly. ‘Wha?’ he began.

      But already the boy had spun about and was freed of the man’s grip on him. This time he did not hesitate. The boy stepped quickly back and then forward holding out both of his hands as if rushing to meet a wall. His hands arrived in the man’s chest and shoved him backward.

      At once the man lost his balance. It was like the road was pulled out from under him, and his feet flew up and he shouted out and fell down with a crash.

      The boy did not wait to watch. He picked up his bag and turned swiftly and began to run. He ran down the centre of the road into the dark. He ran with his brain whirring like a windmill. He ran and kept going while his lungs heaved and his throat tightened and burned. He ran through the dim starlight on the rough road that rose and fell and swung away into the east. He ran past the shapes of cattle in the fields, of sleeping statue-like horses and the looming darkness of trees and wild bushes. The boy ran as though a ghost was chasing him. He ran and did not stop, and did not look around to see if God was watching.

       FIVE

      Cold.

       Cold dark and agh!

      My shoulder.

      He was five miles further along the empty road. He had slowed down and slowed further still as the panic in him calmed, and he realized he was not being followed. The pain in his shoulder was still there and he kept his bag on the other side. Inside his shoes his feet were wet and cold from ditch-water. He could have turned back and been almost home before the Master woke. He could have slipped in the back door and gone upstairs and lain under the warm blankets and mumbled that he was unwell and staying home when the Master called him. He could have been back in that comfort, his head pressed deep into his own pillow, his body curled in the body space in his bed, his books on the shelves beside him. If he hurried now he could still make it. He could take back the note he had left, and pull the curtains. And perhaps he could wake up again and it would still be the morning of his Confirmation. Time would go back and restart with the Master carrying the good plates and cups and saucers into the sitting-room and the Confirmation clothes waiting on a hanger. It would all be exactly as it had been.

      No.

      No, there was no going back. Everything had changed.

       For a reason?

       Why? What reason?

      Letter in the drawer waiting.

      Until that morning.

      It was something the boy often wondered as he read novels. If David Copperfield’s mother had not married Mr Murdstone, would David’s life have been completely different? Would he never have met Steerforth or Agnes, or even Aunt Betsey and Mr Dick? And so did Charles Dickens sit down and draw up the whole plan of each character’s life before he started writing? Did he live out each of their lives before they lived them? Or did they just sort of happen? Was it just chance that as he was writing the words he thought, ‘this is what is going to happen here’, and then made it turn out that way?

      This and other things flew through the boy’s mind as he hurried. In the hedgerows suddenly birds clamoured. For a few moments, so preoccupied was he with his own thoughts, that he wasn’t aware of them. Then, at a turning in the argument in his head, he stopped and the noise startled him. There were sounds of every pitch and kind, shrills and thrills. Birds that sang five notes, four in quick succession, others only the one, over and over. No birds flew but the air was suddenly thick with song. The singing was so full-throated and varied, so widespread everywhere along the roadside that it seemed urgent, as if again some essential messages that could not be understood were there relayed.

      Ahead of the boy in the east the dawn rose. He had seen early morning light in winter before, but never quite watched the full slow drama of the brightening of dark. The night was like a cloth whose hem was moving. Very slowly, at first. The thinnest fringe of a paler shade appeared low in the distance, so like the colour of night that at first you couldn’t say that it was any different. Then, as the boy walked towards it, in the distance the hem withdrew slightly further. Whether the night was pulling back or the day pushing forward he couldn’t say. But his eyes remained fixed on the thin streak of a colour somewhere between blue and purple against a pale-pale white.

      Same colour as veins along the inside of the Master’s arm.

      The streaks of blue were not linear or evenly spaced nor any way you might consider drawn by a hand, but rather as if they were things with their own life, runs of colour and light released out of the darkness. The pallor of the horizon was delicate and fine and seemed to the boy strangely vulnerable, as if light were something really graceful, or shy, and its slow approach to the darkness uncertain and gentle. The first streaks of the dawn vanished as the night was pulled further away until there was a play of many colours.

      Faint yellow buttermilk.

      Washed grey school shirts.

      Curved pink behind fingernails.

      The colours were there for moments only. There, and then diluted into the bigger brightness. Birds took flight from the hedgerows and darted across the sky and climbed the air at upright angles. The dark was gone. He looked behind him to the west but already the morning had come over him, and he was swiftly in the new day.

      The boy felt a sense of gladness then. He had the feeling of someone who has come through a test or difficulty. His first night was behind him. He was already that much closer to completing his journey, he told himself. And although he still felt pain in his shoulder, things would be all right, he thought.

      But the brightness of the early morning brought with it something else too. In the daylight he was suddenly exposed on the road for anyone to see. Now, here were the first cars, and as they approached he had a dread they were coming to find him. When one then two and three passed by he released the breath caught like a bird in the cage of his chest and walked on. But he had the sense that he wore guilt like a yellow coat and that the drivers could tell.

      ‘There’s nothing I can do about it,’ he told himself, ‘I can’t keep off the road by day and only travel by night. I have to chance it. Otherwise I will never get there.’

      He walked on. He did not know exactly where this ‘there’ was. But in the hours since he had left home he had formulated this much: that the man he was looking for had some connection with the BBC, and so their offices in London would be the first place to enquire of him. He was a writer, perhaps a newsman. His name was Ah-Sh something.

      What exactly would happen when the boy met the man, he didn’t think about yet.

      The approach of a large truck up the hill behind him caused the boy to stop and stand in to the side of the road. The truck laboured on the slope and made its way very slowly so that the driver had the boy in his sight a long time. When it arrived alongside him, the truck slowed to a stop. Its engine running, the truck’s passenger door flew open, and above him the boy could see the driver leaning across to call down to him.

      ‘Need a lift?’

      The man was in a pale blue shirt with its sleeves rolled up. His stomach bowed outward, as though on his lap was an inflated ball. He had small curves of golden hair standing upward on his head and as he looked down at the boy there was a smile playing in his eyes and his entire face seemed on the point of laughing.

      ‘Going along the way a bit? Hop up,’ said the man. He smiled warmly, as if he had just told a wonderful story, or thought it marvellous how he had a free seat in his truck and the boy needed one.

      But the boy hesitated. A car hooted at the stopped truck on the hill.

      ‘Well lad, eh?’

       Reason or random? Chance or plan?

      He