Boy in the World. Niall Williams

the boy thought that if the Master knew that he was all right his hurt would be less. But he couldn’t risk a phone call, couldn’t risk a conversation with the Master persuading him to come back, and so instead he shut tight his eyes and concentrated.

      As if he was clearing a table after breakfast, one by one he picked up and put away any thoughts that were in his mind. Then, when he was sure there was nothing left and his mind was clear, he imagined four words.

       I

       am

       all

      right.

      He imagined writing them very carefully on a table. He made the four words of his message and with his eyes still closed, he thought on them with all the power he could manage. He thought on them, as if his thought were a beam of light immensely potent that could make the letters glow whitely and then burn through the air to the Master. I am all right. I am all right.

      ‘Had a little nap, did you?’ Ben Dack asked. ‘Saw you nod off there, excellent. I have had people sleep one side of the country to the other. Truck of dreams, I tell Josie. What dreams and dreamers I have had aboard. Absolute. Had a girl one time told me everything that happened in dreams could happen, no, could be happening, that’s right, in another world. Imagine that. That’s what she said. There’s another you and another me maybe doing different things there you see and, here’s the strange bit, dreaming of here. Do you see? So. Makes you think doesn’t it?’ Ben nodded at the strangeness of this until he had satisfied himself, then announced: ‘Café Dack, I think.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Time for eats.’

      He pulled the truck over into a grassy lay-by and shut it off. At once he raised his hands above his head, then groaned, then rolled his head left and then right, then reached down into a space beside the seat.

      ‘Now,’ he said, ‘ham and cheese or cheese and ham?’

      ‘I’m all right, thank you,’ said the boy.

      ‘No no, you have to eat at the Café Dack. That’s the rules.’

      ‘But you need them for yourself.’

      ‘Josie knows I never travel alone if I can help it. She makes ’em for two people.’

      ‘Every day?’

      ‘Every day. Josie’s a saint, absolute. One hundred and one per cent pure through and true saint. And what I did to be the lucky fellow to marry her I’ll never know. Here, ham and cheese.’ A second sandwich Ben Dack turned over. ‘Cheese and ham for me.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      ‘And milky tea.’

      Ben poured the boy a mug full and they sat there, windows open, flies buzzing and traffic softly passing.

      ‘Dublin?’ asked Ben after a while.

      ‘Yes. Thank you very much.’

      ‘Not that I’m enquiring. Nothing as quick a turnoff to people you pick up on the road than to give them the full interrogation. It’s not fair, I believe. Not fair. Everyone has their own lives, haven’t they? They have, and some things don’t need to be enquired of, you can still be the best of companions. That’s my philosophy.’

      ‘I am on my way to see my father.’

      ‘Oh? Right then, very glad I could be of assistance,’ said Ben, and nodded at how pleased he was by this news and that he had a part in something good. ‘Yes, very glad. Absolute.’

      He finished four sandwiches and two mugs of tea and insisted that the boy eat just as much. Then he produced one of Josie’s jam tarts for each of them and after he wiped his mouth with a blue and white chequered napkin she had given him he announced was going to take his forty now.

      ‘Forty?’ asked the boy.

      ‘Winks, just to rest the eyes for the way into the city. Be fresher, you know? City’s another world. Won’t be long. No need to wake me, body’s like a clock this stage, set the timer,’ he reached up and screwed his ear twice, ‘only joking. No, I’ll wake in eighteen minutes.’ And at that he released the catch in the car seat and it tilted back and he folded his short plump arms on his stomach. At once he was asleep.

      A strange kind of quiet was in the truck but the boy himself could not sleep and sat still while time passed in the middle of the country. He had a sense of being somehow outside of the world, as if it was turning now without him. Everything in the ordinary world was going ahead, children were sitting in school, men and women were at work, and cars and buses and aeroplanes were travelling in constant motion. And he was still, so still that he and Ben and the truck might have been the only un-turning thing in the turning world.

      After eighteen minutes Ben woke up. He stretched, righted his seat, smiled over at the boy and then turned on the engine.

      ‘To Dublin so,’ he said.

      They pulled out to the edge of the road. From sandwich crumbs blackbirds in the long grass flew up and scattered. Ben eased the truck out into the steady traffic.

      ‘Everyone’s going somewhere, eh?’ he said.

      Two hours later they had arrived in the city. Ben followed the road in by the canal and slowly wound his way closer and closer to the docks by the river.

      ‘Well, journey’s end,’ he said when they had arrived there. The boy hesitated. Now that he was here he wasn’t sure that he could go on.

      ‘Hello to your father, and good luck to you in everything you do,’ Ben said and reached out his hand and vigorously shook the boy’s.

      ‘Thank you.’

      Just then cars that were backed up behind the truck began hooting.

      ‘Oops,’ smiled Ben. And although the boy was not in any way prepared to leave him just then, or even sure that he wanted to, he opened the door and climbed down into the noise of the city.

      Dublin. This is Dublin.

      He looked up into the cab. He looked the way a boy can look to a man when standing on the precipice of a new experience, unsure that he can step off into it. He looked for courage, for faith in his own ability, for confirmation. But the moment was frayed with the blaring of car horns, and if he understood the boy’s needs, Ben Dack had no time to meet them. He held up his small plump hand and waved, and, as though he was in on a secret they shared, he made a broad wink.

      ‘Be well,’ he said, ‘until next time.’ And then the truck pulled away, Ben Dack’s face framed in the wing-mirror, and the boy watching and not moving from the spot.

       SIX

      In the Master’s dream his wife was speaking. But although he could see her clearly and could see her mouth move and form the words, the Master could not make them out. She was saying something. She was speaking excitedly, telling him something urgent, but in the dream she appeared as in a film without sound, and though he moved about in the covers and turned his head on the pillow the Master could not hear her. What is it? What is it? Tell me. He turned again in the bedclothes, he screwed his eyes closed even tighter. In dreaming he moved his lips as though reading hers and saying the message in a kind of mumble. But still his brain could not grasp what she was saying. Then, in a final effort to move closer to her, he pushed over further in the bed, hit his head smartly against the bedpost and opened his eyes. The dream was gone, the message lost.

      It was quiet. Very quiet. Mornings in the countryside were always hushed. There was only the noise of the wind in the trees or the birdsong. Nothing was ever coming or going outside, and so quietness was a condition he was used to. But that morning, the moment he opened his eyes, the Master could sense something was too quiet. He blinked and fixed his gaze very