Boy in the World. Niall Williams

as though in everything that had been set out on a kitchen table something had been disturbed in the night, a cup lifted off a saucer and not returned. No Joe, that’s not it. Something, it is something. He lay some moments with this feeling while the last remains of the dream of his wife vanished. Then carefully he angled his feet over the edge of the bed and into his slippers.

      He left the bedroom in his pyjamas and went out into the small hallway and stopped and tried to figure it out again.

      Something. Definitely something. But what he couldn’t say. Still, it was there and he couldn’t ignore it. It lay like a hair across his tongue. He came down the stairs like a man who vaguely remembers that he left the back door open or the tap running or forgot the fireguard in front of the fire. He came expecting to see the problem at once and that it would be something small and easily remedied.

      In the kitchen everything was as it should be. The reminders of the non-party, film-covered bowls of brightly coloured jelly, bottles of soft drinks, boxes of biscuits, were lined up along the counter. In the glass doors of the cupboard he saw himself, his hair tufted, his eyebrows low in puzzlement. What is it? Was it something I dreamt or just my old silliness?

      ‘No, there is something,’ he said aloud to no one listening.

      The Master stood then perfectly still in the centre of the kitchen and shut his eyes and tried to let some part of him that he believed in, and that was beyond his five senses, figure it out. As if his intuition were a fog or a soft creature without shape he stood and released it into the house. He did nothing. He did not move nor look about him for a few brief moments, then, as if fingers clicked inside him, he turned and hurried out of the kitchen. He bounded up the stairs quicker than another of his age and was at the boy’s bedroom door before his breath.

      He raised his right hand to knock. But already he knew.

      That he suddenly knew was something he could not explain to himself. There was no visible sign, nothing real that was disturbed.

      ‘But it was as if there was a cord, an invisible line that runs between me and the boy and when I woke in the morning I knew that it had somehow been pulled. Imagine there was stitching in your heart,’ he would later tell the ghost of his wife, ‘and the thread was yanked, something like that.’

      The Master’s heart hammered while his hand didn’t. He stood before the bedroom door and felt the knowledge of what had happened arrive now in his brain and settle like black sludge. He pressed his lips together. It was no good, he knew, even as his hand rapped. He did not wait a second time but opened the door at once and felt the sight of the empty bed hit him hard like a fist into his chest. Immediately he saw the note on the pillow and had to hold on to the doorframe.

      ‘Oh no.’

      Here it was, here was the fracture he had felt in the morning as soon as he awoke. The boy was gone. He almost didn’t need to read the note. He was stopped with sorrow and the dread of something ripping away from him. He was stopped with panic and fear and failure. Where was he gone? How long gone? And just O God, is he all right?

      He was stopped while every detail of the scene in the bedroom – the bedclothes, books, an open drawer, those slippers – locked itself into his memory. He was stopped like a patient under surgery, as if his side or his chest was opened and a hand was reaching inside him to find the place where he was damaged.

      ‘You stood there when you should have been hurrying,’ he would tell himself later in the morning. ‘Stood there like a fool with the clockwork of you stopped and your old brain fuddled.’

      And indeed there was a forever when the Master seemed to be able only to look at the empty room. Perhaps he was taking the meaning of the situation inside himself. Perhaps he was intuiting something from the way the room had been left. But if so, he didn’t show sign of it. At last he made a small shake of his head, breaking free of some chains of the moment, and crossed and lifted the note.

      It read:

      Dear Joe,

      I could not sleep. I read the letter in the cream-coloured envelope. Did you know what it said? Much of it was burned but some of it I understood.

      I have to go and find the man who was my father. I do not think he knows I was born.

      I must do this now. Something is telling me. I think she would want me to do this.

      I have money and I will go to England and find him and tell him who I am. That is all. Then I will come back. It does not mean I love you less.

      I am sorry for the upset. I will be all right and home again soon.

      The Master read the note twice. As he read the words he saw the hand that wrote them, he saw the boy stooped close to the paper the way he had seen him a thousand times in the classroom. But this was not the classroom.

      ‘You must do something, you old fool. Come on.’

      He turned and hurried to the bedroom next door where he dressed himself quickly. As he did the ghost of his wife was sitting in the chair by the bed.

      ‘I’m a fool,’ he said to her.

      ‘You’re my fool, Joe,’ she answered.

      ‘I couldn’t hear you this morning in the dream. Such a fool, such a fool, he’s gone.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘I’m going after him.’

      ‘Of course you are.’

      He stood one-legged and drew on his trousers. His large hands fumbled with the buttons of his shirt and then he picked up the letter and the agitation in him made it flap in his hand like a broken wing. He read each of the words again as if to confirm them, as if they too might be a dream. The worry in his chest tightened and he felt his breath squeezing from him. He could not breathe, such was the feeling of loss that bound him.

      ‘Why are you not alive now to help me?’ he asked the ghost of his wife. But she only smiled back at him kindly.

      ‘It has to be my fault. I have to be the one to blame, giving him the letter yesterday. What was I thinking? Nothing but an old fool,’ he said. If his wife had been living the Master would have gone to hold her then. He would have found comfort and strength in her arms and been able to gather himself before hurrying after the boy. Deeply now, he missed her and faced the difficulty of moving from where he was, so weighted with sorrow were his feet. The blame he felt was bitter like a drink of thorns. Then he said, ‘You think I should call the police. I know you think that. But I don’t want them hunting him down. He hasn’t done anything wrong, he hasn’t run away, not really. He’s just gone to find someone.’ He argued this out loud to himself and his wife to clarify the situation and make it seem less ominous. To lighten the weight of his blame he said in a most reasonable tone: ‘He will be fine. I won’t call the police. I’ll go after the boy myself. I’ll find him and then I’ll help him.’

      Quickly the Master slid his feet over the broken-down backs of his shoes, tapped his chest pockets for wallet and glasses, made a cape of his tweed jacket as he put it on and hurried out of the bedroom. At the door he paused for a second to look back to where the ghost of his wife was now gone.

      He came downstairs and raced through the house, gathering last-minute things as he went, keys, pencil, paper, maps. As he passed through the sitting-room he stopped as though a hand caught him. There on the table were bottles of whiskey, brandy, six bottles of stout. Morning light glinted on the glass. The Master brought a hand up to his mouth as if holding back his longing to taste. He swallowed hard on nothing. He thought of having just one drink, just one to help him steady himself. The nerves are flying all over the place. I’m as jittery … I need to get a hold of …

      No. No, you old fool. Not now.

      But just one. Just.

      He stood by the table and unscrewed the top of the brandy. Like a part of