Boy in the World. Niall Williams

He lifted a tumbler. He took the bottle by the neck and poured, a small tremor in his hand as the drink filled. Involuntarily he touched the tip of his tongue to his top lip. He blinked his eyes. The house was empty. All was perfectly still. No one would know. Worry and guilt and fear had gathered in his throat. He needed the drink to wash them away. The boy was gone.

      It was my fault. I never should have brought him the letter. I never should have. He threw the thing in the fire, but I knew better. I’m bloody useless. That’s what I am.

      The Master carried the brandy to his lips. He closed his eyes on the memories of himself that returned, the brown corners of a hundred pubs where company had flowed around him, then deserted him, his staggering homeward. But it wouldn’t be like that this time. This time he just needed one.

      Just one before I go after him.

      His lower lip kissed against the glass and the brandy flowed into his mouth. In that first instant it was as welcome to him as a returned friend. The sitting-room was still. Sunlight slanted in the window, timber of table and chairs outlined with urgent illumination. Moments of time were wasting. But the Master stood in the room, shadows clutching the glass, like a pupil staring at an examination he had to take though he knew his result would be a fail. The first mouthful of the brandy was sweet and strong, the second sweeter. Across the floor light and shadow fought, as the big blown clouds in the sky moved eastward.

      O God.

      He held the bottle tilted to pour again. But as he did, by chance, his eye snagged on the title of a book that had not been tidied away but lay on the floor beside the couch. It was The Boy’s Guide to Kite Flying. And whether it mattered that it was this book or might as easily have been another, whether there was something about kites themselves, their thin frail connection from sky to earth, or the boy’s love of them, the Master could not say. But he stopped where he was.

      O God, stop. Stop.

      What are you doing? You’ve got to hurry, you’ve got to get the car and get it started.

      Come on.

      He put down the bottle, went out of the front door and closed it behind him, but he did not lock it. He hurried off on foot in the wake of the boy, breathlessly tramping down the road, his face bright red, and his jacket blowing out in flaps like wings. At every step he was imagining the boy before him.

      When he arrived in the village the old car was waiting.

      ‘Don’t let me down now,’ he said and tried the ignition, and then tapped the dashboard twice with thanks as the engine coughed and then fired perfectly. Rarely did the Master drive further than three or four miles from the house. The car was half his own age and was the only one he had ever owned. Before him it had belonged to a grease-faced puff-lipped mechanic called Mahoney who had bought it from scrap merchants and after significant efforts managed to give the engine the kiss of life. Only the speedometer had failed to return to itself and remained always at forty. The bucket seats in the front were wine vinyl, each of them holed in places. About the floor and elsewhere was a litter beyond category: screws, nails, scissors, thread, vice-grips, erasers, schoolbooks, a knob for the radio, handle for the passenger door, milk cartons, cough drops, newspapers or parts thereof, packets of garden seeds, and an unread copy of the Department of Education’s Guidelines on Discipline. Vaguely the inside of the car smelled like its owner. It smelled of life and experience and chaos.

      The Master grasped the thin black steering-wheel and drove along the country roads with his face pressed forward and his eyes scanning right and left for any sign that might reveal the boy had passed that way. He went out through the village and to the junction of the main road. There he pulled the car over on the grass and got out. From the high cabs of the lorries passing he looked like a man searching for his key. He peered down at the grass, took a few steps back and over with his head bent low. Then he stopped and scratched the tuft of his hair. It was hopeless, there was nothing. Everything was as if normal, as if the world showed no sign of loss or sorrow or joy or happiness, but turned out one day after the next, each one just the same.

      ‘What were you expecting,’ the Master chided himself, ‘a sign?’ You are such an old poop. A boy slips out of the world, but still the world goes on. Things do not stop although one person’s heart breaks. Who even hears it?

      He tried to imagine the boy in that place. He tried to reach that part of himself that had known something was wrong when he opened his eyes in the morning, that part of himself that was not easily explained, the stitching that he would tell the ghost of Mary had been pulled loose from his heart.

      But nothing.

      No. It was useless.

      You’re a fool, and worse, an old fool. Stitching! If you told someone else that, they would be having lads coming to have you locked up.

      A line of cars whooshed past, drivers’ looks quizzing the old man then forgetting about him.

      Where are you? Where are you now? With a silent inner voice the Master asked. He stood on the rough grass of the ditch and in his frustration and longing and desperation he closed tight his fists and urged an answer.

      Come on. Come on.

      He tried to let himself be only an imagination, to be a spirit that could go back and forwards in time, and from one place to another, seeing and knowing each as clearly as here and now. He tried not to be there, not to be a man in a tweed jacket and old trousers standing by the side of the road looking lost as the traffic passed. He tried to let himself be not a body but a soul, a spirit that could transport him elsewhere or connect to the soul of the boy. If you can believe such a thing.

       Where are you?

      To the travellers on that road he must have appeared somewhat bizarre; an old man in baggy clothes standing by the ditch with his eyes scrunched up, his fists clenched tight and shaking slightly, and his lips mouthing words. It wouldn’t be long before a car pulled over and somebody would walk back to see if he was having a heart-attack or a stroke or something.

       Come on, come on!

      The Master was fixed to the spot and asked the air for an answer. He let himself believe one was on the way, if only he could blot out everything else and receive it. He brought his fists up against his forehead and looked ever more a man losing his mind. In the blue of the morning, sunlight came from behind white cloud and shone upon him. Small wind moved in the trees at his back and there was leaf-sound like the last waves of a tide collapsing on the shore. There were no birds singing. There were no cars passing. There was no sound at all. There was in the darkness of his mind, where with closed eyes the Master was searching, a sudden image of the boy’s face.

      And something else.

      Something that was too slight for sound, too fine and thin for substance at all, nothing more than a ripple in the air. He could not say it was a message. He could not say he heard words, could not assert to anyone of science that he could offer proof. But just then, he knew that the boy had been there. He knew in no form of knowledge that is acceptable to examination, but belonged instead to a domain of spirit and belief. For, as the Master opened his eyes on that grassy corner of the road, he read the invisible four words:

      I am all right.

       SEVEN

      Sister Bridget was late. A small nun, twenty-three years of age, with a furrowed brow and kind deep-set brown eyes, she was flustered by the time. There was no reason why it should already be two o’clock. She had not intended to delay at the convent, but Sister Agnes and Sister Cecelia were so insistent, they wouldn’t think of her simply saying hello and goodbye. It was a full year after all, a full year since she had lived there among them before she headed off to what she had thought would be Africa but had turned out to be Birmingham. Because she had taken ill even before her course of injections had finished, and because in the end Mother Clare