Boy in the World. Niall Williams

said at last and shrugged as though attempting to escape, and raised the eyebrows again, but this time in his eyes there was no smile.

      ‘What is it? It’s something … something’s wrong,’ said the boy. ‘Tell me.’

      And there was a moment, and then another. Briefly, everything was stopped, as if a hand reached out and paused the world in its turning. And inside that small cottage, in the kitchen stood a boy and an older man and the slow passing of a ghost, or maybe two. The Master saw them. One was his wife who had died when the boy was seven. She stood by the cooker now watching him, the pale blueberries of her eyes glinting with pride, her two hands brought up to her mouth the way she always did when she had feelings too large for words. The other ghost was the boy’s mother, Marie, the Master’s daughter who had died of cancer when the boy was two. She moved across the kitchen not a day older than the last time the Master had seen her, alive, her face pale, her auburn hair tied behind. She stood by her son and touched the side of his face, although the boy could not see or feel her.

      ‘Tell me,’ said the boy again. ‘What is wrong?’

      The Master was not looking at him but watching the ghost of the boy’s mother and feeling all parts of himself singed with a sorrow he couldn’t speak.

      ‘Are you all right?’ The boy was nudging the old man’s shoulder.

      ‘Yes,’ said the Master, and again ‘yes,’ as though answering various questions from various speakers. He blinked and seemed to right himself.

      ‘What is it?’ asked the boy.

      ‘Hold on.’ The Master crossed the kitchen and went to a drawer in the dresser in which he kept a file of papers. The boy knew that in the wild jumble of things were kept documents of all kinds, in there were the instruction book-lets and guarantees on everything, their two passports for the trip the Master was always hoping they would take together. In the file the old man hunted hurriedly and then found a cream-coloured envelope. He closed the file and put it back in the drawer and came to the boy, the envelope in his hand. He blew on it and brushed it against his sleeve. When he went to speak the words got caught on the knot of his tie and he pulled it a little to the right. Then he held out the envelope.

      ‘What is it?’ asked the boy, not taking it.

      ‘Before your mother died, and you were only an infant, she wrote this letter to you. I watched her write it in the hospital. She wanted you to have it when you turned thirteen. But today she … today you …’ The Master looked to the ghosts but they were gone. ‘Well … the, em, the Confirmation is an important day. It seems right. Here.’

      Suddenly the boy could not move. His heart was racing, his throat tight, had he already loosened the tie? Then why was it he could hardly breathe? Why was it the walls of the little kitchen seemed to pulse in and out?

      Breath. In breath. Breathe.

      He had to breathe.

      Her letter. Breathe. This. In breath.

      Don’t. Can’t.

      No. No, he couldn’t. He would not take the letter. He would not reach out and take it. No, he couldn’t bear to, he silently decided.

      The decision flashed in his mind like a wet knife in a dishcloth. He wouldn’t take the letter. He would wait. He would take it some other day. Then he gasped a breath at last, and the room seemed to stop pulsing.

      No.

      He looked down. And there in his hand he held the cream-coloured envelope.

       TWO

      The boy had never known his mother other than that her name was Marie and that she was the shyly smiling young woman with brown hair in the photograph on the piano. He knew that she died after fighting cancer until her hair was gone and her hands so weak they could not hold on to him. He had no idea who his father was, nor, it seemed, did anyone. And in fact for almost all of the boy’s life to that day he had not thought about it very much. His father and mother had been the Master and his wife when she was alive. They had adopted him as a baby and had loved him always.

      But now he had the cream-coloured envelope in his hand. He was holding the envelope she had held, about to look at the page she had written.

      ‘It’s all right,’ said the Master. ‘You can read it now or you can keep it until later.’ He glanced towards the kitchen door and then the windows to see if the ghosts might be lingering somewhere, but there was nothing. ‘She is … well, she would have been so proud of you today. They both would have.’ He smiled with his eyes and a hundred wrinkled lines were written around them. ‘Whatever you’d like now,’ he said softly, seeing that the boy was lost and unsure. ‘Sometimes,’ he put his arm upon the boy’s shoulder, ‘sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing for a while. Doing nothing at all is often the very wisest thing. Because, it was explained to me once, as the world is a ball and is turning and everything is in fact in motion all the time, doing nothing is not really doing nothing, it’s allowing things to move at their own pace.

      ‘Of course some people don’t understand the wisdom of this,’ the Master whispered, ‘they think when men are doing nothing they are doing nothing.’ Without the boy’s realizing it, the old man had led him to the kitchen door. ‘Take the envelope, go upstairs, do nothing. The church is in half an hour, plenty of time,’ said the Master, ‘go ahead.’

      But the boy did not move. He looked down at the envelope in his hand. And suddenly, there opened a quake in his heart, a glaring gulf of sorrow – widening and widening – a dark nauseating chasm into which he himself was about to fall. He felt he was going to cry, but made only a small moan. Rushing up inside of him now rose a giant black wave of loss and sadness and a kind of anger at the world. The torrent roared in his ears. In it were carried the dead, the ghosts of the past he had thought buried. Before his eyes the room seemed to shimmer. The walls would give. The envelope was shaking in his hand as if electric. He could not bear it. He could not bear the hurt he would release if he opened the letter. He suddenly believed he would drown in grief. And so, perhaps even before he had made a decision, before his brain had considered its menu of options and chosen, and before there was time to stop him, he had stepped back inside the kitchen and thrown the cream-coloured envelope spinning into the fire.

      ‘I don’t want it,’ the boy said, his face flushed, his eyes bright.

      And with that he quickly opened the door and left the kitchen and climbed the stairs two by two until he was inside his bedroom and had thrown himself headfirst on to the blankets.

      In the place where he lived the boy had no friends. Perhaps because of his great intelligence, he had found himself living on the edge of things for his entire childhood. In the classroom many might elbow him and ask in whispers for the answer to questions in English or History or Geography, but once in the open spaces of the yard they quickly ignored him. Perhaps too it was because his skin was not as pale as the others, because there was something indefinable about him that seemed marked, the way a boy might feel with a splashed birthmark on his face or a scar that reminded all of peril and injury. Whichever the reason, the boy had long ago begun to feel that some part of him was flawed, did not work the way things should. He imagined sometimes there was within him a real but invisible damage. And it was this of which he was most afraid.

      To escape the feeling that he had no friend to confide in, the boy had a journal. To its white pages he told his thoughts. Some days there was little to tell, others there was not space enough in the calendar day for all that was hurrying through his mind. As he got older his thoughts grew more complex. Things were not so clear any more. He couldn’t write down just one phrase to tell what had happened or what he thought about something. He wrote in fragments, half-questions. The boy did not name the journal, nor did he think of it in any way as a person. But by the time he was twelve years of age he could not have imagined living his life without it.

      So, now, lying on his