Boy in the World. Niall Williams

over him. Seven years since he had been found unconscious in the village street in the early morning. But now, the pain he felt for the boy needed some relief. He turned the bottle top of Powers whiskey and lifted it off. The strong bitter scent rose familiarly. He might have poured a glass for himself then, but the hand that reached for it stopped in mid-air. It wavered there. Involuntarily the Master touched his lips together and closed his eyes and, with no one but the ghost of his wife watching, he fought a silent battle against himself.

      The boy was still reading David Copperfield with the light outside his window dimming when there was a knock again on his bedroom door and the Master appeared. Now changed back into his old tweed jacket and baggy trousers, he came in and sat on the end of the bed.

      ‘David Copperfield?’ he said.

      ‘Yes,’ said the boy, closing over the page. ‘I’ve read it before.’

      ‘I know you have.’

      ‘But it’s still good. It’s better.’

      ‘I daresay I could read it again myself. A book like that you should read every few years. In fact if there was enough time in the world you could read some books year after year and each time get something new from them.’

      ‘That would be good,’ said the boy.

      ‘Yes.’ The Master looked at all the books on the shelves and thought not for the first time that day how remarkable this boy was. ‘Just checking that you are all right,’ he said.

      ‘I am.’

      ‘Well,’ the Master angled himself slightly to one side and reached into his jacket pocket, ‘here are the cards from your aunts.’ He held out a cluster of white envelopes.

      ‘I shouldn’t take them.’

      ‘Of course you should. You crossed a threshold in your life today as much as anyone else in that church.’

      ‘But …’

      ‘No but, here.’

      The boy took the cards and placed them on the bed.

      ‘Oh, and here.’

      There in the Master’s hand once more was the creamcoloured envelope from that morning, only now its edges were black and one side was burnt away completely.

      ‘Got it out as best I could,’ he said. ‘It is for you. I promised your mother I would deliver it. I don’t see how it would have been right to let it burn. Read it. Read it when you’re ready to, years from now if you like, and then by all means if you want to, go ahead and throw it in the fire, forget about it if you want to, but at least read it first.’

      The Master stood up. His eyes were fixed directly on the boy. He knew there was more to say but couldn’t think of how to say it. ‘Well, anyway, all right?’

      ‘All right.’

      The quiet in the room after the Master left was deeper than before. There was a sharp expectancy, as if the air had been pulled tight as the skin of a drum and at any moment the sticks would begin to beat. The boy moved the Confirmation envelopes about on the bed with his fingers. He looked at the burnt cream-coloured one and lifted it and put it on the bookshelves behind his bed. He picked up David Copperfield to read some more, but as he read down a page he knew he had been following the words with his eyes only. He had no idea what he had just read. He tried again, but with no success.

      He was tired. Evening had just folded into night outside. He opened his bedroom door and called out goodnight, and then got dressed in his pyjamas and into bed.

      Some time before, the boy had stopped saying prayers before sleep. He was not sure God was listening. Besides there were many different Gods people all over the world prayed to, and anyway he didn’t like praying for things for himself. So instead he lay in the bed and tried to think of David Copperfield.

      When he woke it was dark. He felt a hand had shaken him by the shoulder, and as he sat up in his bed he looked around in fright, sure that someone had just been there. He turned on the bedside light but saw no one. Yet it had felt so real. His breath caught in his throat. His sleep had been full of dreams and for some moments he seemed to be clawing aside the cobwebs of them from the front of his mind. He swallowed the nothing in his throat. He closed his eyes and opened them again to see if he was still inside a dream.

      ‘I’m awake,’ he said out loud and heard himself, and with his left fingers touched his right shoulder where still as clearly as anything he could remember the feel of the hand shaking him.

      The boy got out of bed then. He opened his window and felt the cool of the night. He listened to the night sounds; wind and trees and things growing.

      He switched on the light. Then he reached down and took the burnt envelope in his hand. With a silver pen angled carefully, he delicately, slowly opened it. Pieces fell away as he did. When the pen reached the side that was burnt entirely a dark remnant detached and fluttered like a black butterfly to the ground.

      Inside the envelope was a single page. But because of damage by the fire and the way the page had been folded a large arc on the right-hand side was missing.

      The boy held the sheet in the light. The writing was in blue ink, the words on thin lines. They were written at a slight slant from left to right. Most lines had no endings because the paper had been burnt away. Such things the boy noticed at once, as if studying the letter itself and delaying as long as possible the thing he most wanted and was most afraid to do, read it.

      When at last he began, his hand shook. He had to sit down and use his second hand to steady the page.

      The first sentence read:

      I am sorry that I am gone now, and cannot be there to hold you.

      The boy lifted his eyes and looked away out at the dark in the window. He waited a few seconds. He looked there at the nothing that was, ink of sky with stars cloud-blotted, and he pictured the image of his mother.

      He read on.

       I thought that it would be important for you to know

      Then the rest of that phrase was lost as the paper was burnt away.

      The next phrase read:

       love you but because your father did not know

      Next bit missing.

      After that: what you should know about him is

      The fragments were maddening.

      when he was still a student …

      but his work because …

      a writer and …

      for him telling people what was happening in the worl …

      and because he was not from here and was a …

      because if I told him maybe …

       not that he didn’t because I didn’t give him a

      maybe was my mista …

      but because I wasn’t sure and because I couldn’t imagine how …

      from such different worlds, me from here and him …

       and thought it was too important for him to

      for the BBC in London or sometimes …

      Then, a blackened hole, and the letter was finishing: hope that you will forgive me and understand…

       is name is Ah … Sh

      Nothing. A black emptiness, the name unfinished, burnt away. And in the bottom corner, his mother’s signature,

       Marie

      The boy stared at the letter a long time.

      In