Boy in the World. Niall Williams

down to him. The boy cried out with the sudden pain. Now, his face inches from that of the man, he could smell the sour smell of old beer and pee and smoke from the man’s breath and see the pale whites of his eyes. The man pulled him close and squinted and showed a broken line of teeth. The sourness of him was foul and the boy struggled to get free, but the man quickly reached his other hand and grabbed on to him, floundering about until his bony fingers caught hold of the boy’s ear.

      ‘Well, well,’ said the man, his voice thick and slurred as if he was unused to his own tongue. ‘Are you real? Do you feel that?’

      The boy cried out again and brought up his right fist quickly until it arrived with a kind of soft hardness in the man’s face. The eye was pulp, the cheek bone. It was the first time the boy had ever hit anyone with his fist and through him ran the strange sensation of it. There was the shock of his own force as the man let go and fell backward, the disgusting jelly of the eye, the sharp pain in his own knuckles from striking bone. He pulled back and found his chest heaving, his heart rushing up into his throat and thumping wildly. The pain in his shoulder was worse. When he moved there were the teeth of a saw cutting into him.

      The man lay out on the road and did not move. The boy watched him for some moments.

      ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

      There was no response.

      ‘I am sorry I hurt you,’ said the boy, then he turned, picked up his bag to hurry away down the dark road.

      For twenty yards he did not stop. He hastened from the ugliness of the encounter with his heart still racing and a cool sweat pasted across his forehead. He expected a cry. He expected pursuit. But when none came, he grew fearful of the enormous silence behind him; he slowed and then stopped. He looked back and saw the shadow-shape of the man, that could have been a beast or a creature of any kind in that night dark.

      The boy didn’t know what to do. He knew the rule of the world of childhood was not to deal with strangers, but he had left that world now. Now there were only strangers. Was the man badly hurt? Had he knocked his head on the road when he fell back? What if he were dead?

      The boy walked back towards the shadow, in his mouth a sour lump of dread. The black road, the wild briary fingers of the hedgerows, the unearthly silence that made the place seem nowhere and everywhere: these things entered him and registered in the catalogue of fear.

      The man was not moving. The boy could not hear if he breathed. He stood and looked at the twisted dark of him, the legs awry, the head at a sharp tilt to the road.

      ‘Hello? Are you all right?’

      In that utter dark and emptiness it was a greeting weird and unearthly. There was no sign the man heard. The boy lowered his bag and bent down and put his hand on the damp shoulder and shook. Thin sticklike bone, the man was.

      ‘Hello? Hello, can you hear me?’

      And back from what other place he was, the man returned with a gurgle and a groan. He swallowed the nothings in his throat noisily and brought a hand up out of the dark by his side and patted gently the eye that was already puffy.

      ‘I’m going to have a right one tomorrow,’ he said, staring at the boy. ‘It’ll swell out to here, be all purple and yellow.’ Instead of anger he showed pride, as if he enjoyed the wonder of himself and how well he bruised. A small laugh deep in his throat caught in phlegm and soon became a series of coughs that ended when he turned and spat sideways into the ditch. He watched after it for a moment, as though it was some part of him he regretted losing.

      ‘You’re all right so?’ The boy half-turned to leave.

      ‘I have a car back a bit there but I went over into the ditch. I need help to get her out. Just a push. Then I’ll take you a piece of your way. What do you say?’

      The boy did not say anything. What should he say? How was he to decide what was right or wrong here? The man had been drinking and probably drove his car off the road out of drunkenness. The boy should not take a lift from him. Besides how was he to know if the man would actually keep his word, if he wouldn’t drive off the minute they got the car going, or worse if he wouldn’t try and bring the boy back home? Or … There were a dozen reasons to say no. But then, as he was sobering now the man seemed more clear-headed and less frightening. The boy had terrified him falling over him in the dark as the man was curled in a nightmare. Perhaps he was just an ordinary man and only the night and the drink and the surprise had made him seem fierce. Besides, the boy would need to trust people he didn’t know if his journey was to get him anywhere.

      ‘You will take me some of the way?’

      ‘Oh, I will,’ said the man. ‘You have my solemn word,’ he closed his lips on what may have been a belch or a chuckle, ‘as God is my witness.’ And in the darkness the boy could see him raise a hand and pass it over and up in a sign of the cross. ‘Help me up now will you? Good man.’

      A pale hand reached up towards him. It hung there faintly silvered like a dim fish waiting to be caught.

      ‘Friends, eh?’ said the man. ‘No hard feelin’s. Good lad.’

      The boy took a half-step forward. He was still unsure. He was still hearing a voice telling him to run away, Go, go fast now, but it was tangled through another telling him to be adult about this, be not afraid, not a frayed boy.

      There was a moment that stretched, one in which the hand hung waveringly and the boy could feel only his own heart hammering and how huge and empty and dark was the night. The man’s fingers twitched as he tried to reach another inch up to the boy. In whatever angle of starlight that fell then his eyes were caught and revealed as a metallic flash, as though they were glass or steel, one of them smaller than the other. There was the thin jagged line of his teeth, the ruined look of his mouth that opened crookedly like a drawer in the wrong place. The fingers twitched. The boy reached for them.

      ‘Good lad,’ he heard.

      Then suddenly the hand he held held him. The fingers he took locked like a vice around him, crushing into the bones, as the man pulled himself up and was then standing tightly holding the boy’s hand. His face came up like a ravaged moon over the boy. It was a face pocked and grained and with a rough covering of three days’ silvered beard. Its right eye was swollen and pursed half-closed, its breath a sour gas full of the poison of resentment.

      ‘Hit me would you?’ said the man, his fingers around the boy’s hand, pulling him forward with one hand only to poke him in the chest with his other. ‘Hit me, why you …’

      The man’s hand became a fist in the boy’s stomach, and the boy would have fallen backwards but for the hand still holding on to him. He felt the breath knocked out of him in an empty O and his eyes widened in astonishment and hurt.

      ‘… you little …’ the man was muttering, pulling the boy about until he twisted his arm behind his back and pulled it roughly upward. The pain shot through the boy. ‘You little, you’re nothing but a little liar aren’t you, eh? Running away, eh? Oh yes you are, aren’t you, tell the truth.’ The man pushed the boy’s arm higher and the boy made a noise that was the noise of hurt in all languages.

      ‘Tell the truth,’ urged the man again, and lowered the boy’s arm a fraction so that he could answer.

      ‘I’ll tell you the truth!’ shouted the boy.

      ‘Aha.’

      The man relaxed his grip slightly further. And the boy then shouted out as loudly as he could: ‘I am going to find my father!’ He shouted it so loudly that whatever creatures moved in the dark turned and stopped and were startled then and flew or raced or burrowed away. He shouted it with a voice edged with pain and anger, a sharpened scream that slashed the night into pieces and let them fall away in the dark.

      Then without thinking at all, without understanding the effect his words would have, he shouted out: ‘I am going to find out if God is watching!’

      It was not a spell, not an incantation or