History of the Rain (12 page)

I come down the stairs in the stretcher. I’m trying to breathe all the time but it feels like I’m underwater.

‘It’s okay, love,’ Mam says. ‘It’s okay.’ Her hand takes mine at the bottom of the stairs, and with Timmy holding up the top and Packy the bottom we sail out the front door.

The sky is huge and jellyfish-grey and there’s no light in it at all. There’s just this watery expanse leaking drops as we go down the garden to the ambulance.

Timmy and Packy have the inside of it shining. Mam sits beside me. You can see the bravery in her. You can see how she will
not be defeated
, how the world has thrown sadness after sadness at her and knocked her down and she’s still getting up, she’s older than she was and there’s these few silver hairs coming at her temples and her eyes have that extra deepness of knowledge that makes her more beautiful in a kind of lasting way. It’s like she’s this eternal Mother, my mam, this wall around me, holding back the sea that keeps coming for me. I can see it in her eyes. I can see the way she’s hoping so hard that this might be the time, this might be Help Coming.

She’s hoping and trying not to hope at the same time.

And that’s the saddest thing.

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it’s definitely a Thing with Claws.

We drive out of Faha for Dublin when the fields are just waking to today’s rain. Today it’s a soft silveriness that Packy says suits Intermittent 4 on the wipers but Timmy thinks should be 5. They talk the whole way. If we were driving to Moscow they’d talk the whole way there too.

I’m okay inside the ambulance, because somehow it’s not the world.

Conversation follows the road. While we’re still in the parish the talk is all Faha. It’s Martin & Maureen Ring whose daughter Noelle has gone off with one of the Muslims of Mayo, the Ballyhaunis Meat Men. It’s the bachelor Brothers Hayes, who are in their sixties, who each buy a copy of the
Champion
even though they live together in the same three-room bungalow. The brothers have a teabag mountain outside the front door, a giant steaming mound that’s supposed to be composting in the front bed but is resisting because of the rain Timmy says, lends the air at their front door a bit of a tang of India in monsoon season. If we have a flood there’ll be a tea-Ganges heading down to McCarthy’s.

The talk is of the Apostolic Works whose workers are all women in their eighties now and who still meet in Faha N.S. seven o’clock on the evening of the First Tuesday, carrying their glowing Ever-Readies along the road like genuine Illuminates and making the decision now to team up with the troop of the Legion of Mary whose Legionnaires are down to two. It’s the news that when Sean & Sheila Maguire came down to Faha graveyard Wednesday to dig up her grandfather that got buried in the wrong grave they found an actual snake slyly slithering between Ciaran Carr’s plot and that of the woman he was meant to marry, Una Lyons.

We pass Dan Byrne in his black suit and string vest out by the Cross. A big believer in the visuals, Dan lost his shirt on bank investments sometime after the Banks passed their first Stress Test.

The dogs in the street knew the country was cooked, Packy says. Because of me he won’t say fooked.

The Nationwide got narrow, Timmy says.

We get out on to the Ennis road and down to Icarus at the Roundabout. He’s in the conversation for twenty miles. Icarus used to be inside at the Market but flew over to Greece for a bit and came back not the better for it, Packy says. He needed a bit of hammering. He’s not gold enamelling or anything, he’s not the full Byzantium, but he’s Clare’s best Greek and people are kind of fond of him, even if a naked man with arms out and legs akimbo was a bit much for the youth. People didn’t take kindly to his wings getting dinted. He’s erected now in the centre of the Rocky Road roundabout with the CCTV because Packy says The Lads would have him for melting if he was out there without the Eye on him.

‘They would,’ says Timmy. ‘He’s better there anyhow.’

‘He is.’

‘When he was in The Market the scholars from Flannan’s were always putting the traffic cone on his head.’

‘They were.’

‘One time he had a bra and panties.’

‘I didn’t see that.’

‘One time they strapped a traffic cone over his . . .’

‘I remember that all right.’

‘Flannan’s lads.’

‘Good hurlers though.’

‘They might do it this year.’

‘They won’t.’

‘You have no belief. That’s your problem.’

The National Conversation takes the new motorway all the way from Ennis to Dublin and between those shallow naps you have in seatbelts I hear: Why the country is destroyed; why the last crowd were the worst crowd to ever run this country; why bankers should be locked up and criminals let out; why we’ll never see the like again.

The best thing we could do, Packy says, is cut ourselves free.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Just what I said. The best thing we could do as a country. Just cut the rope. Cut the rope and sail away.’

The Consultant doesn’t have an office. He has Rooms. He has some really nice furniture. All his magazines are this month’s. And they have no creases in the covers. When you’re waiting for the Consultant you don’t really want to read about the Ten Best Places to Eat by Moonlight.

I sit with Mam and we wait. I get so tired I can’t even

The piano-playing Aunts come to visit us after Aunt Esther dies. I am eleven years old. Their visit is announced well in advance, the Aunts are very Old School like that. I think they imagine it’s proper to send word ahead so that the maids and servants can start fluffing floors and polishing pillows. They imagine there must be buffing to be done. I think it’s well-intentioned but Nan won’t credit it. She believes my father’s sisters are powdered witches sent from the east with the sole aim of denigrating the people of the west.

Unlike everyone else who uses the back door, the Aunts come in the front. They make the latch of the kitchen door seem a contrivance of intentional backwardness.

Here they are:

‘Hellooo? Hellooo?’

They peer in and at the same moment both angle back their heads, as if they have taken a position a little too close to a panoramic screen. They are tall and big-boned and look like men playing women’s parts in a play by Oscar Wilde.

‘Nan, Verge’s sisters are here,’ my mother says loudly.

But Nan already knows, and furiously pokers the fire to try and smoke them back out. Nan here is The Aged P only with more mischievousness than Mr Wemmick’s in
Great Expectations
, the only book of which my father kept two copies (Books 180 and 400, Penguin Classic & Everyman Classics editions, London), both of which I have read twice, deciding each time that
Great Expectations
is the Greatest. If you don’t agree, stop here, go back and read it again. I’ll wait. Or be dead.

Grandmother Bridget, the Aunts call her.

‘Grandmother Bridget, hello!’ they call out.

Nan doesn’t reply but flaps the
Champion
at the fire and sends out a great curling cloud of smoke.

In reprisal, by way of commentary on Nan’s deficit and I suppose in testament to the superiority of their side of the family genetic, and the east of the country in general, the Aunts smile their full fierce perfect teeth.

‘O and here’s Ruth. Little darling Ruth. Come here, my dear, let us look at you. There is such intelligence in that face, isn’t there, Daphne? And what an interesting dress, dear.’

Another great pall of turfsmoke.

‘Now, Ruth, come and tell us everything. Let us look at you.’

What is it they see? I am thin but not of the sylph kind, more the gawky lanky kind which may be what constitutes the Swain Beautiful but feels Rangy Ruth to me. My knees are actually
sharp
. At that age I am officially Waiting for My Chest. The Chest Fairy is on the way from Boozoomia or somewhere and all the girls in my class are going to sleep at night in their own state of Great Expectation, waking up and checking: is that it? – throwing their shoulders far back and breasting the world, as if the task of womanhood is to balance the weight that lands on your chest and could easily topple you over.

Which in a way I suppose is true.

Anyway, The Chest Fairy passes me by. I’m still Waiting. So when the Aunts look at me there can’t be much that impresses.

I’ve learned that you can never see yourself as another person does. You can never really know who you are for them, at least not until much later. That’s what I think now. I stand and look at my aunts. They have amazing coats and dresses. Their dresses are of a woven cloth on which patterned flowers in subdued colour have been embroidered the way I’ve only seen on wallpaper. Their coats have huge black buttons and when they hand their coats over they are heavy as blankets and smell like cupboards.

‘I’m sure you’re best in your class, Ruth, aren’t you? Good girl, good girl. You’re such a bright girl you will just grow up and dazzle. Won’t she, Daphne? She’ll dazzle.’

‘Dazzle dazzle dazzle.’

‘Mother says you like to read. Do you?’

I do.

‘Of course you do, because you’re so bright, you little angel. If your grandmother was alive she’d – No. No, Penelope, I’m not. I’m not no.’

‘Handkerchief ?’

‘Thank you, Penelope.’

‘We’ve brought you a present, dear.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s just for you.’

It’s a hardcover of Jane Austen’s
Sense and Sensibility
and on the inside front page there’s this little oval black and white picture of her with a baby’s bonnet on her head and a kind of ironic smile like She Knows. Jane knows what stupid insensitive people there are in the world and that’s what is behind every word she writes. Look at her portrait, She Knows. I think Dear Jane had a bit of the Impossible Standard herself although maybe it wasn’t even that impossible, maybe it was just some kind of decency and awareness she was expecting.

‘It’s Jane Austen, dear,’ Aunt P says.

‘What?’ Nan asks from the fire.

‘JANE AUSTEN,’ Aunt roars.

‘EXHAUSTING?’ Nan bellows back. ‘YES,’ and starts the Aged P nod.

Neither of my aunts, I am convinced, ever drank tea from a mug. The china cups are out for them.

They are a pair in the world, the two of them, and trade in exchange one to the other an entire currency of startled, dismayed and disapproving looks. The world fails the Impossible Standard constantly. Sometimes I imagine a whole gallery of their failed suitors, scrubbed jowly farmers of Meath, tweeded-up and cow-licked down, sent up to evenings in Ashcroft. The Meath men have surnames like Castlebridge, Farns, Ainsley. The sisters kill them off afterwards with cutting remarks. One sentence will do for each one.

‘Those hands he has.’ Castlebridge.

‘Did he seem to mumble terribly, dear? Could you, I couldn’t understand him. But perhaps you’re fond of him?’ Farns.

‘Actually I’ve never seen a fork used quite like that.’ Ainsley.

Pursed mouths, raised chins, arched eyebrows: each sister destroys the other’s suitors like she’s scissoring paper dolls. They find none up to standard. Their souls select their own society as the best and they become the pair they are.

‘Is that a?’

‘Tart,’ Mam says.

‘Tart. Pie, yes. I see. Apple?’

‘Rhubarb.’

‘Rhubarb. Well, well. Rhubarb, Daphne.’

‘Yes. Rhubarb.’

From care, or meanness as Nan says, the aunts are thin women. When they lift the cups of tea they do so with thumb and forefinger only, the other three fingers an extended fan for balance and grace. They lean ever so slightly forward and, eyebrows raised and lips tightened to the smallest puckered nub, sip the startling dark brew my mother has made.

‘Rhubarb? Well well, Daphne.’

Dad arrives late. He comes into the kitchen in his wellingtons and there is sudden excitement. His sisters fly up like ravens.

‘O Virgil.’

They flutter about him a few moments – ‘Virgil, are you getting thin? What is this you are wearing?’ – and show their love in questions.

My dad is easily embarrassed.

That man is an ocean of emotion, Jimmy Mac said.

Knowing the aunts were coming, Mam has everything just as tidy as can be. She’s put a load of things away inside the dresser, she’s hidden the tea-towels we usually use and taken out these cream ones I’ve never seen; for the duration of The Visit the Normal Life of our house has been tidied away. I like it in a way. There’s a sense of occasion. So here’s my dad standing in his wellies and he can see how tidy the place is even as his sisters circle. He can see all the effort Mam and I have made and his eyes have that kind of shining they get when the feelings are these waves rising in his heart.

‘O Virgil, are you getting thin?’

My father was always thin and his hair was always silver. His eyes were the bluest blue, the way the water looks when in the sky over it you think you can see Heaven. In my mind the thinness and the silveriness and the blueness were all connected.