History of the Rain (19 page)
Where are you, Aeney?
You slip away from me as you always did. Where are you?
‘Mrs Quinty, can you see the earth from Heaven?’
‘O now, Ruth.’ Mrs Quinty pulled herself up a bit tighter and clutched the balls of her knees.
‘Can they see us? Right now? Through the roof or through the skylight? What do you think?’
Mrs Quinty doesn’t really like to say.
‘I don’t really like to say, Ruth.’
‘But what’s your opinion?’
‘I really don’t think it’s right to talk about it. And I’ll tell you why.’
‘You believe in Heaven?’
Mrs Quinty took a little sharp inbreath, like the air was bitter but medicinal and had to be taken.
‘Well, can you or can’t you see what’s happening here when you’re there?’
Mrs Quinty made dimples of dismay. She gave herself a little tightening tug and glanced towards the door where she could see into Aeney’s room where Mam had all the washing hanging on chairs and stools because there’s no drying outside now and because despite the rain up here in the sky-rooms is the driest place in Faha and though it looks like a kind of ghost laundry, like that description I read in Seamus Heaney of spirits leaving their clothes on hedges as they went off into the spirit world, like Aeney’s room is this secret Take-off Launching Pad, it’s practical. Mrs Quinty kept looking in there while working her way up to an answer. Maybe she was thinking of an official response. Maybe she was doing her own inner mind-Google and really for the first time looking up
Heaven
. She didn’t have to go Pindar, Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, Pythagoras, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas. She didn’t have to open some of those books of my father’s, the ones that came from a monastery sale and smell like frankincense or blue cheese,
De laudibus divinae sapientiae
of Alexander Neckham, the
Weltchronik
of Rudolf of Ems, the translated
Le Miroir du Monde
of Gauntier of Metz, composed 1247, who located Paradise precisely ‘at the point where Asia begins’. All those writers who got themselves in a geography-bind trying to explain how it was that Paradise didn’t get washed away during Noah’s Flood. Or those who had to explain that when Heaven was generally considered to be
above
us that was when they thought the world was flat. Because for the Departed say in, I don’t know, Australia, if they went
Up
to Heaven they’d likely come up in Leitrim, which might be Paradise to wet-faced welly-men from Drumshambo but would be a holy fright, as Tommy Fitz says, to sun-loving sandal-wearers from Oz. No, Mrs Quinty didn’t have to go from Saint Brendan to Dante, all she did was turn the shining eyes to the rainlight and she was back in Low Babies in Muckross Park College, Dublin, one rainy afternoon looking at a picture of holy people standing on clouds and a white nun saying: ‘Now, girls, this is Heaven.’
Heaven’s specific physics and geography were Unknown, and that was the way it was meant to be.
Until you arrived.
Then, even if you were dim as bat-faced Dennis Delany who couldn’t learn the calendar and spelled his own name Dis, you suddenly understood. The entire workings of the mind of God suddenly became clear to you and you went
Ah
. Until then, it’s a Mystery.
‘I don’t believe in it,’ I said.
Mrs Quinty returned from Low Babies. ‘O Ruth.’
‘I don’t. Some days I just don’t. I think there’s no point in any of it. It’s just rubbish. It’s just a story. People die and they’re gone. They don’t see you and you never see them again. It’s just a story to lessen the pain.’
Mrs Quinty looked at me. She looked the way you look at a dog who fell in the river and only just made it back to the bank. ‘Maybe it is a story,’ she said at last. ‘But it’s our story, Ruth.’
By the end of that summer in Ashcroft my father had nearly run out of stories. He’d almost read his father’s full library and arrived at last at
Moby Dick
. The edition I have is a Penguin paperback (Book 2,333, Herman Melville, Penguin, London). It’s been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there’s that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you’ll see.
My father revisited
Moby
a lot.
Maybe it’s because there’s no other novel in the whole world that better captures the Impossible Standard.
The end of that summer in Ashcroft he was reading
Moby
, and then, one evening maybe because he was bored, maybe because he was in one of those mad chapters that detail the physiognomy of whales, he went and took down one of Abraham’s unused Salmon Journals, and shortly after, amidst the Havishammy dust and cobwebs of Ashcroft’s non-dining Dining Room, he began a novel. It was set on a ship in the sea.
Now it takes a certain twist of mind to be able to write anything. And another twist to be able to write every day in a house that’s falling down around you with a mother who’s working her way through the wine cellar and a moist Bank Manager who’s expecting
At the very least, Mrs Kittering-Swain, a gesture
.
My father had both twists. As Matty Nolan said about Father Foley, Poor Man, when he came back with the brown feet after thirty years in Africa, he was Far Gone. Virgil had that power of concentration that he passed on to me. He filled one Salmon Journal and started on the next. He went a bit Marcus Aurelius who (Book 746,
Meditations
, Penguin Classics, London) said men were born with various mania. Young Marcus’s was, he said, to make a plaything of imaginary events. Virgil Swain meet Marcus. Imaginary events, imaginary people, imaginary places, whatever you’re having yourself. Gold-medal Mania.
I suppose it was just pole-vaulting really, only with a smaller pole.
Point is, he was very Far Gone.
And that’s where he was when they came to take the furniture. Mr Houlihan didn’t come in person. He stayed out at the gates in his car, dabbing and moistening and peering in, blinking the rapid blinks of the obscurely guilty and finding he had chewed his lips into looking like burst sausages in an over-hot pan. Gaffney & Boucher it was that were sent. They parked the lorry in the Front Circle beside the fallen chimney and came in like long-necked birds calling various polite but unanswered hellooos through the house, both of them with the low-slung shoulders and downcast eyes of the deeply apologetic. Grandmother did not appear. They arrived in the foyer and began taking the gold mirrors off the wall. One screw wouldn’t loosen. It would only turn and turn, and Gaffney gave it elbow grease and Meath meatiness and broke a piece of the nineteenth-century artisan moulding getting it free. Boucher shouldered the front door and Ashcroft opened to the daylight for the first time in years. They took the long sideboard (leaving the twin China dogs on guard on the floor), the standing Newgate clock, the embroidered Louis chairs, the studded Chesterfield, four armchairs of stuffing various, huffing and puffing as they moved the long oak dining table that bashed against the door jamb and wouldn’t fit – sideways or backways or anyways, Phil; You’re right there, Michael – and at last had to be left just inside the dining-room door.
At teatime Virgil landed back in this world. He didn’t realise anything had changed until he came downstairs and crossed the front foyer and felt something under his foot. He bent down to pick up the piece of gold moulding. That’s when he saw the mirrors were gone. That’s when he saw the front doors were wide open. He called his mother. She failed to answer. He called her again, this time climbing the stairs, thinking
we’ve been robbed
and that this had happened when he was whaling just off the coast of Nantucket.
He knocked on Grandmother’s door. He called to her. When he opened the door he saw her slanted across the bed, one arm hanging over the side as if she’d been caught and pulled askew and then had either shaken free or been thrown back. Her face was lopsided, her lip pulled low on one side where the fish-hook had been.
A stroke is not the word for it, the philosopher Donie Downes says. It’s more a Wallop. It’s a flaming wallop somewhere in the inside back of your head. Bang! like that. And you’re switched off same as the Mains is down and you lie there in the Big Quiet silently cursing the closure of Emergency in Ennis General Hospital and hoping Dear God Timmy and Packy are coming. In Dan’s case everything returned to normal, TG, he says (Thank God), except for the compulsion to tell every passing soul in Ryan’s or Nolan’s, Hanway’s, the post office, going in or out of Mass, about the exact nature and dimension of his Wallop.
Grandmother did not recover. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. Maybe once she was transported out the front doors of Ashcroft and was loaded bumpily up across the fumy exhaust of the ambulance,
rolled
into the grim metal interior and strapped in place, her one imperious eye still good for glaring, maybe she realised she wouldn’t be getting any further in the wine cellar. She had the second stroke. In Faha the word that’s fatally attached to
stroke
is
massive
. This one was Massive. To her eternal mortification it was not in some private room with stacked goosedown pillows, elegant bedclothes, and attendants with proper accents. It was in the ambulance, stopped on a narrow bend somewhere near Navan, waiting for skittish young cattle to cross. Her son was sitting alongside her.
Three weeks after Grandmother died, Virgil too left Ashcroft. There was no natural place left for him to fit into the world.
He took
Moby Dick
and went by bus to Dublin. Two days later he stepped on to a Merchant Navy ship docked on the River Liffey.
Then he went to sea.
TWO
Back in the time when we were all seaweed, Tommy Devlin says, and adjusts himself on his seat for the long story.
Tommy Devlin is Nan’s cousin. He’s a strictly brown-trouser man. He’s an
Irish Independent
man. He’s a fist socked-into-his-hand man in Cusack Park when the boys from Broadford are putting points on the board.
Now for you
. Tommy’s History of the World is not written down but firmly fixed in his mind in the same way that Chocolate Goldgrains are the only biscuit, Flahavan’s the only porridge, and Fianna Fáil the One True Rulers (like all mythological heroes presently enduring a temporary period of exile).
Back in the time when we were all seaweed, he says, there was some seaweed already had the MacCarroll microbes or genomes or whatever and after that it was only a matter of time and creation.
Back then Ireland was down at the South Pole. So I’m thinking it would have been frozen seaweed of the sort Paddy Connolly started selling above in Quilty thinking in the Boom it would catch on like frozen yoghurt but hadn’t calculated on the power of the salt making your lips swell up like slugs in a wet June while you stood there sucking Quilty seaweed. But then the Bust came and the Japanese had the earthquake and the mini-meltdown and couldn’t eat their own and started sending delegations worldwide in search of good seaweed. A Mr Oonishi arrived in the County Clare, had a taste of frozen carrageen and went
odorokuhodo yoi
, which was
boys o boys
in Japanese, and the Connollys were back in business.
Sorry, drifting. It’s a river narrative. Once, we were all frozen seaweed.
Then, Tommy says, America split off of Africa, said
See you boys later
, and did the American thing, it went West.
Ireland of course did its own thing and went north. All of us were seaborne. Whatever microbes were paddling Ireland they were fierce stubborn and didn’t bother stopping at any of the sunnier climes, didn’t say
Lads, what about the Canaries for a location?
Didn’t say
Madeira looks nice
. No, they kept on, getting away from everyone, and would have kept going, Tommy says, except that Iceland had broken off above and was already in situ. The microbes were like the McInerneys who head off to Donegal each year, any number of children sardined into the back of the old Peugeot, three per seatbelt, and somewhere north of Claregalway dement their mother and father with
Are we there yet
. Enniscrone, County Sligo, is as far as they’ve ever made it. Tommy’s basic point: the microbes were getting restless by then. The sun had livened them up. Then the rain got them in a right stew. Suddenly we were bestirring ourselves.
Ireland came to a stop. And the seaweed-people started moving about on the land.
And some of them were MacCarrolls.
Because we were once seaweed we all long to get back there. That’s the premise. The sea is the Mother Ship. That’s the explanation for Kilkee Lahinch Fanore Ballyvaughan and all the bungalows built up and down the Atlantic coast. That’s the reason the planners couldn’t say it’ll look a bit mad and make the whole country look like we’re some kind of perverted sea-voyeurs.
