History of the Rain (30 page)
And still we were not born.
Your narrator, you may already have grasped, is not gifted in matters chronological. Chronos, the God with the three heads who split the egg of the world into three even parts, and started the whole measuring-out business, never appealed to me.
Neither did the DC Comics version Vincent Cunningham says is right cool.
Aeney and I were not yet on the horizon of this world. Sometimes I like to think we were in another one, having just a wonderful time. I like to think not of The World to Come but of The World That Came Before, for which so far in Literature I have found no descriptions. There is something in Edward Joseph Martyn’s peppermint and mothball-smelling
Morgante the Lesser
(Book 2,767, BiblioBazaar, South Carolina) but it’s more a World Elsewhere really. When Mr Martyn wasn’t helping W.B. Yeats found the Abbey Theatre he squeezed in a little time to do the bit of writing, and in this he describes the perfect world of Agathopolis. In Agathopolis Mass is attended every morning after everyone has a good thorough full-body wash. After Mass you sit around on grandstands and watch military reviews.
Unreal.
Here’s a better one. Think of any of your favourite characters, and then picture them in the time before they entered the story. They existed somewhere, in a World Before. Hamlet as a small boy. (
Hamlet Begins
in the Warner Brothers version.)
Macbeth as a teenager. (Out of his pimples The Dark Prince Rises. Sorry, fecund.)
Anna Karenina in school. She probably had someone like Miss Jean Brodie in her prime for a teacher not Mrs Pratt who we had and who, like Miss Barbary in
Bleak House
, never smiled and because I was Plain Ruth Swain told me I shouldn’t rule out the nuns, she herself who had a gawky face on her that Tommy Fitz proved by Google was identical to a Patagonian Toothfish.
In the World Before This One, Aeney and I were waiting. We knew there was longing for us. We wanted to come. But once we did we knew that time was going to start and that meant time was going to end too, so we hung out in distant seas a while longer. We didn’t mean any harm. And anyway the story wasn’t ready for us yet. There are precedents. It’s ten chapters before Sam Weller appears in
The Pickwick Papers
(Book 124, Penguin Classics, London), nineteen before Sarah Gamp arrives in
Martin Chuzzlewit
(Book 800, Penguin Classics, London). But Mary and Virgil were losing hope of ever having children. My father was certain it was his fault. Thanks to the Reverend and thanks to Abraham he had the Swain genius for finding fault in himself. He came up short of the Standard in everything. What it was like to live with that inside you, what it meant to be subject to the constant duress of failing the Impossible, to aspire and fall, aspire and fall, to flick between the cathodes and anodes of rapture and despair, I can only imagine. I don’t aspire. My hope has a small h. I hope to get to the end.
Because, first-off, Mary was a woman, and secondly because she was a MacCarroll, Mam took the news of being unpregnant stoically. She didn’t go do-lally. She didn’t drama-queen. Maybe she knew about the Late Arrivals thing, or maybe Mam just has more faith.
In the evenings after work Virgil would go out in a long buff-coloured coat he had brought back from somewhere in Chile, the one that was split deep up the back so you could ride vaquero-style, that had two tails that flew out and in a crosswind came up like wings. He walked miles along the riverbank. It was chance. It was a fluke of biology. That was all. Don’t be stupid. There was no message, no meaning in it. It was not a Judgment.
But it felt like one.
To save my father from himself my mother took him dancing; Nan’s set-dance addiction had gone down the bloodstream and transmogrified into Jive in Mam at which Virgil was hopeless but did anyway because it made her smile and he was addicted to that. His long frame sole-shuffling was not exactly dancing. Elbows crooked, arms out, he seemed to be doing The Coat-hanger. By living in Ashcroft with Mother Kittering he had missed out on that whole stage of development where bad clothes, peer pressure and pimples combine to teach you how to mimic the cool people. My dad literally had no clue. But Mam didn’t mind. Everything about him was evidence of something special, when special was still a good word.
They went to plays in halls. They went to the Singing Club. They went to the Kilrush Operatic Society’s production of
The Bohemian Girl
at the Mars Theatre, with Guest Artists (all of whom have sung at Covent Garden, the flyer says. It lies folded inside the yellowed dog-eared and generally dirt-smelling copy of John Seymour’s
Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency
, Book 2,601, Corgi, London). One night they went to see Christy Moore who sang with shut eyes the Christie Hennessy song that became Virgil’s favourite because in it was the line ‘We’d love to go to Heaven, but we’re always digging holes’ which my father said summed up we Irish and was more profound than Plato.
Back then same as now the sea-salty village of Doonbeg had the best amateur-drama group, that parish was all theatre, and they went there to see John B. Keane’s
Sive
, and afterwards my mother came out moved and upset. They went across the street into the graveyard and stood a time in the starless dark waiting for the sorrow to pass. She held her arms across herself and he wrapped his around her. They didn’t speak about the play. They didn’t talk out the upset the way they would if we moved the scene to America. My guess is that something in the play had caused her to think about having a daughter and that had led to thinking maybe it was true that they were not going to have children. When Mam gets upset she goes quiet. A whole battle goes on inside her, but unless you know her eyes you can’t tell.
Dad knew. It was his fault. That’s the default Swain position. The indelible watermark of failure. He wanted to apologise. But he wouldn’t know where to begin. He held on to her. They stayed in the quiet of the graveyard as the hall emptied and the audience went to Tubridy’s and Igoe’s, they stayed long enough so the seagulls that slept inland there on the grave of the two Dunne boys that drowned in the Blue Pool had become accustomed to them.
Then Dad said, ‘Come on.’ He led Mam back to the car. Even though he didn’t drive he was Keeper of the Keys, and this time he got in the driver’s seat.
Reader, you’ll think she said, ‘But you can’t drive.’
And he said, ‘I’ve been practising,’ or, ‘It doesn’t look too hard.’ Or any better dialogue you’d care to add here.
But I don’t think she said anything at all.
Then they were driving out of Doonbeg, Dad using that jerky pedal-down pedal-up technique he always had so the Cortina went down Church Street in spasms of hesitation, indicator flashing first left then right as he tried to find the windscreen wipers and at least see what they were going to crash into.
Maybe everybody got out of the way. I don’t know. I can’t drive. I can’t imagine how you do it. How you go around bends without knowing if there is going to be somebody standing there, if there mightn’t be someone who has fainted in the road like Mrs Phelan say, or that idiot boy of the Breegans who likes to stand in traffic. I can’t imagine how I’d progress at all, how I’d ever have the confidence to just trust that it would be all right, that the unexpected wouldn’t happen, because in fact that’s all that does happen.
Virgil had no such problem. He drove leaning forward, hands at ten and two hooked over the steering wheel, mouth tight, eyes fixed on the illumined way. He went faster than he realised. He was not like the Nolan brothers who took corners at a hundred, did the Olympic Rings in doughnuts on the Ennis Road and whose driving skills were mostly testament to a childhood devoted to Pac-Man, and who, Thank the Bust, Kathleen Ryan says, are sharing their talents with the people of Australia now. But he was a wild driver. It was as if he was determined to race her away from the place where the sadness was, as if the Cortina were chariot and horses both and something grave was in pursuit. He drove the way the blind might drive, by faith, ignoring white lines, hurtling away from the Atlantic and heading south by zigzag, sweeping aside veil after veil of mist until they came out on the familiar, the dark slick waters of the estuary. Virgil drove the car up on to the ditch. For a moment he must have thought that would do to stop it. He didn’t actually apply the brakes and the car bumped along aslant, two wheels up on the grass and Mam shouting ‘Virgil!’ And a louder ‘VIRGIL!’ (which certainly startled Publius Vergilius Maro in the Afterlife where I picture him in the sheet-toga Seamus Nolan wore when age eight he gave a sort of boxing interpretation to who he called Punches Pilot in Faha N.S. production of The Nativity. Publius though had probably managed to gather some young lads around him and was telling them about the Trojan War,
again
, and stalled mid-dactylic a little proud because somebody from Faha down in Earthworld was calling his name). They went jouncing along the bank, the car whipping bits of hedge, dipping in hollows, rising on crests before Dad thumped what he discovered were the brakes and Mam screamed, was jolted forward, and Pop! smacked her head off the windscreen the way the doll figures do in the Road Safety ads.
Only her head didn’t come off.
It was only a small
pop
probably. Because she just rubbed her forehead and blinked her eyes and Dad said, ‘Jesus, I’m sorry.’
There were ten blank seconds maybe.
You only need to wait five.
‘Mary?’
Mam looked across at him. She stared, wide-eyed. ‘Have we stopped?’ she asked.
She let him think he’d hurt her another ten seconds then she punched his arm. ‘You’re mad, you know that? Mad.’
‘Starting and stopping are the hard bits,’ Virgil said. And he smiled.
When my father smiled it was like he had unlocked the world. It was that huge. It made you want to smile too. It made you want to laugh and then it made you want to cry. It was in his eyes. I can’t explain it really. There was this sense of something rising deep in him, and of
shine
.
Mam put her hands to her mouth and into them she laughed.
‘Come on,’ he said. He was already getting out of the car. In the movie version Mam’ll say, ‘Where are you going?’ but the dialogue is edited out here. Here there is only his figure become white as he takes off his jacket and leaves it on the driver’s seat. He’s out in the mizzling night rain. His shirt gleams. Across the field the river is black and slick. ‘Come on.’
I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never ever sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.
‘Come on.’ He takes her hand.
And now they are running.
I know that field. Years ago I went there. It’s rough and wildly sloping, hoof-pocked and rushy-bearded both. Running down it is bump and splash, is ankle-twist treachery. You get going and you can’t stop. You’re heading for the river. And you can’t help but scream.
Mam screams. Virgil yells out. And they charge down the dark to the river. The bank is plashy from long river-licking. The muck is silvered and without footprints. It sucks on their shoes. Virgil stops and pulls off his. Then he’s taking off his shirt.
‘Virgil?’
Then he’s taking off his trousers.
‘You’re not?’
The rain is already beaded on his hair. He looks up into the sky. Then he smiles at Mam, turns, goes three steps and dives into the Shannon.
She yells out.
He’s gone. He’s disappeared into the river. She looks at the place where he went in but it’s moving, and quickly she loses the spot, tries to refind it but she can’t. She imagines where he must be gone, the line the dive would have taken him, and she traces that as far as she can but it’s lost in the seamless dark. ‘Virgil?’
Nothing.
A rush of questions, like swimmers entered a sea-race at the same moment, splash-stroke in her mind. How long can you hold your breath underwater? How far can you go? Does a current take you? Is the Shannon deep? Are there river weeds? Malignant river-creatures?
Can he swim
?
She looks out into the nothing. Then for no reason she can explain she turns and looks at his shoes on the bank. Empty shoes are the strangest thing. Look at a pair of anyone’s worn shoes. Look at the wear on them. Look at the scuffs and scratches. Look at the darkened heel-shine inside, where the weight of the world rubbed, the dent of the big toe, where the foot lifted. Tony Lynch who’s the son of Lynch’s Undertakers and who grew up a pallbearer says putting the shoes on the corpse is the hardest part. The empty shoes of someone who’s gone, there’s a metaphysical poem in there. You don’t believe me, look in Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Tango del viudo’ in the thin white
Selected Poems
(Book 1,111, Jonathan Cape, London) with the bookmark
Alberto Casares, libros antigos & modernos, suipacha 521, Buenos Aires
inside. ‘
Los mejores libros para los majors clientes
’.
