History of the Rain (31 page)

Empty shoes. Weird, I know. But true.

Mam looks down at Dad’s shoes on the bank, and that’s when suddenly it hits her:
he’s gone
.

Her heart flips over.
He’s gone
.

My father is gone from this world and in the next moments my mother experiences the kind of dread foreknowledge widows in Latin American novels do, where black birds are sitting in the tops of trees and the wind rustles like black crêpe and smells like charcoal. He’s gone. His story is over.

That’s it.

The immense loneliness of the world after love falls upon my mother. She stands there. She can’t speak, she can’t shout out. She’s just taking this ice-cold knowledge inside her.

Then, forty yards downriver, Virgil comes up through the surface. He yells.

It’s not a yell of panic or fear but of joy, and at that moment my mother discovers that my father is a wonderful swimmer. He’s learned in deep waters and distant places and not only has he no fear he makes fear seem illogical, as if water and current and tide are all graces and a man’s movement within them natural as it is on earth. His stroke is unhurried. There is a kind of elemental delight in crossing the pull of the river, in feeling it, allowing it, resisting. He swims like he could swim for ever. I think he could. I think he can.

He comes back to her and holds his place in the water at her feet. ‘Come in,’ he says.

‘I could kill you.’

It’s not the reply he was hoping for. When I get around to writing it, it will not feature in
Chat-Up Lines for Girls who Don’t Get Out Much
.

She’s serious, and not serious. Her heart has not yet flipped back and she’s in the deep waters of realising that if he was gone her life would be over, which in my book is basically substance essence and quintessence of Love.

‘I’m sorry.’

She looks at him. He is naked. His upper body has the strange luminosity of flesh when most vulnerable. It’s that pale tone the holy painters use, the one that makes you think what the sound of the word
flesh
does, that it’s this thin-thin covering,
flesh
, and so easily it can be pierced.

‘I can’t swim,’ Mam says.

‘I’ll teach you.’

‘You will not.’

‘It’s not hard. Mary, take off your clothes.’ He is floating below her, his arms doing a kind of backward circling I’ve seen him do so he’s moving but not going anywhere.

‘You’re mad.’

‘I’m not.’

‘It’s freezing. I’m freezing right here.’

‘You get used to it. It’s lovely. Come on.’

‘I’m not going in.’

‘Then I’ll have to come get you.’

‘Don’t you dare.’

He puts his feet down, finds the mud floor of the Shannon, which is like a dark paste, tacky and cold, and he wades in to the bank.

‘Virgil!’ She’s watching him, she’s warning him, but she’s not running away.

He puts his hands up, leans forward, and like a strange white river-thing coming ashore flips himself up on to the bank.

‘Virgil! Don’t.’

He stands, the river runs off him, leaves a river shine.

‘Come on. I’ll show you.’

‘Virgil!’

‘You’ll love it.’

‘Don’t you touch me!’

He takes a step towards her. And because she doesn’t want to run away and she doesn’t want to go in the river, and because the whole scene is unscripted and mad, she bends down and takes his shoes and fires them out across the dark and into the water. The surprise in his face makes her laugh. Then she grabs up the rest of his clothes.

‘Mary!’

She throws them, shirt and trousers making briefly an Invisible Man, briefly winged, until he lands on the face of the river. Clothes-man floats seaward. They watch. It seems he’ll swim to the Atlantic. Then a twist in the current takes them; soundlessly my father’s clothes slide under and are gone.

Virgil looks at my mother.

She looks at him.

Then she laughs, and he laughs, and then he comes after her and she runs but not so fast that he cannot catch her. And when he does, her hands feel the chill slippery skin of him and she smells the river that is on him and in him and his kiss is a shock of cold becoming warm, river becoming man.

Nine months later, Aeney and I swam downriver and were born.

Chapter 11

When I wake some parts of me are dead. My arms get under me during sleep. As if all night I have been doing backstroke, slow mill of arm over arm towards unseen destination until exhaustion arrives and I give up. I always wake with a feeling of things unfinished. I wake and feel these lumps under me and sort of wriggle to get them alive. Then the room and the house and the parish gradually assemble around me again and Mam looks in and says ‘Morning Ruth’ and lets up the blind on the skylight and opens it a crack so we can see and feel today’s rain.

Here, in what Shakespeare calls The Place Beneath, the rain that falls from heaven is not so gentle. If once, it’s definitely not twice blessed. Safe to say Dear William & his gartered stockings were never abroad in the County Clare.

‘How are you, pet?’ Mam sits on the edge of the bed. She pats and straightens and fixes the duvet and the pillows while she talks. She can’t help herself. My mam never ever stops. She’s just this amazing machine that somehow manages Nan and me and the house and keeps us all afloat. She’s on all decks, crewman, boilerman, purser, Captain. My mam is a miracle.

‘How are you feeling?’

I can’t say. That’s the thing. I can’t say how I am feeling because once I start to think
what’s an honest answer to that?
I lose my footing. There’s this huge dark tide and I feel
O God
and I can’t. I just can’t. I used to think that no one who hasn’t been inside your life can understand it. But then I read all of Emily Dickinson, the nearly eighteen hundred poems, and afterwards thought
I had been inside
her life in a way that I couldn’t if I had lived next door and known her. I’m pretty sure you could have sold tickets to see the look Emily gave if you asked, ‘How are you feeling today, Miss Dickinson?’

But I don’t want to be cold, or hurt Mam, and I don’t want to get into a discussion either, so I say, ‘I’m okay.’ And Mam smiles the smile that isn’t one, but has that patience and understanding and sadness in it, and from the pocket of her cardigan she takes the yellow and blue and white tablets and gives them to me. The water in the glass is room temperature, and on a single swallow the tablets vanish into me and taste like nothing, which, to anyone with even weak-grade imagination, is disconcerting. You want them to taste like something. You want them to be more substantial, and significant, in a way, though I cannot explain that.

‘Now,’ Mam says, ‘I’ll bring you up something in a little while.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’

She doesn’t get up for a moment. For a moment there’s something silent sitting between us and I know it’s the untold story of our family and it’s like this sea-mist has come up the Shannon and into the room and hangs nebulous and opaque and tastes of salt. Then Mam pats my legs under the duvet two gentle pats and she rises and goes.

From the moment we arrived, Aeney and I were noteworthy personages in the drama of the parish. First of all, we nearly weren’t landed alive. Mother being Mother, she took the perfectly practical no-nonsense approach to pregnancy and paid no heed to the powdered ladies in Mina Prendergast’s who began their stories by saying
I don’t like to say but
or to those who cast their what Margaret Crowe calls Asparagus at the fact that Mam was older than the Faha norm for having a first baby, and in boyfriend terms Dad was An Ancient. The fact that Mam seemed so happy, which in Irish Catholic translates into Doom Imminent, was another portent. The whole parish was waiting for The Delivery. It was not that anyone wished us harm; it was just that people like to be right. They like Next Week’s Episode to turn out exactly as they expected
and
to surprise them. Nurse Dowling came and measured Mam and leaned over to listen to us and said hello. We said hello back. We were perfectly polite. Only we spoke at the same time so she didn’t hear that there were two of us. Everything is Grand, just Grand, and after that we stopped listening to the World to Come and swam the warm swimming that takes you back to being seaweed.

The plan was that we were to be born in hospital. Ennis though had been Downgraded. One morning a vicious sausage heartburn twisted the Minister sideways at his mahogany desk and he had a pregnancy epiphany, decided no one was to be born on the outer edges of the country. Any more, the excellent Irish people would be born in Centres of Excellence. There would be none of these in the County Clare. There would be one in Limerick though, which at that time was a Centre of Fairly Alright, but if you lived in Kilbaha or out on the Loop Head peninsula you’d have a hundred-mile drive on roads the Council had given up to the mercy of the Atlantic which rightly owned them and was in the process of taking them back. Still, the hospital in Limerick was the intended setting for our long-delayed arrival in the narrative, and in the blue Cortina Virgil practised delivery-driving. He didn’t want to fail this. He had a sense of enormity, as if for every inch swelling in Mam’s belly there was growing around his heart a feeling of immensity, as if his life had reached a verge and this great leap was about to happen, and he would be ready. He made the car spotless, or as near as, given that some spots were actual holes. He went on his knees and took every weed out of the garden. He got new gravel for the gravel way and raked it smooth, then raked it smoother. One day he cleaned the kitchen windows and the bedroom windows and then The Room ones, then the kitchen ones again, going round the house the way Tommy Devlin says a cow circles before calving. He whitewashed the house, limey spatters flecking the clean windows, flecking his hands, face and hair which he had no time to clean because Mam’s cry came and when he ran in the door she had already slid down on to the floor before the fire and Nan had stood her still-smoking cigarette on end, pushed the kettle across to boil and taken down two blankets and three towels so the flagstones would be softer landing and to New Arrivals this world wouldn’t seem penitential.

In minutes the parish was on its way. Moira Mac, who had several PhDs in what, with unfortunate phrasing, her husband Jimmy called Dropping Babies, was there before Mam cried a second time. By the time Nurse Dowling came there was a full gathering of women in the kitchen, their men sitting outside on the windowsill, painting the mark of whitewash across their bottoms, smoking, watching the river running and wondering could that be fresh rain starting.

The labour lasted an age. The journey to Limerick was considered and dismissed. Still we didn’t make an entrance. Gulls came up the river. Clouds came after them. The word
Complications
leaked outside in a whisper. The men took turns to go round the corner and pee against the gable. Dad came out, strode right down the garden and out the gate, stood alone in the river view in commune with Abraham or the Reverend or the General Invisible, turned on his heel and without a word strode back in.

Young Father Tipp came, parked his Starlet the way priests park, on the outer edge, carried his missal low down and a little behind him the way Clint Eastwood carried his gun, like he’d only use it if he had to. He took the nods, said what names he knew – ‘Jimmy, John, Martin, Michael, Mick, Sean, Paddy’ – to the ground-mumble chorus of ‘Father’ and then stayed outside amongst them.

‘Is there any . . . ?’

‘No, Father.’

‘Nothing yet, Father.’

‘No. Right.’

‘Could be a while yet, Father.’

‘I see.’

Eventually, to relieve Father Tipp of feeling
spare
, as Aidan Knowles says, Jimmy Mac asked, ‘Would you maybe say a few prayers, Father?’

And so they started up. A kind of human engine.

From where Aeney and I were it sounded like murmuring waves. Wave after wave. Which fooled us into thinking it was maybe the sea.

Mam screamed. Nan fecked the fecking Minister. The room heated under the scrutiny of the female neighbours, none of whom would chance but sidelong glances at Mam, all of them sitting Sufi Clare-Style, hands folded in their laps and eyes fixed faraway on the emerging plot. In the chimney the wind sang, the rain proper started, and finally, between prayers and curses, Aeney Swain swam, landing with some surprise not in the salty Atlantic but in the giant Johnson’s baby-oiled arms of Nurse Dowling.

We were notable personages in Faha, first, because of our birth, our natures being immediately established as precarious and untimely, and second, even as the blankets and towels were tidied, Mam was laid on the couch and the men called in for tea, we were notable for being unexpected twins. Briefly we enjoyed the celebrity reserved for the two-headed.

‘
Two?
’

We were not alike, but likeness is a thing expected of twins and expectations lean to their own fulfilment.