History of the Rain (34 page)
He sat and hummed. Then suddenly he leaned across and I was lost in the deep coarse smell of the river-fields in his jumper and heard, somewhere invisibly above, the soft rubbing sound of pencil on paper.
He leaned back, hummed what he had written. We rocked on.
Aeney had no jealousy in him. I think at first he didn’t know he was a twin. It is different for boys. Boys are born as masters of the universe, until a bigger master knocks them down. I cried; Aeney slept. I was picked up and carried out from where our cots were in Mam and Dad’s, taken up the steep stair that RLS would be delighted to know was called a Captain’s Ladder, on to the little landing and into the chill space that Before Conversion was then the attic and later Aeney’s and mine. Up here, spilled pool of light and stack of books, was my father’s pine table and chair. Up here by the bar-heater he wrote the first poems with me on his lap. When I woke in the mornings I was back in my cot, and felt, well,
composed
. My brother did not care. Even when later he discovered I could not sleep unless held, when he sometimes woke and looked across and his sister was vanished, he appeared unperturbed. Maybe he wasn’t that attached to me. Maybe he had a finely developed and fearless sense of the world to come, or had the unshakeable confidence of the first-born, that first landing in the plump arms of Nurse Dowling, which had informed him that
things would be all right
. The only fracture in this, the only inkling of otherwise was what only I knew, the way Aeney’s hand in sleep went to his sleeve or the label of his pillow so that he was always holding on to something and never adrift.
Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know. In our family it was unremarkable that my father had no income, that he hummed above the ceiling, only went into a church when there was no Mass on, fished religiously, had a book permanently sticking out of his pocket so his pockets were always torn at the edges, or to himself sang undervoice and off-key what I didn’t know then was the Psalms. It was not curious that he liked jam with sausages, was no more odd than Nan sitting on
Clare Champions
and smoking up the chimney or Aeney’s craving for salt on everything, cornflakes, hot chocolate and cake. Nothing in your own family is unusual.
I think nothing of it on the morning the Tooth Fairy has come to be brought by my mother out in the not-quite-rain to find my father, and to find him waiting for a cow to calve while reading aloud. It’s the dirty white paperback of William Blake’s
Songs of Innocence and Experience
(Book 1,112, Avon Books, New York) but back then I think it’s a story for the cows.
‘There she is!’ The book goes into his pocket. He kneels down to me. Always in happiness my father seemed on the point of tears. I thought it normal. I thought every adult must have these huge tides of emotion rising. Every adult must feel this wave of undeserving when they kneel down and see the marvel of their children.
‘Did she come?’
I smile my crooked smile, hold out the shining coin.
‘Let me see. Well well well. Isn’t that something? Will you give me a loan?’
I will. I offer it, but he presses my hand closed inside his.
‘You hold on to it for now, Ruthie,’ he says. ‘But I’ll know where to come if I need it.’
The colour of his eyes deepens with feeling and he has these twin clefts either side of his lips where feeling is checked. ‘You must have been very very good to get that much. Did you see her?’
I didn’t.
‘Do you know I think I did hear something,’ my father says. ‘It was very late. I was awake and working and I heard this gentle
whh whh whh
.’ He blows three times to make the wings of the Tooth Fairy as she circles and then descends upon our house.
Whh whh whh
. ‘She must have folded her wings then because I didn’t hear her inside the kitchen, and the wings would have knocked against things, wouldn’t they?’
They would.
‘But the latch. That’s why I heard the latch. I was wondering about that. It made just the softest clack, must have been when she was going down to your room. You didn’t see her at all? But you felt her maybe?’
I did. I do now.
I nod my solemn five-year-old nod and fly up into the air in my father’s arms. He turns me around in the sky above him, which is where I want to be always, but cannot, and must take succour in the knowledge that though human beings can’t fly soon I will lose more teeth.
When Mam takes me back across the meadow, rain-starred, gummy, dizzy, my father is back reading Blake to the cows.
One day we get a dog, a golden retriever my father christens Huckleberry. He’s not golden but white, which is the best kind I tell God-forgive-me the Bitch of the Brouders when she says your dog is a fake. Aeney and I take Huckleberry down to show him the river and to tell him not to drown. He’s puppy-manic and piddle-happy, scampering on the end of our blue baler-twine leash like his dream-legs are longer than his real ones. Aeney runs with him, and I run after, realising instantly that Huck is to be Aeney’s dog, that in a way inexplicable unless you’ve known it, they
recognise
each other.
Huck will not swim. He may be able to, we don’t know. We throw sticks into the water thinking to fool him into having his retrieving instinct override his desire not to get wet, but he just sits and in the deeps of his brown eyes the sticks float away down the river.
My father says we should skip our homework, we should take him to the beach, and we all load into the Cortina and drive to Kilkee. Huck loves the car. He loves to be moving. He sits up and looks out and Aeney winds down the window that later won’t wind up but has to be fingertip-pulled and then pressed the last inch. I think Huckleberry knows we’re going to the sea. I’m thinking he smells it and is already working out his strategy, How To Avoid The Sea.
That’s the kind of mind I have.
It’s still the time when dogs are allowed to run free on beaches. The Minister for Poo hasn’t been elected yet. So when we come down on to the big horseshoe beach Aeney lets Huck go and Huck goes running like he’s never run before, like sand and shore and sea-wind are marvels particular for dogs. He runs and you feel joy. You can’t explain that. He runs head out and ears back, like he can’t get to where he is going fast enough, like his blood remembers beaches from a world before and what beaches mean is freedom. Aeney tears after him. He yells
Huck! Huck!
and is not dismayed when Huck doesn’t slow, but runs on regardless, arms flying, carefree in the way we all want to be but suppose only exists in fairy tales, the pair of their prints briefly present in the sea-washed glare of the gone-out tide.
‘Swim, Ruthie?’ Dad asks, though he knows I won’t. Then he is in his brown trunks walking towards the ocean and Mam and I are standing, the way girls always are, watching, holding the clothes, peering into the distance, first for Aeney, and then into the far-out sea for Dad.
One sunny birthday we get a horse, a grey mare, who because Dad’s wrestling Homer at the time he calls Hippocampus, which in mythology was part-dolphin part-horse and part-bird, could go speedily on land sea and air, none of which dear Hippy actually managed in her lifetime. A man called Deegan brings her from Kilrush in a horsebox behind his dusty old Mercedes. Hippocampus is going by the name of Nancy and keeping her mythological powers under deep cover.
Mr Deegan gets out of his car says great day great day thank God and smacks his hands together. He wears a small felt hat. He wishes Aeney and I happy birthday and asks us aren’t we the lucky ones. This is a lovely quiet horse for you, he says. Oh Jeez she is. He releases the catches either side of the horsebox and makes a shout of Hup! as he lets down the back. Mam is standing beside the cabin with her arms folded and this held-in smile she reserves just for Dad, for when he has done something she thought impossible. Nan is at the kitchen window scowling her opinion of horse-dealers. Mr Deegan goes inside the box and unties Hippy and maybe because of the drowse of the drive or the torment of flies she has had to ignore, she does not move.
‘Hup now, hup. Come on. Come on, young lady.’ Hippy backs down the ramp with stiff-legged reluctance, comes down into our yard and turns out. Her eyes spook a little until Aeney tells Huck to be quiet.
‘There now, take a look at your horse,’ Mr Deegan says. ‘She’s a classy lady, this one.’ He pats her neck, harder than I would have, but Hippy doesn’t seem to mind.
‘What do you think of her, Ruthie?’ Dad asks.
‘She’s lovely.’
‘Will you pet her?’
‘She likes to be petted,’ Mr Deegan says. ‘Oh Jeez she does.’
‘And she’s quiet?’ Mam asks him.
‘Very quiet, Mam.’ Mr Deegan has a broken china smile. Because by horse-dealer’s instinct he knows Mam is harder to impress than Dad he clicks his fingers on an idea. ‘I’ll show you how quiet,’ he says, and then he crouches down and gets in under the horse, so that he is actually in there, squatting sitting-room-style between her four legs. ‘It rains you can always shelter under here,’ he says. ‘She won’t mind.’ He holds a hand out towards me. ‘Want to have a cup of tea in here? I’ll ring for service.’ He tugs twice on her tail. Hippy doesn’t mind. She doesn’t move.
I, who by age eight am already fearful of all cattle and beasts general, who have already decided the natural world is a misnomer, think this is the best horse there ever was. This is Hippy the Wonder Horse. I take Mr Deegan’s hand and go in under her. So then does Aeney.
‘Will she have babies?’ Aeney asks.
‘Foals they’re called,’ I tell him.
‘Will she have foals?’
‘Please God,’ Mr Deegan says. ‘Please God.’
And I think I know then this will be a day I will be remembering. I know it even before Aeney and I get the giggles under there and cannot stop ourselves, and Hippy doesn’t mind or move and the giggles get worse, and they spread to Mam who passes them to Dad in the form of the smile she releases now, because Virgil is wonderful, because somehow, she doesn’t know how, he has got us a horse for our birthday.
It doesn’t matter that Hippy was never actually ridden, that she just stood in the field, and grazed and wanted to be petted, that when we came home from school I petted her because I had read
Black Beauty
and wanted a good part if Hippy wrote her own autobiography, that Aeney lost interest in her when she wouldn’t go and instead he went river-hunting with Huck for whatever it is that boys hunt. It didn’t matter that months later when Tommy the vet came and examined her he explained that Hippy was approximately a hundred years old, stone deaf, and was employing all of her energy just to stay standing, that my father’s softheartedness had been trod on, that he had paid twenty times what she was worth out of money he didn’t have, somehow none of that matters now, for in these pages now here we are on that hot birthday, my brother and I, giggling mad beneath the mythological horse and making the mark in my heart that says
I was happy here
.
There is a scene I love where a brother and sister meet after many years and little communication. They meet in an arranged café in mid-afternoon. The light is dying and the city outside rumbles softly in the complacent time before rush hour. The café is unexceptional and quiet. She comes first, sits at the far end, a table facing the door, nervous in her buttoned raincoat. The waiter is an older man. He leaves her be. The brother enters late with the look but not the words of apology. He kisses her cheek. They sit and the old man brings them teas they do not want, two pots, strong for him weak for her. It is long ago since they said each other’s names aloud, and saying them now has the extraordinary shyness of encounter I imagine on the Last Day. At first there is the full array of human awkwardness. But here is the thing: almost in an instant their old selves are immediately present. The years and the changes are nothing. They need few words. They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word
family
. So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love.
I cannot remember what book it is in. But it’s in this one now.
Writing of course is a kind of sickness. Well people don’t do it. Art is basically impossible. Edna O’Brien said she was surprised Van Gogh only cut off
one
ear. Robert Lowell said what he felt was
a blazing out
, flashes, nerve jabs in the moments the poem was coming. I myself have had no blazing out, and don’t suppose it’s all that good for your constitution. To stop himself from taking off into the air Ted Hughes had to keep repeating over and over
Beneath my feet is the earth, some part of the surface of the earth
. The thing is, writing is a sickness only cured by writing. That’s the impossible part.