History of the Rain (38 page)

Vincent Cunningham just sat there looking down. His mother died when he was eight, about six months before he proposed to me for the first time, and, like The Monkees, he’s a Believer. He has Heaven the Standard Version that we learned in school pretty much tattooed on his soul. It’s wings and angels for him, plenty of harps, which I personally can’t stand, and those white cotton clouds that have no rain in them but let you lay back like lounge chairs so you can have your feet up and watch the saints come marching in.

‘Sorry, but there is no Heaven,’ I whispered. I didn’t want Mam downstairs to hear. I think in a vague way Heaven sustains her and that, although she doesn’t want to consider the detail and she’s too busy just trying to keep us afloat in this world, she’s sure it lies ahead, like Labasheeda when in the river-fog the road is blind.

Vincent Cunningham said nothing.

‘Okay, say there is. Tell me then, in Heaven who cooks the food?’

His hazelnut eyes came up to me. ‘There’s no food. You’re never hungry.’

‘Thirsty?’

‘No.’

‘That’s disappointing. What’s TV like?’

‘Ruthie.’

‘Is Heaven God’s Most Boring Idea? Is that why He keeps it out of sight?’

‘It’s not boring.’

‘So what do you
do
?’

‘You don’t need to do anything. You’re just happy.’

‘Well, I won’t see you there so. I won’t be going. Thank you.’

‘You can’t say no to Heaven.’

‘I just did.’

It took him a moment. ‘RLS believed in Heaven,’ he said. ‘You said so.’

‘That was Vailima, Samoa.’ It was a quote from RLS my father had written on the back of an envelope that I found inside his American copy of Jorge Luis Borges’s
Labyrinths
(Book 2,999, New Directions, New York):
The endless voice of birds. I have never lived in such a heaven. RLS
. Because of its strangeness, because it was in my father’s hand, and because found writing has a curious potency, I had showed it to Vincent. ‘You think when we die we go to Samoa? What should I pack?’

‘You’re terrible.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. No. Yes.’

‘Look, I have an advantage over you. I’ve thought it through. There is no Heaven. So, I’m just saying, if you’re expecting to see me there, if you’re thinking once you arrive and get over the preliminaries – Hi Peter, wings, harp and whatnot – that you’ll head out and find me and propose, let me just say you’ll be disappointed.’

He didn’t say anything to that. The eyelashes went down. I was cruel to continue, but you already know I did. ‘The tunnel of light people say they see? Just your peripheral vision shutting down. Your brain dies with floods of light. It’s not a place, it’s just chemistry. You’re the engineer, I’m the Swain. I’m the one supposed to be partial to the outlandish. Nobody believes Milton’s Heaven, nobody believes Dante’s. When Dante arrived he said his vision was greater than his speech, so he stopped describing, thank you very much, which tells you he didn’t believe it. Not really. Because even Dante knew, there is no Heaven.’

That, I thought, was the end of it. I’d turned my hurt around to hurt him and he looked down at his long-fingered hands and said nothing. He was wearing his socks, his wellies downstairs after crossing the flood. The socks made him look defenceless, the way they do on boys. The rain drove down on us, the skylight streaming. I wished the night hadn’t been so long. I wished I’d slept.

‘All right,’ Vincent said, ‘let’s say it’s just a story.’

And he’d got me there. He knew it. You could tell from the look on his face. ‘It’s just a story,’ he said, ‘but, Ruth, you believe in stories.’ He smiled that smile he’s planning to use on Saint Peter. ‘All it takes is a leap of faith,’ he said. He actually said that, knowing that if there was one thing Swains know, it was how to leap. ‘Take the leap.’

Then we both heard Timmy and Packy come in downstairs. They said something about the flood and where they had had to leave the ambulance, and how now they were planning to stretcher me across the water. Mam came up the stairs. Vincent Cunningham stood in his socks and looked that look that wanted to say
Ruth, you won’t die, you won’t
, but because Mam was there it didn’t come out in words. ‘Well,’ he said, and then shot up his right hand, palm out, a sort of paused wave or Stop or I Swear and I saw his eyes were shining and knew he wanted to grab me up in his arms and probably actually kiss me but he just said, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ Then he turned and was gone and to Vincent Cunningham I did not get to say goodbye.

After the river took him Aeney became huge. He was big as the sky. He was in every corner of our house. He was at the kitchen table for every meal, came and went on the stairs, blew down the chimney in smoke, rattled the windows, and rained without end. He kept his clothes in the chest of drawers, his mug in the press, his wellies at the back door. He was everywhere. He was in Huck’s brown eyes looking at you with grave and patient and exhausted asking. He was in his schoolbag thrown in the corner and gathering a pale sheen of dust, the creases first like wrinkles and then the whole of it, solemn and undisturbed, laying on the floor and becoming ghost. Aeney was on the road running. He was pulling blackberries in blackberry season. He was in the
cuck-oo
of the cuckoo that could never be seen but was somewhere on the top of the highest tree, looking down and singing its two-note song that could be joyous or plaintive depending. He was in
Treasure Island
. He was at our birthday, bigger and sadder for being present but not having presents. He was first one awake at Christmas, last one to come inside the year it snowed. He was in the final visit of the Aunts. He was in the fields and in the village and at the sea. He was in the river.

The only place he was not was in Faha graveyard.

You think you won’t survive it. You think there’s a crack right down your face and down your body and it’s so deep the pieces of you will fall apart in the street when someone says his name. You think it can’t be true, you think it was a bad dream and you’ll wake up any moment. You think it can’t have been as simple as that. Why one day, that day, did it just
happen
?

And why is the world continuing? How can it? How can the radio be on and the kettle coming to the boil? How can the hens need to be fed?

You go to bed and you lie there and you listen across to his room for him. You listen for the way he breathes when he sleeps and you don’t, the pulse and breath and clock of him, that was annoying sometimes but was just over there, had been since always, had been since before this world, and now the emptiness of it pulls at you and wants to suck you away and you think
Okay let me die tonight I don’t care
.

But you don’t die. You learn to sleep rocking yourself just a little, and making a little low hum no one hears but you, so that the night is never empty and like Peter Pan, un-ageing and evanescent, Aeney can come in through the skylight and you can tell him stories from the books you’ve read.

Your hand hurts from handshakes. Your eyes and your lips are dried out because the water has been wrung out of you and instead you’ve got this sour yellow anger swilling because why are all these people coming now, and why are they who never said his name before saying it now. None of them know him. None of them know his crooked smile from the inside the way you do, his yell jumping off the swing at the highest point, his crash and tumble and getting-up grin. None of them know it should have been you that drowned.

Somehow, you have no idea how, you survive.

Because you are not to die yet, because somebody needs to tell the story, somehow you survive.

We survive.

Maybe just so that we can hurt more. Maybe the finest sufferer is the winner. Maybe that was the plan for us. Maybe if we’d marched down to the river and thrown ourselves in that would have made a mess of our chapter in the Book of Swain. In my father’s black rain-mottled copy of the Bible the spine is broken on the Book of Job.
Has thou not poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese
is right there.

It became a long wet summer. I stayed indoors and saw no one but Mam and Dad and Nan. To get me out of the house Dad took me with him to town and we went to the bookshops. He did not say, ‘Read this, it will help you forget your sorrow over your brother,’ but he gave me books, and to avoid the eyes of others I kept mine in them.

The selfishness of children is absolute and perfect and for the progress of the world perhaps essential. I didn’t really wonder how my parents carried on, didn’t consider the quality of their quietness. If my mother watched over me with extra vigilance, fearful I might slip through some flaw between this world and the next, I felt it only as love.

That summer my father stopped writing. He still went to the table in the lamplight. He still sat leaned forward with his hand forking up the right side of his silver hair. But he did not pick up the pencil. From his room there came not a sound. Whether the inspiration couldn’t come, whether there ever was anything that could rightly be called inspiration and sometimes descended like a tongue of fire, whether it came and out of spite or hurt or anger he denied it access or outlet, whether he had any intention of ever writing anything again and went to the table at night the same way my mother went to Lough Derg to walk barefoot over the stones and let the hurt bleed out of her, I cannot say. He stopped, that’s all.

Mam was still just Mam. Yes, she’d cried, and yes she’d been wretched when the callers came and again at the time we had the Mass that Dad said he wouldn’t go to and she’d shouted at him, the only time I ever heard her, and in compromise Father Tipp said he’d say the Mass here in the kitchen and Dad said all right to that, and yes, she let her hair go tangled more often, but once the worst was over she had sort of recovered, if recovered is something people ever do. What I mean I suppose is that she carried on. Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out. The only changes in Mam were that now whenever she was in the village she went into the church to light a candle, and that since Peggy Mooney’s she was continually asked for flowers for the altar, and she obliged, and in the way customs form in small parishes soon it was clear that Mam would be cutting our flowers and bringing them into Faha church until the end of time.

I had a season to grieve, and then had to go to the Tech on my own. But the fact is grief doesn’t know we invented time. Grief has its own tide and comes and goes in waves. So when I went I was no more
over it
or
out of it
or any of the other absurd things whispered in my wake going down the corridors. For the first weeks I had a status above Julie Burns who had to have all her teeth removed, or Ambrose Trainer who had come from Dublin and had an infected nose piercing. My status was Half. I was The Other One. I was the one who had Half of Her Gone. In the toilets that mascara’d ghoul and Trainee Vampire Siobhan Crowley asked me, ‘Can you feel him? Over there, on the other side? Can you?’

Teachers too treated me with circumspection. My story had preceded me into the staffroom, and created that space around you that stories do. I moved from The Girl Who Wears Glasses to The Girl Who Had the Brother to The Girl Who Walked On Her Own to The Girl Who Read, parts I stepped into with alacrity and relief, relishing the solitude and soon somehow proving both adages, that our natures are incontrovertible, and we become what others expect.

Stories though wear thin after a time. In this world compassion is a limited commodity, and what is first considered appropriate so soon becomes annoyance.
Why is she still like that?

She does it for effect.

She likes the attention.

She’s just so, odd.

As if wilfully, and to further confirm the indelible quirk of my own character, I loved poetry. Mrs Quinty, who was unlike Miss Jean Brodie In Her Prime in all things except seeing in some girls a flicker of intelligence, became aware of it when we read Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mid-Term Break’, the one where his brother dies, where in the second-last line we learn
the bumper knocked him clear
, and I said I liked that
clear
because it went with the
classes to a close
in the second line and though sad somehow
clear
had hope in it. Mrs Quinty did not know then that my father had prepared the ground, that I was already hum-familiar, or that I was drawn to poetry for reasons of mystery. She gave me the anthologies the sale reps brought her and which she had told them she would consider using. Small and taut and resolute she came down the classroom, placed one on my desk and said, ‘You might like to take a look in this.’ Just that. She did not edit, guide or censor. She didn’t go Teacher Mode, didn’t ask me to tell her what I thought or to write up a report or turn the gift into an exercise. She did the most generous and implausible thing, she gave me poetry.

Note to future Swains: reading a poetry anthology in the school yard, while it now has precedent and may appear natural and unremarkable to Swain-minds, is not best equipment for the vicious nightmare that is teenagehood. Reading poetry sealed my fate. In the Tech it classified as off-the-scale weird and left me in the same company as Kiera Murphy the Crayola-eater and Canice Clohessy, The Constipated, in whose unique case shit
didn’t
happen.