NIALL WILLIAMS

Boy and Man

For the two Deirdres

Everything that rises must converge. Flannery O’Connor

Contents

Epigraph Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine About the Author By The Same Author Copyright About the Publisher

ONE

I am no longer a boy. I am a man. Almost. And I am here.

The sun shone. The Master went to the top of the hill and flew the kite. There was brisk wind and it took only a few sharp tugs and the twin cords tightened and the yellow and red sail took flight. At first it danced drunkenly. It swooped, as though the earth and not the air was its element, and the Master waved both hands above his head like the conductor of an invisible orchestra and the kite rose sharply into the blue. He unspooled the lines and kept his gaze focused on the thing that moved further and further from him but was yet connected. The wind pulled the cords tight but the line that was drawn from kite to man was curved into the distance, and a movement of the Master’s hands took moments to travel to the sail in the sky. Soon it was small and almost freed. So far up, it achieved a serene grace, its colours dissolved, its line invisible to any that might have looked up and noticed it from the winding roads below the hill.

It was April, the countryside thereabouts already in bloom. Over stone walls, yellow gorse blossom was draped. Bare branches of the thorn trees were spiked with white flower. The day itself was blue and mild. Spring had come softly to the west of Ireland and it was warmer even than the springs in the memory of old people. The first grass of the year was crisp and had made a dry whispering as the Master had climbed up through it.

Now he flew the kite. A short man over sixty with a tuft of white hair, he had only just come back into the world. Much of it he had forgotten. He knew because he had been told that he had been in a car crash. He knew because he had been told that he had been thought dead and then took breath and lived inside the quiet of a coma more than a year. So too he was told he had once been a Master at a primary school at the edge of the village. He had a wife and onetime a daughter who were both dead now. He had lived with a boy, his grandson, but the boy had run off. To such telling the Master had listened without comment, as though it told of another. He blinked and sat quiet, his blue eyes seeking in the fire any semblance of himself in the tale. But the life just spoken of did not seem his own. Some details – a red cup in his kitchen, a bottle of Power’s whisky half empty, some books, David Copperfield, a dog-eared copy of The Confessions of Saint Augustine, a pair of shoes with the laces tied and the heels broken down, the worn tweed of a jacket – such things seemed to speak of him and his earlier life, but even these seemed obscure. He had the feeling that he did not belong in the world, that perhaps he was meant to have died, and had somehow missed his exit. Now he was left in this After-place. The couple who cared for him, Ben Dack and his wife Josie, were the only ones to whom he felt any connection, but even that seemed tenuous. Who were these people and why were they caring for him? He didn’t remember them. They were not his relations. Why should they have brought him into their own house? For the Master the world was a jumble of things without meaning. Was that red cup important in some way, that boy’s jumper, that old book? These objects from the past, how did they matter if he couldn’t remember them? And if he had come back to life, as they said, what kind of life was it? The country too seemed barely recognizable to him. There were familiarities, brand-names, place-names, but Ireland itself as it passed across the screen of the evening news seemed another country, and he a foreigner in it. To neither the past nor the present was he connected.

The kite lay against the sky. It sat in the wind unmoving, and on the grassy hill below it the man was intent on the lines that rose upward. Time was nothing to him. His morning and afternoon would be divided by the arrival of hunger, when he would tie the lines to his leg and sit to tea-flask and sandwiches. He had no purpose or plan other than to remain there flying the kite. And while he did, a silent figure on the hill beneath a perfect blue sky, he was forgotten by the world he had forgotten. While the hours passed, the kite moved only little. Once it arrived in the high it held still and the Master did not indulge in any tricks, no stunts of flying. He simply watched the twin cords, looked up along the angle, tested the tautness of the lines, and waited; as if for answers he fished the heavens.

The sun shone on Jerzy Maski, lifting blocks and laying them to make rise the wall to the second floor of a new house on the outskirts of the town of Ennis. He had come from Poland a month earlier. Within two days he had a job, and was one of a crew of twenty-three that came like a dawn army in dusty cars and vans to build an estate of seventy-six houses. He was twenty-one years of age. He was fair-haired and strong, and liked to sing when he was drunk in the evenings when the eight other men in the house he shared spoke of Poland. They knew they were in the country only temporarily. They knew that after this estate there would be another, and more after that, but one day they would be told there was nothing more to build in that country. And the knowledge of that made easier the absence of Poland for Jerzy Maski. His English was poor and these people were different. This month had been his first away from Jaslo in southern Podkarpackie not far from the Carpathian Mountains. He did not mind the work, and while he was lifting the blocks and tapping them into place, while the walls were rising about him, he could forget the thing he felt most strongly. He could hide in work the feeling to which he would never confess: that if he paused long enough there would rise in his heart an unbearable longing to have his mother’s hands hold his face.

From the upper level of scaffolding, he saw a lorry bounce over the deeply potholed entrance to the estate and his uncle Laslo called up to him to come unload. He descended the ladder swiftly and his uncle smiled at his nimbleness and strength, nodded consent to an inner argument and led the way out through the doorless hall.

Laslo was in his late fifties and compensated for his baldness with an outrageous moustache. He smoked sixty cigarettes a day, wheezed all of his breath and joked that hell would be no difficulty because so much of him was smoke already. ‘Smoke and these boots,’ he would say, ‘these will do me in hell.’

They crossed the packed dirt of Eden Crescent, the semicircle of walled but unroofed houses, the way randomly stacked with deliveries, pipes, rolls of insulation, white aeroboards, plastic sheeting torn open and flapping in the breeze.

The lorry driver had already climbed down. ‘What a day. What a day what a day what a day. Cripes yes. Warmer than July, eh?’ he said, and clapped and rubbed his hands together. A short man with a ball of belly, he was red-faced and beaming. ‘Island in the sun men, am I right?’

They looked at him.

‘What is he saying?’ Jerzy asked under his breath.

‘I have no idea. Smile at him and nod.’

‘And point is. Point exactly is, the world, the sun, and the layer between. That’s the point. “Are we getting nearer?” says Mickey Cotter. Nearer what says I? “Nearer to heaven or to hell,” says Mickey. That’s a point. By jingo yes. Heaven, says Ben Dack. Choose heaven. But what a day what a day. Twenty-three degrees. Two three. Dear Lord thank you very much. Go raibh mile maith agat if you’re tuned in in the Irish, eh?’

The two Poles nodded away, and Ben Dack took this for encouragement. He clapped his hands again and said, ‘You’re doing some job with this country, men. Some job, indeed. When this country’s finished boy oh boy says he.’

Laslo nodded, Ben nodded back. When in turn Ben looked at him, Jerzy nodded too, and then the three of them considered for a time the half-circle of house shells. Somehow a cigarette had appeared on Laslo’s lip and, hands behind his back like a general, he surveyed the field and through the thicket of his moustache softly leaked the smoke.

‘I’ll make a start,’ Jerzy said, but his uncle touched his arm, ‘Wait. Wait a minute. No need to rush. Take a moment. Nod again.’ Laslo extended a hand as though they were speaking about the development. ‘Good ya,’ he said and nodded.

‘Oh ya,’ said Ben Dack. ‘Certainly ya, most definitely ya. As the man says, you’re the men can turn fields into factories. No bother to you. And no argument from Ben Dack because stands to reason, doesn’t it, there’s more of everything now, more of us more of you more cars more money more. That’s the word, more. Eden Crescent, Eden Dale, Eden Meadows. Must be fifteen Edens in Ennis alone. By cripes. Did Ben Dack ever think he’d see it? In Ireland. Because this isn’t Poland as Josie says. And – you’ll like this – I says, isn’t it? For devilment because Josie’s a saint and you’d want to sometimes, you know, well but also my point, my point obtusely as the fella says, is aren’t all places the same and the longer the world goes ahead spinning isn’t one place spinning into becoming another and isn’t that maybe the way because that’s what Time makes of it. And so what? So Poland Ireland wherever. Irepol. You get me?’

Laslo withdrew the cigarette and nodded.

‘What did he say?’ Jerzy asked. ‘He said Poland.’

‘He said that young man from Poland is a bull, must have women everywhere. Like his fine bull uncle.’

‘“Because what’s a country?” says I. And my saint Josie comes at me with that little furrow in her brow like she wants to say Ben Dack you’ve lost the last marble now. And “what’s a country?” she says and I says right exactly because look there’s no lines drawn from above. You get me? Not a single one. My point. Clear as daylight. Countries are made up. Am I right? Countries are all joined together and only pretend to be separate. Am I right?’

‘He is insane,’ Jerzy whispered.

‘Don’t whisper. Nod.’

They nodded profusely, and for some moments made a strange triangle of mute acquiescence, and then all three looked back at the house shells and in Polish Laslo said, ‘Are they not the ugliest houses you ever saw?’

Jerzy burst out a laugh, and Ben was pleased because the simplicity of his nature was such that he felt sympathy for all strangers and wanted them to be at ease.

‘With this fellow we could nod all day,’ Laslo giggled. ‘I think he would not mind.’

‘But our necks would ache.’ Jerzy said, and then couldn’t stop the laughter coming now. Suddenly it bubbled airily up inside him, quick bursting gasps of it, first one then another; each he tried to stop but couldn’t. Now the laughter grew upon itself and he opened wide his mouth and made a soft near noiseless wheezing as though he had a series of ‘h’s caught in his throat. He sounded not ‘ha’ but only an aspirate ‘h’ and his eyes watered with the effort. He squeezed them shut and bent forward and put his hands on his thighs and laughed down to the ground. Laslo and Ben were laughing too now, heartily, a bizarre human comedy none could explain, but as each looked at the other and had their laughter renewed they were helplessly bound. Each in their way – with shut eyes and wrinkled up nose, with mouth open and head back or tight-lipped, the chuckles snorting out – lost themselves to the laughter. Ben Dack clapped his hands. A giddy joy ran around in them, and for some time neither could they speak nor stop, but in that sunlit Eden Crescent were three men laughing in the mystery of what happens.

TWO

The population of Ethiopia is approaching seventy-two million people.

In the evening after his supper, the Master sat in an armchair by the corner of the fire. While Josie was still working in the kitchen, Ben Dack was engaged in the one activity that could count as his pastime. On a large wooden board set upon the dining table, he worked at a jigsaw. Some years before he had been given one as a present and afterward out of politeness more than interest he had made it. His next birthday Josie had given him another one. She had seen the contentment he got when he tapped a piece into place and the image became clearer. So the jigsaws had continued. Ben Dack never bought one for himself and always showed surprise when it was given and always soon afterward opened the box and began. When the puzzles were finished he used wood glue and then varnish and a simple frame. So now these were the pictures that hung on the walls of the Dack house. It had never occurred to Ben to break up the jigsaws and put them back in their boxes.

That evening the puzzle he worked was ‘The World’s Hardest Jigsaw’, it said on the box, a large image of blue sky and clouds. There were no obvious landmarks, nothing that might indicate where a piece belonged, only sky. By this evening Ben had joined the flat-edged outer pieces, which framed a jagged emptiness.

‘Don’t mind me now,’ he called over to the Master, ‘you have the television up if you want it. Won’t bother me.’

‘No thank you Ben,’ the older man said. He watched the fire. The turf glowed softly.

In front of him the muted television showed the country that was his but that was still unfamiliar. When he glanced up the news was of murders and road killings, of crises in hospitals. The most frequent word on world news was terror, and if he tried to consider this he grew frightened. For him the past was not only another country; worse, it seemed an implausible invention, one in which he was once the Master of a village school and had his grandson with him and they flew kites and read books and never felt afraid. The past was innocent and unbelievable.

‘All done,’ said Josie, dropping the weariness of herself onto the couch. ‘You all right Joe?’ she asked.

‘Yes, thank you Josie,’ the Master said.

Without looking up from the piecemeal sky, Ben asked, ‘Your programme nearly on, love?’

‘Yes, love.’

Ben left the puzzle then and sat beside her and rested his hand in her lap. Sometimes she held it and sometimes gently turned it with a kind of mild curiosity, the hand of another.

She turned up the volume. In the last item of the news a reporter walked out on a dusty landscape in Africa, explaining how fourteen Chinese businessmen had come to Ethiopia to negotiate oil rights. They had been kidnapped by rebel forces, who did not want the government selling the country’s natural resources. Now, in a dry hollow of sand, the fourteen bodies had been found. The handheld camera showed them.

‘Sweet mother of God,’ Josie said.

The Master’s chin rose and trembled and then he wept. It was something to which Ben and Josie had become accustomed. Since his return to the world he had been given now to these sudden moments of strong emotion. They arrived prompted and unprompted, could be brought on by anything, or nothing that was apparent. The Master simply wept. And these incidences, at first alarming, had in time been accepted by Ben and Josie as part of the after-coma; the bits of wreckage that must sometimes float down into the Master’s spirit out of the past. Always, he apologized, but was helpless to stop, though always too his chin battled against trembling and his brows lowered in a vain effort to hold at bay what came through him.

He wept.

Ben and Josie let him be. They offered neither tissues nor consolation, and in time the weeping eased and the Master grew serene again. While Josie watched a country singer on the television, Ben watched the Master and wondered what he was thinking. Was he thinking at all? Did he just sit without any memory of anything other than flying the kite earlier that day? Was that it? Was he blank? Josie had said he was probably happy. ‘It’s a kind of happiness isn’t it? To be alive and not to have any worries at all, isn’t that wonderful sure?’ She had said it because after the first months when Ben had tried often to get the Master to remember, she had been hurt for both of them when nothing had happened. It was not that Ben had wanted acknowledgement or any connection between himself and the man who had reminded him of his dead father. It was that he wanted some meaning out of it. What was the point of what the papers called the miracle, the Lazarus man, who had been dead and come back, and for what? To sit all day, or go and fly a kite? When Ben Dack’s heart bruised on this, his wife had tried to convince him it was for the best. ‘If he remembers he will have pain,’ she told him. ‘Without it, he has a chance of happiness. Leave him be now.’

And because he didn’t want to disagree with her, Ben said no more.

The country-and-western singer finished, and sang another.

‘There’s a break coming,’ Ben said.

She turned his hand in her lap. ‘You want tea so.’

‘Did I say anything about tea?’

‘Tea and biscuits I suppose.’

‘And biscuits! You’re a saint you know that? Absolute, one hundred and one per cent saint. Not another like you on the planet, says he.’

She stood and saw the simplicity of him she loved.

In the break Ben tapped his hands on his knees, glanced over at the Master, then back at the screen. Then he got up quickly and went across to the one bookshelf where they kept the telephone books and the farmer’s almanac and under some of these he found the Master’s copy of David Copperfield and brought it over to him. He opened it on the newspaper clipping that had been stuck inside and handed it like that to the old teacher.

‘There now, take a new look at that,’ Ben said quietly. ‘Go ahead. Give her a shot.’

‘Yes Ben,’ the Master said, with the strange politeness with which he had returned to the world. And he looked down, first at his book, and then at the piece of newspaper. He lifted it up and held it directly in front of him.

It was a picture of a boy.

The prisoner did not know what country he was in. He thought it was Germany or maybe Poland, but he could not be sure because when he was taken he was blindfolded and made unconscious. He saw only the small cell he lived in and the other he was brought to when they wanted to ask him questions. He was happy at least to see the cell. For the longest time he had lived with his eyes tied with a cloth that smelled of ammonia.

He did not have any record of the days. He knew it was a long time since he was taken, but he did not know it was three years.

How is it so hot? Ireland they said would be rainy and cold. Rainy and cold. But it is hot. Hot as Jaslo in summertime. And as soon as the image crossed Jerzy’s mind, he felt something reach into his stomach and twist out homesickness. Jaslo in summertime. He had been a boy with a boy’s freedom, fair- haired and strong and running along the roads in the hum of bees and the sweet sharp scent of pine from the foothills of the mountains. Jaslo. He had not thought of a future then. He had thought only of home, and of his mother, and never dreamed he would build walls in Ireland. It seemed not his life that he was living now but another’s that ran parallel and this sickened him and he fought the sickness with hard work.

He hurried for another block and laid it on the wall. About him the others worked without pause. Like machines, machines that make walls. Cement in our skin, thinned out each night with Polish beer. Each wants to go home. I know. Each one. Not just me. But Laslo says this is a man. A man is work. A man is not crying for his mother. For his home. This is today’s home. Tomorrow’s somewhere else. Jerzy Maski is not a boy. It is stupid to miss Jaslo, a small place. There is nothing there. No money. Who can live in Jaslo now? Only old people.

He laid the block and trimmed it and went for another. He thought of his elder brother who had gone away to become a priest and then not become a priest and then for shame not returned. He wondered where he was in the world and if he ever thought of his younger brother and if he knew that one day a letter had come from their Uncle Laslo saying there was work for good money in Ireland.

‘You go,’ his mother had said. ‘Yes you go.’ She wore black fifteen years after burying her husband.

‘I will stay with you.’

‘I don’t want you under my feet,’ she had said, and turned the lowered wings of her eyebrows to the fire.

And he had not said he would prefer university and to study architecture, for he did not want to hurt her having to say they had not the money. ‘I will go but come back when the big mountain of money is here beside you,’ he had said.

But now that he was in Ireland, and the money was good and the work was plentiful, he thought Poland grew further not nearer each day. Some mornings he woke well before the six o’clock start and thought of himself rising into another life back in Jaslo. He allowed himself the imagining of it the way you might a chocolate in a box, deliberate and pleasurable and too soon passed. He had himself rise from the bed and come down and light the fire and go outside in the little yard at the back and take the axe to the logs. He let himself feel the cool air coming from the mountains and to see his breath plume away on the morning. He lay in the bed and imagined he was this other and already could smell the first thick wood smoke coming down from the chimney with the press of cold air. He could see himself in the woollen jumper and thick trousers and even feel the easy swift motion of the axe and hear the crack as the log split sharply. He was there, paused in the after-stroke, and able to look out into the trees on a cool morning and hear the birdsong and be perfectly still in the opposite life to the one he lived now. He could see himself carry the logs inside and see each corner of the house in which he had grown up, know each chair and how it felt to sit in, and know the sounds of the latches on the presses, the song of the kettle. And these, in this other life, were all perfectly clear to him as he lay in the bed waiting for the alarm. They were as near as dreams, and he clung there on the edge of them, not yet realizing the life he had made up was his father’s.

So, with the alarm, each day he left that other life and went to lay the blocks.

In the evening Laslo complimented his work and passed him another bottle of beer.

‘You were working fast today,’ he said. ‘You are a very good worker, Jerzy, but no more laughing,’ Laslo teased. They both smiled. ‘What was he saying? I have not one idea.’

Jerzy finished the beer, took another.

‘Soon you will be singing,’ Laslo said.

But Jerzy did not sing that night, nor escape the melancholy, and at last rose and went out the front door of the little house and walked down the road beneath the April stars, swaying slightly with the beer and the sense of loss. In some ways the country was no different to Poland. At night you could pretend it was Poland. There was no one speaking. There was only the mild dark and the moon. He walked, saturated with loneliness. It leaked from him. He went out from the tight street of houses where televisions flickered blue and gold against the curtains and gates were closed on their cars. He said out loud ‘Jerzy Maski’ to none listening and then bowed and waved his hand in a wide sweep, as if to a partner in a dance. He staggered backward two steps, widened his eyes with surprise, then stumbled down off the kerb onto the road. He laughed to find himself so. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh-oh.’ And laughed some more, then he walked on down the centre of the road. His forehead was cool and yet beaded with sweat. The streetlights were wild blooms against the blue. In sudden moments he filled with loathing and ridicule. I am an idiot. What is Jaslo to me? I am a man now. Stop stop acting like a baby, a niemowle.

In the centre of the Ennis to Kilrush Road, Jerzy Maski sang the first verse of the Polish national anthem. He sang it in a loud and manly voice and stood to attention, and for moments afterward, he was all right. But too soon, hope or resolve buckled in him and he flung his head forward and vomited. He was bent over like that when the first car came toward him. He lifted his head into the lights and arced his arm to block them. He cursed and saw the Latvian plate as the car flew past, its horn blaring. There was another car travelling fast behind it. In it were five men. The back passenger window was open and leaning out was a man with shaved head who yelled in a language Jerzy did not understand. He was extending his arm in an aim. Was it a gun he held? As the car whooshed past, the man’s hand jerked upward twice as though he released two shots. Then he withdrew back inside the car as it turned sharply towards the road to Limerick.

The moment returned Jerzy to something like clarity. He patted his chest and looked at his fingers for blood. Then he closed his eyes and shook his head hard, as if to shake from the framework of thought a thick, cloying grief. He blinked at the moon and then – as if in the throes of revelation – he walked purposefully down the broken line of the road. His arms he crossed, holding onto himself, his eyes he turned downward. If a car came and hit him so he would die. It was chance. Life was chance.

He walked past one o’clock and two. Single cars flew past. Beyond the town the countryside was stilled, as if it dreamt itself into a fairytale. But Jerzy Maski, moon shouldered, blue eyed, a blaze of fair hair, carried an invisible bowl of sorrow out of the town to Eden Crescent. When he realized he had not been knocked down, he went in among the half-built houses of the new estate and, in one of them, unroofed and unfloored, he passed like a ghost, and sat on two upright blocks at the dark opening where soon would be built a hearth.

THREE

The remains of the oldest-known modern humans were found in Ethiopia. They are estimated to be approximately 200,000 years old. They were excavated at a place near Kibish. Here, at the bottom of dry rocky layers of sediment of a lake that had once been washed by the waters of the Mediterranean, a team of archaeologists which included Richard Leakey made the discovery that changed all previous estimations of how long humans had been walking on the earth.

The Master stared at the picture of the boy. He was a boy twelve years of age, with dark straight hair and sallow skin. His expression was serious, as if he had decided against smiling for the photograph or was otherwise occupied by some troubling thought. He looked out from the picture at the Master the way faces do on the memorial cards for the dead. He was gone. He was lost in the world somewhere. Perhaps he too was dead. The Master had been told what had happened. On the morning of his Confirmation the boy had turned away from the altar rails. That night he had run away. It was presumed out of shame. He had left a note saying he was going to look for his father. But his father was unknown, the boy’s mother had never told. There were only two traces of the boy afterward. The first was that Ben Dack had identified him as the one to whom he gave a lift in his lorry as far as Dublin; the second, that he was one of the victims of the BBC bombing who had been brought to hospital but later left without being discharged.

And this was three years ago. For a year or so Ben and Josie had constantly kept in touch with the police to keep alive the search. They had posters printed. They had spoken on the radio. Ben had gone to London and seen the hospital ward and spoken to the nurse. He was told there was a file with Interpol, he was told that the search would never end, but in the time since the boy was put on file another two hundred and seventy-six names had already been added.

The boy was gone. He was in the world of the missing.

The Master held the newspaper clipping before him, and was still holding it when Josie returned with the tea. She saw him and passed Ben Dack her mild disapproval in her grey eyes.

‘It does no harm,’ he said.

‘Tea now,’ she said a little loudly to the Master, handing him the mug.

‘Oh thank you very much, Josie.’

‘Put that away now and enjoy your tea.’

He put the clipping back inside the copy of David Copperfield and balanced the book on his knee.

‘I’ll put that away for you.’

‘No. No thank you, Josie. It’s fine,’ the Master said.

‘You remember I read it to you?’ Ben asked.

‘Ben!’ Josie knitted her brows at him. She was such a woman as combined strength and gentleness. Though she was slight, though her frame was small, and when her face settled it settled most frequently into a look of kindness, she could be forceful too. The moment she realized she had raised her voice slightly too loud and the men turned to her, she looked away across the room, as though something alarming had run there, and twice she patted in place the back of her hair.

But Ben paused only a beat, then to the Master continued, ‘No no, do you remember I read it out loud? First book I read like that since I don’t know when. I’m only saying, yes indeed, Aunt Betsey Trotsy and Mr Dick and Steerforth and Uriah Heep. By jingo yes. They’re in my head I’ll tell you that. They’re right there.’ He tapped his forehead with the flat of his hand. ‘My point is…’

‘Ben, your tea!’ Josie’s face flushed; she sat a little more erect. She found her hands needed pressing together.

‘Sorry Josie, sorry. My Josie’s a saint, aren’t you pet? Yes, pet.’

The Master took his mug and balanced it on the book.

‘My point is, real as real they are,’ Ben said. ‘That’s my point.’

‘Shsh now, my programme’s back,’ Josie said somewhat abruptly, and regretted her abruptness, and without turning from the screen reached over and put her hand near her husband’s.

And so they all remained that evening before the television and the fire, sipping strong tea, the husband and wife in the dance of relation, and growing tired in the ordinariness of time. Across from them the older man, like a visitor from another domain, sat with quiet politeness and the vague look of someone hearing everything explained in a foreign language.

The country singer introduced a guest, Michael Tubridy, the traditional flute player. A tall man with glasses and a brown suit, he appeared bashful in the studio, as if out of his element. He said the piece he would play was an old air with many names but he knew it as ‘Bruach na Carriage Baine’, Bank of the White Stones. He lifted the flute to his lips and played, and when he did he himself seemed to vanish; instead there were western fields at evening, soft rain falling, cattle standing. There was light turning slowly grey and stone walls glistening and the long deep quiet of the land. Grass damp and heavy darkened. Small winds moved, but nothing else. The slow air, both beautiful and mournful, on its melody brought to every room that ghost-scape. The music was ancient and spell-like and while it lasted nothing else was. Josie put her head against Ben’s shoulder. He shut his eyes. Then, a final long note and the air was ended.

The Master suddenly stood up, as though he had been told something of great importance.

‘You all right, Joe?’ Ben asked.

The Master was standing before the television, and again his chin trembled and he struggled, making a small moan. He balled his fists against his sides and tilted his head upward, as if to keep whatever rose in him from falling out. He turned and left the room.

The bedroom that was his was small and spare. The ceiling sloped along one side of it where a skylight opened to the night. There was a narrow table and a three-drawer chest. There was a picture of the beach at Inch in Kerry, a long pale tongue of sand and foaming sea. On the table was a black-and-white photograph of him and his wife, Mary, taken on their wedding day. He came into the room and put the book on the bed. Then stood into the skylight and looked out at the rectangle of stars. He did this to compose himself. He was aware of his trembling and tried to breathe through it. He was strange to himself now. He had had to accept so much that was unacceptable. Here he was in this room in a house not his own in a life that didn’t seem his own either. ‘You are here to get better,’ was what Ben Dack kept saying to him whenever he showed upset. ‘You are here to get better.’ But he was not getting better. He was the same, one day after the next. He had whole parts of himself that were blank. He looked at the picture of Mary and sometimes he could remember her. He could remember a dress, pale green and yellow buttons, and the backs of her legs as she turned to walk ahead of him into some room. But then he couldn’t remember her face. Or he had her face in front of him as he woke up, her face as it was in sleep when she was lying beside him, but he could not get his memory to open her eyes. What was the sound of her voice? He tried to hear it, tried to make up phrases she must have said to him, tender or not, tried to put back together a morning, a breakfast, or when he came home after school at four o’clock and what did she say to him? What was her phrase?

The vacancy in him was a torment. It meant there was nowhere for feeling to harbour. It was one thing to suffer loss, but even grief nurtures the heart. He was a man standing at the skylight waiting for something, anything, to return. Even when he wept, he did not know clearly why. So often he had asked himself, What if I don’t get better? What if this is what there is? I should have died. I was meant to die, and by chance didn’t. So?

Now the moon and her stars sat in the mild night. He studied their stillness. His breathing steadied. Through the skylight he could look across the night valley, the dark rumple of field and hedgerow. He could make out the far horizon by the few lights of the farmhouses. He tried to remember the names of those people. He had most likely taught their children. But if the knowledge was there, he couldn’t summon it; instead there suddenly came to him some of the names of stars and constellations. Out loud he said, ‘Vega in Lyra. Hercules. Cygnus and Aquila. Auriga, Arcturus in Bootes, Ursa Major. Pegasus.’ And these may have been words in any language, he may have spoken to an invisible other, but that they suddenly came to him gave him comfort.

Below, a murmur rising through the floorboards, the rosary began. It was still a nightly ritual in that house. It had been since Ben Dack and Josie were married, and was broken only briefly one year when they had discovered they couldn’t have children. There had been six months. Then without announcement one night Josie had begun the ‘Hail Mary’ and Ben had slipped to his knees before the fire and it was back in their life. They prayed it with soft voices and heads half in sleep. They prayed it as if it was not second nature but nature itself, and though they knew that elsewhere in the country it had all but passed into folklore, they ringed the prayers one after the other and let them climb where they might.

So it was, if you had passed that house that night on the narrow road that ran past three small farms, the sheds and hay barns and yards with tractors, the slatted houses of restless cattle anxious for the grass of April, you came to a long farmhouse with a light on downstairs and the heads of a man and woman praying the midnight rosary, while above them a skylight was open and a man was peering outward into the dark.

The dark he stared at was himself, and now into it some glimmer that had come from the music. He used to play that air. ‘Bruach na Carraige Baine’. He used to play that on the flute. And this moved him profoundly, and he tried to rescue from the dark an actual scene when the boy might have played, tried to remake it for himself. What room? In the school? Or in the house? Upstairs in his bedroom was it? And he crossed to the bed and picked up the copy of David Copperfield and took out the clipping with the picture again and stared at it hard and he tried to combine the flute and the picture and see the boy playing. It was just there. It was just in that place beyond where he could picture it. He played that. I know he played it. And the return of that sliver of knowledge was like a shard jabbed into his forehead and he wanted to pull it out and press it further at the same time. He shut his eyes and tried to hum the melody. He put his two hands into the wiry white of his hair. Near-remembering was unbearable. He got a foothold on a mossy step and then slipped back into nothingness. For an hour, longer, he tried to find something solid in the half-memory of the music, something in which he could find solace. He played it more than once. When did he play it? When? Remember you fool. Remember. Come on. Don’t forget him. Don’t.

The images all fell as he grasped for them. The ache was unendurable and he went from the room and down the stairs where the lights were already out and Josie and Ben gone to bed. He went to the dresser where there was a small metal stand for keys and from these he took the one marked ‘Joe’s Car’ and he let himself out through the back door.

The night was velvet, a soft mild dark. He crossed the yard where Ben had parked the lorry facing outward for the morning and in the hay barn he saw the yellow car that he had been told was his but that he could not remember. It had been repaired since the crash but only occasionally driven by Ben, to keep the engine alive he said. The Master opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat. He sat awaiting epiphany, but none came. The cold damp of the interior, the cracked places in the plastic of the dashboard, the missing cigarette lighter, the twine-tied winder of the passenger window; he looked at the clues of each but they led him nowhere. Did I smoke once? Did I tie that twine?

He held the steering wheel to see if he could find his own hands there, but there was nothing. Then he turned the key. He put the car into gear and released the handbrake. There was something in that, in the feel of the release. Wasn’t there? Wasn’t there something familiar about that?

He couldn’t be sure, and he couldn’t bear any longer the nearness of his own mind and so he drove out of the yard into the night.

I remember how to drive.

I remember this, shifting the gears, first, second, the narrow slot to third. He drove down the country road, lighting it briefly and leaving it back into darkness behind him. A cat crossed into the ditch. He peered forward, gaining speed now. Hum the air, hum it now, come on. How does it go? Remember. He played it. He played it one what one Christmas concert was it in the school was it picture him remember you old fool remember

The road dipped and came around a sharp bend and then out by McInerney’s where a light was on in the calving cabin. A dog barked as he passed, but he had shut it out under the humming of the air and he had it now clearly in his head. He had the first passage and he knew the boy had played it and he knew that something was coming back to him at last. On the edge of revelation he drove more quickly. Black fields flew past. A horse startled and flew off down along the wall, briefly winged with light, a flash of mane and then tail and then gone into the darkness. Hedgerows thickening with April shouldered the road. The Master found his heart was racing and with it the car moving faster. Come on come on. He hummed the air louder still. He sped the car onward, roaring forward when what he wanted was to get back to the past. At the narrow bends not far from the village he came upon four of Daly’s young cattle broken out and grazing the road grass of the ditch. He was upon them before he could think. One hind-kicked at the light and then jumped the straggle of barbed wire, breasting the tangle of it into the field, bellowing, chased by the others. The urgent night noise of the countryside was short-lived. The animals found they were in sweet grass and forgot pain. A car came against him and did not dip its lights and he cursed it on approach but did not slow down and wanted to close his eyes from the dazzlement, and then did.

A silent moment before the crash. A perfect instant of nothing. His own mind trying to make contact with himself. With eyes shut and muscles tensed the instant was forever.

The cars slid past like two knives, a pulse between them.

The Master sped on through the village and past the church and out where Tommy O’Shea was standing at the crossroads, nine pints full and deciding which was the road home. He drove with his foot pressed to the floor now, as though the pursuit was at its hottest and the truth nearer each second. His breath Steamed the windscreen and he sleeved it with his tweed jacket and made a worse smear and sleeved it again come on come on you can remember, remember, everything is in your head, it’s in your head all the time And then, when the revelation should have come, when he felt it was just a fraction from him there on the edge of his mind, it went.

He was blank.

He knew he could not remember and he took his foot from the accelerator and let the car slow until it came to a stop not fifty feet from the wall where he had crashed three years before. He had come there because he thought he was remembering and that was different to being told. He had thought he would belong to himself again, but now, stopped on the road in the night, he was lost once more. He was a white Lazarus, a meaningless resurrection.

Then, because he thought it was in his head, because he thought the entirety of his past was just behind that less- than-inch of his skull, he unsnapped his seatbelt and then he put the car into gear and drove straight at the wall.

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