This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  Temporarily, then, while waiting for the authorities to discover the anomaly and shut it down, the chemist reopened. Mrs Gaffney operated it along amateur lines, informed not by book-learning but life and decades of marriage to a diligent mixer of powders and dispenser of pills. To the locals, that it was illegal to dispense was neither here nor there once she had Greavy cured of the gout.

  In the three years since Arnold Gaffney had died, no new chemist was found, and soon enough none was looked for. Having little appetite for remote places, the authorities looked the other way, and temporarily, for the time being, let the situation prevail, taking a parental tack: things would sort themselves out. As always, to the problem Faha found an organic solution, turning the deficit to advantage by saying that after so many years Mrs Gaffney knew their complaints better than themselves. She worked in conjunction with Doctor Troy, who visited the chemist’s in the evenings and filled the prescriptions, lending some credence to Maura Dunne’s theory that he was himself secretly in love with the widow. For common ailments Mrs Gaffney knew the common creams and cures, as did the patients, who often asked for them by name. Names retained their original magic. The first time that people encountered a product that worked its brand name became inseparable from it, I’ll take the Vicks. They have a good name.

  So, on the afternoon when I left Christy early to cycle to the chemist’s, I knew that Annie Mooney would be behind the counter. I invented a headache that was behind my eyes, then in my temples, and went with the high seriousness of the vocational, not a little flustered by the comedy of being chosen by circumstances to play Cupid. If that was what I was.

  The little bell above the door jingled and I stepped inside a space of honeyed light and trapped sunbeams. The shop was empty, smaller than I remembered, and stopped me at once with the smell of my mother in her last days.

  The shelves were well-stacked, the multitude of things that could go wrong arranged chasteningly under broad rubrics, Head, Ears, Nose & Throat, Eyes, Teeth, Joints. Because they were a sex that concurred with Aristotle, having more to them than the sum of their parts, in their own category: Women. Furthest from the counter, as ordained by general backwardness in matters of the body, a small shelf: Men. Beside the Men, Animals.

  Behind the counter was a curtained doorway into the main house. Annie Mooney was in there. My heart hammered. I waited some more. What was she doing? Why had she not come out? Had she recognised me holding the bicycles outside the church? In the prolonged pause I found I was suffering from Head, Ears, Nose & Throat, Eyes, Teeth, Joints, and maybe Animals.

  I went to the door, opened and closed it on its jingle again.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have a headache.’ It was a blurt.

  ‘I see.’

  It’s not an easy thing to capture the effect of one person on another. She had appeared silently behind the counter in a dark green dress, an apparition both grave and serene, her long silver hair tied down one side in front of her and her eyes steady and deep and sad, and instantly I was out of my depth.

  ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’

  She hadn’t moved. She was a woman with an unearthly ability to be still, and serious, and in those first moments I think I already knew she was as unlike any woman I had met, and also that she would be impossible to persuade.

  ‘Is it on one side?’

  ‘It’s everywhere.’

  ‘I see. You’ve had it a while?’

  ‘Yes.’ And then, fearing that she might send me for further investigation, ‘No. I mean not really.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘A short time.’

  ‘I see.’

  Each time she said it I thought she was seeing more. Each time I thought: She knows who you are and knows you’re lying and now she’s only waiting to see how deep you want to dig. And because your mouth is often ahead of your thought, I said: ‘It comes and goes.’

  I looked up at her. ‘It’s gone now.’

  In the afternoon light now amber, she looked at me, and because that look moved me in a way I couldn’t have explained yet, because I knew then that long ago she had left Annie across the bridge of girlhood and was simply Ann now, because I myself was an innocent indebted to storybook valour and rescue, I said the thing I had already decided I wouldn’t.

  ‘Christy McMahon,’ I said, and then couldn’t believe that I had actually said it, because nothing had changed. Nothing at all that could be seen or heard had happened, and so, maybe only to reassure myself of the certainty of my own existence, too quickly I went further.

  ‘Christy McMahon is staying at our house.’

  Maybe because of my mother, maybe because one day your mother falls in the street beside you, I had a chill fear of the unpredictability of life. That at any moment a terrible thing can happen was a fundament of how I lived then, and some part of what had sent me to the seminary. The only way to cope with it was will and control. The way to survive was to think a thing through, you plan what will happen and what after that, and after that, and you follow the sequence as far as you can, that way erecting a series of shields through which life itself was unlikely to pass. So, I had imagined what would happen when I told Annie Mooney about Christy. I had rehearsed the scene silent and with sound. She would put her hands to her mouth to hold in what couldn’t be said. She would look at a space above and to the left of me, for a moment unable to meet my eyes, looking into that place just above where the past was rising like a flood tide so fast and full that she would need to touch something so as not to be swept away. To reassure herself of the solidity of the now, she would lay a hand on a shelf of medicines, sunbeamed dust dancing as the sound of the name she hadn’t heard spoken aloud in fifty years filled the shop. She would wonder how I knew and what I knew, questions would be bubbling up off the tide, but she wouldn’t be able to ask them right away, because, soft wheel and hoof noises slow and unreal outside in the street, time would have folded back on itself, and it’d be as when you are returned to a moment buried in the first corner of your heart, returned to a feeling that pierced you once so profoundly that just to survive the loss required everything you had, just to breathe, just to go about in the broken world in the pretence of the ordinary, because she wouldn’t have forgotten him, she wouldn’t attempt to deny it, I knew she already had too much grace and honesty for that, but, I decided, she’d need me to say nothing more, to ask no questions, to allow her to see again the young man summoned by his name, and feel the rage and hurt and begin the rough negotiation we all have to make with failure, blame and loss, in her case more grievous because there had been no explanation, no argument, because he had just vanished, and because I loved you once is among the saddest lines in humanity.

  I was prepared. From the readings of melodramatic novels, words of ballads, and the things your mind makes up when it has no knowledge of real human beings, I had imagined all outcomes, wore a nineteenth-century cloak of black velvet and had my full set of responses to try and help Christy’s cause. But I lost them all now in the face of this actual woman and what she said next. Because, although she didn’t take the worst option, she didn’t snap the heart of Christy like a biscuit, she didn’t say Who? She didn’t laugh, she didn’t frown, she didn’t ask if I was joking or how I knew their connection, she didn’t say Only a child believes in an imperishable love, instead, the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes pursed a little, she looked directly at me and, in a quiet voice, said the last thing I thought she would say: ‘I know.’

  I didn’t move. My lips were dry, my throat tight. A crescent of sweat came beneath the forehead-fall of my hair.

  With untimely gaiety then, the bell jingled, the door opened on a parallelogram of pale reality, and, like ones marooned from a rain-land, in heavy overcoats unsuited to the sun, Mrs Mungovan, Mrs Moore and Mrs Mulvey trundled in together in a hot bundle that broke all spells and I lowered my head and pushed out past them into the street.
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br />   24

  ‘She knows you’re here.’

  It had taken me three unreconciled days to confront Christy. For three days I twisted over and back on the hook of whether to tell him I had gone to the chemist’s, for three days I said nothing, opening and closing my mouth like a trout and twisting some more. Sidelong I studied him, watching to see some shift, some evidence that he was ready now to move on with his atonement. But there was nothing, or nothing obvious. Having gone to see Mrs Gaffney with the intention of pleading Christy’s case, I found that when I came home I reversed myself and wanted to plead hers to him. By her air and manner I had been moved. It was not as obvious as disappointment or grief, I had no sense that her entire life had been unhappy, it hadn’t, or that she would have thought Christy a great opportunity missed, it was not sentimental or trite – but something in the deep moment of her eyes caused me to resolve that Christy had to talk to her. Listen, I was young. Rashness and fixedness. In my breast pocket silver absolutes, pentangle on my shield. I was angry with Christy, galled by his delay. I laid the bicycle against the cow cabin at my grandparents’, determined to tell him to go, go to Ann Mooney at once, but when I came in the door and saw him helping Doady with the ware, saw the gentle ease, the body wisdom of him, instantly I lost the pulse of action and adopted perhaps a philosophy of Saint Placid, hoping the thing would happen by itself.

  The fine weather that sat over Faha sat there still, each morning the flying boats coming up the estuary gleaming like great gannets as a veil of mist lifted revealing cattle standing in silvered grass that was sweetening by the day.

  Knowing that the opportunities of novelty are short-lived, salesmen had appeared in Faha with wares of exotica, straw hats, some soft-brimmed and floppy that looked like upturned basketry and lent the look of a Provençal Van Gogh, others, boaters, suggestive of unknown regattas in a more elegant elsewhere, and from further afield cone-capped sombreros that escaped a dressed-up look of Mexico by being customised with a ribbon of green-and-gold in the Faha colours, Tommy Fitz the first to wear one, the tops of his ears already gristle. Waxen navel oranges appeared, each one a jewel wrapped in dark blue tissue paper, also shorts, sandals, and elegant ladies’ fans from Tennessee, which when extended depicted a scene from the Bible. There were sun sprays and oils, not to protect, but to help penetrate and make last the look of burnt freckle that was translated locally as tan. The sad truth is that, like fish, the looks of the Irish are not improved by sunshine, and if you ever see the photographs Mick Liverpool took when he was visiting his mother, in every one of them there’s a scorched squinting look from what Ambre Solaire called coups de soleil and the sense of a people dazed and displaced.

  So, after ten days of the blessing of fine weather, there were silent prayers that the Lord take his blessing elsewhere for a while, refill the watering holes for the cattle with a small downpour and come back again the following Tuesday, say.

  After the same ten days the parish was already stippled with electricity poles. It was remarkable to look across fields where nothing had changed in a thousand years and see the stuck-up fingers, not yet wired or connected to anything, and not unlike the totems of a tribe landed from elsewhere and claiming territories by lines invisible and arbitrary.

  On the bicycles Christy and I came up where Patsy Phelan in his three-piece suit sat on a small carpet on his front wall. Patsy enjoyed the privilege of stillness, most days did absolutely nothing but breathe and look and hear and smell the world turning. A self-appointed Judge of Existence, at noon he went in for his dinner, then came out again for the second sitting. He had a big florid face pumping out sweat, and when we passed he offered a greeting hitherto unknown in the history of Faha, ‘Savage heat.’

  And, as if suddenly aware of the uniqueness of the time, and foreign behaviour condoned by sunshine, walking the hill at Reidy’s after, I turned to Christy and said: ‘She knows you’re here. Mrs Gaffney, she knows.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m thinking, Noe.’

  ‘Well, what did you think, beforehand, what was your plan?’

  ‘To see her and say I’m sorry.’

  ‘So?’

  He looked up at the sky, his eyes small and his face crinkling, as if momentarily he was in collogue with the sun.

  ‘You have to go see her.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do.’

  ‘You do.’

  I let that statement stand there, bald and barrel-chested, its feet planted and thumbs tucked in the lining of its waistcoat like Butt, and when that brought no response I pushed further: ‘You do. That’s all there is to it. Or what? You came all this way just to sing in the street outside her window?’ I regret the scorn. It’s an acid vice of the high-minded. It belonged to Butt. ‘Are you afraid of her?’

  We were near the top of the hill, one of the Kilkenny girls sailing a white sheet up and over the line, a grace note not lost to me in its simplicity and beauty, in my mind it’s sailing still.

  Christy watched it too. ‘Contrition is more easily said than done,’ he said.

  We went a little further to the crest.

  ‘You have to see her.’

  I looked across at him and, as always, while waiting for something to happen, I realised that something had already happened. He had lost his faith.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt her any more than I already did.’

  ‘But she knows you’re here.’ And, because in the end revelation is irresistible, I added, ‘She told me.’

  Taking a final page from Butt’s practice which was predicated on always having the last word, quickly I mounted the bicycle, pushed off and the downhill took me past the consequiturs, as Felix Pilkington says.

  When we came into Quirke’s there was a quorum in shirtsleeves gathered around a fresh hole in the front field there. Quirke’s was mostly stones and the pole was on the ground while the men assessed whether enough stones had come out to make a third attempt to stand it. When Christy and I came into the avenue our arrival seemed propitious and we did the thing all men do, we came over for a look into the hole, nodding the tight-lipped nods that masqueraded as expertise. Two long lines of rope ran across the grass to a jittery grey horse waiting with Quirke. The third attempt was decided by a smack of the ganger’s hands. Christy threw off his jacket and, because there are coded imperatives in the company of men, I did the same, and we stood in to raise the pole.

  With a sharp hup hup from Quirke and a worry from his rod of osier, the horse took the tension. Head down and hands out on the sticky sweat-melt of the creosote, I saw nothing and heard only the grunts of effort and the come on come on of the ganger, the now now, men as the shaft of timber sank into the hole and then began to rise like a giant’s needle into the sun. It was wonderful. I felt a surge of joy, the simple, original and absolute thrill of a physical victory over the ardours of the terrain, a pulse so quick as to pass instantly in through the arms of each man, into the blood and brain at the same moment with the pole triangled now at nine o’clock, now ten, Come on come on, effort increasing beyond the point where no increase seemed possible and yet was found. And because of that surge, because I was given over completely to the thrust of a communal triumph I had never experienced before, I didn’t hear the rope snap. I didn’t look up or across at where Quirke’s horse had reared, where a welting lash of the rod had assailed its dignity and refusal flashed into its dark eyes, rearing and rounding, dissolving the tension on the rope in the same moment it realised it was no longer mastered. I didn’t see Quirke raise his arms in a misplaced, hopeless hallelujah gesture to make himself bigger than a horse on its hind legs. I was only aware of cries of alarm, and the clenched jaw that is the last denial of victory slipping out of your grasp.

  There must have been a shout of Away, or Run or Christ, I must have been aware of
the men letting go, getting out of the line by which in this moment the triangle of pole to earth was tightening, and even to say in this moment takes too long for what was actually happening. I must have been aware of Christy jumping to the side. But if I was, that awareness didn’t translate into one of the fundamental reactions by which mankind continues on the planet: I didn’t get out of the way.

  Instead, suffering a heroic disorder, that was part not wanting to leave the only moment in my life so far when I was at one with other men, when the profound loneliness I lived in had been assuaged by the communal, and part unwilling to be the one letting down the side, I leaned in to the pole, believing for one blissed-out breath that I could defeat gravity and hold it upright myself. I was looking at my hands. I remember that. I was looking at the splayed whiteness of my hands on the creosote that was the most real thing I had encountered, and my hands were coming back against me on the hinges of the wrists, my shoulders withdrawing like ones in audience to an immense power, the whole of me about to be crushed, now thinking Ground does not give in, planted thighs and locked knees taking a weight that gave reality to the word colossal, Christy calling my name and both my wrists breaking, the pain so extravagant it produced in me a laugh, I don’t know how or why, just a ha half-gasp half holy with amazement that a human being could feel such a thing, tendons twang-snapping, releasing an arrow of realisation that God made man out of elastics and sticks, the pole still falling, filling your mind with ideas both clear and abstruse which could not then be catalogued, because so many things were happening in the same time, because maybe your back was breaking now, a pole from Finland falling being non-negotiable, because your hands gave way and your head took the blow and because now, almost exactly in the same time as victory, came complete and final defeat.