This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  ‘O now, Noe!’ he says. ‘O now.’

  26

  Once he got going, my grandfather’s way of telling a story was to go pell-mell, throwing Aristotle’s unities of action, place and time into the air and in a tumult let the details tumble down the stairs of his brain and out his mouth. He had grown up in an age when storytelling was founded on the forthright principles of passing the time and dissolving the hours of dark. In Faha’s case, this was a dark permanently tattooed with a rain that insisted on its own reality, trying to get into the house any way it could, and doing a pretty good job too, pooling inside the front door where a soppen grey-black towel did nightly duty, weeping along the sashes of the windows, spitting down the chimney, bouncing black hailstones down through the fire and across the hearth, and invading on a rising water table below the grate so the embers hissed when they fell and all boots lifted an involuntary inch, thankful for the foresight of ancestors who put the slope in the floor. My point, the story had to compete with an emphatic actuality, and defeat it by an air-construct of the imagination, adhering to the Virgilian principle that if you can take the mind, the body will follow. To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenets of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion. And because in Faha, like in all country places, time was the only thing people could afford, all stories were long, all storytellers took their, and your, and anyone else’s, time, and all gave it up willingly, understanding that tales of anything as aberrant and contrary as human beings had to be long, not to say convoluted, had to be so long that they wouldn’t, and in fact couldn’t, be finished this side of the grave, and only for the fire gone out and the birds of dawn singing might be continuing still.

  As, from this, you can probably already tell, for storytelling, there were two principal styles available in Faha, the plain and the baroque. Plainness wore the guise of truth but was soon corrupted by politicians, Let me speak plainly now, and avoided by true storytellers. So, Ganga, like me I suppose, chose the baroque, first because of the native precept to enjoy the music of telling, second, because English was a stolen language, and third, because the baroque offered a truer reflection of life as lived in Faha.

  ‘Wait till I tell you now,’ he began, drawing a chair to the bedside and grasping on to the balls of his knees.

  What followed followed in tumultuous fashion, a single sentence, quick-spoke and eye-popping and miraculous, bypassing both the principles of pauses and the mechanics of breath, my grandfather going for it, and in telling his side of what happened building a tower of description that was in constant danger of toppling over as more and more clauses were thrown on to it, adjectives and adverbs, bounteous, haltingly, found in pockets and pitched on, similes not spared, prepositions dangling and otherwise, metaphors throw them on there, in a telling urgent and excited and edged with the real danger that I could have died – and nearly did now in mid-sentence (and, in exuberance, and the irresistibility of funerals for Faha, might have, killed you were) – only to be rescued by Or so I thought, Noe, a running narration that attempted the same leap as all storytelling, to get the listener across the gap into the skin of the other, Do you see? not only capturing what it felt like to be him and be told his grandson might have died, but doing so in a style that was headlong and heart-racing, going both right ahead and roundabout and being in the end perhaps the perfect vocal diagram of the inner workings of my grandfather’s mind.

  The sentence ended not by design but by natural exhaustion. Ganga sat back from the edge of the chair to which the telling had brought him. His face was plum in the amber lamp-dark, eyes soft as a child’s from the shock I had caused. He didn’t need me to say anything. Once he had finished he was relieved not only of the story, but of the peril too, and his round smile came back and he rocked his pinching funeral shoes on the wax of the boards as though all was shipshape and sailing on once more. ‘O now!’

  It was only when he had left soon after, when I lay alone in the dark wondering if Sophie Troy would check on me again, that his story separated itself out into a chronology.

  One of the young Kellys, Simon – I had seen him standing watching at the edge of Quirke’s field, he was one of those boys that are always standing like lesser angels or demons in the vicinity of calamity – well, Simon, who was barefoot, whose shirt was a frayed short-sleeve Glynn & Sons meal bag put to emergency use, the blue ink faded but not altogether, he was the one who had come running to my grandparents with the news. The pole, the pole came clean down on him.

  As always in moments of catastrophe, meaning was separated from the sounds of the words, and in the sunstruck slope of the kitchen there was a blinking gap of nothing, Joe being the first to respond, getting to his feet and lifting his head to look at Ganga with the depthless compassion of a dog’s eyes. I had been carried to the van and Christy was gone with me. They’re taking him to Troy, but Simon (who had the outlaw imagination and saucer-eyes of all the Kellys, who had watched cats kill birds, foxes pheasants, and, once, so far, the dawn raid of a pine marten in the henhouse) was full sure he had seen his first human fatality, declared he looked kilt.

  Ganga took the news like an overwound clock, he had to get going at once. Doady, heart-scalded, but retaining the air of propriety, insisted he couldn’t go to the surgery looking like that. Like what? A collarless shirt with three exclamations of egg-yolk and a fawn trouser, one left-leg piss-burnt stain from the dribblings of his waterworks. That! she delivered with a wife’s lemon juice, and Ganga went down into the room, put on the funeral suit whose fly buttons defeated the excitement of his fingers, Doady catching him at the door in that state and without further comment doing them up.

  The bicycle still lying in Quirke’s front field, he took old Thomas and rode bareback with a fist of mane, urging Thomas just this once to outdo his arthritic amble, and leaving Doady to begin on the rosary which she cracked open right away and was at the Salve Regina by the time my grandfather rode up the avenue at Avalon.

  They each had their reasons for believing me alive, Ganga, because through shallowness or depth, he believed the world will always try and fall right side up, and Doady, because Intercession of the Saints was available to Kerry people.

  My grandfather left Thomas to the sweet grass of Avalon’s lawn and burst in the front door, the clock still thrumming in him until he saw Christy sitting pitched forward, hands down between his knees outside the surgery door, and Christy looked up and said, ‘He’s knocked out, but he’s alive,’ and in the same half-breath added, ‘I’m sorry.’ And because he hadn’t considered attaching blame, because he lived outside of the jurisdiction of all judgement and thought everyone was always doing their best, Ganga put a hand on Christy’s shoulder and squeezed.

  They attended outside in the once-spacious now furniture-crowded dimness of the foyer while inside the doctor had for once decided against the nitroglycerine for which he was famous and employed instead a remedy of his own devising to bring me back to consciousness: he pinched my nose and stopped my mouth, watching the patient go to the perimeter of suffocation until the life-force fought back with an outraged refusal that started my torso and shot open my eyes.

  Ronnie, the eldest of the Troy sisters, brought Christy and Ganga tea in fine china cups that were mismatched with their saucers, but what of it, and if the tea was Early Grey and not in their acquaintance, what of that too, said Ganga, wasn’t it kindness itself? By an un-ironable kink in the duties of daughters, Ronnie had become the mother when Mrs Troy had died. At twenty-three she took over the household in its absolute and fabulous disorder, the kingdom the doctor had let go to pot after the passing of Mrs Troy. Regina, her name was. Regina was the last one to call Ronnie ‘Veronica’. The doctor preferred Ronnie, a diminution that began in affection, and was not knowingly to cover the small fall of his hope for a son when she was born and his having to go to tell Doc Senior, A girl!

  Ronnie had the acuity, intelligence a
nd even temperament of the best physicians but by era and circumstance lost the opportunity to go into medicine. She was diligent and caring and carried a burden of sadness she hoped you didn’t see. Ronnie was the one who came and told Ganga and Christy the doctor had wakened me but that my injuries were several and some severe.

  It was also she who came out an hour later with the doctor’s instructions that someone go to Mrs Gaffney the chemist’s for the materials for the making of casts. Christy volunteered smartly, Ganga said, having no idea what a visit to the chemist had entailed for their lodger.

  Christy would have gone, I knew, with a prime motive, any hesitations because of his own circumstances trumped by a duty of care he felt he had failed. He would have still been in the stalled time of the aftershock, still with the sight of the pole falling on me, but also the surge of spirit that comes on the suite of a kiss from death. As I imagined him, he went with both urgency and relief and was in the evening emptiness of Church Street before he had time to think fully that the fifty years’ wait to see Annie Mooney was at an end.

  In Ganga’s version – He came back soon enough with the bits – the bit I wanted to hear was missing and, drifting down a medical river on which the injured parts of me floated at an analgesic distance, I filled it with a concoction of my own.

  At the chemist’s, Christy knocked on the locked door, first softly then peremptorily. He stood square-chested in the street. A grey eyelid, the edge of Mona Ryan’s curtain stirred. A squat woman who grew a fearful squint, Mona was all the time receiving signs, if only she could read them. Her State glasses came the day of her funeral, and she was buried wearing them.

  Annie Mooney came with the lamp. As the chemist’s wife she’d known a lifetime of night calls, slept the thin sleep of those familiar with the clockless continuum of human woe, the multi-volume encyclopaedia of illnesses, infections, fevers that attack the hearts of the aged, the ears of infants, and, in general, the abiding and mysterious tendency of all living things to sometimes become inflamed. She was not alarmed. She had the tranquillity of the experienced and she called out, ‘Coming,’ which was the first word Christy heard her say in five decades.

  And for a moment, I couldn’t get him to move.

  For a moment, by the magic of empathy and imagination, I am him, and I am the one come back and seeking forgiveness for a folly of youth, and the heartbreak is opened red and raw and forgiveness seems a thing too large for this life.

  In the surgery in Avalon, I press my head back on the divan and open my mouth, as if, like a muted balladeer, to let out the ache.

  Do I exaggerate? Of course I do. The truth doesn’t care. Here’s the thing life teaches you: sometimes the truth can only be reached by exaggeration.

  At last, Christy turns to face the chemist’s door, and through the opaque glass that Arnold Gaffney installed to protect the privacy of patients he sees the blurred illumination of her.

  Inside, Annie puts down the lamp where she always puts it, on the edge of the sill by the cardboard promotion for Panacur drench, and her hand goes to twist the stubborn Yale lock that her husband had meant to oil in all the weeks before he died, and after which she didn’t oil for reasons too deep to be fished. She draws open the door. The bell overhead jingles.

  He sees her.

  ‘I’m not here for myself,’ he says.

  She looks at him.

  Both stories rush forward at the same time, the near one and the far one, the one that he is here because of an accident that is, by virtue of a breathtaking strangeness when it occurs, called pure chance, and has nothing at all to do with their history, that is simply of now, this pure moment, and the other one, the one where Annie Mooney is looking at him and seeing the work of the fifty years, and what life has done to a youth who had all this time remained handsome, animate, spry, quick-witted, big-dreaming, and infuriating, in the backroom of her mind.

  ‘Step inside,’ she says.

  And there, imagination failed me. I couldn’t quite believe any version I pictured, and the tissue pages of what happened next? came apart in my hands. I lay back, exhausted by being for a small time in the shoes of another. But, perhaps because Sophie Troy had already removed me from myself, or because of a white optimism attributable to the chemicals, I wasn’t fearful of the outcome. I took comfort in thinking my trying to catch the falling timber had been instrumental after all, and for a time converted to Phil Moone’s philosophy that idiocy has its place, that there are cogs and levers in the smallest happenstance, that our wrong turns are compensated for by our Creator who not only forgives them, but who put them there in the first place, and by which not-to-call-it-logic, all plots turn out right in the end.

  Sometime after midnight, the surgery door opened and all of me leaped.

  But it was Doctor, not Sophie, Troy. He came briskly to the bedside, carrying a smoking lamp whose wick needed trimming. A taciturn man of fifty, he was compact, with studied, careful movements, and wounded blue eyes. Human sickness was vast, and not as easily explained or remedied as in medical school. Doctor Troy was never seen out of a white shirt and waistcoat. He didn’t look like his father until he sat with the old man’s portrait on the wall behind him. Senior had the same handsome face. Like many a bald man who missed the small ceremony of barbering, the old man had grown a beard. He looked out from his portrait in the beard of Bernard Shaw, a look his son hated for its extravagance and suggestion of untamed. His own hair blown backward into an iron grid by Atlantic storms that never failed to attend his call-outs, Doctor Troy grew no beard, but made do with a shoe-brush moustache that was both assuring and combative. In his practice, the doctor’s dictum was famously threefold. He sat in a winged armchair of life-distressed leather, listened to the patient’s complaint, took a pulse, placed the cold diaphragm of the stethoscope on the chest with the instant life-affirming result of making the patient gasp, sat back, forefinger-brushed the bristles, and said: ‘It will either get better, stay the same, or get worse.’

  Doctor Troy put the lamp on the side table, releasing a tongue of black smoke he didn’t appear to notice. He didn’t say hello, he didn’t say Has my daughter taken good care of you? He just came to the bedside in his worn shoes of tan leather, put a hand on my brow and looked away into the upper air just like his daughter.

  ‘You were an idiot,’ he said to that air up there. ‘They should have been broken. They’re not.’

  His hand smelled grown up. It smelled of whiskey and white cotton and woodsmoke and sandalwood musk, and instantly I thought This is what men should smell like, but how you came by it, by what gravity, engagement and life experience it entered your skin, seemed in the same instant beyond the likes of me.

  ‘I have a pain when I breathe.’

  The doctor made a short air-laugh somewhere in his nostrils, it made it as far as his moustache but not to his mouth, which may have been the reason for the moustache, which trapped the snorts of caustic that were a contingent peril of General Practice. He turned the wounded eyes on me and delivered his dictum. To which I gave the traditional Fahaean rejoinder and said nothing.

  ‘Sleep. Don’t move,’ he said, and left, taking the lamp with him.

  27

  Now, I should say something here about the state of my mind when I woke the following morning.

  First, let me say that I knew nothing of love, except that it belonged in a higher realm. On Marlborough Road in Dublin I had loved the girl next door. Her name was Helen. I loved her as wholly and purely as I think humanly possible when you’re twelve years old. Of course, I never spoke to her, and don’t suppose she ever knew. So, yes, a higher realm. I had no understanding yet that in this life the greatest predicament of man and womankind was just how to love another person. You knew in your blood it was the right thing, you knew somehow without ever having had a single lesson, without it ever being mentioned once in thirteen years of school, without your mother or father saying the word out loud once you passed the age of four and
went in short trousers to the nuns whose only use, not to say knowledge of it, was in reference to God, so it seemed both supreme and unreal at the same time, and lived in an aura of aspiration, a place inside you that aspired up in a spire nearer to heaven maybe, and not the actual ground of dirt and puddles and broken pavement you and your heel-broke shoes lived on. You knew, you knew the Commandments, had learned them out of the missal-thin pages of the green Catechism, where, in a genius move of utter simplicity God had set the high bar for Christianity by saying Love your neighbour like yourself, and you read that and looked over at your neighbour, Patrick Plunkett picking his nose and pressing the pickings on the underside of your desk, and by virtue of nothing more than carnal reality that bar got that much higher. Still, you knew, you knew that the purpose of human beings was to love, just that, and though you knew it, though it was maybe the only given in the ceaseless search for purpose, the evidence of the perplex of love was all around you, so that though there were weddings and white dresses and roses, though every song was a love-song, there were black eyes and bitter words and crying babies too, and every heart got broken sometime, yet, and yet, and yet still again, because you couldn’t deny it, because, if anything was, it was a fundament, it was in the first intention, part of the first motion when the first key was wound and the whole clockwork of man and woman was first set going, love was where everyone was trying to get to.