This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  Forgive an old man. I say this here because pretty soon you get to a place where you’re not sure there’ll be a tomorrow, where you think I better say this now, here, because not only is time no longer on your side, you realise that it never was, that things were passing by faster than you could appreciate, and whole marvels, the quickening green of springtime, the shapeless shaped songs of unseen birds, the rising and falling of white waves, were passing without you noticing.

  So, first, yes, flowing inside the rivers of my bloodstream I had the vague universal longing for love, without any idea exactly of what that entailed, or in my case looked like. And because I was still that young to be in rebellion against my own body, to be repelled by mirrors, to be nothing but a raw and urgent yearning to be other, because what arms and hands and shoulders, what mouth and eyes these were that bore not the slightest resemblance to what I was feeling inside, I had the certainty that I myself, that Noe Crowe could not be loved. I wasn’t alone in this. As I think I’ve said, unworthiness was a birthright then. It was born of religion and history and geography too, the thorns of which have thankfully mostly been plucked now, but then were real.

  All of which is to say that, that morning, waking in Avalon to the birds singing, turning my head to first light on the river meadow, the first thing I thought of was Sophie Troy. (To say thought is a lie, it supposes a vacancy and then a conscious act, but she was there before I was aware of the words to think or say she was. To say thought suggests a singular act, I thought of her, but the truth was she was universal not singular, that is, she was all my thoughts and at the same time, so that they were not separate, not measured or measurable, not individual like memories, not how her hand felt at the back of my neck, not the smell of soap on her fingers or the scent of her hair, not the crinkle sound of the fabric of her blue dress, not the firm resound of her shoes on the oak floor, not the dark line of her lowered and grave eyebrows, the kindness of her voice, but all of these, and more, and all somehow already inside me, fluttering and spinning and hopelessly rendered by the poor phrase, I thought of her.) And so, before the light had travelled up the meadow and the sun made glisten the grass, before the first pilot boats passed on the permanent slow-motion of the estuary tide, I knew I was in a state, if not to actually love, then certainly to give myself to that for which my temperament and education had prepared me, which is, to adore.

  Sophie Troy did not appear in person that morning. By noon my period of being under observation was over. Doctor Troy brought me home in the green Hillman Hunter. He drove it down the middle of roads with an ambassadorial confidence, carrying the patient past the houses where the patient’s story was already sitting, and where this next bit was added now, Troy cured him, or, because some craved catastrophe, Crowe’s fixed, but he’s not right. Sure, he’ll never be right again.

  The doctor drove me home without a word. He was not from the parish and hadn’t the local idiom of speaking without saying anything. The holes in the road he may have considered emblematic of life’s melancholies – he went in and out of each one – shooting jolts of pain into my wrists and up to my shoulders and reminding me I was not only an ardent essence. The day was again dazzling, the sky the same blue that could not be believed, but which, like any wonder that lasts, was already moving from the centre to the edge of conversations in Faha. But to me, turned to the side-window and watching through the reflection of my own face, the country had new lustre. Though I would like to prove the authenticity of my person and the originality of my heart by saying here that no, for me it was different, the truth is we all sometime confirm the durability of clichés. So yes, the grass did seem to have greened overnight, the birds to flicker, the gorse to be flecked with gleam. Even the poached rush-lands of Slattery’s looked pastoral, if you can credit that.

  We passed Tommy Leary leading two horses, we pressed ahead of us in quick-trotting alarm the loose cattle of Cussen’s whose grazing was ditches but whose numbers came up when they turned in the left-open gate of Twomey’s meadow. We passed Hayes’s and Hanway’s, saw an electric crew gathered in the Fairy Field of Naughton’s discussing the rights of way of the invisible. (Later, when I mentioned it, Ganga told me Naughton’s grandfather had operated a poteen still out of the Fairy Fort there. By way of both respect and payment of rent he always let the fairies have the first glass. His first practice had been to toss the poteen into the centre of the ringfort, but his luck went awry and then awry-er, until my grandfather, my grandfather said, told him he was tossing it into the faces of the fairies. He poured the glass and left it on the ground after that. There was no day it wasn’t drunk, Ganga said, and his luck came right after. That’s a true story now for you, he said.) The doctor took and returned nods but was in a silent elsewhere and said nothing until we pulled up in my grandparents’ yard when he turned to me, sniffed some authority off the bristles of his moustache and said: ‘Don’t alarm the old people. You’re fine.’

  Ganga was out to meet us, ‘O now!’, Doady with arms crossed watching from the front door.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor. Doctor, you’ll come in for something?’ said Ganga.

  Doctor Troy raised a hand, smiled his sad smile, got back in the car and drove off, rising for the first time on that road a chariot’s plume of dust.

  ‘Come in. Come in now,’ Doady urged, as if I might be struck again in the sunlight. She looked at me with large eyes and some shyness, a behaviour borrowed perhaps from the sister of Lazarus. She stood aside to let me in the door, shooting two fingers of holy water and then following in ahead of Ganga, keeping close to me and already composing the next instalment for that night’s epistle to Kerry.

  ‘Are you all right?’ was her approximation of nurse ways.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Course he is,’ said Ganga, and patted the wood of the table. ‘Course he is.’

  ‘Go up and lie down,’ ordered my grandmother.

  Lying on the bed, both wrists bound, head thrumming in three-part rapture, pain and pain-relief, I was in that unreal time that passes and doesn’t pass, when you’re off the ground, ungrounded, in a pale smoke-like drift of wakeful dreaming where images, smells and sounds become part of each other and are too swift and numerous to be singled but all which combine in a sweet ache of yearning, which in my case was composed of Sophie Troy, and of Annie Mooney too.

  ‘You go up and check on him,’ I eventually heard Doady say through the holes in the floorboards, turning reality on again.

  I came down, holding my hands in front of me like the handcuffed.

  ‘You’ll have tea.’

  ‘He’ll have something stronger,’ Ganga said.

  ‘Go away and make tea till I look at him. Sit here now.’ My grandmother pointed to Ganga’s armchair with the incompetent cushion of ten Old Moore’s and sat herself beside me. She folded her arms on the tiny blue flowers of her housecoat and looked so directly that I soon realised she was scrutinising me for signs of idiocy.

  ‘Drink that now.’ Ganga put the tea on a footstool and stood there to watch me drink it. It was the worst tea I ever tasted, being some part, maybe most part, whiskey. His whole face inflated with a pink mirth and my complicity in hiding it from Doady.

  ‘What kind of tea did you make him?’ she asked.

  ‘Tea,’ he said. ‘What kind only tea.’

  She got up from studying me and went to the far side of the room where she made a clatter music of pots that in wife-language signalled the deficiencies of her husband and that she alone knew what was required, in this case carrageen moss. Cooking it filled the room with the smells of warm honey and a tide gone out. I sat and watched the fire and found the tea not as terrible and realised custom is half of taste.

  I was negotiating the cure-all of a carrageen both sandy and salty when Christy came home from work.

  ‘Noe!’ he said, large and open-hearted like that, letting his eyes say the rest, then standing back to show the squat
figure in the doorway behind him. ‘This is Mr Rushe, the boss man. He wants a word.’

  Rushe had a face on him like a wasp in October. It may have been customary with him, I can’t say. It combined poorly with the corrugated ginger hair. He had a dull suit of grey tweed and a felt hat. His eyes were grim. He shook hands with Ganga, and, with lesser interest, with Doady, who first cleaned her clean hands on the teacloth. By reflex, my grandmother offered tea, and had to readjust her role when it was firmly refused.

  A figure of officialdom, Rushe’s appearance in my grandparents’ kitchen had the same effect it would on all the old people, it made them shy and somehow smaller in themselves, as though they were in the company of critical judgement. Doady blinked, as if before a blow, and missed the one opportunity to usher all into the parlour. Ganga rocked on the balls of his boots.

  Courtesies over, Rushe turned from them at once, making clear that he was there to see me. He planted his feet with the square stance of a man who had made it to the top of a turning world and wasn’t going to slide off. ‘Mr Crowe.’

  ‘Noe, he’s called,’ Christy said.

  ‘Mr Crowe.’ Beneath his hat Rushe’s face was crunched together, as though hastily assembled. He had the small mouth of a smaller man or one who distrusted words. ‘I am here to clarify one thing. You were not employed by the Electricity Supply Board when the accident happened. You were not under any contract, directive or understanding, formal or informal, written or verbal, stated or unstated, and therefore not authorised to interfere in any manner with the works as being carried out in Quirke’s. Is that correct?’

  Somebody had to take a breath. I took one. I looked across at Christy.

  Rushe lived up to his name, didn’t need a breath to continue: ‘Further, if you were under any misapprehension, instigated on the part of Mr McMahon, for whatever reasons, none of which are pertinent here but will be dealt with in due course, internally, that you were in fact in the employ of the Board, then I must tell you that any liability for what transpired, any liability at all, must lie at the feet of Mr McMahon personally and not at the feet of the Board.’

  Rushe looked at the witness. The witness considered the feet of the Board.

  Ganga had narrowed his eyes, as if trying to see what had been said. Doady stood with her arms crossed, waiting to be knocked by a feather. Christy coughed into his fist and sent me a message with his eyes. I wasn’t sure I got it.

  ‘If Mr McMahon let you believe that you were in fact in the employ of the Board, if he misled you, then you should say so here and now.’ Rushe’s chest had grown larger as he advanced up the corporation, with the effect of making retreat his arms, which, from whiskey-tea, medication, or the unquantifiable hallucinogen of a yellow seaweed, now seemed half-sized and stuck on somewhere behind him. He pushed the block of his head forward on his no-neck to conclude: ‘So, son, think clearly now.’

  That son started spinning like a coin inside me.

  ‘In short, did you think you were an officer of the Electricity Supply Board when you stood in to assist with the erection of the electricity pole in Matthew Quirke’s field, or were you a bystander who chose of your own free will to interfere and thereby injure yourself?’

  It’s hard not to despise officialdom in all forms. The retreat of human beings behind it diminishes the nature of what we are. I’ve never known a man or woman to be better for the wearing of the uniform. I’ve known them to be different, but not more human. I dwell a moment on this scene for two reasons. It’s one I’ve returned to several times in my life, not because it struck me at the time as an axle. Like most, I was not aware enough, or distant enough from the immediacy of things, to assess or see meaning. But it did eventually occur to me that that afternoon when Rushe appeared in my grandparents’ house he brought with him more than his person. In his manner and im-person, he brought the State, and in doing so, in his standing there, squat, rigid and bull-headed, in his use of a tone and language hitherto unknown inside the stone walls of that crooked house, an easier and more natural way of living was nearing its end. Because, it occurred to me, in Faha, and places like it, people had been making it up as they went along and making it up out of no rule book but the one they had been born with, that is an innate sense of right and decency, the rough edges of how to live alongside others having been knocked off not by ordinance or decree but by life.

  I may have the rose-tinted glasses on. There’s no great harm in it sometimes. The thing I’m trying to capture is the foreignness of Rushe in that kitchen and talking that way, the open front door letting in a parallelogram of sunlight and catching the turfsmoke halfway up the blackened wall of that hearth of the eighteenth century, and that he signalled an ending.

  The second thing that occurred was more personal. It was that when he called me son, everything in me baulked. Not for the obvious reason, I think, but something deeper, which began there but I would only flesh out much later, that is, to the role he was consigning me, I would not serve. There in the kitchen, I flushed into the roots of my hair and felt the stirring of a family trait I hadn’t realised I possessed until right then, but which would inform the kind of life I would end up living, that is, what authority provoked in me was a desire to be an outlaw.

  ‘Well, son?’

  ‘It was my fault, Mr Rushe,’ said Christy.

  ‘No, it was my own fault.’

  Rushe’s head didn’t turn, his eyes didn’t leave me. ‘Well, which is it?’

  ‘Mr McMahon did not mislead me.’

  ‘You did not think you were in the employ of the company?’

  ‘I did not.’

  It wasn’t the answer Rushe expected. He pressed just the tip of his tongue through the small lips. ‘Were you paid for the work?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Who did you think was paying you?’

  ‘Mr McMahon.’

  ‘Out of his own pocket?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why would he do such a thing?’ Rushe shot the square head forward to headbutt the stupidity of my position. He had me, until I answered.

  ‘Out of a sense of goodness.’

  A parcel of silence landed between us then. It was as though I had opened a box from which a white dove had risen and flew now about the kitchen, the sense of goodness being just as outlandish.

  O now! Ganga mouthed but didn’t say and rocked back and over on the up-curve of his boot soles. He nodded a nod to Doady who blinked, transfixed by a scene she couldn’t unravel but which she knew would necessitate several pages of the Basildon Bond.

  Rushe found an itch in his temple just below the hat-brim that caused him to smile, or his version. He scratched it once waiting for the dove to pass then continued with an amateur legalese borrowed from Perry Mason novels. ‘So, just to be clear, you were acting of your own free will?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’ He let that sit. He lent it an air of conclusion, not to say defeat, by nodding slowly. We were done. He was about to turn away but turned back and brought his head closer. ‘Well then, the Board could find you liable for interfering with works, causing loss of a day, and endangering crew.’

  ‘Mr Rushe,’ said Christy.

  Mr Rushe didn’t turn to him but raised a finger in the air to hold the speech there. He peeped the tip of his tongue out through the pale lips. ‘Unless, that is, you were ignorant of the law.’

  There was a cold sweat lying along my hairline.

  ‘So, were you? Ignorant?’

  ‘No, I…’

  Christy coughed into his fist.

  I looked at Rushe with as little respect as I’ve looked at any living thing. My grandmother and grandfather were like figures in a painted scene.

  ‘I was,’ I said.

  ‘Ignorant?’

  ‘Ignorant.’

  ‘Well,’ Rushe let out a breath and diminished by two inches, ‘that’s all cleared up then. We won’t be hearing any more of this, from any side, and yo
u won’t be interfering in any sites where trained crews are working. Thank you now,’ he said and touched the rim of his hat in salute or riddance hard to say, then he was out the door, leaving the household in the shook air of aftershock and with an unsettling impression that in a manner peremptory and cool, and without so much as a by-your-leave, the State had invaded.

  28

  That evening, after a muted tea outside in the garden, Ganga found he needed to go talk with Bat Considine. Bat would have newspapers for him, he said. I can’t say I saw the upset in him. It’s a true thing that when you’re young your grandparents can seem fixtures, in their advanced age already beyond ageing, and to stand over the world like two colossi, immune from the daily turbulence below. So, no, I didn’t notice the effect of Rushe’s visit on my grandfather. I only knew it later.

  Ganga went off down the road in the failing light, and, after a last good look at me, as though she were a portrait-painter and wanted to secure me in her eye, Doady withdrew to lose herself in Bond paper, Quink ink, and a single sheet of blotting paper that in blue hieroglyphics left hints to the future of what happened in the past.

  Christy and I sat on at the table. He patted for his cigarettes. I leaned to fish the matches from my trouser pocket, until I remembered my hands were lost to fishing now, and said, ‘I…’ and no more, because no more was needed. I held my hands up, and, wordless, and with not a little delicacy, Christy reached over and fished the box of matches from my pocket.

  It was the early part of the evening, the birds singing their accounts of the day and the whereabouts of night dwelling.

  ‘I’m sorry about all that,’ Christy said after a time.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  And that was where we left it. He smoked, studying the river vanishing into the coming dark. A calf was making a ruckus beyond in Furey’s, and soon enough from a field over its mother started. It seems I remember that. It seems unlikely too.