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
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