Читать книгу Boy in the World - Niall Williams - Страница 6

THREE

He walked along the road out of the village. He walked quickly and did not look back. He did not think of the chaos that he had left behind him in the church, how the bishop had called out to him as he was hurrying down the aisle, how Father Paul had thrown his smile about in panic, how without her glasses Mrs Conway had suddenly started into the wedding march on the organ. He did not think of the Master’s face he had glimpsed as he passed by, or those of his family. He did not think of the little cluster of video fathers that had blocked his way. He thought only:

Get away. Get away.

Go.

Go.

He walked quickly, he watched his polished shoes on the empty road. He was a hundred yards out of the village, then two hundred. It was then that the mild May breeze that was blowing between the hedgerows seemed to calm him a little and his mind began to wonder what had he done.

Or had he done anything? For a few moments it seemed that perhaps the whole thing had been a dream. Perhaps he was still in the bathroom at home and there was no cream-coloured envelope or journey to the church, no bishop or moment of un-Confirmation. He stopped suddenly in the road and waited to see if the clouds moved and the world turned. Watching the light grass of a meadow darkening under a sweep of cloud, he knew and spoke aloud: ‘It’s true. It happened.’

And he began to walk again towards home.

Why had he done it? Why had he not just stood before the bishop and let himself be confirmed? It wasn’t as if he had decided beforehand, it wasn’t as if he had chosen another faith or wanted to make some objection. The best way he could think to describe it was to say there was something that had begun in him. Something that had begun in him the night before when he lay in his bed thinking about the idea of the Confirmation and what it meant, and how before he had been able to sleep he had found himself questioning everything. Questioning why anything was the way it was. Hundreds of questions, thousands of them flying through his mind like bats as the darkness fell over the fields outside. To escape them he had turned over and over in the covers. He had tried to hum the tune of a song, but still the questions came. He was outside a mystery that was in fact himself.

Childhood. Why is it a hood?

Childs hood. Hood hiding what beneath?

What kind of man?

What kind will I be?

Will anyone like me better?

Pray God answers prayers.

If he can hear.

Even if he can hear can he understand?

Is he out of touch? What does he know about now?

If he is all-powerful why does he not appear more often?

Why is he invisible?

Why does he allow evil?

Why does he allow death? And disease. And horrible accidents?

If we are his creations why does he not make us good?

Is there only one God?

The dark furry wings of these questions had fluttered madly in the boy’s mind one after the other until he had arrived not at any answers but at the most maddening questions of all:

Who am I?

And why?

Why?

Why am I alive? What am I for?

The cream-coloured envelope that morning had only added to this confusion. The boy felt that it was as if some power, some force had swept into his life in the last twenty-four hours and upset everything.

It was a poor excuse, he knew. It was not something he would easily be able to explain, and the Master must be ashamed of him now. The entire village must be talking about him. He walked more quickly. The stones of the road crunched under his feet. How was the Master going to explain it, how was he going to show himself in the village shops ever again? Sour yoghurt of shame settled in the base of the boy’s throat. But he could not think of going back. No. Bolting as he did from the foot of the altar was the only thing he could have done; he was propelled to do it.

That was it, propelled.

But by what?

By who?

Confusion made him slow down and stop. He stood in the middle of the road, the dust blowing against his Confirmation clothes. Then he heard the Master’s voice calling out from behind him.

‘Don’t start again for a minute.’

The boy turned and saw the old man puffing along to catch up. When he did he reached out a hand and leaned on the boy and briefly let his head drop low while he sought to catch his breath.

‘I had to leave the car,’ the Master said, his voice a whispery gasp. ‘I thought I wouldn’t have any trouble catching up to you.’ He wheezed twice, ‘But God bless you, the legs of you, you walk very fast.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the boy said.

‘No need to be sorry.’

‘But I ruined everything.’

‘Well, there’s many ways of looking at a thing,’ the Master said, his head upright now and his breath coming more steadily. ‘And if it wasn’t what you wanted, then if you’d gone ahead with it you could say I was the one would have ruined everything.’

‘But I don’t know what I want.’

‘I know that. And I know there’s many there today standing up and being confirmed don’t know what they want either but are too lazy or afraid or deceitful or dim-witted to say so. And some of them only want the envelopes with the money from the aunts and uncles.’ At that, the Master paused and looked about. There were no cars coming or going on the country road and they were halfway from the village to home. He seemed to consider this for a few seconds and then said: ‘Well, we might as well head on together, eh? I daresay the aunts will be hurrying off home and not coming back to the house now.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’ll have to stop saying that.’

‘But …’

‘No.’

The Master’s tone was final. The boy said no more. They walked together homeward. Because in the village the Confirmation was still proceeding there was no traffic and they could walk down the centre of the road. In the stillness of the countryside there was peace, and for a time the problems that had bubbled in the boy’s mind grew calm. They were just walking, that was all. There was only the blue and white sky of the May day, the fields, the cattle standing in them, the birds and their short quick flights making them seem like creatures of mission, or messengers darting through the air.

‘The world is full of conundrums,’ the Master said when they were not far from home. ‘Conundrums, puzzlements,’ he added, ‘and to a young person with any intelligence it will seem as though these should be thought about and puzzled over and eventually solved. That’s the thing. Solved. And as I well know, and have tried to tell you many times, you are not a boy of any intelligence, you are a boy of very great intelligence, and so these puzzlements have to seem even greater, more urgent to you. And even greater and more urgent the need to solve them.’ The Master stopped in the road and put his finger in the air, as if pointing to an invisible blackboard just in front of him. ‘And I know there are very many adults who, if I gave them the time, might look at you and say: the boy thinks too much, you must get him to stop thinking about things so deeply, get the boy outside, give him hard chores, something to tire him out. But you know this is not what I think. I think this would be like having a very fine racehorse and tying him to a plough. Do you understand?’

‘But what’s the use of being intelligent if it only makes things worse?’

The Master didn’t answer this straight away. They walked forward the last few yards towards the house.

‘It is all right to think about things,’ said the Master. ‘It is all right to find the world full of problems and to want to be able to solve them. Beginning with the ones right here in your life. And all right too not to have any idea how to proceed.’

They stepped through an overgrown arch of hedge where there was a small green gate. On the ground in front of them was a wandering line of flagstones that wound its way in the form of a question mark up to the house.

‘See,’ the Master said. ‘When I laid these I was not so sure how I was going, only where I wanted to get to.’

They arrived at the front door and stepped inside the house that had been set for the Confirmation party.

‘Well now,’ the Master said, his cheeks flushed and his soft grey eyes watering a little, ‘I haven’t walked from the village in years. Lemonade, I think.’ He poured a glass for himself and one for the boy. They sat at the kitchen table and for a time the only sound was the ticking of the large clock on the wall.

Then the boy said he would go upstairs to his room and read for a while and the Master nodded. He wanted to be able to say something more to the boy but what it was or what exactly the words were escaped him, and so instead he smiled kindly.

In his room the boy threw himself on to the bed. He kicked off his polished shoes, pulled free the tie and opened the button at his collar. He let his eyes look along the titles of the books on the shelves. He had read all of them already, but sometimes liked to read over again his favourites even knowing how things would turn out. In fact sometimes the books were better for that. Now he took down the hardback David Copperfield the Master had given him two years before, which had been too difficult at first, but become in time one of the boy’s treasures. Now he opened the first page and read the opening words as if meeting again an old friend.

‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’

Downstairs the Master sat in an old leather armchair. For a long time he considered what had happened and what it was he should do now. He felt hurt for the boy at how things had turned out, and his hurt was so sharp and pressing that he thought of seeking relief in one of the whiskey bottles waiting for the guests that were not coming. It had been seven years now since he had stopped drinking, seven years since he had admitted to himself that he could not control the power of alcohol over him. Seven years since he had been found unconscious in the village street in the early morning. But now, the pain he felt for the boy needed some relief. He turned the bottle top of Powers whiskey and lifted it off. The strong bitter scent rose familiarly. He might have poured a glass for himself then, but the hand that reached for it stopped in mid-air. It wavered there. Involuntarily the Master touched his lips together and closed his eyes and, with no one but the ghost of his wife watching, he fought a silent battle against himself.

The boy was still reading David Copperfield with the light outside his window dimming when there was a knock again on his bedroom door and the Master appeared. Now changed back into his old tweed jacket and baggy trousers, he came in and sat on the end of the bed.

‘David Copperfield?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said the boy, closing over the page. ‘I’ve read it before.’

‘I know you have.’

‘But it’s still good. It’s better.’

‘I daresay I could read it again myself. A book like that you should read every few years. In fact if there was enough time in the world you could read some books year after year and each time get something new from them.’

‘That would be good,’ said the boy.

‘Yes.’ The Master looked at all the books on the shelves and thought not for the first time that day how remarkable this boy was. ‘Just checking that you are all right,’ he said.

‘I am.’

‘Well,’ the Master angled himself slightly to one side and reached into his jacket pocket, ‘here are the cards from your aunts.’ He held out a cluster of white envelopes.

‘I shouldn’t take them.’

‘Of course you should. You crossed a threshold in your life today as much as anyone else in that church.’

‘But …’

‘No but, here.’

The boy took the cards and placed them on the bed.

‘Oh, and here.’

There in the Master’s hand once more was the creamcoloured envelope from that morning, only now its edges were black and one side was burnt away completely.

‘Got it out as best I could,’ he said. ‘It is for you. I promised your mother I would deliver it. I don’t see how it would have been right to let it burn. Read it. Read it when you’re ready to, years from now if you like, and then by all means if you want to, go ahead and throw it in the fire, forget about it if you want to, but at least read it first.’

The Master stood up. His eyes were fixed directly on the boy. He knew there was more to say but couldn’t think of how to say it. ‘Well, anyway, all right?’

‘All right.’

The quiet in the room after the Master left was deeper than before. There was a sharp expectancy, as if the air had been pulled tight as the skin of a drum and at any moment the sticks would begin to beat. The boy moved the Confirmation envelopes about on the bed with his fingers. He looked at the burnt cream-coloured one and lifted it and put it on the bookshelves behind his bed. He picked up David Copperfield to read some more, but as he read down a page he knew he had been following the words with his eyes only. He had no idea what he had just read. He tried again, but with no success.

He was tired. Evening had just folded into night outside. He opened his bedroom door and called out goodnight, and then got dressed in his pyjamas and into bed.

Some time before, the boy had stopped saying prayers before sleep. He was not sure God was listening. Besides there were many different Gods people all over the world prayed to, and anyway he didn’t like praying for things for himself. So instead he lay in the bed and tried to think of David Copperfield.

When he woke it was dark. He felt a hand had shaken him by the shoulder, and as he sat up in his bed he looked around in fright, sure that someone had just been there. He turned on the bedside light but saw no one. Yet it had felt so real. His breath caught in his throat. His sleep had been full of dreams and for some moments he seemed to be clawing aside the cobwebs of them from the front of his mind. He swallowed the nothing in his throat. He closed his eyes and opened them again to see if he was still inside a dream.

‘I’m awake,’ he said out loud and heard himself, and with his left fingers touched his right shoulder where still as clearly as anything he could remember the feel of the hand shaking him.

The boy got out of bed then. He opened his window and felt the cool of the night. He listened to the night sounds; wind and trees and things growing.

He switched on the light. Then he reached down and took the burnt envelope in his hand. With a silver pen angled carefully, he delicately, slowly opened it. Pieces fell away as he did. When the pen reached the side that was burnt entirely a dark remnant detached and fluttered like a black butterfly to the ground.

Inside the envelope was a single page. But because of damage by the fire and the way the page had been folded a large arc on the right-hand side was missing.

The boy held the sheet in the light. The writing was in blue ink, the words on thin lines. They were written at a slight slant from left to right. Most lines had no endings because the paper had been burnt away. Such things the boy noticed at once, as if studying the letter itself and delaying as long as possible the thing he most wanted and was most afraid to do, read it.

When at last he began, his hand shook. He had to sit down and use his second hand to steady the page.

The first sentence read:

I am sorry that I am gone now, and cannot be there to hold you.

The boy lifted his eyes and looked away out at the dark in the window. He waited a few seconds. He looked there at the nothing that was, ink of sky with stars cloud-blotted, and he pictured the image of his mother.

He read on.

I thought that it would be important for you to know

Then the rest of that phrase was lost as the paper was burnt away.

The next phrase read:

love you but because your father did not know

Next bit missing.

After that: what you should know about him is

The fragments were maddening.

when he was still a student …

but his work because …

a writer and …

for him telling people what was happening in the worl …

and because he was not from here and was a …

because if I told him maybe …

not that he didn’t because I didn’t give him a

maybe was my mista …

but because I wasn’t sure and because I couldn’t imagine how …

from such different worlds, me from here and him …

and thought it was too important for him to

for the BBC in London or sometimes …

Then, a blackened hole, and the letter was finishing: hope that you will forgive me and understand…

is name is Ah … Sh

Nothing. A black emptiness, the name unfinished, burnt away. And in the bottom corner, his mother’s signature,

Marie

The boy stared at the letter a long time.

In the many months he would have later to relive those moments, sitting in buses and trains or walking long distances alone with his thoughts, he would still not be able to say exactly how what happened next had come about. As though the decisions then were taken for him and it was not he himself taking the steps. Propelled. He was once again propelled. Within minutes he was in his jeans and a red hooded jumper. He was putting on the trainers he always wore, taking from his wardrobe his schoolbag and emptying out all the schoolbooks on to the floor. He was taking his journal and a pen, the small case that held his wooden flute, and the copy of David Copperfield inside which he placed carefully the burnt letter. Then he was writing a quick note to the Master and leaving it on his bed, picking up the Confirmation envelopes and stuffing them in the bag, slipping down the stairs and going to the drawer where he found his passport. Within another minute he was at the back door turning the key. Then, with a last look back, he stepped outside into the night and was gone.