Читать книгу Boy in the World - Niall Williams - Страница 7

FOUR

The dark he plunged into was thick and blinding. Clouds obscured the stars. He walked with one hand held in front of him as if feeling a passageway between walls. Like this he came out into the road. There were no streetlights between here and the village and the way he had walked home earlier that day was now nothing but blackness. The boy stood absolutely still for some moments and closed his eyes. He had read that this was the quickest way to become accustomed to darkness, to keep your eyes shut tight until all the light inside had drained away. Then you could open them and find that the dark was in fact full of minute lights and shades and shadows, and by these you could make your way forward. He shut his eyes and waited in the road. He heard his heart racing louder, and felt a pulsing up along his neck, his breath rising and falling. He tried to calm himself but gave up almost at once, opened his eyes and found he could in fact see where the ditch on both sides of the road began, and where the road itself had a kind of bow shape slightly risen in the middle. He hurried away along it. He passed down by the sleeping farmhouse of the Ryans, their nearest neighbours, and had to shush-shush old Blackie as he lay against the front door and raised an eyebrow at him as if he were a ghost passing.

On he went. Shapes of black upon blackness were cattle in the fields standing. Some, hearing his footsteps along the road, started and turned about and a few bucked their hind legs and took off down the field as though escaping harm. Just so then did the boy disturb the stillness of the night as he travelled through it. It was yet hours before dawn, hours before the Master would go up the stairs to wake him and discover the note he had left.

I will be back soon. I could not tell you because I know you would want to stop me. But I have to do this. I have to do this on my own. Don’t worry.

The boy hurried. He had to get through the village and out on to the main road where he might catch a lift in the early hours of the morning. That was his plan.

Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly a plan, he thought to himself. Rather, what he had was a purpose. Yes. He had a purpose. His purpose was that he was going to find his father. That was it. That was the mystery that he had suddenly become aware of in the last twenty-four hours.

That was it.

Find him. End of story.

Find him because

Because of the letter. Because she wrote it. Because there’s a piece missing, like a jigsaw.

Because I am a jigsaw.

‘That’s it,’ said the boy to the darkness as he walked. That seemed right. He couldn’t see the whole picture until the missing part was found. It was perfectly logical. And although he knew that with the minuscule pieces of information in the letter finding the missing part would be difficult, he did not think it would be impossible. He applied the same reasoning to this as to everything else in his life. Things could be figured out if you followed a procedure, if you followed one step at a time. And for a short while as he walked along the road this occupied his mind. But in the quiet and the dark, moments of the day gone by returned to him. He saw the scene of the Confirmation play back like a silent movie with the church pews, the organ music, the large figure of the bishop, and he felt suddenly uneasy about how he had behaved. Right then he stopped short on the road.

‘Look,’ he said to the night sky, ‘If You exist, I’m sorry. If You were expecting me to be confirmed as one of Your soldiers and I turned my back on You and walked out it wasn’t because I believed something else or in somebody else, all right? It wasn’t personal. If You exist then …’

The boy looked about him on the road. In the dark he could make out nothing. Above him pinholes of stars uncovered glinted in the deep blue.

‘Then …’ He caught his lower lip in his top teeth and held it.

‘Then You can prove it by helping me find my father,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll believe in You, that’ll be my confirmation.’

The boy hesitated briefly then, as if expecting an answer out of the dark, a sign to tell him it was agreed, that everything would be all right and that he could carry on and would be back home again soon. But there was no response, no sign, only the emptiness of the night and the light wind whispering in the bushes.

‘Talking to yourself in the dark,’ said the boy and shrugged his shoulders, ‘so much for being intelligent.’

He hurried on. He passed in beneath the streetlights of the village where the small banner flags for the bishop fluttered overhead. The shops and the pubs and the church seemed ghostly now. There lingered a strange sadness in the street, a sense of aftermath. In no window was there light. The boy could walk down the centre of the village. Strangely he felt more alone than he had on the country road. He hurried out beyond the streetlights and into the dark once more. He was on the main road facing eastward where in a few hours the sun would rise. The road was broad and once he was used to it he could make out the faint trace of the yellow line that ran along its edge.

An hour passed, and then another. He was walking hastily, eyes downward on the yellow line, when he fell over the man.

‘Hey!’ a voice cried out. ‘What the hell?’

The boy went tumbling face-forward, a jumble of dark over dark, and hit his shoulder hard against the road and the pain shot through him, and he was rolling over, crashing into the ditch. There was cold water and wet grass and a tangle of briars that dragged their thorns along the back of his jumper. There was a moment in which everything was upside-down, his feet in the air and his face in the ground. Then there was only the pain in his shoulder.

‘Hey, what the blazes?’ snarled the man’s voice again. He was sitting on the edge of the road where he had been for some time.

The boy let out a groan and held his shoulder and then got himself up out of the cold ditch-water.

‘Are you the devil or a ghost or what?’ growled the man.

‘I am a boy.’

In the dark the man was a low shape. The boy could not make out his features and at first thought he had no legs.

‘A boy-devil or a boy-ghost or what?’

‘Just a boy.’

‘On the road?’

‘Yes.’

There was a moment of nothing but the man’s breathing and the dark full of shadows.

‘Is it still the month of May?’ asked the man.

‘Yes.’

The man seemed to consider this for a short time and the boy stood and held his shoulder, and then the man named the village and asked him if it was a few miles west. The boy was not sure if this was a trick question or if the man himself did not know the answer. He told him the village was not very far.

‘In which direction?’ asked the man.

‘That way.’ The boy pointed.

‘I can’t see, come closer.’

The boy took a step nearer and at once the man reached up and grabbed him hard by the shoulder and pulled the boy down to him. The boy cried out with the sudden pain. Now, his face inches from that of the man, he could smell the sour smell of old beer and pee and smoke from the man’s breath and see the pale whites of his eyes. The man pulled him close and squinted and showed a broken line of teeth. The sourness of him was foul and the boy struggled to get free, but the man quickly reached his other hand and grabbed on to him, floundering about until his bony fingers caught hold of the boy’s ear.

‘Well, well,’ said the man, his voice thick and slurred as if he was unused to his own tongue. ‘Are you real? Do you feel that?’

The boy cried out again and brought up his right fist quickly until it arrived with a kind of soft hardness in the man’s face. The eye was pulp, the cheek bone. It was the first time the boy had ever hit anyone with his fist and through him ran the strange sensation of it. There was the shock of his own force as the man let go and fell backward, the disgusting jelly of the eye, the sharp pain in his own knuckles from striking bone. He pulled back and found his chest heaving, his heart rushing up into his throat and thumping wildly. The pain in his shoulder was worse. When he moved there were the teeth of a saw cutting into him.

The man lay out on the road and did not move. The boy watched him for some moments.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

There was no response.

‘I am sorry I hurt you,’ said the boy, then he turned, picked up his bag to hurry away down the dark road.

For twenty yards he did not stop. He hastened from the ugliness of the encounter with his heart still racing and a cool sweat pasted across his forehead. He expected a cry. He expected pursuit. But when none came, he grew fearful of the enormous silence behind him; he slowed and then stopped. He looked back and saw the shadow-shape of the man, that could have been a beast or a creature of any kind in that night dark.

The boy didn’t know what to do. He knew the rule of the world of childhood was not to deal with strangers, but he had left that world now. Now there were only strangers. Was the man badly hurt? Had he knocked his head on the road when he fell back? What if he were dead?

The boy walked back towards the shadow, in his mouth a sour lump of dread. The black road, the wild briary fingers of the hedgerows, the unearthly silence that made the place seem nowhere and everywhere: these things entered him and registered in the catalogue of fear.

The man was not moving. The boy could not hear if he breathed. He stood and looked at the twisted dark of him, the legs awry, the head at a sharp tilt to the road.

‘Hello? Are you all right?’

In that utter dark and emptiness it was a greeting weird and unearthly. There was no sign the man heard. The boy lowered his bag and bent down and put his hand on the damp shoulder and shook. Thin sticklike bone, the man was.

‘Hello? Hello, can you hear me?’

And back from what other place he was, the man returned with a gurgle and a groan. He swallowed the nothings in his throat noisily and brought a hand up out of the dark by his side and patted gently the eye that was already puffy.

‘I’m going to have a right one tomorrow,’ he said, staring at the boy. ‘It’ll swell out to here, be all purple and yellow.’ Instead of anger he showed pride, as if he enjoyed the wonder of himself and how well he bruised. A small laugh deep in his throat caught in phlegm and soon became a series of coughs that ended when he turned and spat sideways into the ditch. He watched after it for a moment, as though it was some part of him he regretted losing.

‘You’re all right so?’ The boy half-turned to leave.

‘I have a car back a bit there but I went over into the ditch. I need help to get her out. Just a push. Then I’ll take you a piece of your way. What do you say?’

The boy did not say anything. What should he say? How was he to decide what was right or wrong here? The man had been drinking and probably drove his car off the road out of drunkenness. The boy should not take a lift from him. Besides how was he to know if the man would actually keep his word, if he wouldn’t drive off the minute they got the car going, or worse if he wouldn’t try and bring the boy back home? Or … There were a dozen reasons to say no. But then, as he was sobering now the man seemed more clear-headed and less frightening. The boy had terrified him falling over him in the dark as the man was curled in a nightmare. Perhaps he was just an ordinary man and only the night and the drink and the surprise had made him seem fierce. Besides, the boy would need to trust people he didn’t know if his journey was to get him anywhere.

‘You will take me some of the way?’

‘Oh, I will,’ said the man. ‘You have my solemn word,’ he closed his lips on what may have been a belch or a chuckle, ‘as God is my witness.’ And in the darkness the boy could see him raise a hand and pass it over and up in a sign of the cross. ‘Help me up now will you? Good man.’

A pale hand reached up towards him. It hung there faintly silvered like a dim fish waiting to be caught.

‘Friends, eh?’ said the man. ‘No hard feelin’s. Good lad.’

The boy took a half-step forward. He was still unsure. He was still hearing a voice telling him to run away, Go, go fast now, but it was tangled through another telling him to be adult about this, be not afraid, not a frayed boy.

There was a moment that stretched, one in which the hand hung waveringly and the boy could feel only his own heart hammering and how huge and empty and dark was the night. The man’s fingers twitched as he tried to reach another inch up to the boy. In whatever angle of starlight that fell then his eyes were caught and revealed as a metallic flash, as though they were glass or steel, one of them smaller than the other. There was the thin jagged line of his teeth, the ruined look of his mouth that opened crookedly like a drawer in the wrong place. The fingers twitched. The boy reached for them.

‘Good lad,’ he heard.

Then suddenly the hand he held held him. The fingers he took locked like a vice around him, crushing into the bones, as the man pulled himself up and was then standing tightly holding the boy’s hand. His face came up like a ravaged moon over the boy. It was a face pocked and grained and with a rough covering of three days’ silvered beard. Its right eye was swollen and pursed half-closed, its breath a sour gas full of the poison of resentment.

‘Hit me would you?’ said the man, his fingers around the boy’s hand, pulling him forward with one hand only to poke him in the chest with his other. ‘Hit me, why you …’

The man’s hand became a fist in the boy’s stomach, and the boy would have fallen backwards but for the hand still holding on to him. He felt the breath knocked out of him in an empty O and his eyes widened in astonishment and hurt.

‘… you little …’ the man was muttering, pulling the boy about until he twisted his arm behind his back and pulled it roughly upward. The pain shot through the boy. ‘You little, you’re nothing but a little liar aren’t you, eh? Running away, eh? Oh yes you are, aren’t you, tell the truth.’ The man pushed the boy’s arm higher and the boy made a noise that was the noise of hurt in all languages.

‘Tell the truth,’ urged the man again, and lowered the boy’s arm a fraction so that he could answer.

‘I’ll tell you the truth!’ shouted the boy.

‘Aha.’

The man relaxed his grip slightly further. And the boy then shouted out as loudly as he could: ‘I am going to find my father!’ He shouted it so loudly that whatever creatures moved in the dark turned and stopped and were startled then and flew or raced or burrowed away. He shouted it with a voice edged with pain and anger, a sharpened scream that slashed the night into pieces and let them fall away in the dark.

Then without thinking at all, without understanding the effect his words would have, he shouted out: ‘I am going to find out if God is watching!’

It was not a spell, not an incantation or any part magic. It was a roar. And whether from surprise at the mention of God or the strangeness of the night or the still vivid visions of his nightmare, the man responded by lessening his hold slightly. ‘Wha?’ he began.

But already the boy had spun about and was freed of the man’s grip on him. This time he did not hesitate. The boy stepped quickly back and then forward holding out both of his hands as if rushing to meet a wall. His hands arrived in the man’s chest and shoved him backward.

At once the man lost his balance. It was like the road was pulled out from under him, and his feet flew up and he shouted out and fell down with a crash.

The boy did not wait to watch. He picked up his bag and turned swiftly and began to run. He ran down the centre of the road into the dark. He ran with his brain whirring like a windmill. He ran and kept going while his lungs heaved and his throat tightened and burned. He ran through the dim starlight on the rough road that rose and fell and swung away into the east. He ran past the shapes of cattle in the fields, of sleeping statue-like horses and the looming darkness of trees and wild bushes. The boy ran as though a ghost was chasing him. He ran and did not stop, and did not look around to see if God was watching.