Читать книгу Boy in the World - Niall Williams - Страница 8

FIVE

Cold.

Cold dark and agh!

My shoulder.

He was five miles further along the empty road. He had slowed down and slowed further still as the panic in him calmed, and he realized he was not being followed. The pain in his shoulder was still there and he kept his bag on the other side. Inside his shoes his feet were wet and cold from ditch-water. He could have turned back and been almost home before the Master woke. He could have slipped in the back door and gone upstairs and lain under the warm blankets and mumbled that he was unwell and staying home when the Master called him. He could have been back in that comfort, his head pressed deep into his own pillow, his body curled in the body space in his bed, his books on the shelves beside him. If he hurried now he could still make it. He could take back the note he had left, and pull the curtains. And perhaps he could wake up again and it would still be the morning of his Confirmation. Time would go back and restart with the Master carrying the good plates and cups and saucers into the sitting-room and the Confirmation clothes waiting on a hanger. It would all be exactly as it had been.

No.

No, there was no going back. Everything had changed.

For a reason?

Why? What reason?

Letter in the drawer waiting.

Until that morning.

It was something the boy often wondered as he read novels. If David Copperfield’s mother had not married Mr Murdstone, would David’s life have been completely different? Would he never have met Steerforth or Agnes, or even Aunt Betsey and Mr Dick? And so did Charles Dickens sit down and draw up the whole plan of each character’s life before he started writing? Did he live out each of their lives before they lived them? Or did they just sort of happen? Was it just chance that as he was writing the words he thought, ‘this is what is going to happen here’, and then made it turn out that way?

This and other things flew through the boy’s mind as he hurried. In the hedgerows suddenly birds clamoured. For a few moments, so preoccupied was he with his own thoughts, that he wasn’t aware of them. Then, at a turning in the argument in his head, he stopped and the noise startled him. There were sounds of every pitch and kind, shrills and thrills. Birds that sang five notes, four in quick succession, others only the one, over and over. No birds flew but the air was suddenly thick with song. The singing was so full-throated and varied, so widespread everywhere along the roadside that it seemed urgent, as if again some essential messages that could not be understood were there relayed.

Ahead of the boy in the east the dawn rose. He had seen early morning light in winter before, but never quite watched the full slow drama of the brightening of dark. The night was like a cloth whose hem was moving. Very slowly, at first. The thinnest fringe of a paler shade appeared low in the distance, so like the colour of night that at first you couldn’t say that it was any different. Then, as the boy walked towards it, in the distance the hem withdrew slightly further. Whether the night was pulling back or the day pushing forward he couldn’t say. But his eyes remained fixed on the thin streak of a colour somewhere between blue and purple against a pale-pale white.

Same colour as veins along the inside of the Master’s arm.

The streaks of blue were not linear or evenly spaced nor any way you might consider drawn by a hand, but rather as if they were things with their own life, runs of colour and light released out of the darkness. The pallor of the horizon was delicate and fine and seemed to the boy strangely vulnerable, as if light were something really graceful, or shy, and its slow approach to the darkness uncertain and gentle. The first streaks of the dawn vanished as the night was pulled further away until there was a play of many colours.

Faint yellow buttermilk.

Washed grey school shirts.

Curved pink behind fingernails.

The colours were there for moments only. There, and then diluted into the bigger brightness. Birds took flight from the hedgerows and darted across the sky and climbed the air at upright angles. The dark was gone. He looked behind him to the west but already the morning had come over him, and he was swiftly in the new day.

The boy felt a sense of gladness then. He had the feeling of someone who has come through a test or difficulty. His first night was behind him. He was already that much closer to completing his journey, he told himself. And although he still felt pain in his shoulder, things would be all right, he thought.

But the brightness of the early morning brought with it something else too. In the daylight he was suddenly exposed on the road for anyone to see. Now, here were the first cars, and as they approached he had a dread they were coming to find him. When one then two and three passed by he released the breath caught like a bird in the cage of his chest and walked on. But he had the sense that he wore guilt like a yellow coat and that the drivers could tell.

‘There’s nothing I can do about it,’ he told himself, ‘I can’t keep off the road by day and only travel by night. I have to chance it. Otherwise I will never get there.’

He walked on. He did not know exactly where this ‘there’ was. But in the hours since he had left home he had formulated this much: that the man he was looking for had some connection with the BBC, and so their offices in London would be the first place to enquire of him. He was a writer, perhaps a newsman. His name was Ah-Sh something.

What exactly would happen when the boy met the man, he didn’t think about yet.

The approach of a large truck up the hill behind him caused the boy to stop and stand in to the side of the road. The truck laboured on the slope and made its way very slowly so that the driver had the boy in his sight a long time. When it arrived alongside him, the truck slowed to a stop. Its engine running, the truck’s passenger door flew open, and above him the boy could see the driver leaning across to call down to him.

‘Need a lift?’

The man was in a pale blue shirt with its sleeves rolled up. His stomach bowed outward, as though on his lap was an inflated ball. He had small curves of golden hair standing upward on his head and as he looked down at the boy there was a smile playing in his eyes and his entire face seemed on the point of laughing.

‘Going along the way a bit? Hop up,’ said the man. He smiled warmly, as if he had just told a wonderful story, or thought it marvellous how he had a free seat in his truck and the boy needed one.

But the boy hesitated. A car hooted at the stopped truck on the hill.

‘Well lad, eh?’

Reason or random? Chance or plan?

He reached up, grabbed the door handle, climbed on to a metal step and slid in on to the seat.

‘There you go,’ chuckled the man, and held out a short pink hand to the boy. ‘Ben Dack,’ he said, ‘your driver.’ He thought this almost hilarious and the ball on his lap bounced up and down a few times as the humour found a home there.

Remembering the man on the road, the boy took the hand cautiously. But at once he found his fingers squeezed warmly and his arm pumped up and down vigorously while all the time Ben Dack smiled. ‘Welcome aboard,’ he said while the boy snapped the seatbelt. ‘You’re in for a smooth ride.’

The truck pulled out into the road into what was now a steady file of cars.

‘Where you off to?’ asked Ben. ‘I’m taking her all the way across the country to Dublin today.’

‘That’s where I’m going. To Dublin.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Isn’t that lucky then. By jingo it is. All the way to Dublin. I tell Josie, that’s my wife, lovely lovely Josie, a saint to be married to me and I don’t mind admitting it, don’t mind at all. I tell Josie, I tell her I’m taking the truck up to Dublin again tomorrow, third time in ten days, and each time I’m always on the lookout, you know, for someone. Because there’s always someone isn’t there? I think so, I think so. I do. Someone who needs a lift, someone you can lend a hand to just by pulling over. Just as simple as that, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because we’re all in this world right?’ Ben paused a moment as if he was reviewing this piece of information just for a second. ‘Yep, we’re all in this world and who knows I might be you one day and you might be me and even, even,’ he raised his right hand off the steering-wheel and pointed at the boy, ‘I might have been you, sort of, I mean I might have been a fellow on the road looking for a lift, you see, and well …’ The idea became a little complicated then so he waved the hand slightly as though erasing it off the board. ‘Well, the main thing is, the main point I told Josie was, kindness to one person is kindness to yourself. In a way, do you see?’

Trying to keep up with the logic of the point and finding himself somewhere further back in the reasoning than Ben, the boy could only nod.

‘Exactly, it stands to reason doesn’t it? Of course it does. Mathematical, sort of actually. And that way, oops.’ A car came shooting down an avenue and out into the path of the truck, but Ben anticipated it and pulled on the wheel and swung them out of the way.

Although there had almost been a full collision he did not blast the horn or curse, but instead made a little whistle and chuckled. ‘Poor fellow’s probably slept it in, driving half-asleep. He’s absolute awake now anyway.’

The boy said nothing. He was recovering from the near-crash, and trying to assemble in his mind the pieces of this new situation.

‘Where was I? Lost my thought now.’ Ben drummed his fingers on the sides of the steering-wheel, then lifted his right hand and clicked. ‘Yes, that way what one person does for another one is not exactly charity, you see, because it’s not like you’re doing it for them, well you are, you are, but not for them if you see. That’s what I’m always telling Josie, really it’s for yourself, because, because, well, you see, as I say, I could be you.’

At that, arriving triumphantly at his main point, Ben chuckled delightedly. It was all so clear to him. It was like he had the secret of the world and was so pleased that he, just an ordinary fellow, had figured it out. His cheeks were reddened with pleasure and his eyebrows lifted to the angle of a squat roof. He let the brilliance of his argument shine for a moment and as he did so he placed the very tip of his tongue just between his lips.

The countryside flew past them.

‘Dublin, eh?’ he said after a while.

‘Yes,’ said the boy, and after a beat added, ‘thank you for picking me up.’

‘Oh not at all, not at all,’ said Ben. ‘I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you something for nothing. The road is shorter with two. Have you ever noticed that? It is. Absolute gospel. I know this country back and forward. I know every corner of every road I’d say by now. I’ve been on the roads in this country for, what are you sixteen?’

‘Yes,’ lied the boy.

‘Well all the years of your life then, and there’s not one mile of them I’d rather travel on my own. A place can be lovely, but it can still be lonely. And sitting in this cab mile after mile listening to the radio or singing a little bit – no don’t worry I won’t start, Josie says I’d be second to a crow in a singing contest – is no comparison to having someone for company. So thank you. Thank you for coming onboard. Together the two of us will fly across this country in jig-time, absolute jig-time, whereas otherwise. That’s the thing you see, the same journey right? The same one hundred and eighty or so miles right?’

‘Right,’ answered the boy, hoping he wasn’t wrong.

‘The exact same journey can be so different. Can be a different thing altogether, and so much so that you might think they were in different countries even. Different lifetimes, say. That’s the thing. That’s the thing to understand in life. I’m talking too much am I? Josie says I talk too much sometimes, you just tell me if I am and Ben Dack will shut right up, shut right up for mile after mile if you just want me to listen. I can listen. You just say, all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good lad, you’re a good fellow I can tell that. I’m a good judge of character. That’s another thing about giving people a lift along the road, you get to take a sample as it were, a sample of life, just a dip in and there you have what comes up. And do you know what the surprising thing is?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘No, well, you see that’s because you’re young still, and that’s great, that’s absolute. But the surprising thing is this, hold on,’ Ben swung the wheel and took them round a roundabout and out on the Dublin road where he waved a hand at the policeman who was standing behind his car aiming the speed-gun. ‘The surprising thing is, no matter what you hear said nowadays, no matter what you read about terrible things that happen every day to people and how dreadful things can be, the majority, and I mean ninety-nine and ninety-eight ninety-ninths of people are good. Absolute,’ he said, ‘no question. Good, kind, generous, bread-and-butter people. You know? That’s the truth of what I found in this truck, that’s the gospel according to Ben Dack.’ He laughed at this and the ball rose and fell and he put one hand down to steady it.

For a time then it seemed that he had reached the end of all that was urgent in him to express and he was quiet. But not exactly still. It was as though the speeches he had made were then replaying in his head and as he watched the road he made a series of small noddings, eyebrow-raisings, head-anglings and even the slightest occasional humming sound in agreement with himself.

The road ran on. The day that rose was bright with blue sky and white clouds moving swiftly. The boy watched the miles go past. He still had a dull ache in his shoulder. The transfer of light and image on to the windscreen and sometimes up along it flowed as if it was the road travelling over them and not the opposite. As he bobbed gently in the seat the boy kept finding his thoughts going behind him now. He thought not of the way ahead and how he was going to proceed, but instead in his mind he visited the home he had left and imagined the scene of the Master’s discovering the note. It was found by now. What was the first thing the Master would do? The boy pictured him standing, reading it. He pictured a scene of perfect stillness and the Master’s eyes small in their nest of wrinkles while his mind whirred. Would he go directly to the police? Had he already called them? The boy pressed his lips together.

Are they after me?

Without intending to, he took a look in the rear-view mirror, but there was only the steady line of morning traffic behind them. Then again perhaps the Master wouldn’t go to the police yet. Perhaps he wouldn’t want to frighten the boy. Perhaps … It was no good, there were too many possibilities.

Of only one thing the boy was certain, and that was that there would be hurt. There would be worry. And so, sitting in the cab with Ben Dack nodding and agreeing with a silent conversation he was repeating to himself, the boy thought that if the Master knew that he was all right his hurt would be less. But he couldn’t risk a phone call, couldn’t risk a conversation with the Master persuading him to come back, and so instead he shut tight his eyes and concentrated.

As if he was clearing a table after breakfast, one by one he picked up and put away any thoughts that were in his mind. Then, when he was sure there was nothing left and his mind was clear, he imagined four words.

I

am

all

right.

He imagined writing them very carefully on a table. He made the four words of his message and with his eyes still closed, he thought on them with all the power he could manage. He thought on them, as if his thought were a beam of light immensely potent that could make the letters glow whitely and then burn through the air to the Master. I am all right. I am all right.

‘Had a little nap, did you?’ Ben Dack asked. ‘Saw you nod off there, excellent. I have had people sleep one side of the country to the other. Truck of dreams, I tell Josie. What dreams and dreamers I have had aboard. Absolute. Had a girl one time told me everything that happened in dreams could happen, no, could be happening, that’s right, in another world. Imagine that. That’s what she said. There’s another you and another me maybe doing different things there you see and, here’s the strange bit, dreaming of here. Do you see? So. Makes you think doesn’t it?’ Ben nodded at the strangeness of this until he had satisfied himself, then announced: ‘Café Dack, I think.’

‘What?’

‘Time for eats.’

He pulled the truck over into a grassy lay-by and shut it off. At once he raised his hands above his head, then groaned, then rolled his head left and then right, then reached down into a space beside the seat.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘ham and cheese or cheese and ham?’

‘I’m all right, thank you,’ said the boy.

‘No no, you have to eat at the Café Dack. That’s the rules.’

‘But you need them for yourself.’

‘Josie knows I never travel alone if I can help it. She makes ’em for two people.’

‘Every day?’

‘Every day. Josie’s a saint, absolute. One hundred and one per cent pure through and true saint. And what I did to be the lucky fellow to marry her I’ll never know. Here, ham and cheese.’ A second sandwich Ben Dack turned over. ‘Cheese and ham for me.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And milky tea.’

Ben poured the boy a mug full and they sat there, windows open, flies buzzing and traffic softly passing.

‘Dublin?’ asked Ben after a while.

‘Yes. Thank you very much.’

‘Not that I’m enquiring. Nothing as quick a turnoff to people you pick up on the road than to give them the full interrogation. It’s not fair, I believe. Not fair. Everyone has their own lives, haven’t they? They have, and some things don’t need to be enquired of, you can still be the best of companions. That’s my philosophy.’

‘I am on my way to see my father.’

‘Oh? Right then, very glad I could be of assistance,’ said Ben, and nodded at how pleased he was by this news and that he had a part in something good. ‘Yes, very glad. Absolute.’

He finished four sandwiches and two mugs of tea and insisted that the boy eat just as much. Then he produced one of Josie’s jam tarts for each of them and after he wiped his mouth with a blue and white chequered napkin she had given him he announced was going to take his forty now.

‘Forty?’ asked the boy.

‘Winks, just to rest the eyes for the way into the city. Be fresher, you know? City’s another world. Won’t be long. No need to wake me, body’s like a clock this stage, set the timer,’ he reached up and screwed his ear twice, ‘only joking. No, I’ll wake in eighteen minutes.’ And at that he released the catch in the car seat and it tilted back and he folded his short plump arms on his stomach. At once he was asleep.

A strange kind of quiet was in the truck but the boy himself could not sleep and sat still while time passed in the middle of the country. He had a sense of being somehow outside of the world, as if it was turning now without him. Everything in the ordinary world was going ahead, children were sitting in school, men and women were at work, and cars and buses and aeroplanes were travelling in constant motion. And he was still, so still that he and Ben and the truck might have been the only un-turning thing in the turning world.

After eighteen minutes Ben woke up. He stretched, righted his seat, smiled over at the boy and then turned on the engine.

‘To Dublin so,’ he said.

They pulled out to the edge of the road. From sandwich crumbs blackbirds in the long grass flew up and scattered. Ben eased the truck out into the steady traffic.

‘Everyone’s going somewhere, eh?’ he said.

Two hours later they had arrived in the city. Ben followed the road in by the canal and slowly wound his way closer and closer to the docks by the river.

‘Well, journey’s end,’ he said when they had arrived there. The boy hesitated. Now that he was here he wasn’t sure that he could go on.

‘Hello to your father, and good luck to you in everything you do,’ Ben said and reached out his hand and vigorously shook the boy’s.

‘Thank you.’

Just then cars that were backed up behind the truck began hooting.

‘Oops,’ smiled Ben. And although the boy was not in any way prepared to leave him just then, or even sure that he wanted to, he opened the door and climbed down into the noise of the city.

Dublin. This is Dublin.

He looked up into the cab. He looked the way a boy can look to a man when standing on the precipice of a new experience, unsure that he can step off into it. He looked for courage, for faith in his own ability, for confirmation. But the moment was frayed with the blaring of car horns, and if he understood the boy’s needs, Ben Dack had no time to meet them. He held up his small plump hand and waved, and, as though he was in on a secret they shared, he made a broad wink.

‘Be well,’ he said, ‘until next time.’ And then the truck pulled away, Ben Dack’s face framed in the wing-mirror, and the boy watching and not moving from the spot.