Читать книгу Boy in the World - Niall Williams - Страница 9

SIX

In the Master’s dream his wife was speaking. But although he could see her clearly and could see her mouth move and form the words, the Master could not make them out. She was saying something. She was speaking excitedly, telling him something urgent, but in the dream she appeared as in a film without sound, and though he moved about in the covers and turned his head on the pillow the Master could not hear her. What is it? What is it? Tell me. He turned again in the bedclothes, he screwed his eyes closed even tighter. In dreaming he moved his lips as though reading hers and saying the message in a kind of mumble. But still his brain could not grasp what she was saying. Then, in a final effort to move closer to her, he pushed over further in the bed, hit his head smartly against the bedpost and opened his eyes. The dream was gone, the message lost.

It was quiet. Very quiet. Mornings in the countryside were always hushed. There was only the noise of the wind in the trees or the birdsong. Nothing was ever coming or going outside, and so quietness was a condition he was used to. But that morning, the moment he opened his eyes, the Master could sense something was too quiet. He blinked and fixed his gaze very steadily on a place on the wall in front of him so as not to be distracted and tried to figure out just what it was. It was as though in everything that had been set out on a kitchen table something had been disturbed in the night, a cup lifted off a saucer and not returned. No Joe, that’s not it. Something, it is something. He lay some moments with this feeling while the last remains of the dream of his wife vanished. Then carefully he angled his feet over the edge of the bed and into his slippers.

He left the bedroom in his pyjamas and went out into the small hallway and stopped and tried to figure it out again.

Something. Definitely something. But what he couldn’t say. Still, it was there and he couldn’t ignore it. It lay like a hair across his tongue. He came down the stairs like a man who vaguely remembers that he left the back door open or the tap running or forgot the fireguard in front of the fire. He came expecting to see the problem at once and that it would be something small and easily remedied.

In the kitchen everything was as it should be. The reminders of the non-party, film-covered bowls of brightly coloured jelly, bottles of soft drinks, boxes of biscuits, were lined up along the counter. In the glass doors of the cupboard he saw himself, his hair tufted, his eyebrows low in puzzlement. What is it? Was it something I dreamt or just my old silliness?

‘No, there is something,’ he said aloud to no one listening.

The Master stood then perfectly still in the centre of the kitchen and shut his eyes and tried to let some part of him that he believed in, and that was beyond his five senses, figure it out. As if his intuition were a fog or a soft creature without shape he stood and released it into the house. He did nothing. He did not move nor look about him for a few brief moments, then, as if fingers clicked inside him, he turned and hurried out of the kitchen. He bounded up the stairs quicker than another of his age and was at the boy’s bedroom door before his breath.

He raised his right hand to knock. But already he knew.

That he suddenly knew was something he could not explain to himself. There was no visible sign, nothing real that was disturbed.

‘But it was as if there was a cord, an invisible line that runs between me and the boy and when I woke in the morning I knew that it had somehow been pulled. Imagine there was stitching in your heart,’ he would later tell the ghost of his wife, ‘and the thread was yanked, something like that.’

The Master’s heart hammered while his hand didn’t. He stood before the bedroom door and felt the knowledge of what had happened arrive now in his brain and settle like black sludge. He pressed his lips together. It was no good, he knew, even as his hand rapped. He did not wait a second time but opened the door at once and felt the sight of the empty bed hit him hard like a fist into his chest. Immediately he saw the note on the pillow and had to hold on to the doorframe.

‘Oh no.’

Here it was, here was the fracture he had felt in the morning as soon as he awoke. The boy was gone. He almost didn’t need to read the note. He was stopped with sorrow and the dread of something ripping away from him. He was stopped with panic and fear and failure. Where was he gone? How long gone? And just O God, is he all right?

He was stopped while every detail of the scene in the bedroom – the bedclothes, books, an open drawer, those slippers – locked itself into his memory. He was stopped like a patient under surgery, as if his side or his chest was opened and a hand was reaching inside him to find the place where he was damaged.

‘You stood there when you should have been hurrying,’ he would tell himself later in the morning. ‘Stood there like a fool with the clockwork of you stopped and your old brain fuddled.’

And indeed there was a forever when the Master seemed to be able only to look at the empty room. Perhaps he was taking the meaning of the situation inside himself. Perhaps he was intuiting something from the way the room had been left. But if so, he didn’t show sign of it. At last he made a small shake of his head, breaking free of some chains of the moment, and crossed and lifted the note.

It read:

Dear Joe,

I could not sleep. I read the letter in the cream-coloured envelope. Did you know what it said? Much of it was burned but some of it I understood.

I have to go and find the man who was my father. I do not think he knows I was born.

I must do this now. Something is telling me. I think she would want me to do this.

I have money and I will go to England and find him and tell him who I am. That is all. Then I will come back. It does not mean I love you less.

I am sorry for the upset. I will be all right and home again soon.

The Master read the note twice. As he read the words he saw the hand that wrote them, he saw the boy stooped close to the paper the way he had seen him a thousand times in the classroom. But this was not the classroom.

‘You must do something, you old fool. Come on.’

He turned and hurried to the bedroom next door where he dressed himself quickly. As he did the ghost of his wife was sitting in the chair by the bed.

‘I’m a fool,’ he said to her.

‘You’re my fool, Joe,’ she answered.

‘I couldn’t hear you this morning in the dream. Such a fool, such a fool, he’s gone.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m going after him.’

‘Of course you are.’

He stood one-legged and drew on his trousers. His large hands fumbled with the buttons of his shirt and then he picked up the letter and the agitation in him made it flap in his hand like a broken wing. He read each of the words again as if to confirm them, as if they too might be a dream. The worry in his chest tightened and he felt his breath squeezing from him. He could not breathe, such was the feeling of loss that bound him.

‘Why are you not alive now to help me?’ he asked the ghost of his wife. But she only smiled back at him kindly.

‘It has to be my fault. I have to be the one to blame, giving him the letter yesterday. What was I thinking? Nothing but an old fool,’ he said. If his wife had been living the Master would have gone to hold her then. He would have found comfort and strength in her arms and been able to gather himself before hurrying after the boy. Deeply now, he missed her and faced the difficulty of moving from where he was, so weighted with sorrow were his feet. The blame he felt was bitter like a drink of thorns. Then he said, ‘You think I should call the police. I know you think that. But I don’t want them hunting him down. He hasn’t done anything wrong, he hasn’t run away, not really. He’s just gone to find someone.’ He argued this out loud to himself and his wife to clarify the situation and make it seem less ominous. To lighten the weight of his blame he said in a most reasonable tone: ‘He will be fine. I won’t call the police. I’ll go after the boy myself. I’ll find him and then I’ll help him.’

Quickly the Master slid his feet over the broken-down backs of his shoes, tapped his chest pockets for wallet and glasses, made a cape of his tweed jacket as he put it on and hurried out of the bedroom. At the door he paused for a second to look back to where the ghost of his wife was now gone.

He came downstairs and raced through the house, gathering last-minute things as he went, keys, pencil, paper, maps. As he passed through the sitting-room he stopped as though a hand caught him. There on the table were bottles of whiskey, brandy, six bottles of stout. Morning light glinted on the glass. The Master brought a hand up to his mouth as if holding back his longing to taste. He swallowed hard on nothing. He thought of having just one drink, just one to help him steady himself. The nerves are flying all over the place. I’m as jittery … I need to get a hold of …

No. No, you old fool. Not now.

But just one. Just.

He stood by the table and unscrewed the top of the brandy. Like a part of himself he had kept bottled, the smell escaped. He lifted a tumbler. He took the bottle by the neck and poured, a small tremor in his hand as the drink filled. Involuntarily he touched the tip of his tongue to his top lip. He blinked his eyes. The house was empty. All was perfectly still. No one would know. Worry and guilt and fear had gathered in his throat. He needed the drink to wash them away. The boy was gone.

It was my fault. I never should have brought him the letter. I never should have. He threw the thing in the fire, but I knew better. I’m bloody useless. That’s what I am.

The Master carried the brandy to his lips. He closed his eyes on the memories of himself that returned, the brown corners of a hundred pubs where company had flowed around him, then deserted him, his staggering homeward. But it wouldn’t be like that this time. This time he just needed one.

Just one before I go after him.

His lower lip kissed against the glass and the brandy flowed into his mouth. In that first instant it was as welcome to him as a returned friend. The sitting-room was still. Sunlight slanted in the window, timber of table and chairs outlined with urgent illumination. Moments of time were wasting. But the Master stood in the room, shadows clutching the glass, like a pupil staring at an examination he had to take though he knew his result would be a fail. The first mouthful of the brandy was sweet and strong, the second sweeter. Across the floor light and shadow fought, as the big blown clouds in the sky moved eastward.

O God.

He held the bottle tilted to pour again. But as he did, by chance, his eye snagged on the title of a book that had not been tidied away but lay on the floor beside the couch. It was The Boy’s Guide to Kite Flying. And whether it mattered that it was this book or might as easily have been another, whether there was something about kites themselves, their thin frail connection from sky to earth, or the boy’s love of them, the Master could not say. But he stopped where he was.

O God, stop. Stop.

What are you doing? You’ve got to hurry, you’ve got to get the car and get it started.

Come on.

He put down the bottle, went out of the front door and closed it behind him, but he did not lock it. He hurried off on foot in the wake of the boy, breathlessly tramping down the road, his face bright red, and his jacket blowing out in flaps like wings. At every step he was imagining the boy before him.

When he arrived in the village the old car was waiting.

‘Don’t let me down now,’ he said and tried the ignition, and then tapped the dashboard twice with thanks as the engine coughed and then fired perfectly. Rarely did the Master drive further than three or four miles from the house. The car was half his own age and was the only one he had ever owned. Before him it had belonged to a grease-faced puff-lipped mechanic called Mahoney who had bought it from scrap merchants and after significant efforts managed to give the engine the kiss of life. Only the speedometer had failed to return to itself and remained always at forty. The bucket seats in the front were wine vinyl, each of them holed in places. About the floor and elsewhere was a litter beyond category: screws, nails, scissors, thread, vice-grips, erasers, schoolbooks, a knob for the radio, handle for the passenger door, milk cartons, cough drops, newspapers or parts thereof, packets of garden seeds, and an unread copy of the Department of Education’s Guidelines on Discipline. Vaguely the inside of the car smelled like its owner. It smelled of life and experience and chaos.

The Master grasped the thin black steering-wheel and drove along the country roads with his face pressed forward and his eyes scanning right and left for any sign that might reveal the boy had passed that way. He went out through the village and to the junction of the main road. There he pulled the car over on the grass and got out. From the high cabs of the lorries passing he looked like a man searching for his key. He peered down at the grass, took a few steps back and over with his head bent low. Then he stopped and scratched the tuft of his hair. It was hopeless, there was nothing. Everything was as if normal, as if the world showed no sign of loss or sorrow or joy or happiness, but turned out one day after the next, each one just the same.

‘What were you expecting,’ the Master chided himself, ‘a sign?’ You are such an old poop. A boy slips out of the world, but still the world goes on. Things do not stop although one person’s heart breaks. Who even hears it?

He tried to imagine the boy in that place. He tried to reach that part of himself that had known something was wrong when he opened his eyes in the morning, that part of himself that was not easily explained, the stitching that he would tell the ghost of Mary had been pulled loose from his heart.

But nothing.

No. It was useless.

You’re a fool, and worse, an old fool. Stitching! If you told someone else that, they would be having lads coming to have you locked up.

A line of cars whooshed past, drivers’ looks quizzing the old man then forgetting about him.

Where are you? Where are you now? With a silent inner voice the Master asked. He stood on the rough grass of the ditch and in his frustration and longing and desperation he closed tight his fists and urged an answer.

Come on. Come on.

He tried to let himself be only an imagination, to be a spirit that could go back and forwards in time, and from one place to another, seeing and knowing each as clearly as here and now. He tried not to be there, not to be a man in a tweed jacket and old trousers standing by the side of the road looking lost as the traffic passed. He tried to let himself be not a body but a soul, a spirit that could transport him elsewhere or connect to the soul of the boy. If you can believe such a thing.

Where are you?

To the travellers on that road he must have appeared somewhat bizarre; an old man in baggy clothes standing by the ditch with his eyes scrunched up, his fists clenched tight and shaking slightly, and his lips mouthing words. It wouldn’t be long before a car pulled over and somebody would walk back to see if he was having a heart-attack or a stroke or something.

Come on, come on!

The Master was fixed to the spot and asked the air for an answer. He let himself believe one was on the way, if only he could blot out everything else and receive it. He brought his fists up against his forehead and looked ever more a man losing his mind. In the blue of the morning, sunlight came from behind white cloud and shone upon him. Small wind moved in the trees at his back and there was leaf-sound like the last waves of a tide collapsing on the shore. There were no birds singing. There were no cars passing. There was no sound at all. There was in the darkness of his mind, where with closed eyes the Master was searching, a sudden image of the boy’s face.

And something else.

Something that was too slight for sound, too fine and thin for substance at all, nothing more than a ripple in the air. He could not say it was a message. He could not say he heard words, could not assert to anyone of science that he could offer proof. But just then, he knew that the boy had been there. He knew in no form of knowledge that is acceptable to examination, but belonged instead to a domain of spirit and belief. For, as the Master opened his eyes on that grassy corner of the road, he read the invisible four words:

I am all right.