This Is Happiness Read online

  When you try and lift your mother it’s not the same as lifting another human being. The moment you do it you know you’ll never forget it for the rest of your life. You know there’s no frailty, nakedness, nor tenderness either, quite like this, and know that the moment you have her in your arms the feeling of it is entering you so profoundly that from here on it will form part of the knowledge of your blood and brain and soul too, whether you believe in souls or not. I didn’t quite lift but half-dragged my mother off the floor and across the shining wet linoleum to what we called the soft chair where I got her torso half on but she slid back crying all the time now and I had to heave her twice more to get her up. Mam? Mam?

  I got her a glass of water. Her hand came around mine drinking it and I could feel the jumping live quality in her fingers, all of her throbbing like that, her eyes wildly seeking mine, looking away the minute they found them. She didn’t want me to call the neighbours. She was ashamed. So, we sat through the rest of that afternoon, waiting for my father to come home. When he did, he called the doctor, and together they took my mother up the stairs, her legs the legs of a rag doll dangling. That’s it, May. Good girl. That’s it.

  When the doctor left, my father found me doing my homework. Your mother, he said, and immediately lost the rest of his sentence. He was younger than himself at that moment, smaller too, and briefly I could see him the son of Doady and Ganga and wanting to be in one of the lumpy brown armchairs in that immutable home on the far side of the country.

  It’s like she’s been struck, he said, by electricity.

  33

  In the days after seeing Annie Mooney, the cabling started going up in Faha. All over the parish you’d see trucks tearing past in grave urgencies, huge spools of black wire on the back with any number of shirtsleeved or bare-chested men duskily blazoned by the sun looking like they were hastening to and from a game of giants. And walking down any road you’d wonder What’s that line? running taller than three men, between the fort field and Meade’s bog meadow say. The line of wire caught your eye, not only because your eye hadn’t attuned to seeing lines but because these were the first drawn by man on the air over that landscape, and spoke, in some part unsettlingly, of the dominion of science over nature and the reality of future times. From baking in the sun, the cables when they went up smelled of India, Tom Sullivan said, as though he had been there. The rubber, it’s true, had a burnt treacle about it, or was its near cousin, and the cable workers had it about their person, the smell slow to perish and in time the men stopped trying, taking it as a badge of honour, and adding I suppose to their allure. All of them were foreigners, that is, from outside the immediate locality, and foreignness of any kind being better-looking than Fahaean.

  Once the cables went up the crows came down on them, proving true the safety testaments of the Supply Board by not getting electrocuted. (This was refuted by Martin Martin who was a bit of a gligeen and said the current couldn’t travel through claws. If you sat a child on the wire you’d cook it nicely, he maintained, but was not pressed for a test case. He threw a pair of old boots laced together up over the line down near the graveyard, they were there still and they burying him.) Cattle, too dumb or discerning, took small notice of the lines and would graze in their vicinity and under them too, but horses, with their fabled sensitivity, blew their nostrils and high-stepped to the furthermost corners, trotting over and back and making a general ruckus as though they’d supposed they were living in the time of Homer, and the strung wires impugned their nobility. They’d come around, but it took time.

  The lines went up quickly, the whole parish like a Christmas bundle getting strung. People thought little enough of trees then, if there was a tree in the way down she came. If there were branches extending they weren’t extending long. Some of the lads were so saw-handy you’d hardly see the saw in their hands only the great wing of the branch whooshing down and some lad up the tree shown then by the white wound calling Will I take this next one too?

  The fine weather continued to outlast all predictions and prove that even in these times there was such a thing as incredible. Flowers that had been forgotten because they were each year vanquished by the floods falling from upturned clouds now bloomed. They were small roadside blossoms, like the local character, neither showy nor brash, it took an eye to notice them. Maybe the heart-swollen see more. Maybe the world is not the same world when you’re plodding through a pining May-time. Either way, there was a definite flourishing, and that’s a fact. I’m not making more of it than that.

  The annual plague of slugs that had become such a condition of living that in Faha it had passed beyond comment, Bad year for the slugs a phrase redundant in all parts where the river was licking the land and especially in that parish where for years the slugs slimed down the grey skies, this year was visited on a benighted elsewhere. Another boon of what, with Catholic caution and native understatement, was called the fine spell, was that in the press of heat the weeds didn’t come up. Like all who have to swallow occasional curses of their climate, neither Doady nor Ganga ever spoke of the fact that what most thrived in Faha was weeds and rushes. In the normal sop of wet springtime, it could seem that, following some subterranean advertisement of places with saturated mud-soil, the weeds and rushes of several counties had come for their holidays. You could pass an afternoon crooked over in the garden with your grandmother pulling fistfuls and stand after with the small victory of the cleaned bed only to find the dandelions back laughing at you two days later. But this year the weeds were suffocated by an implacable sun and there spread instead a Spanish gardening, which meant a world of watering. It was always known who in the parish had the best wells, a good well being both pagan and Christian, luck and blessing. These were mostly just a wet eye in the ground, but they were respected, understood part of a beneficent covenant and no amount of bucket-dipping could dry them. Now you’d notice people heading here there and everywhere with brimming buckets. And soon enough too you’d hear someone ask the question that in Faha had not been uttered in the living (and also dead) memory of Mrs Moore: Will we run out of water?

  Weather and wiring combined to verb the air and fabricate a sense of the novel. That’s my point.

  In those next few days I didn’t tell Christy I had seen Annie Mooney again, and I didn’t see Sophie Troy, but lived with the blocked arteries of both stories. To keep the pressure and the pain up, in secret I’d tour the memory of Sophie. I’d find some detail I hadn’t realised I’d noticed, the golden almost-down on her face say, and the wonder of that would make a nice agony to be going on with.

  Those nights Christy and I resumed our quest for Junior, knowing that he was likely five miles further than the reach of a cycling handicapped by having to stop every so often to slake an onerous thirst. On those night-journeys, he would enquire of my lover’s progress, and I’d tell him the none I was making and he’d say That’s not good and add breathy bicycle-counsels, most of which were versions of the earlier precis of: Your love is doomed, you must give it everything you’ve got. That he wasn’t adhering to his own advice I let slip for now, the state of in-love granting all its citizens visas of self-centredness.

  When I did think of it, I was surprised that Christy was not more downtrodden by the impasse with Annie, and one evening approaching the village of Kilmihil, where Michael the Archangel himself had stopped, and where every man we met was called some version of Michael, I asked him why. He explained himself in a single sentence. ‘Noe,’ he said, and took a theatrical breath, ‘this, is happiness.’

  I gave him back the look you give those a few shillings short of a pound.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Whenever I said that it used to drive my wife mad.’

  ‘You were married?’

  ‘I was. She left me for a better man. God bless her,’ he said, and nodded down the valley after the memory of her. He smiled, quoting himself: ‘This is happiness.’

  It was a condensed explanation, but I came to
understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.

  I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness, and the bulky blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him.

  ‘This is happiness,’ he affirmed once more, pushing off and gasp-pedalling the uphill away from further enquiry.

  Beneath the pinholed heaven, the night was God-dimensioned and monumental before electric light. In Breen’s pub there was no sign of the Archangel that evening, but there was a piper in the corner, pipers then rare as hens’ teeth, and he played a plaintive music that was like the salt wind singing, utterly strange and familiar, unlike any other music really, an absolute music, uncompromising as a blackthorn, ancient and elemental, and in the air he played was a whole history of the troubled heart, and when I looked at Christy I saw the sorrow in his happiness had made shine his eyes.

  Now, here’s a thing. Soon enough I had been three times standing outside the gates of Avalon, three times tramping up and down the tramped grass, six times seen by Doctor Troy coming and going on missions of mercy and not once stopping to enquire after mine, and none of these times had I seen Sophie. The truth, which was unknown to me at the time, was that if she had come down the avenue I would have died.

  The apprentice lover has to make it up as he or she goes along, they think no one has ever felt like this before. Others have loved, yes, but not like this is textbook. We all feel we are originals, maybe at the moment when we are most universal. So, Noe Crowe’s method was to stand sentry at the gates. Make of it what you want. He would stand and walk up and down and feel he was making a declaration. By farmers, and farmers’ wives, and children, he was seen, saluted, nodded to, but in the broad church of the Fahaean way, which allowed all manner of human oddity, never asked what he was doing there. There were stories, he was sure. But none told to him. In his original thinking, he had thought it would be enough just to see Sophie pass. It would be enough if she walked down the avenue with her sisters and turned out the gate to go into the village. It would be enough if she was the passenger in the doctor’s car and in the pause of the turn right or left he would catch a glimpse of her, and whatever it was that he had, by the sight of her it would be healed. That was his religion, as he was each minute inventing it.

  All he needed was to see her.

  From this distance, when you get past the hopelessness of him, there’s something hopeful in that. In the cure of another.

  Well, she never came. He didn’t get even the glimpse, and instead of his heartache getting better it got worse. That’s in the textbook too.

  Now, in Faha at that time, there was one German. He was called The German. That was what he went by, and called himself too, after a brief failed season trying to get Faha to pronounce his Christian name which was Uwe, ‘You-Wee’, but to Faha’s ears came out like a command to pee. The German had appeared on a bicycle after the war. One day he’d started cycling west and kept going past the devastation of humanity until he came to the drowning edge of the furthermost that was Faha, got off his bicycle, took a look around at all that was green and dripping, knelt down on the ground and wept. Faha being Faha nobody said boo and soon enough The German bought Brouder’s father’s place. The German was the peacefullest man in the parish. He was a keep-to-yourself kind of man, though, who grew a very tidy garden. Very. Some of the Germans, it turned out, had a broad streak of the romantic in them, and The German had a little of Penniworth’s idyll-icitis, Tess Grogan’s Eden-itis, and what have you, because he never once complained of the watery spears falling on his head, the puddling of his furrows, and the river saying hello to the kitchen when it invited itself in around the back. The German just carried on.

  In the parish history, no one recalls whose was the first bicycle he fixed. It stood to reason of course. A man who’d cycled across Europe had a certified knowledge. Well, The German fixed the first bicycle past the point of fixing, returned it somewhere past brand new, and soon enough he was like Cúchulainn with the three hundred wolfhounds, only with bicycles. You’d come into Brouder’s and the bicycles would be coming out against you. They’d be laid in a line in along the boreen waiting their turn. If you lived within ten miles, you knew The German was the man for bicycles.

  But not for company. He lived in the neat little house and he worked on the bicycles into the dark, and after by lamplight. He fished the river in season. But he was friendless.

  And one day, some years ago, I can’t say how, this struck my grandfather in the chest. Bam, like that, and Ganga took a fit of wanting to befriend The German. Now, he had nothing in common with the man. That didn’t stop him. He could find no means, no language, no bridge, between them to cross, except by bringing The German his bicycle to mend. And so, Ganga went out to the shed an evening, apologised to his bicycle, and took a spanner to her. Soon after he’d be pushing the banjaxed bike, wheel-groaning, brakes askew or bearings unbearing, crossing the drizzling twilight with Joe following, up the right-of-way gone now to Brouder’s place. ‘You won’t believe what’s after happening to the bike. Would you take a look at this?’ the two of them going out to the tidy little workshed at the back where The German would set to, tightening, righting, mending, whatever, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter either that there was little talk between them – The German worked in a studied quiet – because by the time he was going home in the dark after, Ganga felt that more than the bicycle was repaired.

  The trouble was, for the companionship to continue, my grandfather had to keep breaking the bicycle.

  And that’s what he did, mostly hiding it from Doady who would have scolded him, but every so often scratching his big round head to tell her, ‘The bicycle isn’t right. I think I’ll take her up to The German,’ letting Doady think she’d married a class of bosthoon, rúchach, gliomach – they have more words for idiots in Kerry than anywhere else – so he could carry on with his visits. The German cottoned on, of course, but categorised it among the innumerable strangenesses of Irish people, neither man saying anything until, umpteen I think the exact number of bicycle repairs later, the eventual breakthrough came when in the shed Ganga spotted a draughtboard.

  Ganga’s German tactic was the only way I could think of to see Sophie Troy again.

  Now, there’s a cruelty easily available in mocking your younger self. Howanever, I don’t want to fall to that here. I want to have generosity of spirit. I want to let him be as he was, honour him in all his innocence and, I’m going to say, purity.

  For a moment so, pause him here on the top of the Captain’s Ladder, and look kindly on the poor fool. It’s the middle of the afternoon. Doady is out at the washing line where the clothes dry in jig-time now and the pegs turn brittle from the sun. Her hens are hunkered under the hedges. The fire in the hearth is just two sods leaning on each other but still a heat is rising from them. It gets trapped here at the top of the stair where he stands. His wrists are still bound, the bindings greyed and frayed some at the edges, but mostly white, so they look the long sleeves of a musketeer. He’s on the top step, maybe fifteen feet of a fall to the slope of the floor. O now! His pulse is in his throat, and in his wrists too, and because just ahead of him is the certainty of pain, and because of what it takes to overrule your own instinct, to choose the way of suffering, he doesn’t move. In a fast-forward not invented yet are the scenes of outcome, what he thinks will happen when he steps off the Captain’s Ladder and lets himself fall. He will put out his hands to save himself, and the wrists will snap. He’ll tumble head-over-heels, bang his head and shoulders off maybe two maybe three of the worn timber steps his grandfather built when he realised the house would need an upstairs to accommodate what kept coming from his loins.
He’ll arrive in a clatter ball at the bottom of the stairs, and be crying out with pain, and his grandmother will find him and call his grandfather and he’ll be brought to the doctor. The scenes can be pictured, but not felt. In order to keep us living, actual pain cannot be imagined. It can be understood; your brain can tell you This is going to hurt, but it can’t pre-feel it, not the lacerating outraged dimension of it, so, while to throw yourself off the top of a steep timber stairs requires a fair bit of negotiation, and I suppose some courage, the courage is based on a fiction. He doesn’t know how much it will hurt. Not really.

  But there he is. I won’t say anything here about the aptness of a fall, only that he was versed enough and young enough, not to say conceited enough, be kind, to want his actions to be symbolic. So, face bloodless and forehead awash in apostle’s ardency, he moves to the lip of the step, pushes across the curve of his quiff, and steps into the air.

  The single second it takes for him to fall to the floor is a lie. There’s too much to fit inside that single beat, the realisation that he’s going head-first, the tilt, topple, and the swiftness that he goes over, the sensation of diving, not yet into a deeper life, not yet translated into meaning, for now only the exhilaration and terror, the blind white descent too swift even to say the word descent, and in that blindness the image that only comes to him now of his mother’s falls, some part of him changing his mind mid-fall and wanting to save himself because, despite being too late by three years, in a twist of illogic that was yet true, in saving himself he would be saving her, then the first bang and the second bang and somewhere before the third the shocked awareness that these were not his wrists snapping, because his body had cheated or outsmarted him and before he hit the plank of the step, shattering it in a sharp clack that Doady heard coming in the back door, his hands had pulled in close to his body for protection and he was going, wings withdrawn, arrowlike and shut-eyed, in the cause of hopeless love, and, in the single second that endorsed the idiom by splitting apart, coming to understand bang bang bang that the part of him taking most of the fall was his head.