History of the Rain (42 page)

‘Hey, Ruthie.’ He swept me into his embrace. I pressed myself into that shirt and held on and for those moments forgave what I didn’t yet know would need forgiveness.

There were other times, times the suddenness in him took my hand and my mother’s hand and brought us out into the garden where the rain that was not called rain was falling softly and where he said, ‘I will make things better for us,’ and Mam said, ‘We are fine, Virgil, we are fine.’ A time when he let out a roar upstairs and came bounding down and clapped his hands hard. One
clap
, like that. Then another, louder,
CLAP
, so that even Nan looked, and I said, ‘Are you done?’ And he smiled and his eyes were shining the way eyes only shine in love-stories and he shook his head and he laughed. He had to catch the laugh with his hand, and then he touched the top of my head. ‘I am going to make things better for us, Ruthie,’ he told me, and went back up the stairs again and soon was humming once more.

We had an engine, a dynamo in our house, and its output was pages and pages of poems. A week passed, then another, and another. He was still writing, and writing it seemed was not the vexing toil it was when I tried to compose my promised poem, but a wildly improbable fizz. It was giddy and swift and surprising. It was plugged in and all-powerful, a blind mad rush that came not linear nor logical nor even reasonable but with the unruly irrepressible quality of life in it, the kind of writing Gabriel García Márquez meant when he said the sheer pleasure of it may be the human condition which most resembles levitation.

And our house rose with it.

How could it not? For a time our house left behind the ordinary world. I had only a vague sense that in the news the country was actually sinking. Greece had already sunk. Spain was sinking, so was Portugal. Whole bits of Europe were returning to seaweed. Our country was on what Margaret Crowe called tender hooks, waiting to see if we’d have a Soft Landing. We would, said the Ministers, just before we didn’t. But really I didn’t notice. The economy, like fine weather, was something that happened in Dublin. Honestly, until the Poles left, I didn’t know we had one. Gradually the Lidl and Aldi bags were coming (Mrs Prendergast called them Ly-dell and All-dee), and the croissants were departing. Shops were closing. In Ryan’s Tommy McCarroll said he’d put his money in the Absolute Idiots Bank and now felt like an absolute idiot. Francie Arthur’s fifty-euro notes started smelling like mattress, and then the Maguires were gone to tile Australia, Pat and Seamus and Sean Walsh to dig holes in Canada, Mona Murphy was selling her furniture in her front garden and Johnny Doyle at Doyle’s Auctioneers was like Young Blight in
Our Mutual Friend
, who, to create an impression of industry, spent his days filling his appointment book with made-up names, Mr Aggs, Baggs, Caggs and yes, let me see, at two sharp, Mr Daggs.

But I was unaware of this, unaware the country was moving into a time where only story would sustain it. Our house was a house in fairy tale, unaware it was in a kingdom of disenchantment. Maybe if you could take away the front walls, maybe if you could lift off the roof of any house and see the actual life in it, the parts that are not, never were, and never will be In Recession, the parts that are people trying to live and trying to do better and be better, maybe then every house would seem magical. In our house the magic was white-hot. My father was on fire. We knew it was not normal, but normal was never a Swain consideration. Everyone adapts inside their own story. That’s the world. In ours the rain fell and my father stayed up in the roof writing poems. The rain was a big part of it. In the coverless second-hand edition of
The Power and the Glory
(Book 1,113, Penguin Classics, London) that belonged once to an Isobel O’Dea, Ursuline Convent, Thurles, Graham Greene says the rain was like a curtain behind which almost anything can happen. And that’s right. But if you haven’t lived in it, if you haven’t looked out day after day into those pale veils, haven’t heard the constant whispering of the rain that you know cannot be voices, cannot be souls, sodden and summoning, then you cannot know the almost anything that can happen.

My father was filled with zeal. It is a word I have never used,
zeal
, because it sounds somehow inappropriate in ordinary life. But that’s what it was. That’s what the quality of animation and focus amounted to. And the zeal was this white fire coming and going on our stairs, was in the bluest eyes and the untucked white shirt and the running of hands over and back on the crown of his head, white fire.

So in a way it was no surprise when I was woken by smoke.

It was in my eyes burning, and when I turned on the light a thick grey cloud of it came across the ceiling. I couldn’t move. I watched it from my pillow with perfect stillness, the way I might have watched Santa or the Tooth Fairy or God if I had caught any of them unawares when I was meant to be sleeping. The smoke travelled curiously, by which I mean it was the curious one and came across the ceiling considering the cool dark glass of the skylight and then curled to come further down into the room. I snuggled down. I breathed into the pillow. I wasn’t sure if the smoke was there for me or would pass on and go out under the door. I wasn’t sure if I had already died and Purgatory was as promised, only with your own pyjamas.

Nobody else was moving. From the house there was not a sound. So the fire was a dreamt one until I was choking.

The smoke descended. It came into my throat and lodged and burned. It took the walls and the ceiling and the skylight and made blind and amorphous the room so that soon there was no room. There was only smoke. My eyes stung and I closed them tight and pulled up the duvet, surprised that I was to die under it and not in the river like my brother.

‘Aeney?’ I whispered. ‘
Aeney
?’

But Aeney didn’t answer. The smoke was taking its time. It was letting me think
In here I will be okay
while slowly in a smoke-way it devoured the room. It found the open drawers of my dresser, found my clothes, found my go-gos and my clips-jar and my hairbrush. For a moment I pictured the floor and the walls being gone and the roof too and my bed standing alone and surrounded by flames in this ardent sky. For a moment I was thinking levitation, that the smoke was a summons only and I was in the sky and soon I would hear the Reverend.

For one perfect moment I had no fear. I was already dead.

I eased the duvet down an inch, the better to hear Him.

But the smoke that was everywhere entered me and I heard only my own gasp and ratchet and cough. I pulled back the duvet, only it didn’t pull back. I got up out of the bed, but only in my mind. I felt my way through the smoke and ran out the door and called ‘Dad? Dad?’ and woke the house before the fire took us all, only I had passed out and discovered too late the difference between dreaming and dying.

In jump-cuts then: being borne down the stairs; my father’s arms; our house in smoke-disguise; flames in the mirror leaping; Nan and Mam in the front garden in their nightdresses;
O Ruthie
; Huck lying in the grass and whimpering; cars and tractors with headlights on; Jimmy Mac, Moira Mac with blankets; the hose, the buckets, the running; the voices.

Because it was beside the river, because it was damp and soggy and owned body and soul by the rain, our house did not burn down. It smouldered.

The cause of the fire was not Pentecostal, it was not zeal. It was more mundane. The chimney had caught. Fire travelled in through the old stonework, eventually feeding on the ancient upper timbers until it met the resistance of the dripping slates. Before the Kilrush fire brigade got there the fire was out, but because they had come they gave the insides a thorough blast. Water went up the chimney. It dripped from the rafters after. Stubborn black pools settled on the flags and on the shelves, in the teacups and the saucers and the glasses, on the seats of our leather armchairs and under the linoleum in the bathroom, the last of the pools remaining a week and only leaving when it was certain from then on our house would be irredeemably stained and for ever smell of fire and water.

Mam and Nan and I went to Mac’s. Three of their boys came out of one room so I could have it. I think I was still in shock. I was still uncertain about being saved. I lay in the bed that was warm and hollowed from McInerneys and for the umpteenth time tried to fathom why Swains were chosen for disaster.

Chapter 5

It would have been easier if we had been struck by lightning. It would have made a kind of sense, would have allowed those of a certain mind to take charcoal comfort in our being singled so. It would have been easier if I wrote
My father caught fire
. Or
The poems exploded
or
What was in him reached the point of combustion
.

Because I know that is what actually happened. I know it cannot have been just random.

We want the world to have a plot.

A chimney fire is not a plot.

Your brother drowning by chance is sad, but to tell it sheds no light and lends no meaning.

What happened is what happened. Things were consequent only in the sense that they followed. Although as they did, I knew we were becoming story. I knew ours was a family waiting for a teller. But where was the meaning?

For ten days Mam and Nan and I stayed at McInerney’s, and my father worked restoring the house. Faha is good in a crisis. He had help from everyone, but mostly Jimmy Mac and the Major who left aside whatever they normally did in order to carry outside the insides of our house, stack it in the haybarn, and cover it in grey canvas by night.

After a week I went back to school, and for a while added to my aura the grandeur of conflagration. I did not exploit it. A nimbus is ungainly in a classroom. In any case I had nausea, dizziness and floaters and feared a smell of singe.

Then one day, a day damp and indifferent as any other, a day without the slightest heralding, a day with nothing about it that said
This day
, I came into Mac’s and asked Mam how our house was coming.

‘It’s coming good,’ she said, ‘we’ll be home soon, Ruthie.’

Disbelieving, I went back to see.

My father was not in the house. The front and back doors were open. I want to say there was music playing. I want to say the tape deck was on and Mozart was playing. I want to have it blasting out, large and joyous and triumphant. I want the whole house to have been filled with music. But there was none, and I am not ready yet to go that far into story. The house was empty, the floors and all damp surfaces covered in
Clare Champions
so it seemed a place of words. I went out the back and around the haggard and up to the wall of the river meadow.

My father was down by the place where Aeney had drowned. He was standing perfectly still, Huck beside him.

‘Dad?’

He only turned the second time I called. And when he did his face fell into that soft creased smile, but his eyes were the saddest I had ever seen them.

‘Hey, Dad. Hi.’

Maybe we all have momentary foreknowledge, which although of little practical use seals our hearts just enough to bear what’s coming. I turned to the river and saw the pages. Through the rain-mist of my glasses I saw them as white-caps. They were small, already distant, and sailing west in the swiftness of the current. I didn’t believe they were pages and then knew they were the poems, and knew the answer he was going to give me when I asked why.

‘They were no good, Ruth.’

I didn’t say anything. A better Ruth would have gone after them, a Ruth not afraid of the river. I stood silently by. I watched the poems go, and felt a laceration, which was partly my own but partly too my father’s, for I knew what throwing them into the river had cost him. I knew Abraham and the Reverend were right there. I knew he had failed the Impossible Standard and believed at that moment that everything he had done had been a failure. He had lost his son to the river, and then almost all of us in a fire that he was not even aware had been moving through the house while he had continued writing a poem he now considered useless.

I think I knew then that a letter would come from London, that Mam would open it in the corner of Faha Post Office. That I would watch her read it and hear the sharp intake of her breath and then take the letter from her and read
Dear Mrs Swain, we thank you for your letter. We are sorry to say we have no record of ever receiving
History of the Rain.

We moved back in to our house. My father was hushed, like a man with ashes in his soul.

Eloquent in his own way, Father Tipp brought a set of Yeats left to him by a cousin in Tipperary who was unaware of his taste. These were the hardcover
Mythologies
,
Autobiographies
,
Essays & Explorations
and
Collected Poems
(Books 3,330, 3,331, 3,332 & 3,333, Macmillan, London), each of which I later discovered must to my father have had an air of peculiar prompting, because though they had gone elsewhere about the world on their inside flyleaves they bore stamps in green ink that said ‘Salisbury Library, Wiltshire’.

‘They need a finer mind than mine,’ the priest said.