Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

Like all in the congregation, he was still trying to answer the common question of everyday, whether this was something or nothing.

Keeping reality at bay is its own discipline.

way in Faha, so, between the doctor’s car and the church gate, those parishioners who wanted a word did not gather, but stood sentry in by the wall or on the fringe of conversations in which they played a non-speaking part. These were always women. Although invisible to Church and State, it was women who knitted the country together, and in Faha,

on Sunday morning after Mass, you could see the needles.

It is an inescapable truth that doctors cannot meet a man, woman or child who has onetime been their patient without an instinctual flick back through the records.

Patients who got well did not return to say so. So, although, by a one-sided accord, Doctor Troy would never bring it up when you met, he had a professional interest, wanted to remember what it was you suffered and see for himself if you were cured. Some patients of course could at

The men standing in front of the Morris stepped aside with the chastened look of ones who had briefly forgotten there was a reality beyond their talk.

What Ronnie herself wanted was to live in that place she considered beautiful, where she could be of use, and in the paradoxical paradise of a falling-down house be free to live inside her mind. That this was a richness she had come to understand first through reading novels meant that they had a special place in her life, a good one better than the company of ten people. Not that you could say that aloud or explain it to a sister whose thoughts never came in paragraphs.

From behind the counter, she got the horn-rimmed glasses that were only for when she needed to see.

made do with a telephony older than Graham Bell, nodding a single nod towards the cathedral and letting his look be a prayer without words.

Acknowledging that sleep is the prime goal every parent wishes for a newborn, he stepped back the way you might before a bomb,

Work was a habit invented to stop the mind from going elsewhere,

Shakespeare’s seven ages

So much of reality we make up to match the one in our minds,

‘Doctor,’ came from the far side of an old cow, and from there rose the white head of one of the Talty brothers. ‘Tim.’

Dr. Troy knows him by his real name now - no longer Tim-Tom.