Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

From those first days, the doctor soon learned the lesson that in all places far from the centre there is no standard way of being.

He undid the beads and took her hand. For a long time now, he had considered the hand one of the marvels of the human form, as individual and expressive as a face. Its twenty-seven bones were not only a feat of engineering, but, once fleshed, were in articulation sublime, the individual communication those bones capable of attested to by the fact that no two handshakes were the same. In Faha, the hands of men and women had their world in them. They were hands swollen, sored, scarred, hands formed by weather and work, hands crooked, curved, with the one finger that couldn’t be straightened or the one that couldn’t be bent, the finger that was part-tobacco, the one with the thorn embedded or nail turned amber, purple or black, from a puck or a blow unrecalled but memorialised, hands with fingers clubbed, contracted, with joints that cracked loud like sundered timber, yellow knobs for knuckles, hands that wore assorted lumps and ganglia, ones with skin roughened, toughened, from contact with earth and animals, from the rubbing scrubbing and scouring that all the world needed, hands that wore history and geography, which was nothing more or less than the signature of place and your time in it.

His own visits to the institution had buckled his spirit. He came away each time with the sense that God must have exhausted his love for people.

But in truth, there was no need, Jack Troy had not yet betrayed a patient’s confidence, and adhered to the adage that the inner health of each of us is the last privacy this side of death.

Changing your mind is one of the most difficult feats of the living.

It was not that the words weren’t there, it was that too many of them were.

Jude and Mary went without words. He was faster, but she was even. Their mother was right, it was not yet dawn; the dark, at first absolute as they left the yard, was layered, like cloths, thinning here, thickening there. Clouds came and went from attending their moon. When she showed, the waters of the river peaked with small lights, the stars like scales in a fisherman’s net. Then the clouds came again, and river and land alike were folded back into the dark, as if without light they did not exist, or in the night had been taken elsewhere, and only now, in the coming dawn, would they be forced to return.

So now, coming from his father’s forecast of good luck, as he ran across the field towards Naughton’s fort, Jude had an urge to seek help there. It was nonsense, a seafoid he would not have admitted or said aloud, but because he was on the rope-bridge between man and boy, the world had a sway in it and the answer to if he believed in spirits was both no and maybe.

How was she still awake, still standing, he wondered, and not for the first time considered that God’s first mistake was starting with a man.

Regret is the salt in the wounds of life, it keeps them stinging. And stops us making the same mistakes.

when the doctor walked the floorboards with her held against him, he was restored to his earlier self, when fatherhood was that thing of hope and prayer, and when to shield your child from harm was the sole propose of your breathing.

we are all young when no one can see us.

But storytellers skip the everyday, mistaking the ordinary for the dull, seizing on the sensational and leaving out the habitual that is in fact the fabric of life.

‘Because one day you or I may be in the same place that Tom is now, and at that time what we will be hoping, what we will be praying for is that there is still enough decency in the world to allow us every last chance to sleep in our own bed, until that is impossible and we need professional care. But until then, we will be hoping, we will be praying, there will be someone who still sees us as people not patients.

The old man’s eyes were beautiful in grief. They were a blue that could not be matched, both pale and deep, and in their tenderness of after-tears held the testimony of true love and could not be long looked at lest they break your heart.

Absence is its own presence; it occupies the same space.

Only through the birth of a child, he thought, is the lure of death conquered. It was a statement worthy of his father. And he recalled then the fantastical notion of the old man, who, in his last year, claimed that the purpose of ageing was to grow into your soul, the one you have been carrying all along.