This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

Doady blinked at him but didn’t smile. She may have been engaged in an act of the imagination, trying to picture the totems of the modern in a room with crooked floor and walls, a twelve-foot hearth with fire on the floor and sunlight coming down a stone chimney wide enough for Ganga to climb up and out the top one year winning a Stygian dare with Bat about flue masonry or passing through purgatory. Like others there, I think my grandmother may have been chastened by a feeling the machines were looking at her, and her life, with cold judgement. I couldn’t help thinking of that moment when Pip looks at his boots and realises how crude they are. My wrists stung. In defence of my grandparents I felt a flare of outrage and wanted Moylan and his machines gone.