This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

‘So, son, think clearly now.’ That son started spinning like a coin inside me. ‘In short, did you think you were an officer of the Electricity Supply Board when you stood in to assist with the erection of the electricity pole in Matthew Quirke’s field, or were you a bystander who chose of your own free will to interfere and thereby injure yourself?’ It’s hard not to despise officialdom in all forms. The retreat of human beings behind it diminishes the nature of what we are. I’ve never known a man or woman to be better for the wearing of the uniform. I’ve known them to be different, but not more human. I dwell a moment on this scene for two reasons. It’s one I’ve returned to several times in my life, not because it struck me at the time as an axle. Like most, I was not aware enough, or distant enough from the immediacy of things, to assess or see meaning. But it did eventually occur to me that that afternoon when Rushe appeared in my grandparents’ house he brought with him more than his person. In his manner and im-person, he brought the State, and in doing so, in his standing there, squat, rigid and bull-headed, in his use of a tone and language hitherto unknown inside the stone walls of that crooked house, an easier and more natural way of living was nearing its end. Because, it occurred to me, in Faha, and places like it, people had been making it up as they went along and making it up out of no rule book but the one they had been born with, that is an innate sense of ri...