This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

Pale and thin as a Communion wafer, he was addicted to the Wilkinson Sword and shaved to the blood vessels.

couldn’t escape the feeling that folded against my back were wings that had failed to open.

I sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you’ve been given. At moments you’re aware of it balanced on your tongue, but not what comes next. Something like that. I can now say that another version of that happens in old age, when it occurs to you that since you’ve lived this long you must have learned something, so you open your eyes before dawn and think: What is it that I’ve learned, what is it I want to say?

Ganga had the large ears that God puts on old men as evidence of the humour necessary for creation.

Saint Anthony has often found my glasses, wallet and keys. Why he keeps taking them in the first place, harder to say.

Father Tom came on his rounds and before he left was asked to bless it. Unwilling to concede that science had answers where religion had mysteries, he improvised a blessing that was a prayer to Gabriel the Archangel, the patron saint of messengers, who was now, he said, in charge of telephones.

There was nothing of the lamb in Mother Acquin. She could have been second choice to command the Allied Forces.

There were five other passengers, one of them a hen.

the metallic ghost stench of mackerel that disobeyed the laws of matter and like Jesus outlived itself by three days.

that way kept up to date with what was new in the world last week.

Consider this: when the electricity did finally come, it was discovered that the 100-watt bulb was too bright for Faha. The instant garishness was too shocking. Dust and cobwebs were discovered to have been thickening on every surface since the sixteenth century. Reality was appalling. It turned out Siney Dunne’s fine head of hair was a wig, not even close in colour to the scruff of his neck,

By the grace of new chapters, it was morning.

Things hitherto unseen were disporting themselves like sunbathers, the entire garden colourfully draped and looking as though partaking in a pagan custom, like the hanging of lights on trees.

the balm of generation.

tall wicker basket for walking sticks, canes and umbrellas that had neither walked nor umbrellaed in decades and a hat rack with the hats of ghosts.

Not knowing who Mrs O Dea was, we were sparing in our sympathy, but nodded a nod and the phrase on her way out hung there and the image of a doorway through which Mrs O Dea was to pass was carpentered into reality.

If fishing for compliment, she caught none.

write this now, having spent a lifetime trying to be, by which I mean the best version, a thing dreamed by those stricken with imagination. Not that you ever quite know what that is, still there he is, that better man, who remains always just ahead of you. I write this now, having come to realise it’s a lifelong pursuit, that once begun will not end this side of the graveyard.

She would draw on the cigarette and the smoke-coloured dashes of her eyebrows would float up and leave no doubt that from ashes to ashes was her destiny, and not such a bad one at that.

novelty a better sauce than chocolate,

If there was a cup to hand it might have flown. Doady made do with a dart of her eyes. Ganga felt it land and stick into the flat of his forehead.

Mother Acquin looked me in the eye. ‘Your mother in Heaven sent me,’ she said. ‘How is she doing?’ Christy asked.

aware that they were carriers of a tradition that was passing through them, but reserved and absent in vanity,

what seemed to me a fairly decent attempt to rid himself of money.

Not to be outdone in the battle for reality,

After a heavy tackle from a Boolean, he stopped, threw his hands in the air and cried out, ‘Elvish-mark’d, rooting hog!’ and ‘Bull’s pizzle!’ for those who preferred their commentary in longwave.

The referee, a martyr called Tuohy, who came by bicycle and hoped to depart that way,

Once standing, any decent story has a life of its own and can run whichever way it wants.

As with everything since the seven days of creation, work was behind schedule.

A story grows in the gaps where the facts fall short.

not unlike the totems of a tribe landed from elsewhere and claiming territories by lines invisible and arbitrary.

had a big florid face pumping out sweat, and when we passed he offered a greeting hitherto unknown in the history of Faha, ‘Savage heat.’

I regret the scorn. It’s an acid vice of the high-minded. It belonged to Butt.

Ronnie, the eldest of the Troy sisters, brought Christy and Ganga tea in fine china cups that were mismatched with their saucers, but what of it, and if the tea was Early Grey and not in their acquaintance, what of that too, said Ganga, wasn’t it kindness itself?

stalled time of the aftershock,

Doady withdrew to lose herself in Bond paper, Quink ink, and a single sheet of blotting paper that in blue hieroglyphics left hints to the future of what happened in the past.

(She herself had been unwell all her life, she’d say out loud, she could die at any moment; it was a gambit that worked until she was a hundred and four and God caught on.)

The skill of looking while not wanting to be seen looking is in Ovid’s manual of lovers, I suppose. I didn’t have it.

for the eventual three performances which were sold-out events that made a mockery of the physics of space and Father Tom’s ticket-only policy by the queue that swelled down Church Street and eventually, by an accordion magic, into the hall.

salt of derision.

Since the passing of his wife his eyes had the tide gone out in them, what was left were suds of feeling, but one of them was caught in his vision then

wonder of that would make a nice agony to be going on with.

It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.

We all feel we are originals, maybe at the moment when we are most universal.

many versions, all of life is a fall from grace. In this one, I’m hoping to go the other way. I’m working on life as a rise to grace, after a fall. After several falls, in fact.

The grey eyes narrowed and took in the sorry truth that despite decades of General Practice humanity continued to have an inexhaustible imagination for harming itself.

now released a brown air of boiled sock.

the first part a Western with Audie Murphy, who had the twin assets of an Irish name and an American jaw. The whole of the country was trapped in an incurable beguilement to cowboy pictures then, those who weren’t secretly cheering for the Apaches were cheering for Johnny Reb, unless John Wayne was in the picture, in which case all bets were off, because he had a farmer’s shoulders and your grandfather’s walk.

‘May be unforeseen expenses too,’ Purtill said, and then defiled the adjective by adding, ‘but there always is.’

There was no time to consider it, I was face-to-face with an America of teeth, coast-to-coast and sea-to-shining-sea, whose immediate effect was to make you keep your mouth closed on your own peninsular coastline.