Boy in the World

Boy in the World
Niall Williams

A beautiful and moving novel about a young boy’s journey from childhood to adulthood from the bestselling author of Four Letters of LoveNiall Williams draws us into life in a small village in Ireland where a boy is growing up and making his first tentative steps to becoming a man. Questioning everything in an attempt to make sense of the world he is discovering through books, he is on the cusp of an understanding of what it is to be a man. But, when the Master, his caring old guardian, gives him a letter from his long-dead mother, his world comes crashing down.Learning for the first time that his father is not dead, as he had been led to believe, the boy must relearn everything he thought he knew. He sets out to find his father, piecing together the information he can glean from his mother's letter: he is a journalist for the BBC, he has lived in London, and he is a Muslim.The boy sets out to find his father. Arriving in London, disorientated and alone, he finds himself at the centre of a terrorist attack as the BBC is bombed and hundreds are killed and injured. Taken under the caring wing of Sister Bridget, a nun also caught up in the chaos, he refuses to allow this catastrophe to move him from his goal; he must find his father.This is the heart-warming tale of a young boy trying to find his way in a changing world, a world where no-one is safe and where terrorists seek to destroy all that civilisation holds dear.

NIALL WILLIAMS

Boy in the World

For my son, Joseph

Contents

Title Page (#ubd7549fd-d5e4-5eb2-85df-fcc9bffc67bc)Dedication (#u41057327-efe4-5721-b644-4a54c5baa813)Chapter One (#u0296e7c3-9d76-5167-9eff-ecd6cd75275a)Chapter Two (#ued69db1a-3240-5374-9c43-1c7e4ee6003c)Chapter Three (#ubb4de7c5-102c-5ddc-a27e-1fdb1a0fad39)Chapter Four (#u2c676245-5ebd-5f9c-87a7-7a6fc0869458)Chapter Five (#ub73adc5c-341c-5200-9cff-5aea20a9ed69)Chapter Six (#u37d48165-d3e9-51b3-8fce-20572f414893)Chapter Seven (#u0203638e-2aaf-541e-b31c-9ec9752edeaf)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

ONE (#uf6cc6e1c-df10-5bfe-87a9-75967c625fc7)

Iamu.

Strange sound. African sound.

Three syllables. Iamu.

In the brief stillness of morning the boy stood and studied himself in the mirror. Beneath a lank fringe of black hair his brown eyes examined their reflection, as if for secrets. The pale brown of his skin, the prominent angle where his cheek seemed now to emerge more clearly, the darkness of his eyebrows, the squat saddle of his nose, these things he considered. The secret the boy sought was who he was to become. With the fingers of his two hands he touched the skin about his jaw to see if there was sign yet of any beard.

Will I be bearded?

Maybe, maybe that roughening was something starting. He turned his head this way and that to look at himself sidelong.

‘I am you,’ he said aloud, turning back to face the mirror, allowing himself to pose with pretend confidence. But almost at once the boy in the reflection lowered his eyes and the confidence crumbled like a mask made of flour.

‘Are you all right in there?’ From just outside the bathroom door a man’s voice called hesitantly. And with even greater hesitation, as though the subject were one of tremendous delicacy, he enquired, ‘Are they fitting?’

‘Yes,’ the boy said. ‘Yes, they’re fine.’ But in fact the new shirt and jacket and trousers bought for his Confirmation that morning were still hanging off the towel rail.

‘Grand, grand. I’m not rushing you,’ said the man. ‘There’s plenty of time. But if anything needs adjusting. Oh, and I will do your tie, don’t worry about that, all right?’

‘Yes,’ said the boy, ‘fine, thanks.’ He could feel the pale grey eyes outside watching the door.

‘So, whenever you’re ready.’

The old man moved away. He himself was already changed into a white shirt and blue suit trousers, and the tight black shoes he wore only for weddings and funerals squeaked off into the kitchen. Through the house now he had last-minute jobs of preparation, counting chairs for guests later, arranging glasses and bottles, gathering stray items of clothing that he and the boy allowed to lie around the house in the ordinary course of their living.

In the bathroom the boy was standing with his two hands pressing down on either side of the sink, looking at himself. It was not because he was vain, not because he often looked at himself in this way, or because he thought himself in any way worth looking at. Rather it was the very opposite, because to himself it seemed he had until that very morning been almost invisible. He had not really thought about what he looked like, or whom he looked like, or what changes were happening in the map of his face. Nor had he thought about what lay ahead for him. Not really. But in the week at school just finished, with the preparations at their most intense, this was the thing the Master had emphasized.

‘You are not boys and girls any longer,’ he had said. He had a voice more aged than himself, sounds frayed and whispery from the smoking of his youth and the whiskey of his middle life. But still he could be firm. He knew a way of telling things that made the words seem important so that even those who paid no attention to spellings or History or Maths paid attention now.

‘You came into this school as boys and girls, but in a week you will be gone.’

There was a broken line of grins along the back row.

‘Yes. When you see me again, in a short time, in a very short time, you will think to yourselves: how old the Master has become. You will think, how very grey is his little bit of hair, how crooked and stooped he seems.’ Here the Master had stooped crookedly and peered out half-blind and the class had laughed. ‘He who once was so large and full of knowledge to me, so wise,’ he continued, ‘will be no more the Master but just an old man. Soon, very soon; in fact for some,’ and here he had looked directly at the boy, ‘this has begun to happen already; you will meet me and think how little that man knows, because you will quickly know so much more than me. And while you will become even smarter,’ again he singled out the boy, ‘I will become to you more foolish.’

The boy had thought to make some response to this, to deny it, but was too timid to speak out loud in front of the class.

The Master paused and angled himself against the seat of his stool, his two hands thrust deep in the pockets of his tweed jacket, his soft grey eyes travelling over the pupils one by one. ‘But this is no reason for sadness,’ he said. ‘No, no. I will not be sad. And you must not be sad. This is a cause for celebration, because it means this; it means the world is getting smarter all the time. And you will be the evidence of that, you will be the ones to save the world from the mess your parents have made of it.’

He allowed this phrase to settle over them, and it was to each of them as if these words were new clothes that they found themselves trying for the first time. Some were uncomfortable, some delighted and proud. The boy was not so sure. He looked at the large crinkled map of the world on the wall behind the Master. He had stared up at it for years in that classroom and knew his way from one country to the next with his eyes closed. But the world was a big place, and the idea of he and his classmates saving it from anything was hard to imagine. He looked along the wall at the posters they had made in preparation for the Confirmation, pictures of the Apostles with yellow crayoned flames touching their foreheads, and he was wondering if the flames burned and hurt when the Master continued.

‘Here, I will remain. And I will know that I have done a very good thing when you are gone from this school. I will have done what I can to teach you what I know. And we will have shared that important time, perhaps that most important time together. But now, you have arrived at a threshold, a doorway. When you leave in a week’s time, you will be leaving something important. Do you know what it is?’

Some hands were raised. Some guesses given: their school, their classroom, their desks with the names written underneath. But each guess the Master patiently dismissed.

‘No, no,’ he said at last, ‘the thing you will be leaving behind is your childhood.’

There had fallen a silence then, as if a gap opened in the air between the Master and the pupils.

‘Now the question you have to begin to ask yourselves is this: what kind of man or woman am I going to become?’

Again the Master allowed his question to hang in the air before them. Then, when he was sure it had begun to play in their minds, he added in a lighter tone, ‘Because of course to some passing by outside this might seem to be only a small country schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere in the west of Ireland. It might seem a quaint old place with a funny old schoolmaster …’

‘Crooked and stooped,’ said Martin Collins from the back row.

‘Yes, crooked and stooped, in a place where nothing important could ever happen. Our roof is falling in. Our blackboard is grey from a hundred years of white chalk. From the skills of our footballers, some of our windows are cracked.’ At this there was murmuring and laughter. ‘But,’ continued the Master, ‘despite appearances, here something remarkable has happened. Here you have taken your first steps in becoming yourselves, in becoming who you are, and who you will be in the world.’

The Master had leaned back on the stool again and considered the faces gazing up at him. Some of the boys had begun to forget already the words he had just spoken and were restless for the bell when they could run out of the schoolyard for the last time. But not the boy. The boy thought about things deeply. This was his nature. Although he had once tried to join in and play games in the schoolyard he was not good at sports, and soon enough discovered both teams preferred it when he did not offer himself to be picked. Above all other things he enjoyed reading books. He was curious about everything in the world and had read through the small school library years before. He had read all the editions of the books of Charles Dickens there, of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jules Verne. He had read the translations of great epic tales from Greece, of the stories of Ulysses and Odysseus, and the entire collection of slim books about the countries of the world. Although these were at least forty years out of date, some with their covers ripped off and pages marked and torn, from them he had tasted something of the places there were out there beyond the classroom. He was a boy who was interested in the how and why of all things, and whose understanding was far greater than others of his age. And this, rather than bringing him closer to adults or his contemporaries, had in fact created a distance between him and everyone else. In a row of lights strung out along a line he was a bulb too bright.

Knowing this, and considering how in the world of childhood he had had such difficulty, the boy had sat at his desk and for a moment let his eyes meet those of the Master. Who am I to become? In the grown-up world, who am I to be? Soundlessly he asked, and felt for the first time the burden of this question in his heart.

Now, in the bathroom before the mirror, he thought of all this again. He leaned against the sides of the sink and might have stayed longer if there hadn’t been a tapping on the door.

‘Nearly ready?’

‘Yes,’ he called back, ‘just coming.’

Quickly then, he put on the new grey trousers and the white shirt that was stiff about the collar. When he squeezed closed the top button the shirt was still loose around his neck. In the mirror he looked ridiculous, he thought. He took the comb and drew a parting in his black hair and smoothed the line, but after an instant shook his head until the hair had returned to its usual untidiness and then he opened the door.

‘Here you are.’ A small man past sixty with a kindly face crinkled like a favoured newspaper stood with the boy’s shoes freshly polished in his hand. His eyes did not move from the boy’s. They were the pale grey of a thumb smudged with newsprint. Although he was still the Master, he did not look like the Master now. Out of the schoolroom and his faithful old tweed jacket and in the blue suit and white shirt, he looked almost a different person altogether. He was shaven very cleanly. There were tiny red nicks cut in his throat and one high on his cheek. The unruly tuft of his hair had been flattened down with water and was momentarily under control.

‘Thanks,’ said the boy.

‘You’re more than welcome. You look … well, fine. Yes, absolutely fine.’

The boy took the shoes and sat in the kitchen to put them on while the Master lifted two kites that were lying by the couch and carried them out to the back hall. ‘Both of these are fine again,’ he said. ‘Maybe this evening, after the lot are gone, we might get a bit of breeze, take them out.’

‘Yes,’ the boy called after him. ‘Thanks for fixing them.’

‘No trouble. May evening, perfect for them.’

It was one of the things the Master and the boy liked best, to be standing below connected to the fluttering kite flying above.