As It Is in Heaven (8 page)

Stephen did not intend to go to the concert, not because he disapproved or wanted to distance himself from the notion of such
music in a place like west Clare, but because there would be people there. Then Moira Fitzgibbon pressed the tickets into
his hand. She was a small woman of thirty-three who had, since leaving the school, become a leading member of the Community
Development Association; she knew her mind, but not books, she told the other members on the night of the first meeting, asking
for all business to be read aloud and excusing herself by explaining without embarrassment that the education system had taught
her nothing and she was taking night classes in reading.

Stephen finished school and went home at four o’clock. The wind was blowing and the forecast was for worse. The darkness was
already falling into the sea. He sat in the front room and turned on the radio. It was four hours before the concert and he
had no intention of attending. With the music on the radio and the muffled company of the dark sea outside, the room was an
island in November and he was soon asleep. It was the way he finished every schoolday in winter, drowsing in the corner armchair
into a forgetfulness, like slipping through the back door of the world. His dreams were not fretful or anxious but a changing
tapestry of recollection and mild invention, which was in fact the history of his heart. His head lay tilted to one side,
and his white face looked painted in the deepening shadows. If he had died then, there in the armchair, the world would have
moved on without him with little pause or regret, like a winter army leaving the long-suffering wounded to fall behind in
the snow. He was a casualty of circumstances, and as he sat slumped in the chair, with the music playing and the sea breaking
in the wind outside, he had no idea that rescue was at hand.

Stephen dreamed he was a child on the stairs. He was standing on the small landing where the stairs turned, and his mother
was downstairs in the kitchen cooking. It was only when he looked down that he realized he had legs, for he seemed frozen
and was unable to move even when Anne Griffin called out his name and his sister, Mary, came running past him with her doll
Philomena. He heard his name being called again, and then saw the long, slim figure that was his mother appear at the bottom
of the stairs and say to him, “Stephen, are you coming down?” And still he could not move. The wallpaper with its printed
flowers in yellow and gold seemed to give way beneath his hand as he reached for something to grasp, and then there was music
playing. It sounded like a cello, like the simple cello music Mary made that swam around the house and was soft and easy,
and still he could not move his legs, even when his mother said again, “Stephen, are you coming down?” And he wanted to, wanted
with all the desperation only dreams can hold, as he saw his mother walk away into the kitchen and heard the music grow louder
and louder still, swaying the stairs, the hallway, the house itself, until he had to turn his head and let out a cry and open
his eyes to see the darkness of the room about him.

He lowered his head into his hands and felt the filmy sweat of his dream.

Then he heard the music.

It was coming from the radio. It was a Mozart quartet. Whether Stephen had heard a fragment of the music as he was sleeping
or whether he had dreamt it, the strange synchronicity of its playing to the tune and tempo of his dreaming was a manifestation
of something. He sat up in his armchair and felt strangely that the music was for him. Whatever makes the world move moved
the world then for Stephen Griffin. Whatever causes the drear of ordinariness to shake and be dazzled with brilliance, until
the illumination changes forever the shape of the thousand moments that follow, it dazzled then. Though Stephen did not quite
know it. He listened to the piece until it was over and then heard the announcer on the Clare station say it was the Interpreti
Veneziani, who were playing that evening in the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis.

One hour later he was driving past the night fields of Inagh in the ten-year-old yellow Ford that was the only car he had
ever owned. He drove with a kind of jerky, quick-slow motion, pressing on the accelerator and letting his foot off again at
each bend, until the car slowed and he pumped it again. It was a style of driving that sickened any passenger but had become
so habitual to Stephen that he hardly seemed to notice the way his foot pressed the pedal as if it belonged to a piano. Foot
on, foot off, the car seemed to row forward like a yellow gondola, pressing and easing against some invisible current that
was flowing ceaselessly against him in the darkness.

He drove on with music playing in his head. His face was a white moon pressed forward over the steering wheel. Wind buffeted
the car. Bits of hedgerow and black plastic flew through the beams of the headlights. The wipers smeared the spits of rain
each time they passed and made the car blind and seeing in turns. The night was breaking up, and Stephen had to grip the wheel
hard to keep the car in the centre of the narrow road. He drove until he saw something coming against him; it too motored
down the centre of the road, which fell away at a slope into the running murk of the ditch on both sides. When the two cars
were close enough to threaten crashing, they veered over and with a mad gaiety swished past each other before retaking the
centre once more. Sometimes the drivers managed frantic salutes as they flew past, desperately trying to keep from knocking
off the wing mirrors.

The journey was dark. The road wound wildly across bogs that stretched away into the fallen night and soaked in the rain like
parts of a vast sea creature. Soon the rain that was blowing across the front of the car was blowing directly at it. And still
Stephen pumped the car forward, lurching it towards the destiny he did not know was as simple and momentous as falling in
love. He was in a state. His thin lips were dry, but his face was wet. He kept thinking of the music, the music playing like
that, and the dreaming and the music becoming one. The car radio had never worked and neither had the fan; so he imagined
the music playing, and to its even tempo rubbed at the windscreen with his sleeve. Not that he could see. He was travelling
a wet blackness that might have been circling upon itself like a tail, but still he pressed on.

He was unlike himself with the fierceness of his intent. But with the mysterious illogic by which one instant of life becomes
charged with passion, he would not surrender or turn back in the rain for anything.

On the passenger seat beside him he had the tickets for the concert. He glanced over at them and in that moment made the car
veer sharply to the left. The wheel hit the top of the ditch and he thumped his head against the fabric of the ceiling a half
dozen times before he was able to bring the car skidding back into the slick centre of the road.

And across the other side, to crash nosedown into a ditch.

God.

  Sitting up in his bed and grinning as the fierce teeth of the Atlantic bit off the slates above him and flung them a hundred
yards into the fields, Moses Mooney told the cats not to worry. Thomas and Angela were curled in the warm place where his
knees bent in the blankets, and he stroked them blindly as he spoke. The black cat called Angela purred and turned her head
in against him. The important thing, he told them, was to realize that the future was indestructible. That no force could
arrest it, and that it proceeded with the same relentless and undiminished energy as the sea itself.

“You can’t drown if you are born to die in your bed,” he said with a giddy glee, raising the great tangle of his beard to
let out the laughter like birds. “Nothing stops the future. Oh no,” he said, “indeed no.”

The rain quickened like a pulse beating against the window. The night thrashed about with the growing storm, taking the salt
from the sea, until even in the thickly curtained bedrooms and kitchens of Miltown Malbay the air tasted of bitterness and
disappointment. It was such a night. The stars had withdrawn behind the many layers of the gusting clouds, and there was no
moon. Only wind and rain. Moses Mooney nodded his head and patted the cats to reassure them as the window in his bathroom
flew open and he felt the breath of the sea coming in about him. “Ha ha, smell that,” he said, and raised the eyebrows of
his blind eyes to catch what he knew was the scent of a storm in Brazil moments after he thought he had drowned for the third
time. Here it is, he thought. Here is the shaking up of the world.

“Go on. Go on,” he said.

Then the lights went out.

Moses Mooney knew it, though he could not see it. He heard them going off in the town and thought that the darkness of all
his neighbours was a symbolic blindness and a token of God’s sympathy for him. They were all to share his vision, he realized,
and lay back against the pillows, which were wet now like tears. It’s black for miles around, he told the cats with mixed
comfort and awe, catching a glimpse at the same instant of that elsewhere which he alone saw, where Stephen Griffin had crashed
the yellow car into the black bog water of the ditch on the road outside Inagh. And in that dreamlike and vivid moment of
clairvoyance, Moses Mooney saw the collapsed figure of Stephen Griffin, and he clapped his hands together in the bed, relishing
the wild improbability of all plots before reaching out and patting the cats in the darkness.

  Moira Fitzgibbon was late. She had already been to the Old Ground Hotel twice that day to make arrangements and meet the quartet
when they arrived from Limerick. She had learned a few phrases in Italian in honour of the visit and listened to the music
of Scarlatti and Vivaldi for two weeks. When she stood in the lobby of the hotel to meet the musicians, she felt her head
spinning. They shook her hand and stood, smiling with the strange complicity of those brought together over music. Any fear
or dread Moira had felt passed like a grey bird and left her feeling she herself had wings. When the musicians went to their
rooms, she drove back to Miltown Malbay to cook dinner for Tom and her two children, but afterwards watched through the back
window above the sink as clouds advanced in across the Atlantic. She washed the dishes and prayed. She prayed first that the
storm would not come; then, when the first black bullets started falling, prayed that it would not be a real storm, that it
would pass over.

By the time she had collected Aoife Taafe, the babysitter, and set the two girls in their pyjamas in the sitting room and
said good night to Tom, who was heading down to the pub, Moira Fitzgibbon was half an hour behind herself. A week earlier,
planning the evening, she was already back in Ennis by now and Tom was minding the children and it was not raining. Now she
hurried out of the house into the gale, and when she sat into the car she let out a cry at the ferocity of the world outside
and the mad bouffant of her hairstyle. Then, as her car was moving out into the street, the lights in Miltown Malbay went
out. She knew her children would be crying and Aoife running for the candles, but Moira Fitzgibbon drove away anyway, drove
out of the darkened town with the tight fervour of a pilgrim, and rocked herself slightly forward, as if her own momentum
might aid the car or the wind carry it onward like a sailboat.

A mile outside Miltown Malbay the darkness was thickly fallen. The fields were the fields of childhood nightmares, whose cows
and sheep blew off the edge of the world in hurricane and tornado. Wisps of barbed wire had come undone from the fenceposts
and whipped across the road in the wind. Plastic bags, drink cans, stuff blew from nowhere and danced. Then the rain thickened
and beat faster than the wipers. Why? Why is it like this? Moira Fitzgibbon asked. On the one night, the one night. Who would
go out on a night like this? There’d be nobody there. God, Why?

There was no answer from the heavens, but there were red smears on the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared the rain she
saw the red backlights of the crashed car in the ditch ahead of her.