As It Is in Heaven by Niall Williams Page A

waterside. The women clapped their hands
     beneath their chins and felt their own air fanning them back from dizziness. Councillor O’Rourke, who had slipped out at the
     beginning of the concert to attend to mobile-phone calls, now stepped back in the door on the wave of applause. He smiled,
     raised his head to show his throat, and held up his hands to applaud so that Moira Fitzgibbon could see him clearly.
    The possibility of an encore vanished in the wave of people spilling forward towards the small stage. Stephen did not move;
     he stood applauding and lost sight of the musicians as the crowd swelled about them. He angled his head to see the woman better,
     but she had stepped off the podium and was lost to him amidst the jostle of the Miltown Malbay people. His mouth was dry,
     his eyes burned. In his chest his lungs seemed to have collapsed. He could not breathe. He felt as if he had been struck in
     the throat. There was a moment when he thought he would fall down; then he looked up and blinked at the chandeliers and was
     able to move quickly from the room.
    Once he made the doorway, he could move faster, and took the red carpeted stairs three at a time, hurrying down into the lobby
     like a man escaping a fire.
    The cool dark dampness of the evening after rain was like a blanket thrown over him. Now he could breathe. He walked out of
     the grounds of the hotel and past the pulling-away cars and the dazzling lights of the homeward bound. But he did not want
     to go home, he wanted to walk, to keep moving until he could travel all the way back into the feeling of the concert. He walked
     around the shut shops of Ennis and heard the music of Venice in his mind. Stephen Griffin walked, mute, beneath the moonless
     sky. It was two o’clock in the morning and he was six miles out on the Inagh road. He had been walking for four hours and
     not once lost sight of the face of Gabriella Castoldi.

16
      Stephen did not go home that night. He walked as far as his car and sat inside it, certain at first that the sensation he
     felt when he got in was that of sinking. Rain had softened the world; the scar where the car had ploughed into the ground
     was opened like wet lips. Stephen closed his eyes and expected slow decline into the sucking soft mouth of the bog. Soundlessly,
     the lemon car eased to the right; he felt the gradual collapse and tender sighing like fire sizzling into water. Then it stopped
     and the car sat there.
    It was still sitting there at eight o’clock the following morning, when Patrick Mulvihill passed in his tractor, supposing
     it to be the abandoned remains of some young lad’s drunken evening, until he saw the figure of the teacher sitting behind
     the steering wheel.
    It took Mulvihill six minutes to tow the car from the bog. It was Stephen’s second rescue.
    “There is no such thing as stillness,” he said to Mulvihill, when the car had been pulled onto the road and the farmer had
     come back to unhitch the rope. He was a short man in a thick coat, his grey face was a balled newspaper. His facial expressions
     were so crumpled it was impossible to separate them more than: Wrinkled, or Very Wrinkled. He gave Stephen Very Wrinkled,
     and amidst the lost, closed-in folds of his red face his green eyes glinted.
    “She’s all right,” he said, smacking the bonnet of the yellow car and ignoring the driver. “You took her too fast round that
     bend on the greasy road. Made terrible rain last night.”
    “I’ve been sitting here all night wondering what to do,” Stephen said.
    “The rain’s gone, but the road’s still greasy.”
    “How do you know what to do? God, I don’t. I didn’t think that … I never expected. It’s not what you … well, maybe for some.
     But I’m not that kind of man. I just …”
    “You don’t notice it in a tractor, with the heaviness.”
    “I want to see her again,” Stephen said.
    “But in a light car like that. She could slide right off easy