Excerpt from Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Open, Heaven

Time runs faster backwards. The years – long, arduous, and uncertain when taken one by one – unspool quickly, turning liquid, so one summer becomes a shimmering light that, almost as soon as it appears in the mind, is subsumed into a dark winter, a relapse of blackness that flashes to reveal a face, a fireside, a snow- encrusted garden. And then the garden sends its snow upwards, into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves, and blooms again in reverse. The faces smile at me, back there, at the far end of the reel; they are younger, more innocent, lighter. If, now that I am in my adulthood, time seems like a silted riverbed I cannot wade through, I find, more often than before, that I can spin it backwards, can turn it into a flow of waters – warmer, sweeter, washing the years away, carrying me with them.

And if one day, perhaps, sitting at my desk, puzzling over a photograph or some snatch of memory, I start to float down that river, I might go past the meadows in season, hear laughter coming like a clear bell from somewhere, someone, or maybe a sharp voice raised against me. There are intervals of light and dark overhead, like the sun breaking through willows, and it always brings me back here: one year, when I am sixteen years old. And I see, in this dream, or this imagined reversal, a family standing there, and sometimes, on the other bank of the river, a lone boy, who might nod to me in recognition, or who might just as easily turn his back and walk across the fields into the sunrise, into the morning, and be gone.

Invariably, I see those years as a sort of morning – the pink sun lifting over the village, mist burning off the canal, off the fields, which are damp with dew; the sound of birds waking with song, the clean streets empty of people, who are only just beginning to rouse, the sun's light just starting to slant through the bedroom windows and across their closed eyes. Of course, I am here now – in a future of sorts – and I find that I cast all of those images with my shadow, watching them replay, skipping over a day, or a week, or a month, to find the moment again when the scene joins up, becomes significant – which is to say, it begins to mean something to me now.

Sometimes, the years spin like this all of a sudden. I might be walking along a street and notice a smell, or see a stranger and mistake them for someone else, and then I am back there, in the village. Or else I will find myself in a long chair, in an office, spinning time back on purpose, searching for something, like a detective going over and over the gathered evidence in search of some missed clue. Often, back there, when the spinning stops and I find my family gathered at the dining table, or my mother in the garden, sunbathing, or Eddie knocking at my bedroom door, calling my name, I might ask myself if these people are alive, and what they are thinking. Of course, they think they are alive. And they cannot tell that I am here, in the future, watching them. They do not know me now – years beyond them – still waiting for one of them to sense my presence in the room, or in the garden, or beside the bed, and to turn their gaze on to me and smile.

Not long ago, I was at home, alone, and I was searching online for images of the village where I had been born. I had been doing this more often, recently: hoping to find the answer to something unfinished, some thread of my life that was unravelling, all these years later. I was clicking through pages and pages of photographs, items of the local news, and this time I saw the lot on an auctioneer's website and, before I knew what I was doing, I was dialling the agent's number. Late 18th century farmhouse, four bedrooms. Including outbuildings and six acres of land. Green Lane, Thornmere. The words were like a talisman: just seeing them, I was back there in those deep lanes, the towpath by the canal, the smell of the hawthorn blossom, and that potholed path down to the old farm where I had used to wait, decades ago, for him.