One by One in the Darkness (7 page)

But David wasn’t as delighted by this as Helen had expected him to be. ‘What if he hates it? Seeing soldiers all over the place; and the barracks all fortified and stuff; that’s going to frighten the life out of him. And what if anything happens? I mean, what if a bomb goes off, or the car gets hijacked or something?’

‘Look, this was your idea in the first place; you can’t back out of it now,’ Helen said. ‘All you can do is plan it very carefully, and hope for the best.’

She offered to help him, so they got together and discussed at length the things it would be all right for Steve to see, and those from which he should absolutely be protected. Steve arrived the following Friday evening, and on Saturday morning Helen called round to David’s house to be introduced.

‘So how’s it going?’ Helen whispered when Steve was out of the room.

‘Great, so far. No problems,’ David whispered back. ‘He didn’t pay much heed to the checkpoint at the airport, and once we got on to the motorway, we just barrelled up to the city. My luck was in: you know what a marvellous evening it was yesterday. Belfast Lough was like glass, the sun was on the mountains, it couldn’t have been better. Steve couldn’t get over how beautiful it was, and that sort of made up for the city being so ugly when we got into it. He says it reminds him of Manchester, and fortunately, he likes Manchester. So far, so good. Let’s just hope the weather holds.’

And the weather did hold, throughout the weekend. David rang Helen at work on Monday to say everything had gone according to plan. He’d taken Steve down to the Mournes on Saturday, and they’d had lunch in Newcastle. In Belfast, he’d
put him in a snug at the Crown, with as much Guinness and as many oysters as he could manage.

‘And nothing he saw freaked him out?’

‘No, but he didn’t realise how hard I was working to make sure he did see precious little. We saw a few jeeps of soldiers in the city centre, but he expected that. The thing is, he expected far more, far worse. No, I think we can say it’s been an unqualified success.’

A few weeks later, David went over to London. On his return, he called to see Helen.

‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been the victim of my own success. Steve wants to come and live here.’

‘What should I say? Congratulations?’

‘No!’ he cried. ‘This isn’t what I wanted: not what I wanted at all. I just wanted him to feel good about coming over here from time to time,’

‘He obviously liked Northern Ireland much more than you expected.’

David looked at her as if she had lost her mind. ‘
Liked
, Helen? How could he have liked it? He didn’t even see it. Roscoffs, the Crown and the Mountains of Mourne: how can he decide on the strength of that?’

‘Well then,’ Helen said, after a moment’s thought, ‘you’re just going to have to get him to come back and have another look, aren’t you?’ And she smiled.

A few weeks later, Steve returned. This time, when David collected him at the airport, he didn’t drive into Belfast by the motorway, but went over the Divis mountain, through Turf Lodge and then down on to the Falls Road, pointing out the heavily fortified barracks and all the other things which, before, he would have been at pains to conceal. He parked outside the off-licence above which Helen had her office. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ he said, locking Steve in the car. ‘Don’t go away.’ An army foot patrol obligingly ambled past at that moment, and when David returned, Steve looked suitably anxious.

On the Saturday he took him back over to West Belfast, took him through the narrow web of streets, showed him the Republican murals on the gable walls around the lower Falls, then took him over to the Shankill and showed him the Loyalist murals.
The ‘Peace Line’, an ugly structure of corrugated iron and barbed wire, which separated the two communities, apparently shocked Steve more than anything else he saw. In Milltown Cemetery, David showed him the many IRA graves, and the Republican plot where Bobby Sands and some of the other hunger strikers were buried; and he pointed out how the gunman who attacked mourners at a funeral in 1987 would have been able to get into the lower part of the graveyard from the Loyalist ‘Village’. The whole time David and Steve were in the cemetery, an army helicopter hovered directly overhead, and there was drizzling rain.

‘It didn’t work,’ David told Helen a week later. ‘He’s still hellbent on coming to live here.’ Steve was far from foolish. He said he’d been shocked and depressed by much he had seen, but he’d expected this: he knew the first visit had been utterly unrepresentative. ‘Do you know what he said? “It strikes me that what’s going on here is almost as much a class thing as a sectarian issue.” Is that shrewd or what? And so he argued then that he wouldn’t be exposed to the conflict very much, because he’d be safe in the part of town where I live.’

‘So he hasn’t even moved here yet and already he’s trotting out the old line, “Where
I
live it’s safe, but in such and such a place you could get shot at any moment”?’

David shrugged. ‘Looks like it. He’s fed up with London too. I suspect that’s a really crucial point. He noticed the high standard of living here; saw how much money there is washing around in certain circles. He just couldn’t believe the prices of property: you can get something really nice here for an absolute fraction of what you’d have to pay for something comparable anywhere in England, let alone London. He says he’s sick of spending hours packed in the Tube going to his work every day; that London’s filthy and dangerous now. No, Steve’s decided that he wants out, and that he wants to come here.’

‘Look on the bright side then: maybe he’ll really like it here,’ Helen said, but David shook his head.

‘He’ll get bored,’ he said. ‘It’ll be all right for a while, and then he’ll begin to miss London, no matter what he says. Believe me, I know him well. And get this: the chain of clothes shops he works for is opening a branch in Belfast and they need a manager
to come over from England to set it up. Not surprisingly, people aren’t exactly falling over themselves to apply, so he’s in with a very good chance of getting the job.’

‘Is it that you really don’t want him to come over here?’

‘No, it’s just this: it won’t work out. I know it won’t work out.’

‘And have you ever considered going to live in London?’

He stared at her with incomprehension. ‘You are joking, aren’t you? What about my work? What if … what if they packed me off to something like … like the fucking Lib. Dem. Party conference? Can you
imagine
it? Christ!’

And so Steve moved to Belfast and David was wrong only about the length of time it would take for the novelty to wear off. It was a good six months before Steve started to grumble, longer again before he started to make trips back to London.

‘Is it anything in particular?’ Helen asked now, over dinner, and David shook his head.

‘It’s just what I expected. I don’t know what’s going to happen now,’ he said. ‘Or maybe I do, and that’s the problem.’ Helen poured more wine into his glass. He was twisting the edge of a wicker tablemat out of shape, and he looked so miserable that, for once, she let him away with it.

‘This is terrible,’ he said. ‘I thought the idea was that I came here to cheer you up. Tell you what, there’s a documentary on TV tonight for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of the Troubles. We’ll have a look at that; that’ll lift our hearts.’

And the thing was, that it did: they watched with something between grief and hilarity the old black-and-white footage of marches and riots. The young women wore miniskirts and had long, straight hair; all the older women wore headscarfs.

‘It all looks so old-fashioned, I just can’t believe it,’ Helen said. ‘You just don’t appreciate how things have changed until you see something like this,’

‘But you can see too how it started,’ David said. The people on the screen looked weary and put-upon: it would have been easy to believe that they were too cowed ever to be a threat, and they could imagine the shock it must have been when their patience broke.

‘What do you think is the biggest difference between now and then?’ Helen asked.

David replied unhesitatingly: ‘We are. The educated Catholic middle class. I don’t think anyone fully anticipated that, or thought through what it would mean, but it should have been easy to foresee.’

‘People like that,’ and she pointed at the screen, ‘wouldn’t have been able to believe that their children could come so far, so fast.’

‘Some of their children,’ he corrected her.

‘I still remember it from school, how the nuns used to din it into us all the time: “Work hard, girls, because you have more to give society than you can perhaps realise. We need our Catholic doctors and nurses and university lecturers; our Catholic lawyers and civil servants.” Did you get that line at your school?’

‘Of course we did. There was far more along those lines than there was suggestion that we might go on for the Church. And it did make a difference, just as the IRA campaign has made more of a difference to changes in attitudes than most people are prepared to admit.’

It made Helen feel sad to look at the images on the screen. It had been like that, yet not like that: the pictures told only part of the story. She remembered the austerity, even though she hadn’t been aware of it at the time, and she wondered how you ever got to the essence of things, of your time, your society, your self. It struck her as strange that out of her whole family, she, the only one whose life was supposedly dedicated to the administration of justice, was the only one who didn’t believe in it as a spiritual fact, who perhaps didn’t believe in it at all. Before the programme was over, she could no longer bear to watch it.

They put on a video, and finished the wine. David left around midnight, promising to give her a call towards the end of the week.

As Sally grew up, she continued to be frail and weak, and much more hesitant than either of her sisters. The nosebleeds from which she suffered continued on and off, but the doctors said they could do nothing for her. They also said they thought it was nothing serious, and that she would probably grow out of it in a year or two. Granny Kate took a great interest in this, as she did in everything concerning her grandchildren. She got Charlie to drive her and Sally down to the monastery in Portglenone, to ask the monks to pray for her. Kate and Helen were left out of this trip, much to their annoyance. Sally came back, looking frightened and proud, holding a prayer book Granny had bought for her at the monastery. She had medals, blue ones, for her sisters, and they added them to the already laden chains which they wore around their necks. Then, sometime later, Granny heard of someone in Ardboe who had a cure for nosebleeds, so she told Emily and Charlie that Sally ought to be taken there. This time, Helen and Kate clamoured to be taken along, and were surprised when their father and Granny had no objections.

Granny had managed to get hold of the phone number of the woman who had the cure, and had rung to make sure that she would be there that evening, because, she said, there was no point in driving all that distance on a fool’s errand. The woman also gave Granny exact instructions on how to reach her house; which turned out to be a nondescript little place with a tin roof, hidden at the end of a pot-holed lane. ‘You stay here now in the car, like good children,’ their daddy said to Helen and Kate, in a tone which they knew meant it was pointless to argue with him. He led Granny and Sally to the house, which swallowed them up.

The minutes trickled by like hours. They always did, when you were left to wait in the car. Kate fiddled with the door locks as she grumbled, ‘I bet there’s nothing wrong with Sally at all. I
bet she’s just discovered some way to make her nose bleed when it suits her, just to get attention. Have you ever noticed how it always happens when her class are doing sums, or when we’re all just ready to go out to Mass or at some time like that? It never happens in Uncle Brian’s house, when we’re all watching the film on television on a Sunday afternoon, or at home when Mammy’s made us French toast, and never, ever when we’re at Granny Kelly’s because Sally knows she’d go bananas if you started bleeding all over her sofa.’ They watched a few scraggy hens pick around miserably near the door of the house. For five minutes they didn’t speak, but sat in a silence as deep as the silence in a church. ‘I bet we’ve been here for over an hour by now,’ Kate said.

‘I wonder what the woman’s doing to Sally,’ Helen said, with relish. They knew vaguely about cures. Granny Kate’s brother was said to have had a cure for strains and sprains, which involved tying flax around the arm or leg that was hurt and then saying special prayers, but they’d heard about others that were more interesting, more dramatic: cures for sties involving thorns from a gooseberry bush, and a cure for shingles where two burning sticks from the fire were held in the form of a cross. Until Sally returned they passed the time inventing cures to which the woman might be submitting her, cures which involved cowpats, nettles, raw eggs and the like, laughing hysterically at the ideas they came up with.

Like the house in which she lived, the woman with the cure looked completely unremarkable: they saw her when Sally, Granny and their father were leaving, and she came to the door to see them off. Helen and Kate clamoured to know what they’d missed: ‘What did she do to you, what did she say?’

‘I’m not allowed to tell anybody,’ Sally said smugly, ‘or the cure won’t work.’

‘What did I tell you!’ Kate cried.

But the evening wasn’t as big a disappointment as it had looked like turning out to be, for their daddy stopped at a filling station to get petrol and when he went in to pay for it, he came out with crisps and chocolates crammed into a brown paper bag, which he handed into the back seat without the conditions or instructions their mother would have added to this gesture. He
stripped the cellophane off a packet of Senior Service, and lit a cigarette, narrowing his eyes in a way Helen loved. She promised herself that she would start smoking just as soon as she was old enough, but she knew better than to say this to anyone. She liked the smell of the spent match, as he waved the flame out.

Then Granny Kate suggested that they go to see the Old Cross at Ardboe, because it was only just down the road, and it would be a pity to have come all this way and not seen it, especially with it being such a fine night. ‘Have you ever been there before?’ she asked the children.

‘Aye, but we’d love to go again,’ Kate said.

And so instead of heading straight for home, they drove for a short while down narrow roads with high hedges. Their daddy parked the car right beside the high cross, which was enclosed by railings. The surface of the stone was weathered, so that some of the biblical scenes carved on the cross had become indistinct. Their daddy pointed out and named Adam and Eve, the Marriage at Cana, the Last Judgement. It didn’t matter that the pictures weren’t perfectly clear, Helen thought: it was enough in itself that the cross was there; to think of it having stood there for all those hundreds of years amazed her almost as much as it amazed and delighted her father. He loved history, and he was always talking about it. Uncle Brian talked about history a lot too, but she would never have said that he loved it. There was a difference, although she wouldn’t have known how to explain or define it. For her daddy, it was the fascination of thinking about people who had lived hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, where he lived now; there was something about the odd combination of closeness and distance that caught his imagination like nothing else. He’d taken them once to see the elk’s head that had been found near Toome years earlier: a grey bony thing that frightened the life out of them, with it’s massive antlers and hollow eye sockets. ‘Can you imagine a yoke like that wandering around here? Doesn’t that beat all?’ Helen would always remember the sob of excitement in his voice. ‘Isn’t the world a wonderful place!’ Now and then in the newspaper there’d be a piece about a farmer somewhere who’d found something on his land: a Viking sword, or a pot of coins, or even a dug-out canoe from the Iron Age, and he’d always draw their
attention to it, read it out to them. ‘Would you like that to be you?’ their mammy would say. ‘I’d die happy, so I would,’ he always replied.

They went through the gate into the graveyard which lay behind the cross. There was the ruin of a tiny church there, and the graveyard itself overlooked the wide expanse of the lough. It was a warm, sticky evening, and Granny Kate flapped her hand in front of her face to drive away the midges that hummed around her. ‘Hasn’t it got terrible heavy,’ she complained. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if we had thunder out of this.’ The enormous sky was full of dark-blue clouds, and although it was late in the evening now, there was still a strong, odd light which lit up the trees and the black-and-white cattle that were grazing in a field below the graveyard. When they heard voices, the cattle slowly raised their heads, then plodded across the field to see what was happening.

Charlie dug into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a handful of loose change. He gave the children a penny each, to hammer into the tree at the far side of the graveyard. From a distance it looked quite ordinary, perhaps a bit stunted, but when you got closer you could see that it’s trunk was almost more metal than wood, for people had hammered coins, pins and nails into it. Their daddy helped them each to find a place for them to hammer in their penny. It wasn’t difficult, for the wood of the tree was quite soft.

‘Don’t forget to make a wish,’ Granny said.

‘I’m going to wish that Sally’s nose doesn’t get better, so that we get plenty more nice outings like this,’ Kate said.

‘Why, you cheeky wee monkey,’ Granny said, but she was laughing, for all that she tried to hide it.

When they were in the car on the way home, Kate bribed Sally with Rolos to try and coax her into telling what the cure had been, while Helen listened in to what the grown-ups were talking about.

‘Brian asked me to be sure and ask you if you want to go with him to the march on Saturday,’ Granny said.

‘What march is that?’

‘The civil rights march that’s to be in Coalisland. I thought he told you about it already.’

‘Aye, now you mention it, I think he did say something about it to me a while back. Is Peter going?’

‘Are you joking me?’

Their daddy was quiet for a while, and then he said, ‘Ach, I don’t know. Do you think it’ll do any good?’

‘Well it won’t do any harm,’ Granny said. ‘I’d have thought you’d have had a bit more go in you, Charlie. I’d be there myself if I was younger than I am now. When you think of what people have to put up with in this country, well, we have to make a start somewhere in telling them that we’ve had enough of that.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘Tell Brian I’ll go with him.’

But when the time came he didn’t go, because one of the cattle fell sick. He was up all Friday night with it, and they had to call the vet twice. When Brian called to collect his brother on his way to Coalisland, Charlie just shook his head. ‘March? I’d fall in a pile I’m that done. But I’ll go with you another time, so I will.’

On the Sunday, when the sisters went over to Brian’s house their cousins Johnny and Declan were full of the march. ‘It was great. We all sat on the road and sang rebel songs. There was nothing the police could do to stop us. Get your daddy to bring you along the next time,’

The summer ended, school started again, and Sally’s nosebleeds began once more. Helen and Kate became embarrassed at being called out of class; dreaded the moment when some wee girl would come into the room and say, ‘Please, Miss, Sally Quinn’s not well again, and she needs one of her big sisters.’

‘And so then you have to go to her class and she’s lying on a rug in the bookstore, like an eejit,’ Helen told their mother.

‘I can’t help it,’ Sally wailed.

‘She can, too,’ Kate said, when their mother decided to keep Sally at home after her nose bled on a Monday and then again on the Tuesday. For the rest of that week, while Helen and Kate were being hurried through their breakfast, and packed off to school with a few cheese sandwiches, Sally would creep into her parents’ warm, empty bed, where she snoozed and drowsed until the middle of the day. Then she got up and after lunch, would spend the rest of the afternoon playing with the kittens in the back yard, helping her mother to make pastry, or just doing some colouring in at the kitchen table. Her nose didn’t
bleed once during these days, and she was fine over the weekend, but when Helen and Kate were getting up for school on Monday morning, they could hear Sally’s thin whine: ‘I’m not well, Mammy.’

Still in her pyjamas, Kate stormed into the other room. ‘If she’s not going, Helen and me are staying at home too, because it’s not fair.’ Their mother stood up for Sally, but then their daddy weighed in, and said that all three of them would be going to school, and that there would be no more nonsense about it. Sally grizzled a bit, but she and her mammy knew that because he hardly ever got involved in matters like this, when he did, there was no turning him. Kate grinned as the three of them got into the car, including Sally with her satchel and her sandwiches. ‘And if you don’t feel well, don’t be sending for Helen or for me, because we won’t come.’

Sally was fine that day, and for weeks afterwards was, as Uncle Peter said, ‘as healthy as a kipper’.

There was another march announced, this time it was to be in Deny At home now, all the talk was about civil rights, and their father said that he wouldn’t miss this march, ‘no matter if every beast I have keels over the night before it’. The Apprentice Boys had called a march for the same day when the civil rights march was announced, and so they both had been declared illegal, which of course made it more important for everybody to be there. The children clamoured to be taken along too, but neither of their parents would hear of it.

‘You’re too small,’ their father insisted. ‘If there was any trouble and you got hurt, even the least little bit, even if you just got very badly frightened, I’d never forgive myself for it.’

‘But Declan and Johnny are going.’

‘Aye, that’s as may be, but Una isn’t going.’ This didn’t explain or excuse anything for Helen and Kate, it just made it seem worse.

‘I can’t wait until I’m grown up,’ Helen said. ‘I’m going to do exactly as I please!’

To make it up to them, Granny said she would take them out for the day: ‘We’ll go to the Holy Well.’

‘How will we get there?’

‘We’ll walk.’

‘But it’s miles away! We’ll never walk that!’

Granny laughed. ‘Of course you will, you only think that it’s far. Sure if you went on the march, you’d have to walk at least that, maybe far further.’

Kate looked doubtful: she thought she could see Granny smiling. ‘I tell you what, I’ll ask Peter to come and collect us, so you won’t have to walk the whole way back home afterwards.’

The walk turned out to be more enjoyable than they had expected, and they dawdled along the roads, which rose and fell and twisted and turned; roads lined with hedges in their autumn colours, and bright with berries. The long thick grass in the ditches was wet when they stepped into it, to avoid the cars and tractors which occasionally passed them by. The people in the vehicles lifted their hands to the family, whether they knew them or not, and Granny Kate greeted them in return. A tractor passed them, driven by a young man with thick black hair.

‘That’s Willy Larkin’s big brother, Tony,’ Kate said. ‘Willy says somebody saw a Mystery Man in the woods behind the school last week. He says he had a big dark coat on him, and a black hat, but where his face should have been, there was only a blank.’

‘And did Willy himself see this man?’ Granny asked, as Sally gripped her hand more tightly.

‘No, somebody told him about it, and then he told me.’