The Blackwater Lightship (14 page)

'We're not sleeping here, sure we're not?'

'No, we're driving back later.'

The boys stood there, downcast and subdued.

'Manus, I'll give you a piggy-back if you come down now,' Hugh said.

'No, I want to sit on your shoulders.'

'All right.'

'And I'm not swimming if it's cold,' Manus said.

Cathal shook his head at Helen, signalling that he did not want to go down the cliff.

'You can come up with me,' she said, 'and sit in the car and read your comic'

'Can I sit at the steering wheel?' Manus asked.

'When you come back,' she said.

Helen and her grandmother waited for her mother to arrive while Cathal sat in the car reading his comic. When Hugh and Manus came back and her mother still had not arrived, she took the cold lunch she had brought from the car into the kitchen and they all sat around the table. Her grandmother had made soup and wanted to cook pork chops, but Helen insisted that they eat only the food she had brought. As she moved from the table to the dresser, she had a sudden memory of Declan being handed one of those willow-patterned plates with onions and carrots on it which he "would not eat. She almost wished now that her grandmother would produce some items that the boys did not eat — cheese, for example, or cabbage — to see their reaction. They would have responded with contempt, they would have refused even to look at the food.

They ate lunch and drank tea afterwards, all the time listening out for Lily's car. They talked about neighbours in Cush, Hugh cut a piece of cardboard for the broken window upstairs, Cathal read his comic and Manus tried to entice the cats from their lair. Helen made sure that there was never silence.

When she brought Cathal to the toilet, he asked if he could look around the house, and she told him he could. Downstairs, when she said to him that she and Declan had once slept in these rooms, he became interested. But when he asked her why they had slept here and not in their own house, she became vague. Cathal, however, persisted, and she told him that her father had died.

'And was your daddy old?' he asked.

'No, Cathal, he was young,' she said.

'And why did he die then?'

'That happens sometimes.'

'Is your mammy old?'

'She's older than me, but she's younger than Granny.'

'And she's not dead?'

'No, we're going to meet her.'

He pondered on what she had said, but he did not seem satisfied.

'Was Declan like Manus when he was small?'

'He was very like Manus,' Helen said.

'What does the image of your father mean?'

'It means you look like him.'

'But he's dead.'

'When he was alive.'

'Did they take photographs of him?'

Her mother did not arrive and the afternoon waned. Finally, they decided to leave. Hugh and Cathal and Manus went to the car.

'I'm nicely hoped up with you all,' Helen's grandmother said to her. 'That Lily is a law on to herself.'

'Tell her we came anyway,' Helen said.

'I'll clean her clock,' her grandmother said and turned towards the dresser, as if to look for something.

Now, for the first time there was silence. Her grandmother did not turn until Helen began to speak.

'We all have a lot to put up with, Helen,' her grandmother said, interrupting her.

Helen said nothing.

'What were you going to say?' her grandmother asked.

'I was going to thank you for the day, and say that you should come up to Dublin and see us.'

Her grandmother looked at her.

'After all those years I suppose it's nice to hear you saying that,' she said. Her tone was bitter, almost angry.

Helen smiled and turned and walked out of the house. In the car, as Hugh started the engine, she rolled down the window and they all waved at her grandmother and Hugh honked the horn as they set off for Dublin.

She waited until later that night, when she had drunk most of a bottle of red wine, to tell Hugh what her grandmother had said.

'We won't go near them for a good while so,' he said.

Now she was back under the same roof with them. She stood up from the bed and studied herself in the old mirror. She could see how tired her eyes looked. She sighed and opened the door and went back out to join her mother and her brother and his friend in their grandmother's house.

•          •          •

Later, as she sat in the kitchen, they heard another car in the lane. Mrs Devereux looked out through the curtains. 'Oh, here's another of them now,' she said.

'Who, Granny?' Helen asked.

'Look yourself,' she said.

Helen saw that it was Paul. He was carrying a suitcase. They watched him talking to Larry.

'Someone else deal with him,' her grandmother said.

Helen went to the door and brought Paul, followed by Larry, into the kitchen. She introduced him to her grandmother, who smiled at him warmly.

'It took me a bit longer than I thought,' he said. 'It's very hard to find this place. I had to ask at nearly every house.'

'Oh God Almighty, I'll have them all on top of me now,' her grandmother said. 'I'll have them in droves.'

'What do you mean, Granny?' Helen asked.

'The neighbours', she said, 'will smell the news.'

'How is he?' Paul asked.

'He's lying down,' Helen said.

'And he hasn't eaten since he came,' her grandmother said.

'No, his appetite can come and go,' Paul said. 'I brought him some clean clothes and there are drugs he needs and Complan.'

'Did you bring the Xanax?' Larry asked.

'I brought a packet of it. I used the old prescription.'

'What's Xanax?' Helen asked.

'It cheers him up a bit,' Larry said.

'Cheers him up,' her grandmother repeated. 'Maybe we should all have it.'

Helen's mother came into the room and examined them all disapprovingly.

'He wants a glass of milk and he shouldn't be left alone like that again, and he wants to know if his friends can stay in the spare room upstairs.'

'This new fellow'll have to bring his car in from the lane first, or it'll roll over the cliff,' her grandmother said.

'Paul,' Helen said. 'His name is Paul.'

'We'll have to get sheets and blankets for them,' her grandmother said. 'Are there any more coming?'

'A line of cars from Dublin,' Helen said.

'We should put a sign up saying we're open for business,' her grandmother said.

•          •          •

In the late afternoon when Larry and Paul were in the bedroom with Declan, and Helen was in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, voices could be heard, and then a knock came at the kitchen door.

'Come in,' Helen's grandmother said.

Two middle-aged women, Madge and Essie Kehoe, clearly sisters by their looks and the way they dressed, entered the room and managed to take in everything even before they spoke.

'Dora, we were just passing and we saw all the cars and we were wondering were you all right.'

Helen watched her grandmother moving towards the kitchen door and closing it behind her two visitors. Tin as right as rain,' she said.

'You have plenty of visitors, Dora?' Madge asked.

'Just down for the day, Helen and her friends.'

'Her husband isn't down?'

'No, no, he's in Donegal.'

'And the boys?'

'In Donegal too.'

'Donegal,' Madge repeated.

Helen left the room and told her brother and his friends not to make a sound. She went upstairs and flushed the toilet noisily.

'We read all about you on the paper nearly every week, Lily,' Essie was saying as Helen came back into the room.

'Oh, Lily's a big shot now,' Madge said to nobody in particular. 'She's in the IDA.'

'Is the red car your car?' Essie asked Helen.

'That's right,' Helen said.

'But that's the car that stopped and asked us directions,' Madge said.

'No, the white car is Helen's,' Lily said firmly.

'And not the red car?'

'No.'

'Whose is the red car then?'

'They're friends of mine, they teach in my school, and they're staying in Curracloe. They've gone for a walk,' Helen said.

'Well, I hope it doesn't rain,' Madge said. They drank tea and looked around them. 'And will you be staying here tonight now?'

'I don't know,' Helen said.

'It's a while since you stayed the night here, Lily,' Essie said.

'I might well have passed up and down when you weren't looking, Essie,' Lily said.

'Oh, Madge would see you then,' her grandmother said coldly and stared towards the door.

'You haven't been down here since last year, have you, Helen?' Essie asked, ignoring the last remark.

'No.'

'And what do you think of the improvements she's made, Lily?' Madge asked, pointing to the radiators.

'Lovely, lovely,' Lily said.

•          •          •

When they had gone, Mrs Devereux put her finger to her lips and went to the window. 'Say nothing now! They're inspecting the cars!'

Helen and her mother went to the window.

'Stand back both of you!' her grandmother ordered. When the Kehoe sisters had finally disappeared, the three women began to laugh.

'I was in school with Essie,' Lily said. 'She was a right hunt.'

'If you'd known her mother, you'd know that she never could have been any other way,' Mrs Devereux said.

'How do you put up with them, Granny?' Helen asked.

'I don't put up with them, Helen,' her grandmother said. 'Did you not hear what I said to them? They'll be raging about that.'

'The oul' father, oul' Crutch Kehoe, used to beat them with nettles,' Lily said.

'Well, if that's all he did to them, they're not too bad,' Mrs Devereux said. 'They'll go off now and they'll fill whoever they meet with the news and gossip. The only lucky thing is they have no telephone.'

As Helen went down to Declan's room to tell the others what had happened, she heard them talking animatedly. It was Larry's voice she heard, telling a story, and the other two interrupting, laughing, egging him on. She left them there; she did not go into the room.

•          •          •

Her grandmother sat by the window. As the pale light from the sea faded and the shadows grew, Helen focused only on the old woman; she watched her white hair and her long thin face. When her grandmother spoke, the voice was sharp and determined.

'Oh, when I saw you getting out of the car,' she said to Paul, 'when I saw you, I said to myself- here's another of them now.'

'Granny, what do you mean?' Helen asked her.

'I think you know what I mean, Helen,' she said.

'She means homosexuals,' Paul said.

'Granny, you can't talk about people like that.'

'When I saw him getting out of the car' — the old woman spoke as though she were talking to herself, trying to remember something — 'it was the way he walked or turned and I wondered what sort of life he was going to have now, what sort of person he could be.' She raised her head and looked across the room at Helen.

'It's a difficult time for all of us,' Helen said.

'It's difficult for them, Helen, and it always will be.'

'I think she means homosexuals again,' Paul said.

'Well, I'm happy,' Larry said. 'I'm not happy being here now, but my life's happy.'

'It's a stupid word, "happy",' Paul said.

There was silence now. The four of them sat in the gloom as the lighthouse began to flash. Her grandmother looked out of the window as if she had heard a sound or someone approaching. Then she faced back into the room. 'I'm old and I can say what I like, Helen.'

Helen realised that she was still afraid of her grandmother, that she would not confront her or defy her. She stared at her across the room, knowing that the old woman could not see the resentment, the dislike. Her grandmother turned to Paul and Larry, her two visitors.

'Declan never told us anything about himself. We always thought that he had a great life in Dublin. No one knew he was sick and no one knew he was one of you.'

She said nothing for a while, but it was clear that she had merely stopped so that she could gather strength for what she was going to say next.

'But I knew something. I've known it for a year now and I never told anyone or said anything. Declan came down here last summer. He left his car way back somewhere so I heard no car, but for some reason I went out to the lane, and I looked down towards the cliff and I saw him coming towards me. He must have passed the house without calling in, or maybe he went down by Mike Redmond's and walked along the strand. And now he was coming towards me, but he didn't expect to see me, and I think he didn't want to see me, and I think that he would have passed by my house if I hadn't come out to the lane. I hadn't seen him since Christmas, and I don't think he had been down here for more than a year. And when he came towards me I could see that he had been crying and he was so thin and so strange, like as though he didn't want to see me. He was always so friendly, even when he was a little boy. And he tried to make up for it when he came into the house. He was all smiles and jokes, but I'll never forget seeing him. He had tea here, and both of us knew that there was something awful, something very wrong. I knew he was in trouble, but AIDS was the last thing I thought of, and I thought of everything.'

Helen held her breath in the semi-darkness as the lighthouse started up. She wondered why her grandmother had not told her this before.

'I knew Declan came down here,' Larry said. 'He used to drive out of Dublin on his own, usually to Wicklow, to the mountains; he would drive along those roads for miles. He drove to Wexford a few times, to his mother's house, but it was always late and he never went in. I think he hoped she'd find him there like you did. But he never saw her. And then he'd drive back to Dublin.'

'I knew something would happen and I waited for it,' Mrs Devereux said, as though she had not been listening.

Helen wanted her grandmother to stop talking. She directed a question at Larry and Paul. 'Do your folks know that you're gay?' she asked them.