The Blackwater Lightship (2 page)

•          •          •

When the janitor from Hugh's school, Frank Mulvey, and his son came in a van with the tables and chairs, she had to restrain herself from telling them where to put everything; she wondered, as she watched them, at how blindly they moved, planning nothing, moving forward without direction. She smiled at herself minding so much about this.

She decided to go to the supermarket to buy the food and the beer. Hugh had already collected the wine and the glasses. She watched from the kitchen window as the boys played aeroplanes in the back garden, circling each other, dipping and diving, their arms outstretched as wings. She called Manus and when he ignored her she called again. He moved reluctantly towards her.

'I want you to come with me to the supermarket,' she said.

'Is Cathal going?'

'No, just you.'

'Why just me? Why can't Cathal go?'

'Come on quickly,' she said.

'I don't want to go,' he said.

'Come on, wash your hands, we're in a hurry.'

'I don't want to go.'

By this time, Cathal had approached and was observing them both.

'Cathal is going to help your daddy with the tables and chairs,' she said.

'I want to do that,' Manus said.

'Why do you need me?'

'To mind the trolley when I'm paying at the checkout.'

'It's boring,' he said.

'Do you think we should get large cans or small cans of beer?' Again, she was using an adult tone.

'It's boring,' he repeated.

When she got back, she saw that the tables and chairs were set up in the garden. She checked one of the kitchen drawers for plastic tablecloths. The boys were once more playing aeroplanes.

'If it rains, we'll move everything in,' Hugh said as they both surveyed the garden.

•          •          •

At nine o'clock the first guests, two men and a woman, arrived carrying six-packs of Guinness and a bottle of red wine. The woman was carrying a fiddle case.

'Are we the first?' one of the men, tall with spectacles and curly hair, said. They seemed uneasy, as though they were half tempted to turn and go. Helen didn't know them and didn't think she had seen them before. Hugh introduced them to her.

'Sit down, sit down, we'll get you a drink,' Hugh said.

They sat in the kitchen and looked out at the tables and the long garden. They said nothing. The two boys came in and examined them and went out again.

'An bhfuil Donncha ag teacht?' Hugh began to speak in Irish and one of the men spoke back from the side of his mouth, something funny, almost bitter. The others laughed. Helen noticed how unfashionably long the speaker's sideburns were.

Hugh handed them drinks, and two of them went into the garden, leaving the one with the long sideburns. It struck Helen for a moment that she had interviewed the woman for a job, or she had worked hours in the school, but she was not sure. Hugh and his friend talked in Irish. Helen wondered if she was wearing the right clothes for the party; she watched the woman from the window, noted her jeans and white top and hennaed hair, how relaxed and natural she looked. Helen moved towards the fridge and checked again that everything was in order: the chilli con carne would simply need to be reheated, the rice boiled; the salads were all ready, the knives and forks and paper napkins set out. She opened some bottles of red wine.

Just then, another group arrived, one of them was carrying a guitar case and another a flute case. She recognised them and they greeted her. There was one woman among them; Helen watched her looking around the kitchen, as though seeking something, a clue, or something she had left behind on a previous visit. When she went to take the six-pack from the man with the guitar, so that she could put it in the fridge, he said he would hold on to it, and smiled at her as if to say that he had been to more parties than she had. He was too warm and direct for her to be offended.

'If you want more, it's in the fridge,' she said to him.

'If I want more, I'll ask you,' he said.

He smiled again. His eyes were a mixture of brown and dark green. His skin was clear; he was very tall. She realised that he was flirting with her.

'I'm tempted to say something,' she said.

'What?'

'No, nothing.'

'What? Say it.'

'I was going to say that you look like someone who might want more.'

He smiled and held her gaze and then reached into his pocket and took out a small bottle opener. He opened a bottle of Guinness and offered it to her. He seemed somewhat taken aback 'when she refused it, intimidated.

'It's too early for me,' she said.

'Well, cheers so,' he said and lifted the bottle.

For the next hour she was busy filling glasses and opening bottles and trying to remember names and faces. As it grew dark, Hugh lit the flares which he had stuck into the grass and these gave off a fitful, glaring light. When she brought the food out and Hugh put on the striped apron to serve it, people were already sitting at the tables. Cathal and Manus and several neighbours' children had made a small table for themselves and were eating pizzas and drinking Coke.

'We'd better hold on to a bit of the food,' Hugh said. 'There are a few won't come until after the pubs shut.'

The Indian doctor and his wife had arrived earlier, greeted everyone, accepted a drink of orange juice and left, but their eldest son, who must have been seven or eight, had remained behind and was at the boys' table. Helen had promised that she would walk him to his door and that he would not be too late. The O'Mearas next door — she was unsure what they did for a living — were sitting alone at a table watching all the laughter and good humour around them. Helen knew she would have to go and sit with them; it was clear that no one else was going to pay them any attention. She was glad that the guard and his wife had not come.

'God, we don't have to talk Irish to you, do we?' Mary O'Meara said to her when she sat down beside them. 'I was just saying to Martin that we should have listened more in school. God, I haven't got a word of it. "An bhfuil cead agam dul amach" is all I can remember.'

Helen realised that she did not want them to know that she spoke no Irish either. She was prepared to eat with them, but she was not prepared to join them in being at a loss. She noticed several more people arriving. One of the new arrivals was a friend of Hugh's called Ciaran Duffy who had a case for uilleann pipes with him. Of all of Hugh's friends, he was the one she liked best and found easiest to be with. She didn't think he spoke much Irish either, but he was a well-known piper and she watched a number of others turning to look at him as he arrived. She liked his boyish self-confidence, his clear, open face. He reminded her of Hugh, except he was bigger, stockier. Hugh guided Ciaran Duffy and his friends over to her table. Everybody shook hands and suddenly, she noticed, in just a few seconds, the O'Mearas had lost their forlorn, isolated aura and were busy taking in their new companions. Hugh brought over chilli con carne and rice and salads and went back to get drinks.

As Helen went out to close the front door, which had been left open so that people could walk through, she noticed the six-packs carefully placed everywhere, like parcels of territory. It was something Hugh would never do, she thought; he would never be bad-mannered like that and in time, she reckoned, as his friends became older and more prosperous, they would change too.

When she came back into the kitchen, his friend with the brown and green eyes appeared. He stood in front of her.

'It's you again,' she said.

'I was wondering where the toilet was, your honour,' he said in a mock country accent.

'Anywhere between here and Terenure,' she said. 'No, seriously, it's upstairs, at the top of the stairs, you'll find it'

'Right so. It's a pleasure being in your house,' he said and moved away.

She went back and sat with the O'Mearas. Opposite her, Ciaran Duffy caught her eye and winked, as if to say that he had the measure of the O'Mearas, but he would be saying nothing. She smiled at him, as if to say that she knew what he was thinking. He shouted something to her, but she could not hear it for all the noise around.

Before she served the fruit salad and cream she counted the guests at the tables: there were thirty-seven; they had expected four or five more; maybe some of them were, as Hugh had said, in the pub. Closing time was half-past eleven. It was eleven o'clock now and maybe time, she thought, to take the Indian boy home — she must find out his name. He was laughing with Cathal and Manus and the other boys. She decided to leave them for another while.

•          •          •

The music started in the kitchen while most of the guests were still at tables outside. The man with the six-packs was playing guitar, his friend the flute, and the woman in the jeans and white top a fiddle. Their playing was casual, unselfconscious, almost loose; Helen knew that any move towards intensity would be frowned upon, or indeed mocked. The flute player was leading them, setting the pace; the music had a strange, repetitive gaiety, and the players continued to give the impression that they were playing to please themselves, or each other, but they were not looking for an audience, nor seeking to impress anybody.

Slowly, people began to carry chairs in from the garden; someone turned off the main light in the kitchen, leaving only the light of two lamps to illuminate the room, and others joined in the playing, another fiddle, a mandolin, a squeezebox. Hugh was still busy opening bottles and filling glasses. She knew that he loved the music, the semi-darkness of the room, the company, the drinking. It reminded him of home, of something which was hardly ever possible in Dublin, something that most of his friends here would not be able to manage, being too modest or lazy, too willing to drift and let things happen.

Suddenly, there was silence all around; a woman had begun to sing. Helen knew her, knew that she had made records in the past with her brother and sister and more recently a solo CD which Hugh had listened to over and over and Helen had slowly grown to like. Helen had met the singer on the stairs earlier in the evening and remembered her shy, friendly smile. Now as she stood against the back wall of the room, she sang with ease and authority, and among the guests there was a hush which was almost reverent. The woman did not often sing in public, and if she had been asked to sing — Helen knew the rules — she would have refused, suggesting somebody else, remaining resolute in not singing. Her voice had come from nowhere during a break in the music. Her family, Helen knew, was from Donegal, but Hugh had only met her in Dublin. Her accent in Irish was pure Donegal, but the strength in the rise and fall of the voice "was entirely hers, and even the O'Mearas, Helen could see, watched her with awe. When the song was over and the singer sat down, she smiled and sipped her drink as though it were nothing.

The music started again, this time faster than before; someone produced a bodhran and began to beat it with his eyes closed. Helen went with the O'Mearas to the front door and then remembered the Indian boy and went back in to find him. He was playing around the tables, being chased by Cathal and Manus and another boy who had permission to stay up until the end of the party. As she broke up the game she wished she had secured permission for the Indian boy to stay on as well.

She walked with him up the street to his house.

'Will your parents not be asleep?' she asked.

'My mother will be waiting,' he said and smiled. She wondered if Cathal and Manus could ever be polite like this.

'I hope she won't blame me for keeping you out so late.'

'No, she will not blame you,' the boy said gravely.

•          •          •

As Helen walked back to the house, she looked at the road bathed in the eerie yellow light which oozed from the streetlamps, and the cars parked in the drives or the roadway — Nissans, Toyotas, Ford Fiestas; every semidetached house was exactly the same, built for people who wanted quiet lives. She smiled to herself at the idea and stood outside the house as a taxi, flashing its lights, approached. She watched as the driver got out, an electric torch in his hand.

'We're looking for Brookfield Park Avenue,' he said. 'We've found Brookfield everything else. It's the wild west out here.' He flashed his torch at a neighbour's doorway.

'It's here. You're here,' she said.

The doors of the taxi opened and four passengers got out, each with a bag of cans under his arm. 'This is the place,' one of them said.. She could not make out any of the faces.

'It's Helen,' one of them said. 'We've been driving around like eejits.'

'I know you,' she said. 'You're Mick Joyce. Is it not too late for you to be out?'

'Hold on until I pay this man,' he said and laughed.

When the taxi drove away, she accompanied the four new guests into the party. Mick Joyce had come to the house several times before; he was a solicitor, he had done all the legal work for Hugh's school. He was the best solicitor in the country, Hugh said, he knew every trick, he was a great man for detail, but once darkness fell — and she had heard Hugh telling the story several times, using the same words — he'd do anything, go anywhere, he'd go to Kerry and back the same night if he thought there was anything going on there. He had a strong Galway accent.

'This is the woman of the house,' he said to the others. They shook her hand. There were no introductions.

'We kept food for you,' she said.

'You're a great woman,' he said.

He walked down the hallway to the kitchen and stood in the doorway as though he owned the place, or was the guest of honour. When the music stopped, several people shouted greetings. Hugh got drinks for him and his companions and then the music started up again.

Helen noticed that Ciaran Duffy was assembling his uilleann pipes, being watched carefully by several people. It was slow, meticulous work, and she realised that those still playing were overshadowed by these preparations. She watched Mick Joyce going into the garden, finding Manus and lifting him on his shoulders, making him laugh and shout; Cathal and his friend followed them as they moved around the garden. She remembered that each time Mick had come to the house he had sought Manus out and acted as though he had come to see him specially. Manus loved him; he was the only friend of Hugh's he ever mentioned.