The Blackwater Lightship (23 page)

'I don't know who he thinks he is,' her mother said.

Helen sighed.

Her grandmother came into the room and sat down. 'We put all the sheets into a bucket outside. Paul said he'll wash them once they've soaked for a while. Isn't he very good?'

Helen felt that her grandmother was deliberately provoking her mother.

'We could easily put them in the boot of my car and I'll stick them in the washing machine when I go home,' Lily said.

'Well, it's a pity you're saying that now rather than doing it at the time,' Mrs Devereux said.

Helen watched her mother bristle quietly at the table as Paul came into the room.

'His headache is getting worse,' Paul said. 'Also, he needs to drink a lot if he doesn't want to become dehydrated. I should have got him 7-Up when I was in the village.'

'How dare you speak to me the way you spoke to me in there!' Lily stood up and faced him. 'I don't know what you think your place is here.'

'Look,' Paul said, 'I knew as soon as I came in that Declan felt humiliated and I decided that he needed privacy and I didn't notice him saying that he wanted you all back in when you left.'

'As far as we are concerned you have no business here,' Lily said.

Helen sought to interrupt her, but Lily continued. 'Maybe it's time you and your friend thought of taking yourselves out of here.'

'Like now, immediately?' Paul asked patiently. 'Just because you want us to?'

'As soon as you can, yes,' Lily said.

'And just because you want us to?' Paul asked again.

'Well, I do live here,' Lily said.

'No you don't,' Helen interrupted.

'It is my mother's house,' Lily said.

'Declan asked Larry and myself to come down here,' Paul said. 'We have, Larry more than me, the two of us have been looking after him during very difficult times when I didn't notice his family around.'

'We weren't around because we were told nothing,' Lily said.

'I wonder why you were told nothing. Maybe you could ponder that, instead of getting in the way and making pointless arguments,' Paul said.

Helen felt that he had gone too far, but he remained placid and in control, weighing each word he said.

'I wasn't in the way,' Lily said.

'Well, it looked like that to me,' Paul replied.

'I'm his mother!' Lily shouted.

Paul shrugged. 'He's an adult and he has got a bad headache and he needs a drink and there's no room for this sort of hysteria.'

'So are you going to leave?' Lily asked.

'Listen, Mrs Breen,' Paul said, 'I'm here as long as Declan is here and you can take that as written in stone, and I'm here because he asked me to be here, and when he asked me to be here he used words and phrases and sentences about you which were not edifying and which I "will not repeat. He is also concerned about you and loves you and wants your approval. He is also very sick. So stop feeling sorry for yourself, Mrs Breen. Declan stays here, I stay here, Larry stays here. One of us goes, we all go, and if you don't believe me, ask Declan.'

'What do you mean, "not edifying"?' Lily asked.

'He's nearly thirty years old and he's afraid to tell you things, for God's sake,' Paul said. 'I haven't time for this. Larry, could the mobile phone be got working, could the battery be recharged?'

Lily began to cry and "went upstairs. Helen left the room and went and sat on Declan's bed.

'What happened?' Declan asked.

'Mammy had a row with Paul,' Helen said.

'She shouldn't have done that. He always wins rows, he always knows what you're going to say next,' Declan said. He put his hands over his eyes and winced. 'The pain comes in waves,' he said and got out of bed again to go to the toilet. 'I'm feeling really sick again.'

•          •          •

Helen met her grandmother at the foot of the stairs.

'That was a bit rough,' Helen said.

'Oh, she's all right,' her grandmother said. 'She'll cry it but of herself. She can put people out of her nice house in Wexford if she likes, but she can't put people out of here. They'll go in their own good time.'

They went back to the kitchen, where Larry was trying to recharge the mobile phone.

'Sorry, everybody, if I sounded offensive,' Paul said.

'You'd feel sorry for poor Lily,' Mrs Devereux said, 'putting her big foot in it without a leg to stand on, as the fellow in Ballyvalden used to say.'

'Does anyone have a screwdriver or a pen-knife?' Larry asked. 'I need to check this plug.'

'I have a knife here.' Mrs Devereux reached into her apron pocket.

'Granny, that's a flick-knife!' Helen said.

Mrs Devereux pressed the switch and the blade flicked open. It looked dangerous. She handed it to Larry.

'Granny, why do you have a flick-knife?' Helen asked her.

'Helen, I don't know if you saw all the programmes about old people being attacked, old people living alone. Oh, it was all they talked about around here; the Kehoes nearly built a moat around their house and the guards in Blackwater were nearly driven out of their minds by the strange sightings. People kept asking me how I was managing. I had no peace and, as you can imagine, Lily was out here day and night with brochures about alarm systems. It was madness. But I'd seen this thing' — she pointed to the flick-knife — 'on the television and it seemed even better than a gun. So I went into Wexford and I asked Mr Parle in Parle's Hardware and he said he didn't stock them, they were too dangerous, and no one in Wexford would stock them. So I explained what I wanted it for. I think he thought I wanted it as a present for a grandson or a nephew. But when I told him he brightened up no end and said he would order one for me, and we talked about shapes and sizes. He said I was quite right to take the law into my own hands. He seemed to know all about flick-knives. And a few weeks later I went into Parle's and there it was, new and shiny.'

'But, Granny,' Helen asked, 'can you use it?'

'Use it, Helen? You just press the switch.'

'And what would you do if an intruder came into the house?' Helen asked.

'I'd stab them, Helen. I'd disfigure them,' her grandmother said.

'God, you sound as though you mean business,' Larry said.

'You're a lesson to us all, Mrs Devereux,' Paul said. 'I'm glad I didn't try and break in here.'

'Does Declan know about the flick-knife?' Larry asked.

'No,' Mrs Devereux said.

'I must go and tell him. This battery should be recharged in about half an hour,' Larry said.

Larry bumped into Lily at the door. She addressed Paul across the room.

'Declan says you're his best friend and I mustn't be rude to you, so I agreed to do what he says.'

'Actually, I'm his best friend,' Larry said.

'Actually, you're just a young pup,' Mrs Devereux said, smiling at him.

'It's OK, I understand. I'm sorry too,' Paul said to Lily.

'Declan's getting sick into the basin all the time,' Lily said. 'He says the headache is getting worse, and he's back in the bathroom again now.'

'What time is it?' Paul asked.

'It's nine o'clock,' Helen said.

'We'll try Louise on the mobile at ten,' Paul said.

•          •          •

While they had dinner each of them took it in turn to stay with Declan. He spent most of the time going to and from the bathroom.

At a quarter to ten Paul established that the mobile phone was working. He asked Mrs Devereux for the name and number of her doctor in Blackwater so that Louise could phone him if she needed to.

'I'll have to draw the line now,' Mrs Devereux said. 'I've been going to old Doctor French for years and I go to his son as well now that he's home, and they know more about me than I do myself, and they're as nosy, God bless the two of them, as the two Kehoes. And I don't want them to know anything more about me.'

'That's fine,' Paul said, 'except you don't have a phone book or a Yellow Pages so we can find some other doctor.'

He rang Directory Enquiries and found the number of the Garda station in Kilmuckridge, the village north of Blackwater; the guard gave him the number of two general practitioners, including the doctor on duty that night.

'You are the essence of efficiency,' Helen said to him.

He rang Louise, and left a message for her to call the mobile number when she returned. As Mrs Devereux poured tea for everyone, Helen noticed that her mother was trying to smile at Paul.

With the first sharp ring of the mobile phone, the two cats sprang from their perch, bringing with them plates and bowls from the upper shelves of the dresser which crashed to the floor and broke into small pieces; the cats leaped across the room and escaped in a flash through the kitchen door as Mrs Devereux screamed at them. 'The whole house will be destroyed,' she said.

Lily tried to calm her down while Paul took the phone into the hallway. Helen began to pick up pieces of crockery and delph.

'The cats have such a quiet life normally,' Mrs Devereux said when Lily had forced her to sit down. 'It must have been the last straw. It was the same when I bought the electric mixer. Six feet into the air they went, the two of them, but they broke nothing that time. They wouldn't come back into the house for two days.'

When they had picked up and swept away most of the shards which lay all over the kitchen floor, Paul came in to say that a Doctor Kirwan from Kilmuckridge was going to visit, that Louise had spoken to him, he would know exactly what to do, and someone would have to go to Wexford, to the chemist shop which was on all-night duty, to get the slow-release morphine for Declan.

When Larry came back from Declan's bedroom Paul told him what had happened.

'I got one of those plates as part of a dinner service as a wedding present, nearly sixty years ago,' Mrs Devereux said.

'They're a bad business, cats,' Larry said. 'We'll drown them if we find them.'

'A little pup, that's the best description of you all day,' Mrs Devereux said.

'Sure you couldn't have two cats up on a dresser like that,' Larry said. 'They'd be bound to knock everything over at some stage.'

'I'd say they take a very dim view of you lot,' Mrs Devereux said. 'And if that terrible handphone goes off again, I don't know what will happen.'

'Two scalded cats, Garret and Charlie,' Larry said. 'I'm raging I missed it.'

•          •          •

When the doctor came, Declan was in the bathroom. He walked downstairs slowly, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. He seemed to Helen almost impossibly thin. The doctor went into the bedroom with him; the rest of them stayed in the dining-room and kitchen. Helen saw that her mother had changed her clothes. When her grandmother did not come to the front door to greet the doctor, but waited nervously in the kitchen, Helen realised that she did not want the doctor to see her or recognise her.

Having finished with Declan, the doctor stood at the dining-room table and wrote a prescription. Helen noticed that his hair, which hung in loose strands around his head, had been badly cut. It was as though someone had put a bowl around his head and then applied a pair of scissors. She spotted Paul watching it as well.

'I've given him an injection -which -will control his bowels for a while. He needs to drink a lot of liquid. This prescription is for the morphine. I'll phone the chemist when I get back, and he'll have it ready for you. He's on the quays in Wexford town, close to the Bank of Ireland.

'This is a very remote place,' he said as Lily paid him.

'It's very good of you to come,' she said.

As soon as the doctor started up the car, Larry and Paul went into Declan's room to talk about his hair.

'You'd think with the amount of money he makes he'd get a proper haircut,' Larry said. 'If I went around like that, people would laugh at me, but just because he's a doctor he gets away with it.'

Mrs Devereux came into the bedroom.

T knew his father, old Bree2y Kirwan,' she said. 'He's very nice. His mother is very nice too, she was a Gethings from Oulart. I didn't know he was home.'

'Is his father's hair like that too?' Larry asked. He gave Mrs Devereux a description of the doctor's hair.

'Oh stop now about his hair. I'm sure he's saving up to get married, giving good example, which is more than I can say for some.'

•          •          •

Declan was quiet now. Larry and Paul drove into Wexford to get the pills for him. Mrs Devereux stood in front of the house, caning the cats in whispers. And Lily and Helen sat in the bedroom, Lily holding a packet of frozen peas on Declan's forehead. 'This will keep the pain down for a while,' she said. She fixed his pillow and pushed his hair back.

Helen was uncomfortable in the room; her mother was still not talking to her. She began to speak to Declan as though Helen were not there.

'Helen says that I abandoned you and her when your father was sick.' Lily's voice was gentle and soft as she spoke, as if they were children still and she was telling them a comforting story before they went to sleep. 'I wrote all the time,' she went on, 'and your granny assured me that if I visited it would just unsettle you, that you were happy here, and it would be better if there were no interruptions to your routine, that she would have to get you settled all over again if I came. So that's why I never visited. You can ask her and she'll tell you. I wanted to come down and your father wanted me to come down, even if just for a day, but your granny said it would be too much for you, me arriving and then going away again. It would be too emotional.'

Lily was almost crying now, but Helen saw that Declan was watching her and his eyes were hard. She wondered if he believed his mother. Helen did not.

'Why did you leave me in Byrnes' house for the funeral and never see me?' Declan asked.

'That was everyone's advice at the time; they all said that you were too young to take in your father's death, and you'd be too young to see the coffin and the grave. And Declan, I would have broken into pieces if I'd seen you in those days, I would have broken into pieces.' She was crying now as Declan softened and held her hand. 'I couldn't have done anything else, Declan and Helen,' Lily said. Her crying had become louder.