The Blackwater Lightship

by Colm Toibin

  She stood on the narrow strand and shivered. Down here in the shadow of the cliff it seemed darker, colder, more like late August than late June. A line of sea birds flew a hand’s distance above the calm water. And as each wave came in, it looked as though it might not break, but merely casually spill in and then get sucked back, but every time there came the inevitable lift and curl and a sound that was almost remote, a sound that, she believed, had nothing to do with her and had no connection to anything she knew, the quiet crashing of a wave.

  From here as far as Keatings’ the erosion had stopped or slowed down. No one knew why. Years earlier, it had seemed just a matter of time before her grandmother’s house would fall into the sea, just as Mike Redmond’s and Keatings’ outhouse had done. And now Keatings’ old white house itself was falling, but there was still one house between her grandmother’s and the sea.

  The erosion had stopped, but when she watched now she noticed fine grains of sand pouring down each layer of cliff, as though an invisible wind were blowing or there was a slow, measured loosening of the earth. It was bright enough still while she looked south to see Raven’s Point and Rosslare Harbour. The strand, as she walked along, became narrower and stonier; she listened to the waves hitting the loose stones, unsettling them, knocking them against each other and then withdrawing. She saw, as she walked towards Keatings’, that some of the red galvanised iron from a shed at the side had fallen now, and raw walls with strips of the old wallpaper were open to the wind, and soon they would fall too, until only a few people would remember that there had once been a hill and a white house below it way back from the cliff.

  Here, the county council had put huge boulders to protect the cliff, but they had no impact. When she turned back, she saw that the line of coast from Cush to Parle’s Gap and Knocknasillogue was as it had been ten or fifteen years before, as though time had stood still. The colours were darkening now, night was coming down. She would walk up the gap where Mike Redmond’s house had been and then along the lanes to her grandmother’s house or along the clifftop if it seemed easier.

  She noticed something out of the side of her eye, and when she turned she saw it again: the lighthouse flashing in the distance, Tuskar Rock. She stood again and watched it, waited for the next flash, but it took a while to come, and then she waited again as the rhythm of the night set in.

  She walked on, knowing what she was facing into now. She imagined Declan in Dublin, afraid, wondering what had happened, alone in the small hospital room with the long night ahead. It was something which she could barely imagine, and as soon as she started thinking about it she stopped herself, and began to dream about him now arriving in his car, hearing the sound of it approaching and seeing him turn in the lane, and knowing that he was, most of the time, able to get around his grandmother in a way that Helen never could. He could talk to her as no one else was able to; he pretended to share her prejudices, he managed to laugh at her in a way she never minded. Declan would have loved her showing him the central heating and the mobile phone. He would have known what to say.

  The climb was easy at Mike Redmond’s, easier than the steps to her grandmother’s lane. Helen walked through the ruin of the house, the front wall having long since fallen into the sea. She looked at the old chimney and the back wall still in place, and then stood at the edge waiting for the next flash from Tuskar. It seemed brighter now, stronger, from this height. She could feel the dew falling and could hear the sound of catde somewhere in the distance as she made her way back to her grandmother’s house.

  THREE

  The bed was uncomfortable and the nylon sheets, she felt, had not been used for years. They must have been from the time of the guest-house; they had a thin, almost slippery feel. The mattress sagged. She was so tired that she had gone to sleep as soon as she lay down, but she woke an hour or two later, unsure where she was, reaching out for a light, unable to think what house she was in, and feeling a strange, hard thirst. Then she remembered where she was and how she had got here. She put her head on the pillow and wondered how she had let this happen. Earlier on, it had seemed a good idea to come and spend the night here, but she had not bargained for being wide awake like this, the light from Tuskar through the curtains flitting across the wall over her bed, and a smell of must and damp in the room.

  She got out of bed and made her way to the kitchen. She filled a mug of water and brought it back to the bedroom. The lino in the room was torn, some of the wallpaper had peeled, the paint on the ceiling was flaking, and the presence of the shiny modern radiator made the room seem even more dingy and depressing. When she pulled the old candlewick bedspread back, she found that the blankets were stained. She didn’t feel tired or sleepy. She shivered. The smell seemed sharper now, and sour, and it was the smell more than anything which brought her back to the time she and Declan had lived in this house.

  This had been her room, Declan’s the one behind. But after a while his bed had been moved in here. She remembered the hammering apart of the iron bed and the feeling as they stood and watched that they were causing all this trouble.

  Declan was afraid. He was afraid of the black clocks which darted awkwardly across the floor, afraid that if you stepped on one of them all the bloody insides would be on your feet. He was afraid of the dark and the cold and of his grandparents’ movements upstairs which seemed to echo in the rooms below. And Helen knew that there was another fear, which was never mentioned in all that time: the fear that their parents would never come back, that they would both be left here, and that these days and nights – Helen was eleven then, Declan eight – would become their lives, rather than an interlude which would soon come to an end.

  Helen remembered how it began. It must have been just after Christmas, maybe early January, and it was her last year at primary school. She remembered the day when she arrived home, dropped her schoolbag inside the door and found her parents in the back room, standing in a pose she had never seen them in before. They were both looking into the mirror which was over the fireplace, and when they saw her coming into the room they did not turn. Her mother spoke. It was a new voice, soft, with a tone of entreaty.

  ‘Helen,’ she said, ‘your father is going to have to go to Dublin for tests.’

  She looked at the two of them as they stared at her and at each other, as though any second now the mirror would flash and take a photograph of them. In her memory, these moments – her father’s slow smile, her mother’s gende tone – were mixed up with their wedding photograph, taken in Lafayette’s in Dublin. She was sure that the scene in front of the mirror could have lasted only a few minutes, maybe less even, enough for a glance from each of them and a sentence – ‘Helen, your father is going to have to go to Dublin for tests’ – and maybe nothing more. In any case, it was the last memory she ever had of seeing her father. She knew she must have seen him later that evening and perhaps the next day, but she had no memory, absolutely none, of seeing him again.

  Her only other memory of that day was of Sister Columb from St John’s arriving and standing in the hallway, refusing to come in. Helen remembered whispering and half-talk in the hallway and then the nun departing.

  ‘The nuns in St John’s are going to knock on the tabernacle tonight,’ her mother said.

  Who did she say this to? And then, Helen remembered, someone had asked what this meant and her mother had explained that it was something which the nuns hardly ever did, but one of them would approach the altar and knock on the tabernacle, and that would be a special way of asking God for a favour.

  Her next memory of that evening was the clearest of all. She was upstairs in her bedroom when Declan came in. He told her that their mother was going to Dublin as well.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re going to Granny’s. We have to pack. She says you’re to pack warm things.’

  She went downstairs. Her mother was in the kitchen.

  ‘How long are we going for? What are
we going to do about school?’

  ‘Your father’s sick,’ her mother said.

  ‘I thought you said that he was going to Dublin for tests.’

  ‘There’s a suitcase under my bed. You can use that,’ her mother said. ‘Bring all your schoolbooks.’

  She wondered had this really happened, the nonanswers to questions, the sense of her mother as being utterly remote, lost to her. In the morning Aidan Larkin, who was in Fianna Fail with her father, drove them to Cush. Dr Flood, later, was going to drive her parents to Dublin. Her mother and father must have been in the house that morning, and must have spoken to her and to Declan, but she had no memory of it, just the car journey and the arrival. Her grandparents in Cush had no telephone, so she had no idea how they had been alerted to the imminent arrival of the two children. Nonetheless, Helen and Declan were expected in this house they had come to previously only on summer Sundays, or in the early summer when the guest-house was not full. Helen had no memory of ever visiting the house before in the winter. This, then, was the first time she noticed the patches of damp on the walls and the smell of damp which was everywhere except the kitchen, and the draughts which came under doors and the fierce wind which came in from the sea.

  The sea was just twenty or thirty yards away, but in all those months – from January to June – she caught sight of it maybe once or twice from the clifftop: this turbulence below them, the waves crashing hard against the cliff-face. Her grandparents, she remembered, behaved as though it were not there. In all the years her grandmother had been in Cush, she had hardly ever been on the strand. They paid no attention to the sea, and Helen and Declan learned to pay no attention to it either.

  The first dispute arose over food. Declan would eat only sliced bread, it had become a sort of joke in the family. But there was no sliced bread in Cush, only brown bread and soda bread that her grandmother made, and loaves of white bread with a hard crust which they bought in Blackwater. There were other things which Declan wouldn’t eat – cabbage or turnips, carrots or onions, eggs or cheese. He was obsessive about this, carefully finding out about each meal, or possible visits to other houses, and making sure that the food would be to his taste, and making himself pleasant in every other matter, and always getting his way.

  On Sunday visits to Cush their mother packed sandwiches for Declan, and during longer visits she brought and cooked their own food. But Declan knew that their grandmother disapproved of this.

  ‘You don’t eat because you like the food, you eat to live, that’s why you eat,’ was one of her sayings.

  As they drove from Enniscorthy to Cush, Helen knew that Declan thought only about food, and what was going to happen. The first dinner in the middle of the day was a stew; her grandmother served out four plates of stew with a big ladle and then put a plate of potatoes in the middle of the table. Her grandfather took off his cap and sat down and blessed himself. Helen made a sign to Declan to say nothing, do nothing. She peeled two potatoes for him and he mashed them up and slowly began to eat them. But he didn’t touch the stew. Her grandfather read the Irish Independent and said very little. Her grandmother busded about – she seldom sat at the table – and when, that first day, she went out into the yard, Helen took Declan’s plate and scraped the stew into the bucket of waste her grandmother kept for the hens. She put the plate back in front of Declan; he sat there amazed, trying not to smile. Neither of their grandparents noticed anything.

  When teatime came, Helen helped her grandmother set the table. For tea there was brown bread, thick slices of white bread and boiled eggs. Declan came into the kitchen as the eggs were being taken from the boiling water.

  ‘These eggs now are fresh,’ his grandmother said, ‘not like the ones you get in the town.’

  ‘Yuck,’ Declan said.

  ‘Declan doesn’t eat eggs,’ Helen said.

  ‘I never heard worse,’ her grandmother said. ‘The things your mother has to put up with. She’s too soft.’

  And so the battle began, the battle that raged daily, Declan filling his pockets with crusts, Helen reaching for the waste bucket, and days when there was no way out, when Declan put the onions and the carrots or the cabbage and the turnips to one side of the plate and refused to eat them, and their grandmother insisted that he stay at the table until he had them eaten, only to relent as soon as he started to cry.

  ‘He can’t eat them, Granny, he’ll get sick,’ Helen would say.

  ‘Stop giving back-answers, Helen.’

  ‘I’m not giving back-answers.’

  As soon as her grandmother began to talk about sending them to the two-teacher school in Blackwater, Helen set up a classroom at the kitchen table and for much of the day, in between meals, she and Declan worked at their schoolbooks, Helen playing the role of teacher. They discovered school as a way of excluding their grandmother, until she put a paraffin heater into the dining-room for them so that she could listen to the radio in peace. They did algebra or Irish or decimal points at the times of the day when she was most likely to hover around them; often they did the same exercises over and over, pretending this required total concentration and not looking up if their grandmother came into the room. They opened Declan’s books at random and went through lessons he had done long before, or began entirely new ones without fully understanding them or finishing them. When they were bored, they laughed and whispered and played cards.

  Their mother wrote short letters to their grandmother saying there was no news and mentioning tests and prayers and hoping that Helen and Declan were not too much of a burden on her. Their mother was staying in Rathmines with her cousin, one of the Bolgers of Bree, and his wife, and they too sent their regards. There was no mention of their father.

  Helen and Declan found a box of games under one of the beds and amused themselves in the long, dark evenings playing Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. Helen found boots she could wear and went often with her grandfather to fetch the cows for milking or to open and close gates for him. Declan had no boots; he hated the muck of the yard and the lane, he seldom went out and often in the afternoon, in the clammy heat of the parlour, he became tired and irritable. Alone together in these first months, they never mentioned home or their mother or their father, or how long they would be here. They worked out strategies to get them through the day without confrontation.

  Slowly, their grandmother began to treat Helen as an adult and Declan as a child, although Helen and Declan continued to treat each other as equals, even if Helen remained in the role of protector. In the first week or so, Helen had an argument with her grandfather; it was the only time he said much during their entire stay in the house. He was reading something in the newspaper about Fianna Fail – he himself was a member of Fine Gael, which was strong in Blackwater – and he turned to Helen and her grandmother and said, ‘They’re only a shower of gangsters, bloody gun-runners. Liam Cosgrave will put manners on the whole lot of them.’

  ‘Jack Lynch is not a gangster or a gun-runner,’ Helen said.

  ‘The rest of them, then,’ her grandfather said. ‘And I’d string Charlie Haughey up. He’s a feckin’ gangster.’

  ‘Oh, language now,’ her grandmother said.

  ‘But Jack Lynch is the leader,’ Helen said.

  ‘Oh, I know who you’ve been listening to,’ her grandfather said. ‘Did we ever think that Lily would have a little Fianna Fáiler for a daughter?’

  ‘And the Irish Independent is only Fine Gael propaganda,’ Helen said.

  ‘Propaganda? Where did you learn that word?’

  ‘Oh, Helen knows all the words,’ her grandmother said.

  ‘It’s saying your prayers you should be,’ her grandfather said and went back to reading the paper.

  ‘Good girl, you stand up to him now,’ her grandmother said later when he had left the room.

  From then on, her grandfather let her watch the news on television and, after a few weeks, one Saturday night Helen realised that she was going to be allowed to watch
The Late Late Show, which her mother and father had never permitted her to watch at home, except for the night when Lieutenant Gerard from The Fugitive was a guest on the show and she was called downstairs. Now in Cush she sat on one of the armchairs in the kitchen and wondered if they had forgotten about her as the news ended and then the break for advertisements ended and the music for the show began and Gay Byrne appeared.

  ‘If something comes on that’s not fit for her now,’ her grandmother said, ‘she’ll go to bed.’

  Helen remembered the slow preparations for the programme, her grandmother making sure that all the housework was done. Tea things and biscuits were set out on a tray, the kettle filled to be put on a hotplate during the second break. Her grandmother loved the programme, and, Helen realised, loved having Helen to discuss the guests and the controversies in the days that followed. Her grandfather, on the other hand, disliked it and muttered to himself when something was said of which he disapproved.

  During that season, Helen remembered, hardly a Saturday night passed without a group of women wanting rights, or a priest in dispute with the hierarchy, appearing on the programme.

  ‘Oh, look who it is now, look at her, look at her hair!’ her grandmother would shout at a woman who appeared on the panel.

  Her grandmother commented throughout, but her comments mostly took the form of exclamations of shock or wonder at what was being said, and on the personal appearance of guests. But sometimes, with extraordinary vehemence, when women’s rights or politics were being discussed she would bang her fist against the armchair and shout her total agreement with an opinion being expressed. ‘She’s right, she’s absolutely right!’ she would roar.

  She hated breaks for music and the appearance of writers or film stars or English people. They told too many funny stories; she wanted argument, not amusement. But she remained silent and tense when religion was discussed, watching some nun or priest or concerned layperson out of the side of her eyes. Once or twice, during these discussions, her grandfather threatened to turn the television off, but he never did so. All three stayed up until the end of the show, and it often went on until close to midnight, as an ex-nun cast doubt on the power of the Pope, or a student leader denounced the Irish bishops or the education system. Contraception and divorce were discussed regularly; her grandparents watched in embarrassed silence, but the only time when they threatened to send Helen to bed was when a woman on the show pointed out that most Irish couples had never seen one another naked, even people who’d been married for years.