One by One in the Darkness

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘I’ll tell you this, I’m not eating it, even if it is still there. Leave the food to me.’

  ‘I’ve got some really good wine.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘It was a present.’ Any other time, she would have told him that Cate had brought it over from London for her, but today she didn’t want to mention her sister. ‘It’s Bordeaux.’

  ‘What year?’

  Helen laughed. ‘How the hell do I know? It’s out in the car, I can’t remember. Anyway, we can drink it tonight. Oh, and about the food, best make it something simple, something that needs hardly any cooking, eh?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ve seen your kitchen.’

  ‘See you sometime after seven, all right?’

  ‘Seven’s great. ‘Bye.’

  It was shortly after six-thirty when Helen pulled into the parking bay in front of her house. As was usual on a Monday she had luggage to take from the boot, having gone straight to work from her family home that morning. The car blipped when she locked it. Helen lived in a development of upmarket townhouses, just off the Ormeau Road. ‘It’s a sort of housing estate, to be honest about it,’ she used to say, which always annoyed Owen, who lived in a similar place not far from Helen. She liked it, though, that her colleagues and friends lived near by: David and Steve were just a few streets away. She’d bought the house for financial motives, and the even more prosaic reason that she needed a place to live, but felt no emotional attachment to it whatsoever, nor did she ever want to. Even before she bought it she’d remarked to her mother that she thought it didn’t have much character, and her mother had agreed: ‘New houses never do.’ But the horror of what had happened to their father had been compounded by it having taken place in Brian’s house. She remembered then a dream she had had, years ago, when she was at university, of watching Brian’s house burning down, and weeping because she would never be able to go there again. And now, even though the house was intact, it was lost to her. She grew to appreciate the very sterility of the place in Belfast: having moved in as soon as the builders moved out she was confident that it was, psychically, a blank.

  She could have done more to make it more comfortable inside: she knew that. It was too sparsely furnished. ‘There’s nothing actually wrong with it,’ Cate had said, the last time she had been there, ‘it’s just that there’s not enough of it.’ She was right, Helen thought, the combination of clinical neatness in the main room with the chilly atmosphere always struck her particularly strongly after she had been home for the weekend. She knew she needed more pictures, more rugs, more things, it was just a question of wanting to have them, and of taking the time and trouble to go out and get them.

  She took the bottles of wine out and set them on the table in the main room, then took her bags upstairs to change out of her work clothes. Anyone seeing her bedroom (and she took great care that no one ever did) would have been amazed by the contrast with the rest of the house. She pushed the door open, and had to push hard, against a pile of newspapers and political magazines which had toppled over and blocked the way. She picked her path carefully over a floor littered with unwashed coffee cups, compact discs, books and stray shoes, to the bed, where she upended her luggage, and shook out the contents; then rummaged for her sweatshirt, trainers and jeans. She changed into these, and then, in the wardrobe at the top of the stairs, where she carefully stored the sober clothes she kept for work, she hung up the suit she had been wearing. Most evenings, she would eat something quick in the kitchen and then come upstairs for the rest of the night. She had a television here, and a CD player, and an armchair she particularly liked: an old one her mother had given her when she bought the new suite for the parlour.

  As she came back into the room, she picked up a CD of Bach cantatas, and put it into the machine. Music was her personal obsession. She shared with David a fondness for old movies; shared it literally in that they used to get together sometimes and watch film noir videos, although that happened a lot less often now ever since Steve had moved in with him. But music was something for herself alone, and it was something she needed. She sat now, lost in the pure, formal structures of the cantatas, looking up in annoyance when the doorbell suddenly rang and wondering who it could be, until she remembered David.

  ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ she said to him, standing by the closed kitchen door. David nodded.

  ‘I’ve long since known that your idea of running a house is to go to Crazy Prices and buy a load of cheese and fruit and stuff, bring it home, stick it in the fridge, and then send out for pizzas every night. Then when the things in the fridge have rotted past all recognition, you put them in the bin and start all over again. I keep telling you, there’s more to it than that.’

  Helen smiled sadly. ‘You’re wrong. I’ve been cooking, you see, that’s the problem.’ She threw open the kitchen door, and even David’s eyes widened at the sight of the overflowing bin, the sticky hob, the brimming sink, where a forest of saucepan handles projected from the greasy water. Helen pulled out the grill pan, as if that might be clean and would redeem her, but it was full of congealed fat. She pulled a face, and slotted the grill back into the cooker.

  ‘See your house?’ David said. ‘It’s like a wee palace, so it is.’

  In the months immediately after her father’s death, Helen had socialised frantically because she was afraid of being alone with her grief. Sympathetic friends and colleagues asked her round to dinner, or suggested going out for an evening’s drinking, and she accepted every invitation on the spot, including one to a Christmas party at Owen’s house. It was at this party that she met David, whom she recognised from television, but also from having seen him on occasion in restaurants or hotel bars around the city, and in the press gallery at the court. When they were introduced, she acknowledged him curtly. The evening was interrupted constantly by Owen’s and his wife Mary’s little son howling over the baby alarm system, until Mary finally admitted defeat and carried the child into the room where the party was going on. As soon as he had been deposited in his playpen, he stopped crying and became contentedly occupied with the toys which were there. David and Helen watched him pick up a red plastic cup and turn it over in his hands, gazing at it with total absorption, as though it were the most fascinating object imaginable. Suddenly the baby dropped the red cup and picked up a blue plastic brick. The red cup rolled away, forgotten, while the baby looked at the new object with the same consuming interest it had had for the cup a few moments earlier.

  ‘Maybe he’ll be a journalist when he grows up,’ Helen said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘He’s got the right sort of attention span.’

  ‘I take it you don’t think much of journalists, then?’

  ‘Most of the time I don’t know how they live with themselves.’

  ‘You know you’re being unfair,’ he said.

  ‘Am I?’ Helen replied, but she noticed he looked hurt, which was disconcerting, when she’d simply set out to annoy him. She didn’t wait for him to reply, she shrugged and turned away.

  When she went home that night, she lay awake for a long time, brooding upon how her father’s murder had been treated by the media, a subject which fed in her a deep slow anger. There’d been the day after the funeral when she’d gone to McGovern’s in Timinstown to buy some groceries, and there on the counter, on the front of one of the Northern Ireland newspapers, was a photograph of herself and Sally with their arms around each other weeping at the graveside. She’d felt sick, dizzy, furious all at once, she felt her face change colour. Mrs McGovern, embarrassed on her behalf, leant over and folded the paper to hide the photo. ‘Wouldn’t you think they’d know people had been through enough without doing things like that,’ she said, and Helen had stared at her, unable to speak. Then Rosemary and Michael had called round to see them later that day, and Rosemary told them, rather shamefacedly, that while they were at the burial a young woman had come up to her and said, ‘Poor
Cate’s taking it badly, isn’t she?’ Because of the familiar way she spoke, Rosemary assumed she must be a close friend of the sisters, and replied, ‘Yes, but Helen’s taking it worst of all, if you ask me.’ She was shocked when, a short time later, she saw the woman writing in a notebook, and realised that she was a reporter, not a family friend. But worst of all had been the British tabloids, where the death was reported coldly and without sympathy, much being made of Brian’s Sinn Fein membership, and the murder having taken place in his house. The inference was that he had only got what was coming to him. At their mother’s insistence they’d made a formal complaint which was rejected. Helen had known it would be: her legal knowledge told her, after a close study of the texts, that they’d been damn clever: the tone was hostile, but no specific accusations were made, it was guilt by association. But they all took it to heart, especially their mother, a person for whom bitterness had hitherto been an unknown thing.

  The morning after the party, Helen thanked Owen for having asked her along.

  ‘Ah, give me a break, you had a lousy night, admit it. I saw you getting stuck into David McKenna. He’s not a bad guy, Helen, believe me. He’s had hard times himself.’

  ‘You’re breaking my heart,’ Helen murmured.

  ‘Listen to me: Mary’s known him since they were children, they grew up in the same street.’ Usually, Owen and Mary didn’t like to talk about Mary’s background. Helen knew that she’d started out in a tiny terraced house in a street off the lower Falls; knew too that it wasn’t to be mentioned, so she was surprised at what Owen said. ‘David’s father was shot too, a man that never was in anything, and David was just a wee fella when it happened. His mother was left with five of them to rear. Nobody knows better than I do why you don’t like journalists, and you’re right, insofar as some of them are arseholes of the first order. But David’s a decent guy. He’s not the worst, not by a long chalk.’

  Helen heard Owen out in silence. She thought about what he had said on and off during the day, and when they were closing up the office that evening, she asked for David’s phone number.

  ‘I owe you an apology,’ she said, when she rang him that night.

  ‘I know you do,’ David replied. ‘You owe me an explanation, too, and if you’ve any decency you’ll buy me a drink.’ She was grateful for his hard, dry tone, for she’d had a bellyful of people oozing sympathy at her by this stage; and when they did get together a few nights later in a city-centre pub, the tone was still sharp and unsentimental. They ordered two double Bushmills, for which Helen paid.

  ‘I know what happened to your father,’ he said bluntly. ‘I saw the reports. Now I’m going to tell you about what happened to mine. He was an electrician, and he worked some of the time with another man, a friend of his, who was a carpenter. They were going to a job just outside the city, up in Hannahstown, one morning in winter, and they were ambushed. Their van was forced over to the side of the road, they were taken out, shot in the head and left there. Nobody was ever arrested or charged for it. My da’s friend was in the IRA, a big shot, as it turned out. He had a huge paramilitary funeral. My father wasn’t in the IRA or in anything else. He left five kids. I was the eldest; I was twelve. He was the same age that I am now, thirty-six. My mother was nearly demented. She told me later it wasn’t just that she missed my father, it was more than the loneliness, although there was that. They’d got on great together; I don’t ever remember them arguing or fighting. She told me she’d been terrified at the prospect of bringing up five children on her own, having to provide for us and get us educated and keep us out of trouble. Anyhow, that’s another story in itself. The thing was, in the press reports of the case, my father got tarred with the same brush as your man, they made no distinction between them. As far as the papers were concerned, they were two terrorists, they got what they deserved, nobody was going to waste any sympathy on people like that. It really upset my father’s brother, and it really upset me. I was only a child, but I knew that it wasn’t true, and it wasn’t fair. My uncle wanted to make some sort of complaint, but my mother told him to forget about it. “Who’s going to care about the likes of us,” she said, “that hasn’t two cold pennies to rub together? Do you think the people that write things in the paper care what we think or feel? I have enough to be doing, left sitting with a houseful of children, without wasting my time making complaints that they’ll only be laughing at behind my back.” So I decided that when I grew up, I was going to be a journalist, that there was going to be at least one person who was telling the truth.’ He laughed. ‘Hell, I was only twelve, after all!’

  ‘One thing I hadn’t properly thought through until my father was killed was how hard it is for the emergency services. No matter what training they have, or how well suited they are to their jobs, it must grind them down, the things they have to face.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ David said. ‘People don’t know the half of it.’

  It was a priest who had broken the news to Helen’s mother and Sally. After Brian, he’d been the first person to arrive at the house. He was a curate, in his early twenties, who had only been ordained in the spring of that year; a banker’s son who had grown up in a comfortable home in County Down, who had won a gold medal for Greek at university and spent a year in Rome. He was gentle and idealistic and kind-hearted, and he had never in his life seen anything like what he found in Brian’s and Lucy’s kitchen that night in late October. Sally told Helen afterwards how sorry they’d felt for him, his voice breaking as he tried to comfort them; his own serenity and peace clearly having been shattered by what he had seen.

  ‘I suppose that’s one thing I was lucky in from the start,’ David went on, ‘if you can call it lucky. I knew from the first that what was going on here wasn’t exciting or glamorous. In fairness, I don’t think any of the local reporters think that. They mostly grew up here, so they know the score. You get a lot of foreign journalists over here for a while when things get particularly bad, but as conflicts go, it’s never been fashionable. Maybe in the sixties, early seventies, it was different, when there was a lot of street fighting, riots, but as far as the rest of the world, and the world media are concerned, it’s too localised. The background isn’t exotic enough, and anyway, it’s never been a full-blown war. There’s nothing to get gung-ho about in a body being found in a wet lane somewhere in, say, Tyrone, on a cold, bad night.’ He admitted that you got cynical working there. When the number of people who had been killed was one off a round figure, you found yourself thinking about what you would say in a day or two, when the figure was reached. A photographer friend to whom he had said this remarked, ‘Well, touch wood always that it won’t be you.’

  ‘But there’s something about the whole nature of it,’ Helen argued, ‘about taking things and making stories about them, and that’s all it amounts to: making up stories out of a few facts, and presenting them as though that interpretation was the absolute truth. That’s what I can’t stand.’

  ‘But what do you want instead? Do you want nothing to be known? Would you really have preferred it if your father’s death had been ignored? All news journalists are aware of the problems inherent in journalism, believe me. Trying to get the right balance, in cases like the one you’re talking about, between reporting accurately and honestly on the one hand, and maintaining people’s dignity, and not making them suffer any more on the other: that’s a key issue in the whole undertaking, and everybody knows that.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘I think a lot of reporters couldn’t care less. They have no empathy, no imagination. The medium is a blunt weapon in itself, that’s the problem. It isn’t fitted to dealing with complexity, it isn’t comfortable with paradox or contradiction, and that’s the heart of the problem, if you ask me.’

  They had argued about this issue many times since that first night, and the most she would concede, even now, was that it was a necessary evil. ‘It’s like politics,’ she said, ‘in that it attracts peo
ple of dubious merit. If you’ve got any kind of decency or scruples, you wouldn’t want to get involved in it in the first place, and to get on in either field, you need to have negative qualities, qualities that wouldn’t be to your credit in any other capacity. But,’ she granted, as he started to protest, ‘there are exceptions. I will grant you that there are people in both journalism and politics who got involved from the best of motives, who are genuinely committed to being a force for change, a force for good, who weren’t just interested in maintaining the status quo or feathering their own nests.’ He’d told her that he’d never wanted to work for a newspaper in Northern Ireland, that it was just preaching to the converted, every side buying and reading the papers that expressed their own prejudices.

  She wondered how he managed without being more cynical than he was as she followed his reports over the coming months. He lacked the complete coldness she’d noted in other journalists she knew, where professionalism was all, and it didn’t matter if it was a killing or a Van Morrison concert they were covering, so long as it was a good story, smoothly presented.

  One evening, about six months after they had first met, David rang and asked if he could come over to see her. He told her that something had happened and he didn’t want to be by himself for the evening, nor with colleagues. She told him he was welcome; when he arrived she made coffee and let him tell her in his own good time what had happened.

  ‘It was a story I had to cover this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think after all I’ve seen in the line of duty that anything could throw me again like this, so that’s a shock, apart from anything else.’

  ‘What was the story?’ Helen said. She didn’t look at him. As he continued to talk she wondered if he was going to start to cry.

  ‘Your man they killed last night. Protestant, living in a mixed area, drives a taxi cab, gets a fare that forces him out of his own territory, gets his head blown off. Fucker in the office says this morning, “Well, place he lived, job he did, what else could he expect?” Christ, I tore into him for that! So this afternoon I had to go out to interview the widow. She wanted to talk to the media, wanted to appeal directly that there be no retaliation. She’s sitting on a sofa in her house, with her three children and her mother, and every one of them done in from crying. The woman’s as much bewildered as anything; keeps asking, “What am I going to do, left with three kids? How am I going to manage?” And I mean really asking, as if the cameraman or the guy doing the sound might be able to give her some sort of practical answer. My mother said exactly the same thing when my father was shot. It brought it all back.’ He put his head in his hands for a moment, and they sat in silence. ‘It was like seeing again what had happened to our family, only now as an adult, I can really see what it means. There’s something about it that … that never stops or ends. Do you know what I mean?’