One by One in the Darkness

by Deirdre Madden

  Helen did.

  ‘When I came out of the house, I was shaking. I tried not to let the others see. I thought, I can’t do this job any more. I can’t go to another funeral, or talk to another widow, or to parents that have had a child killed, I just can’t, Helen.’

  Helen knew that he could, and she also knew that now was not the time to say it. She knew that by the next morning, he would regard this as weakness; that was why he had chosen to come to her. For she knew the same feeling of weary depression which came from working in a relentlessly negative atmosphere. From her work and her life she knew the fate of both the victims and the perpetrators, and both were dreadful.

  The following morning, when she turned on the radio, she heard that a Catholic man had been killed, down in the Markets area. The UFF said it was in retaliation for the killing of the taxi driver.

  Almost a year later, Helen said to David, ‘Do you remember that man who was killed, the taxi driver? They’ve charged somebody with it, a young guy, Oliver Maguire.’

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘We’re defending him.’

  Helen had once commented to Cate that what she liked least about being in her thirties was how it became harder to make friends. Even without their realising it, people’s lives shut like flowers at dusk, became set in the cement of career, marriage, children, mortgage, pension funds and life insurance. When you were in your twenties, things were still undecided, but by the time people turned thirty, choices had been made; hopes and plans had either worked out or had not. People began to assess if those they knew had done as well as they expected them to; and admired their successes or shunned their failure accordingly. Similarly, they looked to others to console and support them in their fate; and this anxious assessment of peers was no less thorough for usually being unconscious. One thing was certain: it certainly took it’s toll of friendships. Helen found that her relations with people she’d known since university cooled and waned in accordance with these social laws which, she grew to realise, were as strict as the laws of physics.

  With childhood friends, it was different. No matter what social differences there were, differences of class, career or income, there was the absence of some sort of obstruction, which was always there with others. She still felt at ease with her cousins, or people like Willy Larkin, with whom she’d gone to school, and whom she would sometimes meet when she was down home at the weekend. Perhaps it was simply that if you’d known people when they were children, you’d known them at their most vunerable, and you never forgot it.

  As for David, the strange thing was that their friendship did have that same quality. Perhaps because his childhood had ended so abruptly it had a particular significance, and he had an uncanny facility for remembering and describing it so vividly that it filled in Helen’s own slight knowledge of the city as it was in the nineteen sixties. She didn’t reciprocate by telling him about her own childhood. She suspected that David wouldn’t have been particularly interested, and that suited her, because she preferred to keep it private, to herself and her sisters.

  The other significant thing which suggested a particular closeness between them was that they were able to fight with each other: they could trade insults without any danger of the friendship being spoiled. Helen criticised him for his vanity over his looks and clothes, a matter which went far beyond the mere need to be well turned out for his job. There was nothing he liked better than being recognised in public. The first time it happened when he was in Helen’s company, she could scarcely believe that his naïve delight was for real: ‘Look! Those people are staring at us and whispering to each other! They’ve recognised me, they know who I am. Don’t stare, pretend we haven’t noticed them.’

  ‘They’re probably saying what a clapped-out old wreck you are in the flesh, compared to how you look on television,’ Helen said. She took him to task for his nervousness (and he conceded that he had a problem with this), so that she would physically wrench from his hands the paper napkin he was absent-mindedly shredding, or the flower he was taking apart. She in her turn would take things from him in the vein of ‘There’s a wee nun in you, a real wee prim prig of a nun, so there is,’ or he would tell her she was a slob and needed someone to take her in hand and sort her out, only she was so damn grumpy that it was no wonder people weren’t exactly queueing up for the job. ‘Piss off,’ she would say, and he’d reply, ‘You see what I mean?’

  While David was preparing the food, Helen wondered what, if anything, she would say to him about Cate. He was sure to ask why she had felt down in the afternoon, and there was no point in trying to fob him off with a lie, because David always knew at once when she wasn’t telling the truth. Of course she would talk to him about it, perhaps even at some length, because they shared all their worries frankly, but it was too soon, she thought. It wasn’t just that if she talked to him about it before she had had a chance to talk to Cate, she would be betraying her sister. It was also that she didn’t know how Cate herself felt about things, that if she were simply to say, ‘Cate’s pregnant,’ it would sound banal, and Helen wasn’t at all sure that it was banal, and if it wasn’t, then what was it? She wondered how Cate herself saw it, and suspected that she would be secretly delighted, even if she was, for a day or so, for form’s sake, pretending to go along with her mother’s view that Cate had been overtaken by calamity. Thinking of this reminded her of her mother, and she cringed to think of how she had spoken to her earlier that day. She went upstairs to her bedroom, and phoned home. Sally answered.

  ‘I’m glad you called, I wanted to ring you later anyway.’

  ‘I wanted to tell Mammy I’m sorry for shouting at her earlier.’

  ‘I’ll pass on the message, but to tell you the truth, it’s the best thing you could have done. It worked like a charm,’ Sally said coolly. ‘I’ve banned Cate’s situation as a subject of conversation for the rest of the night, and I’ll make sure we all get a good night’s sleep. What I wanted to ask you is would it be all right for Cate to go to Belfast tomorrow and stay the night with you?’

  ‘Of course, no problem. Tell her to call at my office for a key, so that she can let herself in if she gets here before I get home from work.’

  ‘Thanks a million, Helen. I just want Mammy to have a bit of time apart from Cate right now, to get used to the idea of what’s happening, and I want to have time to talk to her by herself.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

  ‘Trust me, really, I know what I’m about. And listen, don’t worry. Obviously there’ve been a lot of tears today, but it’ll pass, everything’ll be all right.’

  Feeling much better from this than she would have expected, she went back to the living room, where David was finishing setting out plates of salads and cold meats. As she had expected, he was impressed with the wine.

  ‘Cate gave it to me. She came home at the weekend. She’s got problems at the moment, and we’re all in a bit of a pother about it, but I’ll tell you next time I see you.’ He nodded, and didn’t pursue the subject. ‘How are things with Steve and yourself? You said he was off in London again.’ David made a wry face and sighed.

  ‘I don’t know what to think, truly I don’t. He’s gone for a week. It’s supposed to be for work, but I know that’s just an excuse. I suppose I can only explain it by saying that things are exactly as they were in the past, only then it was a case of my going over there as often as I could to see him; and now it’s a case of him going back as often as he can.’

  Steve’s introduction to Northern Ireland, and his eventual decision to live there, was something in which Helen had been implicated. Early on in their friendship, David told Helen he was involved with a man in London, whom he visited often because he was too afraid to come to Belfast. ‘Keep asking,’ Helen had said. ‘He may change his mind in due course.’ And finally, Steve did decide to risk a weekend trip.

  But David wasn’t as delighted by this as Helen had expected him to be. ‘What if he hates it?
Seeing soldiers all over the place; and the barracks all fortified and stuff; that’s going to frighten the life out of him. And what if anything happens? I mean, what if a bomb goes off, or the car gets hijacked or something?’

  ‘Look, this was your idea in the first place; you can’t back out of it now,’ Helen said. ‘All you can do is plan it very carefully, and hope for the best.’

  She offered to help him, so they got together and discussed at length the things it would be all right for Steve to see, and those from which he should absolutely be protected. Steve arrived the following Friday evening, and on Saturday morning Helen called round to David’s house to be introduced.

  ‘So how’s it going?’ Helen whispered when Steve was out of the room.

  ‘Great, so far. No problems,’ David whispered back. ‘He didn’t pay much heed to the checkpoint at the airport, and once we got on to the motorway, we just barrelled up to the city. My luck was in: you know what a marvellous evening it was yesterday. Belfast Lough was like glass, the sun was on the mountains, it couldn’t have been better. Steve couldn’t get over how beautiful it was, and that sort of made up for the city being so ugly when we got into it. He says it reminds him of Manchester, and fortunately, he likes Manchester. So far, so good. Let’s just hope the weather holds.’

  And the weather did hold, throughout the weekend. David rang Helen at work on Monday to say everything had gone according to plan. He’d taken Steve down to the Mournes on Saturday, and they’d had lunch in Newcastle. In Belfast, he’d put him in a snug at the Crown, with as much Guinness and as many oysters as he could manage.

  ‘And nothing he saw freaked him out?’

  ‘No, but he didn’t realise how hard I was working to make sure he did see precious little. We saw a few jeeps of soldiers in the city centre, but he expected that. The thing is, he expected far more, far worse. No, I think we can say it’s been an unqualified success.’

  A few weeks later, David went over to London. On his return, he called to see Helen.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been the victim of my own success. Steve wants to come and live here.’

  ‘What should I say? Congratulations?’

  ‘No!’ he cried. ‘This isn’t what I wanted: not what I wanted at all. I just wanted him to feel good about coming over here from time to time,’

  ‘He obviously liked Northern Ireland much more than you expected.’

  David looked at her as if she had lost her mind. ‘Liked, Helen? How could he have liked it? He didn’t even see it. Roscoffs, the Crown and the Mountains of Mourne: how can he decide on the strength of that?’

  ‘Well then,’ Helen said, after a moment’s thought, ‘you’re just going to have to get him to come back and have another look, aren’t you?’ And she smiled.

  A few weeks later, Steve returned. This time, when David collected him at the airport, he didn’t drive into Belfast by the motorway, but went over the Divis mountain, through Turf Lodge and then down on to the Falls Road, pointing out the heavily fortified barracks and all the other things which, before, he would have been at pains to conceal. He parked outside the off-licence above which Helen had her office. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ he said, locking Steve in the car. ‘Don’t go away.’ An army foot patrol obligingly ambled past at that moment, and when David returned, Steve looked suitably anxious.

  On the Saturday he took him back over to West Belfast, took him through the narrow web of streets, showed him the Republican murals on the gable walls around the lower Falls, then took him over to the Shankill and showed him the Loyalist murals. The ‘Peace Line’, an ugly structure of corrugated iron and barbed wire, which separated the two communities, apparently shocked Steve more than anything else he saw. In Milltown Cemetery, David showed him the many IRA graves, and the Republican plot where Bobby Sands and some of the other hunger strikers were buried; and he pointed out how the gunman who attacked mourners at a funeral in 1987 would have been able to get into the lower part of the graveyard from the Loyalist ‘Village’. The whole time David and Steve were in the cemetery, an army helicopter hovered directly overhead, and there was drizzling rain.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ David told Helen a week later. ‘He’s still hellbent on coming to live here.’ Steve was far from foolish. He said he’d been shocked and depressed by much he had seen, but he’d expected this: he knew the first visit had been utterly unrepresentative. ‘Do you know what he said? “It strikes me that what’s going on here is almost as much a class thing as a sectarian issue.” Is that shrewd or what? And so he argued then that he wouldn’t be exposed to the conflict very much, because he’d be safe in the part of town where I live.’

  ‘So he hasn’t even moved here yet and already he’s trotting out the old line, “Where I live it’s safe, but in such and such a place you could get shot at any moment”?’

  David shrugged. ‘Looks like it. He’s fed up with London too. I suspect that’s a really crucial point. He noticed the high standard of living here; saw how much money there is washing around in certain circles. He just couldn’t believe the prices of property: you can get something really nice here for an absolute fraction of what you’d have to pay for something comparable anywhere in England, let alone London. He says he’s sick of spending hours packed in the Tube going to his work every day; that London’s filthy and dangerous now. No, Steve’s decided that he wants out, and that he wants to come here.’

  ‘Look on the bright side then: maybe he’ll really like it here,’ Helen said, but David shook his head.

  ‘He’ll get bored,’ he said. ‘It’ll be all right for a while, and then he’ll begin to miss London, no matter what he says. Believe me, I know him well. And get this: the chain of clothes shops he works for is opening a branch in Belfast and they need a manager to come over from England to set it up. Not surprisingly, people aren’t exactly falling over themselves to apply, so he’s in with a very good chance of getting the job.’

  ‘Is it that you really don’t want him to come over here?’

  ‘No, it’s just this: it won’t work out. I know it won’t work out.’

  ‘And have you ever considered going to live in London?’

  He stared at her with incomprehension. ‘You are joking, aren’t you? What about my work? What if … what if they packed me off to something like … like the fucking Lib. Dem. Party conference? Can you imagine it? Christ!’

  And so Steve moved to Belfast and David was wrong only about the length of time it would take for the novelty to wear off. It was a good six months before Steve started to grumble, longer again before he started to make trips back to London.

  ‘Is it anything in particular?’ Helen asked now, over dinner, and David shook his head.

  ‘It’s just what I expected. I don’t know what’s going to happen now,’ he said. ‘Or maybe I do, and that’s the problem.’ Helen poured more wine into his glass. He was twisting the edge of a wicker tablemat out of shape, and he looked so miserable that, for once, she let him away with it.

  ‘This is terrible,’ he said. ‘I thought the idea was that I came here to cheer you up. Tell you what, there’s a documentary on TV tonight for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of the Troubles. We’ll have a look at that; that’ll lift our hearts.’

  And the thing was, that it did: they watched with something between grief and hilarity the old black-and-white footage of marches and riots. The young women wore miniskirts and had long, straight hair; all the older women wore headscarfs.

  ‘It all looks so old-fashioned, I just can’t believe it,’ Helen said. ‘You just don’t appreciate how things have changed until you see something like this,’

  ‘But you can see too how it started,’ David said. The people on the screen looked weary and put-upon: it would have been easy to believe that they were too cowed ever to be a threat, and they could imagine the shock it must have been when their patience broke.

  ‘What do you think is the bi
ggest difference between now and then?’ Helen asked.

  David replied unhesitatingly: ‘We are. The educated Catholic middle class. I don’t think anyone fully anticipated that, or thought through what it would mean, but it should have been easy to foresee.’

  ‘People like that,’ and she pointed at the screen, ‘wouldn’t have been able to believe that their children could come so far, so fast.’

  ‘Some of their children,’ he corrected her.

  ‘I still remember it from school, how the nuns used to din it into us all the time: “Work hard, girls, because you have more to give society than you can perhaps realise. We need our Catholic doctors and nurses and university lecturers; our Catholic lawyers and civil servants.” Did you get that line at your school?’

  ‘Of course we did. There was far more along those lines than there was suggestion that we might go on for the Church. And it did make a difference, just as the IRA campaign has made more of a difference to changes in attitudes than most people are prepared to admit.’