One by One in the Darkness

by Deirdre Madden

  It made Helen feel sad to look at the images on the screen. It had been like that, yet not like that: the pictures told only part of the story. She remembered the austerity, even though she hadn’t been aware of it at the time, and she wondered how you ever got to the essence of things, of your time, your society, your self. It struck her as strange that out of her whole family, she, the only one whose life was supposedly dedicated to the administration of justice, was the only one who didn’t believe in it as a spiritual fact, who perhaps didn’t believe in it at all. Before the programme was over, she could no longer bear to watch it.

  They put on a video, and finished the wine. David left around midnight, promising to give her a call towards the end of the week.

  Chapter Six

  As Sally grew up, she continued to be frail and weak, and much more hesitant than either of her sisters. The nosebleeds from which she suffered continued on and off, but the doctors said they could do nothing for her. They also said they thought it was nothing serious, and that she would probably grow out of it in a year or two. Granny Kate took a great interest in this, as she did in everything concerning her grandchildren. She got Charlie to drive her and Sally down to the monastery in Portglenone, to ask the monks to pray for her. Kate and Helen were left out of this trip, much to their annoyance. Sally came back, looking frightened and proud, holding a prayer book Granny had bought for her at the monastery. She had medals, blue ones, for her sisters, and they added them to the already laden chains which they wore around their necks. Then, sometime later, Granny heard of someone in Ardboe who had a cure for nosebleeds, so she told Emily and Charlie that Sally ought to be taken there. This time, Helen and Kate clamoured to be taken along, and were surprised when their father and Granny had no objections.

  Granny had managed to get hold of the phone number of the woman who had the cure, and had rung to make sure that she would be there that evening, because, she said, there was no point in driving all that distance on a fool’s errand. The woman also gave Granny exact instructions on how to reach her house; which turned out to be a nondescript little place with a tin roof, hidden at the end of a pot-holed lane. ‘You stay here now in the car, like good children,’ their daddy said to Helen and Kate, in a tone which they knew meant it was pointless to argue with him. He led Granny and Sally to the house, which swallowed them up.

  The minutes trickled by like hours. They always did, when you were left to wait in the car. Kate fiddled with the door locks as she grumbled, ‘I bet there’s nothing wrong with Sally at all. I bet she’s just discovered some way to make her nose bleed when it suits her, just to get attention. Have you ever noticed how it always happens when her class are doing sums, or when we’re all just ready to go out to Mass or at some time like that? It never happens in Uncle Brian’s house, when we’re all watching the film on television on a Sunday afternoon, or at home when Mammy’s made us French toast, and never, ever when we’re at Granny Kelly’s because Sally knows she’d go bananas if you started bleeding all over her sofa.’ They watched a few scraggy hens pick around miserably near the door of the house. For five minutes they didn’t speak, but sat in a silence as deep as the silence in a church. ‘I bet we’ve been here for over an hour by now,’ Kate said.

  ‘I wonder what the woman’s doing to Sally,’ Helen said, with relish. They knew vaguely about cures. Granny Kate’s brother was said to have had a cure for strains and sprains, which involved tying flax around the arm or leg that was hurt and then saying special prayers, but they’d heard about others that were more interesting, more dramatic: cures for sties involving thorns from a gooseberry bush, and a cure for shingles where two burning sticks from the fire were held in the form of a cross. Until Sally returned they passed the time inventing cures to which the woman might be submitting her, cures which involved cowpats, nettles, raw eggs and the like, laughing hysterically at the ideas they came up with.

  Like the house in which she lived, the woman with the cure looked completely unremarkable: they saw her when Sally, Granny and their father were leaving, and she came to the door to see them off. Helen and Kate clamoured to know what they’d missed: ‘What did she do to you, what did she say?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to tell anybody,’ Sally said smugly, ‘or the cure won’t work.’

  ‘What did I tell you!’ Kate cried.

  But the evening wasn’t as big a disappointment as it had looked like turning out to be, for their daddy stopped at a filling station to get petrol and when he went in to pay for it, he came out with crisps and chocolates crammed into a brown paper bag, which he handed into the back seat without the conditions or instructions their mother would have added to this gesture. He stripped the cellophane off a packet of Senior Service, and lit a cigarette, narrowing his eyes in a way Helen loved. She promised herself that she would start smoking just as soon as she was old enough, but she knew better than to say this to anyone. She liked the smell of the spent match, as he waved the flame out.

  Then Granny Kate suggested that they go to see the Old Cross at Ardboe, because it was only just down the road, and it would be a pity to have come all this way and not seen it, especially with it being such a fine night. ‘Have you ever been there before?’ she asked the children.

  ‘Aye, but we’d love to go again,’ Kate said.

  And so instead of heading straight for home, they drove for a short while down narrow roads with high hedges. Their daddy parked the car right beside the high cross, which was enclosed by railings. The surface of the stone was weathered, so that some of the biblical scenes carved on the cross had become indistinct. Their daddy pointed out and named Adam and Eve, the Marriage at Cana, the Last Judgement. It didn’t matter that the pictures weren’t perfectly clear, Helen thought: it was enough in itself that the cross was there; to think of it having stood there for all those hundreds of years amazed her almost as much as it amazed and delighted her father. He loved history, and he was always talking about it. Uncle Brian talked about history a lot too, but she would never have said that he loved it. There was a difference, although she wouldn’t have known how to explain or define it. For her daddy, it was the fascination of thinking about people who had lived hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, where he lived now; there was something about the odd combination of closeness and distance that caught his imagination like nothing else. He’d taken them once to see the elk’s head that had been found near Toome years earlier: a grey bony thing that frightened the life out of them, with it’s massive antlers and hollow eye sockets. ‘Can you imagine a yoke like that wandering around here? Doesn’t that beat all?’ Helen would always remember the sob of excitement in his voice. ‘Isn’t the world a wonderful place!’ Now and then in the newspaper there’d be a piece about a farmer somewhere who’d found something on his land: a Viking sword, or a pot of coins, or even a dug-out canoe from the Iron Age, and he’d always draw their attention to it, read it out to them. ‘Would you like that to be you?’ their mammy would say. ‘I’d die happy, so I would,’ he always replied.

  They went through the gate into the graveyard which lay behind the cross. There was the ruin of a tiny church there, and the graveyard itself overlooked the wide expanse of the lough. It was a warm, sticky evening, and Granny Kate flapped her hand in front of her face to drive away the midges that hummed around her. ‘Hasn’t it got terrible heavy,’ she complained. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if we had thunder out of this.’ The enormous sky was full of dark-blue clouds, and although it was late in the evening now, there was still a strong, odd light which lit up the trees and the black-and-white cattle that were grazing in a field below the graveyard. When they heard voices, the cattle slowly raised their heads, then plodded across the field to see what was happening.

  Charlie dug into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a handful of loose change. He gave the children a penny each, to hammer into the tree at the far side of the graveyard. From a distance it looked quite ordinary, perhaps a bit stunted, but when you got clo
ser you could see that it’s trunk was almost more metal than wood, for people had hammered coins, pins and nails into it. Their daddy helped them each to find a place for them to hammer in their penny. It wasn’t difficult, for the wood of the tree was quite soft.

  ‘Don’t forget to make a wish,’ Granny said.

  ‘I’m going to wish that Sally’s nose doesn’t get better, so that we get plenty more nice outings like this,’ Kate said.

  ‘Why, you cheeky wee monkey,’ Granny said, but she was laughing, for all that she tried to hide it.

  When they were in the car on the way home, Kate bribed Sally with Rolos to try and coax her into telling what the cure had been, while Helen listened in to what the grown-ups were talking about.

  ‘Brian asked me to be sure and ask you if you want to go with him to the march on Saturday,’ Granny said.

  ‘What march is that?’

  ‘The civil rights march that’s to be in Coalisland. I thought he told you about it already.’

  ‘Aye, now you mention it, I think he did say something about it to me a while back. Is Peter going?’

  ‘Are you joking me?’

  Their daddy was quiet for a while, and then he said, ‘Ach, I don’t know. Do you think it’ll do any good?’

  ‘Well it won’t do any harm,’ Granny said. ‘I’d have thought you’d have had a bit more go in you, Charlie. I’d be there myself if I was younger than I am now. When you think of what people have to put up with in this country, well, we have to make a start somewhere in telling them that we’ve had enough of that.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘Tell Brian I’ll go with him.’

  But when the time came he didn’t go, because one of the cattle fell sick. He was up all Friday night with it, and they had to call the vet twice. When Brian called to collect his brother on his way to Coalisland, Charlie just shook his head. ‘March? I’d fall in a pile I’m that done. But I’ll go with you another time, so I will.’

  On the Sunday, when the sisters went over to Brian’s house their cousins Johnny and Declan were full of the march. ‘It was great. We all sat on the road and sang rebel songs. There was nothing the police could do to stop us. Get your daddy to bring you along the next time,’

  The summer ended, school started again, and Sally’s nosebleeds began once more. Helen and Kate became embarrassed at being called out of class; dreaded the moment when some wee girl would come into the room and say, ‘Please, Miss, Sally Quinn’s not well again, and she needs one of her big sisters.’

  ‘And so then you have to go to her class and she’s lying on a rug in the bookstore, like an eejit,’ Helen told their mother.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ Sally wailed.

  ‘She can, too,’ Kate said, when their mother decided to keep Sally at home after her nose bled on a Monday and then again on the Tuesday. For the rest of that week, while Helen and Kate were being hurried through their breakfast, and packed off to school with a few cheese sandwiches, Sally would creep into her parents’ warm, empty bed, where she snoozed and drowsed until the middle of the day. Then she got up and after lunch, would spend the rest of the afternoon playing with the kittens in the back yard, helping her mother to make pastry, or just doing some colouring in at the kitchen table. Her nose didn’t bleed once during these days, and she was fine over the weekend, but when Helen and Kate were getting up for school on Monday morning, they could hear Sally’s thin whine: ‘I’m not well, Mammy.’

  Still in her pyjamas, Kate stormed into the other room. ‘If she’s not going, Helen and me are staying at home too, because it’s not fair.’ Their mother stood up for Sally, but then their daddy weighed in, and said that all three of them would be going to school, and that there would be no more nonsense about it. Sally grizzled a bit, but she and her mammy knew that because he hardly ever got involved in matters like this, when he did, there was no turning him. Kate grinned as the three of them got into the car, including Sally with her satchel and her sandwiches. ‘And if you don’t feel well, don’t be sending for Helen or for me, because we won’t come.’

  Sally was fine that day, and for weeks afterwards was, as Uncle Peter said, ‘as healthy as a kipper’.

  There was another march announced, this time it was to be in Deny At home now, all the talk was about civil rights, and their father said that he wouldn’t miss this march, ‘no matter if every beast I have keels over the night before it’. The Apprentice Boys had called a march for the same day when the civil rights march was announced, and so they both had been declared illegal, which of course made it more important for everybody to be there. The children clamoured to be taken along too, but neither of their parents would hear of it.

  ‘You’re too small,’ their father insisted. ‘If there was any trouble and you got hurt, even the least little bit, even if you just got very badly frightened, I’d never forgive myself for it.’

  ‘But Declan and Johnny are going.’

  ‘Aye, that’s as may be, but Una isn’t going.’ This didn’t explain or excuse anything for Helen and Kate, it just made it seem worse.

  ‘I can’t wait until I’m grown up,’ Helen said. ‘I’m going to do exactly as I please!’

  To make it up to them, Granny said she would take them out for the day: ‘We’ll go to the Holy Well.’

  ‘How will we get there?’

  ‘We’ll walk.’

  ‘But it’s miles away! We’ll never walk that!’

  Granny laughed. ‘Of course you will, you only think that it’s far. Sure if you went on the march, you’d have to walk at least that, maybe far further.’

  Kate looked doubtful: she thought she could see Granny smiling. ‘I tell you what, I’ll ask Peter to come and collect us, so you won’t have to walk the whole way back home afterwards.’

  The walk turned out to be more enjoyable than they had expected, and they dawdled along the roads, which rose and fell and twisted and turned; roads lined with hedges in their autumn colours, and bright with berries. The long thick grass in the ditches was wet when they stepped into it, to avoid the cars and tractors which occasionally passed them by. The people in the vehicles lifted their hands to the family, whether they knew them or not, and Granny Kate greeted them in return. A tractor passed them, driven by a young man with thick black hair.

  ‘That’s Willy Larkin’s big brother, Tony,’ Kate said. ‘Willy says somebody saw a Mystery Man in the woods behind the school last week. He says he had a big dark coat on him, and a black hat, but where his face should have been, there was only a blank.’

  ‘And did Willy himself see this man?’ Granny asked, as Sally gripped her hand more tightly.

  ‘No, somebody told him about it, and then he told me.’

  ‘If people know he’s there in the woods, how come he’s such a mystery?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. She was disappointed that Granny was so dismissive of the idea of the Mystery Man: she’d enjoyed the fright of it, the thought of the dark, faceless figure.

  ‘Sure if he had no face, wouldn’t he be walking into things? How would he be able to see where he was going? How would he eat his dinner, if he didn’t have a mouth?’

  ‘Maybe it just was that you couldn’t see his face, I don’t know,’ Kate replied, uncertain now.

  Helen was only half-listening to this: she was still thinking about Tony Larkin, about something he’d done at the carnival during the last football tournament at the start of the summer; something which had upset her, particularly because she hadn’t been able to understand why.

  They always went to the carnival at least once when it was on. Usually it was their daddy who took them, and he’d give them fistfuls of loose change to play the fruit machines or to pay the woman at the hoopla stall, who looked like an African queen, with wooden bands packed on her arms, from her wrist to above her elbow. They’d go on the swingboats, or the dodgem cars. Helen liked the noise of the place; it excited her: the sound of the big generator that ran the
amusements, the screams and shouts of people, the raucous music. There were bright, gaudy lights, vans selling ice cream, minerals and chips, and a marquee, where there’d be a dance for the grown-ups, late in the evening. Usually there was nothing Helen liked better than the carnival, but on this particular evening she already felt a bit uneasy, because Uncle Peter was there, staggering about the place with the neck of a bottle sticking out of his coat pocket. She saw her daddy go over and talk earnestly to him at one point, as if he were trying to explain something difficult to him. She noticed how alike they looked. It was as if her daddy had two selves, and the good, sober one was trying to persuade the one who was always getting drunk to change his ways. Uncle Peter didn’t want to listen: eventually she saw him push her father’s arm aside, and then he walked unsteadily away. She went off then and played at the hoopla for a while with her sisters. Later, she saw Uncle Peter arguing with some young boys. They were teasing him and laughing at him, and Helen felt hurt and angry on his behalf, but there was nothing she could do to help him. She walked away. Sally and Kate got on the dodgem cars, and she was standing watching them when her daddy came up to her and drew her aside, so that she would be able to hear what he was saying above the loud music.

  ‘I have to take Uncle Peter home,’ he said, pressing a few coins into her hand. ‘Look after the other two until I get back. Buy yourselves ice creams, or whatever you want. I’ll be as quick as I can.’ She turned and watched him go, watched him walk over to where Uncle Peter was sitting on the wet ground behind a van selling chips. He had his arms folded across his knees, and his head resting on his arms, as if he wanted to sleep. Helen watched her father gently help him to his feet, and then lead him away from the field where the carnival was taking place, out to the road where the cars were parked.

  When Sally and Kate came off the dodgems, Helen was vague in her explanations as to where their father had gone. She bought them each an ice cream cone, and then she paid for her sisters to go on the waltzers. For a while she stood watching them spinning and screaming, then she turned to look at the swingboats which were near by. Mostly it was children who played with these, but the couple in the swingboat at the end were Tony Larkin, and a fair-haired girl his own age, whose name Helen didn’t know, but whom she vaguely recognised from seeing her at the chapel on Sundays. Tony had just left school, so that meant he was a grown-up.