One by One in the Darkness

by Deirdre Madden

  The leaflet showed a crude drawing of an enormous bottle, to which many tiny figures, some on their knees and struggling, were bound by chains. ‘Are you a slave to the evil of alcohol?’ was printed under it, in heavy type, and then there was a text, sprinkled with quotations from the Bible. Sally looked from her mother to her father, her mouth slightly open, a furtive look on her face. Charlie started to laugh so much, that people around looked at them.

  ‘Now I hope you’ll pay heed to that, Sally,’ he said, ‘for your mammy and me have had enough of you reeling in night after night, taking the two sides of the road with you.’ Sally, who didn’t know what he was talking about, smiled cautiously, and looked even more guilty.

  When they went to see Granny Kelly, a few days before Christmas, it was a different type of outing altogether. They had to get dressed up in their Sunday clothes, and as they waited for their father to get the car ready, Helen noticed how her mother, standing over by the window, was twisting the rings on her fingers, a sullen, unhappy look in her eyes. Their daddy came back into the house.

  ‘Are you right?’

  ‘I want to change my skirt,’ she said, moving to the door.

  He smiled and said wearily, ‘Your skirt’s grand, you look lovely in it. There’s no need to change.’

  ‘Ach, I don’t know, I don’t feel right in it.’

  ‘Put on your green one, then.’

  Perhaps their parents didn’t realise that the children’s sensibilities were delicately tuned to emotional falseness, and so they registered the contrast between this, the tense atmosphere in the car and the apparent delight displayed on their arrival in Ballymena. Granny Kelly herself, wreathed in smiles, came out to the door to welcome them, and led them into a parlour which looked warmer than usual, because of the glittering Christmas tree and the foil streamers. Uncle Michael, Aunt Rosemary and the cousins were there, and a casual observer might have been fooled. But the children noticed how their daddy and Uncle Michael both talked more loudly than usual, and that although their mother smiled and smiled, it never went beyond her mouth, never reached her eyes. When she laughed, it was forced and nervous, not the full, unbuttoned laughter they would hear at home. The children sat neatly on the sofa, sucking pink wafer biscuits and sipping weak tea, and noticing far more than the adults in the room would ever have believed.

  After all the chit-chat died down the conversation turned, inevitably, to civil rights, and the marches which had been taking place during the autumn.

  ‘Bloody head-cases, so they are,’ Uncle Michael said.

  ‘You think so?’ This was the children’s mother, and the tone of her voice had changed, but Uncle Michael either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He gave a little laugh and shook his head as if it were all such nonsense it was hardly worth talking about.

  ‘I mean, how do you think it’s going to end? O’Neill has offered them a few odds and ends to keep them quiet, and of course that’s got the other side’s backs up. Do these People’s Democracy crowd think the ones up in Stormont are going to turn round and say, “God, right enough, there is people in this country that have damn all and we’re doing less than nothing to help them; we’d better start giving them jobs and houses and whatever else they want”?’

  ‘So are people to just sit there like wee mice, and not even ask for what’s their due?’

  Uncle Michael shook his head again. ‘It’ll end in a bloodbath,’ he said. ‘The other side are going to resent the least thing that’s given. They have the power, and they’re not just going to let it be taken away from them. Mark my words: a bloodbath, and the people will have brought it upon themselves.’

  ‘It’s not a question of one side or the other,’ their father began, and he said something about socialism, but their grandmother interrupted him.

  ‘Communists, more like,’ she said. ‘It’s the students I feel most angry about. Look at the chance they’ve been given. If they would sit in the universities and study and work hard, they’d have nothing to complain about, they’d get on in life, get jobs and money; but oh no, they have to be out about the country marching and protesting. The university should just close their doors on them, should boot them out and take in students who are prepared to stick to their books and work.’

  ‘Well now, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you at all there, Mrs Kelly,’ their father said, and they knew this time that he wasn’t going to allow himself to be interrupted or talked down. ‘I was on the march in Deny in October, the one that was disrupted, and I met some of the students there, and I can tell you that I thought them admirable people. They’re not involved in this for themselves. They’re concerned about the people in this country who haven’t had their chances, and who aren’t going to be helped in any way unless somebody makes a stand and gets things moving, unless the people who do have something begin to speak out for those who have nothing.’

  ‘It’s up to every person to look out for himself,’ Granny said, and Uncle Michael nodded at this. ‘I hate to have to say it about my own people, but the Catholics in this country are a feckless, lazy bunch. Given them an opportunity, and they’ll turn their backs on it and walk away.’

  The children could see their parents were angered by this, but they didn’t realise that it was because their father thought what she said was meant to be a slight against their mother; and their mother took it for a veiled insult against her husband’s family.

  ‘The next march there is,’ their mother said, ‘I’ll be on it.’ Everyone in the room looked at her in surprise. ‘And I’ll take the children too.’

  When they got into the car to go home, a short while later, Kate said, ‘It’s good to have that out of the way, isn’t it? Now we can settle down and begin to enjoy Christmas.’

  ‘Oh, Kate,’ their mother said, and they thought she was going to laugh; but she started to cry instead.

  But she kept her word. When the civil rights march from Belfast to Deny took place some two weeks later, it was Emily who insisted that the whole family go to cheer them on. They had to stand and wait for a long time in the raw air; and when at last the students did appear, led by a tired-looking man shouting into a loud hailer, the children felt a sharp mixture of fear and excitement, which was new to them, but which they were to experience many times in the coming years. Helen’s father bent down and whispered in her ear, ‘You’re looking at history.’ But Helen realised this without having to be told. That night she listened to her mother telling Granny Kate how the person leading the march had shouted ‘One man’ and everybody else had shouted ‘One vote,’ ‘One family,’ ‘One house.’ ‘There was a policeman standing right at my elbow,’ she said to Granny, ‘and I didn’t give two hoots, I just shouted back with the rest of them.’ Helen remembered how her mother had looked, standing on the grass verge by the side of the road, with Sally clutching a fistful of her skirt as usual. Her face was red with the cold, but when she shouted the slogans, she’d lost her usual timidity and shyness. Helen knew to look at her how serious all this was: something important had changed.

  Chapter Seven

  TUESDAY

  Just after Cate had left the house that morning to drive to Belfast, she’d met Brian on the road, walking towards her. She stopped the car and rolled down the window.

  ‘I’ve a bit of news for you,’ she said, and watched his smile fade with apprehension. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ Cate smiled foolishly in spite of herself, and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, while Brian stood looking at her for some moments.

  ‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘as the old saying goes, these things happen in the best-regulated families. How’s your mammy taking it?’

  ‘Much as you’d expect.’

  ‘These things sort themselves out in time,’ he said, after another pause. ‘I’ll call up and see her later this morning.’

  ‘Oh, I think I’d give her a wee while yet,’ Cate said hastily. ‘I’m clearing out
myself for a night, to stay with Helen and give Mammy a chance to think it through.’

  ‘It’s as bad as that?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Cate replied, suddenly miserable. Brian leaned towards her. ‘Ach, daughter, this is the worst bit. I mind the time … I mind …’ He looked away. ‘Your mammy’ll come round to it. It’s always a shock at first, so it is.’

  ‘You’re telling me.’ He told her to look after herself. As she drove away she realised that she felt brighter for having spoken to him, without being able to explain to herself exactly why that should be.

  For a moment she even wondered if she felt well enough to head off somewhere for the day; maybe to County Down, that would be good, ending up in Belfast just in time for Helen’s arrival home from work. But she dismissed the idea in the very moment it came to her. She’d slept badly the night before; perhaps she’d need to take a nap for an hour or two in Helen’s place this afternoon. On top of that, she still felt wretched with morning sickness. That at least was one of the benefits of having told her family what had happened: she would no longer have to go through the charade of having to pretend to be well when she felt terrible. God, but Sally was decent! She’d come tapping on Cate’s bedroom door this morning with tea and toast. Having that before she got out of bed had been a good help, as opposed to coming downstairs on an empty stomach and trying not to gag when her mother asked her would she like some scrambled egg. She’d always been great, Sally, and Cate felt guilty now for having taken her so much for granted in the past. The way she’d handed over her car keys, too, without making a big deal about it.

  But that was nothing new either. Often, when Cate was home for a week in the summer, she’d go out for the day with her mother and Sally in Sally’s car. They always liked to go to such places as the Glens of Antrim or the Giant’s Causeway, somewhere you could see magnificent scenery. They would have a picnic, or Cate would treat them to lunch in a hotel. But Sally realised (although she didn’t pretend to understand) that Cate liked to go to other places too. ‘The keys are there,’ she would say, nodding towards where they hung, near the stove. ‘Off you go, if you want.’

  And off Cate did go, many times, driving for hours through the countryside alone, trying to fathom Northern Ireland in a way which wasn’t, if you still lived there, necessary. Or advisable, she thought. Or possible, even.

  Swatragh and Draperstown; Magherafelt and Toome; Plumbridge and Castledawson: her family couldn’t understand her interest in these places. She drove through pinched villages where the edges of the footpaths were painted red, white and blue, where there were Orange Lodges and locked churches; through more prosperous towns with their memorials from the Great War and their baskets of lobelia and fuchsia hanging from brackets from the street lamps, with their Tidy Town awards on burnished plaques and their proper shopfronts. She drove through villages where unemployed men stood on street corners and dragged on cigarettes, or ambled up and down between the chip shop and the bookie’s, past walls which bore Republican graffiti or incongruously glamorous advertisements on huge hoardings. She saw Planter towns that had had the heart bombed out of them; ‘Business as Usual’ signs pasted on the chipboard nailed over the broken windows of The Northern Bank and Williamson’s Hardware. Now and then she would see a Mission tent, or a temporary road sign indicating the way to a ‘Scripture Summer Camp’. She drove along narrow roads between shaggy wet hedges of hawthorn and beech. Once, somewhere in South Derry, she saw a field where a few pale cattle stood up to their knees in nettles and scutchgrass before a ruined building with ‘INLA rule’ painted on it in crude white letters. The cattle stared at her mildly as she passed by.

  She saw signposts for places which had once held no particular significance but whose names were now tainted by the memory of things which had been done there: Claudy, Enniskillen, Ballykelly. She drove and drove and drove under grey skies and soft clouds. The towns and fields slipped past her until she felt that she was watching a film, and then she realised that if she had been asked to pick a single word to sum up her feelings towards Northern Ireland she would be at a complete loss, so much so that she didn’t even know whether a negative or a positive word would have been more apt.

  As she drove to Belfast this morning, she remembered how, during these summer drives, she would sometimes fantasise about moving back to the north to live there, particularly when she saw a house which took her fancy: always a magnificent stone house with ivy growing on it, maybe with a garden running down to a river, the whole thing surrounded by lime trees and oaks. She’d look at a high distant window and imagine herself standing there, looking out from another life. But it didn’t amount to anything, this fantasy; she would do as much if she were on holiday in the Cotswolds or in Tuscany, and build a vague life for herself around some house or market or town half-glimpsed and as quickly forgotten, both the fact of the place and the thought it had stirred.

  Once, during one of her summer drives, she had stopped to buy some petrol in a village in Fermanagh, and she’d been particularly taken with the place. It had been a bright morning and she remembered flowers and an air of quiet prosperity, neat shops, outside one of which bunches of carrots hung with their leafy tops intact. She thought that this looked like the kind of place to which so many of the people she knew in London would like to move, and it belied the idea many of them would have had of life in Northern Ireland. But later that day, while she was listening to the car radio, she heard a report which said that a man of twenty, an RUC reservist, had been shot dead while working in his father’s vegetable shop in that same village. And although she didn’t want to pass through the place again when she was driving home that evening, she had no choice. By then the weather had broken; and the plastic tape which the police had tied to lamp-posts to cordon off the area flapped and strained in the strong wind and rain. An army checkpoint had been set up and every car was being stopped and the whole thing was ghastly and depressing. She thought of the young man dead and felt ashamed of her own easy sentimentality earlier in the day.

  But she was careful never to talk to her family, especially to her mother, about the idea of her moving back to the north, for she was afraid that it might be taken seriously.

  Past Antrim, she turned on the car radio and listened to the news headlines. A man had been shot in his home in North Belfast during the night. A few more bleak items followed, and then the weather forecast, which said that it would be ‘mild and fair’, although Cate could already see dark clouds gathering. Once when she was home she’d remarked to Helen that she thought the forecasts were often inaccurate in Northern Ireland. ‘It’s probably deliberate,’ Helen had replied. ‘If they read out the average day’s news here and then said at the end of it, “Oh, and by the way, it’s going to bucket rain for the next twenty-four hours,” it might be more than people could take.’

  She switched off the radio again and slotted in a cassette, but as she approached Belfast and the traffic got heavier and more complicated she turned the music off too, the better to concentrate. Lorries thundered past on either side of her. ‘Ulster still needs Jesus’, it said in large letters on the side of a church. Far in the distance to her left she could see a cemetery and beyond that Belfast Lough. She drove on, down past the docks and the yellow gantries. She rather liked seeing this part of the city, although she never day-dreamed about living in Belfast. She drove over the Westlink to reach Helen’s office, and it took all of her skill to negotiate her way. She’d driven this in the past, but had asked Sally to talk her through it again that morning before she left the house. She almost missed her turning and ended up on the road to Dublin. The part of the lower Falls where Helen had her office always reminded Cate more of her mother than of her sister, although it had changed a lot since the time she had lived and taught there. Cate was never comfortable in this part of town; she always felt nervous and conspicuous and was afraid that something would happen there. Knowing that this was a prejudice didn’t help her greatly.


  She hadn’t been to Helen’s office before, but had little difficulty finding it. A green door beside an off-licence (‘Handy at the end of a long day,’ Helen used to remark laconically) opened on to a narrow flight of stairs, once she had rung the bell and the buzzer had sounded. At the top of the stairs she turned right into a tiny room where a young man and a woman with a baby were sitting forlornly on a couple of worn-out chairs. The walls were covered in beauty board, and a spider plant was expiring in the corner. Cate could see now what Helen meant about the off licence. The offices in which Cate worked in London were actually quite functional and drab, given the glamorous image of the magazine; but this was something else. A door on the far side of the room opened and a man in his early forties came out. ‘Now, Mr and Mrs …’ he started to say, and then he noticed Cate. ‘Oh, hello, Helen said you would be calling,’ he said, and ushered her through to his office. ‘I’ll see you in a minute,’ he threw over his shoulder as an afterthought to the waiting couple, and closed the door. The office was perhaps slightly bigger than the waiting room, but looked smaller because of the buff folders which were everywhere: two desks were piled high with them, they were heaped on the window-sill, piled on a chair, scattered across the floor. It was like something out of Dickens, Cate thought, and it shocked her to think of her sister spending her working life in such a place.

  ‘Helen had to go down to the Crumlin Road to see someone this morning. She left this for you,’ Owen said, opening a drawer and taking out a key, which he handed to her. Cate had only met Owen a couple of times before, but he was always very friendly towards her. ‘More than he is to me,’ Sally had once said grumpily. ‘He wouldn’t give me the light of day if he could help it. I’m just a wee primary school teacher; what is there to be gained by knowing the likes of me?’