One by One in the Darkness (5 page)

‘Yes,’ said Helen faintly, sorry now she’d ever brought up the subject. She should have said she wanted to be a teacher, then they’d have left her alone.

‘Helen’s going to do great things altogether,’ said her father, smiling proudly at her.

‘Oh, she’ll put all that nonsense out of her head as soon as she
grows up,’ Granny Kelly said. ‘First man looks twice at her, be he selling blades on a street corner, she’ll be off after him, and you’ll hear no more talk of her great ideas, you mark my words.’

Nobody said anything for a moment then: their father looked stunned and Sally whimpered into the silence because she knew something was wrong. At the sound of the tea tray tinkling in the hall, Uncle Michael leapt up to open the door for Aunt Rosemary.

There was a mug for Sally in with the cups and saucers, because the last time they’d been there, she had spilt her tea in her lap. Kate helped her little sister, unfolding a paper napkin for her while the plates of tomato and cheese sandwiches circulated. Tea in Granny Kelly’s house didn’t count as real food, it was just another exercise to make sure you knew the rules, and that you kept them, too. You had to have a respectable number of sandwiches before you could have something sweet, and then you had to choose the most unappealing biscuit on the plate, unless urged to go for something nicer (which you almost never were). Helen dreaded being given no option but to eat a piece of Aunt Rosemary’s seed cake ever since the day Kate had remarked that not only did it look like it had mouse shit in it, it tasted like it too. But her luck was in today, for when the plate came to them there was one pink wafer left, which Kate took, and some Rich Tea biscuits, which Helen was content enough to accept.

As the adults chatted, more warily now, Helen gazed around the room. Even though there was a fire burning in the grate, the parlour always felt cold, perhaps because there were so many glass things in it: a glass-topped table with a biscuit-coloured linen runner on it; a china cabinet containing ornaments and the tea sets people had given Uncle Michael and Auntie Rosemary when they had got married, and a glass vase, which never had flowers in it. Over the fire there hung a framed picture of Grandad Kelly, and even though he had died ever such a long time ago, when their mammy was herself a child, his presence hung over the family in a way Helen couldn’t fully understand, because he was seldom spoken of. She couldn’t help imagining he must have been a rather terrifying person, if only because he’d been married to Granny Kelly. Her idea of her other grandfather
was completely different, perhaps because she could faintly remember him, or because Granny Kate was always talking about him, telling them funny stories and then the tears would stand in her eyes, even while she was laughing and saying things like ‘God, but there wasn’t an ounce of harm in Francis, so there wasn’t!’ She used to wonder how her mother had borne her father’s death, because the very worst thing Helen could imagine was losing either of her parents. Once she’d asked her mother about it, very timidly, and she’d looked so sad when she said, ‘Oh yes, Helen, it was terrible. It made all the difference to me, all the difference in the world.’

His teaching certificate, with an impressive red seal on it, hung in an alcove, and his books, which no one ever read now, were locked in a glass-fronted bookcase. He’d been the headmaster in a little school up near Ballycastle, and on the mantelpiece was the handbell he’d used to ring, to call the children back from the playground when it was time for lessons again. Helen didn’t even like to look at the bell, because it reminded her of the uproar there’d been one day when Kate picked it up and rang it. First, there’d been the hard metal clang of the bell, shockingly loud in the dim room, then Granny Kelly’s cold fury at such a piece of boldness, then Kate crying with shame and hurt at the scolding she got, then Helen crying because Kate cried and Sally starting to howl, and their father putting his head in his hands: oh, that was the most horrible thing to remember! She looked away quickly from the bell, back at the picture of Grandad Kelly which hung over the fire. He didn’t look stern or forbidding in the picture, but puzzled, quizzical.

Once, when they were on holiday at Portrush, their daddy had driven them round the coast to see Grandad Kelly’s school. Tucked away in a green fold of the hills, it was a white-washed building with a blue door and high windows. Beside the school was the teacher’s cottage, where their mammy had lived when she was small, with her parents and Uncle Michael. It was a lovely place, Helen thought: there were sheep in the fields and drystone walls, and all along the roadside there were hedges of wild fuchsia, purple and dark red. The sea crashed in the distance, and the wind had been blowing.

It was strange to think of the brightness there’d been there
when you were sitting now in a chilly, dim parlour. A small lamp was lit on a table beside Granny Kelly, and the only other light in the room was whatever managed to seep in through the long cream blinds which were drawn against the sky. Granny Kelly had to sit in the dark all the time because she had bad eyes, and suddenly Helen thought how horrible that must be for her. No wonder she was grumpy. If Helen was old and stiff and had to wear black clothes all the time and sit in the dark, she would probably be irritable too. That was what Granny Kate was always saying, that you could never really know what it was like to be another person, and because of that, it was wrong for you to judge them. Only God could judge, because only God could see into people’s hearts.

But what a relief it was when their father looked at his watch and stood up! Then, their goodbyes made, they stepped into the street, and it was as if they’d been in the house for a week, rather than an hour or so. Even though it was a day in winter and it was starting to rain out of a cloudy sky, it still seemed bright and fresh to be out in the air again.

They got their Wellingtons: black ones for Helen and Kate, red ones for Sally, their daddy and the shop assistant anxiously pressing the toes of each in turn to make sure that the fit was right. Kate would have liked to have red wellies too, but they didn’t have them in her size. They did some other bits and pieces of shopping, and then he took them into a café and bought them sausage and chips and a bottle of Fanta each, while he had some more tea and a piece of apple pie, and smoked a cigarette. He looked much happier than he had done earlier.

‘I hope I’m not like Granny Kelly when I get old,’ Kate said, shaking the ketchup bottle over her chips.

‘Oh, there’ll be no fear of that,’ their daddy said. ‘You’ll be like your Granny Kate, you’re as like as two peas in a pod, so you are.’

Kate beamed. ‘Helen’ll be like Granny Kelly, then,’ she said impishly.

‘I will not!’ Helen protested, but their daddy just smiled. ‘Ah, Helen’ll be her own woman, won’t you, love?’

After that he bought them a comic each, and a quarter of sweets that were weighed out for them from glass jars: Clove
Rock for Helen, Cherry Lips for Kate, Jelly Babies for Sally. He also bought a box of Milk Tray chocolates for their mammy.

Sally slept in the car on the way home, while Kate read her comic. Helen, who was in her usual place in the front seat, would have liked to have read hers too, but she thought it was more polite to talk to her daddy and keep him company. She liked the journey, anyway, especially the part where you came over the top of Roguery, and far below you could see Lough Neagh, and over to the right was Lough Beg, that their daddy called The Wee Lough, and in the distance were the mountains. When you came over this road at night, it looked like you were driving towards some huge city, because of all the lights, but during the day you could see that it was all just a scattering of small towns, villages and isolated farms.

She wondered if their mammy would be waiting for them, and as the car pulled up at the front of the house they could see her face look out anxiously from behind the parlour curtains.

She rang David at his home rather than at the television studio, because if he was at work at this time of day it meant he wouldn’t be able to see her this evening, so there was no point in contacting him there. She was relieved when she heard his voice on the other end of the line, brisk and distant as he said his number, and warming immediately when he realised who was calling him.

‘Helen, how are you?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, stiffly. It was a sort of code that had evolved between them, so that David would automatically realise that she wasn’t alone, would probably guess, correctly, that Owen, the solicitor with whom Helen worked, was near by and couldn’t but overhear her conversation. What David couldn’t know was that Helen was particularly sensitive about this today because she’d blundered a few hours earlier, having had a loud, tactless row with her mother, losing her temper and shouting down the phone in such a way that Owen was bound to hear her, even though he was in the next room. She’d felt embarrassed and repentant as soon as she hung up, and as a result was perhaps overly cautious now.

‘I wondered if you’d like to come over for an hour or so this evening.’

‘Are you in poor form?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I’ve known better, I must say,’ she replied, in even tones, frowning and doodling tight black grids with heavy pressure on the telephone pad.

He said he would love to come. ‘Steve’s off in London this week, so I’m here on my own anyway.’

‘I can send out for a Chinese.’ She heard him swearing on the other end of the line, and smiled. ‘No, wait, I think there’s a sort of a pie thing in the fridge. Or did I eat that? I can’t remember.’

‘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!’