One by One in the Darkness (14 page)

She passed her hands over her eyes. It all seemed so long ago, because now everything was different. Against the dream of the raft she had to set another dream, one which had troubled her, night after night, which gave her no peace.

She was standing in Lucy’s kitchen, and at her feet was a long thing over which someone had thrown a check table cloth. There were two feet sticking out at one end, wearing a pair of boots she’d helped Charlie to choose in a shop in Antrim. The other end of the cloth was dark and wet; there was a stench of blood and excrement. At the far side of the room, a young man was cowering: eighteen, nineteen years old at the most, a skinny, shivering boy in jeans and a tee-shirt, with ugly tattoos on his forearms. His face was red and distorted because he was crying. ‘Please, Missus,’ he kept saying to Emily, ‘please, Missus, I’m sorry for what I did, I’m sorry, so I am, please, Missus …’ She stood staring at him until he was crying so hard that he could no longer make himself understood. Then Emily spoke, quietly, distinctly.

‘I will never forgive you,’ she said.

Oh she couldn’t tell even her own daughters what it was like to wake from a dream like that and know it was the truth, to know that your heart had been forced shut. To be a woman in her late sixties, to have prayed to God every day of her life, and to be left so that she could feel no compassion, no mercy, only bitterness and hate, was a kind of horror she had never imagined.

She had confided only in Father Johnston, the young curate who had anointed Charlie, and she’d talked to him, oddly enough, because she believed he wouldn’t be able to understand. He came to see her frequently after the killing. They sat facing
each other across the kitchen table. Sometimes there would be long silences in which neither of them spoke. She turned away from him, looked out of the window at the winter sky, the bare trees, the grey waters of the lough.

‘The world’s empty to me without my husband,’ she said to this young man, who’d probably never known what it was to take a girl in his arms and kiss her, much less share his life with someone for almost forty years. ‘I can’t forgive them for what they did, Father. I’ll tell you more than that: I don’t want to be able to forgive them either.’

‘Mrs Quinn,’ the curate said, and the tone of his voice made her turn towards him again. ‘I saw what they did to your husband. If somebody did that to my father, I wouldn’t be able to forgive them either. I think the best I could manage would be to pray that someday I might be able to want to forgive them.’ They sat in silence again for some moments. ‘I hope you don’t mind that I come to see you so often,’ he said, and Emily had realised then that it was as much to console himself as to console her that he came to her house. ‘I go to see the other Mrs Quinn too, but that’s different, being there …’ His voice trailed away, and he dropped his eyes, embarrassed, realising he had said too much. Brian had told her that he had heard the priest being sick out in the yard after what he’d seen in the house.

‘You’re always welcome here, Father,’ Emily said. He smiled timidly at her, and she thought of how she had longed for a son. She called him ‘Father’ but she thought of him as a child.

He’d have been little more than a baby when the Troubles started, for it was twenty-five years ago now. When she was at school, she’d read about the Thirty Years War, and she remembered asking the teacher how there could have been such a thing. ‘Did they fight battles every single day for the whole of the thirty years, Miss, or did they stop for a rest every year or so?’ The teacher had said that she didn’t know.

Not long before Cate came home, Sally had taken Emily into Ballymena to do some shopping. They went into the Skandia to have their lunch, and at a nearby table they saw Mrs Larkin. Emily said hello to her, and they exchanged a few words; but during their meal, she found that she couldn’t help looking over at Mrs Larkin. A wee woman in a grey coat, you’d never have
picked her out in a crowd, you’d never have been able to guess all she’d been through: how she stayed closed in her bedroom for months after Tony died; how she wouldn’t utter a word, as if she had been struck dumb; how she’d been in and out of the mental hospital for years after that, until gradually she began to speak a little, to live again a little. At Charlie’s wake she’d gripped Emily’s hand and said, ‘If people tell you you’ll get over it, Mrs Quinn, don’t believe them, because it isn’t true.’ There’d been well over three thousand people killed since the start of the Troubles, and every single one of them had parents or husbands and wives and children whose lives had been wrecked. It would be written about in the paper for two days, but as soon as the funeral was over it was as if that was the end, when it was really only the beginning.

Look at Lucy: poor Lucy, who had always been so relaxed, so easygoing. She’d been on tranquillisers and sleeping tablets for months after she saw Charlie being killed. They’d had a big security light installed in the yard, that switched itself on when anybody came near the house; and bolts and double locks fitted on the doors. It was like Fort Knox when you went over to see Brian and Lucy now, you could hear the keys rattling as they let you in; and still Lucy was living on her nerves.

Nobody could fathom the suffering the Troubles had brought people, and all the terrible things that had happened. When Sally came in a moment later with a cup of tea and some biscuits for Emily, it somehow confirmed this: Sally going over to the window and saying wasn’t that a lovely chaffinch on the tree there; asking Emily if she was warm enough; admiring the Dutch fern Helen had bought for her a couple of weeks ago: this affectionate ordinariness was the dearest thing in life for Emily, and that was what had been destroyed: Charlie should have been there with them.

Sally turned away from the plants and sat down opposite her mother. ‘Well, have you had a reasonable afternoon? Did you have a good think about things?’

‘Ah, my mind’s been all over the place. I was thinking about your daddy.’

‘And about Cate?’

‘I thought about all of you.’

Sally paused. ‘And Cate?’ she persisted gently.

It was some moments before Emily spoke. ‘What I know, Sally, is this,’ she said at last. ‘The next time Cate comes home from England for a holiday, she won’t be on her own. She’ll have a wee baby with her. And I can make the pair of them welcome, or I can always be reminding Cate, even without saying anything directly to her, how bad a show it is for the child to have no father. And I could go on doing that until the child itself is old enough to know what’s going on. But where would that get any of us? It’s what your daddy was always saying, life’s too short for that sort of thing. And yet it is a bad show, Sally, what’s happened. I won’t be able to feel the way I ought to or indeed want to for a while yet. And you and Cate are going to have to bear with me on that. I know what’s required of me, but it’ll take time. Cate will have to be told that.’

Sally smiled. ‘This is as much as I ever expected you to be able to say at this stage; in fact I think it’s great you’re already this far forward. You’re right, too, Cate will have to have this explained to her.’

They heard the sound of a car pulling up outside the house. ‘That’ll be her now. Stay there, I’ll let her in, and I’ll send her in to you, and you can tell her about it yourself, right now.’

They still went over to see Brian’s and Lucy’s family every Sunday afternoon. On one such day together with their cousins, they went out for a walk by the shore of the lough, and when they came back, they could hear voices raised in anger as they approached the house. On going into the kitchen, they found all three brothers locked in dispute.

‘I’m not trying to make out it wasn’t a bad business,’ Brian was saying, ‘for it was.’

‘“Bad business”?’ Peter shouted. ‘For Christ’s sake, it was a massacre!’

Even before he said this the children had guessed what the adults were arguing about; even when they had been down by the shore they knew that their parents would be talking about the bombings in Belfast, because for the past two days, no one had spoken about anything else. That Friday, twenty-two bombs had exploded in the city centre in the space of an hour and a quarter. Nine people were killed, although at first it had been thought that the toll was eleven: the dead had been so badly dismembered that the emergency services had had difficulty in knowing how many bodies they had actually found. Apart from the bombs, the IRA had made many hoax warnings that day, so that the city had been thrown into complete confusion, and people tried desperately to escape, only to find their way blocked every way they turned. Six of the people who died had been taking shelter in a bus station, having been warned away from a place near by.

‘Don’t you even begin to try to explain or justify what happened,’ Charlie said, but Brian pressed on, loudly saying it was the fault of the British army, for having deliberately not passed on all the warnings in time.

‘And if it had been one of your family killed, if it had been Lucy, or Declan, are you telling me you would still be talking the way you are?’ Peter said.

‘You have to see it in context,’ Brian replied. ‘This is a war, and in a war these things happen,’ but he was again howled down by his brothers, neither of whom would make any direct connection between this and certain other things which had happened in the past. The children remembered the grief and anger of their parents six months earlier, when thirteen people had been shot dead in Derry. Their family, like almost all the families they knew, had hung a black flag from the window of their house; and the schools which the children attended had been closed for a day, as a mark of respect. ‘That was wrong and this is wrong,’ Charlie said now; ‘the one doesn’t make the other right.’

In the middle of the following night, Helen, who was a light sleeper, heard her father go past the door of her bedroom, and down the stairs. She waited and when, after what seemed to her like a long period of time, he hadn’t returned, she crept out of her bed and tiptoed down to join him.

The whole house was still in darkness, and she groped her way along the hall until she stood at the open door of the kitchen. She could see the glow of his cigarette at the far side of the room, but even without that, she knew she would have been able to sense his presence there. ‘Daddy,’ she said, softly so as not to frighten him. He called her over to him and she went, the tiles of the floor stone cold under her slipperless feet, and when she reached him he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tight. His stubble was rough against her face, but she didn’t care, and she drank in the smell of him, which was tinged with cigarette smoke. ‘What if …?’ he said eventually, and he embraced her harder. ‘What if …?’ but he couldn’t finish what he was trying to say, and she realised that he was crying. She knew now, all in a rush, what he was thinking; and there, in the darkness, it was as if she had already lost him, as if his loved body had already been violently destroyed. They clung to each other like people who had been saved from a shipwreck, or a burning building; but it was no use, the disaster had already happened. All over the country, people were living out the nightmare which she now dreaded more than anything else. Who was she to think she deserved to be spared? He took her back up to her room and tucked the blankets tightly around her in the bed;
he stroked her face and told her he loved her; he told her to sleep. But she gained a dark knowledge that night which would never leave her.

Everybody was afraid now. People were being abducted and killed; sometimes shot, sometimes beaten to death or mutilated with knives. Bombs exploded, often without warning, killing or maiming anyone who had the misfortune to be near by. A parked, empty car, even on a deserted country road, was now a thing to be feared. Sammy who drove the travelling shop, and the man who sold hardware out of a van, had both long since stopped calling at their house. Charlie accepted this because it wasn’t a personal slight: as Protestants they no longer felt safe driving around a Catholic area at night. They no longer called with anyone the Quinns knew; but Charlie took to heart Wesley Campbell’s refusal to do business with him any longer.

Wesley was a painter and decorator from Castledawson. Over the years he had done work for the family, many times, and they had always been happy with him, because he worked quickly and neatly, and charged a fair price for his labours. More than that, they had enjoyed his company. Every day he would have lunch with them, and during the meal he would keep them amused with droll stories about his mother, who lived with him and his wife. He used to compliment Emily on her baking; and all told, he was a friendly, kind-hearted man. So when Charlie rang him up and asked him when he would be free to come to paper two rooms for them, he was upset to find him evasive. ‘I have a terrible amount of work on hand these days; I can’t make any promises. I’ll get in touch with you in a month or two, maybe.’

Charlie paid no heed to the ‘maybe’, and rang him up again later that year. This time it was Wesley’s wife who answered the phone, and she left him in no doubt whatsoever that Wesley wasn’t available to work for him, nor would he be at any time in the future. This curt dismissal left Charlie in a gloomy mood for days. ‘Me and Wesley got on great together,’ he kept saying. ‘Why is he doing this to me? Sure he knows it makes no odds to me what church he goes to on a Sunday. If he never put his foot across the threshold of a church that would be his business. Maybe I’ll ring him up again and tell him.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ Emily said quickly. ‘Leave the man alone. He’s probably too frightened to come to a Catholic house now, and you’ll only embarrass him if you force the point.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said, and then, after a long pause he added, ‘That’s the terrible thing, Emily, you’re probably right. Wesley afraid to come to my house. That shows you the pass we’ve come to in this country.’

His unhappiness about this episode was only compounded when he admitted defeat and hired a local man, who turned out to be a sloppy worker, and charged Charlie a fortune.

That September, Kate joined Helen at the grammar school, and did so with a bad grace. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to stay at primary school; but she was appalled by the green uniform which she would have to wear every day for the next seven years. ‘It’s like being in jail, so it is,’ she grumbled, and she complained too, once term started, that the teachers were praising Helen to her all the time. They said she would have to be a hard worker, and exceptionally well behaved, if she wanted to be considered as good a student as her sister. ‘They might at least wait until they see what I’m like before they start making comparisons, and giving me such a hard time,’

Towards the end of that year, Granny Kelly died. It was Charlie who took the call from Michael and broke the news to Emily. The children, who were in the next room, heard her screaming ‘No! No!’ and rushed in to see what was wrong. They found their father trying to restrain their mother, who was howling and weeping. ‘Why are you so upset?’ Sally asked innocently when she heard the news. ‘I thought you didn’t like Granny Kelly at all,’ and this only made their mother cry all the more.

The funeral was a dreary affair, conducted in Ballymena under lashing rain. Uncle Michael was wearing a beautifully cut overcoat; Aunt Rosemary was in fur, and having some difficulty in hiding her relief at Granny Kelly’s demise. ‘We looked shabby beside them,’ Kate said that night, ‘and they knew it, too. Mammy was the only person who cared a straw that Granny was dead.’ Emily mourned her mother for months afterwards. She would sit looking out of the window, or would stare at the fire for hours, not saying or doing anything, not reading or knitting or doing crossword puzzles the way she would have
done in the past. Sometimes, after the girls had gone to bed, they would hear their parents talking together far into the night, in the downstairs rooms. Occasionally, they would catch some of what was being said; and once Helen heard her father say, ‘There is nothing you can do about the past. All you can do is make sure you don’t make the same mistake again; don’t ever alienate the girls so that they grow up to resent you. Stop thinking about your mammy, and start thinking about Kate.’

They hadn’t been happy with the way Kate was settling into the convent, and the report they received at the end of that year only confused them further. She had consistently high marks, but the comments of her teachers were, in some cases, not so flattering.

‘Are you really bold in class, Kate?’

‘No, Daddy!’

‘Well, your Geography teacher seems to think you are.’

‘Oh she would,’ Kate said, dismissively, ‘she’s just a bore and she only likes bores. Do you know what she teaches us, Daddy? About stones. Can you imagine? She has all these lumps of stone on the window-sill and she expects us to learn their names and how they were formed. Can you imagine anything more dull in the whole world? Anyway, what about Mr Higgins, I bet he says nice things about me.’

‘What does he teach you?’

‘Maths.’

‘He says you’re a delight to teach.’ Kate grinned at this.

‘See?’ she said.

‘I always thought you found Maths boring,’ her father said, looking at her over the top of the report card.

‘I do, it’s even worse than Geography,’ she replied, ‘but Mr Higgins is lovely.’

There was more trouble the following autumn. After school, Kate often went into some of the shops in town, while waiting for her bus home. One day she went into a newsagent’s to look at the magazines, and got so caught up in her reading that she almost missed her bus. She raced out of the shop and jumped on; and was so busy laughing and chattering with her friends that it was only when the bus came to her stop, three quarters of an hour later, that she realised she didn’t have her school bag
with her. Charlie rang the police station immediately, but the damage had been done. ‘Major security alert, Kate,’ he said, hanging up the receiver. ‘They have the town centre closed off and the army’s getting ready to blow up your school bag.’

Kate looked horrified, and then she began to smile. ‘You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?’ But her father didn’t smile back. ‘Afraid not.’

He drove her back to the town to collect the bag, and ‘face the music’, as he put it. They had to go to the police barracks, and an RUC man gave Kate a tremendous telling-off. ‘If I had my way, wee girls like you would be locked up in a cell for the night, to show you how serious this is, and then you wouldn’t be so quick as to leave your property lying around you in future.’

‘It was a simple enough mistake to make,’ Charlie said, as Kate began to snivel, and the RUC man then turned on him. ‘Well it is,’ Charlie persisted. ‘All the child did was to forget her school bag. That it caused such problems is more of a reflection on the sort of country we live in, rather than on her.’ The policeman contented himself with a few remarks about irresponsible parents, and let them go.

Afterwards they sat in the car, and Charlie let Kate bawl her fill. He pulled out a clean white cotton handkerchief and passed it to her; she blew her nose loudly and raised a blotched face to him. ‘I hate it here, now,’ she said, through her tears. ‘It’s horrible. People are getting killed all the time, there’s bombs and everything. Everybody’s frightened or sad. When I grow up, I’m going to go away and live somewhere else.’ She sniffed and added, as an afterthought, ‘and it’s always raining here, too,’

‘Did you buy the magazine you were looking at in the shop?’ he asked her, and she shook her head. He took a fistful of change from his pocket and thrust it at her. ‘Away and get it now, and I’ll wait here; only when you get back to the house, make sure and hide it under your coat so your mammy won’t see it.’