One by One in the Darkness (6 page)

‘One thing I hadn’t properly thought through until my father was killed was how hard it is for the emergency services. No matter what training they have, or how well suited they are to their jobs, it must grind them down, the things they have to face.’

‘You’re telling me,’ David said. ‘People don’t know the half of it.’

It was a priest who had broken the news to Helen’s mother and Sally. After Brian, he’d been the first person to arrive at the house. He was a curate, in his early twenties, who had only been
ordained in the spring of that year; a banker’s son who had grown up in a comfortable home in County Down, who had won a gold medal for Greek at university and spent a year in Rome. He was gentle and idealistic and kind-hearted, and he had never in his life seen anything like what he found in Brian’s and Lucy’s kitchen that night in late October. Sally told Helen afterwards how sorry they’d felt for him, his voice breaking as he tried to comfort them; his own serenity and peace clearly having been shattered by what he had seen.

‘I suppose that’s one thing I was lucky in from the start,’ David went on, ‘if you can call it lucky. I knew from the first that what was going on here wasn’t exciting or glamorous. In fairness, I don’t think any of the local reporters think that. They mostly grew up here, so they know the score. You get a lot of foreign journalists over here for a while when things get particularly bad, but as conflicts go, it’s never been fashionable. Maybe in the sixties, early seventies, it was different, when there was a lot of street fighting, riots, but as far as the rest of the world, and the world media are concerned, it’s too localised. The background isn’t exotic enough, and anyway, it’s never been a full-blown war. There’s nothing to get gung-ho about in a body being found in a wet lane somewhere in, say, Tyrone, on a cold, bad night.’ He admitted that you got cynical working there. When the number of people who had been killed was one off a round figure, you found yourself thinking about what you would say in a day or two, when the figure was reached. A photographer friend to whom he had said this remarked, ‘Well, touch wood always that it won’t be you.’

‘But there’s something about the whole nature of it,’ Helen argued, ‘about taking things and making stories about them, and that’s all it amounts to: making up stories out of a few facts, and presenting them as though that interpretation was the absolute truth. That’s what I can’t stand.’

‘But what do you want instead? Do you want nothing to be known? Would you really have preferred it if your father’s death had been ignored? All news journalists are aware of the problems inherent in journalism, believe me. Trying to get the right balance, in cases like the one you’re talking about, between reporting accurately and honestly on the one hand, and maintaining
people’s dignity, and not making them suffer any more on the other: that’s a key issue in the whole undertaking, and everybody knows that.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘I think a lot of reporters couldn’t care less. They have no empathy, no imagination. The medium is a blunt weapon in itself, that’s the problem. It isn’t fitted to dealing with complexity, it isn’t comfortable with paradox or contradiction, and that’s the heart of the problem, if you ask me.’

They had argued about this issue many times since that first night, and the most she would concede, even now, was that it was a necessary evil. ‘It’s like politics,’ she said, ‘in that it attracts people of dubious merit. If you’ve got any kind of decency or scruples, you wouldn’t want to get involved in it in the first place, and to get on in either field, you need to have negative qualities, qualities that wouldn’t be to your credit in any other capacity. But,’ she granted, as he started to protest, ‘there are exceptions. I will grant you that there are people in both journalism and politics who got involved from the best of motives, who are genuinely committed to being a force for change, a force for good, who weren’t just interested in maintaining the status quo or feathering their own nests.’ He’d told her that he’d never wanted to work for a newspaper in Northern Ireland, that it was just preaching to the converted, every side buying and reading the papers that expressed their own prejudices.

She wondered how he managed without being more cynical than he was as she followed his reports over the coming months. He lacked the complete coldness she’d noted in other journalists she knew, where professionalism was all, and it didn’t matter if it was a killing or a Van Morrison concert they were covering, so long as it was a good story, smoothly presented.

One evening, about six months after they had first met, David rang and asked if he could come over to see her. He told her that something had happened and he didn’t want to be by himself for the evening, nor with colleagues. She told him he was welcome; when he arrived she made coffee and let him tell her in his own good time what had happened.

‘It was a story I had to cover this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think after all I’ve seen in the line of duty that anything could
throw me again like this, so that’s a shock, apart from anything else.’

‘What was the story?’ Helen said. She didn’t look at him. As he continued to talk she wondered if he was going to start to cry.

‘Your man they killed last night. Protestant, living in a mixed area, drives a taxi cab, gets a fare that forces him out of his own territory, gets his head blown off. Fucker in the office says this morning, “Well, place he lived, job he did, what else could he expect?” Christ, I tore into him for that! So this afternoon I had to go out to interview the widow. She wanted to talk to the media, wanted to appeal directly that there be no retaliation. She’s sitting on a sofa in her house, with her three children and her mother, and every one of them done in from crying. The woman’s as much bewildered as anything; keeps asking, “What am I going to do, left with three kids? How am I going to manage?” And I mean really asking, as if the cameraman or the guy doing the sound might be able to give her some sort of practical answer. My mother said exactly the same thing when my father was shot. It brought it all back.’ He put his head in his hands for a moment, and they sat in silence. ‘It was like seeing again what had happened to our family, only now as an adult, I can
really
see what it means. There’s something about it that … that never stops or ends. Do you know what I mean?’

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.