The Blackwater Lightship (6 page)

The climb was easy at Mike Redmond's, easier than the steps to her grandmother's lane. Helen walked through the ruin of the house, the front wall having long since fallen into the sea. She looked at the old chimney and the back wall still in place, and then stood at the edge waiting for the next flash from Tuskar. It seemed brighter now, stronger, from this height. She could feel the dew falling and could hear the sound of cattle somewhere in the distance as she made her way back to her grandmother's house.

The bed was uncomfortable and the nylon sheets, she felt, had not been used for years. They must have been from the time of the guest-house; they had a thin, almost slippery feel. The mattress sagged. She was so tired that she had gone to sleep as soon as she lay down, but she woke an hour or two later, unsure where she was, reaching out for a light, unable to think what house she was in, and feeling a strange, hard thirst. Then she remembered where she was and how she had got here. She put her head on the pillow and wondered how she had let this happen. Earlier on, it had seemed a good idea to come and spend the night here, but she had not bargained for being wide awake like this, the light from Tuskar through the curtains flitting across the wall over her bed, and a smell of must and damp in the room.

She got out of bed and made her way to the kitchen. She filled a mug of water and brought it back to the bedroom. The lino in the room was torn, some of the wallpaper had peeled, the paint on the ceiling was flaking, and the presence of the shiny modern radiator made the room seem even more dingy and depressing. When she pulled the old candlewick bedspread back, she found that the blankets were stained. She didn't feel tired or sleepy. She shivered. The smell seemed sharper now, and sour, and it was the smell more than anything which brought her back to the time she and Declan had lived in this house.

This had been her room, Declan's the one behind. But after a while his bed had been moved in here. She remembered the hammering apart of the iron bed and the feeling as they stood and watched that they were causing all this trouble.

Declan was afraid. He was afraid of the black clocks which darted awkwardly across the floor, afraid that if you stepped on one of them all the bloody insides would be on your feet. He was afraid of the dark and the cold and of his grandparents' movements upstairs which seemed to echo in the rooms below. And Helen knew that there was another fear, which was never mentioned in all that time: the fear that their parents would never come back, that they would both be left here, and that these days and nights — Helen was eleven then, Declan eight — would become their lives, rather than an interlude which would soon come to an end.

Helen remembered how it began. It must have been just after Christmas, maybe early January, and it was her last year at primary school. She remembered the day when she arrived home, dropped her schoolbag inside the door and found her parents in the back room, standing in a pose she had never seen them in before. They were both looking into the mirror which was over the fireplace, and when they saw her coming into the room they did not turn. Her mother spoke. It was a new voice, soft, with a tone of entreaty.

'Helen,' she said, 'your father is going to have to go to Dublin for tests.'

She looked at the two of them as they stared at her and at each other, as though any second now the mirror would flash and take a photograph of them. In her memory, these moments — her father's slow smile, her mother's gentle tone — were mixed up with their wedding photograph, taken in Lafayette's in Dublin. She was sure that the scene in front of the mirror could have lasted only a few minutes, maybe less even, enough for a glance from each of them and a sentence — 'Helen, your father is going to have to go to Dublin for tests' — and maybe nothing more. In any case, it was the last memory she ever had of seeing her father. She knew she must have seen him later that evening and perhaps the next day, but she had no memory, absolutely none, of seeing him again.

Her only other memory of that day was of Sister Columb from St John's arriving and standing in the hallway, refusing to come in. Helen remembered whispering and half-talk in the hallway and then the nun departing.

'The nuns in St John's are going to knock on the tabernacle tonight,' her mother said.

Who did she say this to? And then, Helen remembered, someone had asked what this meant and her mother had explained that it was something which the nuns hardly ever did, but one of them would approach the altar and knock on the tabernacle, and that would be a special way of asking God for a favour.

Her next memory of that evening was the clearest of all. She was upstairs in her bedroom when Declan came in. He told her that their mother was going to Dublin as "well.

'What's going to happen to us?' she asked.

'We're going to Granny's. We have to pack. She says you're to pack warm things.'

She went downstairs. Her mother was in the kitchen.

'How long are we going for? What are we going to do about school?'

'Your father's sick,' her mother said.

'I thought you said that he was going to Dublin for tests.'

'There's a suitcase under my bed. You can use that,' her mother said. 'Bring all your schoolbooks.'

She wondered had this really happened, the non-answers to questions, the sense of her mother as being utterly remote, lost to her. In the morning Aidan Larkin, who was in Fianna Fail with her father, drove them to Cush. Dr Flood, later, was going to drive her parents to Dublin. Her mother and father must have been in the house that morning, and must have spoken to her and to Declan, but she had no memory of it, just the car journey and the arrival. Her grandparents in Cush had no telephone, so she had no idea how they had been alerted to the imminent arrival of the two children. Nonetheless, Helen and Declan were expected in this house they had come to previously only on summer Sundays, or in the early summer when the guest-house was not full. Helen had no memory of ever visiting the house before in the winter. This, then, was the first time she noticed the Patches of damp on the walls and the smell of damp which was everywhere except the kitchen, and the draughts which came under doors and the fierce wind which came in from the sea.

The sea was just twenty or thirty yards away, but in all those months — from January to June — she caught sight of it maybe once or twice from the clifftop: this turbulence below them, the waves crashing hard against the cliff-face. Her grandparents, she remembered, behaved as though it were not there. In all the years her grandmother had been in Cush, she had hardly ever been on the strand. They paid no attention to the sea, and Helen and Declan learned to pay no attention to it either.

The first dispute arose over food. Declan would eat only sliced bread, it had become a sort of joke in the family. But there was no sliced bread in Cush, only brown bread and soda bread that her grandmother made, and loaves of white bread with a hard crust which they bought in Blackwater. There were other things which Declan wouldn't eat — cabbage or turnips, carrots or onions, eggs or cheese. He was obsessive about this, carefully finding out about each meal, or possible visits to other houses, and making sure that the food would be to his taste, and making himself pleasant in every other matter, and always getting his way.

On Sunday visits to Cush their mother packed sandwiches for Declan, and during longer visits she brought and cooked their own food. But Declan knew that their grandmother disapproved of this.

'You don't eat because you like the food, you eat to live, that's why you eat,' was one of her sayings.

As they drove from Enniscorthy to Cush, Helen knew that Declan thought only about food, and what was going to happen. The first dinner in the middle of the day was a stew; her grandmother served out four plates of stew with a big ladle and then put a plate of potatoes in the middle of the table. Her grandfather took off his cap and sat down and blessed himself. Helen made a sign to Declan to say nothing, do nothing. She peeled two potatoes for him and he mashed them up and slowly began to eat them. But he didn't touch the stew. Her grandfather read the Irish Independent and said very little. Her grandmother bustled about — she seldom sat at the table — and when, that first day, she went out into the yard, Helen took Declan's plate and scraped the stew into the bucket of waste her grandmother kept for the hens. She put the plate back in front of Declan; he sat there amazed, trying not to smile. Neither of their grandparents noticed anything.

When teatime came, Helen helped her grandmother set the table. For tea there was brown bread, thick slices of white bread and boiled eggs. Declan came into the kitchen as the eggs were being taken from the boiling water.

'These eggs now are fresh,' his grandmother said, 'not like the ones you get in the town.'

'Yuck,' Declan said.

'Declan doesn't eat eggs,' Helen said.

'I never heard worse,' her grandmother said. 'The things your mother has to put up with. She's too soft.'

And so the battle began, the battle that raged daily, Declan filling his pockets with crusts, Helen reaching for the waste bucket, and days when there was no way out, when Declan put the onions and the carrots or the cabbage and the turnips to one side of the plate and refused to eat them, and their grandmother insisted that he stay at the table until he had them eaten, only to relent as soon as he started to cry.

'He can't eat them, Granny, he'll get sick,' Helen would say.

'Stop giving back-answers, Helen.'

'I'm not giving back-answers.'

As soon as her grandmother began to talk about sending them to the two-teacher school in Blackwater, Helen set up a classroom at the kitchen table and for much of the day, in between meals, she and Declan worked at their schoolbooks, Helen playing the role of teacher. They discovered school as a way of excluding their grandmother, until she put a paraffin heater into the dining-room for them so that she could listen to the radio in peace. They did algebra or Irish or decimal points at the times of the day when she was most likely to hover around them; often they did the same exercises over and over, pretending this required total concentration and not looking up if their grandmother came into the room. They opened Declan's books at random and went through lessons he had done long before, or began entirely new ones without fully understanding them or finishing them. When they were bored, they laughed and whispered and played cards.

Their mother wrote short letters to their grandmother saying there was no news and mentioning tests and prayers and hoping that Helen and Declan were not too much of a burden on her. Their mother was staying in Rathmines with her cousin, one of the Bolgers of Bree, and his wife, and they too sent their regards. There was no mention of their father.

Helen and Declan found a box of games under one of the beds and amused themselves in the long, dark evenings playing Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. Helen found boots she could wear and went often with her grandfather to fetch the cows for milking or to open and close gates for him. Declan had no boots; he hated the muck of the yard and the lane, he seldom went out and often in the afternoon, in the clammy heat of the parlour, he became tired and irritable. Alone together in these first months, they never mentioned home or their mother or their father, or how long they would be here. They worked out strategies to get them through the day without confrontation.

Slowly, their grandmother began to treat Helen as an adult and Declan as a child, although Helen and Declan continued to treat each other as equals, even if Helen remained in the role of protector. In the first week or so, Helen had an argument with her grandfather; it was the only time he said much during their entire stay in the house. He was reading something in the newspaper about Fianna Fail — he himself was a member of Fine Gael, which was strong in Blackwater — and he turned to Helen and her grandmother and said, 'They're only a shower of gangsters, bloody gun-runners. Liam Cosgrave will put manners on the whole lot of them.'

'Jack Lynch is not a gangster or a gun-runner,' Helen said.

'The rest of them, then,' her grandfather said. 'And I'd string Charlie Haughey up. He's a feckin' gangster.'

'Oh, language now,' her grandmother said.

'But Jack Lynch is the leader,' Helen said.

'Oh, I know who you've been listening to,' her grandfather said. 'Did we ever think that Lily would have a little Fianna Failer for a daughter?'

'And the Irish Independent is only Fine Gael propaganda,' Helen said.

'Propaganda? Where did you learn that word?'

'Oh, Helen knows all the words,' her grandmother said.

'It's saying your prayers you should be,' her grandfather said and went back to reading the paper.

'Good girl, you stand up to him now,' her grandmother said later when he had left the room.

From then on, her grandfather let her watch the news on television and, after a few weeks, one Saturday night Helen realised that she was going to be allowed to watch The Late Late Show, which her mother and father had never permitted her to watch at home, except for the night when Lieutenant Gerard from The Fugitive was a guest on the show and she was called downstairs. Now in Cush she sat on one of the armchairs in the kitchen and wondered if they had forgotten about her as the news ended and then the break for advertisements ended and the music for the show began and Gay Byrne appeared.

'If something conies on that's not fit for her now,' her grandmother said, 'she'll go to bed.'

Helen remembered the slow preparations for the programme, her grandmother making sure that all the housework was done. Tea things and biscuits were set out on a tray, the kettle filled to be put on a hotplate during the second break. Her grandmother loved the programme, and, Helen realised, loved having Helen to discuss the guests and the controversies in the days that followed.

Her grandfather, on the other hand, disliked it and muttered to himself when something was said of which he disapproved.

During that season, Helen remembered, hardly a Saturday night passed without a group of women wanting rights, or a priest in dispute with the hierarchy, appearing on the programme.