One by One in the Darkness

by Deirdre Madden

  He paid the man, who put the money in a leather pouch hanging around his neck, then set the boat going with a sudden, sharp tug of his hand. Tony and the girl pulled hard on the ropes to make the boat swing, then they both stood up, and by bending their knees and using the force of their bodies they made the boat swing faster and higher. Before long, Helen wasn’t the only one who was aware of them: people stopped what they were doing and watched as the boat swung up to it’s highest possible point, so that it looked as if the couple might fall out. Then abruptly the boat dropped, and swung back in the opposite direction, again reaching the highest point. It seemed to stop for a few seconds at the top each time, and this pause gave the movement of the boat a slow, strange rhythm, in spite of the abrupt drops the boat made from each extremity of height. Even though the music was still playing, there was a kind of silence in the stillness which fell over the field, as people stopped what they were doing and stared, wondering how it would all end. The man who owned the swingboats tried to stop them, but the boat was going too high and too fast. He attempted once to lift the plank of wood which, held against the bottom of the boat, would usually have been enough to bring it to a standstill, but this time it was too dangerous: the plank was knocked from his hand, and the man had to wait until the couple slowed and stopped in their own time.

  Tony helped the girl to climb out of the boat. Somebody laughed, somebody whistled, somebody near Helen said, ‘The cheeky bitch.’ The fair-haired girl, who was walking past at that moment, heard it too, and she went red but looked defiant, for all that, then Helen saw her turn her head urgently, to see where Tony was. Helen didn’t understand why what she had just seen made her feel so strange, so confused. She only knew that she wanted her father, and when she suddenly saw him coming through the gate into the field again, she ran over at once, and buried her face in his jacket.

  Even today, on the walk with her sisters and grandmother, she wished that her father was there with them. She never enjoyed outings like this half as much when he wasn’t there. He loved and understood such places. Even last night he’d been telling them about how, when she was a child, Granny Kate had gone there on a pilgrimage with her mother, travelling by charabanc from Magherafelt, and how people had come from far and wide every year. ‘Imagine them when you’re there,’ he’d said. He’d told them about the well, too, and how there were stones in it that were supposed to save you from drowning, and that when people had had to emigrate to America, they’d always wanted to take one of these stones with them. But it was Uncle Peter who had told her that the well was a pagan place, and that the Christians had then just taken it over, and pretended that it was theirs.

  The well was enclosed, and over it hung a hazel tree, with rags and handkerchiefs tied to it. Helen remembered what Uncle Peter had said: the well had a strange atmosphere, not like the deep, still peace of an empty chapel, but powerful, defiant, somehow secretive. Granny Kate pulled out a bunch of clean cotton rags she had brought with her, and handed them one each. She told them to dip the rags in the water of the well and bless themselves with them, then tie them on to the bush. Granny helped Sally, and tapped her on the nose with the damp cloth before bending a branch of the tree down, so that Sally could tie on her rag.

  ‘This is great gas,’ Kate said, but Helen realised she felt foolish. She was only doing this strange thing because she had been told to do it, and she didn’t understand how it could possibly do any good. Would God really cure Sally’s nosebleeds because Our Lady asked Him to, and because Sally had asked Our Lady, and then tied a bit of wet rag on a bush? Granny made them all join their hands and say a prayer together, and then they all trooped away.

  They walked by the water’s edge while they waited for Uncle Peter to come and collect them. They were right down by the shore of Lough Neagh, and from this part you could see the huge expanse of water more clearly than from where they lived; you could see the shores in the distance. They looked out across at the Sperrins and Slieve Gallion, and they thought of their father, off at the march in Derry. Helen still wished that she had been allowed to go with him.

  But when they got back to the house, they heard that the march hadn’t gone off peacefully. There had been riots, and when their father and Brian didn’t come home at the time they were expected, the children could see how worried their mother was, although she tried to hide it. The police had blocked the march and baton-charged the marchers. On television, they watched black-and-white pictures of crowds running, of people with blood on their faces and shirts; of men being pulled along the ground by the hair, or being beaten where they lay. They saw a man, one of the organisers, pleading for calm and reason, and before he could finish what he was saying, he was struck in the stomach with a baton. After that, Emily wasn’t able to pretend any longer that she wasn’t anxious. When at last they heard a car pull up outside, they all rushed out to meet him.

  ‘There was no sense in what happened today,’ he said, angry and shaken. ‘They just hammered the living daylights out of people.’ He said they were late home because Brian had been badly cut on the face, and they’d decided to take him to the hospital, in case the wound needed stitches. They’d had to wait for a long time there, because so many people had been brought in wounded, and then it had taken them a long time to get back to where the car was parked. He was glad that it had been on the television. ‘I suppose it would have suited them better for all this to have been kept quiet.’

  There were more civil rights marches organised in Belfast later that year, some organised by the students at the university, and although Charlie and Brian didn’t go to them, all the talk at home now was about civil rights, and how things would have to change. The children couldn’t understand all of what was being said. One phrase they heard people using over and over was, ‘Live, oul’ horse, and you’ll get grass.’

  Halloween came, and their daddy took them over to Brian’s house, for them to celebrate it with their cousins, as they did every year. He laughed when he got into the car and looked over his shoulder to see three small witches sitting in the back seat. They were all wearing pointed paper hats with moons and stars printed on them: he’d bought them for the children himself, in McGovern’s. All three were wearing the masks they’d made in art class at school. ‘You’d put the heart across a body,’ he said to them, as he started the engine.

  They ran screaming around the bonfire Uncle Peter had built for them, and Helen felt both frightened and excited as she watched the firelight on the blackened faces of her sisters and cousins. They had fireworks too: Roman candles and Catherine wheels, sparklers and rockets. The coloured lights flowed briefly like magical liquids when Uncle Peter set the fireworks off, and the children covered their ears at the loud noise. Afterwards, you couldn’t remember the fireworks exactly as they had been: there was something about the nature of them that made it impossible, until another one was lit. Later, they moved into the back scullery, where Aunt Lucy filled a zinc bath with water, and floated yellow apples in it for them to try to catch and pull out with their teeth. She put piles of flour on dinner plates, and a wrapped toffee on the top, again for them to pick up and claim, without using their fingers. ‘Make as much mess as you want,’ she said indulgently: and they did.

  And then when they were bored with that, they went into the kitchen where Granny was sitting by the stove. She laughed when she saw them: ‘Look at the cut of yis!’ They had cups of strong, sweet tea, slices of buttered brack; there were bowls of monkey nuts, and oranges; and an apple pie Granny had made, with coins hidden in it.

  ‘I always loved Halloween,’ Granny said. ‘I always remember there was a game I played, when I was older than you are, to find out who I was going to marry.’ She told them of how, when she was sixteen, she’d sat before a mirror at night, combing her hair and eating an apple. ‘The idea was, that at the very stroke of midnight, you’d see the face of the man you were to marry reflected in the mirror.’

  ‘That would be so scary, Gr
anny,’ Una said. ‘That would be just like seeing a ghost.’

  ‘It would be worse if you did it and didn’t see anybody,’ Kate said. ‘That would be a disappointment: you wouldn’t know if it meant that you were never going to get married, or if it was just that the game wasn’t working.’

  ‘Oh, I saw something,’ Granny said. She told them that a face had appeared: faintly at first, as if in a mist, but gradually it became clearer until it was as if she was looking at a flesh-and-blood person standing behind her, just at her very shoulder, leaning down and smiling at her in the mirror. ‘You’d have sworn on all you held dear, that if you’d turned round, he’d have been standing there in the room with you: but of course, I didn’t dare to turn.’

  ‘I’d have died on the spot!’ Una said. Helen noticed that Una’s eyes were so wide by this stage that there was a clear white rim around the blue of her iris.

  ‘I took a good, hard look at him though,’ Granny went on. ‘I wanted to be able to recognise him when I did meet him in later life. But it didn’t work out as simply as that.’

  They already knew the story of how Granny and Grandad had met: how she’d been working in a draper’s shop in Magherafelt, and he’d come in one day, looking for a jacket. She’d told them this story so often that they all had a clear image in their minds of the dim shop, the high wooden counter, the smell of wool, the heavy ledger in which she had to record all the purchases. But it was hard to imagine Granny and Grandad as young people and looking as they did in the framed photographs in the parlour: Granny with her hair piled high on her head in an extravagant roll, Grandad a light-boned, timid-looking boy.

  ‘There was a wee bell fixed to the back of the door, that rang so that if you were out in the back, you’d know a customer had come into the shop. I remember as well the first day Francis came in. He was looking for a tweed jacket, and I had been out in the store with just the very thing, when I heard the bell ring as he came in. But I knew if I sold him what he wanted, he might never come back to the shop again. So I brought in three jackets for him to try, that I knew fine well would drown him. God, I can see him yet, with the sleeves to the tips of his fingers. So I said that we’d be getting more in, and the best thing would be for him to come back the next day he was in town. “I always be here on a Wednesday,” says he. So the next Wednesday morning, I made sure that all the jackets that were his size were well hidden, and told him they still hadn’t arrived. I always remember he smiled when I said that. “I’ll be back next week, then.” So the next Wednesday morning, again I weeded out all the jackets in his size. Eleven o’clock, in comes Francis, and the pair of us go over to the rail, and start going through them. But hadn’t I missed one! About the fifth jacket along, doesn’t the label say exactly the size he’d been looking for. So he looks at it, then looks at me, then pushes the jacket along the rail, and we go through the rest of them. “Nothing,” says he at the end of it. “It looks like I’m just going to have to keep coming in here every week. But that’s no great hardship.” And I knew then that I had him!’ Granny Kate said.

  ‘But this is the spooky part,’ she went on. ‘One night, a few years after we were married, I was sitting combing my hair in front of the big mirror that’s in the back room of this house to this very day, when Francis came into the room and stood behind me. I looked at his reflection, and only then did I realise that it was him: the very same man I’d seen in the mirror at midnight, on Halloween, years earlier.’ Una gave a little scream.

  ‘You’ll have these children up half the night with bad dreams,’ Aunt Lucy said.

  Granny Kate looked surprised. ‘But it’s a lovely story,’ she said. ‘I mean, it wasn’t as if he was dead at the time: not that that would have scared me. I’d never have been frightened of Francis, living or dead. After he’d gone I used to think how lovely it would be to look up and see him standing there before me again, for I missed him sorely.’ Aunt Lucy shoved a bowl of monkey nuts under Una’s nose. ‘Eat these,’ she said, ‘and put the ghosts out of your head.’ But it wouldn’t have been Halloween if Granny hadn’t given you a good fright: it was as much a part of the celebrations as having brack to eat, or making your own false face.

  For the pattern of their lives was as predictable as the seasons. The regular round of necessity was broken by celebrations and feasts: Christmas, Easter, family birthdays. The scope of their lives was tiny but it was profound, and to them, it was immense. The physical bounds of their world were confined to little more than a few fields and houses, but they knew these places with the deep, unconscious knowledge that a bird or a fox might have for it’s habitat. The idea of home was something they lived so completely that they would have been at a loss to define it. But they would have known to be inadequate such phrases as: ‘It’s where you’re from,’ ‘It’s the place you live,’ ‘It’s where your family are.’

  And yet for all this they knew that their lives, so complete in themselves, were off centre in relation to the society beyond those few fields and houses. They recognised this most acutely every July, when they were often taken to the Antrim coast for the day, and as they went through Ballymena and Broughshane, they would see all the Union Jacks flying at the houses, and the red, white and blue bunting across the streets. They thought that the Orange arches which spanned the roads in the towns were ugly, and creepy, too, with their strange symbols: a ladder, a set square and compass, a five-pointed star. They knew that they weren’t supposed to be able to understand what these things meant; and they knew, too, without having to be told that the motto painted on the arches: ‘Welcome here, Brethren!’ didn’t include the Quinn family.

  They would see photographs of the Orange marches in the newspapers, or they would see reports on television, but they never, in all their childhood, actually saw an Orange march taking place, for their parents always made a point of staying at home on that day, complaining bitterly that you were made a prisoner in your own home whether you liked it or not. It wasn’t even so much that it would never have occurred to the children to ask to be taken along to see one: they just knew that it wasn’t for them: they weren’t particularly interested, and they knew that they weren’t wanted there. For the most part, they didn’t even think about it, for their lives were complete as they were.

  In the weeks leading up to Christmas, there were two fixed events in their calendar: one was a visit to Miss Regan, the woman their mother had lived with when she was teaching in Belfast. The other was a visit to Granny Kelly in Ballymena. On the first Saturday in December they set out, potatoes and turf in the boot, on the back window a tray of eggs and a Christmas cake their mother had baked. She had a Christmas present for Miss Regan too, a gift set of lily of the valley soap and talc, wrapped in paper printed with poinsettias. She never agonised over what she would buy her friend, as she did when she was trying to choose a gift for Granny Kelly.

  There was always something embarrassing and exciting about the moment when they arrived. Miss Regan’s tiny, cluttered parlour could barely contain the fuss, for Emily and Miss Regan would both keep talking at the same time, and they both cried a little bit, even though they pretended not to, and wiped the tears away almost before they had come. Even after all these years, Miss Regan still was amazed at the fact of Emily’s life now, and the children, and how tall they’d grown since last she saw them, were a particular source of wonder.

  After drinking three glasses of white lemonade, Helen had to go to the toilet, and as she stood washing her hands at the basin she looked out of the window across the rows and rows of chimney pots and slate roofs, slicked with rain, under a low grey sky. She wondered how her mother had lived there, when she thought of the fields, the wide sky and the light at home. She thought she would feel suffocated to live where all the houses were jammed together in rows, and opened out directly on to the street, without so much as a little square of grass in front of them. And yet how her mother had loved it, for she still spoke of the year when she had been a teacher as a
special time, a time when she’d been happy. Helen tried to imagine her mother as a much younger woman, but when she tried to picture her as someone who wasn’t her mother, she drew a blank: she found she didn’t like the idea. She dried her hands on the towel, and hurried back downstairs again.

  Her parents and Miss Regan were talking about politics and civil rights when she went back into the room. All the grown-ups she knew talked about little else these days: except for Uncle Peter. There was an air of defiant excitement about them when they spoke of these things, something she wasn’t used to seeing in her family or her teacher or anyone she knew.

  When their father had finished his tea, he took the children into the city centre, leaving Emily to spend some hours with her friend. He took them to see Santa in the Co-Op and did some shopping until such time as their mother came into the town and met up with them at a time and place they had arranged earlier. In Cornmarket, they saw a man wearing a thing like a large black-plastic bib, with ‘What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?’ printed on it in bold white letters. The man was shouting about God and Jesus and sin and salvation, and Kate made her mind up that she wanted to see one of the leaflets he was distributing to the passers-by. When her parents weren’t looking, she took one. ‘Here, Sally, put this in your pocket for me,’ she said, stuffing it into Sally’s anorak before her little sister could say anything. And it was there that their mother found it when she went to look for Sally’s mittens a while later. ‘What’s this?’ she said, smoothing out the folded sheet, and the children pressed round to see, as they hadn’t had a chance to look at it so far.