One by One in the Darkness

by Deirdre Madden

  As she explained to Oliver the papers she’d brought along, he continued to stare hard into her face, as though he were trying to memorise every word she uttered, and when at last she said, ‘Here, have a look at them yourself,’ it took longer than she would have thought necessary for him to unlock his gaze from her, and fasten it upon the documents which she pushed across the table to him. She looked at the crown of his head as he read, and wondered again what it was about him that bothered her so much. Maybe it was because, through David, she’d had a glimpse of the full effect of what Oliver had done. He was also a person of enormous self-possession, and that was a quality that never appealed to Helen. She noted now with some relish that his nails were bitten to the quick. She strongly suspected that he didn’t like her either, that he would have preferred Owen to deal exclusively with his case. Maybe he thought that because she didn’t come across as particularly sympathetic to him she wasn’t going to make much of an effort on his behalf; or, even worse, he might even think that she wasn’t up to the job simply because she was a woman. As he looked up again, she realised that she felt afraid to be with him, but she didn’t know if it was fear on her own behalf, or on his.

  ‘That looks all right,’ he said, handing the papers back to her. ‘But what about this?’ and he went on to query in detail two points which had come up in their last meeting. This sort of thing happened frequently, and she always found it intensely annoying. The prisoners who were on remand spent much of their time discussing their cases with one another, pooling their not inconsiderable legal knowledge so that they knew their rights to the letter. Often they would challenge what their lawyers said to them, or make suggestions which were useful or to the point. Helen heard Oliver out, frowning at the surface of the table and not meeting his gaze. She told him that she and Owen were already aware of the angle to which he referred, but that as yet, nothing could be done.

  ‘We’ll keep you informed.’

  He nodded briefly. There was a short silence. ‘Oliver, I know Owen has told you, and I’m telling you again now, the forensic evidence on this is as tight as can be, you know that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  His tone annoyed her. She took a certain pleasure in following on by saying, ‘You know you’re bound to get time?’

  ‘Yeah. I know that.’

  ‘You’re going to get life.’

  ‘You mean you know you’re going to lose this case,’ he said. He glanced away. ‘I’ll do a few years.’

  ‘You’ll do more than that,’ Helen said.

  He shrugged. ‘Have you seen my ma lately?’ he said after a moment.

  He was chewing at his nails now, Helen noticed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Have you?’ He shook his head.

  Suddenly, she could see him as on the night of the killing, as vividly as if she’d been there with him when he went into the call box and booked a cab from a firm based in Sandy Row. He waited then outside a chip shop for the car to arrive, the collar of his leather jacket turned up against the cold of the night. Every so often the door of the shop would open, and a heavy smell of vinegar and hot fat would surge out; she could hear the voices of the women who worked there. He stood in the shadows so as not to be seen, only moving out to the edge of the pavement when a blue car pulled up, and she recognised the jowly face of the driver from blurred photographs of him which had been published in the newspapers after his death. He rolled down the car window and called out the false name in which the cab had been booked. Oliver nodded and got in. There was a faint smell of stale pine from the tree-shaped air freshener which dangled from the driver’s mirror. Helen watched the lit streets of the city, black and slick with rain, slip past beyond the steadily moving arc of the windscreen wipers. Oliver would not be drawn into conversation; in the mirror she could see anxiety gradually flicker in the taxi driver’s eyes, until the moment when Oliver took a gun out of his jacket pocket and pressing it against the driver’s neck said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. You and me are going somewhere different.’

  Sitting across the table from him, Helen involuntarily raised her hand to the left side of her neck, which was as cold as though it had been brushed by a sliver of ice.

  ‘You did do it,’ she said. ‘You really did do it.’

  Oliver took his hands away from his mouth, and gave a little smile.

  ‘That’s what people like you keep telling me, anyway.’

  ‘Mr Kane isn’t here?’ was the first thing Oliver’s mother asked when Helen showed her into the office that afternoon. Helen and Owen were on first-name terms with Oliver, but Mrs Maguire was persistently formal: it seemed to make her feel better.

  ‘He asked me to see you, as he had to leave early today,’ Helen replied, aware of how hesitant and anxious the woman was. Suddenly, Mrs Maguire became aware that Helen might possibly offer a new opinion.

  ‘Mr Kane says it’s certain that Oliver’ll be convicted.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘And you think the same thing?’

  Helen nodded.

  ‘But he didn’t do it!’ the woman wailed. This time Helen neither spoke nor nodded. She looked briefly at her watch, then glanced up at the woman.

  This is terrible,’ Mrs Maguire said, ‘people getting convicted for things they didn’t do. Look at the Birmingham Six, how long they were in jail. Are you telling me that that’s what’s going to happen to Oliver, and there’s nothing to be done to stop it?’

  ‘That was a very different case,’ Helen said quickly.

  ‘Why?’

  Helen paused, tempted to say the obvious: that the Birmingham Six were innocent, and then leave Mrs Maguire to draw the logical conclusion about Oliver. Instead, she said nothing, hoping this would give greater import to her words when she did at last reply.

  ‘Mrs Maguire, I think it’s best for you to try to prepare yourself for the worst. Oliver’s going to get a long sentence. He knows this himself. The sooner you come to terms with this, the better.’

  Most of the other solicitors they knew wouldn’t have put up with this sort of thing, and she sometimes wondered why Owen bothered. There was nothing to be gained from it: a complete waste of time for all concerned, but then it was unusual for a mother to be as persistent as this. Owen was always much tougher on the clients than with their relatives. In many cases Helen admired the fortitude of the women concerned, and sometimes she thought it was more than some of the prisoners deserved. Women would be left for years to bring up children on their own, with little or no money. Helen used to see them waiting in the rain for the bus out to the jail, or taking part in demonstrations on the Falls Road on behalf of prisoners. But there was no denying it was easier for families where there was a strong Republican tradition, where a father, brothers, cousins, maybe sisters, had done time for the IRA. When the whole family believed in The Cause, there was no stigma attached to being in prison.

  It was a different story for families with no such tradition. Helen had seen that at close quarters: gentle, middle-aged couples mortified at their son or daughter being on the wrong side of the law for anything, let alone this. She used to see such people sitting in the public gallery of the court. They cried. Sometimes they broke down completely, either on hearing an exact account of the crime of which their child was being accused, or when sentence was passed. When they left the court, they hid their faces in shame. It would be like that with Mrs Maguire, Helen thought, listening to her as she talked about her son’s life. Oliver was the youngest of a family of four. He’d been a late arrival, seven years after the child above him. His father died when he was ten. She’d wanted him to be like the others: they’d got jobs, trades. ‘None of them ever was in anything,’ she said. Christ, how Helen hated that phrase! The soldiers had picked on Oliver when he was a teenager. They’d arrested him before now, and once they’d beaten him.

  ‘If you’d seen the hiding he got, Miss Quinn, and he was hardly more than a child. Wouldn’t you wonder how they do the things to another human being?
’

  ‘What things?’ Helen said sharply.

  The woman, who’d had her eyes fixed pleading upon Helen’s face, suddenly broke her gaze, looked away. ‘The things,’ she said, as Helen stayed intimidatingly silent. ‘You know the things that happen here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Helen. ‘I do.’

  ‘Oliver couldn’t have done what they’re accusing him of. I know, because I’m his mother, and nobody knows him better than I do. I know his faults as well as his good points and he hasn’t it in him to … to do a thing like that.’ But her voice faltered, and suddenly Helen looked straight into the eyes of the woman sitting opposite her.

  ‘She knows,’ Helen thought. ‘She knows the truth as well as I do, but she can’t bear to believe it. She comes here to try to get us to hold off the day when she has to believe it.’ Helen thought of her own circumstances. Two years down the line and it was still the last thing she thought about before she went to sleep at night, and the first thing that came into her mind when she woke every morning. What they’d done to her father still haunted her dreams, the thought of it could ambush her at any moment of the day. Something as trivial as the nicotine stains on the fingers of the man selling her newspapers could bring him back to her, but only for a fraction of a second, only to take him away again, and leave instead the terrible image of his going.

  And yet …

  Oh there was no danger of her losing her temper with Mrs Maguire, as Owen had feared. She wouldn’t shout that her son was as guilty as hell and she knew it, so why did she come in here to waste everyone’s time? No, the danger was that she would say something much worse. Oliver’s mother knew full well what had happened to Helen’s father. The danger was that Helen might say, ‘I would rather be me than you: I wouldn’t be you for anything.’ That was the one thing Mrs Maguire wouldn’t have been able to handle, and suddenly Helen realised that if she were to speak at all now, that was the only thing she would be able to say. Mrs Maguire knew it, too. The two women sat there looking at each other. At last, Oliver’s mother spoke.

  ‘It’s all like a dream, so it is,’ she said very softly. ‘All like a terrible dream.’

  Helen bowed her head and put her hands over her eyes: she loathed anyone seeing her cry. She heard the scraping sound of a chair being pushed back.

  ‘I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time, Miss Quinn,’ the woman said. ‘Thank you for talking to me.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  After dinner, they sat around the stove in the kitchen, drinking tea and talking, far into the night. Helen shared the sofa with Cate, who had taken off her shoes and sat with her legs curled up under her; their mother was in the high-backed chair she preferred, and Sally was on a foot stool.

  ‘I hope it’s a long time before we have to go through another week like this one,’ Emily remarked.

  ‘It wasn’t so bad,’ Sally said at once. ‘We’ve been through worse than this before now, far worse.’

  ‘That’s true, aye,’ her mother agreed, embarrassed now at what she had said; and she glanced shyly at Cate, but Cate blushed and looked away.

  ‘Maybe that’s the only good thing about what happened,’ Sally went on. ‘No matter what ever arises in the future, nothing can ever be so bad again.’

  ‘Anyway, just think, in a couple of years we’ll be sitting here picking mashed banana out of our hair. Won’t that be great?’ Helen said. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t wait.’

  ‘It’ll be strange having a baby around the place again,’ Emily said. ‘I have to admit I haven’t thought that one through yet; I can hardly imagine it.’ None of her daughters said anything in response to this, but their silence was eloquent; and Emily knew that that was what she needed to imagine, and, as Sally had said, it wasn’t the worst possibility, not by a long way.

  They were all reluctant to go to bed that night. They put more fuel in the stove; they listened to the sound of the wind blowing around the eves of the house, and their talk became more broken, more desultory. Emily at last stood up, weariness getting the better of her unwillingness to be the first to break the warm, half-spoken intimacy of the evening. It was always like this towards the end of Cate’s visits, and tonight, for the first time in years, Emily suddenly blurted out what she always thought at such a time: ‘It’s a pity you have to go away again, Cate. It would be lovely if you were always here.’

  ‘Oh, but then I’d lose my novelty value,’ Cate said, with as much irony as she could summon up. ‘You’d take me for granted then, and begin to forget just how special I am.’

  ‘She’s not away yet,’ Helen added. ‘We still have two more magical days of her company. How are we going to stand the excitement, will you tell me that?’

  Laughing, their mother said goodnight and left the room. The sisters sat in silence and listened to the sound of Emily’s footsteps as she ascended the stairs; and then they could hear her moving about in the room above them, as she prepared for bed. They continued to talk, more quietly now, so as not to disturb her. ‘You should go up too, Sally,’ Cate said, some time later. ‘I know to look at you that you’re exhausted.’

  ‘We all are,’ Sally said; but she was the next to go. And now Helen realised that she was afraid of the moment when Cate would also withdraw from her company, and she would be left alone. Cate knew this too. ‘I’m getting my second wind now,’ she lied.

  ‘Would you like a whiskey?’ Cate shook her head, smiled sadly and patted her middle.

  ‘Sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘You have one, anyway.’

  ‘I’ll leave it.’

  But when at last Cate did leave the kitchen, Helen poured herself a stiff drink, and sat listening to Verdi on her Walkman until it was so absurdly late that there was nothing for it but to rinse her glass, check for a final time that the front and back doors were locked, put out all the lights and go to bed too.

  She lay down and in the blackness pulled the blankets tightly around herself.

  When Helen was a child, sometimes she used to find it hard to fall asleep at night, and then she would slip into a fold in her mind somewhere between her dreams and her imagination. It was something she cultivated: she knew she wasn’t asleep, but she could see marvellous things then, which would never have been possible had she been fully awake.

  By the force of her imagination she would lift herself out of her bed, and pass through the roof of the house like a beam of light passing through water. Then she would soar, oh, how she soared, through the black night until she was high above the world, until she was as far away as one of the angels who floated beside God’s shoulder in the picture at the front of the Children’s Bible, where God was a vast old man with a triangular yellow light around his head, leaning above the solar system with his hand raised in blessing. The blackness of the universe was warm, soft as velvet, and studded with stars that twinkled. The Milky Way, far off, was a silver glittering belt, like flung coins.

  But what Helen saw was better than a picture in a book, better than a film, because she could see and feel that the universe was alive; see the sun burning and feel it’s heat, see the planets, laced with moons which circled and spun around them.

  Once Miss Wilson had taken the whole class, in groups of five at a time, into the windowless bookstore and, armed with a toy globe and a pocket torch, had shown them how the world rotated in the light of the sun: how day and night happen. Now Helen could see it for herself, as she leaned over the earth and the clouds obligingly swirled and melted away, leaving a globe of the world as bald as the one in the schoolroom: but alive! In turn, the countries moved into the light and day broke. She narrowed her eyes and looked at Japan: in houses with paper windows, people were waking up. She saw dim temples where monks in robes were burning incense before golden statues. She looked at China: a web of roads; rickshaws and millions of bicycles in a pure dawn light. Mountains, deserts, tangled jungles; fabulous cities, dusty villages: she c
ould see even to the depths of the ocean, where there were shoals of coloured fish and the wrecks of ships, their treasures all spilt.

  And then she would look for Ireland, where it was night. It made no difference, for with the powers she had she could see it all, see it first as an island at the edge of Europe, the seas pounding around it; then, on looking closer, the rim of mountains, the flat centre (‘Ireland is like a saucer,’ Miss Wilson had told them), and then, closer again, the patchwork of fields, cut by rivers and ditches. She saw dark houses, sleeping cattle, birds and night animals: the red fur of a fox, a heavy badger. She looked then to the north of Ireland, and this delighted her most of all: she saw the place where she lived. She recognised everything she saw now: the silent schoolroom, with it’s rows of empty desks, it’s nature table; the locked chapel, uncannily quiet, a red light burning before the tabernacle; familiar trees; the cold, dark waters of the lough. In Uncle Brian’s and Aunt Lucy’s house Granny Kate was fast asleep, pink and grey hat boxes stacked on the wardrobe which contained her immaculate suits and dresses: Helen could smell the dried lavender which hung there in lace sachets. On the lane which led up to the house a man was staggering along; sobbing and laughing and shouting at the stars, and Helen’s heart contracted with pity when she looked at him. And then, strangest and best of all, she saw her own house, saw her daddy sitting on the kitchen sofa, smoking a last cigarette before locking the doors, banking up the stove for the night, and going off upstairs to bed where their mammy was reading. Sally and Cate were already asleep, and finally Helen could see herself, as though she were looking down on her own bed, where she was curled up, drowsing, waiting for sleep and feeling safe, so safe and so happy, not knowing that when she was a woman, it would break her heart to remember all this.