Things went bad for them, that was what they had in common. Both of them had wound up on the street. Mummy Noreen was born in a workhouse. Born out of wedlock. That was a terrible thing in them days, a terrible shame to hang over you, though I suppose it doesn’t matter so much nowadays. Mummy Noreen’s mother lived in the workhouse in Belfast because she was a . . . I don’t like to use the word. She went with men for money. I suppose it was hard times, right enough, but still. Mummy Noreen always carried that with her, knowing her father was some boy who gave her mother a lock of shillings so he could do his business with her.
But they were upset, and talking more about the outside than they used to, and I was worried and scared too. But I was excited. And you know, I think deep inside them, even though neither of them would say it out loud, I think they were excited too. Maybe they felt ashamed of that. I know I did. Being excited that someone new was coming to suffer the same as us, sure that’s nothing to be excited about, is it? But all the same, I was.
That was why they talked so much about the outside. Because the outside was coming in, and they wanted to know what had changed and what had stayed the same. To see someone new from out there.
Two days, maybe, I’m not sure. They dragged on and we kept working, Mummy Noreen doing the best she could with only one good hand, her broken fingers still twined together with the stick Mummy Joy had taken from one of my dollies. The Daddies were acting strange too. You could see the excitement in them, but they felt no shame in it. And they wanted the place shining, top to bottom. They never worked us so hard before or after.
It was maybe the third morning when we were allowed upstairs for a short while, just to get the place sorted, the breakfast things redd up, all that. Then Daddy Tam put on his suit, the one he wore to church on a Sunday, and he went off in the car. Then Daddy Ivan chased us down the stairs and gave us a talking-to. He telt us we had to stay quiet down there, not make a sound, no matter what. He said if we made any noise, we’d be dealt with. And not just a slap or a kick either. He’d really hurt us. He was serious, you could tell to look at him.
So we stayed down there, just the one lamp burning, keeping quiet. The Mummies whispered one to the other, but only now and again. Mostly, we just waited. Mummy Joy had to scold me for fidgeting, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t holt still. I had to keep going to piddle in the bucket in the corner.
It was a long time past before anything happened. I don’t know how long, I still don’t have a great notion of time, I can hardly tell you the difference between a minute and an hour. But I’d gotten powerful hungry, I know that much, even though Daddy Ivan had sent down some bread and cheese with us. We could hear nothing but our own bellies rumbling. Not a noise from upstairs.
Then all of a sudden, there was footsteps. You could always hear the Daddies clumping about up there, and we could tell them apart, just by the sound of them. This was Daddy Ivan and Daddy George moving about. We all looked at each other because we knew something was happening. And then we heard Daddy Tam come in, and he had someone with him. Someone with hardly anything to them at all. You could hardly hear her footsteps. I say her because we knew it would be a girl. She must have weighed next to nothing, and I imagined in my head it was a fairy up there, just flitting about the place.
We all watched the door at the top of the stairs, waiting for it to open. But it didn’t, at least not for a long time yet. But we could smell cooking. A good smell, meat first, then later on, something sweet that made my mouth water. It must have been the evening time before anything happened. I’d fallen asleep on my bed, and so had the Mummies, I think. The noise of the door being unlocked woke me up, and I shot up, all dizzy with that sick feeling you get when you’re woken up in a fright. And Mummy Joy and Mummy Noreen were lying cuddled together, staring up at the door. I mind the red creases on Mummy Joy’s cheek, from the pillow. I don’t know why that sticks in my head.
The door opened, and I couldn’t see much through the light from upstairs, just a shape. Then she stepped down onto the stairs and I could see her and I could hardly breathe. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I thought she was an angel, I did, I believed she’d come down from heaven to take us away. She had on her the most beautiful dress I’d ever seen, a deep blue colour, not like the auld rags we had to wear. And her hair was lovely, all clean and smooth, not wild like mine. Her face, her skin, everything about her.
We all stayed there for a while, us staring up at her, her staring down at us. Then Daddy Tam steps down behind her, gives her a nudge. But she didn’t move, just stood there, her eyes all big and wide.
Says she, Who are they?
10: Sara
A bell over the shop door chimed as Sara entered. She paused there for a moment, her eyes adjusting to the gloom, and realised some of the lights had been switched off. Checking her watch, she saw it was close to five thirty.
“Here, now, you just caught me,” a voice called from the back of the shop.
Sara stepped around a refrigerated unit full of fruit and vegetables and saw a man behind the counter, standing at the open cash register. She guessed him to be in his mid-seventies, well past retirement age, a slight man but possessing a strong build. He wore a shirt and tie underneath his white overcoat, and she imagined him straightening the knot before he opened his door each morning.
“I was about to start redding up the place. What can I do for you?”
“Sorry, I just need a few things, is that okay?”
“Course it is,” he said, closing the drawer. “There’s no rush.”
She returned his smile and lifted a basket from a stack by the door. Browsing the shelves and chillers, she selected milk, butter, a half-dozen eggs, then came to the rows of bread. She chose a wheaten loaf, which she knew Damien liked, along with something called Irwin’s Nutty Krust, which came wrapped in waxy orange and white paper. She added a bag of apples to her basket, some oranges, plums, and then browsed the vegetables. Peppers, onions, courgettes; there was some dried pasta at home, and tinned tomatoes. Perhaps she could make up a ragu for dinner. It seemed an age since she had really cooked anything.
As she brought her items to the counter, the man winked and said, “That’s not a local accent.”
“No,” she said. “I’m from just outside Bath, originally.”
“Ah, an English girl.”
She almost bristled at being called a girl, but his easy manner disarmed any offence he could have caused.
“My husband’s from Lurgan,” she said, placing the basket on the counter. “We just moved into an old farmhouse out the road. The Ashes, it’s called, because of the trees around it. It still needs a lot of work, but it’s getting there.”
He looked more closely at her now, as if he hadn’t really seen her before.
“The old Jackson place?” he asked.
His friendly manner had cooled, and the urge came upon her to leave the basket and exit the shop. She gave him her warmest smile as she searched her memory for the name Tony had given her.
“You’re Mr. Buchanan, aren’t you?”
“Aye,” he said, his expression drawn and tight.
His scrutiny burned her, as if she had done him some wrong by coming here. She should say nothing more, pay for the groceries and go. But she wanted to know.
“Someone told me you know Mary, the woman who lived there before us.”
“Aye, I do. In fact, I was about to take a spin over to the care home and see how she’s doing. I was told she wandered off early this morning.”
“Yes,” Sara said, a defensive feeling rising in her. “She came to the house around six, knocked on the door. She was confused. My husband brought her back.”
“Well,” Mr. Buchanan said, lifting the first item from her basket and ringing it up on the till. “So long as she’s safe, that’s the main thing.”
“I w
ondered about her,” Sara said.
“Aye?”
He seemed to have no desire to discuss Mary further, but Sara’s time working with vulnerable children had taught her that such apparent reticence is often deceptive. Coax him a little and he might open up.
“About what happened to her. About what happened out at the house all those years ago. I tried searching online but I couldn’t find much.”
Mr. Buchanan looked up from the till, studied her, his eyes watchful.
“Maybe you shouldn’t know too much about that place,” he said. “Not if you’re going to live in it.”
“I’d like to know. I heard you were close to Mary.”
He let out an exhalation as his expression softened. “As close as anybody could be, I suppose.”
“How did you get to know her?” Sara asked.
Mr Buchanan gave a sorrowful smile and lowered himself onto a stool behind the counter, his movements stiffened by age.
“It was this shop she walked into that morning,” he said. “After the killings out there at the farm. My father opened the door to her. Me and my mother were in the back having breakfast, and he called my mother out. We used to live above the shop in them days, with the kitchen just through the storeroom.” He pointed over his shoulder to the open door. “I followed after my mother, came out here, and here was this wee girl, not much younger than me, standing right where you are now. She was spattered in blood, wasn’t saying anything, no matter what my father asked her. Not even her name. She wouldn’t talk to my mother either. Just stood there, not even shaking. Completely still.
“I don’t know how long that went on. My mother knelt down in front of her, holding her hands, trying to get something out of her. My father was pacing up and down, asking what to do. Then I remember she looked at me. I was here, behind the counter. Mary looked me in the eye, just for a second, then she fell to the floor. My mother screamed like the wee girl had dropped dead, but she hadn’t. My father dragged me out from behind the counter and told me to run up the street and get Dr. James, wake him up if I had to. So, here’s me running up Morganstown Main Street in my pyjamas at the scrake of dawn. Dr. James—James Cardwell was his name—he was at his breakfast when I got to his house, up by the church there. He came huffing and puffing behind me, and the wee girl was still lying in a heap on the floor when we got back.
“Dr. James turned her over on her side, arranged her arms and legs, said it was to stop her from choking. He reckoned she was in shock and we had to get an ambulance out for her, and the police. They took her away to hospital, and the police took my father into the back to talk to them about it.
“It was a few days before she said a word to anyone. Nobody knew where she’d come from, who she was, or what had happened to her. I mind the newspapermen coming by here, and my mother telling me not to say a word to them. I think it was the third or the fourth day before she told the doctors anything, and from what I heard, all she could say was they’re all dead, they’re all dead. It wasn’t till she said the names of them that a policeman from the village here figured out who she was talking about. Big Ivan Jackson, and his two sons, George and Tam, or Thomas to give him his proper name.”
“Who were they?” Sara asked.
“Farmers,” he said. He frowned before continuing. “Big ignorant lumps of men, they were. Reared cattle out there, for beef, not for milking. I mind I would see them in church on a Sunday morning, the three of them together taking up about six people’s worth of the pew. They weren’t pleasant men. My father never liked dealing with them. Big Ivan would come in once or twice a week, and he’d always crib over the price of everything, no matter how cheap it was. If you gave him a ha’penny off, he’d look a shilling. And he’d get in an awful twist if you didn’t give it to him.There’s times I remember him shouting at my father, telling him he was a thief for looking the full price of things.”
“Why didn’t your father kick him out?” Sara asked.
“I wondered that myself plenty of times,” Mr. Buchanan said. “It wasn’t till I was older that I realised the truth. It was because he was scared of him. And well he should have been, knowing what happened out there.”
“What did happen?” Sara asked, fearing the answer. “All I know is the family was killed.”
“Family,” Mr. Buchanan echoed, distaste in his voice and on his face. “Seems an odd word for it. No one really knows what the situation was out there. What led up to it. What I do know is, five of them died. Big Ivan, the two sons, and the two women who’d been living there. No one knew who they were till later on, and no one really knew what they were doing there. Whether they were wives to the Jackson boys or what. Tell you the truth, I can’t even mind their names now. Either way, they all died. They reckon George, the younger brother, lost the head and did them all in before he shot himself. At least, that’s what the inquiry decided. Mary went and hid in the cattle shed till the morning, then she walked into the village here and knocked on that door.”
Sara thought of the red stains on the stone kitchen floor. She remembered picking at them with her fingernail. Without meaning to, she wiped her fingertips on her jeans, hard enough to hurt.
“When did you see Mary again?” she asked.
“It was a few years. My father gave his testimony at the hearings, and that was that for a while. All the fuss died down after a few months. The newspapermen stopped calling. That was around the time things were starting to go bad here. It was before the shooting and the bombing, a good few years before the army was out on the streets, but there was trouble brewing in Belfast and Londonderry, or Derry, or whatever you want to call it. What happened out the road was soon forgotten about. Wee Mary was in care until she was sixteen, then she was turned out. She had nowhere to go but back to that house. It was hers by right, seeing as she was the last survivor of that family, if you could call it a family. No one ever knew for sure which one of them was her father.
“Anyway, when my father found out she was living out there, him and me filled a box with bits and pieces, whatever fruit and veg was about to turn, and we drove out there in his wee van. The place was wild, all overgrown, weeds everywhere, half the windows broken. My father knocked on the door for a good five or ten minutes and there was no answer, but we knew she was there. You know the way you can tell if someone’s in or not? You can feel them there. I knew in my bones she was watching us.
“My father calls out, says he, we’ll just leave this here for you. We’ll come back in a lock of days and see what you need.”
“He sounds like he was a good man,” Sara said.
Mr. Buchanan’s gaze became distant, a warm smile on his mouth.
“He was. My father was a proper Christian man. Not like these auld hoors who just pretend to be Christians so they can excuse their own hatred. He knew what it meant, what Jesus said on the mount. He never refused anyone in need, no matter who they were. And that wee girl was in need.
“So, we came back three or four days later, and the empty box was on the doorstep waiting for us. We had another one with us, along with a few rashers of bacon and some eggs we’d got from Herron’s Butchers, they were just across the street from here. My father knocked on the door again, and here, this time, didn’t it open? I still remember the sight of her in the doorway. She can’t have been even five foot tall, as thin as my wee finger, and pale. And she was awful pretty, even with the filth of her. Like a doll. She was like a doll someone had found on the street. I was seventeen at the time, I think. A couple of years out of school, anyway. My father told me to quit staring, then he turned to her and asked if she was all right, if she needed anything. She just took the box of food from him and closed the door.
“But that was the start of it. Over the next lock of months, my father got boys out to tidy the place up for her, to fix the windows, patch-up the roof and whatnot. Paid them out of his own pocket. He got her some
hens and a rooster and put up a wee house for them so she could have eggs. He helped her arrange renting out the fields she owned so she’d have a few shillings of her own, and she could pay him for the food. It was never as much as it really cost him, but he wanted her to feel like she was paying her way. That’s how things went on for fifteen years or so, then a stroke did for my father, and I took over. I’ve been going out there twice a week for forty-odd years. I’ve gotten to know her about as well as anybody could. People about the town here would say she’s mad in the head. Some of the children used to call her Scary Mary. And fair enough, she might be a wee bit touched, but who wouldn’t be after what she went through?”
He had finished ringing-up her items and told Sara the price. She fished her purse from the bottom of the shopping bag, opened it, and sorted through the few notes and coins. For a horrifying moment, she feared she might not have enough, and Damien kept her bank cards. He had done since they married, when he insisted on joint finances, and she agreed. She wasn’t good with money. He often told her that. After digging in the folds of the purse, she found the last few pence she needed and felt a wash of relief. She handed over the money in exact change, and Mr. Buchanan thanked her.
Sara packed her bag of groceries, lifted it from the counter, and said, “Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I appreciate it.”
“I’m sorry it wasn’t a happier topic,” he said.
She had reached the door when he called after her.
“There’s one thing.”
Sara stopped and turned to look back at him, passing the bag from one hand to the other.
“You seem like a decent young woman, so I don’t know if I should say this or not. Francie Keane would be your father-in-law, wouldn’t he?”
She felt the fine hairs on her arms ripple and stand. “Yes,” she said.
“About a fortnight before the fire at Mary Jackson’s house, he came in here. He asked me about Mary, if she was fit to keep that place, and did I think she’d ever sell it if someone offered the right money. I told him Mary didn’t have any sense of money, what it was and what it was for, but I could ask her if he wanted me to. So I did, and she said, no, she wasn’t for selling. I called your father-in-law’s solicitor, like he told me to, and passed it on. Two weeks later, there was a fire.”
The House of Ashes Page 6