Reading in the Dark

by Seamus Deane

  And he raised his hand and made the sign of the Cross above our heads and crossed the room, blew out the candle as the bell rang wildly in the chapel tower, and asked that the lights be switched on. He left in silence with the candle smoking heavily behind him at the foot of the statue, stubby in its thick drapery of wax.

  ‘That was your grandfather,’ said McShane to me. ‘I know that story too. He worked at the newspaper office and he was McLaughlin’s friend. My father told me all about it.’

  I derided him. I had heard the story too, but I wasn’t going to take it on before everyone else. Not if my mother’s father was involved. Did Regan know? Was it really my grandfather who had done that, the little man who sat around in his simmet vest all day long, looking sick and scarcely saying a word? Anyway, it was just folklore. I had heard something of it when I was much younger and lay on the landing at night listening to the grown-ups talking in the kitchen below and had leaned over the banisters and imagined it was the edge of the parapet and that I was falling, falling down to the river of the hallway, as deaf and shining as a log.

  PISTOL

  January 1949

  In that dark winter, there were two police cars, black and black, that appeared to have landed like spaceships out of the early morning light of the street. I saw their gleaming metal reflected in the lacquered window glass of the house next door as they took off with us. But first there was the search. A bright figure, in a white rain-cape, came through the bedroom door and stood with his back to the wall, switching the light on and off. He was shouting, but I was numb with shock and could see only his mouth opening and closing. I dressed within that thin membrane of silence. They were, I knew, looking for the gun I had found the afternoon before in the bottom drawer inside the wardrobe of the room next door, where my sisters slept.

  It was a long, chill pistol, blue-black and heavy, which I had smuggled out the back to show to some boys from Fahan Street, up near the old city walls. They had come over to play football and afterwards we had an argument about politics. I had been warned never even to mention the gun which, I was told, had been a gift to my father from a young German sailor, whose submarine had been brought in to the port at the end of the war. He had been held with about thirty others in Nissen huts down by the docks, and my father used to bring him extra sandwiches or milk every lunch-time when he was helping to wire up the huts for light and heat. Before he went away the young sailor gave my father the gun as a memento. But since we had cousins in gaol for being in the IRA, we were a marked family and had to be careful. Young as I was, I was being stupid.

  While we were gathered round the gun, hefting it, aiming it, measuring its length against our forearms, I had felt eyes watching. Fogey McKeever, known to be a police informer, was at the end of the lane, looking on. He was a young, open-faced man of twenty or so with a bright smile and wide-spaced, rounded eyes. He looked the soul of candour. He had seen me bring the gun back into the house.

  I waited ten minutes and then brought it out again, wrapped in an old newspaper, and buried it in one of the stone trenches up the field. I was so sure that was enough that I had forgotten about it even before I went to sleep. But now, here were the police, and the house was being splintered open. The linoleum was being ripped off, the floorboards crowbarred up, the wardrobe was lying face down in the middle of the floor and the slashed wallpaper was hanging down in ribbons.

  We were huddled downstairs and held in the centre of the room while the kitchen was searched. One policeman opened a tin of Australian peaches and poured the yellow scimitar slices and the sugar-logged syrup all over the floor. Another went out to the yard and split open a bag of cement in his ransack of the shed. He came walking through in a white cloud, his boots sticking to the slimy lino and the cement falling from him in white flakes. I was still in the silence. Objects seemed to be floating, free of gravity, all over the room. Everybody had sweat or tears on their faces. Then my father, Liam and I were in the police cars and the morning light had already reached the roof-tops as a polished gleam in the slates that fled as we turned the corner of the street towards the police barracks, no more than a few hundred yards away.

  Where was the gun? I had had it, I had been seen with it, where was it? Policemen with huge faces bent down to ask me, quietly at first, then more and more loudly. They made my father sit at a table and then lean over it, with his arms outspread. Then they beat him on the neck and shoulders with rubber truncheons, short and gorged-red in colour. He told them, but they didn’t believe him. So they beat us too, Liam and me, across the table from him. I remember the sweat and rage on his face as he looked. When they pushed my chin down on the table for a moment, I was looking up at him. Did he wink at me? Or were there tears in his eyes? Then my head bounced so hard on the table with the blows that I bit hard on my tongue.

  For long after, I would come awake in the small hours of the morning, sweating, asking myself over and over, ‘Where is the gun? Where is it? Where is the gun?’ I would rub the sleep and fear that lay like a cobweb across my face. If a light flickered from the street beyond, the image of the police car would reappear and my hair would feel starched and my hands sweaty. The police smell took the oxygen out of the air and left me sitting there, with my chest heaving.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FIRE

  June 1949

  It was a city of bonfires. The Protestants had more than we had. They had the twelfth of July, when they celebrated the triumph of Protestant armies at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690; then they had the twelfth of August when they celebrated the liberation of the city from a besieging Catholic army in 1689; then they had the burning of Lundy’s effigy on the eighteenth of December. Lundy had been the traitor who had tried to open the gates of the city to the Catholic enemy. We had only the fifteenth of August bonfires; it was a church festival but we made it into a political one as well, to answer the fires of the twelfth. But our celebrations were not official, like the Protestant ones. The police would sometimes make us put out the fires or try to stop us collecting old car tyres or chopping down trees in preparation. Fire was what I loved to hear of and to see. It transformed the grey air and streets, excited and exciting. When, in mid-August, to commemorate the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady into heaven, the bonfires were lit at the foot of the sloping, parallel streets, against the stone wall above the Park, the night sky reddened around the rising furls of black tyre-smoke that exploded every so often in high soprano bursts of paraffined flame. Their acrid odour would gradually give way to the more fragrant aroma of soft-burning trees that drifted across the little houses in their serried slopes, gravelled streets falling down from the asphalted Lone Moor Road that for us marked the limit between the city proper and the beginning of the countryside that spread out into Donegal four miles away. In the small hours of the morning, people sitting on benches and kitchen chairs around the fire were still singing; sometimes a window in one of the nearby houses cracked in a spasm of heat; the police car, that had been sitting in the outer darkness of two hundred yards away, switched on its lights and glided away; the shadows on the gable wall shrivelled as the fires burnt down to their red intestines. The Feast of the Assumption dwindled into the sixteenth of August, and solo singers began to dominate the sing-along chorusing. It marked the end of summer. The faint bronze tints of the dawn implied autumn, and the stars fainted into the increasing light as people trailed their chairs reluctantly home.

  The dismembered streets lay strewn all around the ruined distillery where Uncle Eddie had fought, aching with a long, dolorous absence. With the distillery had gone the smell of vaporised whiskey and heated red brick, the sullen glow that must have loomed over the crouching houses like an amber sunset. Now, instead, we had the high Gothic cathedral and its parochial house, standing above the area in a permanent greystone winter overlooking the abandoned site that seemed to me a faithless and desolate patch, rinsed of its colour, pale and bald in the midst of the tumble of small houses, unpaved st
reets and the giant moraine of debris that had slid from the foot of the city walls down a sloping embankment to where our territory began. In the early winter evenings, people angled past like shadows under the weak street lights, voices would say goodnight and be gone.

  There were two open spaces near our house. Behind our row of houses, the back field sloped up towards the Lone Moor Road; it ended in a roadway that curved down towards Blucher Street and then straightened towards the police barracks, three hundred yards away. The roadway was flanked by a stone wall, with a flat parapet, only five feet high on our side, twelve feet high on the other. On the other side was Meenan’s Park, although the older people still called it Watt’s Field, after the owner of the distillery. We could climb the wall and drop down on the other side; but the wall ran past the foot of the streets – Limewood, Tyrconnell, Beechwood and Elmwood – pierced by a rectangular opening at each street that led to a flight of railed steps down to the park. A line of air-raid shelters separated the top section of the park from the open spaces beyond, where we played football. At night, the field and the park were pitch-black. The only street lighting was a single curved lamp, eight feet high, at the end of each street. We were told never to play in the park at night, for Daddy Watt’s ghost haunted it, looking for revenge for the distillery fire that had ruined him. Those who saw him said he was just a black shape that moved like a shadow around the park, but that the shape had a mouth that opened and showed a red fire raging within.

  To reach the ruins of the distillery, we had only to cross Blucher Street, go along Eglinton Terrace, across the mouth of the Bogside, with the city abattoir on our left, the street stained by the droppings of the cows, pigs and sheep that were herded in there from the high lorries with their slatted sides. There, vast and red-bricked, blackened and gaunt, was the distillery, taking up a whole block of territory. The black stumps of its roof-timbers poked into the sky. Sometimes, when passing there, I would hear the terrified squealing of pigs from the slaughterhouse. They sounded so human I imagined they were going to break into words, screaming for mercy. And the noise would echo in the hollow distillery, wailing through the collapsed floors, clinging to the blackened brick inside. I had heard that people ran from their houses as the shooting started and the police cordon tightened. The crowd in the street, at the top of the Bogside, started singing rebel songs, but the police fired over their heads and the crowd scattered. The IRA gunmen, on the roof or at the top-floor windows, fired single shots, each one like a match flare against the sky. They were outgunned, surrounded, lost. It was their last-minute protest at the founding of the new state. Then the explosion came and the whole building shook and went on fire. No one knew when or if the building would be repaired or knocked down and replaced. It was a burnt space in the heart of the neighbourhood.

  The town lay entranced, embraced by the great sleeping light of the river and the green beyond of the border. It woke now and then, like someone startled and shouting from a dream, in clamour at its abandonment. Once, at the height of a St Patrick’s Day riot, when the police had baton-charged a march and pursued us into our territory, we enticed them to follow us further downhill from the Lone Moor into the long street called Stanley’s Walk that ran parallel with our own. We had splashed half a barrel of oil from a ransacked garage on the road surface at the curve of the slope. The police and B Specials raced down after us, under a hail of stones thrown at the cars and the jeeps they rode in or ran alongside. Advertising hoardings at the side of the street took the first volley of our missiles as the two leading cars hit the oil. A giant paper Coca-Cola bottle was punctured, along with the raised chin of a clean-shaven Gillette model. The cars swung and hurtled into the side walls, shredding stones from them like flakes of straw. The oil glittered in the sudsy swathe of the tyres, and one car lit up in a blue circle of flame as the police ran from it. The whole street seemed to be bent sideways, tilted by the blazing hoardings into the old Gaelic football ground.

  AMERICAN CITIES

  September 1949

  Chicago was a place I longed to see. I had heard that there had been a big fire there once, although I wondered if that were not a mix-up with San Francisco and the earthquake that I knew had destroyed it. American cities were given to catastrophe. ‘The British bombed Washington,’ Uncle Dan told me. Was this also part of the war? I imagined Spitfires, with their red, white and blue bull’s-eyes on the wings, zooming down, the way the Germans zoomed down on us, and the Americans shouting ‘Goddamn’. ‘They never did,’ said Uncle Manus. ‘Bombed it flat,’ said Dan, ‘I’m tellin’ you. They did so. I read that somewhere.’ All those American cities destroyed – bombs, fire, earthquake. It was hard to imagine. Dan said that someone he knew had seen the Chicago fire and had said it leapt across the river like an animal, and that the water steamed. John said he’d seen the whiskey running in the gutters after the distillery fire, with the flames running along the top in a blue fringe, and people collecting it in buckets. There were bullets whizzing everywhere. One of them had knocked the bucket from a man’s hand, and the whiskey had exploded and the man had shouted curses at the IRA men for losing him his whiskey and ruining a good bucket. Oh, that was only a wee fire compared to what we have now, said the others. Sure there’s parts of Germany and Russia that, they say, will still be smouldering by the end of the century People just evaporated in the heat. ‘Can you evaporate?’ I asked my father. He thought so. Jesus Christ, I wish they’d drop one or two of those evaporator bombs in this Godforsaken hole, said Dan; at least we’d feel a bit of heat once before we go into the Big Blue Yonder. He always said that. The Big Blue Yonder. Armies went into it. Warships were blown up into it. Submarines were felled below the water and spun downward into it. Cities, blurred by bombing, faded into it. I could see the American cities sailing into that Yonder, their skyscraper heads flaring under the clouds, especially after someone said that the city of Los Angeles meant the City of the Angels. That made its rising from the earth to the sky seem more likely. Some angels, those boyos over there, said Tom. The wildness of Dan’s Yonder seemed to fit in with American cities and their spectacular destinies. With us, there was just the enclosing rain, so fine that they said there was no space between the lines of it except for someone like Dan who was so skinny he could wriggle through it for an hour and still be dry as a bone. It was only when he put a coat on that you could see him. Dan laughed and claimed that compared to my aunt Katie’s husband, Tony McIlhenny, he was at least a string with knots in it. McIlhenny’s ears, he said, were wider than his shoulders. You’re not to mention that bastard, said Manus; skinny an’all as he was, he did enough damage for ten men. Didn’t he go to Chicago? I asked. They all turned round and looked at me. Ay, he did, said one of them. An’ didn’t come back either. Left his wife and wee’un. Never trusted him myself. Too much the charmer, always the ladies’ man. Looked like an Italian, didn’t he? asked another. Talked like one too, with his arms waving and that big smile on his face. Oh, a real rare one, McIlhenny. Didn’t he see Eddie in Chicago? I asked again; didn’t he write home to Katie to say he did? That’s a fact, said Manus. He did so. Maybe Eddie had died in the big fire there in Chicago, said John. Escaped one here, was got by another there. What do you think, Frank? Not at all, my father replied. That Chicago fire; that was long before Eddie got there. If he ever did, someone said. Are you sure of those dates? Wasn’t it about the same time? Their voices chorused back and forth. If he ever did. I couldn’t remember which one of them said that. And if he didn’t? Why did McIlhenny not come back or at least send for his wife and child? Those skyscrapers in Chicago are so high, said Dan, you could drink a bottle of whiskey on the top floor and you’d have a hangover before you were halfway down – even if you used a parachute. They all laughed and cut the cards again, dealing them out rapidly as they chuckled, ‘Jack high, you’ve the shout,’ Three to a run,’ ‘Two pair.’ I left to play handball at the gable wall of the house at the end of the street. I’d dodge between the s
trokes of the rain and come home dry as you like after they had all gone, and my father would be nodding off to sleep in his chair with the cards scattered all over the table, their blacks and reds shining.

  BLOOD

  October 1949

  She coughed. Crimson sparks landed all over her grey nightdress and the bedclothes. She looked at me, her eyes wide. I couldn’t move, my legs were so leaden and a pulse passed up and down from my head to my toes as though someone had slashed me from behind. Before I could reach the door, it opened and Aunt Bernadette came in. She looked at us and her face went furtive with shock.