Reading in the Dark

by Seamus Deane

In the winter of 1947, the snow had covered the air-raid shelters out in the back field. No one ever used the shelters during the war, not even after the bombing of Belfast. When the Americans began to arrive, in their thousands, some people said we were in for it now. But the Germans came once only, made a bombing run on the docks where the American ships were lined up in threes and fours, missed, and never came again. The sirens had given several false alarms before, but this time the throb of the approaching planes seemed to make them more frenetic. We woke to their wild moanings, were carried to safety under the stairs and cradled sleepily between our parents, lightly asperged by the bright drops of cold Lourdes water that my mother would every so often sprinkle on us. I remember the silence when the droning stopped and then the long lamentation of each plane’s dive. One or two guns pumped. Then the house seemed to lift a little on a wave of sound. When the all-clear sounded, my father remembered the air-raid shelters, where we should have gone, and laughed.

  There were five shelters, built in a line parallel with the street, from the top of the sloping field to the bottom. The last was almost opposite our back gate. Made of red brick and concrete slab roofs, they echoed like empty stone boxes. Our feet rang in them and our voices boomed. They stank of urine and cheap wine, for derelicts used to sit there drinking, sprawled against the wall as though they had been shot, their eyes razor-slit with exhaustion. Once as I ran through them, I saw two tinkers, a man and a woman, wrestling on the floor; I almost ran into their heaving foetor of split clothes and white skin. Vomit was rising up in my throat as I got out again into the field. For ages afterwards, I could envisage them clearly, he butting back and forth on top of her, she writhing slowly, one leg in mid-air. I didn’t know what I had seen, but I said nothing.

  When the shelters were demolished, in late spring, 1950, the broken rubble was left strewn along the edge of the field out the back. After a time, it began to be used as a dumping ground. Within months, we had a rat problem. The City Corporation did nothing, despite the rats scampering and squeaking. When I went outside to shovel coal from the back shed into the fire-bucket, a rat would streak through the door when I opened it or scarper to the back of the coal pile when I drove the shovel in to its base. Soon, they were appearing in the houses. We would have to destroy them in their nests in the rubble.

  The men of the neighbourhood dug deep trenches at each end of the line of rubble, building the excavated earth into a steep slope to make it harder for the emerging rats to escape. Then they half-filled the trenches with anything that would burn – newspapers, oilcloth, shards of linoleum, broken planks. They sprinkled this with pink paraffin. We were deputed to collect all the dogs of the neighbourhood. There were collies, greyhounds, Kerry Blues with their steel-trap jaws, terriers of every description and mongrels that defied any. We patrolled on top of the rubble, hissing at the dogs, slapping them on the jaws and jumping back as they snarled and twisted on their leads. When a dog stopped and sniffed or barked at an exit hole in the rubble, we blocked it with stones or thrust burning, paraffin-soaked rags down on a stick and piled in paper and dried grass on top until there was a smoky mass curling up. Then we blocked it as best we could and watched for exit plumes of smoke at other parts of the rubble. We blocked these too. Soon the whole stretch was drifting with smoke. We wore our gas masks as we moved up and down in lines, looking like creatures with inflated and goggled insect heads, holding the dogs tight on the leashes as they strained and whimpered.

  The rats began to emerge, first from the deep trenches at either end. The men stood above with blazing torches in their hands. They waited, as the rats bolted back and forth, leaping every so often, like salmon, to clear the sloping earth bank above. Then, when the trench was packed with the squeaking, twisting creatures, they threw in the torches, the paraffin exploded, and the flames wavered up at each end, simultaneously, then closed their silky curtains in a swift hiss over the length of the trench. Standing on top of the rubble we could hear the rats and feel them moving. Then they began to come out from the bolt holes, some of them muscled, slug-like, others hairy and squalid, all of them darting or scurrying at an amazing speed. We released the dogs and picked up branches, hurling sticks, iron bars or makeshift spears, made of two or three bamboo poles lashed together and sharpened at the end or with a blade fixed on top. The dogs caught the rats in their jaws and tossed them back and forth. Some rats escaped into the darkness behind us, and we sent the greyhounds after them. The dead ones were pitched into the flames; others we forced back with our sticks and spears until, twisting and turning, they slipped over the edge into the blazing trenches, from which they would sometimes leap in mid-air, squealing in agony.

  We had begun in late afternoon. By dark, the battle was over. We were poking in the embered trenches, heavy with the massed bodies of the rats, when we heard one of the mongrels bark and then yelp with fear. From the middle of the rubble, a rat was emerging, dazed with smoke. It seemed to come out in sections, as though it were a snake. ‘A king rat,’ said someone, and we rushed it with the dogs. It screamed like a baby piglet as we came for it and fled from the rubble heap, but we pinned it to the wall of one of the back yards. The dogs turned hesitantly, barking, but not going in. The rat rose on its hind legs, screeching from its red and grey mouth, its whitish belly exposed. Finally we enraged a Kerry Blue, slapping it on the nose, poking it in the flanks until it was snapping round in tight, violent circles. Then we lifted it and threw it on the rat so that it had to bite or be bitten. The rat’s head almost came off with the second snap.

  Going home through the smoke-swirls and the noise, the mock-burial parties for the dead rats that were being covered by the clay from the trenches, the poles tipped with knives clashing in skirmishes, I felt so sick that the flesh seemed to tighten on my bones. The infested field was glowing and blurring like an inferno. Even the night sky seemed vague, as the smoke drifted across the starlight, and I imagined the living rats that remained, breathing their vengeance in a dull miasmic unison deep underground.

  CRAZY JOE

  August 1951

  It was Crazy Joe Johnson who got me into the art room of the public library. Everybody called him Crazy Joe. He was always walking around the streets, talking to everyone he met, especially children. He rarely made sense to us, but we had been told not to make fun of him; something had happened when he was a young man and he had never been right since. He had no harm in him; the only harm in Joe had been done to him by someone else. So we were told; I wasn’t so sure. He made me feel uneasy. He was often in or around the library, nodding and smiling to himself, humming, twirling his walking stick, raising his hat to women, real or imagined. He had a sculpted, clean appearance. His medallion face fronted his large head like a mask, and the head itself, perched on his tiny body, swung and vibrated all the time like an insect’s. His smile was brilliant for his teeth were false and his speech was as precise and fumigated as the rest of him, all lips and teeth and tip of the tongue.

  On a summer evening, after playing football up at Rosemount, I came through the public park on my way to the library to borrow books for the weekend. The librarian, a formidable Protestant lady, clucked her tongue at me but let me through the wooden turnstile beside the desk after inspecting my hands by turning them over like a pair of dried fish on the blotting paper at the counter. She was large, her blouse tight on her breasts, her throat slightly goitrous. In her armour of chiffon and serge, with her blondish hair rigidly waved, she seemed to pulse softly and secretly. Even on this occasion, when I was still streaked with sweat from the football, she pursed her lips in determined disapproval and then smiled as she let me through. Her friendliness was stronger than her sense of respectability.

  Once through, I went straight to the door of the art room. ‘Reserved for Adults’ declared the black-and-white lettering across the glass door with its mahogany trim and ornate brass and wooden handle. Joe was in there on his own, standing at a lectern, turning an immense page that flashed
colour and left a brief rainbow on his hand. On seeing me, he immediately came towards the door in quick, martinet steps. I retreated towards the Young Readers section, grabbed the first book that came to hand and pretended to read. Joe arrived, beaming, took the book from my hand, placed it back on the shelf and whispered,

  ‘Let me show you something.’

  He held me by the sleeve and led me towards the room.

  ‘I’m not allowed in there. It’s for adults only.’

  ‘Tosh, pure tosh. If I invite you in, no permission is required. Miss Knowles will be only too pleased to see a hot little savage like yourself come under the cool shade of my educative influence. Right, Miss Knowles?’

  He raised his voice in her direction, but she seemed not to hear him and kept her eyes on the box of filing cards she was arranging with minute care.

  ‘You see? Idiot boy. Come.’

  So we went in. He led me across to the book he had been looking at, wide open on the wooden lectern. The colours were thick and dark. I did not know how to look properly. The shapes jumped from the page and then coiled down again. He shut the book in a handclap of dustbeams.

  ‘I think not. Let us begin with the French. Here we are. Feast your eyes, young fellow, feast your eyes and say nothing, for you can say nothing that will not be ridiculous.’

  It was a painting of a naked woman. Her body lay on dark velvet and was both sprawled and private. The colours of her flesh were interfused like fragrances.

  ‘Oh,’ I exclaimed.

  ‘O-ho,’ Joe chortled, ‘young Caliban sees beauty The beauty of Boucher, young sir, will stir the sensibilities of even such an outcast as thou art.’

  And he slammed the book shut.

  ‘Out with you now. Too much too quickly will disturb the savage breast. Return to your trash. Get thee gone.’

  He waved me away imperiously. I walked through the leaf shadows on the floor to the doorway, nodded at Miss Knowles and held up my hands to show her I had no books with me, went through the turnstile, feeling its wooden baton stroke my flesh, and stood at the wire-mesh fence outside, surveying the trees and the grass and the red-brick shirt factory beyond. Boucher. I had never heard the name before. I had never seen a nude before. Her flesh was solid, but so replete with light. Irene Mackey, from the Lecky Road, whom I had long fancied and thought beautiful, suddenly seemed ordinary.

  Every week, I went back but I didn’t see the woman in the painting again; Joe was often there and he began to walk out of the library with me and stroll in the park. His aim was, he said, to give me a little of the education I so sorely lacked but at least had the decency to want. The walk usually consisted of a descent down a flight of broad steps to an ornamental pond surrounded by iron railings. We would stop there, lean on the railings and look at the green-black water shifting under its carpet of water lilies. Most of the time, the water looked metallic, but on occasion, when the sun shone, it became less burnished and softened to a sexual velveteen. Joe leaned in close to my ear and half-whispered, half-shouted a garbled mess of things – stories, questions, conundrums. Sometimes his false teeth shifted in and out; sometimes he seemed unaccountably close to tears; mostly, he beamed fiercely, clanking the railings with his walking stick or stomping it on the ground for emphasis. His head swung back and forth endlessly.

  ‘Let me tell you, since you never asked, which is to your credit, or else you’re very sly,’ he said one day as we stood at the pond, ‘why I’ve never let you see that painting again. You do want to know? Don’t have me waste my breath.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘You saw her, the woman in the painting, eh? Didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I saw her.’

  ‘Beautiful, wasn’t she. Did you recognise her? Eh?’

  ‘No. How could I?’

  ‘How could you not? She was Irish. A Mademoiselle Murphy. She had, she had … ’

  He beamed at me. ‘… sexual intercourse with the kings of France. The kings of France. Those boys knew a thing or two in that particular area, I can tell you.’

  He banged his stick delightedly on the railings.

  ‘Oh, this was long ago in the good old days. When France was France. Beautiful all right. But she was also evil. Did you see that?’

  I shook my head and looked into his bright, old-young face. His eyes were red and rheumy. He caught my shirt sleeve and tugged me down towards him. His breath whined in his chest.

  ‘I knew a man who knew that woman. Actually, my dear young friend, knew her carnally.’

  ‘Carnally?’ I queried.

  ‘Latin, you fool,’ he snarl-smiled, ‘don’t they even teach you Latin? Carnis. Car-nis. Flesh. Knew her in the flesh.’

  ‘But I thought she lived long ago, in France.’

  ‘That makes no difference. The painter lived long ago, as you say. But she … she was Irish. So, you see?’

  This was a conundrum. I said nothing. He took out a giant white handkerchief and blew his nose, chuckled, and stowed the handkerchief away in his trouser pocket. A corner of it continued to peep out like a white mouse with a green mucus eye.

  ‘There’s a man you’ve seen but never noticed and he’s not far from here. He’s the man I mean. He never speaks. He stands in the same place all day at a street corner and he looks up Bligh’s Lane as if he had never seen it before.’

  I knew the man he meant. I had noticed him. Larry McLaughlin, a relative of the Brigid in Katie’s story Now I would hear his tale.

  ‘Now, when he was a young man, within a week of getting married, off he goes one day up Bligh’s Lane towards Holywell Hill or Sheriff’s Mountain. Is it not strange that the same bump of heather has two names? Have you been there?’

  ‘Yes, often.’

  The hill beyond that was the hill where Grianan stood.

  ‘Well, which name was the first?’

  ‘Holywell, I suppose. There’d have been a well before there was a sheriff.’

  ‘And who was Bligh, the man Bligh’s Lane is called after?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And you think you live here. I could expect no more. It’s one thing not knowing her. No Caliban would. But the place where you go, every silly Sunday, I bet, with your daddy, and all those damned bells ringing, and the streets stiff with boredom, and you don’t even know where you are. Just snuffling round like a young foal. What will become of you?’

  I shrugged and stared at the white lily napkins with their spidery yellow tongues, so still they seemed glued to the water.

  ‘And there’s another thing. Why is it sad when I ask what will become of you and not sad when I ask what will you become? Is the word “of” sad?’

  He took out his white mouse handkerchief and wiped his eyes. Was he crying? I thought I’d better get away, but he caught my sleeve again.

  ‘Anyway, off goes this man – let’s call him by his first name, Larry – late afternoon, up to the hill with two names, four-and-a-half miles up and four miles down if you take the short cut over the watery brook, which he did, wouldn’t you know, just as it was getting dark. It was one of those -ember months, the sinking fire months.’

  The pond crinkled like tin as a breeze sped across it.

  ‘So, Larry is coming home. You know whom I mean, of course, but we’ll name no names. Discretion is the better part of candour. Dear me, I don’t like what’s going to happen now. Crossing water at dusk is bad luck. It’s tempting fate. The world on the side you leave is never the same as the world you reach. And you know what else about the watery brook?’

  ‘Yes. It marks the border.’

  ‘Oh, bloody clever.’ He huffed for a moment. ‘So, Larry did walk into one country and crossed back at dusk into the one he’d come from. Wasn’t he the sorry man, he did!’

  ‘Why, what happened? Was he shot or something?’

  ‘Shot, my arse. How could he have been shot and be still standing there at the street corner? Am I wasting my breath? Sure no one’s ever shot at the b
order these days, more’s the pity.’

  His face was flushed with anger, and his false teeth shot in and out as he sucked on his cheeks.

  ‘He could have been wounded and then recovered. And I am listening.’

  ‘You’re quite right. That’s possible. But that’s not what happened. Let’s proceed. No more interruptions.’

  He turned round and looked up the hill towards Rosemount.

  ‘I see the factory lights are on. It must always be dark in there. I don’t think they ever clean those windows. Can you imagine what it’s like in there, with all those women, rows and rows of them, turning men’s shirts back and forth all the time, collars and cuffs and tails? I’d hate to hear what they say to one another about the bodies of the men that are going to wear them. Lucky for them that we do, or they’d be out of a job, the bitches. I wonder, are their hands as clean as they should be, running them up the inside of the back of the shirt and opening them up from the inside. Is this the only city in the world where men wear shirts that women’s hands have been inside even before they wear them? Eh?’

  He shuddered. I thought that his shirt must be very small. The women would laugh at that all right, a little thing with the broad stripes he favoured, like a miniature gaol window on a hanger. But what had happened to Larry? Joe was swirling the loose gravel with his stick. I wanted to run off but I knew I had to stay.

  ‘So, he’s on his way home, swinging along quite happily, in the last evening of his bachelorhood, the embers of his chastity finally beginning to die down. There’s a woman on the road ahead of him. She turns round at the noise of his steps; she’s dawdling along and gives him a smile that puts the heart across him, for she’s the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She asks if he would walk into town with her for she’s afraid of the dark. In ten or twenty yards, she’s linked his arm and in half a mile, after pressing against him and sweet-talking him, they’re in a field, and she’s lying under him, and he’s pulling at his shirt and trousers, and she’s in the black grass pulling him down when – wham! She’s gone!’