Reading in the Dark

by Seamus Deane

  The Bishop leaned over and said,

  ‘You can get up now. Your teacher will take you over.’

  But I could not move. I had become golden. My whole body was solid: an ingot. They would have to lift me and carry me off the altar and put me kneeling in a niche in the wall of the side chapel. Father Browne touched my shoulder, and I rose at once, the teacher caught my elbow and escorted me to the side where the other four were standing and left me there with them, my skin crawling on my scalp and the word ‘unconditional’ running in my head, over and over, a word that shone on and off like a lighthouse beam out of my mouth and across the faces of the staring congregation, drowning in the sea of sound as the choir sang. That was the first time the Bishop spoke to me.

  Nugent was still talking.

  He had renounced the flesh for the sake of the spirit, he was saying. The flesh was good, good in itself but not by itself. That was an important distinction.

  I agreed, nodding vigorously.

  The danger of the flesh was, he announced, that it could become an appetite that lived by what it fed on.

  He sat back and looked at me expectantly.

  How else could something live? I wondered, but again he was smiling expectantly at me, and again I realised he had asked a question I had not heard. The noise in my head was deafening.

  ‘You know that phrase – about appetite?’ asked Father Nugent.

  I looked at him, appalled. Was this something I was supposed to know?

  ‘It’s Shakespeare, I believe. One of the plays.’

  The plays. I had thought there was only the one, The Merchant of Venice, which we were reading and rehearsing in third year. This man was ready for the asylum. Soon I would be too.

  He leaned forward, and I sat back as far as I could go. The fire was windowed in his glasses.

  ‘Sex without love is akin to murder. You are a murderer of your own body -and of the body of the woman with whom you perform the loveless act. And in murdering the flesh, you murder also the soul.’

  He leaned back, and the fires in his spectacles disappeared. I liked the way he had placed that ‘also’. That was neat, truly official. He was going on.

  ‘… the misuse of our most mysterious power, the power of originating life itself. Nothing else compares with it except the love from which that life springs, which is in God, and the love that life brings forth in us – that too is in God, of course, but is also what moulds, defines and sanctifies us all our days.’

  He paused and took breath. I was nodding again but I was beginning to make the smallest possible definite movements in the chair to signal that I thought the show was over.

  ‘One thing. When it comes to women. Above all things. Avoid brutality That will make a man of you. Not strength. Not fighting. Not sport. Not money. A lot of your companions are… what shall I say? A little raucous, you know? Tough for the sake of being tough, you know what I mean, son? Avoid that. Go in peace.’

  He stood up and blessed me with a swift sign of the cross that pinned me back in the chair for a moment. He left me to the end of the corridor with its lines of green baize doors on either side. I ran from the building, cut out the back gate to intercept Irene Mackey, if I could, on the way home from her school for lunch. Just to look at her and persuade myself she was looking at me. As I ran, I imagined Father Nugent hesitantly closing his door and looking at the armchairs on either side of the fire, now mute and emptied of all confidences in the whitened light of his lamp and the tall windows.

  GOING TO THE PICTURES

  November 1953

  We saw the movie Beau Geste. The idea of lodging the corpses of the dead legionnaires on the parapets seemed to us ingenious, although there was a great deal of argument about how dead men could stand so with a rifle tucked under their arms, and how the Tuareg tribesmen could have failed to notice.

  We took up the evil sergeant’s announcement as a slogan that we chanted regularly when we walked in a group through the Protestant area that lay between the school and our streets.

  ‘Everybody does his duty at Zinderneuf, dead or alive. We’ll make the Arabs think we’ve got a thousand men.’

  The history teacher rebuked us for admiring all that English public-schoolboy nonsense in the movie. The three brothers. The stolen jewel. The so-called Viking funeral at the end for the dead Beau. The name Beau Geste itself We should learn more about the Irish tradition in the French Foreign Legion. For instance, the great Fenian organiser, John Devoy, had joined the Legion in his youth in order to get the military training for fighting the English. The French were always our friends, he said.

  So they say, so they say, my father told me. But really, it’s just a case of one empire or another. France and America were republics; they should never have gone on to become empires. Real republicans would never do that. But then, he asked, with a marked bitterness, who ever met a real republican? Rarer than a real Christian. He lifted the newspaper in front of his face again.

  Your brother, you met him, I wanted to say. Your own brother. He was one. But you’ll never know it. Instead I asked him why Devoy had joined up with the French to fight Arabs so that he could then fight for Ireland against the British Empire. He shrugged his shoulders. Maybe he saw too many movies, he laughed.

  But every other Saturday afternoon, when the football team did not have a home game, we went to the pictures in the City Cinema or in St Columb’s Hall. Once, on a feast day, when there was no school, we went to a six o’clock showing. Irene Mackey had finally agreed to go with me and the others on this occasion. She was still Grenaghan’s girlfriend; the presence of the others made her feel it was safe enough to come with me. He was a tough, even though he walked with a limp. But I’d worry about him later, I decided. She’d be sitting beside me. That was enough. To my right was Harkin and Moran. To Irene’s left was Toner, his girlfriend, Sheila, and then O’Donnell. With everyone else we jeered at the advertisements and a documentary about growing, wheat on the Canadian plains. Then the real movie – a thriller – began. I inched closer to Irene, and she snuggled in towards me. Someone behind kicked the back of my chair and laughed.

  ‘You two behave yourselves,’ said a man’s voice.

  We both blushed and parted slightly. Harkin, who was eating from a tub of ice-cream, whispered to me:

  ‘Just say the word an’ I’ll turn round and fix your man behind. One smack in the gob.’

  Irene looked at me in horror.

  ‘No. Forget it. We’ll watch the movie.’

  After a time, as the plot unravelled, O’Donnell began to lay bets on what would happen, and who the murderer was.

  ‘Who’s the fucker in the bedroom? A tanner says it’s the da, the big fella with the glasses.’

  ‘Her da? Never. Let’s see your tanner and you’re on whispered Harkin across Irene and me. O’Donnell’s hand came out of the gloom with a silver sixpence in the palm. Then it withdrew.

  ‘You’re on,’ said Harkin, displaying his own tanner.

  We were all slumped back, caught in the glare of the screen above us. The film’s heroine went into the kitchen and made coffee.

  ‘Is coffee much different from tea?’ whispered Sheila.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ answered Toner in embarrassment, ‘it’s away different.’

  ‘How do you know?’ cackled O’Donnell from the other side. ‘You never drank coffee in your life.’

  ‘I did so. Out at the American base one day. I was out there delivering stuff from Lipton’s shop, and they gave me coffee then. Plenty o’ times, so I did.’

  ‘Be quiet, you lot,’ said the man’s voice from behind us, ‘some people want to hear the picture. That’s what we paid money for.’

  The usherette’s torch danced over us, and we slid down a little in the seats. Everybody shushed. The picture had reached its crisis. A detective on the screen was questioning a suspect.

  Moran, craned across, whispering: Did you hear the joke about the Eskimo detective? He said
to the suspect, “Where were you on the night of the twenty-first of September to the twenty-first of March?”’

  Toner laughed out loud.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Sheila.

  ‘Never mind; we’ll tell you after. Jesus.’

  ‘What’s the joke?’ whispered Irene in my ear.

  ‘He didn’t tell it right. I’ll tell you outside.’ A pang crossed my stomach. She didn’t get that?

  On the screen, a door handle turned and the door edged open into the hallway. There was a glimpse of a gloved hand.

  Nat was leaving. The door opened further.

  ‘Eedjit.’ roared Moran, ‘your man’s in the bedroom. Keep bonehead talking.’

  ‘Shhh,’ said the man behind.

  A girl was sobbing some rows back.

  ‘She’s going to be killed. Why doesn’t someone tell her?’

  ‘Hi, Miss, you’re going to be killed,’ shouted Harkin.

  Some people laughed, but there was much shushing too, and the usherette’s light played across us and stayed for a few seconds. Irene gripped my hand tightly. I twisted mine round hers, and we interwove our fingers.

  On screen, the hero was at the door, preparing to leave.

  ‘NO, NO, NO,’ we roared in unison. ‘You gom. You’re lockin’ her in with him. He’s in the bedroom.’

  ‘She’s had it now,’ Toner announced.

  Sheila began to weep. Irene clung to my arm.

  ‘I can’t look,’ she whispered. ‘Tell me when it’s all over.’

  ‘But this is the best bit!’

  But she dug her face in my shoulder and wouldn’t look. The cinema was silent.

  ‘Jesus, it is her da,’ whispered Toner, as the camera settled on a photograph of the heroine’s father.

  ‘You owe me a tanner, Harkin,’ said O’Donnell gleefully, banging his hands together.

  The killer pulled the mask from his face. It was her father. I was horrified. I forgot Irene.

  ‘Her da?’ squealed Sheila in disbelief. ‘He wouldn’t kill his own daughter.’ ‘ANIMAL!’ she roared at the screen. The people around us laughed.

  The hero was pounding his way up the stairs, gun drawn.

  A shot, an embrace, a voice-over. The End.

  ‘Jesus, that was good,’ said Toner as the lights went up, ‘I knew it was him all the time.’

  ‘On your arse, you did,’ jeered Moran, ‘you thought it was the man in the drugstore. Anyone would’ve known it was the da.’

  I left Irene to my own street corner, since she thought we might be more likely to meet Grenaghan at her own. We stood near the street lamp. I could see my own door from there and I kept an eye on it in case anyone came out to leave out the milk bottles for the morning. We kissed once, very softly. As I leant forward to kiss her again, I wondered if I could suggest we get out of the light and go round to the back lane. A shadow came up on the wall above us, and I knew, even as she stepped away, that it was Grenaghan. He was just a blur moving close. The house door opened. My father stepped out in the block of yellow light. I saw him perfectly. Grenaghan stopped and looked. My father looked across at us. Then he stepped in again, leaving the door open. Grenaghan swung at me and caught me on the side of the head. Then Liam appeared with some of the others, including Harkin, Moran and O’Donnell. They all ran at Grenaghan who turned, leapt on the wall and dropped into the field below. They didn’t follow him into the darkness.

  Liam sat me against the wall.

  ‘Where’s Irene?’ I asked.

  ‘Irene? You’re asking about her? She passed us a hundred yards down the road, running. Said nothing. She must have set you up for Grenaghan.’

  I shook my head. It wasn’t true. They all took me for a fool. But Irene avoided me thereafter, and I could not bring myself to pursue her and ask her outright. She stayed with Grenaghan. My father pulled down my lip to check the bruising on the inside.

  ‘Standing in the light with your back to the dark. That’s asking for it. You should have been on your guard. Anyway, you’re too young to be running around with girls. Stick to your studies. And stay away from Grenaghan and anybody associated with him. You hear?’

  He went out then and bolted the hall door before we went to bed. The house felt tight and small, and my head felt thunderous.

  HAUNTED

  December 1953

  The story ran like this, said Liam, as he explained to me why Grenaghan should be left alone. You’ve heard it before, he told me, the old yarn about the diocesan exorcist, Father Browne, whose hair went white in one night fighting the devil. Christ knows what the devil looked like after a night with that maniac. Anyway, it was that family – the Grenaghans – it was all about. Years and years ago, Jimmy Grenaghan, your man’s grandfather, had been in love with a woman called Claire Falkener. But he had been one of those hopelessly shy men and had never told her, even though she knew it. Everything was so strict then, at the turn of the century. She couldn’t say anything directly and he blushed at the thought of addressing her or any woman. ‘Better to have loved and not be able to talk than ever to have talked at all,’ Liam cackled.

  Claire waited and waited. Grenaghan watched her, but said nothing. The Falkener family gave no encouragement. Jimmy was never going to grow up. He walked in fear of his own shadow and his smile, they said, was a smile at nothing; it was just an apology for being in the world. And anyway, who wanted a cringer like that in the family? So, in the heel of the hunt, Claire tired of waiting, was courted by another man, Danno Bredin, and married him. Bredin was in the Merchant Navy, so he was away a lot, sometimes as much as eight months in the year. They had three children, a boy and two girls. To everybody’s surprise, Jimmy Grenaghan went off to England, looking for work. Nobody thought he could ever get up the nerve to buy a ticket and leave his mammy. But he did, and he stayed away for several years. On top of all that, he came back to Derry as a qualified tradesman and found a job in the local foundry. He was a different man by then, a changed ‘person – no longer the shy stick he had been. He even looked different, walked different, dressed well, talked with confidence. England had transformed him, done him a world of good. But he never looked at another woman. Instead, he took to visiting Claire, becoming a kind of second father to the children, buying them presents, even going so far as to go out with her now and then to the New Year’s pantomime, or out the country roads for a walk. People pulled in their breaths and hissed their gossip. But then, during the War, it was reported that Danno Bredin’s ship had gone down off the coast of Argentina, all hands lost. Claire and Jimmy waited six months, then he moved into the house with her. They didn’t marry; just lived together. The priest came down and gave off yards to her. She just listened and shut the door after him. When the priest came back, Jimmy met him and put his arm across the doorway and wouldn’t let him in. Told him it was none of his business. A lot of the neighbours didn’t speak to them. Jimmy was ostracised; so was Claire. It was worse for her, living in the street all day long. He, at least, had his work to go to as foreman of the foundry. So not many could turn a word in his mouth there. Then Danno Bredin returned. He had been injured in the shipping disaster and had a permanent limp and looked sick. He had been pensioned off. But there he was, limp and all, and the cuckoo, Jimmy, was in the nest.

  Claire and Jimmy must really have been in love, for she wouldn’t have Bredin around the place. Told him marriage to him was no marriage, with him away most of the time. Claimed he had relations with other women, she knew it for a fact. There was total uproar. Bredin could have gone to law for the house. But instead, he rented a bedroom in the house opposite them, that belonged to a widow, and sat in it, day after day, at the window, looking at his own house, his own children, across the way. He spoke to no one. He never went out, just sat there, a face at the window, looking at what had become of his life. The street – Wellington Street it was – had an uneasy air about it. People didn’t like passing between those two houses – even Claire, who started t
o leave the house by the back, down the lane and on to the Lecky Road so that she wouldn’t see the shrivelling face of her husband watching her. Jimmy ignored him, even made a point of it by standing in the doorway smoking a cigarette after dinner and looking up and down the street, letting Bredin see he could not care less. Finally, one day, Bredin was no longer at the window. He had become ill. He lingered for a while. The doctor said there was no hope for him. And sure enough, he died. The funeral was a terrible business. Bredin’s relatives wouldn’t hear of Claire or her children attending it. As the hearse moved off, the horses reared up and whinnied as if frightened by something, and the coffin rocked between its shining rails in its glass carriage. The family spat on the closed door of Claire and Jimmy’s house. A front window was broken. Bredin’s mother stood outside the door and cursed all within it, long and bitter, for having ruined her son’s life. That they might never have luck in this life, nor peace in the next. That they be blackened with misery, seed, breed and generation from this day forward. That they might never have a house where they could live that was not cursed. That they might see his face every day and night until the end of their days; her voice weak and shrill, chanting its sentences in the air to the closed door, the curtained windows, the hole in the glass of one of them, until she was finally pulled away.

  All was quiet for a time. But then the neighbours said they began to hear strange noises coming from the house, like thunder rolling and rattling. The children cried. They said they couldn’t open the front door to go out at times, because it felt like someone was holding it shut. Claire aged, and always looked frightened. She went to the priest, but he said he could do nothing for her until she left Jimmy. Then Jimmy himself went into the house one day from work. He had been telling people they were trying to sell it, although everyone knew it couldn’t be sold. Who would want it? Jimmy reappeared that day at the front door, as he had often done, smoking a cigarette and staring at the blank window of the house opposite where Bredin had lived. It was said that, as he flicked the cigarette into the gutter and turned to go in, he hesitated and shouted something – a curse, Bredin’s name, something like that – at the blank window. Then he went in. Next morning he was found at the foot of the stairs, his neck broken. The police said it was an accident. Six months later, Claire died in her bed, a look of terror on her face, but not a mark on her body. The children were taken away by Grenaghan’s family; the Falkeners wanted nothing to do with them.