Home was a huge sky; it was flat fields of poor land fringed with hawthorn and alder. It was birds in flight; it was columns of midges like smoke in a summer dusk. It was grey water; it was a mad wind; it was a solid stone house where the silence was uncanny. [1; vide. unheimlich ]
. she put her finger up to her brow to touch a tiny invisible scar at her hairline. When she was six, she’d run into a hay baler and cut her head so badly that she’d had to go to the hospital for stitches; and it had left a faint mark which had remained with her for the rest of her life. Touching the scar quickly, so that no one ever realised that she was doing it, restored a sense of reality, a sense of who she was, in a way that looking at her own reflection could not. [2]
[...]
[Cate and Helen:] On the outskirts of Antrim there were already houses where Union Jacks and Ulster flags were hanging out for the Twelfth of July, even though it was only mid June. Red, white and blue bunting hung across the streets. ‘I thought we might as well go this way, through town,’ Helen said, ‘take the scenic route, rather than go by the motorway. We’re in no great hurry.’ On the far side of Antrim Cate noticed small pieces of wood with messages on them nailed to the trees and telegraph poles. ‘WHERE IS YOUR BIBLE?’ they said, ‘ETERNITY WHERE?’ and ‘REPENT!’ [6]
[...]
Cate always loved the first meal with her family when she came home [...] It reminded her of the visceral, uncomprehending emotional closeness that had bound them together over dinners of baked beans and fish fingers eaten at that same table when they were small children. Uncle Brian had always said, ‘I never saw three sisters that were as close, and I never saw three sisters that were as different.’ It was still true. If they hadn’t been sisters, they would never have been friends. [8]
[...]
[Helen:] She’d said to Cate that her trips home at the weekend had been a safety valve, but it wasn’t true: it was more of an entry into a danger zone, as though there were a hairline crack in her otherwise steely self-containment, and to go home was to push against that crack with her fingers and feel it yield and fear that some day it would split open completely. She realised this more fully today than ever before, and it frightened her. She got up from the chair and tried to distract herself. [24]
[...]
Helen could see why people gravitated to Cate, why they liked her, but also why they shied away from Helen and found her intimidating. Cate was on the side of life, and it was painful to Helen to have to admit that that was not true of herself. [25]
[...]
Flora and Fauna of Northern Ireland, Field Guide to the Birds of Lough Neagh, Monuments of Pre-Christian Ireland, Celtic Heritage. The fiction was on the shelf above: Call My Brother Back by Michael McLaverty, Alexander Irvine’s My Lady of the Chimney Corner, and collections of short stories by Liam O’Flaherty and Frank O’Connor. There were some of Granny Kate’s books mixed in with them [...] When she was still a child, Helen remembered her father taking her along to hear Seamus Heaney read in Magherafelt. When was that? Sometime in the early seventies, it must have been. He’d bought at that reading one of the several collections of Heaney’s poems which he owned, and as Helen reached up to lift down a copy of North, she noticed a figure standing at the kitchen window. [27]
[...]
‘It was my fault,’ he’d said abruptly, lifting his gaze from the floor tiles and looking Helen hard in the eye. ‘It was me they wanted. I’m to blame.’ [28]
[...]
For she knew the same feeling of weary depression which came from working in a relentlessly negative atmosphere. From her work and her life she knew the fate of both the victims and The perpetrators, and both were dreadful. [52]
[...]
‘What do you think is the biggest difference between now and then?’ Helen asked.
David replied unhesitatingly: ’We are. The educated Catholic middle class. I don’t think anyone fully anticipated that, or thought through what it would mean, but it should have been easy to foresee.’
[...]
“Work hard, girls, because you have more to give society than you can perhaps realise. [...]” Did you get that line at your school?’
‘Of course we did. There was far more along those lines than there was suggestion that we might go on for the Church. And it did make a difference, just as the IRA campaign has made more of a difference to changes in attitudes than most people are prepared to admit.’ [60]
[...]
The scope of their lives was tiny but it was profound, and to them, it was immense. The physical bounds of their world were confined to little more than a few fields and houses, but they knew these places with the deep, unconscious knowledge that a bird or a fox might have for its habitat. The idea of home was something they lived so completely that they would have been at a loss to define it. But they would have known to be inadequate such phrases as: ’It’s where you’re from,’ ’It’s the place you live,’ ‘It’s where your family are.’ [75]
[...]
Uncle Michael shook his head again. ‘It’ll end in a bloodbath,’ he said. ‘the other side are going to resent the least thing that’s given. They have the power, and they’re not just going to let it be taken away from them. Mark my words: a bloodbath, and the people will have brought it upon themselves.’ [79]
[...]
What did she have ‘in common’ with Sally and Helen, except that they were sisters? Surely that was the whole point of family. It was to change strangers into friends that you needed some kind of shared interests, beliefs or aspirations, but with your sisters, what you had ’in common’ was each other. Looking back on this now, years later, she was even a bit ashamed to realise how much she’d taken her own family for granted, how unremarkable she’d found the tremendous warmth and love in which she had grown up. She’d always known that childhood was important, and to catch a glimpse into the unhappiness of other people’s lives had shocked and unsettled her. [88]
[...]
[...] it was something more than the English being less comfortable with the bereaved than the Irish were. What they were thinking only dawned on her slowly, and it was so horrible that she shrank away, afraid of having to confront it until she was forced to do so; and of course it wasn’t long before that happened.
One day, about three weeks after she returned to work, a journalist who had often done freelance work for the magazine in the past had called in to discuss a supplement which had been commissioned in Cate’s absence. As she looked through the initial work he’d brought along she remarked, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t in on this from the start, but I was in Ireland; and she didn’t know why she added, ‘My father died.’
‘Yes, I know,’ the man replied. ’I read about it in the papers.’ Cate lifted her head from the material she had been glancing through and stared hard at the man, but he stared back coldly [91] at her, and did not speak. ’He thinks my father was a terrorist,’ she said to herself. ’He thinks that he brought his fate upon himself; that he deserves the death he got.’
[...]
[Cate on getting pregnant:] The only explanation she would ever be able to give was this: ’I wanted something real.’ [93]
[...]
And as soon as it was over, they could hardly believe it had [97] happened. They watched from the window as the soldiers walked away out from the shadow of the house and into the bright sun, fanning midges from their faces. As soon as they were out of sight it was as if they had imagined this strange thing, that two soldiers, one in full battle dress and with a gun, the other with an accent they could barely understand, had come into their front room and asked them all sorts of odd, personal questions, and then gone away again.
[...]
Tony Larkin, the eldest brother of Helen’s school friend Willy Larkin, died planting a bomb at an electricity pylon over near Magherafelt. ’A pylon,’ their father said bitterly when he heard the news. ’A fucking electricity pylon,’ and that startled them, for he almost never used language like that. ’Where did he think that was going to get any of us? Did he think that was going to free Ireland?’ Tony was nineteen. [103]
[...]
[.; the funeral:] When they got into the car to go home, they sat in silence for a moment, and then he said to them, ’Never forget what you saw today; and never let anybody try to tell you that it was anything other than a life wasted, and lives destroyed.’ [105]
[...]
[Emily:] She was standing in Lucy’s kitchen, and at her feet was a long thing over which someone had thrown a check table cloth. There were two feet sticking out at one end, wearing a pair of boots she’d helped Charlie to choose in a shop in Antrim. The other end of the cloth was dark and wet; there was a stench of blood and excrement. At the far side of the room, a young man was cowering: eighteen, nineteen years old at the most, a skinny, shivering boy in jeans and a tee-shirt, with ugly tattoos on his forearms. His face was red and distorted because he was crying. ’Please, Missus,’ he kept saying to Emily, ’please, Missus, I’m sorry for what I did, I’m sorry, so I am, please, Missus ...’ She stood staring at him until he was crying so hard that he could no longer make himself understood. Then Emily spoke, quietly, distinctly.
‘I will never forgive you,’ she said. [125]
[...]
[Sally:] ‘If it wasn’t for Mammy, I’d leave tomorrow. I can’t stand being in Northern Ireland. All that guff about it being a great wee place, and the people being so friendly. I feel ashamed for having gone along with all that; other people were being killed the way Daddy was, and I was one of the ones saying, “There’s more to Northern Ireland than shooting and bombing.” Anyway, I hinted to Mammy again, very gently, that I’d like to go away, but she [139] wouldn’t hear tell of it. She needs me now. And maybe I need her too.’
[...]
Enlightenment, when it finally came, was abrupt and painful. [147]
She’d been having lunch in a restaurant with a man whom she’d been seeing for about six months, chatting to him about Sally, from whom she’d had a letter that morning, when suddenly the man interrupted her. ‘Cate, I can’t tell you how sick I am of hearing you go on and on about your bloody family. Do you ever think of anything else?’
[...]
Sister Benedict stared at her for a few moments. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, ’if the educated Catholic middle class in Northern Ireland was bigger, it probably would make a difference, but I dare say not the difference you or indeed others have in mind.’ [158]
[...]
And at this point, in an abrupt reversal of the gentle descent of her childhood, Helen’s vision swung violently away, and now she was aware of the cold light of dead stars; the graceless immensity of a dark universe. Now her image of her father’s death was infinitely small, infinitely tender: the searing grief came from the tension between that smallness and the enormity of infinite time and space. No pity, no forgiveness, no justifi¬cation: maybe if she could have conceived of a consciousness where every unique horror in the history of humanity was known and grieved for, it would have given her some comfort. Sometimes she felt that all she had was her grief, a grief she could scarcely bear.
In the solid stone house, the silence was uncanny.
One by one in the darkness, the sisters slept. [181; End.]