Chapter Two

WHEN Granny Kate talked about the colour of her clothes, she never just used simple words like ‘red’, ‘blue’ or ‘green’. Her cardigan was ‘a soft blue, the colour of a thrush’s egg’. She had a skirt that was ‘a big strong purple, like an iris’, and a coat that was ‘reddy-brown, the colour of a brick’. She was wearing a new coat at Mass this morning, and Kate was keen to have a closer look at it, for she’d heard Granny describe it to Kate’s mother during the week as being ‘that lovely rich-green colour you get when a mallard turns its neck and the light hits it’. The sermon had started, and Kate twisted round in her seat. Granny was two rows behind them, at the far end of the pew. She saw Kate looking at her, and smiled. Kate grinned back. Granny had a wonderful new hat too. She’d told them she got it in McKillens in Ballymena. Kate didn’t know how much she’d paid for it, but it must have been a lot of money for when she told Kate’s mother the price she’d leaned over and whispered in her ear, and their mother had widened her eyes and said ‘No!’ in such a way that the children knew she wasn’t putting it on. Granny Kate had leaned back to her own side of the sofa. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Did you ever hear worse?’ but she’d looked delighted.
 Kate’s mother had noticed that she was looking round, and tapped on her leg, frowned at her, whispered at her to behave. Kate turned to face the altar again. Father Black was still talking away. Even Helen wasn’t pretending that she could understand what he was saying. Forbidden to look behind her, Kate now looked sideways at her elder sister, who was leafing slowly through her book. It was called A Sunday Missal for Little Children, and it had coloured pictures of a priest saying Mass. Helen yawned, but pretended not to: Kate could see her swallow down the yawn. Kate picked up her own book, which was about the Ten Commandments. On every page there were pictures of children and behind each child there was an angel. When the child was obeying the commandment, and doing something like [10] giving his mother a bunch of flowers or going to Mass on a Sunday, the angel looked content; but when the children were doing bad things, like stealing and telling lies, the angels had their faces sunk in their hands, and they were crying. Helen’s angel must never cry, Kate thought, yawning herself now, freely and comfortably. Not that Kate’s own angel really had much to worry about: she knew she was a bit more mischievous than Helen, but she really wasn’t a bad girl.
 She closed the book and put it down again. Sally was asleep, leaning against her mother’s hip. The rag doll she’d got for her birthday had slipped out of her grasp and had fallen on the floor. Because she was so small Sally was allowed to bring toys to church and to sleep if she wanted; their mother didn’t mind so long as she didn’t cry or talk out loud. Kate looked across the body of the church: she could see her daddy over on the men’s side, sitting where he always did, about five rows from the front. Uncle Brian was down at the back. Their father was always one of the first of the men to go up to Holy Communion. Uncle Brian only ever went to Communion once a year, at Easter. Uncle Peter never went to Mass, not even at Christmas.
 When Mass was over and the people were leaving the church, their mother would give Helen and Kate a penny each, so that they could go up and light a candle in front of the statue of the Sacred Heart. After that, they would go outside and stop briefly by Grandad Francis’s grave to say a prayer for him. Only Helen could remember him, and even she had been so small when he died that her image of him was vague. She’d told Kate that she remembered when he was sick she’d gone over one day with her mother and they’d brought him a box of Meltis Newbury Fruits. She could remember him sitting up in bed turning the box over in his hands: a tiny shrunken man with eyes like black beads. Helen told Kate not to tell anybody about this, because she was afraid they would think she only remembered him because of the sweets (which Kate thought was quite possible, because Helen was very fond of fruit jellies). Usually Granny was already at the grave when they got there, because Grandad Francis had been her husband; and she was there this morning, in her new coat, which Kate stroked appreciatively with her palm as she walked beside her, down the path to where her father [11] out the long deep drawers you could smell all the stuff, the Vienna rolls, the wheaten farls, the sausage rolls and the Florence cakes. There were other travelling shops which came to the house, Devlins on a Tuesday, and Sammy on a Friday. Brian couldn’t stick Sammy because he didn’t sell cigarettes ‘on principle’, whatever that meant. Their daddy said it was because he was Saved. Sammy was from Magherafelt. They could have had milk brought to the house every morning too, but they didn’t need it, because they had their own cows. Their daddy set some milk aside for them every morning before the creamery lorry came and collected the rest of it. There were a few other people who came to sell things, but you never knew when they would appear, and then you mightn’t see them again for months: the Betterware Brush man; a dark man with a turban, who sold clothes; and a man with a whole van full of hardware, who was always trying to persuade their mother to buy things like flower vases and tea sets. ‘I really don’t know what I would do with them,’ she would say. ‘I got all those things as wedding presents years ago, and some of them are sitting in the press to this day.’ The van smelt of lavender floor polish. The most their mother ever bought off the hardware man was a few yellow dusters and a bottle of Brasso.
 ‘Will you come over and see us later in the day?’ Uncle Brian said to the children as he got out of the car. ‘What about you, Miss Sally? Will you come over and see your cousins?’ Sally smiled, but didn’t say anything.
 Aunt Lucy always took Johnny, Declan and Una to second Mass. While they were out, Granny changed out of her good clothes, and started cooking the dinner so that it would be ready for them when they got back, while Uncle Brian read the papers and kept an eye on the baby. Kate, Helen and Sally had their dinner later in the day, around five. When they went home on Sunday morning, they had a big meal of sausage and rashers and eggs and fried bread.
 Kate and Helen went over to visit Uncle Brian and Auntie Lucy most Sundays, and this week Sally said that she would come too: usually she preferred to stay at home with her mother. In winter you could see Brian’s house clearly through the bare trees, but now it was almost summer, and so you could only see [13] was standing in a group with Uncle Brian and some other men, talking and smoking.
 They saw Granny and Uncle Brian again on the way home, when they stopped at McGovern’s for the Sunday papers. McGovern’s was in Timinstown: their daddy had once said that if you thought about it, McGovern’s was Timinstown. There was only the shop and the petrol pump outside it and three houses: a well-furnished roadside, he said, but not to Mrs McGovern, a pale, thin woman who became a frazzle of anxiety in the hour after each of the two Masses on Sunday morning, when her shop became a mad scrum of people wanting papers and sweets and cigarettes. Aunt Lucy said that one morning when she was in there, it had all become too much for Mrs McGovern, and she’d given a big loud scream in front of everybody, and started to cry: they’d had to take her into her own kitchen and make her a cup of tea. Ever since then a nephew of hers came to help her on a Sunday morning, but you could see she still didn’t like it; she preferred the rest of the week when the people dawdled in in ones or twos and made their minds up slowly.
 Their mother went in to get the papers: ‘I might get a block of ice cream too,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget the wafers!’ Kate bawled after her, as Uncle Brain slipped into their mother’s place in the front passenger seat to continue his conversation with his brother. The two men smoked as they talked: Uncle Brian had smoked so much in his life that the thumb and first and second fingers of his right hand were a ginger colour that didn’t come off, no matter how much he washed his hands. Kate didn’t like this, nor did she like the back of his neck, which she studied now with distaste: a fat, pitted neck that bulged over the collar of his shirt. It was a pity, because he had a nice face, and he was great fun. But lots of men had horrible necks, past a certain age; she’d noticed that. Kate felt sorry for them: it must be terrible to know your neck was slowly becoming ugly: but then again, they couldn’t see it, so maybe it wasn’t such a trouble to them.
 Uncle Brian drove a bread van for Hughes. He came to their house once a week, but they only ever saw him in the school holidays, because he came in the early afternoon. Kate loved going out to the van. He’d ring the bell and by the time you went out he’d be pegging open the heavy doors. When he pulled [12] the roof. ‘Be careful of Sally crossing the foot-stick,’ their mother said as they set out across the fields, which was the quickest way to get there. The only problem was the foot-stick, a frail, narrow bridge their father had constructed across a ditch for them. He didn’t need the foot-stick: he could just step over the ditch, but they’d been warned not to try this. Kate didn’t like to think of what their mother would do to them if Sally slipped and fell into the mud below while they were supposed to be looking after her; and she was happier when they’d got past that point, and were on to Unde Brian’s land.
 Now Sally was spitting at something. ‘What is it, what’s wrong?’
 ‘I swallowed a midge,’ Sally said, ready to cry.
 ‘Well, that doesn’t matter, you can eat meat today, it’s not a Friday. Don’t be such a cry baby. Look, if you’re not good, me and Helen won’t take you with us the next time. We might even run away now and leave you here in the middle of the field.’
 ‘Shush, Kate,’ Helen said, taking Sally’s hand. ‘We aren’t going to leave you here. Look, we’re almost there now.’
 Uncle Brian’s house was much nearer the lough than their own home. It stood a short distance from a curved bay, where there were yellow wild iris and the shiny green rushes Uncle Peter used to make St Brigid’s crosses every February. They pushed their way through the branches of the small trees that separated the bay from the fields they had just crossed, and stood in the wide lane for a moment to get their breath back
 Kate thought that even if you closed your eyes and tried your hardest, you couldn’t imagine a nicer house than Uncle Brian’s, with its two little windows sticking out of the roof and the porch and the shiny front door that was the colour of chocolate. Behind the house there were some twisted apple trees, and at the front there was a low wall which enclosed a straggling garden. Once there had been a lawn with flower-beds at the edges, but Unde Brian had let everything just grow away to its heart’s content, so that the garden had almost swallowed itself up. It was better like that, Kate thought. Granny Kate’s two marmalade cats, with their hard green eyes and their whiskers like white wires, used to hide in the deep grass that took Sally to the waist. There were fruit bushes too, with squashy currants and hard, hairy [14] gooseberries, glassy and green, that tasted bitter and made your mouth feel dry. They helped their cousins gather the fruit for Granny to make jam. A lazy rose had draped itself over the wall, and in summer it covered itself with fat yellow blossoms, and gave off a rich yellow scent. ‘It’s like drinking some kind of golden wine, just to smell that rose,’ Granny Kate used to say.
 The front door was almost never opened, and the back door was seldom locked, so they went into the house through the scullery, and then went on into the kitchen. They didn’t bother to knock: nobody expected them to, for they were as free to come and go in this house as they were in their own home. If anything they were even more at liberty to do as they pleased here, for Uncle Brian and Aunt Lucy set less store by things like tidiness and good behaviour than their own parents did. The family was finishing dinner when the children went in. Granny Kate was cutting an apple pie, and they put out extra plates for Helen, Kate and Sally, and poured them mugs of hot, sweet tea. Uncle Peter had already moved over to a chair beside the stove, and Helen went over to sit beside him. Kate was more wary of him than Helen was, although she did like him. He never asked you how you were getting on at school, or wanted to test your multiplication tables or anything stupid like that. He talked to you in the same quiet way he talked to Uncle Brian or any other adult. As Kate ate her apple pie she listened in to what he was saying to Helen.
 ‘I seen an otter down by the canal the other night. Be sure and tell your daddy when you go home.’
 ‘What was it doing?’
 ‘Sitting in nice and quiet by the bank, but when it heard me, it slipped into the water and swum off. You wouldn’t think to look at it, the power that’s in it. The jaws on that boy, if he give you a nip, he’d take the finger clean off your hand. He could bite clean through a fish, bones and all, the same as you’d eat a bit of bread and jam, and not a bother on him.’
 Friday night two weeks earlier, Helen and Kate had been lying in bed ready to sleep when they heard a shout in the distance. ‘That’s Uncle Peter,’ Kate said. Helen didn’t reply.
 ‘That’s Uncle Peter,’ Kate said again, as the voice came nearer. [15]
 ‘I heard you the first time,’ Helen said. ‘Keep quiet and go to sleep.’
 Now he was at the bottom of their lane, they could hear him rant and shout.
 `Daddy would never be like that.’ Kate heard Helen sit up in bed. ‘If you say one more word, Kate Quinn, I’m going to go to Mammy and tell her you won’t let me get to sleep.’ Kate could hear the tears in Helen’s voice. The shouts gradually died away. When Uncle Peter got home, he wouldn’t sleep in the house. There was a caravan out under the apple trees and Uncle Brian would take him there, and put him to bed. He’d stay there for days, maybe even weeks, and if they went to visit they wouldn’t see him, he wouldn’t come out until he was better. Kate felt uneasy playing in the orchard when she knew he was in the caravan. ‘What does he do in there?’ Kate asked Declan. ‘Sleeps. Drinks. Cries. Granny brings him out a bit of dinner, but he hardly ever eats anything.’ And then a day would come and you would go to the house and he would be back in sitting by the stove, lighting one cigarette off the other, quiet and shy as ever he was. Weeks and months might pass before he started to shout and had to go away again.
 One day when Helen wasn’t around, Kate had asked Granny, ‘What’s wrong with Uncle Peter?’
 ‘Two things,’ she said. ‘He thinks too much, and then he drinks too much.’
 ‘Why?’ said Kate. She hadn’t understood what Granny meant. Granny laughed. ‘It would take a wiser woman than me to answer that.’
 ‘Well, I don’t like it,’ Kate said, and now it was Granny Kate who asked, ‘Why?’
 ‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘It’s just scary to hear him shouting, or to see him not able to walk properly. It’s horrible.’
 And when she said that, Granny had looked sad. She was quiet for a minute and then she told Kate to remember that a person might do bad things but that that didn’t mean they were a bad person, and that there was no badness in Uncle Peter. The way he was made her sad and the whole family too, but the person it hurt most of all was Uncle Peter himself. ‘You mustn’t be afraid of him. You should feel sorry for him.’ [16]
 ‘I do. I feel sorry for you too.’ And then Granny Kate laughed. ‘Oh, I’ll manage,’ she said, ‘I’ll survive.’
 Uncle Peter didn’t have one special job that he did all the time, like Daddy or Uncle Brian. He worked on and off at different things, fishing, or clearing drains with a rented digger or cutting back the hedges or digging holes in the road. Sometimes he went on the dole and stayed at home. He helped Granny Kate mind the baby when Uncle Brian was off in the bread van and Aunt Lucy was in the cigarette factory; sometimes he’d be doing the washing up when you went in, or taking the laundry down off the clothes airer on the scullery ceiling. Their daddy and Uncle Brian also did housework now and then, because there had been no girls in the family, and Granny Kate had made them do things when they were children because she didn’t like housework herself. She didn’t much care if people thought it was odd. ‘If there’s an hour you could spend either reading a book or washing the floor, I know which I’d rather do,’ she said.
 ‘There’s a Shirley Temple film on the telly this afternoon,’ Una said to Kate. ‘The Good Ship Lollipop.’
 ‘Don’t tell me you want to be sitting in watching television on a nice day like this,’ Aunt Lucy said. ‘It’d be far better for you to be outside playing.’
 ‘Shirley Temple’s a pain, anyway; Johnny said, just to annoy Una, because he knew she liked her. Una was Kate’s friend as well as her cousin: they sat beside each other at school. Johnny was a year older than Helen, who was in the same class as Declan.
 ‘I could take you out in the boat,’ Uncle Peter said. ‘It’s a good calm day for it, but I don’t know that I’d have room for the lot of you.’ Sally wanted to stay at home with Granny, which pleased Helen. She always felt responsible for looking after Sally and Kate, and she would enjoy being out in the boat more if she didn’t have Sally to worry about. Una said that she would stay at home too, and watch the film, and Uncle Peter said that he could manage the four who still wanted to go with him.
 The blue wooden boat was pulled up into the reeds. ‘Get you in first, Johnny and Declan, and one of youse can start bailing her,’ Uncle Peter said. The bailer was an old paint tin lying in about four inches of water at the bottom of the boat. Uncle Peter [17] lifted Helen and Kate in, then pushed the boat hard and climbed in himself, as it slid out into the lough. Kate liked that moment, because it was frightening. She always thought for a split second that the boat was going to tip over or sink. The difference between standing firm on the shore one minute, and then feeling the boat tremble uncertainly beneath you the next was exciting. Within seconds, though, you got used to being on the water, as the boat steadied itself. Uncle Peter began to row with long, even strokes. There was a green scum of algae at the edge of the shore, but the water was clearer further out. The sky was bare and blue, but for a few high strands of fine clouds. Kate took off her cardigan, because of the sticky, prickly heat of the day, then turned in the boat to look back at Uncle Brian’s house. It was strange to see from an unfamiliar angle a place you knew so well, and she wasn’t quite sure that she liked it. When Helen said that you could see their own house too, she didn’t want to look at it.
 ‘Will you take us to one of the islands?’ Johnny said. ‘Ah, do,’ he went on, when Uncle Peter didn’t say ‘No’ straight off, and the others noticed this too, and joined in with the pleading. ‘It’s the breeding time,’ he said. ‘The chicks is hatching now, the birds’ll go wild if you go out there.’
 But far from putting them off, this only made the islands more attractive. Uncle Peter shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘only youse are to behave and not stand on the nests or be frightened or anything.’
 The islands were not far off the shore, in fact the alternative to landing on them and what Uncle Peter had intended when they set out would have been to row out past them, out of the bay. They were small islands, narrow and flat, with a few scrubby trees and bushes growing on them. As Uncle Peter directed the boat towards the largest of the islands, she saw why he had said they weren’t to be frightened, and hoped she would be able to stay brave, for the gulls heard the boat approaching and flew up in fear and anger, to protect the chicks. They strafed the boat the way she had seen a blackbird go for one of Granny Kate’s cats once, when the cat was sitting with its paws folded beside a fledgling that had fallen out of its nest. The blackbird had dive-bombed the cat again and again, coming within inches of its [18] ears, and all the time making a racket that Granny Kate said would have raised the dead. Kate knew to look at Helen that she was frightened too, but Helen would be brave, even if Kate weakened and shrieked as the fat white birds dipped low and angry around them.
 She shaded her eyes against the sun that flashed on the water, and looked up. Hundreds of gulls were flying around high above them. She’d seen this before, but from a distance, when her father would look out of the window and say, there must be someone out on the islands. She wondered if he would notice it today, and if he would ever guess who it was that was out there.
 The boat juddered as it got into shallow water, and Uncle Peter told them to sit where they were until he had it properly beached and tied up. He lifted them out in turn, saying, ‘Mind what I said now, mind you don’t hurt anything.’
 Kate had never imagined how careful they would have to be, for there were nests everywhere, crude, flat nests, she thought, not like the small, tight nest a songbird would make for itself with straw and mud and moss. The gulls’ nests were just flat upon the ground, and there were so many of them you had to be careful where you walked. Uncle Peter kept warning them, Johnny and Kate in particular, to go easy. Some of the eggs had already hatched, but the fluffy brown chicks didn’t interest her as much as the dark wet stunned-looking ones that weren’t long enough out of the egg to have dried out and found their feet. Strangest of all were the eggs that were only partly hatched, so that when you leaned low over them you could see a tiny hole, a crack, and you knew that the bird was working away inside to free itself. Kate wondered what it would be like to be in an egg: shut up in a tiny space barely bigger than yourself, knowing nothing but that you had to tap and tap and tap until you broke into the light and fell out, uncoiling yourself. She imagined darkness and heat in the egg, and was so lost in this thought that when Helen touched her arm, she jumped.
 ‘We won’t tell anybody about this, Kate, all right?’
 ‘We can tell Daddy, can’t we?’ she said.
 ‘Oh yes, it doesn’t matter if we tell Daddy,’ Helen replied. ‘I mean other people. People in school. We can tell them about the island, but I don’t want to tell them about the birds.’ [19]
 ‘All right,’ Kate said. She glanced over at Uncle Peter, who was leaning against a tree and smoking a cigarette. Soon he would lift them back into the boat and row them away from the island. The gulls would all fly back to their chicks. They’d take Sally back home across the fields and have their dinner: chicken, and then tinned peaches with the ice cream they’d got in McGovern’s on the way home from Mass. They’d get their school bags ready for the morning and in the evening they’d have to go to bed early, so that they wouldn’t sleep in the next day. And some night again when she was lying in the dark, waiting to fall asleep, she would hear Uncle Peter shouting, out there in the night. She would make herself think of the day he’d taken them , out to the island and showed them the gulls’ nests, and she’d try not to be frightened any more. [20]