Chapter Six

AS SALLY grew up, she continued to be frail and weak, and much more hesitant than either of her sisters. The nosebleeds from which she suffered continued on and off, but the doctors said they could do nothing for her. They also said they thought it was nothing serious, and that she would probably grow out of it in a year or two. Granny Kate took a great interest in this, as she did in everything concerning her grandchildren. She got Charlie to drive her and Sally down to the monastery in Portglenone, to ask the monks to pray for her. Kate and Helen were left out of this trip, much to their annoyance. Sally came back, looking frightened and proud, holding a prayer book Granny had bought for her at the monastery. She had medals, blue ones, for her sisters, and they added them to the already laden chains which they wore around their necks. Then, sometime later, Granny heard of someone in Ardboe who had a cure for nose-bleeds, so she told Emily and Charlie that Sally ought to be taken there. This time, Helen and Kate clamoured to be taken along, and were surprised when their father and Granny had no objections.
 Granny had managed to get hold of the phone number of the woman who had the cure, and had rung to make sure that she would be there that evening, because, she said, there was no point in driving all that distance on a fool’s errand. The woman also gave Granny exact instructions on how to reach her house; which turned out to be a nondescript little place with a tin roof, hidden at the end of a pot-holed lane. ‘You stay here now in the car, like good children,’ their daddy said to Helen and Kate, in a tone which they knew meant it was pointless to argue with him. He led Granny and Sally to the house, which swallowed them up.
 The minutes trickled by like hours. They always did, when you were left to wait in the car. Kate fiddled with the door locks as she grumbled, ‘I bet there’s nothing wrong with Sally at all. I [61] bet she’s just discovered some way to make her nose bleed when it suits her, just to get attention. Have you ever noticed how it always happens when her class are doing sums, or when we’re all just ready to go out to Mass or at some time like that? It never happens in Uncle Brian’s house, when we’re all watching the film on television on a Sunday afternoon, or at home when Mammy’s made us French toast, and never, ever when we’re at Granny Kelly’s because Sally knows she’d go bananas if you started bleeding all over her sofa.’ They watched a few scraggy hens pick around miserably near the door of the house. For five minutes they didn’t speak, but sat in a silence as deep as the silence in a church. ‘I bet we’ve been here for over an hour by now,’ Kate said.
 ‘I wonder what the woman’s doing to Sally,’ Helen said, with relish. They knew vaguely about cures. Granny Kate’s brother was said to have had a cure for strains and sprains, which involved tying flax around the arm or leg that was hurt and then saying special prayers, but they’d heard about others that were more interesting, more dramatic: cures for sties involving thorns from a gooseberry bush, and a cure for shingles where two burning sticks from the fire were held in the form of a cross. Until Sally returned they passed the time inventing cures to which the woman might be submitting her, cures which involved cowpats, nettles, raw eggs and the like, laughing hysterically at the ideas they came up with.
 Like the house in which she lived, the woman with the cure looked completely unremarkable: they saw her when Sally, Granny and their father were leaving, and she came to the door to see them off. Helen and Kate clamoured to know what they’d missed: ‘What did she do to you, what did she say?’
 ‘I’m not allowed to tell anybody; Sally said smugly, ‘or the cure won’t work.’
 ‘What did I tell you!’ Kate cried.
 But the evening wasn’t as big a disappointment as it had looked like turning out to be, for their daddy stopped at a filling station to get petrol and when he went in to pay for it, he came out with crisps and chocolates crammed into a brown paper bag, which he handed into the back seat without the conditions or instructions their mother would have added to this gesture. He [62] stripped the cellophane off a packet of Senior Service, and lit a cigarette, narrowing his eyes in a way Helen loved. She promised herself that she would start smoking just as soon as she was old enough, but she knew better than to say this to anyone. She liked the smell of the spent match, as he waved the flame out.
 Then Granny Kate suggested that they go to see the Old Cross at Ardboe, because it was only just down the road, and it would be a pity to have come all this way and not seen it, especially with it being such a fine night. ‘Have you ever been there before?’ she asked the children.
 ‘Aye, but we’d love to go again,’ Kate said.
 And so instead of heading straight for home, they drove for a short while down narrow roads with high hedges. Their daddy parked the car right beside the high cross, which was enclosed by railings. The surface of the stone was weathered, so that some of the biblical scenes carved on the cross had become indistinct. Their daddy pointed out and named Adam and Eve, the Marriage at Cana, the Last Judgement. It didn’t matter that the pictures weren’t perfectly clear, Helen thought: it was enough in itself that the cross was there; to think of it having stood there for all those hundreds of years amazed her almost as much as it amazed and delighted her father. He loved history, and he was always talking about it. Uncle Brian talked about history a lot too, but she would never have said that he loved it. There was a difference, although she wouldn’t have known how to explain or define it. For her daddy, it was the fascination of thinking about people who had lived hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, where he lived now; there was something about the odd combination of closeness and distance that caught his imagination like nothing else. He’d taken them once to see the elk’s head that had been found near Toome years earlier: a grey bony thing that frightened the life out of them, with its massive antlers and hollow eye sockets. ‘Can you imagine a yoke like that wandering around here? Doesn’t that beat all?’ Helen would always remember the sob of excitement in his voice. ‘Isn’t the world a wonderful place!’ Now and then in the newspaper there’d be a piece about a farmer somewhere who’d found some-thing on his land: a Viking sword, or a pot of coins, or even a dug-out canoe from the Iron Age, and he’d always draw their [63] attention to it, read it out to them. ‘Would you like that to be you?’ their mammy would say. ‘I’d die happy, so I would,’ he always replied.
 They went through the gate into the graveyard which lay behind the cross. There was the ruin of a tiny church there, and the graveyard itself overlooked the wide expanse of the lough. It was a warm, sticky evening, and Granny Kate flapped her hand in front of her face to drive away the midges that hummed around her. ‘Hasn’t it got terrible heavy,’ she complained. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if we had thunder out of this.’ The enormous sky was full of dark-blue clouds, and although it was late in the evening now, there was still a strong, odd light which lit up the trees and the black-and-white cattle that were grazing in a field below the graveyard. When they heard voices, the cattle slowly raised their heads, then plodded across the field to see what was happening.
 Charlie dug into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a handful of loose change. He gave the children a penny each, to hammer into the tree at the far side of the graveyard. From a distance it-looked quite ordinary, perhaps a bit stunted, but when you got closer you could see that its trunk was almost more metal than wood, for people had hammered coins, pins and nails into it. Their daddy helped them each to find a place for them to hammer in their penny. It wasn’t difficult, for the wood of the tree was quite soft.
 ‘Don’t forget to make a wish,’ Granny said.
 ‘I’m going to wish that Sally’s nose doesn’t get better, so that we get plenty more nice outings like this,’ Kate said.
 ‘Why, you cheeky wee monkey,’ Granny said, but she was laughing, for all that she tried to hide it.
 When they were in the car on the way home, Kate bribed Sally with Rolos to try and coax her into telling what the cure had been, while Helen listened in to what the grown-ups were talking about.
 ‘Brian asked me to be sure and ask you if you want to go with him to the march on Saturday; Granny said.
 ‘What march is that?’
 ‘The civil rights march that’s to be in Coalisland. I thought he told you about it already.’ [64]
 ‘Aye, now you mention it, I think he did say something about it to me a while back. Is Peter going?’
 ‘Are you joking me?’
 Their daddy was quiet for a while, and then he said, ‘Ach, I don’t know. Do you think it’ll do any good?’
 ‘Well it won’t do any harm,’ Granny said. ‘I’d have thought you’d have had a bit more go in you, Charlie. I’d be there myself if I was younger than I am now. When you think of what people have to put up with in this country, well, we have to make a start somewhere in telling them that we’ve had enough of that.’
 ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘Tell Brian I’ll go with him.’
 But when the time came he didn’t go, because one of the cattle fell sick. He was up all Friday night with it, and they had to call the vet twice. When Brian called to collect his brother on his way to Coalisland, Charlie just shook his head. ‘March? I’d fall in a pile I’m that done. But I’ll go with you another time, so I will.’
 On the Sunday, when the sisters went over to Brian’s house their cousins Johnny and Declan were full of the march. ‘It was great. We all sat on the road and sang rebel songs. There was nothing the police could do to stop us. Get your daddy to bring you along the next time.’
 The summer ended, school started again, and Sally’s nose-bleeds began once more. Helen and Kate became embarrassed at being called out of class; dreaded the moment when some wee girl would come into the room and say, ‘Please, Miss, Sally Quinn’s not well again, and she needs one of her big sisters.’
 ‘And so then you have to go to her class and she’s lying on a rug in the bookstore, like an eejit,’ Helen told their mother.
 ‘I can’t help it,’ Sally wailed.
 ‘She can, too,’ Kate said, when their mother decided to keep Sally at home after her nose bled on a Monday and then again on the Tuesday. For the rest of that week, while Helen and Kate were being hurried through their breakfast, and packed off to school with a few cheese sandwiches, Sally would creep into her parents’ warm, empty bed, where she snoozed and drowsed until the middle of the day. Then she got up and after lunch, would spend the rest of the afternoon playing with the kittens in the back yard, helping her mother to make pastry, or just doing some colouring in at the kitchen table. Her nose didn’t [65] bleed once during these days, and she was fine over the weekend, but when Helen and Kate were getting up for school on Monday morning, they could hear Sally’s thin whine: ‘I’m not well, Mammy.’
 Still in her pyjamas, Kate stormed into the other room. ‘If she’s not going, Helen and me are staying at home too, because it’s not fair.’ Their mother stood up for Sally, but then their daddy weighed in, and said that all three of them would be going to school, and that there would be no more nonsense about it. Sally grizzled a bit, but she and her mammy knew that because he hardly ever got involved in matters like this, when he did, there was no turning him. Kate grinned as the three of them got into the car, including Sally with her satchel and her sandwiches. ‘And if you don’t feel well, don’t be sending for Helen or for me, because we won’t come.’
 Sally was fine that day, and for weeks afterwards was, as Uncle Peter said, ‘as healthy as a kipper’.
 There was another march announced, this time it was to be in Derry. At home now, all the talk was about civil rights, and their father said that he wouldn’t miss this march, ‘no matter if every beast I have keels over the night before it’. The Apprentice Boys had called a march for the same day when the civil rights march was announced, and so they both had been declared illegal, which of course made it more important for everybody to be there. The children clamoured to be taken along too, but neither of their parents would hear of it.
 ‘You’re too small,’ their father insisted. ‘If there was any trouble and you got hurt, even the least little bit, even if you just got very badly frightened, I’d never forgive myself for it.’
 ‘But Declan and Johnny are going.’
 ‘Aye, that’s as may be, but Una isn’t going.’ This didn’t explain or excuse anything for Helen and Kate, it just made it seem worse.
 ‘I can’t wait until I’m grown up,’ Helen said. ‘I’m going to do exactly as I please!’
 To make it up to them, Granny said she would take them out for the day: ‘We’ll go to the Holy Well.’
 ‘How will we get there?’
 ‘We’ll walk’ [66]
 ‘But it’s miles away! We’ll never walk that!’
 Granny laughed. ‘Of course you will, you only think that it’s far. Sure if you went on the march, you’d have to walk at least that, maybe far further.’
 Kate looked doubtful: she thought she could see Granny smiling. ‘I tell you what, I’ll ask Peter to come and collect us, so you won’t have to walk the whole way back home afterwards.’
 The walk turned out to be more enjoyable than they had expected, and they dawdled along the roads, which rose and fell and twisted and turned; roads lined with hedges in their autumn colours, and bright with berries. The long thick grass in the ditches was wet when they stepped into it, to avoid the cars and tractors which occasionally passed them by. The people in the vehicles lifted their hands to the family, whether they knew them or not, and Granny Kate greeted them in return. A tractor passed them, driven by a young man with thick black hair.
 ‘That’s Willy Larkins big brother, Tony; Kate said. ‘Willy says somebody saw a Mystery Man in the woods behind the school last week. He says he had a big dark coat on him, and a black hat, but where his face should have been, there was only a blank.’
 ‘And did Willy himself see this man?’ Granny asked, as Sally gripped her hand more tightly.
 ‘No, somebody told him about it, and then he told me.’
 ‘If people know he’s there in the woods, how come he’s such a mystery?’
 ‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. She was disappointed that Granny was so dismissive of the idea of the Mystery Man: she’d enjoyed the fright of it, the thought of the dark, faceless figure.
 ‘Sure if he had no face, wouldn’t he be walking into things? How would he be able to see where he was going? How would he eat his dinner, if he didn’t have a mouth?’
 ‘Maybe it just was that you couldn’t see his face, I don’t know,’ Kate replied, uncertain now.
 Helen was only half-listening to this: she was still thinking about Tony Larkin, about something he’d done at the carnival during the last football tournament at the start of the summer; something which had upset her, particularly because she hadn’t been able to understand why.
 They always went to the carnival at least once when it was [67] on. Usually it was their daddy who took them, and he’d give them fistfuls of loose change to play the fruit machines or to pay the woman at the hoopla stall, who looked like an African queen, with wooden bands packed on her arms, from her wrist to above her elbow. They’d go on the swingboats, or the dodgem cars. Helen liked the noise of the place; it excited her: the sound of the big generator that ran the amusements, the screams and shouts of people, the raucous music. There were bright, gaudy lights, vans selling ice cream, minerals and chips, and a marquee, where there’d be a dance for the grown-ups, late in the evening. Usually there was nothing Helen liked better than the carnival, but on this particular evening she already felt a bit uneasy, because Uncle Peter was there, staggering about the place with the neck of a bottle sticking out of his coat pocket. She saw her daddy go over and talk earnestly to him at one point, as if he were trying to explain something difficult to him. She noticed how alike they looked. It was as if her daddy had two selves, and the good, sober one was trying to persuade the one who was always getting drunk to change his ways. Uncle Peter didn’t want to listen: eventually she saw him push her father’s arm aside, and then he walked unsteadily away. She went off then and played at the hoopla for a while with her sisters. Later, she saw Uncle Peter arguing with some young boys. They were teasing him and laughing at him, and Helen felt hurt and angry on his behalf, but there was nothing she could do to help him. She walked away. Sally and Kate got on the dodgem cars, and she was standing watching them when her daddy came up to her and drew her aside, so that she would be able to hear what he was saying above the loud music.
 ‘I have to take Uncle Peter home,’ he said, pressing a few coins into her hand. ‘Look after the other two until I get back. Buy yourselves ice creams, or whatever you want. I’ll be as quick as I can.’ She turned and watched him go, watched him walk over to where Uncle Peter was sitting on the wet ground behind a van selling chips. He had his arms folded across his knees, and his head resting on his arms, as if he wanted to sleep. Helen watched her father gently help him to his feet, and then lead him away from the field where the carnival was taking place, out to the road where the cars were parked. [68]
 When Sally and Kate came off the dodgems, Helen was vague in her explanations as to where their father had gone. She bought them each an ice cream cone, and then she paid for her sisters to go on the waltzers. For a while she stood watching them spinning and screaming, then she turned to look at the swing-boats which were near by. Mostly it was children who played with these, but the couple in the swingboat at the end were Tony Larkin, and a fair-haired girl his own age, whose name Helen didn’t know, but whom she vaguely recognised from seeing her at the chapel on Sundays. Tony had just left school, so that meant he was a grown-up.
 He paid the man, who put the money in a leather pouch hanging around his neck, then set the boat going with a sudden, sharp tug of his hand. Tony and the girl pulled hard on the ropes to make the boat swing, then they both stood up, and by bending their knees and using the force of their bodies they made the boat swing faster and higher. Before long, Helen wasn’t the only one who was aware of them: people stopped what they were doing and watched as the boat swung up to its highest possible point, so that it looked as if the couple might fall out. Then abruptly the boat dropped, and swung back in the opposite direction, again reaching the highest point. It seemed to stop for a few seconds at the top each time, and this pause gave the movement of the boat a slow, strange rhythm, in spite of the abrupt drops the boat made from each extremity of height. Even though the music was still playing, there was a kind of silence in the stillness which fell over the field, as people stopped what they were doing and stared, wondering how it would all end. The man who owned the swingboats tried to stop them, but the boat was going too high and too fast. He attempted once to lift the plank of wood which, held against the bottom of the boat, would usually have been enough to bring it to a standstill, but this time it was too dangerous: the plank was knocked from his hand, and the man had to wait until the couple slowed and stopped in their own time.
 Tony helped the girl to climb out of the boat. Somebody laughed, somebody whistled, somebody near Helen said, ‘The cheeky bitch.’ The fair-haired girl, who was walking past at that moment, heard it too, and she went red but looked defiant, for [69] all that, then Helen saw her turn her head urgently, to see where Tony was. Helen didn’t understand why what she had just seen made her feel so strange, so confused. She only knew that she wanted her father, and when she suddenly saw him coming through the gate into the field again, she ran over at once, and buried her face in his jacket.
 Even today, on the walk with her sisters and grandmother, she wished that her father was there with them. She never enjoyed outings like this half as much when he wasn’t there. He loved and understood such places. Even last night he’d been telling them about how, when she was a child, Granny Kate had gone there on a pilgrimage with her mother, travelling by charabanc from Magherafelt, and how people had come from far and wide every year. ‘Imagine them when you’re there,’ he’d said. He’d told them about the well, too, and how there were stones in it that were supposed to save you from drowning, and that when people had had to emigrate to America, they’d always wanted to take one of these stones with them. But it was Uncle Peter who had told her that the well was a pagan place, and that the Christians had then just taken it over, and pretended that it was theirs.
 The well was enclosed, and over it hung a hazel tree, with rags and handkerchiefs tied to it. Helen remembered what Uncle Peter had said: the well had a strange atmosphere, not like the deep, still peace of an empty chapel, but powerful, defiant, somehow secretive. Granny Kate pulled out a bunch of clean cotton rags she had brought with her, and handed them one each. She told them to dip the rags in the water of the well and bless themselves with them, then tie them on to the bush. Granny helped Sally, and tapped her on the nose with the damp cloth before bending a branch of the tree down, so that Sally could tie on her rag.
 ‘This is great gas,’ Kate said, but Helen realised she felt foolish. She was only doing this strange thing because she had been told to do it, and she didn’t understand how it could possibly do any good. Would God really cure Sally’s nosebleeds because Our Lady asked Him to, and because Sally had asked Our Lady, and then tied a bit of wet rag on a bush? Granny made them all join [70] their hands and say a prayer together, and then they all trooped away.
 They walked by the water’s edge while they waited for Uncle Peter to come and collect them. They were right down by the shore of Lough Neagh, and from this part you could see the huge expanse of water more clearly than from where they lived; you could see the shores in the distance. They looked out across at the Sperrins and Slieve Gallion, and they thought of their father, off at the march in Derry. Helen still wished that she had been allowed to go with him.
 But when they got back to the house, they heard that the march hadn’t gone off peacefully. There had been riots, and when their father and Brian didn’t come home at the time they were expected, the children could see how worried their mother was, although she tried to hide it. The police had blocked the march and baton-charged the marchers. On television, they watched black-and-white pictures of crowds running, of people with blood on their faces and shirts; of men being pulled along the ground by the hair, or being beaten where they lay. They saw a man, one of the organisers, pleading for calm and reason, and before he could finish what he was saying, he was struck in the stomach with a baton. After that, Emily wasn’t able to pretend any longer that she wasn’t anxious. When at last they heard a car pull up outside, they all rushed out to meet him.
 ‘There was no sense in what happened today; he said, angry and shaken. ‘They just hammered the living daylights out of people.’ He said they were late home because Brian had been badly cut on the face, and they’d decided to take him to the hospital, in case the wound needed stitches. They’d had to wait for a long time there, because so many people had been brought in wounded, and then it had taken them a long time to get back to where the car was parked. He was glad that it had been on the television. ‘I suppose it would have suited them better for all this to have been kept quiet.’
 There were more civil rights marches organised in Belfast later that year, some organised by the students at the university, and although Charlie and Brian didn’t go to them, all the talk at home now was about civil rights, and how things would have to change. The children couldn’t understand all of what was [71] being said. One phrase they heard people using over and over was, ‘Live, oul’ horse, and you’ll get grass.’
 Halloween came, and their daddy took them over to Brian’s house, for them to celebrate it with their cousins, as they did every year. He laughed when he got into the car and looked over his shoulder to see three small witches sitting in the back seat. They were all wearing pointed paper hats with moons and stars printed on them: he’d bought them for the children himself, in McGovern’s. All three were wearing the masks they’d made in art class at school. ‘You’d put the heart across a body; he said to them, as he started the engine.
 They ran screaming around the bonfire Uncle Peter had built for them, and Helen felt both frightened and excited as she watched the firelight on the blackened faces of her sisters and cousins. They had fireworks too: Roman candles and Catherine wheels, sparklers and rockets. The coloured lights flowed briefly like magical liquids when Uncle Peter set the fireworks off, and the children covered their ears at the loud noise. Afterwards, you couldn’t remember the fireworks exactly as they had been: there was something about the nature of them that made it impossible, until another one was lit. Later, they moved into the back scullery, where Aunt Lucy filled a zinc bath with water, and floated yellow apples in it for them to try to catch and pull out with their teeth. She put piles of flour on dinner plates, and a wrapped toffee on the top, again for them to pick up and claim, without using their fingers. ‘Make as much mess as you want,’ she said indulgently: and they did.
 And then when they were bored with that, they went into the kitchen where Granny was sitting by the stove. She laughed when she saw them: ‘Look at the cut of yis!’ They had cups of strong, sweet tea, slices of buttered brack; there were bowls of monkey nuts, and oranges; and an apple pie Granny had made, with coins hidden in it.
 ‘I always loved Halloween,’ Granny said. ‘I always remember there was a game I played, when I was older than you are, to find out who I was going to marry.’ She told them of how, when she was sixteen, she’d sat before a mirror at night, combing her hair and eating an apple. ‘The idea was, that at the very stroke [72] of midnight, you’d see the face of the man you were to marry reflected in the mirror.’
 ‘That would be so scary, Granny,’ Una said. ‘That would be just like seeing a ghost.’
 ‘It would be worse if you did it and didn’t see anybody,’ Kate said. ‘That would be a disappointment: you wouldn’t know if it meant that you were never going to get married, or if it was just that the game wasn’t working.’
 ‘Oh, I saw something,’ Granny said. She told them that a face had appeared: faintly at first, as if in a mist, but gradually it became clearer until it was as if she was looking at a flesh-andblood person standing behind her, just at her very shoulder, leaning down and smiling at her in the mirror. ‘You’d have sworn on all you held dear, that if you’d turned round, he’d have been standing there in the room with you: but of course, I didn’t dare to turn.’
 ‘I’d have died on the spot!’ Una said. Helen noticed that Una’s eyes were so wide by this stage that there was a clear white rim around the blue of her iris.
 ‘I took a good, hard look at him though,’ Granny went on. ‘I wanted to be able to recognise him when I did meet him in later life. But it didn’t work out as simply as that.’
 They already knew the story of how Granny and Grandad had met: how she’d been working in a draper’s shop in Magherafelt, and he’d come in one day, looking for a jacket. She’d told them this story so often that they all had a clear image in their minds of the dim shop, the high wooden counter, the smell of wool, the heavy ledger in which she had to record all the purchases. But it was hard to imagine Granny and Grandad as young people and looking as they did in the framed photographs in the parlour: Granny with her hair piled high on her head in an extravagant roll, Grandad a light-boned, timid-looking boy.
 ‘There was a wee bell fixed to the back of the door, that rang so that if you were out in the back, you’d know a customer had come into the shop. I remember as well the first day Francis came in. He was looking for a tweed jacket, and I had been out in the store with just the very thing, when I heard the bell ring as he came in. But I knew if I sold him what he wanted, he might never come back to the shop again. So I brought in three [73] jackets for him to try, that I knew fine well would drown him. God, I can see him yet, with the sleeves to the tips of his fingers. So I said that we’d be getting more in, and the best thing would be for him to come back the next day he was in town. “I always be here on a Wednesday,” says he. So the next Wednesday morning, I made sure that all the jackets that were his size were well hidden, and told him they still hadn’t arrived. I always remember he smiled when I said that. “I’ll be back next week, then.” So the next Wednesday morning, again I weeded out all the jackets in his size. Eleven o’clock, in comes Francis, and the pair of us go over to the rail, and start going through them. But hadn’t I missed one! About the fifth jacket along, doesn’t the label say exactly the size he’d been looking for. So he looks at it, then looks at me, then pushes the jacket along the rail, and we go through the rest of them. “Nothing,” says he at the end of it. “It looks like I’m just going to have to keep coming in here every week. But that’s no great hardship.” And I knew then that I had him!’ Granny Kate said.
 ‘But this is the spooky part,’ she went on. ‘One night, a few years after we were married, I was sitting combing my hair in front of the big mirror that’s in the back room of this house to this very day, when Francis came into the room and stood behind me. I looked at his reflection, and only then did I realise that it was him: the very same man I’d seen in the mirror at midnight, on Halloween, years earlier.’ Una gave a little scream.
 ‘You’ll have these children up half the night with bad dreams,’ Aunt Lucy said.
 Granny Kate looked surprised. ‘But it’s a lovely story,’ she said. ‘I mean, it wasn’t as if he was dead at the time: not that that would have scared me. I’d never have been frightened of Francis, living or dead. After he’d gone I used to think how lovely it would be to look up and see him standing there before me again, for I missed him sorely.’ Aunt Lucy shoved a bowl of monkey nuts under Una’s nose. ‘Eat these,’ she said, ‘and put the ghosts out of your head.’ But it wouldn’t have been Halloween if Granny hadn’t given you a good fright: it was as much a part of the celebrations as having brack to eat, or making your own false face.
 For the pattern of their lives was as predictable as the seasons.[74] The regular round of necessity was broken by celebrations and feasts: Christmas, Easter, family birthdays. 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.’
 And yet for all this they knew that their lives, so complete in themselves, were off centre in relation to the society beyond those few fields and houses. They recognised this most acutely every July, when they were often taken to the Antrim coast for the day, and as they went through Ballymena and Broughshane, they would see all the Union Jacks flying at the houses, and the red, white and blue bunting across the streets. They thought that the Orange arches which spanned the roads in the towns were ugly, and creepy, too, with their strange symbols: a ladder, a set square and compass, a five-pointed star. They knew that they weren’t supposed to be able to understand what these things meant; and they knew, too, without having to be told that the motto painted on the arches: ‘Welcome here, Brethren!’ didn’t include the Quinn family.
 They would see photographs of the Orange marches in the newspapers, or they would see reports on television, but they never, in all their childhood, actually saw an Orange march taking place, for their parents always made a point of staying at home on that day, complaining bitterly that you were made a prisoner in your own home whether you liked it or not. It wasn’t even so much that it would never have occurred to the children to ask to be taken along to see one: they just knew that it wasn’t for them: they weren’t particularly interested, and they knew that they weren’t wanted there. For the most part, they didn’t even think about it, for their lives were complete as they were.
 In the weeks leading up to Christmas, there were two fixed events in their calendar: one was a visit to Miss Regan, the woman their mother had lived with when she was teaching in [75] Belfast. The other was a visit to Granny Kelly in Ballymena. On the first Saturday in December they set out, potatoes and turf in the boot, on the back window a tray of eggs and a Christmas cake their mother had baked. She had a Christmas present for Miss Regan too, a gift set of lily of the valley soap and talc, wrapped in paper printed with poinsettias. She never agonised over what she would buy her friend, as she did when she was trying to choose a gift for Granny Kelly.
 There was always something embarrassing and exciting about the moment when they arrived. Miss Regan ‘s tiny, cluttered parlour could barely contain the fuss, for Emily and Miss Regan would both keep talking at the same time, and they both cried a little bit, even though they pretended not to, and wiped the tears away almost before they had come. Even after all these years, Miss Regan still was amazed at the fact of Emily’s life now, and the children, and how tall they’d grown since last she saw them, were a particular source of wonder.
 After drinking three glasses of white lemonade, Helen had to go to the toilet, and as she stood washing her hands at the basin she looked out of the window across the rows and rows of chimney pots and slate roofs, slicked with rain, under a low grey sky. She wondered how her mother had lived there, when she thought of the fields, the wide sky and the light at home. She thought she would feel suffocated to live where all the houses were jammed together in rows, and opened out directly on to the street, without so much as a little square of grass in front of them. And yet how her mother had loved it, for she still spoke of the year when she had been a teacher as a special time, a time when she’d been happy. Helen tried to imagine her mother as a much younger woman, but when she tried to picture her as someone who wasn’t her mother, she drew a blank: she found she didn’t like the idea. She dried her hands on the towel, and hurried back downstairs again.
 Her parents and Miss Regan were talking about politics and civil rights when she went back into the room. All the grown-ups she knew talked about little else these days: except for Uncle Peter. There was an air of defiant excitement about them when they spoke of these things, something she wasn’t used to seeing in her family or her teacher or anyone she knew. [76]
 When their father had finished his tea, he took the children into the city centre, leaving Emily to spend some hours with her friend. He took them to see Santa in the Co-Op and did some shopping until such time as their mother came into the town and met up with them at a time and place they had arranged earlier. In Cornmarket, they saw a man wearing a thing like a large black-plastic bib, with ‘What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?’ printed on it in bold white letters. The man was shouting about God and Jesus and sin and salvation, and Kate made her mind up that she wanted to see one of the leaflets he was distributing to the passers-by. When her parents weren’t looking, she took one. ‘Here, Sally, put this in your pocket for me,’ she said, stuffing it into Sally’s anorak before her little sister could say anything. And it was there that their mother found it when she went to look for Sally’s mittens a while later. ‘What’s this?’ she said, smoothing out the folded sheet, and the children pressed round to see, as they hadn’t had a chance to look at it so far.
 The leaflet showed a crude drawing of an enormous bottle, to which many tiny figures, some on their knees and struggling, were bound by chains. ‘Are you a slave to the evil of alcohol?’ was printed under it, in heavy type, and then there was a text, sprinkled with quotations from the Bible. Sally looked from her mother to her father, her mouth slightly open, a furtive look on her face. Charlie started to laugh so much, that people around looked at them.
 ‘Now I hope you’ll pay heed to that, Sally,’ he said, ‘for your mammy and me have had enough of you reeling in night after night, taking the two sides of the road with you.’ Sally, who didn’t know what he was talking about, smiled cautiously, and looked even more guilty.
 When they went to see Granny Kelly, a few days before Christmas, it was a different type of outing altogether. They had to get dressed up in their Sunday clothes, and as they waited for their father to get the car ready, Helen noticed how her mother, standing over by the window, was twisting the rings on her fingers, a sullen, unhappy look in her eyes. Their daddy came back into the house.
 ‘Are you right?’ [77]
 ‘I want to change my skirt,’ she said, moving to the door.
 He smiled and said wearily, ‘Your skirt’s grand, you look lovely in it. There’s no need to change.’
 ‘Ach, I don’t know, I don’t feel right in it.’
 ‘Put on your green one, then.’
 Perhaps their parents didn’t realise that the children’s sensibilities were delicately tuned to emotional falseness, and so they registered the contrast between this, the tense atmosphere in the car and the apparent delight displayed on their arrival in Ballymena. Granny Kelly herself, wreathed in smiles, came out to the door to welcome them, and led them into a parlour which looked warmer than usual, because of the glittering Christmas tree and the foil streamers. Uncle Michael, Aunt Rosemary and the cousins were there, and a casual observer might have been fooled. But the children noticed how their daddy and Uncle Michael both talked more loudly than usual, and that although their mother smiled and smiled, it never went beyond her mouth, never reached her eyes. When she laughed, it was forced and nervous, not the full, unbuttoned laughter they would hear at home. The children sat neatly on the sofa, sucking pink wafer biscuits and sipping weak tea, and noticing far more than the adults in the room would ever have believed.
 After all the chit-chat died down the conversation turned, inevitably, to civil rights, and the marches which had been taking place during the autumn.
 ‘Bloody head-cases, so they are,’ Uncle Michael said.
 ‘You think so?’ This was the children’s mother, and the tone of her voice had changed, but Uncle Michael either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He gave a little laugh and shook his head as if it were all such nonsense it was hardly worth talking about.
 ‘I mean, how do you think it’s going to end? O’Neill has offered them a few odds and ends to keep them quiet, and of course that’s got the other side’s backs up. Do these People’s Democracy crowd think the ones up in Stormont are going to turn round and say, “God, right enough, there is people in this country that have damn all and we’re doing less than nothing to help them; we’d better start giving them jobs and houses and whatever else they want”?’ [78]
 ‘So are people to just sit there like wee mice, and not even ask for what’s their due?’
 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.’
 ‘It’s not a question of one side or the other,’ their father began, and he said something about socialism, but their grandmother interrupted him.
 ‘Communists, more like,’ she said. ‘It’s the students I feel most angry about. Look at the chance they’ve been given. If they would sit in the universities and study and work hard, they’d have nothing to complain about, they’d get on in life, get jobs and money; but oh no, they have to be out about the country marching and protesting. The university should just close their doors on them, should boot them out and take in students who are prepared to stick to their books and work.’
 ‘Well now, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you at all there, Mrs Kelly,’ their father said, and they knew this time that he wasn’t going to allow himself to be interrupted or talked down. ‘I was on the march in Derry in October, the one that was disrupted, and I met some of the students there, and I can tell you that I thought them admirable people. They’re not involved in this for themselves. They’re concerned about the people in this country who haven’t had their chances, and who aren’t going to be helped in any way unless somebody makes a stand and gets things moving, unless the people who do have something begin to speak out for those who have nothing.’
 ‘It’s up to every person to look out for himself,’ Granny said, and Uncle Michael nodded at this. ‘I hate to have to say it about my own people, but the Catholics in this country are a feckless, lazy bunch. Given them an opportunity, and they’ll turn their backs on it and walk away.’
 The children could see their parents were angered by this, but they didn’t realise that it was because their father thought what she said was meant to be a slight against their mother; and their mother took it for a veiled insult against her husband’s family.
 ‘The next march there is,’ their mother said, ‘I’ll be on it.’ [79]
 Everyone in the room looked at her in surprise. ‘And I’ll take the children too.’
 When they got into the car to go home, a short while later, Kate said, ‘It’s good to have that out of the way, isn’t it? Now we can settle down and begin to enjoy Christmas.’
 ‘Oh, Kate,’ their mother said, and they thought she was going to laugh; but she started to cry instead.
 But she kept her word. When the civil rights march from Belfast to Derry took place some two weeks later, it was Emily who insisted that the whole family go to cheer them on. They had to stand and wait for a long time in the raw air; and when at last the students did appear, led by a tired-looking man shouting into a loud hailer, the children felt a sharp mixture of fear and excitement, which was new to them, but which they were to experience many times in the coming years. Helen’s father bent down and whispered in her ear, ‘You’re looking at history’ But Helen realised this without having to be told. That night she listened to her mother telling Granny Kate how the person leading the march had shouted ‘One man’ and everybody else had shouted ‘One vote; ‘One family,’ ‘One house.’ ‘There was a policeman standing right at my elbow,’ she said to Granny, ‘and I didn’t give two hoots, I just shouted back with the rest of them.’ Helen remembered how her mother had looked, standing on the grass verge by the side of the road, with Sally clutching a fistful of her skirt as usual. Her face was red with the cold, but when she shouted the slogans, she’d lost her usual timidity and shyness. Helen knew to look at her how serious all this was: some-thing important had changed. [80]