Chapter Fourteen
FRIDAY NIGHT

AFTER dinner, they sat around the stove in the kitchen, drinking tea and talking, far into the night. Helen shared the sofa with Cate, who had taken off her shoes and sat with her legs curled up under her; their mother was in the high-backed chair she preferred, and Sally was on a foot stool.
 ‘I hope it’s a long time before we have to go through another week like this one,’ Emily remarked.
 ‘It wasn’t so bad,’ Sally said at once. ‘We’ve been through worse than this before now, far worse.’
 ‘That’s true, aye,’ her mother agreed, embarrassed now at what she had said; and she glanced shyly at Cate, but Cate blushed and looked away.
 ‘Maybe that’s the only good thing about what happened,’ Sally went on. ‘No matter what ever arises in the future, nothing can ever be so bad again.’
 ‘Anyway, just think, in a couple of years we’ll be sitting here picking mashed banana out of our hair. Won’t that be great?’ Helen said. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t wait.’
 ‘It’ll be strange having a baby around the place again,’ Emily said. ‘I have to admit I haven’t thought that one through yet; I can hardly imagine it.’ None of her daughters said anything in response to this, but their silence was eloquent; and Emily knew that that was what she needed to imagine, and, as Sally had said, it wasn’t the worst possibility, not by a long way.
 They were all reluctant to go to bed that night. They put more fuel in the stove; they listened to the sound of the wind blowing around the eves of the house, and their talk became more broken, more desultory. Emily at last stood up, weariness getting the better of her unwillingness to be the first to break the warm, half-spoken intimacy of the evening. It was always like this towards the end of Cate’s visits, and tonight, for the first time in years, Emily suddenly blurted out what she always thought [177] at such a time: ‘It’s a pity you have to go away again, Cate. It would be lovely if you were always here.’
 ‘Oh, but then I’d lose my novelty value,’ Cate said, with as much irony as she could summon up. ‘You’d take me for granted then, and begin to forget just how special I am.’
 ‘She’s not away yet,’ Helen added. ‘We still have two more magical days of her company. How are we going to stand the excitement, will you tell me that?’
 Laughing, their mother said goodnight and left the room. The sisters sat in silence and listened to the sound of Emily’s footsteps as she ascended the stairs; and then they could hear her moving about in the room above them, as she prepared for bed. They continued to talk, more quietly now, so as not to disturb her. ‘You should go up too, Sally,’ Cate said, some time later. ‘I know to look at you that you’re exhausted.’
 ‘We all are,’ Sally said; but she was the next to go. And now Helen realised that she was afraid of the moment when Cate would also withdraw from her company, and she would be left alone. Cate knew this too. ‘I’m getting my second wind now,’ she lied.
 ‘Would you like a whiskey?’ Cate shook her head, smiled sadly and patted her middle.
 ‘Sorry, I forgot.’
 ‘You have one, anyway.’
 ‘I’ll leave it.’
 But when at last Cate did leave the kitchen, Helen poured herself a stiff drink, and sat listening to Verdi on her Walkman until it was so absurdly late that there was nothing for it but to rinse her glass, check for a final time that the front and back doors were locked, put out all the lights and go to bed too.
 She lay down and in the blackness pulled the blankets tightly around herself.
 
 When Helen was a child, sometimes she used to find it hard to fall asleep at night, and then she would slip into a fold in her mind somewhere between her dreams and her imagination. It was something she cultivated: she knew she wasn’t asleep, but she could see marvellous things then, which would never have been possible had she been fully awake. [178]
 By the force of her imagination she would lift herself out of her bed, and pass through the roof of the house like a beam of light passing through water. Then she would soar, oh, how she soared, through the black night until she was high above the world, until she was as far away as one of the angels who floated beside God’s shoulder in the picture at the front of the Children’s Bible, where God was a vast old man with a triangular yellow light around his head, leaning above the solar system with his hand raised in blessing. The blackness of the universe was warm, soft as velvet, and studded with stars that twinkled. The Milky Way, far off, was a silver glittering belt, like flung coins.
 But what Helen saw was better than a picture in a book, better than a film, because she could see and feel that the universe was alive; see the sun burning and feel its heat, see the planets, laced with moons which circled and spun around them.
 Once Miss Wilson had taken the whole class, in groups of five at a time, into the windowless bookstore and, armed with a toy globe and a pocket torch, had shown them how the world rotated in the light of the sun: how day and night happen. Now Helen could see it for herself, as she leaned over the earth and the clouds obligingly swirled and melted away, leaving a globe of the world as bald as the one in the schoolroom: but alive! In turn, the countries moved into the light and day broke. She narrowed her eyes and looked at japan: in houses with paper windows, people were waking up. She saw dim temples where monks in robes were burning incense before golden statues. She looked at China: a web of roads; rickshaws and millions of bicycles in a pure dawn light. Mountains, deserts, tangled jungles; fabulous cities, dusty villages: she could see even to the depths of the ocean, where there were shoals of coloured fish and the wrecks of ships, their treasures all spilt.
 And then she would look for Ireland, where it was night. It made no difference, for with the powers she had she could see it all, see it first as an island at the edge of Europe, the seas pounding around it; then, on looking closer, the rim of mountains, the flat centre (‘Ireland is like a saucer,’ Miss Wilson had told them), and then, closer again, the patchwork of fields, cut by rivers and ditches. She saw dark houses, sleeping cattle, birds and night animals: the red fur of a fox, a heavy badger. She [179] looked then to the north of Ireland, and this delighted her most of all: she saw the place where she lived. She recognised everything she saw now: the silent schoolroom, with its rows of empty desks, its nature table; the locked chapel, uncannily quiet, a red light burning before the tabernacle; familiar trees; the cold, dark waters of the lough. In Uncle Brian’s and Aunt Lucy’s house Granny Kate was fast asleep, pink and grey hat boxes stacked on the wardrobe which contained her immaculate suits and dresses: Helen could smell the dried lavender which hung there in lace sachets. On the lane which led up to the house a man was staggering along; sobbing and laughing and shouting at the stars, and Helen’s heart contracted with pity when she looked at him. And then, strangest and best of all, she saw her own house, saw her daddy sitting on the kitchen sofa, smoking a last cigarette before locking the doors, banking up the stove for the night, and going off upstairs to bed where their mammy was reading. Sally and Cate were already asleep, and finally Helen could see herself, as though she were looking down on her own bed, where she was curled up, drowsing, waiting for sleep and feeling safe, so safe and so happy, not knowing that when she was a woman, it would break her heart to remember all this.
 For now when she lay longing for sleep, a different image unrolled inexorably in her mind, repeated constantly, like a loop of film but sharper than that, more vivid, and running at just a fraction of a second slower than normal time, which gave it the heavy feel of a nightmare.
 But this was no dream: she saw her father sitting at Lucy’s kitchen table, drinking tea out of a blue mug. She could smell the smoke of his cigarette, even smell the familiar tweed of his jacket. He was talking through to Lucy, who was working out in the back scullery: she’d been doing the dishes when he arrived, and he told her to carry on with what she was about. He glanced up at the clock and said, ‘I wonder what’s keeping Brian that he’s not home yet,’ and Lucy replied, ‘There’s a car pulled up outside now, but it’s not Brian’s, by the sound of it.’ And as soon as she spoke these words he heard her scream, as two men burst into the back scullery, and knocked her to the ground as they pushed past her; and then Helen’s father saw them himself as they came into the kitchen, two men in parkas with the hoods [180] pulled up, Halloween masks on their faces. He saw the guns, too, and he knew what they were going to do to him. The sound of a chair scraping back on the tiles, ‘Ah no, Christ Jesus no,’ and then they shot him at point-blank range, blowing half his head away. As they ran out of the house, one of them punched the air and whooped, because it had been so easy.
 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 justification: 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.]