Colm Tóibín - The Blackwater Lightship

She closed the wardrobe door and the drawers, and then left the room and stood out on the landing with her eyes shut. Slowly, she walked back into the bedroom. It was the shoes that made the difference, made it seem that he was lying there asleep and she could come and lie beside him. She placed herself on her mother's side of the bed, carefully and gingerly so as not to disturb him. She reached out and held the hand that should be there at the end of the right-hand sleeve of the jacket. She reached over and lifted the cap and kissed where his mouth should be. She snuggled up against him.

By the time she heard them, Mrs Morrissey and Mrs Maher were already in the hall. She realised she would have to move very fast and very quietly, but she knew that if they came upstairs now she would be caught and it would be impossible to explain. She reached for the shoes and put them on the floor, leaning over the figure she had made of her father. Without making a sound, she bundled up the suit and shirt and tie and underwear and socks. She placed the books on the floor and took the clothes and the pillow and the cap and moved slowly towards her own room, knowing that the creaking floorboards would soon alert the two women downstairs to her presence. She did not have time to smooth the bedspread or check the room.

'Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is there someone upstairs?' Mrs Morrissey shouted.

Helen shoved the clothes under her own bed and sprang to attention, calling over the bannisters.

'It's me! It's Helen!'

'Helen!' Mrs Maher shouted. 'You're after giving us a terrible fright. What are you doing here in the name of God? What are you doing here? You're meant to be down in Mrs Byrne's.'

'My granny said I was to come up here,' Helen said, and then rushed into her parents' bedroom to check that she had left nothing important on the bed. She smoothed out the bedspread and went back to the landing and walked downstairs.

'Well,' Mrs Maher said, 'you gave us a fright.' She had put white plastic bags full of large sliced pans on the kitchen table, and other bags on the draining board and the kitchen floor.

'You shouldn't be here on your own,' Mrs Morrissey said. 'If your mammy heard you were here on your own!'

'That's what my granny said, I was to come here,' Helen said.

'Well, I'll get Jim to drive you down to Mai Byrne's. Isn't Declan down there?'

'But they're all boys down there,' Helen said. 'They'll just tease me. I can't go down there.'

'Isn't she very precocious! Isn't she a little lady!' Mrs Maher said.

For the next two hours, Helen worked with them, buttering the bread, making ham sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, salad sandwiches for people who would come back to the house after the removal of her father's remains.

'There'll be a big crowd tonight,' Mrs Maher said.

'And an even bigger crowd tomorrow. The whole of Fianna Fail in the county Wexford will be there.'

Mrs Maher and Mrs Morrissey talked while they worked, but Helen only half listened to them. She wondered was her father in his coffin yet, and did they open the coffin again, or was it closed now for ever? She wondered if they covered his feet, or left them bare.

As each pile of sandwiches was made, it was placed back into the greaseproof wrapping paper to keep the bread fresh. Mrs Maher held a cigarette between her lips while she worked. Each time the ash grew long, Helen watched to see if it would fall into one of the sandwiches, but she always tipped it into the sink before it fell.

Mrs Morrissey hoovered the downstairs rooms. After a while, when she knew that they were both busy, Helen slipped upstairs to her room and found the underpants, the vest and the socks and put them back into the drawers where they had been. She checked downstairs again by looking over the bannisters and, when she was sure that she would remain undisturbed, she disentangled the rest of the clothes, untying the tie and putting the shirt back on its hanger. Her mother would believe, she thought, that it had wrinkled because it had been unused there so long. As she left it on the back of the door, she tried to crease the other shirt which hung there too. She put the suit back in the wardrobe and closed the wardrobe door. She flushed the toilet before she went back downstairs. She had forgotten the tie, but she knew she would be able to deal with that later.

She carried on helping their two neighbours make the sandwiches. When they were finished, Mrs Morrissey said, she could come over to their house and have her dinner and wait for her mammy to come. It would be quiet, Mrs Morrissey said, and it was a sad day and she'd have to look after her mother.

'She must be broken-hearted,' Mrs Maher said.

Her grandmother was waiting for her in the kitchen.

'I don't think you slept, Helen,' she said.

'I lay awake for a long time, but then I slept for a while,' Helen said.

'I knew you were awake.'

Her grandmother put slices of bread into an electric toaster and then made tea.

'I lay awake,' Helen said, 'thinking about all the things that happened years ago. Maybe it was the room and the lighthouse brought it all back, and Declan being in hospital I suppose. Anyway, I went over everything, Daddy dying and us being down here.'

'That was a very hard time, Helen,' her grandmother said. She poured tea and took a boiled egg from a saucepan on the Aga. When the toast was done, she put it on a plate.

'Do you remember us coming down here in the year after he died? You mentioned it on the phone the day you rang me,' Helen asked.

'I do, Helen,' her grandmother said.

'You know, I would come out of school and Mammy would be sitting there in the car, the old red Mini, with Declan in the back, and as soon as I'd get in, she'd start up the engine without saying a word. I used to dread it. God, I used to dread it.'

'She couldn't manage, Helen, that's what it was. She couldn't get over losing him.'

'She'd drive us up to school in the morning from here, and I'd close my eyes when I came out at the end of the day and hope when I opened them that she wouldn't be there. But often she'd be waiting there again, and we'd know that she hadn't been home, she'd spent the day driving around the country or sitting in the hotel or in Murphy Flood's. I used to dread coming out of school.'

'You and Declan were all she had,' her grandmother said.

'I don't want to criticise her, Granny,' Helen said, 'we've been through all that, and I know it was hard for her, but the whole journey down and back she wouldn't speak to us. I have my own children now and I couldn't imagine doing that.'

'Helen, she was doing her best. She couldn't manage. She was very good to me when your grandfather died. I remember that you were doing your Leaving Cert. She looked after me then, even though she was back working herself.'

'When you rang me, Granny, you said she had never done anything for you.'

'Well, that was wrong, Helen,' her grandmother said.

Helen drove towards Wexford. The drizzle became blustery rain as she approached Curracloe. It was past ten o'clock now and her mother would, she supposed, be at work. She was glad she did not have to tell her the news at the door of her house; it would be easier to arrive at the office.

As she was having breakfast with her grandmother that morning, a memory came to her which she put out of her mind. It was something she could not mention. Now, as she reached the main road into Wexford, the wipers criss-crossing the windscreen of the car, she pictured the scene which had earlier come back to her.

It was a Sunday in the summer the year after her father died. For the previous few months, they had not travelled much to her grandmother's at Cush during the week, but had always gone on Sunday, setting out from Enniscorthy after twelve o'clock Mass. This Sunday – it might have been June or early July – she noticed that they were driving along the Osborne Road towards Drumgoole. She said nothing, but Declan, from the back of the car, asked why they were not driving the usual way.