Colm Tóibín - The Blackwater Lightship

'It's all dirty,' he said.

'Do we have to go down?' Cathal asked.

'No,' Helen said, 'you can do what you like.'

She realised that they were used to the long sandy beaches in Donegal, and that the marl of the cliff and the short strand seemed strange to them.

'But I think you'd like it down there,' Helen said.

'How long are we staying here?' Cathal asked.

'Just today.'

'We're not sleeping here, sure we're not?'

'No, we're driving back later.'

The boys stood there, downcast and subdued.

'Manus, I'll give you a piggy-back if you come down now,' Hugh said.

'No, I want to sit on your shoulders.'

'All right.'

'And I'm not swimming if it's cold,' Manus said.

Cathal shook his head at Helen, signalling that he did not want to go down the cliff.

'You can come up with me,' she said, 'and sit in the car and read your comic'

'Can I sit at the steering wheel?' Manus asked.

'When you come back,' she said.

Helen and her grandmother waited for her mother to arrive while Cathal sat in the car reading his comic. When Hugh and Manus came back and her mother still had not arrived, she took the cold lunch she had brought from the car into the kitchen and they all sat around the table. Her grandmother had made soup and wanted to cook pork chops, but Helen insisted that they eat only the food she had brought. As she moved from the table to the dresser, she had a sudden memory of Declan being handed one of those willow-patterned plates with onions and carrots on it which he "would not eat. She almost wished now that her grandmother would produce some items that the boys did not eat \a151 cheese, for example, or cabbage \a151 to see their reaction. They would have responded with contempt, they would have refused even to look at the food.

They ate lunch and drank tea afterwards, all the time listening out for Lily's car. They talked about neighbours in Cush, Hugh cut a piece of cardboard for the broken window upstairs, Cathal read his comic and Manus tried to entice the cats from their lair. Helen made sure that there was never silence.

When she brought Cathal to the toilet, he asked if he could look around the house, and she told him he could. Downstairs, when she said to him that she and Declan had once slept in these rooms, he became interested. But when he asked her why they had slept here and not in their own house, she became vague. Cathal, however, persisted, and she told him that her father had died.

'And was your daddy old?' he asked.

'No, Cathal, he was young,' she said.

'And why did he die then?'

'That happens sometimes.'

'Is your mammy old?'

'She's older than me, but she's younger than Granny.'

'And she's not dead?'

'No, we're going to meet her.'

He pondered on what she had said, but he did not seem satisfied.

'Was Declan like Manus when he was small?'

'He was very like Manus,' Helen said.

'What does the image of your father mean?'

'It means you look like him.'

'But he's dead.'

'When he was alive.'

'Did they take photographs of him?'

Her mother did not arrive and the afternoon waned. Finally, they decided to leave. Hugh and Cathal and Manus went to the car.

'I'm nicely hoped up with you all,' Helen's grandmother said to her. 'That Lily is a law on to herself.'

'Tell her we came anyway,' Helen said.

'I'll clean her clock,' her grandmother said and turned towards the dresser, as if to look for something.

Now, for the first time there was silence. Her grandmother did not turn until Helen began to speak.

'We all have a lot to put up with, Helen,' her grandmother said, interrupting her.

Helen said nothing.

'What were you going to say?' her grandmother asked.

'I was going to thank you for the day, and say that you should come up to Dublin and see us.'

Her grandmother looked at her.

'After all those years I suppose it's nice to hear you saying that,' she said. Her tone was bitter, almost angry.

Helen smiled and turned and walked out of the house. In the car, as Hugh started the engine, she rolled down the window and they all waved at her grandmother and Hugh honked the horn as they set off for Dublin.

She waited until later that night, when she had drunk most of a bottle of red wine, to tell Hugh what her grandmother had said.

'We won't go near them for a good while so,' he said.

Now she was back under the same roof with them. She stood up from the bed and studied herself in the old mirror. She could see how tired her eyes looked. She sighed and opened the door and went back out to join her mother and her brother and his friend in their grandmother's house.

Later, as she sat in the kitchen, they heard another car in the lane. Mrs Devereux looked out through the curtains. 'Oh, here's another of them now,' she said.

'Who, Granny?' Helen asked.

'Look yourself,' she said.

Helen saw that it was Paul. He was carrying a suitcase. They watched him talking to Larry.

'Someone else deal with him,' her grandmother said.

Helen went to the door and brought Paul, followed by Larry, into the kitchen. She introduced him to her grandmother, who smiled at him warmly.

'It took me a bit longer than I thought,' he said. 'It's very hard to find this place. I had to ask at nearly every house.'

'Oh God Almighty, I'll have them all on top of me now,' her grandmother said. 'I'll have them in droves.'

'What do you mean, Granny?' Helen asked.

'The neighbours', she said, 'will smell the news.'

'How is he?' Paul asked.

'He's lying down,' Helen said.

'And he hasn't eaten since he came,' her grandmother said.

'No, his appetite can come and go,' Paul said. 'I brought him some clean clothes and there are drugs he needs and Complan.'

'Did you bring the Xanax?' Larry asked.

'I brought a packet of it. I used the old prescription.'

'What's Xanax?' Helen asked.

'It cheers him up a bit,' Larry said.

'Cheers him up,' her grandmother repeated. 'Maybe we should all have it.'

Helen's mother came into the room and examined them all disapprovingly.

'He wants a glass of milk and he shouldn't be left alone like that again, and he wants to know if his friends can stay in the spare room upstairs.'

'This new fellow'll have to bring his car in from the lane first, or it'll roll over the cliff,' her grandmother said.

'Paul,' Helen said. 'His name is Paul.'

'We'll have to get sheets and blankets for them,' her grandmother said. 'Are there any more coming?'

'A line of cars from Dublin,' Helen said.

'We should put a sign up saying we're open for business,' her grandmother said.

In the late afternoon when Larry and Paul were in the bedroom with Declan, and Helen was in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, voices could be heard, and then a knock came at the kitchen door.

'Come in,' Helen's grandmother said.

Two middle-aged women, Madge and Essie Kehoe, clearly sisters by their looks and the way they dressed, entered the room and managed to take in everything even before they spoke.

'Dora, we were just passing and we saw all the cars and we were wondering were you all right.'

Helen watched her grandmother moving towards the kitchen door and closing it behind her two visitors. Tin as right as rain,' she said.

'You have plenty of visitors, Dora?' Madge asked.

'Just down for the day, Helen and her friends.'

'Her husband isn't down?'

'No, no, he's in Donegal.'

'And the boys?'

'In Donegal too.'

'Donegal,' Madge repeated.

Helen left the room and told her brother and his friends not to make a sound. She went upstairs and flushed the toilet noisily.