The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín Read Free Book Online

ago with your father's cancer. There was nothing the doctors could do. And poor Declan's only just starting his life.'
    'What will I do about my mother?' Helen asked.
    'You'll go into Wexford in the morning and you'll break the news to her softly, Helen. Let her sleep tonight now. It's the last night's sleep she'll have for a long time.'
    Her grandmother made tea and put biscuits on a plate. She sat down opposite Helen. It was still bright outside, and Helen felt a desperate need to go down to the strand, to get away from the intensity of her grandmother's attention.
    'I'll make you up a bed now,' her grandmother said. 'The room hasn't been used since you were here last summer. Your mother never stays, and she hasn't been here much recently.'
    'Have you fallen out with her?' Helen asked.
    'Ah, not really. She still thinks she's going to get me to move into Wexford. What if I broke my leg out here, she asked me. And I told her I've plenty of money now that I sold the sites; that old field that was full of ragwort. I never consulted her or asked for her opinion. And that's all is wrong with her, but she's well over it now. She's good at forgetting things, putting them behind her. And I had the central heating installed without as much as a by-your-leave from her. Come on until I show you.'
    She stood up and Helen accompanied her into the old dining-room. She pointed at the new white radiator, and then opened the doors of the two bedrooms off the dining-room with iron beds and bare mattresses. These two rooms also had radiators.
    'I had it put in all over the house, and a big oil tank out the back. I bought a deep-freeze as well, so I have no worries. Your mother came down when the work was half done and said that the house would rot. She said that she had everything set up for me in Wexford. "It's a wonder, Lily," I said to her, "that you don't look high-up or low-down at me and I only ten miles out the road and you with your big car. Isn't it funny now that you've started to call when you know I have money?" Oh, she was raging. That was Easter and I didn't see her again until the end of May. She brought me down this.' She took a mobile phone from her apron pocket. She held it in her left hand as though it were a small animal. 'Oh, I told her I couldn't have a phone in the house. I'd worry about it, so I keep this here, it's turned off, I never use it.'
    'But, Granny, you didn't mean it about the money.'
    'No, Helen, but it was the only thing I could say that would make her stop trying to move me into the town. Oh, she was raging. And she'd be even more raging if she thought I told you. God help her, she'll have other things to think about now.'
    Her grandmother went over to the window and peered out through the curtains.
    'Is it easy to get down to the strand this year, Granny?' Helen asked.
    'Oh yes, Helen, they dug steps and the steps have stayed, except for the last bit which is all marly and mucky.'
    'I'd like to go down, just for a minute, just so I can think, it's been the longest day I've ever spent.'
    'You go down, Helen, and I'll make up your bed, and I'd be glad if you'd drive the car into the yard or I'll have dreams about it rolling over the cliff.'
    'I won't be long.'
    •          •          •
    The last strong rays of the sun could be seen over the hill behind the house. The air was still, with hardly a hint of the night about to fall. She felt almost healed and enclosed by her grandmother, but she knew, too, that her grandmother's attempt to suggest that nothing could hurt her was half pretence; the other half was a hardness built up over a lifetime of expecting the worst and then watching it unfold.
    As Helen walked down the lane, she could see only the soft blue horizon and she could not imagine what the sea would look like in this light. And when she came to the edge she saw it down below: blue with eddies of dark blue and green in the distance. The sea "was calm and the waves rolled