The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín Read Free Book Online Page B

to her grandmother's lane. Helen walked through the ruin of the house, the front wall having long since fallen into the sea. She looked at the old chimney and the back wall still in place, and then stood at the edge waiting for the next flash from Tuskar. It seemed brighter now, stronger, from this height. She could feel the dew falling and could hear the sound of cattle somewhere in the distance as she made her way back to her grandmother's house.

CHAPTER THREE
    The bed was uncomfortable and the nylon sheets, she felt, had not been used for years. They must have been from the time of the guest-house; they had a thin, almost slippery feel. The mattress sagged. She was so tired that she had gone to sleep as soon as she lay down, but she woke an hour or two later, unsure where she was, reaching out for a light, unable to think what house she was in, and feeling a strange, hard thirst. Then she remembered where she was and how she had got here. She put her head on the pillow and wondered how she had let this happen. Earlier on, it had seemed a good idea to come and spend the night here, but she had not bargained for being wide awake like this, the light from Tuskar through the curtains flitting across the wall over her bed, and a smell of must and damp in the room.
    She got out of bed and made her way to the kitchen. She filled a mug of water and brought it back to the bedroom. The lino in the room was torn, some of the wallpaper had peeled, the paint on the ceiling was flaking, and the presence of the shiny modern radiator made the room seem even more dingy and depressing. When she pulled the old candlewick bedspread back, she found that the blankets were stained. She didn't feel tired or sleepy. She shivered. The smell seemed sharper now, and sour, and it was the smell more than anything which brought her back to the time she and Declan had lived in this house.
    This had been her room, Declan's the one behind. But after a while his bed had been moved in here. She remembered the hammering apart of the iron bed and the feeling as they stood and watched that they were causing all this trouble.
    Declan was afraid. He was afraid of the black clocks which darted awkwardly across the floor, afraid that if you stepped on one of them all the bloody insides would be on your feet. He was afraid of the dark and the cold and of his grandparents' movements upstairs which seemed to echo in the rooms below. And Helen knew that there was another fear, which was never mentioned in all that time: the fear that their parents would never come back, that they would both be left here, and that these days and nights — Helen was eleven then, Declan eight — would become their lives, rather than an interlude which would soon come to an end.
    Helen remembered how it began. It must have been just after Christmas, maybe early January, and it was her last year at primary school. She remembered the day when she arrived home, dropped her schoolbag inside the door and found her parents in the back room, standing in a pose she had never seen them in before. They were both looking into the mirror which was over the fireplace, and when they saw her coming into the room they did not turn. Her mother spoke. It was a new voice, soft, with a tone of entreaty.
    'Helen,' she said, 'your father is going to have to go to Dublin for tests.'
    She looked at the two of them as they stared at her and at each other, as though any second now the mirror would flash and take a photograph of them. In her memory, these moments — her father's slow smile, her mother's gentle tone — were mixed up with their wedding photograph, taken in Lafayette's in Dublin. She was sure that the scene in front of the mirror could have lasted only a few minutes, maybe less even, enough for a glance from each of them and a sentence — 'Helen, your father is going to have to go to Dublin for tests' — and maybe nothing more. In any case, it was the last memory she ever had of seeing her