“Keep the books, Joe, you earned them.”
“I wouldn’t have got a Second in the Juniors without you, Declan.”
“Sure, you would, Joe. You’re a born scientist. I only did what you told me. If you’d had a half decent partner, you would have walked away with a First.”
“Wrestle you for them!”
“There’s the bus. See you tomorrow, Joe.”
It is midnight and the wind and the ocean are restless and he too is restless in his bed, unable to sleep.
He remembers.
It is Thursday, April 16th. The day before Good Friday. Their last day.
He sees them clearly in his memory, recalls their faces on that fateful morning, their expressions, their gestures, and he searches now for some sign in their faces and voices of their doom. But there is none.
Mairead is excited, of course, because today is her birthday, and she is trying on her new white wool sweater, a gift from her mother. It is 7:45 in the morning and the three of them are in the kitchen where they eat. Mary Doyle is cooking breakfast and a man on Radio Ulster is singing, “Have I told you lately that I love you?” He sings it “luurv.”
Mairead is happy. She tells her ma that she luurvs her sweater—it fits perfectly, and she luurvs her ma, and she luurvs her big brother, and she thanks Declan again for the beautiful notebook that is large and heavy and has blank, creamy pages, enough for a whole year, and which is just perfect because Mairead loves to write, and someday, she always tells them, she will be a famous poet like William Butler Yeats.
She admired the notebook in Marks and Spencer some weeks earlier. “It would make a perfect diary too,” she said. Declan checked the price and made a quick calculation; he would be able to afford it if he was careful with his pocket money. It had a picture on the cover of a beautiful Victorian lady seated at a desk, writing. “It’s so elegant,” Mairead said, as she stroked its cover with her fingers.
She is a skinny kid with long, long legs, who walks daintily with her back straight; she has brown hair and lively blue eyes. She takes after her ma. Declan is supposed to take after his da. The new sweater helps fill her out a little and looks good on her. “Take it off while you eat your breakfast,” says their ma, so she peels it off carefully over her head and suddenly she’s skinny again in a faded pink T-shirt that says Make Love Not War. She folds the sweater neatly and carries it into the living room and places it on the back of the sofa for later.
Breakfast is fried eggs and refried boiled potatoes from last night’s dinner and toast and marmalade with hot milky tea. Mairead likes tea whenever her ma lets her have it, but mostly she drinks milk. Declan is old enough to choose whatever he wants. He is reading a science fiction book while he eats his breakfast.
Their ma opens the kitchen window and throws out a handful of crumbs for the birds. Then she sits down with her tea and toast. She takes Declan’s book away from him. “Manners at the table, Declan. I swear to heaven you’ll be reading in your grave.”
Declan, remembering, ransacks the memory, listens and watches his ma keenly. But despite “grave,” there is no inkling of death in either her voice or her manner. She is relaxed and happy on her daughter’s birthday, looking forward to their outing in the city. She sips her tea, her elbow cupped in her hand, the hot teacup near her pale cheek, her blue eyes drowsy and fond.
The initial excitement of her birthday gifts over, Mairead is now dreamy. She sips at her glass of milk and gazes over her mother’s head out the kitchen window at a pair of spring sparrows on the sandstone window ledge pecking jerkily at the breadcrumbs. Ten is an important birthday. She had three birthday cards, one each from Declan and her ma, and one from her friend Rosaleen.
There is not a sign of doubt or foreboding on her dreamy young face, not a hint in her happiness that today is the day she must die.
Declan, still remembering, sees himself finish his breakfast and get up from the table. He watches himself run up the stairs and brush his teeth, then grab his lunch off the kitchen table where his ma has left it for him, kiss his ma and Mairead hurriedly, unthinkingly, absent-mindedly, thinking only of Tim O’Malley waiting for him, ready for school, unaware that this is the last time he will ever see his ma and Mairead alive.
Several hours later he is summoned to the headmaster’s study, and the headmaster is nodding at him. His old, serious face, the creases around his mouth as he speaks the words. The policeman is standing beside the headmaster’s desk. Help? Who can help? Death is a scythe that cuts you down.
He walks home. The house is empty. Everything is tidy and in its place, just the way they left it before they went off on their birthday jaunt. His eyes search for a message, a note, some final word scribbled by his ma, but there is nothing. The kitchen counter is neat: the toaster with its bright daisy-yellow cover, the teapot with its blue wool cap, cleaned and rinsed, the brown plastic dishrack emptied of its knives and forks and plates. There are still a few crumbs left outside the window from the sparrows.
He sits on the old sofabed in the living room and stares at his ma’s pictures of Pope John XXIII and the Sacred Heart hanging on the wall, Jesus with his long, sad, suffering face, left hand pointing to his burning heart, a prayer in the lower margin: “Come to Me, all ye who are heavily burdened and I will give you rest.”
Mrs. O’Malley from next door comes in. “Are you there, Declan, love?” And when she sees him sitting there, his school bag still clutched in his hand, she says, “Oh sweet Jesus—they killed your ma and the child!” And starts crying and sits beside him and clutches him to her shoulder, weeping hot tears into his hair.
Father Coughlan, the parish priest is next. He tiptoes into the house and makes the sign of the cross and takes Declan’s hands into his own. “God be with you, boy, in your time of trouble.” And he blesses him and tells him he must be strong and does he wish for him to send Mrs. Moloney from the rectory to stay in the house with him for a week or so while he telephones his uncle, Matthew Doyle, in Canada? Declan is staring at the Sacred Heart. He shakes his head. He will be all right; Mrs. O’Malley will be coming in.
When he gets rid of everyone, he locks the door and climbs the stairs. He opens his ma’s bedroom door and stands there, just looking. On the wall over the bed is another Sacred Heart picture. Suffering. The room is very empty. Then he goes to Mairead’s room which is his own room also, divided in two by a curtain strung up on a pair of wall hooks—the house, like all the others in the row, has only two bedrooms. The diary he gave her for her birthday is on the hurriedlymade bed. There is a pair of soiled white socks on the floor beside the bed. Her green blazer, part of her school uniform, hangs on the back of a chair. He picks up the diary and stares at the Victorian lady on the cover.
He goes to his own side of the room and lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling, the diary clasped in his hand, and he waits in the silence. He is waiting for them to come home, rattling and laughing through the door downstairs, tired and happy after their day in the city, waiting for them to dismiss this empty, tomb-like silence.
But they don’t come.
The funeral is on Monday. The IRA with their black berets and dark glasses make a political thing of it. The police are there in full force. The Brits too, in their armored six-wheeled Saracens. If they try anything, there will be a riot for sure. Schools are closed. All the victims. All the mourners. Hundreds attend. The coffins closed.
It is the last he ever sees of his ma and his sister, two dark wooden boxes, one of them small, on the shoulders of the IRA pallbearers. He watches, his face pale in the cold spring sun. The pain he feels is unbearable, but he wants to guard it and nourish it so it will grow, and when it has grown powerful enough it will explode.
He watches the coffins being lowered into the consecrated ground.
He doesn’t cry.
The Brits don’t try anything. There is no riot. Not this time.
After the funeral he holds it in for two days at the O’Malleys’. All day and night and the next day. Then the next night, he climbs through the window into his own empty house and sits on his ma’s bed and weeps, weeps until he thinks it will kill him.
He stops remembering.
The wind keens in from the black Canadian sea and rattles his window. He pushes himself up out of bed and looks out at the dark night and the turbulent sea.
He remembers again that picture of his mother’s—the Sacred Heart, that sad suffering Jesus face on the wall.
It looks a lot like his Uncle Matthew.