Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane

Author:Seamus Deane
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473573819
Publisher: Random House

DEATHBED

November 1952

Grandfather wanted me to read the newspaper to him, page by page, starting with the sport. Even the horse-racing seemed to interest him, although he had never been a gambler himself. Then the news. Then the death notices. When we had exhausted the paper he asked me to talk to him about what I was doing, about school, my friends, life on the street, home. I asked him about what it had been like working for the Derry Journal in the twenties and thirties as a linotype operator, about his fight to get the workers unionised, about the troubles of the twenties, about professional football and boxing. I wanted him to tell me the story I had heard in fragments from the stairs, when I was a youngster, and from Brother Regan’s sermon. But he would not yield on the Billy Mahon episode; he’d just say those were bad times and some things were best forgotten except that we had to keep up the fight against the government, always, always.

‘What’s wrong with my mother?’ I asked him one day, for she had just left and was shaky and upset every time she came.

Oh, he replied, she had her troubles but she’d be all right. Why does she keep talking about Eddie? I asked him, lying, for she had never mentioned him at all since that one occasion, now two weeks back. He roused himself at that and pretended to wonder too, but was uneasy and asked me what she had said. Only his name, I told him, and that there was something terrible. But Eddie was my father’s brother and was long since disappeared, so what could it be now? What could she know now that had begun to trouble her? But she had sworn me to silence, I told him, for she knew she could talk to me and I would say nothing.

Not even to your father?’

I knew to say it.

‘Especially not to my father. She said that. But I shouldn’t even talk to you about it; it’s only that I’m worried about her.’

I pressed and pressed through long afternoons until he tired and slept and Katie came to shoo me away and let me go back to my family, sometimes overnight, for I was getting too pale and too bound up with him. Even though my mother was beginning to be ill by this time, and visiting my grandfather less and less, I still longed to get back to him, to keep at him until he told me what was going on, what had happened. I was getting nowhere when the priests intervened.

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