One by One in the Darkness Read Online Free

sets. ‘I really don’t know what I would do with them,’ she would say. ‘I got all those things as wedding presents years ago, and some of them are sitting in the press to this day.’ The van smelt of lavender floor polish. The most their mother ever bought off the hardware man was a few yellow dusters and a bottle of Brasso.
    ‘Will you come over and see us later in the day?’ Uncle Brian said to the children as he got out of the car. ‘What about you, Miss Sally? Will you come over and see your cousins?’ Sally smiled, but didn’t say anything.
    Aunt Lucy always took Johnny, Declan and Una to second Mass. While they were out, Granny changed out of her good clothes, and started cooking the dinner so that it would be ready for them when they got back, while Uncle Brian read the papers and kept an eye on the baby. Kate, Helen and Sally had their dinner later in the day, around five. When they went home on Sunday morning, they had a big meal of sausage and rashers and eggs and fried bread.
    Kate and Helen went over to visit Uncle Brian and Auntie Lucy most Sundays, and this week Sally said that she would come too: usually she preferred to stay at home with her mother. In winter you could see Brian’s house clearly through the bare trees, but now it was almost summer, and so you could only seethe roof. ‘Be careful of Sally crossing the foot-stick,’ their mother said as they set out across the fields, which was the quickest way to get there. The only problem was the foot-stick, a frail, narrow bridge their father had constructed across a ditch for them. He didn’t need the foot-stick: he could just step over the ditch, but they’d been warned not to try this. Kate didn’t like to think of what their mother would do to them if Sally slipped and fell into the mud below while they were supposed to be looking after her; and she was happier when they’d got past that point, and were on to Uncle Brian’s land.
    Now Sally was spitting at something. ‘What is it, what’s wrong?’
    ‘I swallowed a midge,’ Sally said, ready to cry.
    ‘Well, that doesn’t matter, you can eat meat today, it’s not a Friday. Don’t be such a cry baby. Look, if you’re not good, me and Helen won’t take you with us the next time. We might even run away now and leave you here in the middle of the field.’
    ‘Shush, Kate,’ Helen said, taking Sally’s hand. ‘We aren’t going to leave you here. Look, we’re almost there now.’
    Uncle Brian’s house was much nearer the lough than their own home. It stood a short distance from a curved bay, where there were yellow wild iris and the shiny green rushes Uncle Peter used to make St Brigid’s crosses every February. They pushed their way through the branches of the small trees that separated the bay from the fields they had just crossed, and stood in the wide lane for a moment to get their breath back.
    Kate thought that even if you closed your eyes and tried your hardest, you couldn’t imagine a nicer house than Uncle Brian’s, with it’s two little windows sticking out of the roof and the porch and the shiny front door that was the colour of chocolate. Behind the house there were some twisted apple trees, and at the front there was a low wall which enclosed a straggling garden. Once there had been a lawn with flower-beds at the edges, but Uncle Brian had let everything just grow away to it’s heart’s content, so that the garden had almost swallowed itself up. It was better like that, Kate thought. Granny Kate’s two marmalade cats, with their hard green eyes and their whiskers like white wires, used to hide in the deep grass that took Sally to the waist. There were fruit bushes too, with squashy currants and hard, hairygooseberries, glassy and green, that tasted bitter and made your mouth feel dry. They helped their cousins gather the fruit for Granny to make jam. A lazy rose had draped itself over the wall, and in summer it covered itself with fat yellow blossoms,