One by One in the Darkness Read Online Free Page A

and gave off a rich yellow scent. ‘It’s like drinking some kind of golden wine, just to smell that rose,’ Granny Kate used to say.
    The front door was almost never opened, and the back door was seldom locked, so they went into the house through the scullery, and then went on into the kitchen. They didn’t bother to knock: nobody expected them to, for they were as free to come and go in this house as they were in their own home. If anything they were even more at liberty to do as they pleased here, for Uncle Brian and Aunt Lucy set less store by things like tidiness and good behaviour than their own parents did. The family was finishing dinner when the children went in. Granny Kate was cutting an apple pie, and they put out extra plates for Helen, Kate and Sally, and poured them mugs of hot, sweet tea. Uncle Peter had already moved over to a chair beside the stove, and Helen went over to sit beside him. Kate was more wary of him than Helen was, although she did like him. He never asked you how you were getting on at school, or wanted to test your multiplication tables or anything stupid like that. He talked to you in the same quiet way he talked to Uncle Brian or any other adult. As Kate ate her apple pie she listened in to what he was saying to Helen.
    ‘I seen an otter down by the canal the other night. Be sure and tell your daddy when you go home.’
    ‘What was it doing?’
    ‘Sitting in nice and quiet by the bank, but when it heard me, it slipped into the water and swum off. You wouldn’t think to look at it, the power that’s in it. The jaws on that boy, if he give you a nip, he’d take the finger clean off your hand. He could bite clean through a fish, bones and all, the same as you’d eat a bit of bread and jam, and not a bother on him.’
    Friday night two weeks earlier, Helen and Kate had been lying in bed ready to sleep when they heard a shout in the distance.
    ‘That’s Uncle Peter,’ Kate said. Helen didn’t reply.
    ‘That’s Uncle Peter,’ Kate said again, as the voice came nearer.
    ‘I heard you the first time,’ Helen said. ‘Keep quiet and go to sleep.’
    Now he was at the bottom of their lane, they could hear him rant and shout.
    ‘Daddy would never be like that.’ Kate heard Helen sit up in bed. ‘If you say one more word, Kate Quinn, I’m going to go to Mammy and tell her you won’t let me get to sleep.’ Kate could hear the tears in Helen’s voice. The shouts gradually died away. When Uncle Peter got home, he wouldn’t sleep in the house. There was a caravan out under the apple trees and Uncle Brian would take him there, and put him to bed. He’d stay there for days, maybe even weeks, and if they went to visit they wouldn’t see him, he wouldn’t come out until he was better. Kate felt uneasy playing in the orchard when she knew he was in the caravan. ‘What does he do in there?’ Kate asked Declan. ‘Sleeps. Drinks. Cries. Granny brings him out a bit of dinner, but he hardly ever eats anything.’ And then a day would come and you would go to the house and he would be back in sitting by the stove, lighting one cigarette off the other, quiet and shy as ever he was. Weeks and months might pass before he started to shout and had to go away again.
    One day when Helen wasn’t around, Kate had asked Granny, ‘What’s wrong with Uncle Peter?’
    ‘Two things,’ she said. ‘He thinks too much, and then he drinks too much.’
    ‘Why?’ said Kate. She hadn’t understood what Granny meant. Granny laughed. ‘It would take a wiser woman than me to answer that.’
    ‘Well, I don’t like it,’ Kate said, and now it was Granny Kate who asked, ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘It’s just scary to hear him shouting, or to see him not able to walk properly. It’s horrible.’
    And when she said that, Granny had looked sad. She was quiet for a minute and then she told Kate to remember that a person might do bad things but that that didn’t mean they were a