One by One in the Darkness Read Online Free Page B

bad person, and that there was no badness in Uncle Peter. The way he was made her sad and the whole family too, but the person it hurt most of all was Uncle Peter himself. ‘You mustn’t be afraid of him. You should feel sorry for him.’
    ‘I do. I feel sorry for you too.’ And then Granny Kate laughed.
    ‘Oh, I’ll manage,’ she said, ‘I’ll survive.’
    Uncle Peter didn’t have one special job that he did all the time, like Daddy or Uncle Brian. He worked on and off at different things, fishing, or clearing drains with a rented digger or cutting back the hedges or digging holes in the road. Sometimes he went on the dole and stayed at home. He helped Granny Kate mind the baby when Uncle Brian was off in the bread van and Aunt Lucy was in the cigarette factory; sometimes he’d be doing the washing up when you went in, or taking the laundry down off the clothes airer on the scullery ceiling. Their daddy and Uncle Brian also did housework now and then, because there had been no girls in the family, and Granny Kate had made them do things when they were children because she didn’t like housework herself. She didn’t much care if people thought it was odd. ‘If there’s an hour you could spend either reading a book or washing the floor, I know which I’d rather do,’ she said.
    ‘There’s a Shirley Temple film on the telly this afternoon,’ Una said to Kate. ‘ The Good Ship Lollipop .’
    ‘Don’t tell me you want to be sitting in watching television on a nice day like this,’ Aunt Lucy said. ‘It’d be far better for you to be outside playing.’
    ‘Shirley Temple’s a pain, anyway,’ Johnny said, just to annoy Una, because he knew she liked her. Una was Kate’s friend as well as her cousin: they sat beside each other at school. Johnny was a year older than Helen, who was in the same class as Declan.
    ‘I could take you out in the boat,’ Uncle Peter said. ‘It’s a good calm day for it, but I don’t know that I’d have room for the lot of you.’ Sally wanted to stay at home with Granny, which pleased Helen. She always felt responsible for looking after Sally and Kate, and she would enjoy being out in the boat more if she didn’t have Sally to worry about. Una said that she would stay at home too, and watch the film, and Uncle Peter said that he could manage the four who still wanted to go with him.
    The blue wooden boat was pulled up into the reeds. ‘Get you in first, Johnny and Declan, and one of youse can start bailing her,’ Uncle Peter said. The bailer was an old paint tin lying in about four inches of water at the bottom of the boat. Uncle Peterlifted Helen and Kate in, then pushed the boat hard and climbed in himself, as it slid out into the lough. Kate liked that moment, because it was frightening. She always thought for a split second that the boat was going to tip over or sink. The difference between standing firm on the shore one minute, and then feeling the boat tremble uncertainly beneath you the next was exciting. Within seconds, though, you got used to being on the water, as the boat steadied itself. Uncle Peter began to row with long, even strokes. There was a green scum of algae at the edge of the shore, but the water was clearer further out. The sky was bare and blue, but for a few high strands of fine clouds. Kate took off her cardigan, because of the sticky, prickly heat of the day, then turned in the boat to look back at Uncle Brian’s house. It was strange to see from an unfamiliar angle a place you knew so well, and she wasn’t quite sure that she liked it. When Helen said that you could see their own house too, she didn’t want to look at it.
    ‘Will you take us to one of the islands?’ Johnny said. ‘Ah, do,’ he went on, when Uncle Peter didn’t say ‘No’ straight off, and the others noticed this too, and joined in with the pleading. ‘It’s the breeding time,’ he said. ‘The chicks is hatching now, the birds’ll go wild if you go out