One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden

errand. The woman also gave Granny exact instructions on how to reach her house; which turned out to be a nondescript little place with a tin roof, hidden at the end of a pot-holed lane. ‘You stay here now in the car, like good children,’ their daddy said to Helen and Kate, in a tone which they knew meant it was pointless to argue with him. He led Granny and Sally to the house, which swallowed them up.
    The minutes trickled by like hours. They always did, when you were left to wait in the car. Kate fiddled with the door locks as she grumbled, ‘I bet there’s nothing wrong with Sally at all. Ibet she’s just discovered some way to make her nose bleed when it suits her, just to get attention. Have you ever noticed how it always happens when her class are doing sums, or when we’re all just ready to go out to Mass or at some time like that? It never happens in Uncle Brian’s house, when we’re all watching the film on television on a Sunday afternoon, or at home when Mammy’s made us French toast, and never, ever when we’re at Granny Kelly’s because Sally knows she’d go bananas if you started bleeding all over her sofa.’ They watched a few scraggy hens pick around miserably near the door of the house. For five minutes they didn’t speak, but sat in a silence as deep as the silence in a church. ‘I bet we’ve been here for over an hour by now,’ Kate said.
    ‘I wonder what the woman’s doing to Sally,’ Helen said, with relish. They knew vaguely about cures. Granny Kate’s brother was said to have had a cure for strains and sprains, which involved tying flax around the arm or leg that was hurt and then saying special prayers, but they’d heard about others that were more interesting, more dramatic: cures for sties involving thorns from a gooseberry bush, and a cure for shingles where two burning sticks from the fire were held in the form of a cross. Until Sally returned they passed the time inventing cures to which the woman might be submitting her, cures which involved cowpats, nettles, raw eggs and the like, laughing hysterically at the ideas they came up with.
    Like the house in which she lived, the woman with the cure looked completely unremarkable: they saw her when Sally, Granny and their father were leaving, and she came to the door to see them off. Helen and Kate clamoured to know what they’d missed: ‘What did she do to you, what did she say?’
    ‘I’m not allowed to tell anybody,’ Sally said smugly, ‘or the cure won’t work.’
    ‘What did I tell you!’ Kate cried.
    But the evening wasn’t as big a disappointment as it had looked like turning out to be, for their daddy stopped at a filling station to get petrol and when he went in to pay for it, he came out with crisps and chocolates crammed into a brown paper bag, which he handed into the back seat without the conditions or instructions their mother would have added to this gesture. Hestripped the cellophane off a packet of Senior Service, and lit a cigarette, narrowing his eyes in a way Helen loved. She promised herself that she would start smoking just as soon as she was old enough, but she knew better than to say this to anyone. She liked the smell of the spent match, as he waved the flame out.
    Then Granny Kate suggested that they go to see the Old Cross at Ardboe, because it was only just down the road, and it would be a pity to have come all this way and not seen it, especially with it being such a fine night. ‘Have you ever been there before?’ she asked the children.
    ‘Aye, but we’d love to go again,’ Kate said.
    And so instead of heading straight for home, they drove for a short while down narrow roads with high hedges. Their daddy parked the car right beside the high cross, which was enclosed by railings. The surface of the stone was weathered, so that some of the biblical scenes carved on the cross had become indistinct. Their daddy pointed out and named Adam and Eve, the Marriage at Cana, the Last