One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden Page B

what people have to put up with in this country, well, we have to make a start somewhere in telling them that we’ve had enough of that.’
    ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘Tell Brian I’ll go with him.’
    But when the time came he didn’t go, because one of the cattle fell sick. He was up all Friday night with it, and they had to call the vet twice. When Brian called to collect his brother on his way to Coalisland, Charlie just shook his head. ‘March? I’d fall in a pile I’m that done. But I’ll go with you another time, so I will.’
    On the Sunday, when the sisters went over to Brian’s house their cousins Johnny and Declan were full of the march. ‘It was great. We all sat on the road and sang rebel songs. There was nothing the police could do to stop us. Get your daddy to bring you along the next time,’
    The summer ended, school started again, and Sally’s nosebleeds began once more. Helen and Kate became embarrassed at being called out of class; dreaded the moment when some wee girl would come into the room and say, ‘Please, Miss, Sally Quinn’s not well again, and she needs one of her big sisters.’
    ‘And so then you have to go to her class and she’s lying on a rug in the bookstore, like an eejit,’ Helen told their mother.
    ‘I can’t help it,’ Sally wailed.
    ‘She can, too,’ Kate said, when their mother decided to keep Sally at home after her nose bled on a Monday and then again on the Tuesday. For the rest of that week, while Helen and Kate were being hurried through their breakfast, and packed off to school with a few cheese sandwiches, Sally would creep into her parents’ warm, empty bed, where she snoozed and drowsed until the middle of the day. Then she got up and after lunch, would spend the rest of the afternoon playing with the kittens in the back yard, helping her mother to make pastry, or just doing some colouring in at the kitchen table. Her nose didn’tbleed once during these days, and she was fine over the weekend, but when Helen and Kate were getting up for school on Monday morning, they could hear Sally’s thin whine: ‘I’m not well, Mammy.’
    Still in her pyjamas, Kate stormed into the other room. ‘If she’s not going, Helen and me are staying at home too, because it’s not fair.’ Their mother stood up for Sally, but then their daddy weighed in, and said that all three of them would be going to school, and that there would be no more nonsense about it. Sally grizzled a bit, but she and her mammy knew that because he hardly ever got involved in matters like this, when he did, there was no turning him. Kate grinned as the three of them got into the car, including Sally with her satchel and her sandwiches. ‘And if you don’t feel well, don’t be sending for Helen or for me, because we won’t come.’
    Sally was fine that day, and for weeks afterwards was, as Uncle Peter said, ‘as healthy as a kipper’.
    There was another march announced, this time it was to be in Deny At home now, all the talk was about civil rights, and their father said that he wouldn’t miss this march, ‘no matter if every beast I have keels over the night before it’. The Apprentice Boys had called a march for the same day when the civil rights march was announced, and so they both had been declared illegal, which of course made it more important for everybody to be there. The children clamoured to be taken along too, but neither of their parents would hear of it.
    ‘You’re too small,’ their father insisted. ‘If there was any trouble and you got hurt, even the least little bit, even if you just got very badly frightened, I’d never forgive myself for it.’
    ‘But Declan and Johnny are going.’
    ‘Aye, that’s as may be, but Una isn’t going.’ This didn’t explain or excuse anything for Helen and Kate, it just made it seem worse.
    ‘I can’t wait until I’m grown up,’ Helen said. ‘I’m going to do exactly as I please!’
    To make it up to them,