Crying in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

throat.
    ‘Er, can I come in, Mrs Walsh? If I’m to do some work with Bobby and Micky, I’ll have to be able to see them, won’t I?’
    She stepped aside and allowed me in, but her eyes were full of suspicion and anxiety. The hallway was dark and gloomy and a stale smell of cooking hung in the air, even though it was only ten thirty, and I doubted very much that she had been cooking since the evening before: fried breakfasts were a luxury few in Haroldstown could afford. The walls in the hallway were covered with photographs of Biddy and her family, but I was not invited to stop and admire them. Still unspeaking, she brushed past me through a door to my left. I followed.
    The living room was moderately better lit but would still be difficult to read in. The curtains were only partially open, and a sheen of dirt coated the windowpane. Biddy sat on a grimy couch and stared into space. I looked about and saw an armchair covered in unironed clothes. I picked them up, made as neat a pile of them as I could and placed them on a coffee table. Then I sat down. The walls of this room were also completely hidden by framed photographs – hundreds of them, in fact. I could see Biddy in some of them, looking young and happy, beside a dark-haired, dark-eyed man who was looking into the camera with a steely gaze. He was not handsome: there was something cruel about the set of his mouth, and his eyebrows met in the middle, but he certainly looked striking. This, I assumed, was Toddy Walsh. As my eyes travelled around the countless images, I saw that he was in almost every single photograph. With him and Biddy in some of the snapshots were two little boys. I could trace them through infancy and into early childhood. The boys were both dark, like their parents, although the older one seemed to resemble his father more, while the younger mostly took after the mother.
    ‘Where are the boys, Mrs Walsh?’
    Slowly, she turned to look at me.
    ‘They’re with him.’
    ‘I’m sorry …’
    ‘They’re out the back with their father.’
    A sense of dread washed over me. I pushed the feeling aside and smiled.
    ‘Great! Well, that’s perfect. Can I go out and meet them? It would be great to see exactly what they’re doing. It’s a good place to start actually.’
    A look of horror spread across her face at the prospect.
    ‘No! No, you stay here and I’ll go and get them, bring them to you!’
    I’d like to go to them …’ I pressed, sensing this was a sore point, but wanting to see where it would lead.
    ‘No! I said no.’
    She stood up, trembling now. As she walked to the door, I called after her: ‘Mrs Walsh, can I ask you why you don’t want me to go out to the boys?’
    She stopped with her back to me, her head lowered.
    ‘Because,’ she said, her voice a whisper, ‘you’ll frighten him off. I want the boys to get better, not to be so wild. They’re being eaten up by what’s happening – they don’t understand it. I’m terrible worried about them, so I am. The social workers tell me you can cure them. I want you to do that for me. For
them.
Give them peace. But you’re not to drive him away. Not now that he’s come back to us.’
    Then she was gone. I sat for some minutes, considering what had just passed between us. There was a lot I still didn’t understand, so I decided to simply focus on the boys for the time being.
    I stood up and opened the curtains to better let the daylight in and then went back out to my car and got a box of tissues. I cleaned the window as best I could. When I was finished, the room, while far from pleasant, was reasonably bright. It was a start. I then brought in a box, from the boot of my car, which contained a few simple toys and some felt-tip pens and paper.
    Five or six minutes later, Biddy came in with the two boys. I felt like I knew them already, even though it was only from the countless pictures that were all around me. Bobby was six years old and taller by a head than his