Free The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín Page B

herself.
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    She listened: there was no sound at all. She had never noticed silence before. It was five months since she had been in this house. She looked around the room, touched the cold tiles of the fireplace, sat on one of the armchairs. She walked into the back room and opened the curtains. It was the stillness which surprised her, the emptiness. She had thought about these rooms so much in Cush, she now expected them to come to life for her, but they did nothing. She opened the back door and collected the suitcase from under the kitchen "window; she came back in and closed it. She sat in the back room and thought about Mrs Byrne's big living-room over the shop, and everybody being nice to her because her father had died, and she shivered.
    She was glad she had come back here. When she put her hand on the kitchen door handle, she had realised that her father's hand would have touched it too, his fingerprints or the print of the palm of his hand had probably — no, definitely — been left there. His hand was dead now, lying cold in his coffin. And this house, every inch of it, had his traces imprinted on it: the chair where he sat, the cups and glasses he used must still have some trace of him, the knives and forks he touched, in all the years he would have touched every one of them. She went to the front door and touched the handle and lock that he must have touched.
    Upstairs, in her parents' bedroom, his suits and jackets and trousers and shirts and ties lay in the wardrobe. She opened the wardrobe and touched one of the suits and it swayed on its hanger. When she pushed the hangers along, she found a pair of braces that he must not have worn for years. She ran her fingers along them and then recoiled, putting all the hangers back evenly in place.
    She went to the window and looked across the valley at the Turret Rocks and Vinegar Hill, and then down into the street, at the carefully tended front lawns bordered with flower-beds. There was no one on the street. The neighbours must have not seen her arriving or they would have come to knock on the door immediately.
    Her father's shoes under the bed surprised her more than anything. They needed polish on the toes, and the laces on one of them were somewhat frayed. More than anything else in the room, they suggested her father's presence rather than his absence, as though he could arrive at any moment to sit on the bed and slip them on, and lean over to tie up the laces.
    On the back of the door was her mother's dressing-gown and behind it hung two ironed white shirts. She took one of them down and held it up against her and looked in the mirror. She put her feet into his shoes, which were much too big for her. She opened the wardrobe again and found a dark grey suit. She put it on the bed and went through the ties, searching for one which was dark but not too dark, with dots or stripes. She put a few ties against the suit, as she had observed her mother do, to see if they matched, and eventually chose one with grey and white stripes on black. She opened a drawer and found a white vest and white underpants and in another drawer she found a pair of socks.
    She laid the suit full-length on the bed. She put the shirt inside the jacket and stuffed the sleeves of the shirt into its arms, and opened the buttons of the shirt and put the vest inside, and then closed up the buttons. She put the tie around her own neck, as if it were her school tie, and tied a knot in it and placed it inside the collar of her father's shirt and tightened it. Then she put the underpants inside the trousers and laid the trousers out, tying up the buttons of the fly, and tucking the shirt into the trousers. She found the socks and put one inside each shoe and placed the shoes at the bottom of the trouser legs, but they didn't look right.
    She went downstairs and picked a pile of books from the bookcase in the front room and brought them upstairs. She