Free One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden

until she remembered David.
    ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ she said to him, standing by the closed kitchen door. David nodded.
    ‘I’ve long since known that your idea of running a house is to go to Crazy Prices and buy a load of cheese and fruit and stuff, bring it home, stick it in the fridge, and then send out for pizzas every night. Then when the things in the fridge have rotted past all recognition, you put them in the bin and start all over again. I keep telling you, there’s more to it than that.’
    Helen smiled sadly. ‘You’re wrong. I’ve been cooking, you see, that’s the problem.’ She threw open the kitchen door, and even David’s eyes widened at the sight of the overflowing bin, the sticky hob, the brimming sink, where a forest of saucepan handles projected from the greasy water. Helen pulled out the grill pan, as if that might be clean and would redeem her, but it was full of congealed fat. She pulled a face, and slotted the grill back into the cooker.
    ‘See your house?’ David said. ‘It’s like a wee palace, so it is.’
    In the months immediately after her father’s death, Helen had socialised frantically because she was afraid of being alone with her grief. Sympathetic friends and colleagues asked her round to dinner, or suggested going out for an evening’s drinking, and she accepted every invitation on the spot, including one to a Christmas party at Owen’s house. It was at this party that she met David, whom she recognised from television, but also from having seen him on occasion in restaurants or hotel bars around the city, and in the press gallery at the court. When they were introduced, she acknowledged him curtly. The evening was interrupted constantly by Owen’s and his wife Mary’s little son howling over the baby alarm system, until Mary finally admitted defeat and carried the child into the room where the party was going on. As soon as he had been deposited in his playpen, he stopped crying and became contentedly occupied with the toys which were there. David and Helen watched him pick up a red plastic cup and turn it over in his hands, gazing at it with total absorption, as though it were the most fascinating object imaginable. Suddenly the baby dropped the red cup and picked up a blue plastic brick. The red cup rolled away, forgotten, while the baby looked at the new object with the same consuming interest it had had for the cup a few moments earlier.
    ‘Maybe he’ll be a journalist when he grows up,’ Helen said.
    ‘What makes you say that?’
    ‘He’s got the right sort of attention span.’
    ‘I take it you don’t think much of journalists, then?’
    ‘Most of the time I don’t know how they live with themselves.’
    ‘You know you’re being unfair,’ he said.
    ‘Am I?’ Helen replied, but she noticed he looked hurt, which was disconcerting, when she’d simply set out to annoy him. She didn’t wait for him to reply, she shrugged and turned away.
    When she went home that night, she lay awake for a long time, brooding upon how her father’s murder had been treated by the media, a subject which fed in her a deep slow anger. There’d been the day after the funeral when she’d gone to McGovern’s in Timinstown to buy some groceries, and there on the counter, on the front of one of the Northern Ireland newspapers, was a photograph of herself and Sally with their arms around each other weeping at the graveside. She’d felt sick, dizzy, furious all at once, she felt her face change colour. Mrs McGovern, embarrassed on her behalf, leant over and folded the paper to hide the photo. ‘Wouldn’t you think they’d know people had been through enough without doing things like that,’ she said, and Helen had stared at her, unable to speak. Then Rosemary and Michael had called round to see them later that day, and Rosemary told them, rather shamefacedly, that while they were at the burial a young woman had come up to her and said, ‘Poor Cate’s