Homecoming. Cathy Kelly

she could see Prudence’s house a lot of the time. No laughing carloads of grandchildren ever pulled up there. Rae pitied her neighbour, even if she didn’t like her very much.

      Prudence reminded Rae a little of her own mother-in-law, Geraldine Kerrigan. They were both judgemental and determined to see the negative side in any situation. The only difference was that Rae didn’t have to spend time with Prudence but Geraldine was coming for lunch on Sunday. Rae normally loved the slowness of Sunday, but not when Geraldine was coming, an event which happened with increasing regularity as Geraldine grew older.

      And nothing, nothing would be done the way Geraldine liked it. The table would be too fussily decorated or else Geraldine might remark that Rae must have been too busy to set things properly. The roast would be overdone or too bloody in the centre. The vegetables would be wrong for a person with such a sensitive stomach, or else carrot puree was suitable only for people with no teeth, surely?

      Still, Geraldine had done one wonderful thing in her life, which was giving birth to Rae’s husband Will. Meeting Will had been one of the blessings of Rae’s life: her son, Anton, had been the other one. He was grown up now, in London working full time for the political magazine he’d gone to on a placement during his politics degree. Sometimes the old white house seemed empty without him, with no head stuck in the fridge roaring, ‘What can I eat, Mum?’ and no noisy footsteps running up and down the stairs at odd hours, yelling, ‘I’ll call when I want to be collected.’

      His absence had partly been filled by Rae doing more volunteer work for Community Cares, a local charity that some people described as the second social welfare system. They helped people when there was nobody else, offering financial aid and friendship.

      Her tea was nearly cold now. She’d spent too long standing on the balcony thinking. Rae finished it off, went inside her bedroom and closed the balcony doors tightly. She loved their bedroom. It was like a warm cocoon, with wallpaper the colour of honey, a quilted yellow silk eiderdown and old gold picture frames on the walls with black-and-white photos of their family over the years. On Rae’s side of the bed were piles of books waiting to be read: on Will’s side was a photo of Rae and his single book – he didn’t read in the same crazy, haphazard way she did, with three books on the go at all times.

      Each time she looked at this lovely warm room, Rae thought how lucky she was. Unlike most people, she got to see just how lucky she was every single day.

      When people asked her why she worked as a volunteer for Community Cares along with running the tearooms, she rarely replied truthfully. Rae knew that the people who asked in such astonishment wouldn’t have understood the true answer.

      ‘But why? Why would you want to go into horrible council flats like Delaney and see all those drug addicts?’

      ‘It’s rewarding,’ she would say simply and change the conversation. She’d long ago learned that it was impossible to change people’s firmly set views on poverty and deprivation. Geraldine, her mother-in-law, was one such person. In all the time Rae had been working for Community Cares, Geraldine had never once said a nice thing about either the work or the people being helped.

      ‘I suppose somebody has to do it,’ was as much as she could bring herself to say.

      Geraldine prided herself on her family’s standing in society. Being involved with the dregs of society didn’t make the slightest sense to her. Surely people would want to distance themselves from poverty?

      To the other sort of people who asked Rae why she worked with the charity – the ones who seemed to understand and who recognised that it could be hard to be exposed to other people’s pain every day – Rae told half the truth:

      ‘Helping people gives me peace.’

      She didn’t say that she’d had first-hand experience of the strife that came from poverty and deprivation. Though Rae had been married to Will Kerrigan for twenty-five years and had lived in the comfort of Golden Square all that time, in her mind’s eye, she was only a few steps away from the Hennessey girl who had grown up in a run-down bungalow on the outskirts of Limerick city.

      Ironically, she didn’t remember Community Cares coming to her household to help, but then, her parents would probably have yelled at the volunteers and called them ‘dogooders!’ They were touchy about anyone they thought might be looking down on them.

      Set up in the 1930s to help the poor, over the decades Community Cares had grown to a country-wide organisation with branches in every town. It wasn’t religious, just humanist. Nobody was ever turned away.

      Rae and her CC partner, Dulcie, normally made calls on Tuesday evenings and Wednesday afternoons, like today. Theirs was a perfect working relationship as Dulcie was different from Rae in every way that mattered. Dulcie was seventy and had worked with the charity for over twenty years. Small, grey-haired, with bright, inquisitive eyes and an addiction to nail art, she had seen everything life could throw at a person. She was also great fun.

      Today, they’d made two calls in the Delaney flats. Over the ten years she’d been a volunteer, Rae had spent hours in the Delaney flat complex behind Golden Square. A trio of down-at-heel redbrick council blocks, Delaney One, Two and Three housed many fatherless families and elderly people who relied on state cheques and money from CC.

      Rae had never felt afraid there. CC was viewed as a part of the fabric of the place and respected by the residents like no other organisation, because they actually helped. Besides, Rae could always see beyond the sullen gazes of the kids who loitered by the landings to the lonely desperation behind. The way they looked at the world was a mask, as much to keep the pain in as to keep the rest of the world out.

      ‘I hope the rest of January is as good as today,’ Dulcie had muttered as they hurried from her van to the graffiti-scrawled entrance of Delaney One. ‘Not a bit of rain, and it’s really quite mild.’

      ‘We wish,’ said Rae, smiling. She’d loved the day of sun too.

      ‘If you can do rain dances, why can’t you do sun dances?’ Dulcie wondered.

      ‘Howareyase girls,’ yelled a voice.

      It was Mickey the Madser, a name he’d given himself, waving a brown paper bag with a bottle inside as they walked up the grim concrete stairs. The lifts in Delaney were always broken.

      ‘Have youse got a few bob to spare?’ he roared. His hearing had been damaged many years ago and he always shouted.

      CC had paid Mickey’s gas bill several times and often gave him food shopping vouchers – ones that couldn’t be exchanged for alcohol.

      ‘Not for Buckfast, I’m afraid,’ Rae said.

      ‘It was worth a try,’ said Mickey, unabashed.

      Janet, who lived on the third floor with her three children, had the door open and the kettle boiling by the time they got to her. ‘I heard you talking to Mickey,’ she said. ‘Who needs an alarm, right?’

      An alarm would have been useless in Delaney. The network of kids would spread the news of any visitor’s arrival at high speed and if someone was determined to break into one of the flats, they would, alarm or no alarm. Janet’s ex, who was constantly trying to fight his addiction to heroin, had broken in several times looking for money.

      Janet was twenty-seven, looked closer to thirty-seven and kept the small flat as neat as a pin. The three children were industriously doing their homework at the kitchen table while Rae, Dulcie and Janet shared a pot of tea and talked. CC had helped pay for Janet’s accountancy night courses. But it was still proving hard for her to get work.

      ‘It’s the address,’ Janet said, without a shred of self-pity. ‘If I apply anywhere local, they take one look at the address and say, “Forget it, love.” Nobody wants to hire anyone from Delaney. They think we’ll rob them blind.’

      She wasn’t bitter, just resigned. That was why her three children were made to sit down and diligently do their homework every night. Janet was determined that education would get them out of the trap that was Delaney