Let There be Light

You’ve heard of the story of the house on the sea road, the ramshackle one beyond the last estate. If you read good contemporary literature you’ll know the story is about Cordelia and her daily struggles in a house with no electricity, as well as her rapport with a local man. How when she goes to bed at night, her window slightly open, there is only the slow roar of the sea and the hum of the wind in the dune grass to distract her from sleep.

You probably haven’t heard my story. I’m the local man’s wife. We live on the estate with our two daughters. The streets are narrow enough that a three-point turn becomes a five-point and driving tests are failed as a result. Wire fences cordon off a pile of muck, bricks and unfinished houses until the wind blows them down and the second car’s engine is half-ruined by the sea air -

But by god we have electricity. The tumble dryer is on from morning till night, full of sparkly knickers and black boleros; my eldest, made up like a Goth, has her hair permanently gripped by the hot teeth of hair straighteners and we have a plasma TV above our electric fire. When I open the front door, light blazes out onto the driveway, light from the living room, light from our bedroom, forty-watt, sixty, even a hundred when the winter darkness just gets too damned much.

That’s electricity for you. Let there be light, I say, and there is light. And thus I am a little God in my own home. It’s easy. What’s hard is living in Ireland in the twenty-first century without that power. It takes work to be that damn primitive.

That is, work for others. It did not take long for the men to find out about the lone female with the silly name living in the cottage by the sea with no means of heating, washing or reading at night. Her habit of dousing her face in cold water in the mornings was first observed by my husband when he dropped some turf in by her door. Commercially-made briquettes, I hasten to add, not sods cut from the bog.

“It gives her high colouring,” he said. “She has a luminous look, like something from the Dutch masters.”

“Yes, I know what look you’re talking about. It’s called youth.”

But he ignored me, just as the other men ignored their wives, all engrossed in helping Cordelia maintain her off-grid lifestyle. Her washing made its way to our machines and our flasks and kettles disappeared – all filled with warm water and sneaked off down to her cottage, presumably so that she would not miss the scalding pleasure of a daily cuppa. “She lives so simply!” Gerard McGovern had the nerve to say once in my hearing. That was the point of no return: we summoned a war council of the other wives on the estate, as well as the odd stray man who remained unimpressed by her creed of independence. One of these men told us something rather interesting.

“You know, I work for the electricity board and I can tell you the previous tenant never disconnected. And we generally don’t come round till they haven’t paid for a couple of months. She could switch on now no bother at all.”

“You’re codding me!” exclaimed Breda Malone, the oldest of us and with the husband most smitten with Cordelia. Apart from mine, of course.

But codding he was not. And so the die was cast: we would make her switch back on, by hook or by crook. We would show her she was no better than the rest of us.

By nightfall, we had the cottage under siege. We sat in the dunes, on the road, in the back garden. We would starve or thirst her out, we resolved. At first it was a silent protest. There was no need to explain our presence; she knew full well why we were there. But then as there was no reaction inside and the windows stayed dark, someone spread the rumour that one of our men was in there. That was when things took a nasty turn and the chanting started.

“Switch it on,” someone sang, quietly at first, “switch it on.”
Then the rest of us joined in.
“Switch it on, switch it on, switch it on!”
We gathered closer and the chant got louder and angrier as we encircled Cordelia’s hut.
“Switch it ON!”
That was when things got a bit out of hand. Someone, don’t ask me who, fecked a hardback copy of *The Collected Short Stories of John McGahern* at the window and broke the glass. It must have been one hell of a book to have been thick enough to do that, making the shattered fragments fall inwards. We heard the book go to the floor inside with a thud and rustle. And that was what broke her resolve. That, and the slow handclap maybe.

When the light in the window finally went on, the crowd of us let out an ironic cheer. But as she came to the window, we backed off. We would not have the men and storytellers call us savages because we’d attacked her. Besides, we had revenge enough in that glance.

There’s nothing like a good bright halogen bulb to show off a five o’clock shadow, after all.

Susan Lanigan graduated from a Masters in Writing in NUI Galway with first class honours in 2003. Since then, she has had short stories published nationwide in a variety of magazines and publications, such as The Stinging Fly, Southword, The Sunday Tribune, the Irish Independent (forthcoming) and Mayo News. She has been twice shortlisted for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, and has won awards for short stories and poetry elsewhere. Currently she has one story published and another forthcoming in Nature Magazine’s Science Fiction section and is also featured in a special sci-fi/fantasy anthology Music For Another World. Her work has also featured in the fundraising anthology 50 Stories For Pakistan. Susan runs regular writing workshops: find out more at her blog The Joy of Writing.