The Scattering
As he stood on the shore gazing at the sea, water began to seep through the eyeholes of his boots. He could feel the weight of the year that had been, and wished by wishing it would slip away from him into the tide.
The coast drew in by the green mobile home up on the cliff. He looked up at the big grasses swaying in the wind, at the wooden gate set into the cliff steps, and at the curtains inside the home tied back neatly with bows. How he’d like to have lived by the sea in a caravan or a mobile home, he thought, kicking a gold stone out of the sand. He turned and walked in the direction of the cliff face, saw the mile-long stretch to Whitestown, white and quiet, strewn with mounds of silky, walnut-coloured seaweed.
He thought of September, when they had stood on the end of Carlingford pier and scattered Gerry’s ashes into the harbour. At first he had hated the idea, but Eva insisted it was what Gerry had wanted. Now, three months on, on the first day of the New Year, the thought that his brother was out there in the sea began to reassure him about the whole grisly business.
Beyond the heaps of seaweed he saw the skeletal remains of an old boat and walked towards it. He stepped into the hull, pulled at some rotting wood, and in the gap noticed two small bottles on a ledge: one, a white plastic Our Lady of Lourdes with a blue crown cap, and the other, brown and medicinal-looking, tied round the neck with coffee-coloured string. Turning the brown bottle in his hand, he guessed it had contained a tincture for wounds, though it had no odour, except of salt.
Further along the beach he saw a car parked above the dunes. A woman was standing by the edge of the dunes looking at the sea. She was holding a blue plastic bag tensely against her cream coat. He thought of turning back as he was now alone on this stretch and did not want to alarm the woman, who had begun her descent to the beach. Suddenly a dog came bounding towards him. He had seen the exuberant three-legged collie on the beach many times, always alone, absurdly oblivious to its missing limb. When it ran towards her the woman shooed it, and it carried on in the direction of Carlingford.
As he passed the woman he said hello, but she ignored him. She was familiar. He turned and watched her stop at the boat, but could not place where he had seen her before. He walked on.
Everyone had been quiet on the pier. (Even when his father had nearly fallen into the water at his turn to scatter.) They had been led by Eva along the beach rather than the pier road, and he had raged at the sight of all these people made to traipse in the dusk across stinking lobster cages, stones and dark-green pools. There they were, this mass of family and friends, stepping over stones and pools – children, women in heels – to scatter Gerry’s ashes, and, miraculously, the whole thing had gone off in fine style. A blazing pink sun had come out on a day filled with rain; the muddy shore to the steps of the high-walled pier was thronged with chattering sandpipers; the evening light curled around the edge of the Mournes onto the flat black stones of the harbour beach.
He rested the shells and stones he had collected on a tuft of sandy grass and, sitting on a rock, wondered if he should leave a note. What would he say? That he had slipped out of the scheme of things? That he had looked at his life after Gerry had died and found it a frightful mess: his job, his marriage, his house, his own self? That only a few moments of his existence here and there had truly belonged to him: last year’s visit to Belfast, Aisha, the black-haired Polish girl, the hotel she’d brought him to, the one night of clarity? He checked his pockets: no pen or paper. He thought he heard Gerry speak his famous aphorism, Never waste a journey. At first it registered as a taunt for his lack of preparedness with the note, then as a kind of plea.
The whitish light over the sea had given way to a dark anvil-shaped cloud moving in from the north. He thought of his wife and the length of time they’d been married. Here, in the bracing air, he could honestly admit the years were only a number to him – he could easily walk away. Then why hadn’t he? Instead, he went round in a state of permanent uncertainty. And this being so, Gerry’s aphorism gave his quickly mounting doubts about walking into the cold sea something to cling to.
As he came off the beach at Templetown and headed for his car, he noticed on the side of the road a small shrine. There was a bright red poinsettia (with a blue plastic bag skirting the pot) on the ground in front of a low marble-engraved stone, together with coloured beads, dead flowers, holy medals. The stone read: To our mother, Jean McConville, murdered by the IRA in 1979 and believed buried on this beach. He looked up at the big signpost for Templetown advertising its recently acquired blue-flag status. A blue flag for a clean beach. The people of the Peninsula had worked hard for it; he’d seen them on Sundays lugging rusty beds with loose springs from the rocks under the dunes, plucking canisters of farming chemicals from the shore. They had made this beach, once so full of waste and death, clean and safe. They – and the industrious tide, which was like forgiveness and made everything new.
After shaking the sand from his boots he opened the car door then stopped to stare again at the sea. He had left the house, a few miles into the hills, to buy cigarettes for his wife. He’d have to hurry now to Lily Finnegan’s who would shut her pub early on New Year’s Day. But he was unable to rush. He slipped into the car and drove towards Lily’s, thinking about Gerry out there in the darkening sea, far beyond his reach – and Aisha in Belfast who wasn’t.
Painting, Smoking, Eating
Patricia hurried nervously to the door and bolted it. The strangers peering in were far too boisterous; two of them had just inadvertently whipped Mr and Mrs Donnelly with their dreadlocks as the elderly couple passed them on the street with their dog.
She watched them enthusing about her Victorian dolls, her Gary Glitter shoes, the two Ossie Clark ‘Twiggy’ dresses. Eventually, she saw that their attention narrowed to her new collection of silver and gemstone jewellery, purchased a week previously at the buyers’ fair in London. They like the citrine armlets and that amber choker, she noted, congratulating herself on the canny choices she had made at the fair. She saw that there was one of the three, however, upon whom the sparkling array of gems made no impression. The eyes of the blonde-haired girl were not drawn to the jewellery, the seventies shoe collection or the striking Mondrian designs of the dresses, but to a small hand-painted Japanese table-screen. She’s looking at the Reverend’s screen, Patricia thought, as she unlocked the door to let the strangers in.
‘I have to keep the door closed,’ she explained, brusquely, ‘but do come in if you like.’ The three entered the narrow room and fanned out to examine Patricia’s prodigious display of retro-artefacts and fine vintage jewellery.
‘It’s like Aladdin’s cave,’ remarked the dark-haired girl.
‘Like Mrs Haversham’s living room,’ joked the moon-faced man. Patricia hoped he wasn’t referring to the lack of cleanliness of her artefacts; the task of keeping them free from dust and grime was an intricate and arduous one. For instance, she used Silvio on the chunkier silver necklaces, teapots and French cutlery, but some of the bead and diamante pieces were trickier to clean: hexagonal glass gems (usually inlaid with other glass gems) set into shallow clasps that had to be swabbed clean with cotton buds and cold soapy water. Dust motes hovered over the entire space, betrayed by the room’s three sixty-watt bulbs half-robed by alabaster and stained-glass shades. Above the fireplace hung a creamy-white canvas appliquéd with a George Herbert poem. It read:
O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue
To cry to thee
And then not heare it crying.
The display units and tables were tumbledown, and, where there were no linen or lace coverings, portions of what was once a bedspread that had belonged to Patricia’s mother’ served instead. Patricia was aware that the entire arrangement appeared as if it had been hastily assembled. It had been hastily assembled.
The blonde-haired girl reached in to the window display and picked up the Japanese screen. Excellent taste, thought Patricia, who was watching the m
ovements of the three out of the corner of one big china-blue eye.
‘Why?’ asked the girl.
‘Why what?’
‘Why must you keep the door closed?’
‘Because we had a robbery last week.’ The other two turned in unison towards her and sighed sympathetically. The blonde-haired girl did not respond, as if intuiting Patricia’s desire to elaborate.
‘They came and took all my money. My entire year’s profits. And most of my Japanese collection, too.’
‘Who came?’ asked the girl.
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t here. My daughter was running the shop that day. They weren’t from around here, that’s all we know.’
‘What did the cops do?’ the moon-faced man asked.
‘We’ll see. Nothing yet.’
Patricia Millicent Urquhart was a woman of fifty-three, no longer shapely or beautiful, but attractive in a guileless sort of way. Men would no longer open doors for her in shops or hotels, and if they did, she would thank them, gratefully, as if they had made an astute and substantial purchase in her shop. She had a thin moustache and her two overgrown brows were knitted into a kind of permanent frown. Once, before she had married and settled in England, she had spent a year in Florence. There the Italian men had adored her voluptuous shape. Her rather chatty and spirited manner had made her more approachable than the other students of the Academy. She had been assured in herself, kept exquisitely groomed and, despite a love for the sun, always wore a hat. Then, she had a delicately pale and fresh complexion, and was unselfconsciously proud of her strong figure. It had been a definitive year. She often went to Florence in her mind, to its narrow, ancient streets and cafes, to the Academia Dell’ Arte, and of course to Giovanni.
She drummed the marble counter with the fingers of one hand, resting the other on the bridge of the till. Her gnawed red fingers were incongruously adorned with rings set with moonstones, malachite and rubies, her thick wrists wrapped in a slew of thin gold bangles that jangled as she tapped.
‘What’s this made from?’ asked the dark-haired girl, dangling a bracelet studded with squares of blue and port-coloured stone.
‘Lapis and garnet.’
‘It’s very exotic.’
‘An early-seventies design. You can tell by the geometry. They loved all that, the Moroccan look,’ replied Patricia.
‘Cool!’ said the man, scrutinising the bracelet. The dark-haired girl and the moon-faced man began to compare the garish colours of the sixties’ collection to the mellow earth-tones of the seventies’, and the debate broadened out to the sixties versus the seventies in all things. Patricia was glad to see her pieces provoke such interest in history. All the same, she kept her eye on the dreadlocked two as they motioned towards the end of the shop, gleefully examining the trends of a century.
The robbery had brought back memories of her husband, Gordon. He had been a generous but violent husband. His rages had exhausted her, had left her self-confidence ebbing and flowing like the tide. Giovanni had told his students that as guardians of artistic souls they were to protect and nourish them. She knew she had failed to do this. Her marriage had been a colossal mistake, and, since the robbery, she had begun to think she’d made yet another with the shop. She’d not run a business before and had gotten into antiques purely by accident, having inherited so many.
Gordon had had complete control over all their furniture purchases in their London house. His choice the Louis Poulsen lamps, the Hitch Mylius sofa, the Le Corbusier recliner, the two red Arne Jacobsen egg chairs. And his choice the commissioning of artwork to match the modernist furnishings. And so, when Patricia found herself drowning in clutter in her dead mother’s house on the northeastern Irish coast, she decided the best way to dispose of it all was to sell it, and within months she had developed the kind of dealer instinct that takes some brokers a lifetime to acquire: she knew what would sell, she bought cheap and nurtured her top clients. This world of antiques was the antithesis of her previous life, and that this was so made her very happy. But now it was clear that if she did not find the funds to replace the stolen stock and repair the displays (which the thieves had levelled with a hatchet), until her insurance came through at least, there would be no business. And what would she do then?
‘Were they of great value, the things they took?’
Patricia took a long look at her blonde-haired inquisitor. The girl seemed to understand the distress the robbery had caused her. Not even the police had realised it had near enough plunged them into poverty.
‘Yes. Some were irreplaceable.’
‘I’ve not seen you here before,’ the girl said, pressing a crimson moiré-silk corsage into the fat of her cheek.
‘We’ve only been here a year or so. From London. But I’m from here, originally.’
The girl wandered closer, stopping to smell the perfume off the pumps and thick glass tips of the scent decanters.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Patricia,’ Patricia said.
‘Mine’s Jean.’
Pat’s Curios was centrally placed on the street so that it had a clear, unhindered view of the Irish Sea. On a good day much of the low-lying Cooley Peninsula could be seen from within the shop, its swathes of heather and gorse sweeping down to the shimmering water. The sea here was tame, and until the arrival of winter, possessed no real force. It was a seaweed-smelling sea, thought by many to have been poisoned over the years by Sellafield. Scuba divers continued to visit all year round, but generally people no longer came to Dundalk’s elegant coastal village to collect cockles, as they had done, or to swim. It was a sea that had to be fought off in winter with sandbags and towels, as the brown, sand-heavy water would rage over the promenade wall, under doors and into houses. All the same, it possessed a predictable temper, to which the locals were well attuned.
Behind the lighthouse, on the far side of the Peninsula, was Templetown beach, where the police had been digging for months in search of a woman’s body. The beach had been named by the IRA as the vicinity of her burial place, but Templetown beach was two miles long and so the searching had seemed interminable. In the mornings, Patricia would look out at the helicopters and the flashing lights of the diggers, a chilling reminder of the old tensions of the place. In the afternoons she might see O’Neils horses stride out from the headlands to the shallows, just as they would when she was a child. Sometimes she would stop what she was doing in the shop just to watch the cargo ships pass on their way to Greenore harbour.
In recent months she had begun to gaze out at the black rock in the bay; as a child she had played in its grassy loft. She would momentarily catch sight of sea creatures and sirens, formed, she concluded, from the sun-reflected foam and driftwood that would gather by the rock. At times it seemed to Patricia that only this sea understood how disorganised and fractured she felt. This sea, George Herbert – and now, perhaps, the blonde-haired girl.
‘How much is this?’ asked the girl, returning to the Japanese screen.
‘It’s not for sale.’
‘Oh. I thought…’
‘It’s an accessory. For the shop. To divide the pieces.’
‘It’s very pretty. Was it part of your collection?’
‘Yes. A gift. I’m grateful they missed it.’ The girl returned the screen to the podium.
The sight of the screen recalled to Patricia her recent trip to Earls Court. She had broken briefly from buying to visit the church where she and Gordon had married. At the end of the lane-way, by the black railings of the cemetery, she had stopped, surprised by the sound of water. She had turned in to the courtyard and found a fountain humming its soothing water-music for the dead. Once, in place of the fountain, there had been a large diseased cherry blossom with a seat inset for pilgrims, mourners and escapees from the relentlessness of Kensington High Street. She had been relieved to find that Reverend Kent had had the sense to replace it. A beautiful touch, she had thought, passing her fingers through the w
ater as it trickled down a miniature staircase onto bonsai shrubbery. She had tiptoed to the door, peered into the Reverend’s kitchen; the peachy evening light spilled onto the blue terrazzo floor tiles. It had all changed inside too. The windows had new yellow curtains. Her heart sank as she thought Reverend Kent might have married. It was he who had encouraged her to make the break, to stand up to Gordon. All the times she had sat with him under the cherry tree. She had wanted to thank him for his kindness and advice (he had told her ‘drive – don’t drift’ and it had made all the difference). Irresolutely, she took a step forward. The brass plate on the wall read: Reverend Craig. Please do not ring after 8pm. In that moment she felt desolate. She had wanted to retch. She’d had such a run of bad luck: a strained and difficult divorce, the robbery, now the only person in the world in whom she might confide had disappeared without telling her. She said a prayer for the shop in the church then toiled back to the hotel in the rain. Surely Reverend Kent would find her if he wanted to.
The door of the shop flew open, the bell reverberating loudly. A tall, shorthaired girl of about seventeen stormed in wearing headphones and a backpack bulging with brushes, pallet, a folded-up easel and a rolled-up canvas with frayed edges. She grunted something at Patricia, waded through the shop till she got to the end of the room curtained off to a small kitchen, then snapped the drape closed behind her.
‘Natalie, my daughter. Home from an exhibition,’ Patricia said to the blonde-haired girl, who seemed bemused by the whirlwind entrance. Natalie quickly re-emerged, minus impedimenta, and loped towards the till. Patricia kissed her daughter on the cheek.
‘How was the exhibition?’ the blonde girl asked, passing her hand through the bristles of a coral-backed hairbrush.
The Scattering Page 5