The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  ‘Great,’ Natalie replied. Patricia noticed her daughter leering at the stranger who seemed so casually authoritative in their shop.

  ‘I told this lady about the robbery,’ Patricia said.

  ‘Whose work did you see?’ the blonde girl asked.

  ‘Oh, it was a Guston retrospective.’

  ‘Ah. The clenched fist. Painting, Smoking, Eating.’

  ‘You know his work?’

  ‘Oh, indeed. I’ve even been to his house in Connecticut.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Sure. Guston believed his studio was filled with all sorts of angels and ghosts, did you know that?’

  ‘No,’ Natalie replied, dismissively.

  ‘He used to have a poem, Auden, I think, on his wall. Just like you have here. Let’s see… it said the ghosts that haunt our lives are handy with mirrors and wires.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Natalie asked, perplexed.

  ‘That, maybe, sometimes, they’re there to help.’

  ‘The ghosts?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Patricia wanted to ask where the ghosts were on the day of the robbery, but thought better of it.

  The three women huddled together in the centre of the shop discussing Philip Guston and painting, while at the furthest end of the store, by the World collection, the couple with the dreadlocks tried on Patricia’s much-prized African war-masks.

  *

  Patricia stared out at her daughter smoking a cigarette on the promenade wall. ‘She has been a different person,’ she said with a sigh, ‘since we came. She has bloomed. But the robbery shook her. She thinks I’m going to have to close.’ The blonde girl pulled out a dark opal-like stone from her pocket.

  ‘Have you seen this before?’ she asked, and placed the stone in Patricia’s hand.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s called seraphanite. Chanellers, healers use it. I know that sounds a bit, well… but the vibrations are very strong, don’t you think?’ As she turned the stone around in her palm Patricia wanted to laugh – and went to return it to the girl.

  ‘No, I want you to keep it,’ the girl replied. ‘Please. Hold it close. It will protect the shop.’

  Patricia saw how sincere the girl seemed, how genuine in her insistence she keep the stone.

  ‘Won’t you have something in exchange?’ she said, ‘like a bracelet?’

  ‘No, it’s a gift. I don’t want anything in return.’

  Patricia held the rock up to the light. Thin flecks of silvery quartz glistened in feathered ribbons of white. It radiated an intense heat. Immediately she thought of Giovanni. Once, before she’d finally left England for Ireland, she’d opened the door of their summerhouse in Devon to the frail figure of her old art lecturer. She had ushered him in and tenderly held him, noting his dank, sour smell. ‘Why did you go my little Patricia?’ he had said, over and over. (She had always loved how he called her ‘little’.) She had never given him an explanation for her sudden departure from the Academy, nor did she tell him at the house. Patricia saw herself with Giovanni on that sultry evening, watching the light fall on the yachts and trawlers of Salcombe Harbour as they sailed out towards the English Channel. It had been so warm they had eaten on the porch and listened to the waves lap the low chalky cliffs. She never heard from him after that visit, and read some months later in The Times that he was dead.

  ‘I have to be getting back now. But please, keep the stone. And remember, you must never give it to anyone else. I’d rather you hurled it into the sea. What has been taken from you will come back.’

  Patricia felt a tremulous shiver in her stomach. She knew the girl was right. Her luck would change. It had to. A renewed sense of trust in herself and in her destiny filled her.

  ‘Thank you,’ Patricia said.

  As the doorbell resounded, Patricia watched the blonde-haired girl walk eastwards towards the rocky part of the coast until she could no longer be seen from the shop. Patricia saw the Japanese screen and grabbed it. She rushed up to the other two, who were about to exit, and offered them the screen.

  ‘I can’t leave the shop, but would you mind giving this to your friend?’

  ‘Which friend?’ asked the dark-haired girl.

  ‘Jean! The blonde girl that was in here with you.’

  ‘No, you are mistaken. The blonde girl was not with us,’ the moon-faced man replied.

  The door closed and the two dreadlocked strangers walked hand in hand towards the sands. Patricia looked out at them, then at her daughter, who was on the promenade wall, laughing at a chattering seagull.

  The Congo

  When I awoke the first thing I did was check my bag. I took from it what I needed then tucked it back under the bed, placing my father’s slippers neatly in front. I went to the window and opened it, amazed as I did that I remembered the bottom pane was loose. A grey cloud hung over the town, and three mallards the colour of barley flew in a line towards the Ramparts River. I wondered if I had been away at all, for everything was as it had been when I had left, twenty-odd years before, except I could no longer hear the lowing of cows from Quincey’s field, which was home now to a new housing estate. It had been like this since my arrival: encounters with my old self, a strange sensation of continuum, of picking up where I had left off. As if my London self was there still, walking through Richmond on his way to Kew, while my younger self, that ghost, was here in this damp house, staring out at the dawn weather.

  I closed the door behind me, the smell of the eggs I’d fried for my father’s breakfast still clinging to my nostrils, and walked to the corner of the tree-lined Avenue. The edges of my holster chafed at my ribs and sweat beads formed on my forehead making my face feel cold. I carried on down the Echo Road, past the freshly mown playing fields, on towards the Grange.

  The place was as tranquil as I’d ever seen it. In the pale morning light even the houses with the smashed-in windows and weed-run gardens looked serene, so that the ragwort passed almost for daisies. There was a fabulous assortment of colours too, from the many flower baskets, filled as they were with petunias, begonias, violets. There had always been people in the Grange who would try to pull themselves up; always a mother or father prepared to stand up to the gangs.

  From where I stood, I could see Devlin’s place. The house seemed much the same: the satiny fuchsia hedge, the faux-Tudor windows gleaming like mirrors, the tall palm soaking up the rays of the early sun. Had he really returned, I wondered? Or had he gone, upon his release, to Kilburn, as some had said he had, where it was possible he’d been living under my nose all these months?

  Grace had always been proud of her home. I’d always considered it a testament to her resourcefulness that when she’d found herself stuck in this estate on a widow’s pension with six sons (two of them gang members), Grace had still managed to keep an attractive house. Fortress Devlin, she would call it, as she’d felt so safe within its walls. Built in the seventies, the Grange had promised the families that came to live in it – modernity: bathrooms, spacious bedrooms, central heating. But within a decade it had become a festering sprawl, filled with gangs, drugs, violence. And her husband’s death before her boys were full-grown, ensured that Grace and her sons remained there, such is the quicksand nature of the ghetto, which requires money, time and strategy to get out of (and none of these had been much available to Grace). The air up on the Avenue had always been rarified and easy, while here, even now, I could feel the deadweight of Grange air in my lungs.

  As I proceeded to the corner of the car park for the new Dunnes Stores (where once there had been a hill – ‘the clump’ – where gangs such as ours would meet for prearranged fights), I saw a figure walk towards the bottleneck opening of the estate. I moved in behind a van and, for a second, thought I might have been seen for the figure did not pass. A match was struck and tipped to the ground, a cigarette sucked upon. The man continued past the van and a row of wood-panelled houses, stopped at the end of the street by the tall pa
lm, opened the gate. It was Devlin. And apart from the close-clipped hair and greying sideburns he’d hardly changed: the same casual self-assurance, the almost effeminate gait.

  I became perturbed by something: my heart, pounding against my ribs. This was not how it was to have gone. Think of The Congo, I kept telling myself. Think of The fucking Congo. I closed my eyes, and for a few chilling moments supposed I was actually there.

  *

  ‘Where d’yez think you’re goin’, you lot?’ Staunton leaned into the car and thumped the glove compartment open. He rummaged inside, probably looking for drugs or drink, and pulled out my book. ‘War and Peace,’ he read out, venomously. Devlin stared straight ahead. None of us spoke. ‘Yez have been drinkin’, am I right?’

  ‘Aye. We’re all under the affluence of incahol, Sergeant,’ Devlin replied, deadpan, at which the rest of us cracked up. Staunton bit his lip. Devlin reached out, grabbed the book, threw it back to me. At this I knew the cop would do one of two things. Either pull us over and quiz us, maybe roughly, with a slap to the back of Devlin’s head, or he would leave it, sensing what so many others had: the stirring power of this young man with ink-black hair and obsidian-like eyes who spoke with alarming authority. Then Devlin drew close, whispered something inaudible into Staunton’s ear. Something he had on him, something we could tell was sexual. The cop paled, was breathless, his appointed authority gone like a mirage, so much so that when he asked what had happened to the missing wing of my Hillman Hunter, I confidently responded that it had ‘flown away’.

  ‘Well, go on. To wherever you’re off ta, but yez can’t stop here,’ Staunton said, oblivious to the fact that we had just left the publican in a torrent of blood, his rooms upturned, his cash register emptied, his skull in pieces under a corn-yellow canister of gas.

  We had not gone to bed that night. Under Devlin’s orders, the twins had taken the simpleton, Gascoigne, into the cemetery and tied him with rope to a stone Celtic cross. Devlin had wanted to teach Gascoigne a lesson. To get him to keep his mouth shut about things he’d seen in his mother’s B&B: somebody else’s girl, somebody’s wife. Mikey peeled the bananas while Joe forced them, one by one, into the lad’s mouth. It was my job to watch over all of this. Watch, as the Crilly twins pissed on the poor wretch, bound and stuffed like a pig on a spit, the piss-steam rising off him like smoke. Under Devlin’s orders we left Gascoigne in full-dark, wailing and crying for his mother. Then, later, when I’d slipped back to let the boy go, I saw Devlin walk him out of the cemetery, his arm around the boy. I imagined Devlin saying to Gascoigne that it was he who had saved him, that he would look out for him, like he’d done to me. That was how Devlin operated. Like all bullies, he sought out the feeble-minded, misfits and outsiders, who, having experienced the ferocity of his power also knew its narcotic warmth and radiance.

  Later, after we’d left the bar and its publican for dead, I drove to the Cooley hills. All the way up the meandering lane, Adamski’s Killer boomed (as if accusingly) from the car stereo. I parked the car by the gates. We clambered out and walked into the bog, sat high up on the plum-coloured heather.

  I looked down at the town, all amber in the evening light, at the Irish Sea below us winding around the stark blue Mournes across the border. I felt cold. The hills filled with an icy sea-wind that closed around us like a cloak. I thought immediately of the Russian winter and the frostbitten Napoleonic soldiers of my book. And for the first time I doubted Devlin’s leadership. Why had he let it go so far? The reality of the murder we’d just committed under his feverish spell suddenly hit me. I looked around. The twins had felt it too. They were both pale and slumped, huddled together on the mizzling day, like two spent sunflowers in October. Then Devlin walked up to us. I will never forget the way he did that. He churlishly took the twins’ knives and twisted them into a bank of turf, hard and skinned-over since the Council had prohibited cutting it a few years before. (The knives had not even been used that day.) Then he said he was hungry, that the cold mountain air had made him ravenous. I wanted to puke when he said that, and suddenly what we had done down there in the town began to seem as real and terrible a thing as Devlin’s hunger.

  I cannot remember exactly why he chose The Congo. I just remember that after the cemetery, Devlin said he wanted to do some damage. I had no idea he meant ‘people damage’; I thought he meant burning something, or trashing some old house up, and I was ready, as ever, with my car.

  ‘Where you thinking of goin’?’ Mikey asked.

  ‘Park Street,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Class!’ Joe said, and went on about being in for a day’s drinking.

  ‘No. No drink. That’s not what I meant,’ said Devlin.

  ‘What did you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, somethin’ will come. Somethin’ will come and we will know.’ That was Devlin all over. So damned enigmatic. As if he had commune with someone other than his own present self. I would learn in court that this was a trait common to the likes of Charles Manson and Ian Brady, a means to avoid all guilt: blame it on the voices, the signs, some force outside oneself.

  He was younger than me by two years, so by rights we should never have been friends. Only he saved me once. One night, up the alley by MJ’s (where he and the twins drank), he’d stopped me from being kicked to death by a bunch of shit-kickers from Ardee. Only for that night I’d never have been part of the gang, or come to know him or the Crilly twins, or any of the lads from the Grange. (After all, I went to the Grammar, and lived on the Avenue.) I remember looking up, half-expecting the tall, dark-eyed interloper to join them, and, instead, he flung them off me like a wild cat. Then the twins charged in, dragged my two hick assailants towards the river. I never asked Devlin why he pulled me from that beating. I presume he saw in me what he later saw in Gascoigne: an exploitable weakness, such as the shame I wore like a badge as son of the town’s most notorious drunk.

  I sheltered in, and even came to like, the ‘hard’ reputation the Grange boys had. I hoped that by association it would rub off. Until my involvement with Devlin, I’d had to suffer all manner of quips about my family’s change of fortune. From millionaires to hungry up in the big house (followed by the passing of my mother, who did what she did, some said, because she had felt so disgraced). So, by the time I fell in with Devlin, I was that fed up I no longer cared if people thought me a chip off the old block or not (and they definitely did). I began to justify their thoughts, became well and truly Mad Mansfield, the Drunken Solicitor’s Son. I began to drink heavily, mindlessly sometimes; to gamble (anything – cards, horses, dogs, the slots*), so that I must have seemed like rich pickings indeed to Devlin with the amount of insecurities I had. Whatever way it happened, the way two people find their fate in one another, I was a troubled young man from the Avenue one day, and the next bewitched by a lout (albeit a beautiful lout).

  Devlin called in to the bar. No one answered. The signs he’d been waiting for: no one around, middle of the day, cash register open.

  For the first few minutes inside, the twins joked and pretended we were in the bar of a Western. The Congo was high-ceilinged, had never been updated. The wooden floors were dull and decorticated in places. The bar itself was breast-high with a gleaming brass rail hanging just beneath the rim of the bar top. Devlin sat on one of the red leather seats and lit up in his usual girlish way, slow and light, his little finger apart (erect almost), and watched the twins as they fooled around. I have never since met anyone, however duplicitous or skilled in the craft of acting, who could smile as sweetly as he – the smooth white baby-fangs, the gentle crescent dimples – yet possess a simultaneous deadness in the eyes. It was, I understand now, the overlapping of two people in one. He was night and day in one, and it was, for me, I recall, a hopelessly magnetic contrast.

  ‘Mikey leave it!’ Devlin said.

  ‘But Jesus man, the place is fuckin’ empty!’

  ‘You’re tanked up enough. We might need to run for it. Use your head.’
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  ‘Well, come on then!’ Joe said. ‘We’ve got the money, what we waiting for? Let’s go.’

  Devlin placed his long legs on top of the table, and crossed his feet. He put his arms behind his head, wrist to nape.

  ‘Why would someone leave a place like this for scumbags like us to come and fuck around inside it, hah?’ Devlin said.

  ‘Maybe he’s gone to get somethin’,’ Mikey replied.

  ‘Who’s he?’ Devlin asked Mikey, who was now scared.

  ‘Who’s he?’ Devlin repeated.

  ‘Prentice Black he means,’ I said, ‘the owner.’ My father had known Prentice Black. People who came to the bar thought Prentice a survivor from an Irish UN battalion massacred in the Congo in the 1960s, and Prentice would let them think it. The truth was Prentice had bought the pub from a man named Cyril White in the same year the Congo had gone from being a Belgian colony to a Democratic Republic. Prentice (who had himself been a member of the ‘old’ IRA, i.e. pre-Bloody Sunday IRA), could not resist what he saw as a parallel between his purchase and the establishment of the African state, hence the pub’s name. (There was even a map of Africa in the shape of Patrice Lumumba’s head in the men’s toilets.) When I suggested that Prentice might be over in the bookies opposite, it set something off in Devlin.

  ‘Well, then we’ll wait,’ Devlin said, coolly.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, why?’ asked Joe. He and Mikey had become bored and restless in the dingy veneer-panelled lounge, the light a muddy olive colour from the stained-glass tiles above the windows. They had begun writing, with a black felt-tip marker, obscenities, on the wide mirror at the back of the bar.

  ‘Hey, we’ll wait, fuckwit, because a man that’d leave his bar in the middle of the day is a careless man. And in my experience, a careless man always has easy access to money.’

  It was then I started to become afraid. Mikey and Joe had between them taken over fifty pounds from the till. My pockets were stuffed with cigarettes, crisps, a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. We could have walked. That’s what I wanted to do. Even the twins looked worried. For Devlin had implied something way beyond our usual messing. Even beyond the worst we, as a gang, had done up till then (which, apart from Gascoigne, had been the bottles we’d stolen for the Provos for petrol bombs). Yet we remained. Compelled as ever by that smile, by those black unforgiving eyes, by the magnetism I loved but had already begun to resent. And so minutes passed and we waited. I remember the silence. I remember wondering what he would do and how he might do it. I remember not knowing if I should run, or throw myself down and bathe in his glow. The room was like a theatre, all hush and darkness, as we, the actors (chorus and lead), waited in the wings for our audience to enter. And somehow I knew, through some inner sense, that when Prentice Black returned to his bar from wherever he had been, he would never leave.