The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  Disturbed by a flapping sound, I quickly opened my eyes to find that I was a long way from those dark, unforgiving days of my youth: it was the leaves of the tall palm whipping at the air as if they would break loose. I watched the ravens caw over the rooftops of the Grange on their way to the Avenue’s tall cedars where they nested. Again, I noticed it: the sensation of continuum. A trickle of smoke from the chimney of Devlin’s house – though it was a warm morning, and I imagined Devlin in there looking after Grace.

  I’d gotten seven years for my part in the murder of the publican. Devlin and the twins mandatory life. I’d blamed Devlin for all that had gone wrong with me since: my discovery of opiates, my involvement in importing scams. I’d even learned how to use a gun; there are many such places in London. But standing here at the edge of the Grange, despite my anger, my hand would not reach into my holster, nor would my legs (as if in some kind of physical rebellion) carry me to his house. The dreams of retribution that had seen me through the years in London seemed suddenly impotent here. There was a sameness to the place that was obdurate, and I saw that my rage belonged entirely to the man who walked to his job at Kew each morning, whose only deliverance from this self and that, was time spent with the flowers and plants of the hothouses.

  Of all the chilling details of that afternoon in The Congo bar, one image in particular stands out for me. Crossing the lounge to exit, I recall I’d looked across at the mirror, covered in the twins’ spidery scrawls, and seen a skull-like face: eyes bloodshot from crying, blood on the hair and cheeks. I saw that the face belonged not to me, but to Devlin, who was looking in horror at something, or someone else, who or what, I could not fully see, for the light was poor. Perhaps, he looked at nothing in particular. Perhaps, he looked at me. I have often suspected as much. I remind myself on such occasions that though it was I, in the end, who had dropped the canister on the publican, neither Devlin nor the others had tried to stop me. In fact Devlin had screamed ‘down, Mansfield, down’. His claims in court that he had meant for me to place the canister out of harm’s way did not stand up under cross-examination. (My own lawyer, a long-standing associate of my father, had emphasised my vulnerability, ‘the fragility of one so young without a mother’.)

  Finding solace in Devlin’s greying hair, and in the fact he now lived an obviously uneventful life in the same wretched council house in which he had grown up, I walked back to the Avenue. But I felt bereft, too, knowing I would never again experience the intoxicating spell he had cast upon my youth. Grace had blamed ‘the middle-class boy from the Avenue’ and claimed that if anyone had been the protégé it was her son. But Grange people have always been (understandably) jealous of the affluent suburb that looks down upon them, and, I suppose, with all the harshness life had meted out to her, Grace is no exception.

  1976

  ‘Maggie’s was a troublous life, and this was the form in which she took her opium.’

  GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss

  I sit on the back step topping and tailing the peas. It is a warm day for May, the sky white and high, and already there is a watery haze over the fields. I split the pods and empty them into the ceramic bowl Dada makes cakes in. The peas are soft and shiny and smell of the earth, and without thinking I put a few in my mouth and bite down. Dada makes a sound behind me that I know means he wants me to stop eating the peas, so I do. He is watching me like a hawk this week, making sure, he says, I stay far from the contents of the medicine cabinet.

  ‘Dada says to leave that cat,’ I call out to Francie, who has been trying to lure one of our neighbour’s kittens over the wall with a piece of rope.

  ‘I saw Daddy do it himself last week, didn’t you, Daddy?’

  ‘No!’ my father bellows. ‘Listen to Claire,’ he says, ‘listen to my wee Claire,’ and he scoops me up into the air, peas scattering to the floor.

  ‘Go now, the two of yez, and tell the others to come, the wee scuts,’ Dada says, and sends me out to Francie. By this break in his watchfulness I think that maybe he has forgiven me.

  We pass the sheets drying in the yard and go towards the gate. As I hold open the gate for Francie, I look up and see Dada smiling. Then, despite all Dada has said, Francie walks on and neglects to bolt the gate after us. I see Dada shaking his head and the two of us share a glance about Francie and I go myself to bolt the gate. I might be bold for taking my brother’s pills but Francie is older and should know better than to go against Dada’s wishes.

  We know where the others will be. When first we moved here Dada helped us uncover a den in the ruins of Roche’s Castle, half a mile into the fields at the back of the house. Dada says the castle has tunnels beneath it that go on for miles ending at Ice House Hill at the far end of town. It was built for a Norman lord, he says, who had wanted an escape route to the Castletown River which flows through the town into the Irish Sea.

  The entrance to the castle is via a winding, quartz-flecked staircase, down which the sound of footsteps echoes loudly. The bottom chamber – den headquarters – looks up to a row of black bars arranged in a half-moon on the ground outside. I lie down with Francie as we watch Nora and Isabel below. Francie reaches out, buries my hair in the tall grass. He screws up his face, whispers: ‘We’d always find you in a crowd, Claire,’ and brings his mouth to the bars.

  ‘Oooh,’ he says, low and deep.

  ‘What’s that? Isabel, you hear that?’

  ‘Oooh,’ Francie repeats, then presses his fingers to my mouth to stop Nora and Isabel hearing me laugh, pleads with his eyes for me to be quiet. I want to bite Francie’s hand but I know no harm can come to him or Dada will get vexed.

  ‘Nora, Nora, I think we’ve a ghost, what’ll we do?’ Isabel says. Francie is shaking with laughter, and Isabel, who has slipped out from the den, jumps us from behind.

  ‘You didn’t scare us. We’re invincible to ghosts we are.’

  ‘We did, we did,’ Francie insists, then skips off in a whirl of excitement to the banks of the Fane, a few yards behind the castle. Immediately Francie picks up stones, skims them with great precision across the water. Isabel shouts over to him that he’s not supposed to leave us but he pays no heed. Francis likes to pretend there’s nothing wrong with him. This is all our mother’s fault, Dada says.

  Isabel pivots back towards the den with me behind. As we close into a tight triumvirate, I become rigid with anticipation.

  ‘We found something,’ Isabel says.

  ‘What you find?’ I ask.

  ‘Promise you won’t tell Daddy.’

  ‘Or Dada,’ Nora jokes, and makes a prim-looking face.

  ‘Right,’ I say. Then Isabel, who is fifteen and the eldest, grabs the crumpled noisy thing off Nora and hides it behind her back.

  ‘You can’t ask Claire not to tell Daddy something, Isabel, as she tells him everything. Claire go on over to Francie,’ says Nora, who’s twelve and plump and sounds the most English out of all of us.

  ‘I won’t tell him, honest I won’t,’ I reply. Isabel and Nora look at each other. Nora tilts her neck to the breeze filing through the bars above.

  ‘Say you swear on Daddy’s life.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Isabel, you shouldn’t ask her to swear on Daddy’s life. That’s bad,’ Nora retorts.

  ‘Well, then she can’t see the thing.’

  ‘Why can’t I swear on your life?’ I say.

  ‘Oh here it is, but you better not bloody tell.’ Then Isabel produces from behind her back a dirty brown paper bag. She reaches in, delicately, and fishes out from it a yellowed and bloodstained needle, like the ones I’ve seen used on Francis in the hospital.

  ‘Jack Duffy sticks this in his arm,’ she says. Then we all fall about, laughing, pretending to stab it into each other. Finally, Isabel wraps up the needle and proceeds to hide it by standing on the long corroded nails that are staggered into one of the castle’s walls, placing the bag high up under a moss-covered brick.

  We have been beggi
ng Dada for a television. But he says he has seen the other families on the Littlemarshes sitting in silence, eating meals off their laps, glued to the flashing screen in the corner, their exhausted fathers asleep on sofas – and he doesn’t want that life for us. Aunt Sarah says she will get us a television for Christmas if Dada doesn’t. Isabel says a television will stop us being bored, as we are most Sundays waiting for Ed Molloy. The arrival later of Dada’s best friend means that Francie and Isabel have to close up their books, as the men will want the front room to talk in.

  ‘Go into the kitchen,’ Dada says, packing Francie and Isabel out of the room. ‘We won’t be long.’

  ‘I don’t want to be with the girls,’ says Francie, who wants to carry on with his schoolwork, just not with all of us.

  ‘Well, go to the room upstairs,’ Dada says, ‘can’t you use the dressing table?’ The look on Francie’s face, I know well what it means. Before Christmas, Francie – who has his own room at the top of the house with a bed and no desk – would do his homework at the long dressing table in Mammy and Dada’s room. But now we only go into that room if we want to stare at Mammy’s pictures, or pick up and smell the scent off her perfume bottles or spread our hands across the coral and black hairbrush with her hairs still inside it. None of us would use that room for studying in. Not now.

  ‘I’ll read outside,’ Francie says, ‘it’s warm enough.’

  We are excited to see Ed Molloy as he always brings sweets. When he arrives we all stand but say nothing about the big bag he holds out in his arms like a baby. Dada allows us the Curly Wurlys and Fry’s bars, I think, mainly as a distraction so he and Ed can go into the front room to do their talking. When Francie goes out to the yard to read, and Isabel and Nora are doing their homework in the kitchen, I go to the front-room door and listen, though my father’s and Ed’s conversations are not much to report as they are always the same: about the days they lived in London. Ed had lived on the same road as Dada and Mammy in Kilburn. They went to dances and to see showbands together. The photographs of Mammy in Mammy and Dada’s room, and the one that was in the paper in January, were all taken by Ed. Through the door I hear Ed say England is a godless country that allows unborn babies to be murdered and that we are well out of it. I hear my father say he misses London and that he only ever came home because it was what ‘she wanted’. I have heard my father say this before.

  Ed is tall, with dimples in his face. When Mammy would show people our photographs they would often say, ‘who is that handsome man,’ and say nothing about our father. Ed often tells us about his days as an actor in a group and he knows everything there is to know about films. Ed came home from London first, before Mam and Dada, and I remember Mammy saying it was because London had made him sick. I think of this every time Ed says something in the room bad about London. I would like to say to my father he should know not to praise a place that made his dearest friend ill, only he’d know then I was listening. Once, when I asked Mammy how did London make Ed ill, she said it was to do with something that happened to the three of them in a dancehall one night but that it affected Ed the most. She never said what it was. I suppose if I really want to know now I will have to ask Dada.

  When they finish, Ed comes out to the yard. Isabel wants to show him the den but Dada says Ed must be getting off home. Ed says he would like to see it though he has to leave after because he has an early start. As Isabel and Nora tug at Ed’s jacket, dragging him towards the gate, I turn towards the kitchen and see my father watching us. He waves and I wave back.

  Francis walks ahead of us, acting like he is a stronger, bigger boy. He is shouting out to Ed, telling him that we are in acres of bogland known as Cox’s fields, that to the left are Haliday’s Mills and a small indigenous wood and he gives detailed descriptions of the plants and birds Dada has taught us about since we moved here. Ed seems to know nothing about nature, and when Francie shows him the falcons circling above us and the raspberries ripening along the hedgerow, Ed is fascinated. All along our trip to the den, Ed wants to listen to what Francie has to say. Francie is clever and he knows it. Because Mammy wouldn’t let him do chores, he has spent more time with his books than any of us.

  Ed has brought his camera and he takes photographs of things that Francie points out. Ed wants us always to be in the shots, making big grins. Where it is most parched in the bog there are swarms of ladybirds on the rocks, and Ed suggests we pick up the ladybirds, let them crawl on our skin while he photographs them. Ed says he loves ladybirds as they are sacred to Our Lady, which is why they are named so. (Ed is awful religious.) So we put them on our arms and legs and Ed says a rhyme as he takes photos of the ladybirds crawling up under our skirts and T-shirts, and we all laugh as it is so ticklish. He says the rhyme, and we all repeat, like as if we were in a school play:

  Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,

  your house is on fire and your children are gone.

  All except one, and that’s little Anne

  for she has crept under the warming pan.

  When Francie tells Ed about the tunnels that lead under Roche’s castle to another part of town, Ed tells me and Nora and Isabel to wait by the river. He says we are to skim the stones across the water to see who is best at it while he photographs the castle, which, he says, is so interesting it should be in the history books. We don’t mind; we are glad to keep cool on the hot evening.

  The river is so still and I am distracted from skimming my stones by the quiet that is in the air. A willow tree is being tugged at by the water coiling around the tree’s light-green branches and this is the only movement I can see apart from the ripples from our stones. As Isabel and Nora battle it out, skimming further and further down river, I look over at the castle, and I think about all the years it has been sitting there, and how it will probably still be there when I and everyone I love is dead. The thought makes me feel sad, as I have never imagined myself not being on the earth before. I wonder if Mammy ever had such thoughts.

  By the time Ed and Francie come back to us, the sky is darkening and Ed says he has to get home. Francie looks pale and I think that maybe he did too much talking and tired himself out, that he will be needing a blue pill when we get back to the house and I feel instantly bad that a few weeks before I’d stolen half his supply.

  *

  When the school holidays come, Francie does not go out with us to the den but stays in all the time in his boxroom with the window open, listening to his transistor. Always the music he listens to is loud and angry. He says it’s the music young people are listening to now in London. He also says he wishes we never came to this country because everything has gone wrong since. He secretly cries sometimes, too, and I think it must be over Mammy because I often cry for her as do Isabel and Nora. Then one evening there is a big row. Dada says he has found something in Francie’s room in a toffee tin. It is a small lump of something that when he found it had been wrapped up in plastic. Lying out on the kitchen table it looks like sheep shit to me though it is herby smelling and oily. When Dada starts to bang his fist down on the table, I tell him to stop.

  ‘Mammy would not be happy,’ I wail, ‘you shouting at Francie.’ Dada looks at me then and he straight away stops the shouting and banging. Mammy had always protected Francis; sometimes it was like he was the girl, while me, Isabel and Nora were the boys – and I think Dada is finding it hard to protect Francie the same way Mammy did. The word ‘drugs’ is said and I know what this means. Then Isabel comes in and Francie takes the opportunity to run out of the room, so I say: ‘There’s a thing, Dada, in the castle. A thing in a paper bag that Jack Duffy does stuff with.’ Isabel looks at me as if she would kill me. Dada sees this look on her.

  ‘What stuff and what thing?’ Dada asks, and Isabel turns to leave when she sees how annoyed he sounds.

  ‘Isabel, come back. Explain to me what Claire means,’ Dada demands, but Isabel won’t answer.

  ‘A needle thing,’ I say, ‘in a bag under a brick.
Isabel says Jack Duffy sticks it in his arm whenever he goes there. Nora says you put drugs inside it.’

  ‘Duffy? The councillor’s son?’ Dada asks. Isabel nods.

  ‘Fella you been chatting ta up there sometimes?’

  ‘Yes Daddy, but he’s very nice,’ Isabel says.

  ‘Jesus, Isabel. That’s it. I forbid you, all of you to go up there again. Do you know what that means, that needle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do, Isabel, you do!’

  ‘But he’s nice. Kind. He gives me…’

  ‘He gives you what?’

  ‘Books. Music.’

  ‘Come on,’ Dada says, ‘you both lead me now to that brick. Put on your coats, the two of you.’ He then leads Isabel and me through the bog at the back of the house towards Roche’s Castle. We are not even fully dressed. We have our pyjamas on with coats thrown over and Wellingtons on and it is sticky and dark and we can’t see the warrens and rocks in the high vetch even though Dada has brought a torch. When we get to the castle, Isabel finds the brown bag and hands it to Dada.