The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  ‘Why d’you want to take it, Daddy? Jack will know it’s missing when he comes.’

  ‘Evidence,’ he says to both of us, ‘for fucken evidence.’

  Dada brings me to the barracks with him because he says the others are too stupid to mind me. He is annoyed with all his children. He bangs loudly on the little shutter so that the sergeant will not keep him waiting. He jumps a queue of two women waiting with forms. They fan themselves with the forms and say things under their breath. My father says nothing about his pushing in front to the women, which makes them say more things and look at me with tilted heads and eyes that are full of pity. He bangs on the glass until two sergeants show up at once, both chomping on biscuits.

  ‘I want to report a crime,’ Dada says.

  ‘What crime would that be?’ the slimmer of the two sergeants says, and he winks at me.

  ‘The crime of plying drugs to a boy of fourteen years with a heart condition. That’s what.’

  ‘Is it your boy?’ the sergeant says and my father nods. The sergeant goes to open the doors.

  ‘Come inside now for a chat, man, and you tell me what it is you’re claiming was done to your son.’ As we walk through the offices of the barracks, the guard beckons to a ban gharda* sitting at a desk.

  ‘The wee one will have to wait outside, Mr McCourt. Don’t worry, she’s in good hands,’ he says, and my father stops and hunkers down to me. He looks hard-eyed at me, like a sparrowhawk, and gives me a hug.

  ‘Be good for the ban gharda now, won’t you Claire?’ he says, and I say: ‘No. I won’t be good. I want to come in with you.’ The two guards look at each other and I hear the other guards in the office laugh. The ban gharda brings me in to the room where my father is and we sit by the wall. Perhaps she brings me because she sees the distress on him. Perhaps they all know here that our mother was one of the people who died in the bomb at Christmas and they want to help us. It seems everyone has wanted to help us since that time. The ban gharda holds my hand all the while and I let her.

  I watch my father pass the brown bag over to the sergeant. He makes a complaint about Jack Duffy and the sergeant writes it down. As Jack, Dada explains, is eighteen, he should go to jail for giving drugs to our Francie who might have died had he taken stronger. I see the sergeant raise his eyebrows when Dada tells him Jack Duffy is the son of Eoin Duffy, one of the town’s councillors.

  ‘Good luck,’ the sergeant says.

  Dada is pale and quiet all the way home. When we get inside the house he sends me into the bed with Isabel, who has her eyes closed and is clutching a photo of Mammy. I curl up beside Isabel but she shrugs me off. She is annoyed, I think, because I told about Jack’s needle. That night, I hear Dada climb the stairs to Francie’s room and speak softly to my brother.

  Two or three days pass and things get calm again in the house. Dada has gone back to the bakery and everything seems normal – with him getting up early and coming home in the afternoon. Nora is in charge when Dada is away as she is the only sensible one among us, he says. Then on Sunday morning there is a heavy knock on our front door. Dada goes down to answer and I hide on the landing with Nora and Isabel. I peep my head round the wall of the landing, see Dada usher in a small man with greying sandy hair to the front room. I have seen this man before. His face is on every telegraph pole in our part of town and on the roundabouts towards the border. He has a pug face, which Mammy used to say reminded her of a Hollywood film star, such as James Cagney or Mickey Rooney. Some of the posters have things written over them. One in our own street had ‘a vote for Duffy, is a vote for murder’ written across Mr Duffy’s face – before it was taken down. I go close to the door. Eoin Duffy is pleading for Dada not to press charges against Jack, but Dada won’t listen. I hear our father shout: ‘Ya can’t believe a word comes out of an addict’s mouth, do ya not know that, Eoin, hah?’

  Then Eoin Duffy charges out of the room like a bull. As I run back upstairs to Nora and Isabel I hear Mr Duffy say to my father: ‘I can afford good lawyers. You can’t. And another thing: your boy went to a lot of others in this town. Not just to Jack, who is a fucken easy target, the mess he’s in. Maybe you need to look closer to home, McCourt. Francie told Jack a thing or two about what happened him.’

  ‘What do you mean, what happened him?’ Dada says.

  ‘Speak to your son,’ Eoin Duffy says, and he opens the front door and bangs it as he leaves. Obviously, Mr Duffy is referring to our mother and the bomb, I think to myself – so why doesn’t Dada see this? When Eoin Duffy is out of the house Dada looks up and is vexed to see us on the stairs. He says he wants us to go out – either to the public pool in Blackrock or to the cinema in town – while he speaks to Francie. For the first time ever, I do not trust my father. I think he will do something bad to our brother.

  He gives us money for the film in the Adelphi, but we don’t go: we want to see what Dada will do. After we leave the house he comes out, stands on the stone seat he and Mammy used to sit on together and sees we are not on our way in to town. He tells us to go on or he’ll walk us there himself. We concoct a plan to hide behind the fir trees that jut out from the garden a few houses down so that when he looks out next time he won’t see us. We hear the door open, close, and we stay still. Just as we are about to back up to slip over our neighbour’s wall, the front door opens again and Dada leaves. We come out from the firs and follow our father, who is walking a long, straight route up the tree-lined Dublin Road.

  ‘He’s going to the Duffys’,’ Isabel says.

  ‘How do you know?’ Nora asks.

  ‘Because this is the bloody way,’ Isabel replies.

  As we walk along the steep road in the dry heat, the sky the colour of Francie’s pills, I feel sad. The last time I walked this road I was with Mammy and we were going to the shrine at Ladywell. That day, there had been throngs of people gathered around the statue of the Virgin by the well, waiting for it to overflow – as it is supposed to do every August 15 – and it didn’t happen. Mammy had taken me because I’d wanted to see ‘the miracle’ with her, and so now as I walk with Isabel and Nora, past the Littlemarshes, past Ladywell and on toward the big plush houses of the Dublin Road, I feel my mother’s absence keenly. It seems permanent in a way it hasn’t felt before: she is not walking beside me, telling me about her dreams of moving to this road one day. Many of the people who own the shops and businesses in the town live on this road. Some of the houses are supposed to have swimming pools. As we pass the large imposing properties, I feel myself become more alert, as if the long tidy lawns, the cars in the driveways, the absence of any kind of wildness along the road has woken me up. I see a boy and girl my age dressed in riding gear, their shirts crisp and white as the shirts in the Daz adverts; across the road two older girls are running around in pink swimsuits, whacking each other with towels. Dogs with shiny coats are slumped on doorsteps. Isabel, Nora and I say nothing about what we see as we walk so as not to alert our father who is only steps ahead. But I think Isabel and Nora must also see how different this road seems, how it is a world of money and comfort, one that is not only alien to us but sort of frightening, too, in that it is all so dazzling, like intense sunlight, or the flash of a camera, which creates a glint and obscures the thing you’re looking at. I think how unsuited to Mammy, who never hid anything – and yet, when I think about it, was herself sort of hidden – this road would have been.

  Eventually Isabel stops. She says the white and turquoise bungalow on the southern edge of Cox’s fields is Eoin Duffy’s house. I am glad, as the soupy air has made me breathless. Though we are so sweaty from the walk the midges swarm around us when we do stop. From the shade of a chestnut tree opposite the bungalow we watch Eoin Duffy let Dada into his home. We talk then about maybe going back as there is no point hanging around now Dada is gone, not when we could all be instead in the cool darkness of the cinema, when suddenly, Isabel spots Jack. He is walking slowly down a slip-road from the fields. He turns for the road
to his house, picks at leaves along the hedgerow, his long legs loose and ungainly, like a beautiful young giraffe. Isabel calls to him with a whistle he recognises. When he comes over she starts pulling at him, sort of taunting him about giving our Francie drugs. The way she does this reminds me of the way Dada gets angry. Intensely, with lots of tears and fury. And because of this, I see that Isabel likes Jack. I can tell. He seems to be telling her that there is something else to the story Francie told him, which seems not to have much to do with Mammy at all.

  ‘He made me promise,’ Jack says.

  ‘And what’s your promise worth, you big shit?’ Isabel replies. She is crying and Jack is touching her hair.

  ‘He said, Francie said, someone had done something to him.’ Nora is trying to pull me away from the two of them now but I think of the ban gharda and how I stood my ground and so I do it again.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Isabel asks. Jack stiffens, shakes his head as if he has said too much already.

  ‘You need to spill it love, come on,’ Isabel pleads, and she becomes all soft with Jack. ‘What did Francie say? He’s not talking to us so you need to spill it. Or Daddy will take you to court. You understand? He’s in your house right now, probably waiting for you.’

  ‘Ah Jesus, I can’t…’ Jack says, and he keeps looking at me. ‘Francis said… ah, Jesus… he said that someone touched him up, like… held him against a wall… and.’ And then he whispers to Isabel who whispers to Nora who does not whisper to me. Then they all look at me and I can see shock on their faces, almost like the time when Mammy died.

  ‘You go home now Jack Duffy and you tell this to my father, you hear?’ Isabel says. She sounds very strict and Jack is nodding his head. We watch as he goes to his house and lets himself in.

  ‘What happened to Francie at the wall?’ I plead. My sisters, both of them, are welling up and shaking and Nora calls for Mammy who is dead now not even a year and I break from them and run towards home.

  *

  Dada has put a sign in the window of the shop saying that someone he knows has died in England and he will open in a week. He asks his customers to go to Joe Gallagher’s bakery on Bridge Street while he is away. But this is not true. Dada is not in England. When Sunday comes, Dada makes the meal like he always does. A roast and a pudding. Usually he makes a trifle or a crumble, something simple, but the pudding today looks different. It is deep, fleshy, has berries all over. It smells spicy, cinnamon or allspice. I ask what sort of pudding it is and Dada says it’s a celebration for ‘the great long summer of ’76, the best since ’59’. I ask if I can help and he teases me about the cake I tried to make blue from Francie’s pills and that he is better off by himself. We ask if Ed is coming this Sunday and Dada says no and that we are to go to Sarah’s to celebrate the great summer with our cousins on Patrick Street. Nora and Isabel are looking at each other the whole time Dada is getting ready the dinner, talking about the amount of tayberries and raspberries he has used.

  The day goes slowly at Aunt Sarah’s. Our cousins take Francie, Nora and Isabel to the Castletown River to show them where our great-uncle drowned in a whirlpool as a child. I would like to see this whirlpool but Sarah says I’m too young. To keep me occupied, Sarah brings out the albums that have photos in them of her and my mother when they are my age. She says I am the spit of my mother. ‘It’s the hair,’ she says, ‘real lobster-red,’ and I smile though I have never seen a lobster. As Sarah pours herself a glass of wine, I look through the photos all neatly pasted into the album, and I see one of Mammy, Dada and Ed. Straight away I ask Sarah a question. (And I see once I’ve asked it there is something heavy in the air, some secret.) ‘What was it, Aunt Sarah, made Ed so sick in London?’ Sarah bites the corner of her lip, looks up at me.

  ‘Well, your mammy, daddy and Ed were all at a dance one night in Kilburn,’ she says. (I know this bit already.) ‘And during it a group of men burst into the dancehall and told the band to stop playing, and the crowd they were looking for a John McGinnity, who they believed to be in the room. They said McGinnity should come outside as they were certain sure it was he who had betrayed them to the English police.’ She sighs then, remembering this story of Ed’s illness. ‘But as no man by the name of McGinnity would come forward, the men decided to keep the crowd locked inside the dancehall until he did. Your father kept quiet because he thought the men might have guns and because your mammy was pregnant with Isabel. But he – yer man, Ed, started getting annoyed with your mammy and daddy. Well, what happens next is this: Ed huffs and puffs, breaks into a terrible sweat, becomes like a cornered rat. Starts flinging himself, wildly, at anything resembling a door or a way out. He just completely – snaps – is what he does.’ Sarah clicks her fingers when she says this so I will understand what she’s trying to describe. She is thirsty on the hot day, gulps down more wine. Then she puts on a voice that sounds like Ed’s: ‘Ya can’t bloody well hold us like this,’ she says, all manly and deep.

  ‘And who in blazes are you?’ she says in the voice I take to be of the hostage-takers, and laughs. Sarah describes then, in a way that both excites and scares me, how Ed grabbed the leader of the pack by the head and smacked it so hard on the floor Ed had to be pulled off the man, who along with the other hostage-takers was soon turned out by the priests running the dance – but not before telling Ed he’d come one day to kill him. Sarah says it was after this night Ed began to think someone was following him; all times in the mornings or on the train, on the weekends about London or at the dances in Cricklewood and Kilburn. Even the few girlfriends Ed had he believed to be spies, ‘and for the IRA, too, if you don’t mind,’ she says. ‘So that’s how London made Ed sick. Up here. Not like Francis.’ I sense that this story is too wild for me to be told it, and is something of a transgression, but I also sense that Aunt Sarah tells it on purpose because she doesn’t like Ed Molloy. She shakes her head, drinks more wine. ‘He really did that, ya know, child,’ she says, ‘rocketed around that dancehall, went up the walls. Shocked your father and your mother. Even the fellas holding the place up were afeared of him. Your mother always said it wasn’t like he was caught or trapped, more like he was caught out. He put them all at risk with his panic.’

  That evening Sarah drives us home. Whoever my father has had lunch with there is no trace of them now in the house. The kitchen is scrubbed clean and aired, the smells of meat and baking are gone. Dada is not in the mood to hear about our day but when we ask again for a television he says yes. We jump around, talk about the programmes we will watch. We ask if we can go to the den to play but Dada says no to this, that we’re not to go there for a long while yet. Everyone agrees because of the television. And because of what was found in the den. And because of Francie.

  Later, I come down from my room. I am feeling confused about Francie and Mammy and even the summer pudding. I want to ask Dada more questions about what Aunt Sarah told me but I think it will only annoy him. Everyone is quiet, alone in their own space in different parts of the house. Dada is in the front room and has been there a while. I go into the kitchen, the hum of the fridge the only sound, which makes me think of Mammy who would sit at the kitchen table alone sometimes when everything was done, giving herself a treat – a cigarette or a bag of peanuts or a small bottle of stout. And then I see it. Walking a slow, uncertain path across the counter. Fluttering her wings with the fragile black undersides, pulling again to a dead stop, as if listening for predators. Black-headed. Polka-dotted. Hard metallic red, like the postboxes I can still remember from London. I go to bring her outside, but she scuttles off towards the wall. I follow her trail and it leads me to something hidden behind the bread bin. I tentatively pull the object out. It is black and chrome with small silver letters spelling the word Minolta on the side and a long, thin buckled strap wrapped around it. I recognise it: Ed’s camera. I wonder if Ed has been here today and why Dada has not told us. As I turn the camera around in my hands, I know instantly that I cannot mention it to my father
, not now nor for a long time yet and I return the camera to its hiding place. I see the ladybird then, gather her onto my palm, bring her out to the garden.

  In the morning the camera is gone. Dada is home for the day and the others are at school. I ask him if Francie is recovered now from his drug-taking and Dada smiles, says he is, that now everything will be like it was before the big row and that everyone needs to take care of Francie, especially for Mammy’s sake. I do not mention the camera, as I know deep inside that to do so will expose my father’s lie, and ruin the calm Dada says is to return to the house.

  In the days that come after, we are visited by the guards and others looking for Ed Molloy. Always Dada mentions the same story, about Ed’s fear of being hunted down by the men he’d met in a dancehall in London. ‘He went peculiar after it,’ Dada says. Sometimes, even months later, I hear Francie crying alone in his room and I wonder if maybe he misses Ed as well as Mammy for I remember then that Ed had always liked Francis the best.

  Eoin Duffy would be re-elected that autumn. His pledges to the people who voted for him would be kept. He would ask questions of the politicians in Dublin about the bomb at Christmas – but get no response – and have a park built in Cox’s fields for the Littlemarshes children to play in. He would declare the ruin of Roche’s Castle to be of special archaeological significance (just as Ed had said it was), and have a group of men come to the fields one day to erect an enormous iron grate around it, ‘to keep the castle safe’. It would occur to me, seeing the men padlock the heavy black chain around the castle’s enclosure, that despite the great long summer of ’76, the world I was growing up in was filled with things that ended in sadness. Our beloved den locked away in an iron cage, Ed getting so sick in London (or so I believed) that we would never see him again, our mother blown to smithereens (or so Isabel said) in a bomb, the Ladywell miracle that didn’t happen. Shortly after I found the camera, I would stop calling my father Dada, call him Dad instead, a word that would always feel awkward and blunt in my mouth.