The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  She turned to the Buddha, touched its golden head. He had never practised. He claimed to have forgotten, too, the rules of his two birth religions (Catholicism and Islam) so, instead, followed a simple bespoke ceremony. He laid out rosary beads on a white linen cloth, placed a black and white photograph of his father (sitting on a prayer mat in Cairo) against a miniature of the Little Child of Prague given to him by his mother, and lit candles. Certainly he spoke to something or someone when he came in here and sat by the dressing table. She never thought to ask him what, or whom, exactly. She knew only that she would find him in deep commune with it, or them, and that he would cry with his eyes closed, rocking back and forth then reach out and touch the statue or beads or photo as if reaching for a life raft.

  Someone had been in. There were two thin drinking glasses filled with mayflowers on either side of the statue, and a tea-light that had burned out. She touched the buds and put her fingers to her nose: a pineapple smell. Immediately there they were, on cue, the burning tears. She blinked, forced them back. It must have been Mrs Ramsey. She had asked her to check the place, given her keys. Perhaps Mrs Ramsey had (through the window) seen him sitting here, and known completely what he was doing hunched over the statue, clutching at the beads and the photo of his father. It was the one part of their fight she had not shared; she did not know how to pray, nor what it was that one prayed to (the Humanist service had been her idea). Mrs Ramsey must know, or else she would not have left the flowers, now wilted, their heads almost bald. She collected them up, threw them in the black plastic bag she’d brought in with her, carried the bag into the hall.

  She managed to fill three bags with out-of-date cosmetics, food products, wastepaper from the office, junk mail. She packed a crate with things she could recycle: newspapers, tins, bottles (a reminder of her heavy consumption of wine that winter). She would bring the bags and crate to the recycling centre in town. She lined up the green bags filled with pulses and rice and vitamin pills to give to her father. She was convinced now that she would put the house up for sale and return to London. It would be impossible to remain and carry on a life here. He was not here. He was not anywhere. Not in the bedroom sleeping or praying; not in the office drawing; not in the living room staring out at the grouse and peacocks; not in the garage imagining its conversion into a room with a spa. He had vanished. Truly, he had passed away. Into that sweet jar-shaped canister of ashes held in the office at the crematorium (waiting for her to make up her mind – to scatter or to keep). And she’d better stop this looking, this being-revealed-to business, because it was only a step away from stopping strangers on the street, to see if he had gone there, into the body of another man.

  She picked up her handbag and rummaged inside for the keys to her car. She clutched at the cold bundle, placed them down on the long iroko shelf in the hallway (the brown-black colour of his Mediterranean eyes) and dropped the bag. She could not stop looking. If she had seen him in the rose petals then he must be here. He would come to her. She needed a place to lie down. Her legs felt weak. Weightless and frail, she drifted from side to side along the hall, aimlessly brushing up against the walls, mindlessly touching the edges of paintings – the Patrick Caulfield, the Paolozzis. She knew where she would end up: in the pit of tears that would tear at her ribs and rip her throat. She opened the bedroom door, glided towards her side of the bed, slipped under the duvet and the folded-down throw, and turned to cradle the indents.

  An hour must have passed this way. When she woke she recalled she had not seen his face (as in a dream), or had any memory of him, but had been overcome by, bombarded with – colours: blacks and blues, deep greens and golds. She’d been tossed from one shade to the next, had emitted fluctuating levels of cries, until, at rest, jaded and empty, she landed on yellow, and here she breathed easy, stroking his pillow, rhythmically, till her mind cleared, whereupon she fell into a deep sleep.

  A voice came from outside, by the window. She was sure she could be seen curled up on the dishevelled, tear-soaked bed like a child. She went onto her knees and looked out and saw that Mrs Ramsey had begun her retreat towards Cotter’s Lane. She jumped up, ran out of the room and opened the front door.

  ‘Mrs Ramsey, Julia, Julia – I’m in, it’s me. I’m home.’ Mrs Ramsey turned and walked towards her with her head bowed.

  ‘I’m sorry love, I’m so sorry.’ Mrs Ramsey reached out and hugged her, then rubbed her arms vigorously up and down, passing into her skin from hard warty hands motherliness, and a heartfelt sympathy. Then, with tears in her eyes, she asked if there was anything she could do.

  ‘No. Not for the moment.’

  Mrs Ramsey said nothing when she told her Chalfont was to be sold, that she could no longer see herself living in the place now her husband was gone. Mrs Ramsey seemed to understand.

  ‘Thank you for the mayflowers.’

  ‘Oh, that was your father. I saw him pick them along the Lane. He’s awfully put out. He wanted to go over but the journey would have been too much for him, you know that.’

  She closed the door. She looked in the hall mirror, at her face, lined and black-streaked, at the slate-coloured weariness around her eyes. Fixing her fuzzy hair, she remembered she had not pulled down the blinds. Inside the bedroom she straightened the duvet, folded down the throw, removed the damp pillow. She would place the pillow on her bed tonight; it still had his smell, clean and powdery, of the woods after a night’s rain, and there were a few grey hairs still clinging. She pulled down the blind and closed the door, brought the pillow to the pile of things in the hall, ready to be loaded into the Jeep. She went into the office, pulled down the blinds, brushed her hand along the row of tall, dusty books on modern architecture as she exited, and closed the door.

  She stared out at the sanctuary; it rustled in parts and she thought she saw the hare, but couldn’t make it out amongst the rocks and deadwood. She had become out of step with the movements of the place. Once, they were attuned to the darting of a grouse here, a rabbit there. The animals were so quick, so adept at camouflaging themselves (except for the flagrant prowling of the white ferret who would steal in without caring who or what observed him), that only a kind of hawk-eyed seeing could follow their progress through all that scrub. After months of such looking even the nightlit grass would become penetrable.

  She knew if she stared long enough the green undulating veil would lift, and she would see that wild world once more. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow she would come back to this house whose name he had not wanted to change, sit in this room with a cup of tea, and look out at the fields. Or, if not tomorrow then the next day, whenever she was ready to look steadily into things, for she was not able to do so now. She thought of her father, and wondered what he’d like to eat for lunch. There would be things to do for him; she would need to go to the shops. Today, if he let her, she would treat him to a meal in a restaurant in town. The day was fine. It would be really lovely, she thought, to walk.

  Blood

  Fred Plunkett walked around her in his mind like an invisible wolf. She was thin and gazelle-like, had a creamy retrousse nose, and wore a brash perfume that tingled the back of his throat. There was also an arrogance to her, as if she were accustomed to other people’s submission and was rattled now by having to explain herself.

  ‘Didn’t Louise say? I’m Lara. I’ve come to use the library. I’m researching a book. I’ve come especially.’ As she went towards a bulging black satchel resting by the pillar, Fred thought, Damn, she’s got some sort of letter. Proof. From Louise herself. Now I shall have to say:

  ‘Ah yes. The friend from London.’

  ‘Yes!’ the girl replied.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Fred said.

  The girl entered the hallway, removed her sunglasses, hooked them over the lapels of her military-fit coat. She refused Fred’s offer of Nescafé, but allowed him to take her coat (whereupon she placed her glasses on her head). On her way towards the stairwell, Tomas welcomed her with a leg rub
from his moulting ginger torso. Fred watched her look down at the cat and smiled.

  ‘Louise has such a wonderful home,’ she said, stopping to view the artwork on the stairwell wall.

  ‘How do you know her, exactly?’ Fred said.

  ‘Oh. From University. She was my Professor,’ the girl replied.

  Fred’s aunt had taught at University College, London for almost twenty years. An authority on the archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Louise Foster had turned thousands of students on to the poetic and imaginative brilliance of the Koran (mostly via NJ Dawood’s 1956 translation). Despite her retirement, due to recent world events (and her expertise) she was regularly asked to advise political organisations, think-tanks and journalists the world over. Hence, she was often away, and this is how Fred, who hoped to complete his thesis in his aunt’s spacious Victorian house (with its substantial collection of rare books, local newspapers, archaeological journals, and tranquil setting between the Cooley Mountains and Irish Sea), found himself caretaker of it, and of his aunt’s cat, a role that had not come without its complications.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, once inside the library, ‘a good view of the hills,’ and placed the girl’s bag down on the desk opposite his. The small cemetery at Faughart could be seen from the window. Here, the remains of Edward the Bruce had lain interred in a sunken vault marked by an iron Celtic cross since 1318. When she got to the chair, the girl angled it away from the window towards the large echoing heart of the room. She then turned, reached over and closed the shutters.

  ‘The light,’ she said, ‘it bothers me. I’m somewhat photo-sensitive.’

  He noticed that indeed the girl’s eyes were watering in the sun’s glare. Not until both shutters were closed did he get the full impact of them: sensitive and transparent like a calm June day in Greenore.

  *

  ‘I’ll be taking a break soon,’ Fred said, quietly, his head bowed over his book-burdened table. ‘I’ve a bit of a job to do downstairs.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the girl responded, sniffily. Fred immediately felt a strange pang in his chest, and wondered if, perhaps, Lara knew the full extent of his arrangement with Louise. He blushed and pretended to work. Furtively, he watched her lay out two large leather-bound books on the reading table.

  ‘What are you researching, Lara?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh. Settlers to this area in the fifteenth century.’

  ‘From Britain?’

  ‘No,’ Lara replied, scanning the huge ivory pages. As she did not elaborate, and as he was afraid to enquire further, Fred turned to his wastepaper basket and began to sharpen his pencils. The room seemed to fill with small, intrusive noises: the trembling chalky sound of the ivory pages being turned, the pencil shavings hitting the screwed-up balls of paper like rain, the swish of Lara’s dress each time she moved, her assured slow breathing. Fred longed to speak, if only to divest all of these increasingly troubling and arousing sounds of their unwarranted power.

  Slyly, he watched her remove a small cardigan and wrap it around the chair at the reading table. He took in her tight lampblack dress, the tiny buttons down the front, the sheer chocolate-brown tights with a seam, and shoes that had high plastic heels. Christ. How had he not noticed those before? At first he thought she looked like a Forties film star. And then decided that, no, that wasn’t quite right: she looked like a Goth, but a much more glamorous Goth than the Goths he was used to seeing in Belfast. Her lips were a matt dark-red, her skin white as jasmine, her hands adorned with silver skull-decked rings. And there was something else about her that he liked, though he could not decide what it was. Was it this dark style of hers? (Though what did he know about women and their styles? He hadn’t so much as touched a woman in six years. It was far too complicated: women, sex, relationships. It was rocket science. Fred had immersed himself in the much more certain world of academia, and had for the past six years, been utterly, inescapably celibate.) Or was it some more hidden quality she had that impressed him?

  At Queens, Fred liked the Goths. They intrigued him with their Marylyn Manson T-shirts, dyed black hair and black lipstick. They formed an underwelt: the girls with their white faces and sleek hair, the men in their high-heeled rubber shoes. In a feeble attempt to ally himself with what he thought of as a kind of tribal subversiveness, Fred had had his mother sew PVC patches onto his tweed jackets and cardigans, and though he fantasised about wearing substantially larger amounts of PVC than that (like a gimp suit), he never did. Between seminars and symposia he would sometimes visit Gresham Street with its seedy hotels and flyblown glamour, or linger in the Arcade on North Queens Street delighting in the wares of Gemini, MissTique and Private Lines. He loved to stroke the PVC tops with their chains and cut-away breasts, smell the rubber T-shirts, cast his eyes around at the exotic, shiny blackness of it all and lose himself in this slightly seditious but alluring world. A world that far from belonging to the realm of ‘fantasy’, was a hard reality in Belfast. For Fred had found the city to be full of S&M clubs, fetish clubs, groups such as Transsexuals United Against Sectarianism, not to mention the bondage parties he had heard so much about but to which he had never been invited.

  ‘I do hope you won’t mind, but I’m intrigued. What is your book about, Lara?’ he asked. ‘I mean, what is it that interests you about these “settlers”?’

  ‘Well, it’s sort of about vampires,’ she replied, pronouncing the ‘v’ softly, and the second half of the word as one syllable, so that in her cut-glass accent it rhymed with ‘far’. Seconds later the ridiculousness of what she had said hit him with particular force.

  ‘But there’s no such thing, surely. I mean there’s no such thing as vampires!’ he said. ‘Vampires! Children of the night!’ he added, in mock-Transylvanian.

  ‘Have you read Dracula?’ she asked. Fred glared.

  ‘Then you know that while Mina is saved the Count is destroyed. But this is Stoker’s fiction. In reality, Count Dracula’s body was never found. I have reason to believe he escaped Romania and came here to the Irish borderlands in the fifteenth century.’

  Here? Dracula? To the Cooley Mountains?

  It immediately occurred to Fred, then, that a flake, albeit an extremely good-looking one, had interrupted a crucial day of study. ‘So how did Dracula get here, then?’ he asked, sarcastically.

  ‘Probably through the Black Sea, through the Bosphorus and Sea of Marmara, then into Istanbul and around the Mediterranean. It would have been a terrifically tough journey and must have taken months. Oh, and I’ve just found here a number of references to a family with exotic origins that arrived in these parts at exactly the right time. Just think – there could actually be people living here in this area directly descended from the Count.’

  Fred Plunkett sat back in his chair and laughed. It was rude he knew, but he couldn’t help it. In fact, rather like his feline charge, he could hardly contain himself. As he guffawed (and guffawed) he could see the girl sitting composed on the edge of her chair, seemingly oblivious to the racket he was making; she had opened slightly one of the shutters and was gazing toward a darkened Faughart cemetery and the grave of Edward the Bruce. Fred stopped laughing and cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been terribly rude. Perhaps I should leave you to it.’ He gathered up his papers, neatly re-piled his books, plugged his chair into the desk, and walked towards the door.

  ‘I hope you brought an umbrella, Fred,’ Lara said.

  Fred looked to the window by his desk. It wasn’t raining, but yes, she had observed it: the dense black cloud coming in off the sea on its way towards the house.

  ‘I imagine that will have passed by the time I’m done downstairs,’ Fred said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Lara replied, ‘Tomas.’

  She knew! The deal with Louise! No doubt, she was on to him about his perving too, his afternoon of languorous looking.

  All the way along the corridor, and down the stairwell, Fred convinced himself he�
��d been ousted from his favourite place, from his one place of real privacy, in a most devious manner. Lara had overwhelmed him with strangeness, with some fantastical belief that Dracula, like Edward the Bruce, had come to settle in the Cooley Peninsula. Hold that thought. Dra-cul-a. No. It couldn’t be. The origins of the area were in the Gaelic, in ‘Cualaigne’. It was pointless even to consider the girl’s daft hypothesis. As if a legendary, largely fictitious character, played by both Gary Oldman and the great Klaus Kinski, would come and set up house in this inhospitable hinterland. It was far enough from anywhere now (an hour from both Belfast and Dublin on the train), but surely a lot further five hundred years ago.

  Fred went into the living room and immediately saw the green cloud-shaped stain. He placed his knapsack down, removed his tweed jacket with the PVC elbow patches and placed it on the arm of the divan. He tugged at his aunt’s Persian rug and turned to Tomas, newly awake. Sensing his minder’s displeasure at this latest befouling, the cat launched himself over Fred’s right shoulder and scratched the side of Fred’s neck before scuttling off to some dark recess of the hall.