The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  Near seven, Joe entered McGeogh’s, nodded to Sean at the bar, and headed for the stairs. He felt nervous, apprehensive; he knew the others had nailed the tunes. He walked along the narrow wood-panelled corridor, past the framed monochrome photographs of some of the city’s best-loved musicians of the 1970s, the heyday of Jazz in Dublin, young men in black suits and wide gaudy ties who Joe had played with once or had seen play. He entered the room at the end. Kole was there already. He seems pensive, too, Joe thought, as he hung his coat up on the back of the door.

  ‘Alright, Joe?’ Kole asked.

  ‘Sure Kole. You?’ Joe glanced up at Kole’s bright brown eyes full of their usual cheer behind the thick-framed glasses. But something was up. Joe could tell.

  ‘Where’s your sax?’ Kole didn’t answer.

  ‘Where’s Tommy and Des?’

  ‘I wanted to tell you on your own. They’re coming later. But I’ll be gone by then,’ Kole replied.

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Kyle Baxter. He’s doing a tour.’

  Joe knew what Kole meant. The Kyle Baxter band had won all sorts of awards. They were a real professional band; did all Duke Ellington, Count Basie, very little Miles Davis. Mostly real old swing. They’d even been in the French charts at one point.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Paris. Then the States. I get to go to New York, Joe.’

  Joe looked long and hard at his friend. Five years before, Kole had come to Dublin from Nigeria aged fourteen with nothing but his gift: the ability to play the alto-sax in a way few can, skillfully and smoothly, with a distinctive lush tone. And now, here he was, soon to be among that ‘going forwards’ group of people that Joe had only ever read or dreamt about.

  ‘When do you go?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘That quick?’

  ‘Someone dropped out.’

  ‘More fool them,’ Joe quipped. Kole smiled and nodded, but then quickly became solemn.

  ‘You’ve been a good friend, Joe. One of the best in Dublin. I will miss you.’

  Joe blushed. He sat down on one of the plastic chairs by the window and gazed out onto the street. He could see the edge of the Liffey, dark-green and swollen from the morning’s rain. The day was brighter than it had been, the sky brushed through with orange and pink. They were the best moments in Ireland, he thought, those blazing pink-sky moments that came usually at the end of a terrible day, just in time to scupper any pipedreams he might have of leaving the place. It had been the undoing of him, he felt, this ability he had to see the beauty, the hope in everything. It had prevented him from making changes, leaving places, jobs, people.

  ‘Suppose a shake is in order,’ Joe said, and he stuck out his hand. Kole shook it and pulled Joe up towards him. In the close, gruff hug, Joe could smell the young man’s crisp, watery breath. He felt a sudden pang of jealousy for Kole’s youth, for the possibilities that lay before the young musician.

  ‘You’ve been my good friend, Joe. You gave me confidence. More than my own father.’

  ‘Players like you don’t need confidence, Kole. You have your gift,’ Joe replied.

  ‘What I mean is, not everyone made me feel inside, Joe, you know? I’ve been outside a lot in Dublin. But not here. Not here in this room with you and the guys.’

  ‘Where you’re going no one’s going to pass any remarks. Where you’re going, you will be inside, as you say, all the time, wherever you go.’

  ‘I don’t know. America’s just another place, Joe,’ Kole replied.

  Of course it was. Joe knew he had built the country up to a preposterous degree in his mind and to anyone green enough to listen. He had needed to believe in something. Yet he could have gone to the States many times over and didn’t. Why not? Something always came up. A sick parent or child, a strike, a crisis of some sort. He’d wanted to visit Woodlawn Cemetery where Miles was buried, but he didn’t go. After his sister had moved to Boston she’d invited him over many times, but still he didn’t go. How he could have such a passion for a place he’d never been to and wouldn’t go to when he’d been given the opportunity, he could not fathom.

  ‘Come on, let me hear you play,’ Kole said.

  ‘Oh, I’ve been trying to sort out that middle section, Kole, and I get nowhere. You – well, you must be hot-wired to Cannonball’s brain. You got that fat sound straight away. I just get bogged down.’ Then Kole tilted his head right back as he always did when deep in thought.

  ‘What do you think about when you hear it on the CD?’ Kole asked.

  ‘“Flamenco Sketches”? Well, I think what a genius Miles Davis was and how I know someone just like him.’

  ‘What I mean Joe, is, what is it you see? What do you see when you hear the music?’

  Well of course he saw things. Wasn’t that his problem? An inability to concentrate on the notes due to being completely intoxicated with the tune and all it evoked in him. He closed his eyes and described what he saw to Kole. Velvety Edward Hopper-like greens and reds, steam rising from drains, yellow taxis, the concrete and glass of buildings, hardly the sky at all. He heard all sorts of things (other than the actual notes), too: the clatter of high-heeled shoes, people talking excitedly, the spout of an Espresso machine sputtering frothily into a cup, the legs of wooden chairs scraping across a tiled floor. But mostly he saw and heard: ‘Rain. That’s what I’m seeing and hearing the most, Kole. Warm, sticky rain and everyone is happy in this rain because it smells sweet or something. You know, it’s probably just that high-hat and cymbal.’

  ‘Concentrate, Joe.’

  ‘Well, that’s it. I see long and happy rain. And there’s this café with rain-soaked people coming in and out of it.’

  ‘Good!’ Kole said.

  ‘Now forget all those problems you had in the middle section. Miles was improvising, remember? Here’s the trumpet. Don’t open your eyes. Just keep seeing all you described to me, and play.’

  Joe could not believe he was about to do this in front of his friend. It felt silly. But no sooner had he wrapped his lips around the tobacco-tasting tip than he began to feel something inside him yield and flow. He did not think about the music, about fighting his distracted thoughts, about Kole leaving, about his solitary lunch-breaks outside the hut on the sidings. He did not think of these things, only the sticky, warm droplets seeping through his shirt. It felt good to let himself loose in the images he saw in the music. He was outside. It was hot. New York or New Orleans at Mardi Gras. There was a sultry glow on the streets, from cafés, bars, passing buses and cars. Nowhere the windy sting of Dublin’s rain, just imaginary warm rain. He felt alive, soaked through, invigorated. The rhythm oozed out of him. He could taste salt on his lips. Before he knew it, he had reached the middle section and could feel himself soaring, the sound taking flight out of his body like a seabird. When at last he opened his eyes, Kole had left the room, and Tom and Des were standing by the door, clapping wildly. Joe knew he had played in a way he had never played before. He’d played like Kole, free and lush.

  On his way home Joe stopped by the white-walled gallery and glanced in. With only a few stragglers still inside, he could see more clearly the unframed paintings on the wall. He recognised in one a snow-covered Gardens of Remembrance, in another the silver sands of Dollymount Strand, and in the painting closest to him he smiled at two piebald ponies grazing on tall grass outside a block of flats. A man in an orange shirt moved towards the window. He beckoned to Joe with a glass of wine. Joe took a deep breath, entered the gallery and, declining the wine, sauntered cautiously towards the paintings.

  ‘See anything you like?’ the man shouted over, at length.

  ‘Everything,’ Joe replied, shyly, and drew closer to the wall.

  ‘It’s my father’s work. He really only painted Dublin once he’d left,’ the man said in a brash, well-spoken American accent.

  ‘Really?’ Joe responded.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ the man replied. ‘He missed the p
lace so much. He missed the way the light mellows over the Liffey in the evening, and that cold wintry rain you have here. Oh God, he totally missed that.’

  The Stonemason’s Wife

  At suction, Rose would sometimes go in too vigorously and pinch at the patients’ gums, or let saliva build up in the hollows of their cheeks. She tended to be roughest with those who held tightly to her hand (even though she’d offered it). Rose said nothing about such compulsions to the dentist. He always seemed so interested in the patients’ lives, especially those who were artistic or had travelled, and, she imagined, he lived a little vicariously through them.

  On the whole though, Rose enjoyed her job. It had been difficult enough returning to it after her five-year break, a time during which, it seemed to her, the world had at last realised she was in it. By the end of the five years, however, life was as it had been before: a terrible, loveless struggle. Each day a confirmation that she was not in the world, not fully and deeply, but at best was a silent presence in it, forgotten at fourteen when Gemma came, and her life was taken up with another. In fact, at the end of the five years, Rose had wished she were dead. So how had it all come to this? She would often ask herself this question during her lunch-break, while glancing through the out-of-date women’s magazines in reception. Declan Whately would sometimes find her looking up and out over the pages, sandwich by her side, thoughts back in the year she and her husband had spent building the house.

  ‘You alright, Rose?’ he would ask.

  ‘Aye. I’m grand, Declan. Just thinking about Gemma,’ she would say.

  ‘How’s she doing, Rose?’

  ‘Flyin’,’ she would reply. And it, at least, was the truth.

  Rose knew the dentist admired her because of Gemma. She knew there were quite a few people who did. And why wouldn’t they admire her? At fourteen years of age she had, by herself, made the decision to keep the child; a decision her family had not wanted her to make, had been unwilling, at first, to accept or support. And she had persisted, becoming (either out of admiration or pity) something of a cause célèbre in the town. Of course, what people didn’t know was that Rose had made such a decision because she wanted to show the town a valiant front: in appearing stoical she had hoped to restore something of her sullied reputation. Had she not kept Gemma (abortion not being an option for her in Ireland), and looked to a visible and busy motherhood, Rose was afraid people might detect her crushed hopes, her resentment, her wish that there had been no Gemma at all.

  And so, up until the split, her marriage to Thomas L’Estrange seemed to her as a consolation for all the trials and difficulties of her younger years. It was what her brother, who was a follower of the Baha’i Faith, liked to call ‘Karma’. For keeping Gemma that time, he would tell her, when everyone would have understood if she hadn’t, she had been rewarded with this quiet stonemason. A man with whom she could take long walks along the beach in silence and still feel comfortable. Somebody to do nothing with, as New Woman had put it.

  Thomas L’Estrange had initially come to the surgery for a root canal. He had not reached for Rose’s hand though she had offered it. He courted her slowly and quietly and was attentive to her every change of mood or heart. He was also rich; had land at the back of his mother’s house and, within a year of their marriage, had built a house on it from stone gathered illegally from the beach. He took the quartz-flecked granite from Templetown for the outer walls, the thick brown sand from Riverstown to render, the shale-coloured boulders at the back of Carlingford beach for the cornerstones. Rose agreed wholeheartedly with her brother: Thomas L’Estrange was her prize for keeping Gemma that time. For all the years lost, for the pitying looks from her friends. Friends who had gone into the world and come back to the town with its bounty – money, experience – while she had found a corner of it in which to keep her head down, rear a child, find a job.

  Once installed in the tall stone house, yards from the shore, at the end of the sloping lane behind Mrs L’Estrange’s white cottage, Rose would have her friends come to visit, and they would gasp at the view. They would wonder at the five ensuite bedrooms and the contemporary Italian kitchen; at her husband’s building and architectural skills; at the smooth unpainted walls made from the stone he’d plundered from the beach. They would especially remark upon the stone, and how it still smelled of salt, and how standing in the house with its view of the curving shoreline one would think one was out at sea.

  Thomas L’Estrange was a master craftsman. He had built their bedroom at the back of the house with a balcony so that at night they could watch the ships and trawlers pass slowly into the harbours of Greenore or Carlingford. He’d built a turreted roof for Gemma. Rose would beam with pride when her friends, home from London and Dublin and New York, would visit this ‘castle’ her ‘prince’ had built her. Most of them had left during the eighties, when recession had laid waste to the town, and, Rose believed, they had very much wanted to return, to have the life she now had. She would bring them on lengthy tours of the spacious sea-lit rooms, give detailed descriptions of her husband’s meticulous building processes, list his ambitions for the property. It was, finally, as if it was she who had triumphed. And, if she were honest, this is what she had loved most about those five years in the house. She loved Thomas, she did. But she loved more the new and thrilling taste of triumph.

  And it hardly lasted. For he had ruined it summarily, with something she could not in a million years have been prepared for. And whom could she tell? How could she turn to the once-pitying, now envious friends and tell them that after five years of marriage she had discovered Thomas L’Estrange was a – well, what was he? She hadn’t the words for it. She was simply not ready for whatever vague and frightful thing her husband was. She knew only he was to have been her prince, not her princess.

  Yet people did know. How, she had no idea; only he must have been in some kind of club or group. She had heard rumours; was told of a Gay and Lesbian Society in the basement of a building on Crowe Street in which there was a leopard-skin divan. Perhaps he had visited it. She wasn’t sure and she hadn’t asked. She saw what she saw and that evening left the house.

  The image of him in the back room especially entered her mind during root canals. Again and again she would open the door, having come home early that day, and there he would be: walking towards the long mirror by the window, her tights stretched over his sinewy legs, ripped along his right calf, her Karen Millen dress a perfect fit over his slender back – while Supertramp’s the Logical Song boomed from the stereo. She had wanted to laugh and thought he must have been joking until she saw his hands, those dry, stonecutter’s hands, bejewelled and wafting through the air in an imaginary conversation with the mirror, his angular jaw jutting out from side to side. She stared in silence by the door for what seemed like an age, for she thought him beautiful: light and graceful, long and small-hipped. Surely this dazzling creature was not the man she’d married? It was as if he’d been set free from that person, like a butterfly let loose from a room. Then, as Thomas L’Estrange’s beauty began to conflict with what he stood for in her mind and in her life, Rose checked herself. She was confused. That she had found him so alluring like this deeply surprised and disgusted her. Her hands shook as she closed the door. She referred to the incident only once packed.

  Declan Whately must have noticed something was wrong. She was aware she seemed more aggressive in the surgery, more distracted in her breaks, though he said nothing about this. She often wondered if he knew about Thomas, or if, indeed, the whole town knew. And it was thinking about the town’s old condescension towards her that brought Rose lowest. Five years earlier she had transformed the ‘tragedy’ of giving birth at fourteen into a triumph. Now she was as before, her triumph reversed, like Cinderella’s pumpkin, all due to Thomas L’Estrange’s ‘inclination’.

  Declan was shutting up the surgery when she fainted. When she came to, she was on the sofa in the waiting room. The window was open and the d
entist was making her tea.

  ‘You fainted, Rose,’ he said.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Declan.’

  ‘Oh no, you’re grand. You’ve not been yourself at all lately, Rose.’

  Then she told him. About the house, the stones from the beach, the discovery that day, about not telling a soul yet the peculiar sense she had that people knew. Though she neglected to tell him about the strange sensation that had passed through her as she stood watching her husband dressed as a woman. He would have asked her to describe it, and she did not want to explain how her eyes had softened and narrowed, how her legs had tingled.

  ‘A terrible load of weighty stuff to keep to yourself, Rose. A person could explode with all that inside them. Or implode maybe, like you’ve been doing.’

  She was glad of the dentist’s fuss, and appreciated his kind and thoughtful words. Especially when he told her she was a treasure to the surgery, that her warmth was a natural gift, that her holding the patients’ hands in their half-hour of need was proof of a large and indomitable heart, that any man would be mad to let her escape his life. He said that most people had secrets, and asked her to think again about the meaning of what she had seen her husband do.

  ‘Is it really so bad now, Rose, to do a bit of dressing up?’

  Rose noticed that in Declan Whately’s eyes Thomas L’Estrange was not the monster she had made him out to be. He was much worse: a thing of pity. Rose did not notice, however, that the dentist listened intently, not only to all she told him about Thomas but to the musical tone in her voice, as if he himself would faint with pleasure; to her breathy pauses, her nervy intake of new breath. And she certainly did not see there was no triumph to be had in a time when no one was looking anyway, when no one cared, when pity might be the very most someone might offer another, when everyone in the town these days was busy not noticing anyone else. Rose, who noticed none of these things, walked into the dark and empty street wondering what the dentist meant by ‘a natural gift’.