The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  I went up to the bog and waited for my foxes to emerge from their earth, which was deep beneath the over-leaning bank I would sit on. Straight away I thought about Martha and the band, and of the times we would come up here to talk about our futures. Our band was thought of as about the best thing ever came out of this borderland mire. Martha had a voice that sounded sassy, a cross between Patti Smith and the girl from Chromatics. We’d a big following and were raved about once in Hotpress (who’d said we were the ‘Nirvana of the North’). All the Goths and interesting types would crawl out of the local woodwork to see us play. They’d loved us with a passion verging on the maniacal, or so it seemed to me then. I was full of hope that time. A real Pollyanna (or whatever the male equivalent is). Sometimes I wondered if that hopeful part of me would ever return. It seemed to me, as I sat eating my sandwich, no fox in sight, that the paradox of having retreated so far from the world as I had done, becoming nigh on a recluse in recent years, a veritable shut-in (discounting my visits to the foxes), was that during the years of the band I’d had a deeply hopeful and cheery disposition.

  *

  ‘Massage my feet, Michael, will you, Son, while I read this?’ Ma said, seated beside the unlit fire. She already had her stockings off, her feet spread out onto a towel. She smelled powdery, beneath which I could also detect the sour undersmell of sweat. There were bottles of creams and lotions laid out beside her.

  ‘Give me them,’ I said, and I began to rub. And right there my night was ruined. Not just because there’s nothing like massaging one’s mother’s feet (Ma’s being all swollen and flaky) to quench any romantic feeling gathering in a man’s body but because within seconds I could tell that what she really wanted to do was to reel me in, have a captive audience while she plotted out the course of our lives together:

  ‘I was thinking, Michael, about what we might do in a few years when I get the pension. I’d qualify for a free travel-pass as well as one for a carer. You could put in for that you know, and you’d get a free travel-pass, and then we could travel the whole of Ireland if we wanted to on the train.’

  ‘Who’d mind the shop?’ I said, alarmed (to say the least) that she had me in her mind as her future carer.

  ‘Well, the days we’d be going we could close up the shop. We wouldn’t be going every day. You don’t seem that enthused.’

  ‘I am, Ma. I love trains. I am enthused.’

  ‘Not like we can get off to Greece or anything. We’re too busy now and by the time I get my pension I’ll be too old for Greece. So the passes would be great to have.’

  ‘I can’t wait for you to be getting your pension, so,’ I said. And all warmed from her dreams of availing of free travel, and from the Deep Heat I was rubbing into her shins, she took up her book again, flicked through the pages. I saw this as my opportunity: ‘Do you think, maybe, you’d be alright if I was to go dancing one of these nights, Ma?’

  ‘Dancing?’ she said, ‘what kind of dancing?’

  ‘Just in town, maybe the weekend, maybe a disco.’ Of course, I was planning/hoping to bump into Martha, thinking she might be inclined to venture out to one of our old haunts now that she was home.

  ‘I’m afraid my dancing days are long over,’ Ma said, ‘them and the acting.’

  ‘Well, I was meaning maybe not with you, Ma,’ I said, ‘with Noel I meant.’

  ‘A disco?’

  ‘Aye,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not that you need my permission, Michael. Lord knows, but I’d be glad of a break from running round looking after you. But take a look at yourself, the cut of you, that leather jacket and the hair. And besides, you know yourself you wouldn’t last five minutes with all the commotion around you. Not worth going out for anyway. All gone to hell out there. Drowning in a sea of drink we are and aren’t there lectures advertised every week in the Northern Star for depression and suicide for young people?’

  ‘Ma!’ (It was ridiculous, I knew, that I should be pleading to do something twelve year olds were doing the world over. But Ma and me had history. And she never stopped reminding me of it.)

  ‘After a few drinks wouldn’t you be linking up with all sorts of dubious characters, might not understand how fragile you are, Michael,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not fragile, Ma.’

  ‘Are. In your own way. My advice is to stay away from the discos.’ Clearly, if I wanted to accidentally-on-purpose bump into Martha I’d have to do it without my mother’s permission, for it would never be given anyway.

  ‘What are you reading?’ I asked, trying to get her off the subject of me and discos and she turned the face of the book towards me: a Methuen School’s Edition of Macbeth, probably Eugene’s.

  ‘Only for the memories,’ she said. I told her she shouldn’t be reading such books with all the blood and guts that was in them, especially considering what could happen if she were to get upset, but she got defensive, told me to go away from her, even after the excellent rub I’d given her. She said she wished Eugene was here because Eugene was the only one who understood her, and who could massage her feet properly also, as he was going to be a doctor in Trinity College and, naturally, he would be better at massaging feet. (Naturally.) Bad enough that I’d given up my evening of thinking and dreaming about Martha to massage my mother’s feet but then I got shirked off for not being Eugene. I wanted to remind Ma that Eugene was dead seventeen years but I knew the whole thing would kick off then, so I left it.

  ‘Don’t forget to refill the crisps,’ Ma said to me on my way out. I glanced back at her and saw she was ringing her hands and reciting out damn spot. I wished then I’d gone up to see my foxes for the entirety of the evening instead of having to suffer that old speech of hers (for which she’d won an award), which she would intonate in a sort of clipped and grotesque whisper, her face taking on an alarmed expression that always recalled to me Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein.

  *

  McDaid’s Grocery Store was left to my mother by hers. (When Ma married she changed the name from Soraghan’s.) The apostrophe before the ‘s’ was a reminder to all in Castlemoyne as to whom, exactly, the shop belonged. It also meant her husband and sons, if and when we worked in the shop, and we all did at one point, were, essentially, her employees. Constance Soraghan then McDaid was once a name to be reckoned with in these parts. Her trophies for acting filled the shelves of the house, a two-storey extension separated from the shop by a door. (And a very important door, too, for once I was in the house I was no longer her employee though she often abused that fact.) From within the shop could be seen a life-sized poster of her with golden, flocculent curls and Clara Bow lips, and the words The Jailbird by George Shiels emblazoned across her. There was rarely a day when someone would not comment on that poster. If they didn’t, then she’d direct their attention to it somehow or stand close by so they would note the resemblance. Sometimes, if she thought she was alone, or I wasn’t looking, she’d stare into it like a mirror. She’d find herself in the features, sweep down the loose skin of her neck, soften her curls, as if about to enter for her pivotal scene.

  *

  The next day, Coco Conway called into the shop with a packet of fresh steaks sourced from his own private abattoir. This was more or less a weekly occurrence, and always he and Ma would haggle over prices, with Ma flirting, most disconcertingly, in order to get a reduction. Coco would lap this up, probably remembering her as she was in the poster. ‘Moyne’s own Meryl Streep,’ he would call her, and I think she flirted with him not only to get the prices of his produce down but so he would call her Meryl Streep. When she went off to wash the blood of the steaks from her hands (before paying Coco the money) I knew he would take the opportunity to get all ‘man to man’ with me. ‘A fine strap of a woman, your mother, the strength of an ox in her,’ he said, lasciviously, one eye cocked at the poster. I moved over to the morning’s pile of mail. Being no respecter of personal space, Coco sidled up to me: ‘I hear you’re up with the foxes again, Mich
ael.’ I nodded. ‘Don’t mind telling ya, but they’re nothing but vermin.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, and Coco laughed. ‘Don’t believe in “vermin”, anyways,’ I said, ‘apart from the human sort. What’s the point in shooting foxes for the sake of sheep and chickens you’re going to get nothing for anyway? It’s barbaric. Whole lives ruined just so some drunken gurrier can have a burger he’s too pissed to taste,’ and he laughed again, though I don’t think he got what I was trying to say to him.

  ‘I saw her today, ya know,’ Coco said. I’d a good idea as to who he was talking about.

  ‘A-ho!’ he said, pointing at me, convinced he’d caught my blush. ‘She’d be sure ta call in on ya boy.’ (I hated the way they all called me lad or boy or boyo when wasn’t I thirty-five years old?)

  As Ma completed her dealings with Coco, I noticed a brochure newly arrived from the Postcard Company. I quickly scanned the cover letter. They’d new postcards to send us. Did we want to order a postcard carousel? Have cards with famous faces of Monaghan on them, excerpts of poems by Patrick Kavanagh? The brochure read:

  Contemporary & Vintage Postcards

  Kavanagh Country images (Inniskeen village; D. McNello’s Bar; Kavanagh’s headstone; the banks of the River Fane; Kavanagh’s portrait by Patrick Swift; excerpts from The Great Hunger, with the poem’s protagonist, Patrick Maguire, depicted sitting on a wooden fence, Tarry Flynn, The Green Fool)

  Carrickmacross Lace images

  Fishing in Lough Muckno images

  Retail price: 50 cent each.

  Coco had gone two minutes when the doorbell rang out again. Thinking it was him who’d entered I went to chide him for calling my foxes ‘vermin’ when I saw an apparition, the midday light bouncing off her hair so that it looked silver-streaked. Thinner than before, like in the Northern Star photo, Martha seemed even more beautiful than the mental image I’d been dwelling on for the best part of seventeen years.

  ‘Hello Michael,’ she said. I hoped that Ma, who’d gone upstairs after Coco had left, hadn’t heard the bell.

  ‘Hello,’ I replied. It wasn’t the right way to say it. But I could see she knew, Jesus, she knew I was glad to see her.

  ‘Been a long time,’ Martha said.

  ‘It has.’

  ‘You look great.’

  ‘Not so bad yourself.’ I wanted to take off my shop-coat right there, walk out of the place with her, but then Ma clattered down the stairs. When she came into the shop I saw she’d half the contents of my father’s wardrobe in her arms.

  ‘Here now,’ Ma said, without bothering to look up and see who it was I’d been talking to. ‘Been thinking, Michael, these suits of your father’s should fit you. You should give some thought to wearing these.’ Embarrassed by such talk in front of Martha, I replied:

  ‘Don’t bloody-well want to be wearing a dead man’s suit, Ma,’ and sort of threw a laugh out of myself and Martha laughed in return. Then Ma looked up, saw who it was I was laughing with. It was sheer pleasure watching the blood drain from my mother’s face. Ashen she was, ashen.

  ‘Hello Connie,’ Martha said, soft and clear.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Martha Cassidy,’ Ma said, with the utmost disdain in her voice. Even for her it was a pretty low, sarcastic tone. I was embarrassed for Martha, but also for myself, for it must have been plain as day that in all these years nothing much had changed with me: I was still living under my mother’s thumb. In fact I was sure I could see in Martha’s face something of the look I’d seen on all my friend’s faces, on the face of every girl I’d ever been out with since. The look that said: Norman Bates is alive and well and living in Castlemoyne.

  She swept her fingers through her hair. Oh that soft, cold, wavy hair… the bright eyes… the pale skin… the full, pillowy lips…

  ‘How have you both been?’ she said. Ma was just about to reply with something cutting, haughty. I could feel it coiling round her brain, dipping down into her sack of bile for some relish, working its back legs into the ground, ready to burst out of her mouth, but before it did it was I who answered this apparition on the doorstep of our shop: ‘Everything’s grand, Martha. We’ve been very well.’

  ‘I heard about your father, Michael.’ I nodded at this, and out of the corner of my eye saw Ma retreating behind me, sort of sadly. When we were alone Martha made a face, her eyes following Ma as she made her way upstairs with my father’s suits.

  ‘God, I remember the band practices up there!’

  ‘Do you, Martha?’

  ‘And her banging on the ceiling at us to be quiet!’

  ‘There by the grace of God, says you,’ I said, before I knew it. Of course, had we got hitched, as had been the plan all those years ago, there’d have been no chance in hell Martha would have ended up living above and working in the shop. But, standing there, seeing me for the first time in an age, she was polite enough not to question the daftness of what I’d just said.

  ‘I see the hair’s the same.’

  ‘Aye. Dirty blonde,’ I said, and she laughed.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Michael.’ And suddenly seventeen years fell away and we were back to the comfort and effortlessness of each other’s company. We arranged to meet that evening and already my mind was ticking over about what I’d wear, how I’d smell, like some lovesick puppy. I could hear movement again upstairs, the sound of pacing, followed by an impatient shoe-tapping sound on the wooden floor of the landing. Martha heard it too and I could see she wanted to get out before Ma returned.

  ‘Right then,’ she said, ‘by the bog road at seven.’ Then Ma’s voice echoed down the stairs, all polished and pointed: ‘An awful busy day I reckon it’s going to turn out to be, Son. And a big trip to the Cash and Carry we need to be making, too.’

  ‘We’ll be grand, Ma,’ I shouted, and waved to Martha as she left. I could hear Ma move to the window, probably so as to watch Martha (with middling-to-strong hatred, no doubt) as she walked away from the shop. When she came down Ma seemed sniffy, busied herself with the newspapers.

  ‘She’s brave, Ma,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s brave?’

  ‘Martha,’ I said.

  ‘How d’you make that out?’

  ‘To have come back here after all this time.’

  ‘Tie back your hair will you, Michael?’ she said, as if she sensed already that she was losing her grip on me with Martha’s return, and I, feeling bizarrely sorry for her – and for the loss of that grip – tied back my hair as she requested.

  *

  Martha stood on the highest hill. The evening was fine, the sun fat and low in the sky. Before us the bog simmered. Everywhere bees and flies swirled about plants that had been growing there for as long as I could remember: foxtail, vetch, purple moor grass, bog-cotton, tormentil, deer sedge, bog-asphodel, bindweed, ling, sundew. The land below us was covered in lush-looking crops and the haze of them breathing filled the air. The rushes shook by the stream behind us. The gorse throbbed with light. Out on the heather I’d lain a flask of tea, the leftovers of Coco’s scraps (for the foxes), and my cigarettes. I lay back and watched the fleet bog wind blow through Martha’s hair, as if pulling it up and out by invisible marionette strings as she leapt from rock to rock. It could have been twenty years ago; it was like no time had passed at all, as if it had been breeched somehow, folded back on, by this tryst at the top of the bog, like those we had had many years before.

  ‘Lady’s Brae, Devlin’s, Pat May’s, Daly’s, Keady, and over there – Dundalk, Dundalk bay…

  ‘That’s cheating,’ I shouted, as she was naming places that could not be seen with the naked eye.

  ‘Fermanagh, Loughill, Mass hill, Shercock, Shancoduff, Ballybay – Cassidy’s and McDaid’s.

  ‘What’s the biggest hill?’

  ‘Mass hill.’

  ‘Who owns the blue sheep?’

  ‘Henrys.’

  She plucked a stem of bog-cotton and said she’d missed the bog flowers. I couldn�
��t believe how much she’d remembered. Once I’d have won this game we were playing of naming places that could be seen from the bog (which divided McDaid’s land from Cassidys’) but it seemed the place names had stayed more alive in Martha’s memory than in my own, and me living all this time beside them.

  ‘It’s the details help you hang on to a place, Michael, when you’re away as long as me,’ Martha said.

  She had wanted to see the spot where once we would have our chats, our ‘private liaisons’. And I agreed to show her my foxes. After an hour or so, it was clear there would be no detail of our history here together that she would leave untouched. To deflect, I asked her about herself, how life had been in America, but she was vague about it, said her friends had helped her and that she’d ended up in some weird town in California (near Roswell) where she’d had some brainwave-slash-epiphany thing which had launched her forward. The details of this she was not talkative about. I presumed it was only as she didn’t want to be yammering on all the time about how successful she was. Martha had always been a most modest person.

  ‘Where was it you did it, Michael?’ she said then, as I sort of knew she would, eventually, and I felt my bones chill. I looked at her and knew from the wide earnest eyes of her exactly what she meant.

  ‘Over there,’ I said, and pointed to a flat stretch of lichen, close to the stream. I was sort of annoyed she’d brought the matter up. I wanted to ask did she want to erect a fucking plaque there or what but of course I didn’t. She turned away.

  ‘You were a god, Michael. Do you know that?’ she said, her back to me.

  ‘A wha’?’ I said, mock-incredulously.

  ‘You heard. Remember you drove into that gig on a motorbike?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said. And I started thinking again of our days in the band.