The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Riverside Inn,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s it. You see, you’ve not forgotten. Like fucking Kurt Cobain, you were, remember? You were so…’ Martha didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. I knew what she meant.

  ‘Things change, Martha,’ I said. ‘After Eugene… I couldn’t let Ma down… she was… well, she was a bloody mess after it all.’

  ‘You tried to kill yourself, Michael. And I totally blame her.’ To this, I said the words: it wasn’t because of Ma at all… well, I mouthed them, without volume, because I was nervous, had felt I was hitherto coming across like I suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome so I held back, possibly on the one thing I should have said outright to her. I realised that in all the years we’d been apart she still did not know why I’d come up to the bog that day. She’d thought it was to do with my mother’s usual prodding and poking. I saw, too, that Martha still had the old confidence in me; still saw in me that ‘god’, as she put it. So how could I tell her I’d come up here like a ninny, missing my dead brother, pulled this way and that by my mother’s attempts to wreck my life as she had Eugene’s, stuck between love and guilt and sick with the indecision, at once paralysed and overwhelmed, and taken a blade to my own arms – because of her, because she was going to leave me, here, alone, in this closed and sodden tomb of a county.

  *

  That night I arrived home to find Ma had bolted the door. I’d had a few jars with Martha in town and had walked her back on the balmy night to Josie’s, her aunt’s place. (In the pub, we’d bumped into a few old faces, including Noel, who ran his father’s butchers on High Street. He’d drummed with us for a while. Everyone was glad to see us. In fact, the whole evening had been rather wonderful. And I was closer to feeling like a god this first night with Martha than I’d felt in a long time.)

  ‘Open the door, Ma,’ I shouted up at the window. No sound. Then the curtains were wrenched back and I could see her staring down at me, glasses on, chocolate-brown hairnet pinned to her head, no doubt to protect for Coco Conway those grey-golden Meryl Streep-ish locks of hers.

  ‘Come on, Ma. Open the door,’ I shouted. I could hear her footsteps then, heavy on the stairs, and eventually she unlocked the door making a big ceremonious deal out of the whole lot – the bolts, the mortice lock – and opened it, slightly, with the chain still on, and looked straight at me, her own and only living son: ‘Who is it?’ she said.

  ‘Jesus fuck, you know it’s me, Ma! You just looked down at me from the window.’ And then this long, black shotgun was being pointed at me, and I screamed. As soon as she pulled back I burst clean through the door, breaking the chain. When I stumbled in, Ma was up against the stairs, pointing the yoke straight at me. I honestly thought she would fire. I could see something dark and cruel in her. In all the years we’d been cooped up in this house together (which was bad enough after Eugene and worse after my father died) I’d never directly encountered this look but I had felt it. In every sarcastic comment, in the way she’d no tenderness for me, not at any time or in any situation, in how she would mock the music I listened to and denounce my fox-feeding to the worst animal-haters that would come into the shop. Now, in the half-dark of the room, I saw her for real, sort of maskless. I saw with alcohol-derived clarity that there was something caught, trapped between us, that was almost creaturish, like an albatross – weighed down and entangled in net: it was blame. I fucking knew it, I said to myself, as she stood there in her long white nightdress that was shamefully flimsy and bare feet with the rough-skinned toes all painted up in a brash persimmon-coloured nail varnish, her eyes ablaze and narrow like a snake’s, or a fox about to pounce on a rat. She blamed me for Eugene. (I had always the sense that because I was in a band she thought it must have been me who’d dragged Eugene into the scene he was in. But he was well capable of finding his own trouble.)

  ‘You were out with that one,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s that one?’

  ‘That hussy. The Cassidy one.’

  ‘Don’t talk about her like that,’ I said, quite viciously, near enough forgetting about the gun, though, like I said, I’d had a few jars. I pulled back then, just to be on the safe side. ‘Put. The gun. Down. Ma. For fuck’s sake.’

  ‘She was never any good.’

  I let out a big sigh, went to the door, saying I’d sleep in the barn as I couldn’t stand to listen to her any more, nor be in the same house with someone pointing a gun at me.

  ‘Come back, Michael,’ she said, seeing me go to leave. When I stopped, she went to the cupboard under the stairs, lodged the gun inside, covered it with a few coats and closed the door.

  ‘Pretty bloody handy with that gun aren’t you, Ma?’

  ‘Never know what scum’d be calling these nights,’ she said. ‘And besides, wouldn’t a mother need a gun with a son like you comes in stocious drunk with the big foul breath on him?’ Well, I couldn’t resist. It was like those articles I’d read in the shop when I was bored, which was most days, about people in northern England or southern America who supposedly had ‘out of body experiences.’. That’s what it felt like as I lunged at my own mother and let out an enormous stinky breath directly into her face. She screwed up her eyes and mouth with the repugnancy of it, turned away.

  ‘Oh, this is what she’s done to you. What she’s always done to you. Makes you belligerent. That’s what it is.’

  ‘It’s not belligerence! It’s fucking freedom. That’s what she gives me, Ma. Freedom to be myself. Li-ber-ty!’

  ‘Liberty!’ Ma said, mockingly, and stood there shaking her head, a crafty smile spreading across her face. I was annoyed that she could come so quickly back from the disgusting thing I’d just done to her. I think I would have halted in my tracks, thrown myself down at her feet, begging her forgiveness had she, say, started to cry. But no, she’d gotten a taste for a row and was going to stand her ground, and she did, and she looked just like she did in the poster on the wall by the shop door, and it was then I realised she fucking loved it, the drama, the operatic proportions of things, the rows between us.

  ‘Come on, Ma, let’s go to bed,’ I said, afraid for the thing to get out of hand and all too aware that both of us had easy access to a gun.

  ‘I’ve heard a few things about Martha Cassidy and her fabulous singing career. Oh, I’ve heard plenty.’

  ‘Like what have you heard? And from whom? The biddies round this way? They’d make muck of a saint,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t a biddy who told me,’ Ma said.

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Never you fucking mind who told me.’

  ‘Don’t swear, Ma, it doesn’t suit you. Told you what?’

  ‘Just how your precious Martha Cassidy’s been making a living over there, and it’s not by singing. It’s by lying on her back, best way she knows how.’ I looked at my mother, at her mouth all foamy and thin and twisted, and all the horrific stories I would read in the newspapers each day came suddenly into my mind, instantly metamorphosed as stories with me and Ma in the starring roles: Son bludgeons own mother to death in row; ‘Meryl Streep’ mowed down in Castlemoyne; Son of woman-who-ruined-his-relationship-with-the-love-of-his-life-and-caused-her-firstborn- son-to-stop-taking-his-insulin-in-order-to-get-the-fuck-away-from-her turns nasty and shoots his mother’s head clean off. All this zipped through my brain (along with the words Ma had just said about Martha earning her keep in a supine position), as the two of us stood there, simmering with rage in the alcohol-scented room, and way way way back towards my spinal cortex a little thought started up, that just maybe my mother was right (about Martha). This was the terrible, insidious hold Ma had on me: that even when she was spiteful and wicked, a part of me thought she was right.

  I could hear her wandering around upstairs. She had the radio on and was pottering about, probably working herself up into a tizzy (as she was prone to do), probably coming on all Elsa Lanchester and launching into Out Damn Spot.
Why is it you like that speech, I asked her once and she said it was because she could relate to her, Lady Macbeth. Well, just let her fucking sleepwalk, I said to myself. Ever since my father died it was me who had to watch out for her so she wouldn’t be getting upset and go sleepwalking into the bog behind the house, like she did a few times, after Eugene’s death especially, and went spraining her ankle once with it, too. So I went to the door and undid all the bolts in the hope that tonight she would go out and sleepwalk. I’d a good mind, too, to empty all her Clonazepam and bottles of sal volatile down the sink. I was in such a mood I was inclined to lure her up to the bog myself.

  Instead, I went to the long sideboard that housed my stereo and old LPs and took out my favourite album. It felt damp and dusty in my hands. I removed the vinyl from the Nevermind sleeve: between the two hovered the mildew-y, tobacco-y, vaguely semen-y smell of my youth. I placed the needle on ‘Something in the Way’. I turned the volume up, loud, then louder still. I jumped onto the sofa and violently thrummed my air-guitar, louder in my mind than Kurt Cobain had ever played it and sang directly up to the ceiling so she could hear. I had not forgotten the words, which had quartered themselves somewhere in my DNA, like a long-abandoned prayer:

  Underneath the bridge

  the tarp has sprung a leak

  the animals I’ve trapped

  have all become my pets

  When the song was done, I flung myself down onto the sofa to catch my breath. I lit up a cigarette, rested my two feet on the coffee table (something Ma hated me doing), and started to laugh. Between jumping around to the song, meeting Martha and having a good night out, I was beginning at last to feel more in the world than out of it. I was all sweaty and stinking from the jumping and air-guitaring so I took off my jacket and shirt. And immediately I was hurled back seventeen years, as my eyes followed the curling paths, first on my left arm, then on my right, of the long, deep, milk-white scars.

  *

  The next day, Ma had me plagued in the shop, giving me this order and that return for the Cash and Carry. I’d been sneezing all morning but Ma was pretending the whole episode of the night before hadn’t happened.

  ‘Keep some of this chocolate in the fridge, nice and cool it is then. Always the mark of a sophisticated shop when you can get a cold Turkish Delight,’ she said, sort of distant and falsely chipper, as if I was not her son, but a sales rep. or customer. But I wouldn’t let her off with her aloofness; I was determined to cheer her up.

  ‘See Ma, you’re a hostess type of woman.’

  ‘I am not. But I might have been a hostess type of woman,’ she replied, ‘if I’d gone to the Abbey, who knows.’ This was ‘the great tragedy’ in our family, the one, at least, that was allowed to be spoken of. That Ma had turned down the Abbey Theatre when they’d asked her to join them due to the pressure of her own mother. Ma always told this story without any words of regret, claiming her mother had been right. Though the regret was nonetheless palpable. It may not have contained a single word of regret but the way Ma would tell the story, it had the delivery of Tragedy in which she became St Joan, and so it was for others, her family mostly (of which I was now the last), to observe the terrible wrong that had been done to poor Constance.

  ‘A family of entertainers we all were,’ I joked, ever so slightly hinting at my own lost career, but Ma did not hear this in my voice. Instead, she took my surface-joviality as permission to hightail it back to the past, once more to Eugene.

  ‘When he was younger, he used to like sneaking into the shop, stealing away with the sweets.’

  ‘That was me,’ I said.

  ‘No. It was Eugene.’

  ‘No, Ma, it was me used steal the sweets. You have it mixed up. Eugene couldn’t have sweets on account of…’ I stopped short because I could see what she was doing. Changing the past so Eugene would emerge the perfect dead son. Just as she had whitewashed the events that had led up to his death.

  ‘No. That’s it. He couldn’t. But I used to catch him in here all the same.’

  ‘That’s because he was at the till,’ I replied.

  ‘Shut the fecking hell up,’ she said.

  ‘He was never after the sweets, Ma. But he was after stealing money and you know it, too. I’ll say no more, Ma, but get it right.’ By now she had her hands over her ears.

  ‘No, you get it right. Eugene had the big brains that would take him to Dublin to Trinity College to be a doctor with the best Leaving Certificate results a boy could get in the whole of Ireland, and coming out of this wee dot on the map of the world. MOYNE BOY WONDER, the papers said, knocked down in his prime by a weakness in his blood. That’s it, Michael, and that’s all it is with Eugene.’ I wanted to vigorously argue this but I hadn’t the energy or courage so I let it go.

  We spent the morning stacking and pricing tins in silence. People came and went, and we kept the radio on loud so no one would notice we weren’t speaking. After lunch I thought I could hear the far-off purr of an engine, increasing in power as it came close to the shop. Eventually, the doorbell rang and Martha came in, head to toe in bike leathers, a glossy black bike helmet hanging out of her hand. She looked unbelievable.

  ‘Connie,’ she said, greeting my mother, who grunted a reply and went to tear the plastic off a new delivery.

  ‘I found your motorbike, Michael. The Norton,’ Martha said. ‘I was wondering if you’d like to give her a test run.’ I felt a combination of adrenalin and lust course through my veins and was unbuttoning my shop-coat before I knew it.

  ‘Sure, look at the cut of him. Hasn’t he a cold from being out half of the night?’ Ma said.

  ‘We won’t be long,’ Martha said.

  ‘I’ll get you a jumper,’ Ma said, and was almost off to get it and me letting her when I saw the horror at that sentence on Martha’s face.

  ‘A jumper? Don’t be getting me a jumper. My jacket’s fine, sure,’ I said. I took off the shop-coat, threw it on the counter, took my jacket off the coat-hanger and put it on. ‘I won’t be long, Ma. I just want to see the bike again, that’s all, ’ I said. To which Martha added, ‘aren’t we only going for the wee ride, Connie,’ and she winked at me in quite an alarming, exciting way, and I turned and saw that Ma was not disgusted by this, but sad, and so help me I felt sorry for her. Then Ma had to go and spoil even my ridiculous pity.

  ‘Tell me this, Martha.’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘How is it, if you’re so big in America, no one’s heard of you here? You’ve never been on the radio, or in the Irish Times. Northern Star is the only place I’ve ever seen you. And sure Josie could say anything to them and they’d print it. Josie’s always bigging you up. Ever since your father, she…’ and then Ma stopped short. Martha did not look happy.

  ‘“Ever since your father” what, Connie?’ Martha said. I tried to sort of push Martha out the door then but she was determined to get to the bottom of Ma’s dig.

  ‘Ma meant nothing.’

  ‘Oh yes she did.’

  Martha probably didn’t know it but this is what Ma had been waiting for. Ma would always want to be led up to the big dramatic speech (the précis was never her forte; she needed expansion, brewing room for venom). It was her modus operandi. I should know. And sure enough, Martha had pressed the right button and Big Dramatic Speech was delivered: ‘I meant, when he was caught mixing the milk with the water, and the dairies were all closed. Do you remember that, Michael? Of course we know now it was because he was thick with them fellas with their big politics and bigger drug rings. A lot of people lost their jobs over that scam; lots of retailers got caught out by it, too. Do you not remember, Michael, when we were shocked to hear the likes of them fellas would even think of bleeding money from a clapped-out Monaghan dairy when they could be at your glamorous, lucrative crimes like, I don’t know, robbing banks or post offices.’

  ‘You fucking bitch,’ Martha said.

  ‘Didn’t I always say she had a foul mouth?’ Ma said, lo
oking at me. I squared up to Ma and made a ZIP IT gesture to my own mouth. Then Martha burst across me, her years in America ringing out in the cadences of every sentence.

  ‘I bet you were glad to see the back of me, Connie, eh? And you know what? I still didn’t get an explanation. What reason do you have for stopping Michael and me marrying that time, huh? You’d think you’d have backed off by now. Because didn’t he have to go and pay a heavy price for it, and hasn’t he paid up big time, Connie?’

  ‘He’s got a good life,’ Ma said.

  ‘Eugene had a good life too and looked what happened to him! Seems the action in this house is so fucking spectacular all the men can’t wait to be getting away from it! And now we’re on that subject, I’m sure you know about Michael’s little heart-to-heart with Eugene at the hospital that time. I’m sure by now Michael has told you all about it…’ and then she looked at me, at my big vacant face. She looked from me to Ma. It must have been obvious I’d not told Ma a single word of my last conversation with Eugene.

  ‘No more, Martha!’ I said.

  ‘Whist, will you, Michael,’ Ma said, as if I wasn’t even in the room.

  ‘So you listen to me,’ Martha continued, ‘because me and him are going on that bike right now and we’re going to tear up this fucking road, do you hear?’ Ma backed off. I grabbed Martha, pulled her out of the shop. Outside, I revved up the Norton for the first time in nearly two decades, and sped off with Martha sitting behind me, her arms wrapped tightly around my waist.

  *

  The last time I’d seen the Norton was the summer of 1993. It was the last night Martha and I were a couple; the night she said it was her or Ma and that she believed I would never get up from under my mother’s feet, and that after Eugene died, Ma had me good and proper and it was crucial I get away from her (‘cut the fucking umbilical cord’ were Martha’s exact words); the night she said she would be leaving for America, leaving the band, leaving Castlemoyne, and that if I wanted her I should go with her; the night I ran like a frightened little girl into the bleak bog, running for home. And so the bike stayed all these years at Josie’s. Because I’d not had the courage to go back for it. Not after the split with Martha, and not after I’d split open my two arms and near enough emptied them of all life up on the bog. I was glad to be on that bike again. I was ecstatic. But despite Martha’s hair blowing forward into my face and the black softness of it, I could not get Ma and her sad, defeated look in the shop out of my mind. I dropped Martha off at Josie’s and rode as if I’d never been off that bike – straight for home. I reckoned then that I was a hopeless case, and was probably much worse than Norman Bates, who at least had madness as an excuse, whereas mine was a warped, utterly misplaced and unrelenting sense of filial fucking duty.