The Scattering

by Jaki McCarrick

  *

  There’s a picture in Ma’s room of me and Eugene as kids. She’s in the middle, sitting in a chair in the garden. He’s sort of behind her, like he’s in charge or something, and I’m standing beside her, chest out, grinning, my legs apart like John Wayne. Eugene is holding a turquoise-coloured ball. The way he holds the ball always would pull me into that photo. Up to his chest, firmly, as if he’d been fully involved in his game of ball-playing before being called to sit for the photo, probably by my father. Most kids would have let that ball go, run off to the new adventure of having their picture taken, but Eugene was never like most kids. He brings the ball. It’s his thing. The call to the photo has interrupted him. He is saying, as he stands there behind my mother, his already manly hand around the ball, that he is a private person with his own world, that he is not available. I look different. Though only a year younger, I don’t have that sense of purpose, of self-possession, of interest in anything other than smiling stupidly at the camera. Three or four years after the photo is taken, Eugene is diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. And everyone says it was then we sort of lost him. First, he would retreat into his books, then show up late for the shots (in the days of hypodermic-administered insulin) that my mother would give him, and when he was older he’d stay out with his glue-sniffing friends in the town (a crowd worse even than the grunge-heads I knew, who at least were making music, creating stuff). But I think differently. In the photo I can see it: the distance from us has already started. I can see it in the way he holds that ball; he’s apart, chosen his own company. And I sometimes wonder how my mother and father could not have noticed this earlier about their strange but beautiful boy, that he was always playing his own game, and would never let anyone else in.

  *

  It was Josie’s birthday. She was sixty-five. Martha said that this was why she had come home: to do something nice for her aunt, who had looked after her all those years when her father was busy with his ‘politics’ (since the scandal with the dairy he had moved to Dundalk and Martha had seen little of him). Martha invited me to the bash which, she apologised, was to consist of a séance of some kind followed by drinks and snacks al fresco. She said she thought I might think the affair too hokey. I didn’t think it too hokey at all. It wasn’t as if I’d been to anything much that wasn’t hokey in about seventeen years. Josie was glad to see me. I had bumped into her a few times in town, always making my excuses, rushing off somewhere. In seventeen years we’d not had a proper conversation, and I never once asked her how Martha was doing, though I’d read all the features about Martha’s singing career in the Northern Star. Now, sitting out on the long lawn in front of Josie’s cottage, the sky’s blueness fading to the grey bruised colour of early moonlight, I turned and saw Josie, Coco Conway, the large bleach-blonde medium, a few others, all gathered round the table in Josie’s front room, and I was sorry I’d not been friendlier all those years.

  Martha and I were sipping slowly at our glasses of wine, our seats placed before a crest of blue hydrangeas and southernwood while we listened in to the séance. (It sounded like a lot of fun that séance and I half wondered if I should go in myself and ask for Eugene to be ‘got in touch with’ so I could tell him what a cunt I thought he was for doing what he did.) It felt fine to be out in the moonlight with Martha. I looked at her sitting in her deckchair, her legs crossed, her top leg swinging slowly back and forth, so that when it was forth it was nicely inclined towards me. Sometimes she would look up at the sky, trying to make out the constellations, and this would give me occasion to consider the situation. For I kept having to remind myself that no matter what strange notions I had about time, about not being able to feel correctly its passage, knowing other people could feel time more correctly, more conventionally somehow, but that I could not, seventeen years had actually passed since we’d been ‘a couple’. Because I was tempted to believe that what had really passed was just one continuous day. This one day where I open my eyes in the morning, get up, brush my teeth, work, eat, go to bed, sleep – with her not there. And as I more or less did that every day for seventeen years, it did not feel like 17 x 365 days, it felt like one day. Which is why I could not fully feel that it was over between us. Because the thing that had separated us, time, I was not able to experience. Of course, I kept such thoughts to myself.

  ‘This place you said you went to in California, where you had your awakening thing, what did you say it was named after?’

  ‘A TV quiz-show.’

  ‘Jesus. Strange name that, Truth or Consequences.’

  ‘It is, I suppose.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t have an epiphany in a town with a name like that?’

  ‘It has these lithium-rich waters. Maybe that’s what did it. The lithium,’ she said. I smiled at that, thinking of ‘Lithium’, the Nirvana song we’d both loved once.

  ‘Roswell is due east, close to the Mexican border,’ she said. ‘Now that’s a really interesting place. Still dining out on the whole alien thing, of course, and why not? People move there for the dry air. It’s good for the bones. Unlike the Monaghan damp which makes cripples of everyone. Josie’s destroyed with arthritis.’

  ‘What else do you remember about life here,’ I asked, sort of hoping she might think of the old days, or else maybe remind me again what a ‘god’ she thought I was.

  ‘I remember our gigs,’ she replied. I nodded. ‘I remember Dalty O’Hanlon sleeping in a coffin, jumping off the balcony of the Adelphi Cinema, thought he was a vampire. At A Fistful of Dollars and wearing a cape.’

  ‘He broke his legs doing it,’ I said.

  ‘Castlemoyne was like the Wild West back then,’ Martha said.

  ‘Remember Dinger?’

  ‘Dinger Ward?’ As she tried to put a face to the name, I got up and did an impersonation of Dinger Ward’s walk, which was like that of a tight-arsed penguin.

  ‘He walked with his fists clenched, like this.’

  ‘Just in case?’

  ‘Just in case.’

  ‘They were violent times,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘Hard young men with no jobs on the borderlands. That’s what it was, Martha.’

  ‘I thought there’d be better people, better men. You know, not long after us, me and men didn’t work out, Michael.’

  ‘There must have been someone,’ I said. Martha shook her head. And just as things were starting to get interesting, the séance party broke up. I could hear raised voices. I glanced back at the house and saw Josie and Coco on the porch but ignored them as the moment between Martha and me was far too electric to disturb.

  ‘Mother of Jesus,’ Coco said, rushing towards us. Dogs were barking from the yards of nearby farms so eventually I stood up to see what all the commotion was about.

  ‘By the roads, look,’ Josie said, pointing to the lane. A female figure was walking towards us with her arms out. It was a startling and unsettling sight, for the woman was completely naked. Across her legs were wisps of grass, bracken, cuds of the thick black mud of the bog. Her figure was strong and full, her breasts heavy, the nipples dark.

  ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus,’ I said, upon recognition.

  ‘Oh dear Christ,’ Martha said, upon recognition.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Josie said, as the figure of my mother came towards us.

  ‘Is that… is that…’ Coco asked, his jaw dropping further and further so that if he had finished that sentence and said my mother’s actual name I would have punched him.

  ‘Get some slippers for Christ’s sake,’ Josie said, ‘and some clothes. Coco! Stop gawping will ya and get Connie some slippers and a blanket!’ Coco hurried to the house. Martha looked at me, nodding. I knew what she was thinking: there she goes again, Constance McDaid and her marvellous acting, about to hijack the show, wreck the party she has not even been invited to. This was the kind of thing Martha had often thought, and said, about my mother.

  ‘Did you ever see such a thing in your entire
life?’ Josie said, with utmost compassion in her voice.

  ‘She should get an Oscar for this performance,’ Martha said, with none.

  ‘She’s sleepwalking. Usually only does it when someone dies, or she gets nervous,’ I said. I went to my mother, wrapped my jacket around her. She shrugged it off.

  ‘Wake up, Ma. You’re out. At Josie’s. It’s her birthday,’ I said.

  ‘I’m looking for my son,’ Ma said, plaintively, so that I wanted to hug her, tell her everything would be fine.

  ‘Here I am, Ma. Come on now and we’ll go home.’ But then she looked at me with a great sourness in her face.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘my son Eugene.’ Her words stung me with a scorpion-like precision, not least because they had been heard by all present.

  ‘Come on,’ Josie said, ‘I’ll drive you both home.’ I turned to explain to Martha, to let her know that I’d to deal with this, bring Ma home, give her her pills (get some clothes on her at least), and to communicate that I was sorry to leave the wonderful reminiscing we were having, but Martha had left already, was about to enter the house, her head bowed, evidently no longer prepared to give my mother any more of her time, probably as she considered Ma had taken up enough of it. As I watched her go in, more slumped, more the Martha who had lived here before, unfree, smaller than the apparition who had entered the shop a week or so before, I knew then that I’d lost her. For the second time.

  Now it was Ma who was sneezing and going round the place all sheepish. I had still not worked out what had caused her to go so far with the sleepwalking, or why she’d had no clothes on her at all, except that with the warmth of the night she had probably gone to bed without them. These were not thoughts I wanted to dwell on. Anyway, I didn’t tell her where I was going. ‘A fag break,’ I said and she nodded. When I got to the bog road, Martha was waiting, all zipped up in her close-fitting jacket. As we walked, both a little breathless, I sensed a tension between us. Eventually she came out with it: ‘I changed my booking, Michael. I’m heading back Friday.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, coolly. I could straight away feel myself shutting down a little inside (due to the thought of returning to that Norman Bates-type creature). But I’d no claim on Martha, no claim on her whatsoever. ‘You should go back,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing for you here now.’ Then we walked quietly up to the bog. What we saw when we got there knocked all thoughts of Martha leaving out of my head. For lying in a great awful heap by the rock where we would sit, were three, four dead foxes. I recognised them immediately as the mother and her cubs that I’d been feeding. The sight of them there, bullet-riddled, was something to behold. They lay slack-jawed, their eyes closed, side by side, as if they’d clung to each other in their final minutes.

  ‘What. The. Fuck.’

  ‘Oh, it’s awful!’ Martha said. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ I could think of several people, their faces immediately collapsing in my mind into a single face, a single set of cruel dead eyes peering down the barrel of a gun.

  ‘Oh God!’ I kept repeating. ‘They’re supposed to get permission. The gun clubs. This side of the border alone there’s Castlemoyne, Tullycorbe, Castleshane…’

  ‘Gun clubs?’

  ‘Or Jack Daly, worried about his bloody sheep.’ As soon as I said Daly’s name it was he I saw (in my mind) shooting the foxes. ‘Bastard! He’s been saying he wasn’t happy I’d been feeding them up here. I’ll fucking kill him!’ I was about to run down to Daly’s cabin when Martha held me back by the arm. Just her touch seemed to make everything melt inside me and so help me I started to cry.

  ‘Oh, Michael. Don’t make it worse.’

  ‘I loved them, Martha.’

  ‘There’ll be no sympathy for you here, Michael. Not with foxes.’

  ‘Aren’t you the only one ever understood me here?’

  ‘How do you live in such a place? You, who’s so sensitive, the sweetest man. How do you live with these people who don’t, won’t, understand you? Who would kill your foxes, knowing they were yours?’

  ‘It was probably the gun club.’

  ‘It was probably your mother, Michael!’

  ‘She wouldn’t.’

  ‘She fucking would. Oh, when will you wake up? Eugene couldn’t stand her. Everyone bloody knows he stopped taking his insulin on purpose except her.’ Then I turned from her, my head (and heart) reeling, and scooped up the plump bodies. I brought the fox and her cubs to a small bog pool, thick with duckweed, and buried them in the dank and stagnant water, covered the mass of fur with stones. As I placed the last stone on the pile, Martha sighed and went and sat on the long rock. After it was done, I wiped my hands in moss and lit up a cigarette. Martha was looking out at the land below, and I could tell by the way she looked, with a strange blend of love and disgust and rage, that when she would leave here she would never return.

  ‘Your mother will be wondering where you’ve got to, Michael,’ she said. I got the sarcasm.

  ‘Come on, we better go,’ I said.

  ‘Look, I haven’t been entirely honest with you,’ she said.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘I didn’t just come home for Josie. I thought, maybe, here, I could… Josie’s been exaggerating my success, is what I mean, Michael. At singing. I did a few good gigs, got good reviews. But you see…’ and I noticed she seemed again as she had the night before, smaller, less angelic.

  ‘You see, Michael, that town I was in… the epiphany thing… I’d been at music for years, not getting anywhere. And then I was invited to do a gig in this hotel, and when I got there, about two people showed and the gig was cancelled. But it was there, I suddenly realised something. That it was all a sort of con. Ambition. Getting where? Where’s the top? Where is it? And that’s the moment I started to relax. To sleep properly. A lot of the cares I’d had before just vanished, and I’d bathe in the healing waters they have there every morning. In 38 degree centigrade, lithium-rich water. I made friends there, too. One of these – we call her the Countess – has bought a bar. Not far from Truth or Consequences. Between there and Roswell. She wants it to be a music-orientated bar, a few alien dummies, maybe, but she wants me to run it. For a couple of years. I think you should run it with me. You’d be good at that, Michael. What do you say?’ Martha lay back on the rock, facing the sky. I wondered if I should mention the thing that Ma had hinted at, the rumours about how Martha had been earning her living (i.e. supinely) but suddenly I didn’t care one way or the other. ‘Michael,’ she said, ‘just think about it, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said. I saw in her eyes then that her life in the States had not been easy, and I felt pity for her. I could see, too, that maybe this Roswell bar thing was, as far as she was concerned anyway, her last shot at a vaguely interesting life.

  ‘Once I asked you to choose,’ she said, ‘between me and Connie. It was probably too much to ask, after Eugene, I see that now. So I won’t ask you to do that again. But this day, Michael, after all that has happened: your beautiful foxes, herself ruining the party, give me this day and not her, will you? Before I go back, huh?’ For a split-second I did actually think of getting back to the shop. Then my eye drew up on something lying in the grass. I kicked at it, picked it up: a two-inch, cinnamon-red, gold-rimmed cartridge shell. I brought the shell to my nose. The former liveliness of the foxes I had come to know and love haunted the cold, indicting smell of sulphur. I put the shell in my pocket and walked towards Martha who was lying back on the rock like some kind of terrific ancient sacrifice. I went to her, my face wet with tears, cupped my hands around her hair and she came towards me.

  *

  We were to leave the following week. Martha made all the arrangements. She changed her booking, made a new one for me. I spent three days sorting myself out with appropriate clothes, suncreams, US dollars; filled several rubbish bags with junk and in so doing revealed a bedroom that looked to have been the room of a child or teenager. (Posters of Bruce Lee, skateboard-themed wallpaper.) It fe
lt enormously gratifying to take all that old stuff from walls and drawers and plunge it into rubbish bags. Also into the bags went my comics, my stash of Men Only magazines and all the touristic tat Ma and I had bought on our trips to Donegal, Cork and Kerry. (Including the framed photo of us outside Blarney Castle, where Ma had refused to trust the man responsible for holding visitors as they bent backwards to kiss the Blarney stone, saying she could smell alcohol off his breath and that he was bound to drop us all to our deaths down the unguarded opening, and a ruckus had broken out so they’d asked us to leave. As well as the watercolour from Letterfrack where, in a corner of that lonesome wilderness, we had bumped into the British MP, Robin Cook, the year before he died.) So by the end of my dumping session all that was left were my more modern clothes, a few books, CDs, select mementoes. My old life was over and my new life was about to begin. So why did I feel so confused? Was it because I had secretly (really secretly) loved these days in this house with my mother? The years of our sometimes-humorous bickering; watching rented films and bringing the two of us cocoa; blackberry-picking in September so she could make jam; meals on the first Sunday of the month in the Shercock Hotel and everyone knowing me and Ma, knowing she was once Meryl Streep and had a great talent and that I wasn’t so bad either. Hadn’t it secretly made me feel all sort of safe and warm inside? And what was this I was about to do anyway? Take a one-way flight to L fucking A. Not Boston or New York or Chicago, but LAX, California, to shack up with Martha in the desert. Thoughts of all of this new stuff jingled around my head like loose change. I started to sweat. Maybe, I should hang on, a day, two. I’d boasted (a lot) about the new life I was about to have with Martha and the plans we had to do music again (slight exaggeration) but still I sensed Ma did not believe me somehow. As if she could read my mind and see my conflictedness and understand it better than I could myself. Not once did she ask me to stay. And though I’d spent an entire day trying to get it out of her: was she sleepwalking or ‘acting’, was it her who killed my foxes or some other, I believed her when she said she was sleepwalking and that she’d never kill my foxes. She was my mother for God’s sake, no matter what Martha thought of her.