The Scattering (22 page)

If I could fling the kidney bowl at the door someone would come. There is now an awful smell in this room. A bad, bad smell. It stinks. Of oils, flesh.

The silence is shrill. I have been singing songs in my head in order to short-circuit the overpowering strength of it but this has been creating its own monotony, its own tyranny. I will just have to continue with these short rib breaths, and wait, though I do seem to have developed an ache from all this waiting and heaving. If only there was even the faintest hint in here of the efficient hive that is the cardiac annex, but nothing. The room is like a sealed container. The high, miniature glazed brick that serves as my ‘window' an impediment to sound and air. Only, I do hear something. A tiny, flapping murmur. And it's been there for some time, merged within the shrill, rhythmic silence, not distinguishable enough for me to have hitherto singled it out. Something faint. What is it? To the left. I see it. It is a fly.

*

The fly. Its dark, silver-green body has been flitting along the upper tiles of the room for such a long time. Sudden flight and rest. Sudden flight and rest. Though I seem unable to sense the passing of time, I do think I've watched him now for at least an hour.

The door opens. Three men in orange uniforms brush past the side of my bed, disengage the pus and blood-filled drip. They bring with them the familiar smell of sweat. They do not catch my eye. I certainly cannot form words. At last, I think, I will soon be out in the clear air and the drip that has saved me, provided vital fluids and cleansed my blood, will no longer be required. Soon they will take me to sanctuary, to a light room with bay windows and fruit, views of the harbour; the iced-over pond where Canada geese will be screeching their rubbery heels to a halt on the ice; people skiing to work through placards of white fog, perhaps over parked cars as they had done the morning I arrived. Perhaps it has stopped snowing.

The fly lands on the crisp, white linen cuff of my sheet. Crawls a light, haphazard path up my pale, flaxen-haired arm. Hovers around my chest, lands on my raw pink stitches. I lightly blow him off. He springs to my wrist, where I notice I have a large vinegar-brown cloakroom tag dangling from a hoop of twine. My chest absolutely aches. From breathing and waiting and heaving yes, but also from something else. There is a frenzied buzzing inside my heart. It echoes the fly. The fly is wiping his pin-legs like paws. Licking and wiping and resting. Licking and wiping and resting. Hopping at intervals. His eyes drill. He watches with slow intent, like a basilisk. I see his eyes are lashed. I begin to wonder if he is a she.

The men in orange enter again, wheel me out. Talk about last night's game in hushed tones, stop. I want to ask about the cricket. England versus New Zealand. Who opened? Who bowled? Had it been Woods with his trademark parsimony? For a second I think of the Ashes in summer, and wonder will it rain at Lords. People are crying in the corridors. Melanie is crying. Melanie was always a terrible actress. Plaistow is plying the crying Melanie with white tissues from a blue box. His steady hands reach out for hers. My blue-eyed children are crying and shrinking from me.

They wheel me into a large red and black room, heavy with that smell, Eucalyptus, pine, flesh. I feel instantly marooned. The room is in the Victorian block. It is stygian, colder. They leave me alone. With the fly. Why is she so attached to me? Why does she wait? Ah. Eyelids weigh down on a throb, on a pitch-black breath. And finally, it dawns.

The Hemingway Papers

As a boy her father had owned a mare called Nellie, whose skin, he claimed, was as dark as blackstrap molasses. Whenever he was sad or ill his thoughts would return to Nellie and what had happened to her; in the hospital he would tell and retell Nellie's story. He was eleven years old when he'd found the mare caught up in barbed wire at the top of the bog. He'd unloosed her and walked her home and he and his father hoisted her then in a sling to the joists of a barn, where, all summer long they lovingly nursed her back to health. Clare noticed how her father would always build the story up so as to make clear the message of
a good deed returned
: ‘When she was well she bolted only once, with us out after her. And the second we left, lightning struck the barn and it burst into flames. Had Nellie not done that, me and my father would have died inside that barn.'

Now her father was asking for the stories he had written
.
He said they were in a red box brought over from London when the family had returned to Ireland. When he first mentioned the box Clare had thought him delirious for it had never arrived; he'd left it behind him years ago in their council flat in north London, the keys of which he had illegally sold to a friend of his for a thousand pounds. Besides, even if she were to find the box, she believed the chances of discovering anything inside it remotely resembling a written story were slim, for she'd never seen her father write more than a few letters. Certainly, no one in the family had ever believed him when he said he'd done a correspondence course in short-story writing with Ernest Hemingway.

‘You probably mislaid them,' she said.

‘No. They're in the box. No mistake about it. There's nothing wrong with my memory.'

‘Why do you want to see that stuff now?'

‘To read. For you to read, Clare. It's important.'

Every day, when she went to visit, her father would ask her had she found the box. And each time she would stop short of reminding him that it had never arrived. She felt it would be like reminding him of his enormous failure as a father. That he'd neither seen to the removal of their furniture from London to Ireland – nor to the transportation of his own things, that he'd hung back in London while her mother had reared her and her siblings alone and that he'd only holed up with them years later when he'd run out of money. That was the truth of it and Clare knew that somewhere inside her father, he knew it. But there was no point in going through all of that again. They had rowed about it for too many years – about his drinking, gambling, general abdication from all responsibility as a parent. Now, in the crowded ward, he seemed small and fearful, and she considered his persistency with the box to be really a means to distract himself, just as he had always managed to distract himself from some harsh reality or duty.

On his sixth day in the hospital she noticed that he appeared frail, more lost in himself, his voice light and unsure. So, that evening, beset by a stubborn compassion for him, Clare decided she would try to find the man to whom her father had sold the key to their London flat thirty years previously in the hope that she might also find the missing red box.

*

She sat by the phone in the solemn front room of her dead mother's house. It was her father's house now, but neither she nor her siblings thought of it as such. He had never put a penny into it, and had twice tried to remortgage it. He really had been a passenger in their lives, getting by on his charm, his occasional deviousness and other people's pity. One by one, she jotted down the numbers for all seventeen Sean Igoes living in the Greater London area given to her by Directory Enquiries.

‘Was it a
red
box by any chance?' the ninth Sean Igoe enquired.

‘Yes!' Clare replied, and began to get excited as the gravelly voiced man at the other end of the phone described the box exactly as her father had done. He sounded nervous. She knew something had gone wrong with her father's friendship with this man but had not known what exactly.

She booked her flight to London for the following morning. It was expensive but there was no time to lose. From Heathrow, she took a black cab to where the ninth Sean Igoe lived in West Hendon. As she paid the driver, she silently questioned the costly trip she was making, all for a man who had never given her anything.

Sean looked younger than Clare expected. He wore jeans. He was tall and muscular and stared at her from the hallway of the pale-brick house in which he lived in an awkward, wide-eyed manner. From his gauche bearing, Clare thought him exactly the kind of man her father had always befriended. The kind of man – rough-edged, honest, gentle, shy – that her father could twist round his little finger and that she would always want to warn. He invited her enthusiastically into the living room of his flat, where she waited, stroking his calico cat, as he went into another room for the box.

‘Here we are,' he said on his return, ‘a blast from the past,' and placed the box, which was the size of a small cupboard, by Clare's feet. He swept back from his face a tuft of grey wood-shaving curls and began immediately to reminisce.

‘Ah, your father was a great man. He'd light up a room,' he said.

‘How come you lost touch?' Clare asked.

‘Ya know how it is,' he replied.

‘Not really,' she said, at which Sean's face coloured and narrowed towards her.

‘The sun mighta shone outta the man's arse, but he did things. Enough said.' She didn't ask Sean what things her father had done to cause the rift in their friendship. She'd guessed it was to do with money, ripping someone off – quite likely Sean. ‘But, 'tis obvious you're nothing like him,' he added, quickly, as if to take the sting from his earlier remark.

He left the room to make her tea. Clare sensed from his uncertain movements in the tiny kitchen that he was unused to visitors. As he rattled round, erratically going from cupboard to drawer, she found herself defending her father. ‘You know, Sean, his own father died when he was twelve. My grandmother couldn't cope so they put him in a school. I'm sure you heard about those schools. God knows what happened him there. He never talked about it.' At that, Sean stopped what he was doing and speedily returned to her. He seemed annoyed.

‘I know well the schools you talk of and the kind that ran them,' he said. Clare saw in the man before her then a small child. He had suddenly the same pained look she had seen often in her father: the open hurt face, the altar boy's grin, as if neither of them had moved on at all from some early part of their lives.

‘But the thing about your father,' he sighed, ‘was – I see it now but I didn't then – he made us all feel at home, us fellas over here so young and alone. And him with his stories. Ah, sure we adored him, as if it was his job to be adored and ours to adore him. I've often wondered why that was, and I think it was because he was all sort of hollow in himself – which brought out the best in others. We could forgive him anything and mostly we did. Most things anyway.' Sean's words shook her. They did not describe the man she'd lived with for almost half her life. Whatever her father's failures as a parent and husband, he had evidently been as a beacon to Sean and the men he'd known in London. Men who were damaged, perhaps, as her father was, or not long out of the fields of Ireland and so clueless as to how to behave in a big city. ‘A man's man' her mother had always called him, and now, here in Sean's dark and Spartan flat, Clare understood something of what that had meant. Sean booked her a lift back to the airport with a friend of his from Cork who would do the lift for her cheap. She thought about asking the driver to make a detour, to go down the road where she had once lived, but decided against it.

When the plane touched down at Dublin the sky was still bright, shot through with orange and a stark watermelon red. She collected the box from the carousel, put it on the trolley and went to her car. She put the box on the passenger seat, drove towards the house. She couldn't wait to get home and open it. But she was also afraid. For there sitting beside her was a reminder of her parents' hope-filled dreams of returning and of the dreadful reality: their awful planning, their bungling, cobbled-together lives.

When she got inside the house, she placed the box on the kitchen table. She ripped off the duct-tape she'd taped it up with, and stared at the red leatherette veneer, torn and loose in places. In the corners there were tiny blue doodles, childish attempts at drawing the box, possibly her own. She lifted the lid. The smell was musty. After a while there was another smell, an undersmell. She recognised it immediately as her father's aftershave, Old Spice. She dived in, pulled out a bunch of notebooks. There were around twenty filled with his close, neat longhand. Beneath these were pages of typed text with sheets of metallic blue carbon paper between some of the pages. She found faded newspaper clippings. One featured a long poem with her father's name at the end. Another was about him winning a Biro for a parody he'd written of
‘The Mountains of Mourne'. The feature went on to say her father had a ‘flair', that his style was ‘crisp and succinct' and that the judges ‘hoped he would carry on writing'. She rummaged to the end of the box and found a bunch of letters tied up in a dry coffee-coloured string, which easily loosened. The letter on top was dated February 1959, and printed in the top right-hand corner was an address:
Finca Vigia, Havana, Cuba
. The name, in type, at the end, was Ernest Hemingway. (Though the letter was just signed ‘Ernest'.) She flicked through the letters: all were written on the same Manila paper, and all were from the American writer. They seemed to get briefer as she moved back through them, as if Hemingway and her father had had more to say to each other as the months rolled on. She returned to the letter on top, which, she realised by the date, was the last.

‘Your last story is wonderful,' it read. ‘You must gather all the stories you have written for the course and publish. Send to me and I'll see what I can do. This story,
The Light of the West
, recalls to me a story of my own,
Summer People
, which you mentioned you had read and enjoyed. I thank you for that. You place your young characters in an authentic setting, and the debilitating pain the boy experiences once he is removed from that beautiful bog-land place and sent to that evil school is truly moving. I remember summers like you describe. No adult summer is ever like the summers of our youth. Please continue to write me of your progress when I move to Idaho in the Fall.'