The Scattering (25 page)

‘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.

‘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.