The Scattering (26 page)

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, looking 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.

*

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.