The Scattering (9 page)

He was younger than me by two years, so by rights we should never have been friends. Only he saved me once. One night, up the alley by MJ's (where he and the twins drank), he'd stopped me from being kicked to death by a bunch of shit-kickers from Ardee. Only for that night I'd never have been part of the gang, or come to know him or the Crilly twins, or any of the lads from the Grange. (After all, I went to the Grammar, and lived on the Avenue.) I remember looking up, half-expecting the tall, dark-eyed interloper to join them, and, instead, he flung them off me like a wild cat. Then the twins charged in, dragged my two hick assailants towards the river. I never asked Devlin why he pulled me from that beating. I presume he saw in me what he later saw in Gascoigne: an exploitable weakness, such as the shame I wore like a badge as son of the town's most notorious drunk.

I sheltered in, and even came to like, the ‘hard' reputation the Grange boys had. I hoped that by association it would rub off. Until my involvement with Devlin, I'd had to suffer all manner of quips about my family's change of fortune. From millionaires to hungry up in the big house (followed by the passing of my mother, who did what she did, some said, because she had felt so disgraced). So, by the time I fell in with Devlin, I was that fed up I no longer cared if people thought me a chip off the old block or not (and they definitely did). I began to justify their thoughts, became well and truly Mad Mansfield, the Drunken Solicitor's Son. I began to drink heavily, mindlessly sometimes; to gamble (anything – cards, horses, dogs, the slots
*
), so that I must have seemed like rich pickings indeed to Devlin with the amount of insecurities I had. Whatever way it happened, the way two people find their fate in one another, I was a troubled young man from the Avenue one day, and the next bewitched by a lout (albeit a beautiful lout).

Devlin called in to the bar. No one answered. The signs he'd been waiting for: no one around, middle of the day, cash register open.

For the first few minutes inside, the twins joked and pretended we were in the bar of a Western. The Congo was high-ceilinged, had never been updated. The wooden floors were dull and decorticated in places. The bar itself was breast-high with a gleaming brass rail hanging just beneath the rim of the bar top. Devlin sat on one of the red leather seats and lit up in his usual girlish way, slow and light, his little finger apart (erect almost), and watched the twins as they fooled around. I have never since met anyone, however duplicitous or skilled in the craft of acting, who could smile as sweetly as he – the smooth white baby-fangs, the gentle crescent dimples – yet possess a simultaneous deadness in the eyes. It was, I understand now, the overlapping of two people in one. He was night and day in one, and it was, for me, I recall, a hopelessly magnetic contrast.

‘Mikey leave it!' Devlin said.

‘But Jesus man, the place is fuckin' empty!'

‘You're tanked up enough. We might need to run for it. Use your head.'

‘Well, come on then!' Joe said. ‘We've got the money, what we waiting for? Let's go.'

Devlin placed his long legs on top of the table, and crossed his feet. He put his arms behind his head, wrist to nape.

‘Why would someone leave a place like this for scumbags like us to come and fuck around inside it, hah?' Devlin said.

‘Maybe he's gone to get somethin',' Mikey replied.

‘Who's he?' Devlin asked Mikey, who was now scared.

‘Who's he?' Devlin repeated.

‘Prentice Black he means,' I said, ‘the owner.' My father had known Prentice Black. People who came to the bar thought Prentice a survivor from an Irish UN battalion massacred in the Congo in the 1960s, and Prentice would let them think it. The truth was Prentice had bought the pub from a man named Cyril White in the same year the Congo had gone from being a Belgian colony to a Democratic Republic. Prentice (who had himself been a member of the ‘old' IRA, i.e. pre-Bloody Sunday IRA), could not resist what he saw as a parallel between his purchase and the establishment of the African state, hence the pub's name. (There was even a map of Africa in the shape of Patrice Lumumba's head in the men's toilets.) When I suggested that Prentice might be over in the bookies opposite, it set something off in Devlin.

‘Well, then we'll wait,' Devlin said, coolly.

‘Fuck's sake, why?' asked Joe. He and Mikey had become bored and restless in the dingy veneer-panelled lounge, the light a muddy olive colour from the stained-glass tiles above the windows. They had begun writing, with a black felt-tip marker, obscenities, on the wide mirror at the back of the bar.

‘Hey, we'll wait, fuckwit, because a man that'd leave his bar in the middle of the day is a careless man. And in my experience, a careless man always has easy access to money.'

It was then I started to become afraid. Mikey and Joe had between them taken over fifty pounds from the till. My pockets were stuffed with cigarettes, crisps, a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. We could have walked. That's what I wanted to do. Even the twins looked worried. For Devlin had implied something way beyond our usual messing. Even beyond the worst we, as a gang, had done up till then (which, apart from Gascoigne, had been the bottles we'd stolen for the Provos for petrol bombs). Yet we remained. Compelled as ever by that smile, by those black unforgiving eyes, by the magnetism I loved but had already begun to resent. And so minutes passed and we waited. I remember the silence. I remember wondering what he would do and how he might do it. I remember not knowing if I should run, or throw myself down and bathe in his glow. The room was like a theatre, all hush and darkness, as we, the actors (chorus and lead), waited in the wings for our audience to enter. And somehow I knew, through some inner sense, that when Prentice Black returned to his bar from wherever he had been, he would never leave.

Disturbed by a flapping sound, I quickly opened my eyes to find that I was a long way from those dark, unforgiving days of my youth: it was the leaves of the tall palm whipping at the air as if they would break loose. I watched the ravens caw over the rooftops of the Grange on their way to the Avenue's tall cedars where they nested. Again, I noticed it: the sensation of continuum. A trickle of smoke from the chimney of Devlin's house – though it was a warm morning, and I imagined Devlin in there looking after Grace.

I'd gotten seven years for my part in the murder of the publican. Devlin and the twins mandatory life. I'd blamed Devlin for all that had gone wrong with me since: my discovery of opiates, my involvement in importing scams. I'd even learned how to use a gun; there are many such places in London. But standing here at the edge of the Grange, despite my anger, my hand would not reach into my holster, nor would my legs (as if in some kind of physical rebellion) carry me to his house. The dreams of retribution that had seen me through the years in London seemed suddenly impotent here. There was a sameness to the place that was obdurate, and I saw that my rage belonged entirely to the man who walked to his job at Kew each morning, whose only deliverance from this self and that, was time spent with the flowers and plants of the hothouses.

Of all the chilling details of that afternoon in The Congo bar, one image in particular stands out for me. Crossing the lounge to exit, I recall I'd looked across at the mirror, covered in the twins' spidery scrawls, and seen a skull-like face: eyes bloodshot from crying, blood on the hair and cheeks. I saw that the face belonged not to me, but to Devlin, who was looking in horror at something, or someone else, who or what, I could not fully see, for the light was poor. Perhaps, he looked at nothing in particular. Perhaps, he looked at me. I have often suspected as much. I remind myself on such occasions that though it was I, in the end, who had dropped the canister on the publican, neither Devlin nor the others had tried to stop me. In fact Devlin had screamed ‘down, Mansfield, down'. His claims in court that he had meant for me to place the canister out of harm's way did not stand up under cross-examination. (My own lawyer, a long-standing associate of my father, had emphasised my vulnerability, ‘the fragility of one so young without a mother'.)

Finding solace in Devlin's greying hair, and in the fact he now lived an obviously uneventful life in the same wretched council house in which he had grown up, I walked back to the Avenue. But I felt bereft, too, knowing I would never again experience the intoxicating spell he had cast upon my youth. Grace had blamed ‘the middle-class boy from the Avenue' and claimed that if anyone had been the protégé it was her son. But Grange people have always been (understandably) jealous of the affluent suburb that looks down upon them, and, I suppose, with all the harshness life had meted out to her, Grace is no exception.

1976

‘Maggie's was a troublous life, and this was the form in which she took her opium.'

GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss

I sit on the back step topping and tailing the peas. It is a warm day for May, the sky white and high, and already there is a watery haze over the fields. I split the pods and empty them into the ceramic bowl Dada makes cakes in. The peas are soft and shiny and smell of the earth, and without thinking I put a few in my mouth and bite down. Dada makes a sound behind me that I know means he wants me to stop eating the peas, so I do. He is watching me like a hawk this week, making sure, he says, I stay far from the contents of the medicine cabinet.

‘Dada says to leave that cat,' I call out to Francie, who has been trying to lure one of our neighbour's kittens over the wall with a piece of rope.

‘I saw Daddy do it himself last week, didn't you, Daddy?'

‘No!' my father bellows. ‘Listen to Claire,' he says, ‘listen to my wee Claire,' and he scoops me up into the air, peas scattering to the floor.

‘Go now, the two of yez, and tell the others to come, the wee scuts,' Dada says, and sends me out to Francie. By this break in his watchfulness I think that maybe he has forgiven me.

We pass the sheets drying in the yard and go towards the gate. As I hold open the gate for Francie, I look up and see Dada smiling. Then, despite all Dada has said, Francie walks on and neglects to bolt the gate after us. I see Dada shaking his head and the two of us share a glance about Francie and I go myself to bolt the gate. I might be bold for taking my brother's pills but Francie is older and should know better than to go against Dada's wishes.

We know where the others will be. When first we moved here Dada helped us uncover a den in the ruins of Roche's Castle, half a mile into the fields at the back of the house. Dada says the castle has tunnels beneath it that go on for miles ending at Ice House Hill at the far end of town. It was built for a Norman lord, he says, who had wanted an escape route to the Castletown River which flows through the town into the Irish Sea.

The entrance to the castle is via a winding, quartz-flecked staircase, down which the sound of footsteps echoes loudly. The bottom chamber – den headquarters – looks up to a row of black bars arranged in a half-moon on the ground outside. I lie down with Francie as we watch Nora and Isabel below. Francie reaches out, buries my hair in the tall grass. He screws up his face, whispers: ‘We'd always find you in a crowd, Claire,' and brings his mouth to the bars.

‘Oooh,' he says, low and deep.

‘What's that? Isabel, you hear that?'

‘Oooh,' Francie repeats, then presses his fingers to my mouth to stop Nora and Isabel hearing me laugh, pleads with his eyes for me to be quiet. I want to bite Francie's hand but I know no harm can come to him or Dada will get vexed.

‘Nora, Nora, I think we've a ghost, what'll we do?' Isabel says. Francie is shaking with laughter, and Isabel, who has slipped out from the den, jumps us from behind.

‘You didn't scare us. We're invincible to ghosts we are.'

‘We did, we did,' Francie insists, then skips off in a whirl of excitement to the banks of the Fane, a few yards behind the castle. Immediately Francie picks up stones, skims them with great precision across the water. Isabel shouts over to him that he's not supposed to leave us but he pays no heed. Francis likes to pretend there's nothing wrong with him. This is all our mother's fault, Dada says.

Isabel pivots back towards the den with me behind. As we close into a tight triumvirate, I become rigid with anticipation.

‘We found something,' Isabel says.

‘What you find?' I ask.

‘Promise you won't tell Daddy.'

‘Or
Dada
,' Nora jokes, and makes a prim-looking face.

‘Right,' I say. Then Isabel, who is fifteen and the eldest, grabs the crumpled noisy thing off Nora and hides it behind her back.

‘You can't ask Claire not to tell Daddy something, Isabel, as she tells him everything. Claire go on over to Francie,' says Nora, who's twelve and plump and sounds the most English out of all of us.

‘I won't tell him, honest I won't,' I reply. Isabel and Nora look at each other. Nora tilts her neck to the breeze filing through the bars above.

‘Say you swear on Daddy's life.'

‘No.'

‘Isabel, you shouldn't ask her to swear on Daddy's life. That's bad,' Nora retorts.

‘Well, then she can't see the thing.'