The Scattering (15 page)

She moved towards the fire, teetered slightly on her high, glassy heels, at which Tomas jumped from her arms onto the rug, and positioned his rump as if to relieve himself once again, whereupon Lara gently shooed him from the room. She laughed loudly. Beautiful teeth, he thought. He watched her walk slowly to the coffee table, coolly open the gilded case and slip her hand inside for a cigarette.

‘What were you thinking, Fred, when I came in?'

‘Oh. About the rug, about my thesis. In fact, my whole life flashed before me.'

‘Such a strange look. I barely recognised you.'

‘I was about to clean that mess, and, suddenly, now, I cannot. I don't know why but I cannot. Perhaps you will apologise to Louise for me, tell her I will phone tomorrow? Would you do that?' Fred said. Lara nodded, then stood back and examined the cloud-shaped stain.

‘Louise really should keep Tomas in the yard. She can hardly expect
family
to do something like that.' He drew hard on his cigarette. Lara was assuring him, and he was enjoying it.

‘I was only supposed to cat-sit. You see, he's incontinent, poor thing. Some kind of infection. Louise never
asked
me, you know, to clean the crap up. I just felt it wasn't right the cat should soil the house on my watch. Now, well, I feel like a fool. I should never have assumed such responsibility.'

‘You've been
asleep
Fred, haven't you, hmmm? Asleep to yourself.' Yes, that was how it was. Exactly. He was so bound up in a sense of duty, of what was proper and right, that in recent years he had been
asleep
to his own needs. He watched her yank together the two blue velvet drapes.

‘Hope I didn't intrude upon your studies today, Fred.'

‘No, no. Of course not.'

‘By the way, I forgot to ask. What's your thesis on?' Lara asked.

‘Oh, it's a study of various kinds of leukemia,' Fred replied.

‘You find the library useful for that?'

‘Of course. For the past twenty years we've had abnormally high levels of cancer and blood disorders in the Northeast. Sellafield being the main suspect. Louise has kept excellent local archives.'

When Fred left the house it was raining. Clouds raced across the sky and he stopped to see an alternately blue and yellow haze veil the moon, which otherwise shone like a perfectly round silver button. He was cold. He considered turning back for one of Louise's umbrellas, but the recalcitrant voice within him that had earlier risen up in a rage urged him to carry on into the full force of the silvery light, now turning the bay emerald. He found himself thrilling to the heavy droplets of rain sinking into his skin, and enjoyed this new sensation of defiance, of cutting loose.

Turning right at the bend by the cemetery, Fred walked towards the house he shared with his mother at the edge of a hazel wood. (All around, the land here had long belonged to the Fosters, and though his mother was one of their number, she'd not flourished as her sister had done and had only the small house.) There was an unfamiliar bounce to Fred's step, and his legs felt sinewy and strong as he strode up the narrow path. Before he entered the gates, he stopped. Something soft and thick was in his mouth, a strange taste, warm and bitter. It wasn't rain but he recognised it. He put his forefinger across his bottom lip and felt the torn flesh, then placed his finger inside his mouth, made a circle of his teeth. He looked up towards the moon, now high over Greenore, and checked his finger in the moonlight. Fred Plunkett did not know what to do. Should he find a way to reverse the transformation? Retrace his steps, go back to the house, find put-upon, tweed-wearing Fred and continue his life as before? Or, now that he had evidently developed a pair of long, smooth
fangs
, together with a ravenous desire for blood, should he forget about that Fred (that husk) once and for all, and obey the latest bizarre instruction of his booming inner voice?

The Visit

It had been a day of weather: snow and wind, sunshine and rain. Water dripped from the overhanging hedges in the drive and the path was thick with pine needles. Brendan made a mental note to sweep them up once Pat had gone. He stopped before the gates and pulled his trousers up by their creases to check his shoes and thought that maybe he should've worn his boots. He walked on. Pat would make him forget. Pat could make you forget all kinds of silly woes. He glanced over at Coogan's and noticed the stars and stripes flag, still and wet on the pole.

After McCaughey's he looked over at Joy Callan's neat line of laundry crowning her raised side lawn: a small satin-rimmed blanket, black stockings, two blue ballroom gowns, a pair of orange nylon pillowcases. As he approached her house he saw her in the yard, bright and chic in pink slacks and a tight white jumper. She was raking up leaves. He watched her part the dresses then yank the wet leaves into a pile. It made him smile; she might have hung the gowns out after she'd raked, but Joy always seemed to do things differently from others. And anyway, he was glad, because she made the task so mesmerising. He recalled how after her husband had gone she had kept body and soul together by moonlighting, rather originally he thought, as a mushroom picker in Clones.
Otherwise, as a relief teacher she had taught both his children in the Friary, though she had not been popular. He waved and wondered would she be at the Square tomorrow. He made a mental note to call in one of these evenings with the picture of Sean's wedding in the paper
.

Walking on, his thoughts returned to Pat. He looked forward to seeing him. There would be much talk of the ‘great adventures' as Brendan called them, the London times, the days of the Black Lion where he had been manager for nearly a decade and where Pat had been its most notorious barfly. He was proud to think he'd organised some of London's most celebrated lock-ins, booked musicians from Dublin and Doolin and Donegal, and had the likes of David Bailey and Donovan in attendance. Soon he and Pat would be reminiscing about those times, about the dog races at Hackney and White City, the times they'd played poker in Holland Park with Jack Doyle.

He walked up the cobbled lane towards the station. He could see clearly on the cold day the sprawl of the town towards the hills. The trees by the church were draped in ropes of white lights, and a flurry of flags hung from Carroll's Apartments. He was amazed to think that here, in this small dot on the face of the globe, he and Pat would stand together tomorrow evening and see the President of America.

The big station clock said ten to three. He had a few minutes yet to gather his thoughts, stare over at the glass wall of the brewery. He sat outside on the iron seat. The gulls hovered above him, filling the air with their cries. The sweet wort's more pungent today, he thought, as his gaze fixed on the huge copper kettle glistening through the glass. It had been his first job in the brewery to wash the kettle out once the sweet wort had been siphoned off. He would then prepare it for the following morning's shipment of hops and grain. He had spent the best part of five years inside that copper drum, up to his ankles in the remnants of fresh hops, proteins and sticky clumps of caramelised sugar. It had given him time to think; to put into perspective all that had happened in '74.

There was a rumble on the tracks. He turned and saw the sleek green body of the Enterprise stack up like a metallic snake along platform two. He walked over and watched from the ticket office. The doors of the carriages swung open. Women with pull-up trolleys, young men in dishevelled suits, Mrs Little and her daughter, Edel. As the crowds dispersed he saw a ghost, the tall, hulking frame of Pat Coleman standing stock-still on the busy platform. The springy hair was all white, the once firm chest now visibly lax. Brendan watched his friend remove a cigarette from behind his ear, ask a girl for a light, then take three or four concentrated puffs before flicking the stub behind him onto the tracks. Pat's short-sleeved shirt seemed frowsy and unironed; the thick brown arms with their blue tattoos recalled to Brendan Pat's nickname on the sites: Popeye. Popeye Pat had had the strength of ten men, and once, in a drunken rage, Brendan had seen him flatten as many.

He followed Pat's gaze. Up to the pale, elusive sky of the North; out to the striking sweep of the white-capped hills, the green spire of the Protestant church peeping up against them. He began to feel unfamiliar pangs of pride for the town, as if through Pat's languorous impression, he, too, was glimpsing it for the first time. The town was his wife's town, and he had always found it hard to appreciate its people with their wariness, their industrious, practical approach to things. His wife had been right; he
had
put up a resistance. She had accused him often of hiding away in the brewery kettle like a genie. But the friendships he had formed here had been without the closeness of his London bonds. The men he knew from the town were nothing like that famous man on platform two.

He watched Pat follow the crowds as they exited the platform via the wooden ramp. He'd forgotten about Pat's hip. The two of them would seem a right pair with their battered bodies, their war wounds, struggling up the road to the house. They'd have to get a taxi.

At first Pat walked right past him, then doubled back, grabbed his hand with a warm, heavy shake and twirled him round in the air, both feet dangling. The familiar horseplay made Brendan feel warm and young inside. He suggested they take a taxi but Pat said he wanted to walk.

‘What d'you think?' Brendan said, turning onto the prosperous-looking road.

‘Looks good,' Pat replied in his reedy voice, the rapid Limerick lilt fully intact.

‘You know you're to stay as long as you like.'

‘Well, I'll see. It'd be something to hear Clinton. After that, I've a whole load to see in Kilkenny and Limerick.'

Pat's sallow, tight face spoke of his abstinence. No beads of sweat across the brow or lip, no dank odour. Gone were the umber circles and the frantic eyes.
If you don't stop drinking you'll die
, Brendan had said quietly into Pat's ear on his last visit to Guy's. Pat had often said it was those words together with his friend's insistence he
could
quit that had saved his life.

Past the
Texaco garage, Pat stopped to watch Nick O'Hare sort through a trailer of wicker goods. ‘That's Nick,' said Brendan. ‘Used to be a coach with the town's football team, now runs a type of yoga place in that house.' Pat seemed enthralled by Nick's wares. There were fusions of weave and dried flowers, shopping baskets with long handles, knee-high linen boxes stained in a dark cinnabar, as well as a small Lloyd Loom-style chair. Bowls of felt sunflowers, papier-mâché apples and grapes littered the tarmac drive. Pat went up to the brass sign on the pillar and mouthed the words engraved on it:
Vipassana Centre
.

‘How are ya?' Pat shouted over to Nick, who was down on his hunkers editing strands of grass from the baskets.

‘Well, Brendan,' Nick replied, thinking it had been Brendan who had hollered. ‘I'm making these for the President. I'll bring one up to you.'

‘Do,' Brendan replied, waving, and carried on hurriedly, hoping Pat would take the hint and move on with him.

‘D'you ever go in there?' Pat asked.

‘Jesus, no.' Brendan replied.

‘I'd love one of those baskets for Fidelma.'

‘Haven't I a dozen in the garage?' Brendan said.

Walking on, he tried to turn the conversation towards London and the Black Lion. He asked Pat if he'd heard anything from the old gang, from Mocky Joe in particular. Mocky Joe's success at cards had enabled him to live in London for over a decade without working. One night, weeks before Brendan had left London, the flame-haired Mocky Joe had been picked up under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and held. Of all the men he and Pat had known that had been stopped under the Sus laws or questioned under the PTA
Mocky Joe was the only one the police had ever charged. He'd served twelve years. At first Pat seemed to have no recollection of him, but eventually put a face to the nickname. ‘The poor fucker,' Pat said, ‘I went to see him and he didn't know me at all.' Then Brendan thought of the time of his own arrest, the long night of questioning in Harrow Road police station, and of the lie he had told there.

Pat stopped to look over the bridge. ‘The kids used to walk all the way along that one time, trying to catch frogs,' Brendan said, realising he had never himself walked the banks of the narrow river. The sedge rustled below where they looked and an ochre-coloured frog leaped out, springing from one clump to the next along the shallow rim of the water. He saw that Pat was bewitched by the frog, its golden skin pulsating like a loud gold watch; it seemed alien, larger than the small green specimens the kids had once brought from the banks. They watched the bright interloper go on with the river, thinning out towards Toberona and Castletown. Though it seemed hard for him to get the memories out of Pat, Brendan looked forward to the chats they were yet to have about all the great adventures.

Closer to home, Pat wanted to stop off at Cheever's. Brendan reluctantly followed Pat into the store, which was festooned on the outside with green and white bunting. A flag with WELCOME BILL stencilled on it protruded from the wall.