The Scattering (29 page)

‘Good-bye, Ma,' I said, and I was about off when she called me back.

‘Michael?'

‘Yes, Ma?'

‘There's something I want to ask you. Something Martha said when she was here. About what Eugene said to you in the hospital.'

‘It's nothing. You don't want to hear.'

‘Tell me, won't you?'

‘You know.'

‘Tell me yourself, now you're going. Please.' Her voice sounded weak.

‘Ah, you do know. You do. It's not like you always say, Ma. Eugene didn't
forget
to take his insulin. He knew what would happen if he missed that shot. Eugene wasn't ever going to be a doctor, Mam. It's not what he wanted. Tell her
it's not for you
, I said. But he couldn't hurt you, he said. Couldn't let you down with all you'd sacrificed. He was hanging round that crowd in the town, drinking the head off himself, and I worried because if he wasn't careful he'd miss the insulin. He knew what would happen if he missed that shot. The kidneys would fail and he'd go blind. And it did happen. And he told me it was because he saw the rest of his life before him and none of it belonged to him. So he let it slip. Do you have any idea what it's like not to own your own life, Ma? Well, I'll tell you. All there is ahead of you is time, and for Eugene it was endless time, time and needles. He felt he had no life. And I knew he would do that one day.' It felt good to tell her the last words Eugene had said to me. She had no clue, I think, just how much her own squashed dreams had shaped, and warped, her sons. No fucking clue. Until, maybe, she saw that I would not take my last chance out of Dodge.

‘Good cut on you that suit.'

‘I'll send it back when I get settled.'

‘No need.'

‘Don't want to be wearing a dead man's suit, Ma. Only it's a change. I'll send it.'

‘Did Bucky Lawless cut your hair?' I nodded.

‘Stylish it is.'

‘I'll go out the house way.'

‘Good luck to you, Son.'

‘Goodbye, Ma,' I said. I did not kiss her.

*

It was a dark, frosty morning as I walked to the bus stop. There was a long queue already formed. A few men in suits; some women, one in an ultramarine stewardess' uniform; quite a few young men in twos, mostly with big duffle bags; a whole family (all of them quiet and downcast) with a ton of suitcases. Every man and his dog is getting out of Moyne, I thought to myself. Once the bus had left the towns and was onto the motorway, I gazed out the window at the bumpy Monaghan landscape. It looked just as it did in our postcards. Lots of sheep and cattle and big houses (though the postcards, naturally enough, missed all the houses I saw that were now empty, or for sale, or unfinished, some of them almost fully returned to nature) all surrounded by lush deep-green fields. And until we reached Louth, a scattering of lakes, some covered in a thick blue mist with swans on them. The hay in the fields was all still and sort of smug-looking from having been recently gathered and baled. The hay done, the farmers were now at the barley and it was short and blunt where it had been cut already. The land was busy with autumn activity and was full of harvesters and tractors. Some of the farmers I saw I knew. I felt a lump in my throat as I looked out at the morning light, all frail and black-tinged over the fields, and I tried to tell myself it would be the death of me that land (I knew well that Maguire in Kavanagh's
Great Hunger
ends his days a ‘hungry fiend' who ‘screams the apocalypse of clay' and that if I were to remain I was destined to have much the same kind of half-buried existence; even Kavanagh himself had gotten out and he'd loved the place) and not to get too upset about leaving it, though tears rolled down my face nonetheless. As the bus approached Dublin airport, I felt a shift, a loosening (my breathing deepened), as if all of a sudden I could
feel
time and its passing, and those years with Ma in the house and shop, when I thought I'd be stuck forever in Moyne (and half wanting to be stuck there), were somehow laid to rest, and I felt ready for whatever lay ahead.

Notes

The Badminton Court

The central image of this story is based on the painting ‘The Badminton Game' by David Inshaw.

The Visit

In 2000, President Bill Clinton and his family visited the town of Dundalk on the Irish border as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

The Lagoon

There were sixteen people who ‘disappeared' during ‘the Troubles' in Northern Ireland. The Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for thirteen of the sixteen, while one was admitted by the INLA. No attribution has been given to the remaining two. To date the remains of nine victims have been recovered.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editors of the following publications, where some of these stories, or versions of them, have appeared:
The Dublin Review, Irish Pages, The Warwick Review, Wasafiri Magazine, Cyphers, Brace: A New Generation in Fiction
(published by Comma Press),
Verbal Arts Magazine, Wordlegs, The Frogmore Papers.
‘The Congo'
was shortlisted for the 2009 Asham Award.
‘Blood'
won First Prize in the Spinetinglers 2009 Dark Fiction short story competition. ‘The Visit'
won First Prize in the 2010 Wasafiri New Writing Awards and appears in the 2012
Best British Short Stories Anthology
(published by Salt, edited by Nicholas Royle). Thanks to Penny Thomas for reading and editing, to C.V. for his careful reading, and to my sister, Tracey McCarrick, for her observations on ‘The Tribe'
.
All characters in
The Scattering
are fictional, and though some places and events are real, for the purposes of fiction-making they are often depicted without geographical veracity.

About the Author

Jaki McCarrick lives in Dundalk and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, gaining a Master of Philosophy Degree, Creative Writing – Distinction. Before this Jaki gained a BA Performing Arts, First Class Honours Degree at Middlesex University. She has also completed an RNT Directors Course, 2001, and has studied for a PhD thesis on the work of Patrick Kavanagh.

 Jaki has won many awards for her work including: Winner of the 2005 SCDA National Playwriting Competition for
The Mushroom Pickers
; Shortlisted for the Sphinx Playwriting Award 2006, Bruntwood Prize 2006, Kings Cross Award 2007 for
The Moth-Hour
; Winner of the 2010 Papatango New Writing Award, Shortlisted for the 2009 Adrienne Benham Award and the 2010 Yale International Drama Award for
Leopoldville
; Shortlisted for the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Winner of the Galway Theatre Festival Playwriting Competition for
Belfast Girls
(developed during McCarrick's attachment to the National Theatre, London in 2012). For fiction her prizes include first prize in the 2009 Northern Ireland Spinetinglers Dark Fiction competition for
‘
Blood'
,
shortlisted for the 2009 Asham Award for short fiction for
‘The Congo'
, winner of the 2010 Wasafiri Prize for New Writing for
‘The Visit'
(also selected for
The 2012 Anthology of Best British Short Stories
). For poetry she won the first Liverpool Lennon (Paper) Poetry Competition, judged by Carol Ann Duffy, for her poem, ‘The Selkie of Dorinish' (2010), and was shortlisted for 2012 Patrick Kavanagh Award and Cork Literary Review Manuscript Competition (in which she was placed 2
nd
). Jaki has recently been awarded a writing residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris commencing April 2013.

Seren is the book imprint of 

Poetry Wales Press Ltd

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© Jaki McCarrick 2013

ISBN: 978-1-78172-033-2

The right of Jaki McCarrick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. 

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library. 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder. 

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author's imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

The Badminton Game, 1972 (oil on canvas), Inshaw, David (b.1943) © David Inshaw / The Bridgeman Art Library

quote from Jen Hadfield, Night-no-Place, with thanks to 

Bloodaxe Books

The publisher works with the financial assistance of 

The Welsh Books Council