The Scattering Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Endorsements

  Dedication

  Dostoyevsky Quote

  By the Black Field

  The Badminton Court

  1975

  Hellebores

  The Scattering

  Painting, Smoking, Eating

  The Congo

  1976

  The Burning Woman

  The Sanctuary

  Blood

  The Visit

  The Tribe

  Trumpet City

  The Stonemason’s Wife

  Stitch-up

  The Hemingway Papers

  The Lagoon

  The Jailbird

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  The Scattering

  a collection of short stories

  by

  Jaki McCarrick

  The Scattering’

  ‘Jaki McCarrick tells a chilling tale of death and despair.’

  The Irish Emigrant

  ‘The Sanctuary’

  ‘…a tender story of mourning and longing.’

  writewords.org.uk

  ‘Of particular note… Jacqueline McCarrick’s “The Sanctuary”; a tender portrait of a lover dealing with the death of a long-term partner.’

  Mark Brown, The Short Review

  ‘The Badminton Court’

  ‘I was totally knocked for six by this story. It is an incredible piece of writing… The spare, sinewy sentences had me going over and over them; and such economy of writing! I must, simply must see more of her work…’

  Alex Smith The Frogmore Papers

  ‘The Visit’

  ‘“The Visit” takes the reader deep into old sadnesses and life-changing feuds which still burned under the surface of Irish society at the time of Bill Clinton’s visit.’

  Susan Haigh, The New Short Review

  ‘By the Black Field’

  ‘My highlights to date would be: Jaki McCarrick’s “By the Black Field”... it has such an understated menace running through it and the writing is so subtly coloured, it reads like looking at a painting.”

  Brian Kirk, Wordlegs

  Leopoldville (play)

  ‘A superbly dark, taut thriller…. A fascinating piece of theatre.’

  Deborah Klayman, RemoteGoat: 4 Stars

  ‘Impossible to shake off, the effects of this show plaster themselves on its audience… a stellar script… Expect to leave shaken.’

  Naima Khan, Spoonfed Theatre Journal: 4 Stars

  ‘A sharp, well-observed piece of writing that is performed beautifully by this young, ensemble cast. The tension builds and builds throughout the play culminating in a harrowing twist that both excites and disgusts in equal measure… Fantastic work.’

  Phil Tucker, Broadway Baby, 5 Stars

  ‘A fantastic, haunting, terrifying play… very strong, young cast & tight direction. It’s the winning entry for The Papatango New Writing Competition 2010 and rightly so…’

  Shenagh Govan, The Group, Theatre Royal Stratford East

  ‘All the familiar ingredients are here: rustic eccentricity, colloquial lyricism, the Troubles. Yet fine performances and a subtle handling of the shades of morality lift this above the ordinary.’

  Kieron Quirke Evening Standard: 4 Stars

  ‘A powerful play’

  Nina Steiger, Soho Theatre

  ‘I love her voice’

  Simon Reade, Bristol Old Vic

  The Mushroom Pickers, Gene Frankel Theatre, New York

  ‘There’s a great deal to admire in new Irish playwright Jacqueline McCarrick’s debut work “The Mushroom Pickers”… a compellingly dark and difficult play… steeped in the dialect and lore of Co. Monaghan… one of the play’s major strengths is its strong sense of place – the local landscape is presented throughout as both beguiling and dangerous – and McCarrick knows how to sift drama from the tensions and realities of everyday border county life… McCarrick’s play is unique in that it presents a part of Ireland rarely seen on Irish stages, and the playwright presents the realities of that region with courage and rare honesty… (the company) is also to be thanked for bringing this challenging new production to the New York stage for the first time.’

  Arts Editor, Cahir O’Doherty, New York Review

  For my father,

  and in memory of Pamela Von Hunnius

  Each of us is responsible for

  everything and to every

  human being.

  DOSTOYEVSKY

  By the Black Field

  Angel was building a fence right along where his land cut down to the river, not because the river might burst its banks, which it was prone to do in the rain-heavy months, but because he or Jess or the child might accidentally fall in, especially on a moonless night when they might not be able to see. He was concerned because the ground was too soft now for the poles, and he was convinced that what he should have done was rebuild his grandfather’s wall as far as Henry’s.

  A pleat formed between his brows. He was bothered and his eyes hurt. He lacerated himself for his persistence – and for wasting good money on the poles.

  He looked up at the swaying pines as if seeing his wife’s face: no doubt she would be disappointed in his efforts. He turned to the newly ploughed field. Soon it would be ready for sowing. He thought of summer when there would be knee-high potato stalks with their purplish and white-wheeled flowers filling its black space.

  He heard a woman talking on the road. It was Margaret, the frenetic, spindly woman who lived round the turn on the other side of the ring fort. He could never say what, exactly, but something troubled him about her. She and her husband Jack ran a computer business from their blue dormer. She was nice enough to him and Jess when they first arrived, and when they’d meet her on the road she would say hello and sometimes ask them about themselves. But still, Angel disliked her; he saw in her a kind of desperate and cold ambition and it reminded him of London. Her mustard-coloured MG would regularly screech to a halt out in the road. She’d have forgotten something that the small, wiry Jack would invariably be asked to retrieve. Or she’d pull over to take or make a call, and talk so loud the birds would fly out of the trees. And there she was now, Angel thought, at it again. Though this time she seemed to be alone, and was walking.

  He was heavy with depression: a feeling of length in his stomach as if a fist was inside him pushing down on his breath. He set about methodically collecting the poles then stacked them against the side of the house beside the turf.

  There were times when Angel thought that the land communicated with him. He knew that this was irrational, and probably due to overwork, and to the fact that he had not yet lost his city-born infatuation with green fields (and also, possibly, because he’d spent his childhood summers in this place and had fond and lively memories of it). He imagined that after a few more years on the farm he’d be as hardnosed towards the land as every other farmer he knew. Still, he could not dispel the sense he had that wherever he went on his six acres he was not alone. He would feel guided towards sowing this or that crop, doing this or that farm job. Sometimes he would just put his ‘delusion’ down to the voices of men and women at work in nearby fields being carried on the breeze or downriver. That’s what he told himself. He said nothing about the experience to his wife.

  As he closed the door behind him, Jess brushed past carrying his grandmother’s large blue-flowered plate (that she had left to him) filled with steaming vegetables. He quickly washed his hands and changed his clothes then tucked himself into the table.

  ‘The poles are all wrong, Jess,’ he said, his mouth full of food.

  ‘How come?’ Jess asked.

  �
��It’s too wet. I should have hired some help and built the wall.’

  She was strong, like a thick white lily in the sunshine. And now, in the eighth month, more unavailable to him than ever. Since they moved here she seemed to fall into an ever-deepening daze, Angel thought. He knew she had no love for this land. Not everyone was able to engage with nature the way he could, he knew that. He had not expected her to love the place, just to appreciate something of its beauty and charm, as she had seemed to do at first. But lately she’d begun to talk about London and how she missed it, and the talk had annoyed him. He felt as if he had failed her. He looked at her across the table from him. She was beautiful with her long white hair, and eyes that were as pink as his own.

  The house, lost on the end of the long road before the turn towards Carrick, was set into a wide, elder-protected circle, further shaded by pines and a large oak. A dead beech stump, host to clusters of oyster mushrooms, sat behind the front stone pier. It was one of the few restored cottages of its kind in the barony. All the other homesteads of a similar age in the area served as a source for walls, or were used as rickyards or byres – or were simply abandoned. While he had rehabilitated the old house, his neighbours – the Dalys, Cassidys, Conlons – had all set up in the soulless, heavily mortgaged piles they’d had built alongside stone cottages (in various stages of dereliction) in the same way the Church had established itself throughout the land on pagan sites and shrines. Before they had come, the house had known no modernity, though latterly, with electricity, his grandmother had had ‘the wireless’. And up until now it had been shelter (during the summers, anyway) to only one albino child (and how he got into the works nobody knew), and that was Angel.

  In the autumn there had been a rat in the barn and it was this, Angel believed, that had triggered Jess’ mistrust of the place. At first they thought it was a mink; a neighbour who had come home from Australia had begun breeding Swedish mink for fur and all the mink had escaped. A rat, however, was another story. Angel had stalked the rat for three days. Then, one morning, he found it on the barn floor, sleeping, and took a hammer to it. His frenzied attack on the creature disturbed him, and he knew then that he, too, had begun to change in the place.

  After the meal, he cleared the plates and sat by the fire. He watched his wife as she walked to the window and looked out. He wondered if, after the child was born, she would want to stay.

  ‘Will we go out and watch the weather, Jess?’ he asked, hoping she would stand with him on the porch and look up at the stars as they had done when they first came.

  ‘In a bit,’ she replied, and went to lie down in the back room. He pulled his chair into the warmth and thought of the fence. It was important to get a barrier erected. A partially sighted child could not be allowed to wander a farm left unguarded to a deep river. He’d call in some aid and build a wall. He’d call someone tomorrow. There was more than enough stone; round the sheds there was plenty, and it was all free.

  He must have fallen asleep. There was a heavy rap on the door and when he awoke he had thought for a second he was back in the flat in Willesden and was confused. He went to the door and opened it.

  ‘Terence O’Hanlon?’ the tall garda asked. Angel could smell cigarette smoke off the man’s breath.

  ‘That’s me,’ Angel replied.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Angel hesitated. He’d heard stories about people calling to remote homesteads under all sorts of pretexts, then looked out and saw the squad car. He asked the garda in, shut the door behind him and dropped the latch. Jess came out of the room, slowly tying her hair. He watched the garda staring wide-eyed at Jess’ long white hair flashing around the low-lit room.

  ‘I’m sorry to have bothered you both,’ the garda said.

  ‘No. It’s fine. What’s the problem?’ Angel asked. The garda seemed nervous.

  ‘Terrible storm forecast,’ the garda said.

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Messing it up terrible these days, aren’t they, the weather people?’

  ‘They are.’ Angel laughed, thinking of his poor day with the poles.

  ‘What can I do for you, Officer?’

  ‘Patrick is fine.’

  ‘Patrick. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Please. Sit down,’ Jess said, and gestured to the garda, who took Angel’s chair by the fire.

  ‘Look, I just have to ask you both not to go far, at least not out of the local area, if you don’t mind. For the next couple of days anyway.’

  ‘Why? What’s going on?’ Jess asked, alarmed. The garda seemed put out and wiped his mouth with his hand which, Angel observed, was as wide and thick as a brick.

  ‘I suppose you’ll know soon enough, but a body was found this evening up there in the bog. The other side of the ring fort.’

  ‘A body?’ said Jess.

  ‘Aye. A woman. A dead one,’ the garda replied.

  ‘Who is it?’ Angel asked.

  ‘Your neighbour, actually. Margaret Murphy. Lives, or lived, I should say, up in the blue house. These are hard times now and people do crazy things. We need to make enquiries all around. Who knows what goes through a person’s mind these days, huh? The figures are up.’

  ‘The figures?’ Jess enquired.

  ‘Suicide,’ the garda said. ‘We have a mink problem as you know in these parts. But it is my belief she must have been dead already for them to have done that to her.’ Angel sat Jess down into a chair.

  ‘Did you know herself and Jack Murphy?’

  ‘Only in passing,’ Angel replied.

  ‘Fresh over from England, Mr O’Hanlon, are you?’

  ‘Well, yes and no. We’ve been here since last spring.’

  ‘Keep yourselves to yourselves do you?’

  ‘Mostly, yes.’

  ‘I seemed to recall word of a fella with the look of yourself come to the old O’Hanlon place from London.’

  ‘That would be me then,’ Angel replied, curtly.

  ‘Right. Well, I’ll not keep you both tonight.’ The garda stood up, nodded, and went to lift the latch of the door. Angel quickly aided his release out onto the porch.

  ‘Is that it?’ Angel asked.

  ‘That’s it. I’ll call in tomorrow and we’ll catch up then.’

  ‘Patrick…’ Angel called out before the garda had reached the hedge.

  ‘I saw her you know. Margaret. Today. Out on the road.’

  ‘What time would that have been?’

  ‘Four, five hours ago.’

  ‘She was probably on her way up. ’Tis a pity you didn’t catch her first, huh?’

  ‘Then you’re sure it’s…’

  ‘She has previous. That’s all you need know. Just keep to the village for the weekend now till the forensics are done. Goodnight now.’

  When he returned to the house, Jess was curled up in bed. Angel quietly closed the bedroom door and went into the kitchen. He stood with his back to the fire and began to consider the day: nothing had gone right from the start of it. Maybe the whole project had been a mistake and they would have been as well to have sold the property when he’d inherited it. But they’d had this mad idea of a life in the country. Maybe it was he and Jess; maybe they were just wrong in the place, like the Swedish mink. Why had he not called out to Margaret when he saw her in the road? She was alone, and not shouting her usual venom at Jack. He should have guessed something was amiss.

  He went out with his big stick to the side field. He walked along the lane-way to the edge of the land, passed the desolate-looking black field, all darkly ploughed and waiting to be sown, the tall grasses on the rim of it kissing in the crosswinds. He looked over towards Henry’s and saw a flashing light from a television screen spill onto their flat dark lawn. He looked up at the black pines and turned to face the long width of emptiness over the ravine down to the river. In the water he saw his reflection and the transillumination of his eyes; they glowed. He took a gulp of the sleet-laden air and thought of poor gormless Jack who had now lost h
is wife. It racked him. He thought of Jess, and of all the precious time he’d missed with her this past year. The wall can wait a while, he told the land, and turned and walked quickly towards the house.

  The Badminton Court

  The window of my room faces a tall hedge and an ancient oak, home to a kestrel and her two chicks. Beyond Redwood are hills, the edge of a winding silver lake. As I observe its gleam curl around the estate, I know instantly that I do not have to cross the lake to find what I need, that happiness is a small question, easily answered.

  Summer. The smell of cut grass, the faint odour of plimsoles. Throughout the house the unmistakable bouquet of hemp. Fourteen acres of manicured gardens and lawns. The sky an azure spell. Clouds that are bird-shaped: an eagle, doves, buzzards. There is a palpable sense of waiting on the badminton court below, a silence soon to be punctured by bat whacks, whistling shuttlecocks and the swish of serge skirts.

  I look down at the court, the sun scalding the lawn, the bullfinches gathering in the gods of the low, long hedge to watch the morning game. I know I’ll be here for a while. Then music: Saint-Saëns, Joy Division. I know what she wants. I hear the front door slam. I go to the games room and change into the maroon-coloured gown. I am here to play. I am here to help her forget. I am here to help her die.

  This is Redwood House, Suffolk. Constable country. Miranda is seventeen. She is thin with shorn blonde hair, and is altogether the most disarmingly honest person I have ever met. Reveals to everyone precisely what her illness is, gives them diagnosis and prognosis. Brain tumour. Malignant. Grade four. Three to six months. I am used to a more guarded (though perhaps ‘duplicit’ is a better word) environment. My father’s cagey manoeuvres, his dubious schemes, his admired business acumen. My presence is itself the settlement of his debts to Miranda’s father.

  Apart from Frances and me, she is alone at Redwood. Her father is off on some protracted business trip; her mother, never discussed, is, I think, barely known to her. The herbal preparations, the meals, the thrice-weekly trips to the clinic, are left to Frances.