The Scattering (16 page)

‘That's a bitter day, Brendan,' Mrs Cheever said as she sorted through the newspapers. Brendan nodded then guided Pat towards the freezer at the back of the shop.

‘But you have it lovely and warm in here, missus,' Pat shouted over to the stout woman. Brendan saw Mrs Cheever look up at them and move a fallen strand of hair away from her face, her fingers black with newsprint.

‘I'm with him. Over from London for the visit,' Pat said.

‘Very pleased to meet you,' Mrs Cheever replied, in her singsong voice. She walked over and put a copy of
The Democrat
under Brendan's arm.

‘Here. The son's wedding is in that. Have another for safe-keeping.'

Pat picked out a pack of Galtee cheese, some rashers, a half-pound of lard, a sliced white batch-loaf, a copy of
Ireland's Own
and Kimberly biscuits. In the basket they looked like something from a 1950s tourist brochure, the type of provisions Brendan himself had bought years ago in Mandy's in Willesden when he was homesick.

‘Pat, you're my guest. You're to spend nothing.'

‘Always pay my way, you know that,' Pat insisted.

By Callan's Brendan heard harp music and stopped. It sounded loud and sad. He saw Joy seated at the table, staring stiffly into a hand-mirror. He saw her catch sight of him, then Pat, who was examining her winter flowers. He wanted to call out but she dashed from the room. He sensed they had stumbled upon a private moment, a low. His pace quickened. When he stopped he heard Pat laughing behind him.

‘Now there's a woman in need of cheering up.'

‘Can't tell you the times I've wanted to call in to her but never do.'

‘You have to get yourself a reason, man.'

‘She likes dancing, I drag my left leg. All I can think of is bringing things, flowers maybe.'

‘All good, but it's not a reason. Ask her to come to Clinton with us.'

It had not even occurred to him to ask Joy Callan to go to the Square with them. One evening in Cheever's he'd spoken to her about the President's visit and had been impressed by her enthusiasm, by her belief that the visit would act as some kind of salve for what the town had been through in the last three decades.

‘This is it,' Brendan said, opening the turquoise gates to the house. Pat gasped at the long, shrub-filled lawns. Brendan watched his friend hobble back to the gates, rest his hands on his hips and look up and down the bunting-covered road. Blue cigarette smoke swirled around Pat's head like a halo.

‘How in the name of God do you manage?' Pat said, retreating towards him.

‘I have a home-help. Her husband comes up, does the lawn in summer.'

‘Good job you have such friends and neighbours.'

Brendan stopped. Surely Pat had seen how preoccupied and standoffish the people here were, and how different he was from them. Surely Pat had observed this.

‘The people of this town never liked me, Pat. Nor me them. There's been no friends for me like the London ones,' Brendan said.

‘Could have fooled me,' Pat replied, darting towards the woody fuchsia hedge. He broke a piece off, smelled the tiny buds. Shepherding him into the house, Brendan put Pat's assessment of his neighbours and friends aside. After all, what did Pat know?

Later, Pat suggested they bring their tea out onto the porch. Brendan followed Pat out with the teapot and an ashtray. The mauve dusk had begun to blacken. Small birds thronged in the elder bushes. Occasionally, passers-by saw them from the glow of the street-lamp and waved. He was determined to get Pat talking.

‘Do you not remember all that carry on in Maida Vale in '74?' he said at length. Pat shook his head, hurled the end of his tea into the grass.

‘You don't remember the police bulldozing into me, asking me about you?'

‘No.'

‘Came ramstaming into our digs in the middle of the night, said they wanted to question me. Took me to Harrow Road station, said someone the spit of you killed an off-duty soldier in Maida Vale. I said – well, ya know what I said. That you were with me up in White City.'

‘I don't remember much of that time at all, Brendan, tell ya the truth.'

Pat seemed uneasy. Perhaps he should not have brought the incident up, but all evening Pat's memory had been hazy. He'd wanted to jolt Pat into remembering. Especially since the lie he had told had cost him so much: a precipitous move from London to this hardnosed border town, a move he hadn't wanted to make, had regretted all the years since.

He brought the cups inside. From the kitchen he could see Pat glaring meditatively out into the greeny-black of the garden, his hands cupped. It had been impossible to draw him back to the days of the Black Lion. Pat had just wanted to look out into the night and talk about the barely discernable shrubs: the mahonias, hebes, winter sweet. Surely this white-haired man with his apparent amnesia and love of plants was not the same Pat. Popeye Pat, who'd had the strength of a bear and may or may not have killed a man in a nightclub in Maida Vale. It dawned on Brendan then, that it had all changed, his London: the lads, the infamous Black Lion lock-ins, the dramas with the PTA. At nine, Pat said he was ready for bed, that abstinence had made a lark out of him.

At around five Brendan thought he heard Pat stir. When he got up, the blinds had been raised, the curtains pulled. December glowed in the empty kitchen. He saw a folded note and a crisp twenty Euro bill under a cup on the table. He picked up the note. Pat's heavy spidery scrawl had almost punctured the page. He scanned it quickly. Something about Pat heading off to see his wife's people in Kilkenny, and that he would call in again next week. The note continued:
Once you said I'd die if I didn't stop drinking. You said you knew I could do it. You saw the best in me and it gave me hope to go on. Now, for god's sake man, would you ever give that town a chance. And give my regards to Bill and Hillary.

Brendan opened the door to the backyard. The smell of sweet wort filled the room. He realised how familiar that smell was, how he'd smelled it daily now for almost twenty-five years. Perhaps, whilst he wasn't looking, he had entered the tapestry of this place after all. Trembling, he picked up the phone to ask Joy Callan if she would walk with him later to the Market Square to see the President.

The Tribe

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

J.G. BALLARD

The images that came up on the screen were of a cold, forested environment. Beside me the lake was iced over and wide as a sea. There were trees all around frozen ponds and up and down mountainsides. I wondered if there was human life here at all. Nothing stirred outside, except for the unmistakable shape of an owl flying across the almost-full moon. I wrapped up in my boots and Gore-Tex and kept my gun close. Into a compartment of my backpack I placed another, more lethal gun and clasped the bag to my front. I secured my mask and hood then exited the POD (shorthand for the small machine that had brought me here, with its state-of-the-art Personal Odyssey Drive® system).

Outside, it was freezing. I'd never known cold like it. Not even on the coldest days in New York. In fact, it was not like any cold I'd ever experienced on the earth, anywhere (including the Northwest Territories where I had prepared for this trip). Yet it was so clean, so
newly
clean. I could distinctly smell pine, and the ice had a fragrant quality, close to mint. I knew that the tundra that covered the earth at this time had beneath it a multitude of flowers and plants, and it was as if the air now was full of the possibility of them. The season, of course, was spring.

I had begun to ascend the mountain when I saw what appeared to be a light. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. (I wasn't hungry but I was tired and had considered returning to the POD, though it would have been dawn before I got there.) I thought perhaps the moon reflected off the snow, but the light was orange. Within a few steps I saw that a fire burned just beyond a redwood copse. (The snow on the trees' laden branches made the copse seem like some outlandish installation, like those I'd seen years before in galleries in the Village.) My first instinct was to rush towards it. It had to signify human life – no animal as far as we knew had learned how to make fire. But what kind of beings had made this one? And what would they make of me? If they were the beings we sought, that I had hoped to find here
,
then could they
speak
? (We had presumed, perhaps conservatively, that I might encounter at best a protolanguage, and not, at this point, actual lexical structure.) I suddenly became afraid of what I might find, though I could feel the gun against my thigh, and it felt warm, as all security is warm, and that I was so quick to think of the weapons I'd brought with me gave me quite a jolt.

I gathered myself and tried to remember my purpose here. I checked that the vial was where I had packed it. It was. Cold and deadly as the modernity that had made it.

*

I saw them sitting around the fire, their backs against a circle of high stones. Some of their young ran from caves and were followed by females who evidently disapproved of them out in the cold air. I could smell something roasting on the fire and saw within the flames a long slim-headed beast. Suddenly, the group rose to their feet. They began to make sounds out of the back of their throats which reverberated throughout the hills. The sounds seemed to pass from being to being in a perfect choreography of polyrhythms; it was quite like what I'd heard of Flamenco music. They were covered from head to toe in taupe, grey and dark-red furs, which looked to be the pelts of rabbits, some kind of arctic-like fox, and bears. The group sang its song to the fire, to the beast roasting on the spit, and to the moon and icy expanse – and though I could not understand a word (in so far as their song was composed of words), I felt, somehow, that this was a song of praise, perhaps, even, of welcoming the spring.

After a while, one of the older males loosened the beast from the two thin poles it hung from and set it down on a long flat slab. He cut furiously into it with a hand-axe made of what seemed in the moonlight to be quartz or river-flint. He made many piles of meat, and only when he gestured did the group gather around the slab to eat. They were talking. The sound was unmistakable: laughter, grunts, jesting, the aural characteristics of human engagement, all the sounds that one might hear in any modern crowd. These hominids were clearly enjoying their food. It was then I realised that other than the energy biscuits and apples in my backpack, I'd no further supplies until I returned to the POD. The POD itself had enough food for a few more days of my explorations here; the rest held in reserve for the journey home (if I would, indeed, return). I slowly unclasped the pack and squatted down beside it. I was so hungry I devoured two of the three biscuits and washed them down with a small bottle of chemical-tasting water.

Within a few minutes I could hear a commotion. I stood up and saw a fight break out between two males, between them, a young female clinging tightly to a rock. The smaller of the two males was eventually trounced by the other and stole off like a honey badger into the woods. The tall, rangier male brought the female towards two older females who laughed as they walked her back to the caves. Quickly, the peace returned. After the meal, the taller male quenched the fire and moved the stragglers along. There was something civilised and quite authoritative, I thought, about this creature hanging back to tidy up the remains of his tribe's revels.

As I would need daylight in order to proceed with my task, I decided to remain where I was. Below me nothing stirred except three or four brindled dogs that looked like small wolves gathering in the centre of the valley to finish off the meat. There seemed also to be a constant rumbling sound, which I supposed was a distant ice storm (perhaps signifying some kind of metamorphic activity in the region). It was as I found an over-leaning bank of earth, under which I planned to sleep, that I heard the other sound. It was terrible and gurgling and instantly recognisable. I looked down and saw that the tall authoritative tribe-member stood in the empty valley below, a pole pierced through his chest, pinning him to the white earth. The others began to emerge from their caves and the sides of the valley. The young female and the group she had been with ran to him. They screamed and cried and pulled the pole from the tall male, at which he dropped to the ground. I heard a sound, if not an actual word, repeated again and again by one of the older females. ‘Orvey! Orvey! Orvey!' she seemed to cry, as she continually tried to wake him. And I knew, somewhere in the depths of my being, that the sound – for how could I call it a word when I was yet to be convinced that this tribe was in possession of what could feasibly be called language? – meant:
child.

*

My sleep had been fitful. My dreams full of images from my past: old friends, many already dead, the bustle of the city (before the Hudson disaster), nights at the theatre, candlelit dinners. All of it punctuated by the repeating image of the male skewered to the ice. I had reached for my gun a dozen times, and held my backpack close throughout the night. I deduced that what had seemed, at first, to be a harmonious scene from where I was perched had probably been some sort of projection of mine. Perhaps I had wanted to be surprised by the life I'd found here; had imagined I'd stumbled onto an icy Eden of sorts. But the night had ended as it does in any town or city in any country in the modern world, where, in my time, the murder of a man over nothing more than a piece of meat was a pretty common occurrence. I don't know why I was so surprised or saddened. What did I care about this group – with their backs to their high protective stones? I had not come here to care – not about this tribe anyway. Still, I could not get the older female's cry, or the younger female's attempts to shake the male alive, out of my mind. The sounds and images of the night weighed against any kind of meaningful sleep. These, together with the thought that nagged at the back of my mind, that the heavy-set, wilder male, who was probably the cause of the tall male's death, had not emerged onto the scene – and was now, no doubt, loose somewhere in the woods, which, in the dawn light, seemed to me to be comprised of a variety of pines, oak, hazel and pistachio.