Free The Scattering by Jaki McCarrick

them the screen.
    â€˜I can’t leave the shop, but would you mind giving this to your friend?’
    â€˜Which friend?’ asked the dark-haired girl.
    â€˜Jean! The blonde girl that was in here with you.’
    â€˜No, you are mistaken. The blonde girl was not with us,’ the moon-faced man replied.
    The door closed and the two dreadlocked strangers walked hand in hand towards the sands. Patricia looked out at them, then at her daughter, who was on the promenade wall, laughing at a chattering seagull.

The Congo

    When I awoke the first thing I did was check my bag. I took from it what I needed then tucked it back under the bed, placing my father’s slippers neatly in front. I went to the window and opened it, amazed as I did that I remembered the bottom pane was loose. A grey cloud hung over the town, and three mallards the colour of barley flew in a line towards the Ramparts River. I wondered if I had been away at all, for everything was as it had been when I had left, twenty-odd years before, except I could no longer hear the lowing of cows from Quincey’s field, which was home now to a new housing estate. It had been like this since my arrival: encounters with my old self, a strange sensation of continuum, of picking up where I had left off. As if my London self was there still, walking through Richmond on his way to Kew, while my younger self, that ghost, was here in this damp house, staring out at the dawn weather.
    I closed the door behind me, the smell of the eggs I’d fried for my father’s breakfast still clinging to my nostrils, and walked to the corner of the tree-lined Avenue. The edges of my holster chafed at my ribs and sweat beads formed on my forehead making my face feel cold. I carried on down the Echo Road, past the freshly mown playing fields, on towards the Grange.
    The place was as tranquil as I’d ever seen it. In the pale morning light even the houses with the smashed-in windows and weed-run gardens looked serene, so that the ragwort passed almost for daisies. There was a fabulous assortment of colours too, from the many flower baskets, filled as they were with petunias, begonias, violets. There had always been people in the Grange who would try to pull themselves up; always a mother or father prepared to stand up to the gangs.
    From where I stood, I could see Devlin’s place. The house seemed much the same: the satiny fuchsia hedge, the faux-Tudor windows gleaming like mirrors, the tall palm soaking up the rays of the early sun. Had he really returned, I wondered? Or had he gone, upon his release, to Kilburn, as some had said he had, where it was possible he’d been living under my nose all these months?
    Grace had always been proud of her home. I’d always considered it a testament to her resourcefulness that when she’d found herself stuck in this estate on a widow’s pension with six sons (two of them gang members), Grace had still managed to keep an attractive house. Fortress Devlin, she would call it, as she’d felt so safe within its walls. Built in the seventies, the Grange had promised the families that came to live in it – modernity: bathrooms, spacious bedrooms, central heating. But within a decade it had become a festering sprawl, filled with gangs, drugs, violence. And her husband’s death before her boys were full-grown, ensured that Grace and her sons remained there, such is the quicksand nature of the ghetto, which requires money, time and strategy to get out of (and none of these had been much available to Grace). The air up on the Avenue had always been rarified and easy, while here, even now, I could feel the deadweight of Grange air in my lungs.
    As I proceeded to the corner of the car park for the new Dunnes Stores (where once there had been a hill – ‘the clump’ – where gangs such as ours would meet for prearranged fights), I saw a figure walk towards the bottleneck opening of the estate. I