Free The Scattering by Jaki McCarrick Page B

cloak. I thought immediately of the Russian winter and the frostbitten Napoleonic soldiers of my book. And for the first time I doubted Devlin’s leadership. Why had he let it go so far? The reality of the murder we’d just committed under his feverish spell suddenly hit me. I looked around. The twins had felt it too. They were both pale and slumped, huddled together on the mizzling day, like two spent sunflowers in October. Then Devlin walked up to us. I will never forget the way he did that. He churlishly took the twins’ knives and twisted them into a bank of turf, hard and skinned-over since the Council had prohibited cutting it a few years before. (The knives had not even been used that day.) Then he said he was hungry , that the cold mountain air had made him ravenous. I wanted to puke when he said that, and suddenly what we had done down there in the town began to seem as real and terrible a thing as Devlin’s hunger.
    I cannot remember exactly why he chose The Congo. I just remember that after the cemetery, Devlin said he wanted to do some damage . I had no idea he meant ‘people damage’; I thought he meant burning something, or trashing some old house up, and I was ready, as ever, with my car.
    â€˜Where you thinking of goin’?’ Mikey asked.
    â€˜Park Street,’ Devlin said.
    â€˜Class!’ Joe said, and went on about being in for a day’s drinking.
    â€˜No. No drink. That’s not what I meant,’ said Devlin.
    â€˜What did you mean?’ I asked.
    â€˜Well, somethin’ will come. Somethin’ will come and we will know.’ That was Devlin all over. So damned enigmatic. As if he had commune with someone other than his own present self. I would learn in court that this was a trait common to the likes of Charles Manson and Ian Brady, a means to avoid all guilt: blame it on the voices, the signs, some force outside oneself.
    He was younger than me by two years, so by rights we should never have been friends. Only he saved me once. One night, up the alley by MJ’s (where he and the twins drank), he’d stopped me from being kicked to death by a bunch of shit-kickers from Ardee. Only for that night I’d never have been part of the gang, or come to know him or the Crilly twins, or any of the lads from the Grange. (After all, I went to the Grammar, and lived on the Avenue.) I remember looking up, half-expecting the tall, dark-eyed interloper to join them, and, instead, he flung them off me like a wild cat. Then the twins charged in, dragged my two hick assailants towards the river. I never asked Devlin why he pulled me from that beating. I presume he saw in me what he later saw in Gascoigne: an exploitable weakness, such as the shame I wore like a badge as son of the town’s most notorious drunk.
    I sheltered in, and even came to like, the ‘hard’ reputation the Grange boys had. I hoped that by association it would rub off. Until my involvement with Devlin, I’d had to suffer all manner of quips about my family’s change of fortune. From millionaires to hungry up in the big house (followed by the passing of my mother, who did what she did, some said, because she had felt so disgraced). So, by the time I fell in with Devlin, I was that fed up I no longer cared if people thought me a chip off the old block or not (and they definitely did). I began to justify their thoughts, became well and truly Mad Mansfield, the Drunken Solicitor’s Son. I began to drink heavily, mindlessly sometimes; to gamble (anything – cards, horses, dogs, the slots * ), so that I must have seemed like rich pickings indeed to Devlin with the amount of insecurities I had. Whatever way it happened, the way two people find their fate in one another, I was a troubled young man from the Avenue one day, and the next bewitched by a lout (albeit a beautiful lout).
    Devlin called in to the bar. No one answered. The signs he’d been waiting for: no