The Scattering by Jaki McCarrick

one around, middle of the day, cash register open.
    For the first few minutes inside, the twins joked and pretended we were in the bar of a Western. The Congo was high-ceilinged, had never been updated. The wooden floors were dull and decorticated in places. The bar itself was breast-high with a gleaming brass rail hanging just beneath the rim of the bar top. Devlin sat on one of the red leather seats and lit up in his usual girlish way, slow and light, his little finger apart (erect almost), and watched the twins as they fooled around. I have never since met anyone, however duplicitous or skilled in the craft of acting, who could smile as sweetly as he – the smooth white baby-fangs, the gentle crescent dimples – yet possess a simultaneous deadness in the eyes. It was, I understand now, the overlapping of two people in one. He was night and day in one, and it was, for me, I recall, a hopelessly magnetic contrast.
    â€˜Mikey leave it!’ Devlin said.
    â€˜But Jesus man, the place is fuckin’ empty!’
    â€˜You’re tanked up enough. We might need to run for it. Use your head.’
    â€˜Well, come on then!’ Joe said. ‘We’ve got the money, what we waiting for? Let’s go.’
    Devlin placed his long legs on top of the table, and crossed his feet. He put his arms behind his head, wrist to nape.
    â€˜Why would someone leave a place like this for scumbags like us to come and fuck around inside it, hah?’ Devlin said.
    â€˜Maybe he’s gone to get somethin’,’ Mikey replied.
    â€˜Who’s he?’ Devlin asked Mikey, who was now scared.
    â€˜Who’s he?’ Devlin repeated.
    â€˜Prentice Black he means,’ I said, ‘the owner.’ My father had known Prentice Black. People who came to the bar thought Prentice a survivor from an Irish UN battalion massacred in the Congo in the 1960s, and Prentice would let them think it. The truth was Prentice had bought the pub from a man named Cyril White in the same year the Congo had gone from being a Belgian colony to a Democratic Republic. Prentice (who had himself been a member of the ‘old’ IRA, i.e. pre-Bloody Sunday IRA), could not resist what he saw as a parallel between his purchase and the establishment of the African state, hence the pub’s name. (There was even a map of Africa in the shape of Patrice Lumumba’s head in the men’s toilets.) When I suggested that Prentice might be over in the bookies opposite, it set something off in Devlin.
    â€˜Well, then we’ll wait,’ Devlin said, coolly.
    â€˜Fuck’s sake, why?’ asked Joe. He and Mikey had become bored and restless in the dingy veneer-panelled lounge, the light a muddy olive colour from the stained-glass tiles above the windows. They had begun writing, with a black felt-tip marker, obscenities, on the wide mirror at the back of the bar.
    â€˜Hey, we’ll wait, fuckwit, because a man that’d leave his bar in the middle of the day is a careless man. And in my experience, a careless man always has easy access to money.’
    It was then I started to become afraid. Mikey and Joe had between them taken over fifty pounds from the till. My pockets were stuffed with cigarettes, crisps, a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. We could have walked. That’s what I wanted to do. Even the twins looked worried. For Devlin had implied something way beyond our usual messing. Even beyond the worst we, as a gang, had done up till then (which, apart from Gascoigne, had been the bottles we’d stolen for the Provos for petrol bombs). Yet we remained. Compelled as ever by that smile, by those black unforgiving eyes, by the magnetism I loved but had already begun to resent. And so minutes passed and we waited. I remember the silence. I remember wondering what he would do and how he might do it. I remember not knowing if I should run, or throw myself down and bathe in his glow. The room was like a theatre, all hush