The Scattering

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Authors: Jaki McCarrick
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all things. Patricia was glad to see her pieces provoke such interest in history. All the same, she kept her eye on the dreadlocked two as they motioned towards the end of the shop, gleefully examining the trends of a century.
    The robbery had brought back memories of her husband, Gordon. He had been a generous but violent husband. His rages had exhausted her, had left her self-confidence ebbing and flowing like the tide. Giovanni had told his students that as guardians of artistic souls they were to protect and nourish them. She knew she had failed to do this. Her marriage had been a colossal mistake, and, since the robbery, she had begun to think she’d made yet another with the shop. She’d not run a business before and had gotten into antiques purely by accident, having inherited so many.
    Gordon had had complete control over all their furniture purchases in their London house. His choice the Louis Poulsen lamps, the Hitch Mylius sofa, the Le Corbusier recliner, the two red Arne Jacobsen egg chairs. And his choice the commissioning of artwork to match the modernist furnishings. And so, when Patricia found herself drowning in clutter in her dead mother’s house on the northeastern Irish coast, she decided the best way to dispose of it all was to sell it, and within months she had developed the kind of dealer instinct that takes some brokers a lifetime to acquire: she knew what would sell, she bought cheap and nurtured her top clients. This world of antiques was the antithesis of her previous life, and that this was so made her very happy. But now it was clear that if she did not find the funds to replace the stolen stock and repair the displays (which the thieves had levelled with a hatchet), until her insurance came through at least, there would be no business. And what would she do then?
    â€˜Were they of great value, the things they took?’
    Patricia took a long look at her blonde-haired inquisitor. The girl seemed to understand the distress the robbery had caused her. Not even the police had realised it had near enough plunged them into poverty.
    â€˜Yes. Some were irreplaceable.’
    â€˜I’ve not seen you here before,’ the girl said, pressing a crimson moiré-silk corsage into the fat of her cheek.
    â€˜We’ve only been here a year or so. From London. But I’m from here, originally.’
    The girl wandered closer, stopping to smell the perfume off the pumps and thick glass tips of the scent decanters.
    â€˜What’s your name?’ she asked.
    â€˜Patricia,’ Patricia said.
    â€˜Mine’s Jean.’
    Pat’s Curios was centrally placed on the street so that it had a clear, unhindered view of the Irish Sea. On a good day much of the low-lying Cooley Peninsula could be seen from within the shop, its swathes of heather and gorse sweeping down to the shimmering water. The sea here was tame, and until the arrival of winter, possessed no real force. It was a seaweed-smelling sea, thought by many to have been poisoned over the years by Sellafield. Scuba divers continued to visit all year round, but generally people no longer came to Dundalk’s elegant coastal village to collect cockles, as they had done, or to swim. It was a sea that had to be fought off in winter with sandbags and towels, as the brown, sand-heavy water would rage over the promenade wall, under doors and into houses. All the same, it possessed a predictable temper, to which the locals were well attuned.
    Behind the lighthouse, on the far side of the Peninsula, was Templetown beach, where the police had been digging for months in search of a woman’s body. The beach had been named by the IRA as the vicinity of her burial place, but Templetown beach was two miles long and so the searching had seemed interminable. In the mornings, Patricia would look out at the helicopters and the flashing lights of the diggers, a chilling reminder of the old tensions of the place. In the afternoons she

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