The Scattering Read Free

gleam curl around the estate, I know instantly that I do not have to cross the lake to find what I need, that happiness is a small question, easily answered.
    Summer. The smell of cut grass, the faint odour of plimsoles. Throughout the house the unmistakable bouquet of hemp. Fourteen acres of manicured gardens and lawns. The sky an azure spell. Clouds that are bird-shaped: an eagle, doves, buzzards. There is a palpable sense of waiting on the badminton court below, a silence soon to be punctured by bat whacks, whistling shuttlecocks and the swish of serge skirts.
    I look down at the court, the sun scalding the lawn, the bullfinches gathering in the gods of the low, long hedge to watch the morning game. I know I’ll be here for a while. Then music: Saint-Saëns, Joy Division. I know what she wants. I hear the front door slam. I go to the games room and change into the maroon-coloured gown. I am here to play. I am here to help her forget. I am here to help her die.
    This is Redwood House, Suffolk. Constable country. Miranda is seventeen. She is thin with shorn blonde hair, and is altogether the most disarmingly honest person I have ever met. Reveals to everyone precisely what her illness is, gives them diagnosis and prognosis. Brain tumour. Malignant. Grade four. Three to six months. I am used to a more guarded (though perhaps ‘duplicit’ is a better word) environment. My father’s cagey manoeuvres, his dubious schemes, his admired business acumen. My presence is itself the settlement of his debts to Miranda’s father.
    Apart from Frances and me, she is alone at Redwood. Her father is off on some protracted business trip; her mother, never discussed, is, I think, barely known to her. The herbal preparations, the meals, the thrice-weekly trips to the clinic, are left to Frances.
    Further to the south of Redwood there is another property, with a small boathouse: South Lodge. Lavender hedgerows, saxifrage-covered rocks, an assortment of mangy cats and kittens. This is Inshaw’s place. From this land he watches us. When we play he pretends he is out gathering mushrooms or repairing the corrugated roof of the boathouse. Sometimes I see his dark, deliquescent eyes follow the shuttlecock back and forth over the net. He is a presence in the game; triangulates it. She tells me to ignore him.
    I have become, within weeks, father and mother to her. Father, mother and more.
    Dinner. Frances has prepared salmon and marinated tuna and Miranda wants to teach me how to use chopsticks. She rises, comes towards me. The sick smell of her as she bends over my shoulder; death is in her breath. I have forgotten she is so ill. It is easy to do: that lightness of spirit, precision of play. She drops her head on my hair. Your beautiful hair, she says, your long, dark beautiful hair. I am aware of her bones against my own tumescence and curves. She comes away, stands before me, androgynous and stark, and for a moment it seems as if each of us has been called up from the depths of the other’s consciousness. We go on like this. The days are endless, summer does not turn. Only I notice the chicks are bigger in the oak, and that Inshaw has finally repaired his roof and is sailing his boat, or I would hardly register the passing of time at all.
    I bump into Inshaw in the village. I am surprised. Nice man, shy. We discuss Miranda. Poor Miranda. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right. He says he will look out for her when I leave at the end of September. I realise I do not want to leave, not ever. I think of my first night and the thoughts I’d had of escape, of secret instant escape onto the tall hedge; I consider how fortunate it was I did not give in to those thoughts. The encounter with Inshaw has startled me. The sudden reality of the situation, a splint of cold glass in my skull.
    She says little at breakfast. The evening before she had been on fire. Rapid, erratic thoughts, unfinished sentences, sentences that