The Gathering

by Anne Enright

  I have a picture from that visit, of Liam with Emily on his knee one night after her bath. He is a small grey heap of a man, settled back into an armchair that is covered in a dust sheet. Emily is two; naked, straight as a die, and more beautiful than I have words to say. Liam’s hands are big, stuffed hands, wrapped around her middle, as he holds her on. Her bum is neat and sharp, sitting side-saddle on one of his thighs. Behind her, the cloth of his trousers wrinkles and sags around a crotch that is a mystery no one is interested in any more. His face is amused.

  Liam understood Emily – they liked each other. Of Rebecca, who is more like me, he said, ‘Pity about the teeth.’

  I have to forgive that too, I suppose.

  Pity about the teeth.

  Soon after the Gardai took him in and our father got him out again, he threw the breadknife across the kitchen at my mother, who was probably just trying to say something nice, and the whole family piled into him, and kicked him around the back garden.

  ‘Ya fucken eejit.’

  ‘You missed, you thick.’

  And there was great satisfaction to it, as I recall. Like a scab that needed to be picked. He had it coming to him.

  (And perhaps, more secretly, so did she.)

  But still I wondered, for a long time, what the cops had lifted him for. I thought about it a lot. It might have been for a broken window, or nicking drink in the offie, or just the look in his eye. Or it might have been for something I could not even guess at. There was a girl, Natalie, who was weepy and shouting at the corner of the road – maybe it was her. I thought there might have been some misunderstanding, that my father was obliged to straighten out with further information about the girl and her messy ways, and the length of her Saturday-night skirt.

  In the end, I had to ask him. I said, ‘Was it Natalie? Was it that wan?’ and he just looked at me.

  What if he had raped her? Isn’t that one of the things that men do? What if there was blood on her leg, tears on her face? Snot. What else?

  I was sixteen and I knew nothing at all about sex. Isn’t that strange? Whatever I knew of the mechanics of it was not available to me, somehow. I did not know how these things went. It seems that the years of my adolescence were years of increasing innocence, because by sixteen I was completely passionate and completely pure. We would all become poets, I thought, we would love mightily, and Liam, in his anger, would change the world.

  Even so, there was something I couldn’t quite get a handle on: something that was highly relevant, that I really needed to know. In the end I had to ask him.

  ‘Was it Natalie – the cop thing?’

  Liam looked at me. And the gap that opened between us was the gap that exists between a woman and a man – or so I thought, at sixteen – the difference between what a man might do, or want to do, sexually, what a woman might only guess at.

  ‘Were you messing with her?’ I said.

  And he said, ‘Don’t be so thick.’

  There was a wood we walked through once. It was autumn, perhaps even that autumn. The trunks of the trees were grey and bright, and the leaves that clung to them were as theatrical an orange as leaves could get. It was an avenue of beech trees, I think now, with the roots lifting massively out of the earth in front of us.

  That’s all.

  It was a romantic scene, walking along this avenue of orange leaves, so I would have been thinking of Tanner or Joe Ninety or whoever it was that week: I would have been thinking of the unknown man I was destined to love. Instead of which I was stuck, in all this beauty, with my brother.

  There were mountains in the distance; massive with rock and heather. We walked under a high, pale sky and we felt, in this landscape, so small, and there was no one to judge. That’s all. There was an immense feeling of Godlessness about it. Which made it sort of funny, in a way – all of it: the mountains and the pale sky and the overly orange leaves that refused to fall, in these, the closing days of our unholy alliance.

  What was the best time?

  When Liam was fourteen or so, he had a bike and I had none and he used to give me a crossbar down to the shops or up to the local swimming pool. I don’t know how he saw over my shoulder to do it. There was always a fight over the steering – me holding the handlebars rigid, him trying to pull them one way or the other, with his chin digging into my back, and my hair in his eyes. He cycled bandy, and my legs were stuck out to one side; so we were a thing of elbows and knees, the poke of handlebar ends and the vicious jab of stainless-steel pedals. You would think we did it for fun, but it was a fight from first to last.

  After which, in the pool, we would ignore each other on the grounds of gender, and if there were no boys for him to hang out with, he swam alone, and if there were no girls I did the same. Sometimes we knew nobody, but we did not give up the chance of getting to know someone by ever speaking to each other. And if he did come over to me, with his skinny wet chest and his face all red in patches, I would be completely annoyed with him for blowing my cover. Because who can be a mysterious object of the deep when their brother is hanging around, saying, ‘You’ve got a snotter.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Big green one.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Go away.’

  ‘There it is.’

  ‘Fuck off!! Go away!’

  His skinny chest arching backwards. His messy, purple mouth going under. His foot churning water in my face, as he swims off to join the monstrous boys at the other end of the pool.

  Natalie would have been there too, a fat little ten-year-old with a few pubic hairs like an old woman’s chin – she lost the bottom of her bikini every time she dived off the edge of the pool. Four years later I ask Liam was he messing with her, and he gives me a look from a distance that I do not know how to cross.

  I do now.

  Now I know that the look in Liam’s eye was the look of someone who knows they are alone. Because the world will never know what has happened to you, and what you carry around as a result of it. Even your sister – your saviour in a way, the girl who stands in the light of the hall – even she does not hold or remember the thing she saw. Because, by that stage, I think I had forgotten it entirely.

  Over the next twenty years, the world around us changed and I remembered Mr Nugent. But I never would have made that shift on my own – if I hadn’t been listening to the radio, and reading the paper, and hearing about what went on in schools and churches and in people’s homes. It went on slap-bang in front of me and still I did not realise it. And for this, I am very sorry too.

  26

  EMILY TURNS HER cat’s eyes to me.

  ‘How did Uncle Liam die?’ she says.

  ‘He drowned,’ I say.

  ‘How did he drown?’

  ‘He couldn’t breathe in the water.’

  ‘In the sea water?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It is important to be clear about these things – Emily needs to dismantle the world before she can put it together again. Rebecca’s mind is a vaguer sort of machine, anxiety sets her adrift. Sometimes I wish she would focus up, but who is to say which is the better way to be?

  ‘I can swim,’ says Emily.

  ‘Yes, you can swim, you’re a great swimmer.’

  ‘Couldn’t he not swim?’

  ‘Sweetie, he didn’t want to.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you want a hug?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Well, I want a hug. Come here and give your poor mother a hug.’

  And she comes over with outstretched arms and a big fake smile for the ‘Poor Mummy’ pantomime. I should think of her as selfish, but I don’t – I think of her as utterly beautiful in her selfishness.

  ‘I think it’s OK to kill yourself,’ she says into my chest. ‘You know, when you’re old.’

  It is hard to remember that they don’t mean to hurt – or don’t know that they do. I push her back from me and I say, in
a tear-thickened shame-on-you voice, ‘Your Uncle Liam was not old, Emily. He was sick. Do you hear me? Your Uncle Liam was sick, in his head.’

  She lingers at my knee and draws with her fingernail in the smooth nylon of my tights.

  ‘Like seasick sick?’

  ‘Oh forget it, all right? Just forget it.’

  She jumps in to hug me, her victory won over all my concerns. And then she runs off to play.

  For a week, I compose a great and poetic speech for my children about how there are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts – they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared.

  I am all for sadness, I say, don’t get me wrong. I am all for the ordinary life of the brain. But we fill up sometimes, like those little wooden birds that sit on a pole – we fill up with it, until donk, we tilt into the drink.

  27

  ABOUT A MONTH after the funeral, Tom comes home as usual and he slings his coat into the sofa and sets his briefcase down, then he comes over to the dining area, working his tie loose, taking off his jacket, hanging it on the back of a hardback chair; he mooches over to the island to pick a piece of fruit from the bowl, and I think, It never happened, Liam never died, it is all the same as it ever was. Instead of which, I say, ‘You’d fuck anything.’

  ‘What?’ he says.

  I say, ‘I don’t know where it starts and where it ends, that’s all. You’d fuck the nineteen-year-old waitress, or the fifteen-year-old who looks nineteen.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I don’t know where the edges are, that’s all. I don’t know where you draw the line. Puberty, is that a line? It happens to girls at nine, now.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he says.

  ‘Or not to your actual fucking. Of course. But just, you know, to your desire. To what you want. Is there a limit to what you want to fuck, out there?’

  I have gone mad.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ says Tom.

  He plucks his jacket from the chair and heads for the front door, but I’ve got my bag and I’m there before him, scrabbling for the latch.

  ‘You’re not leaving,’ I say.

  ‘Get out of the way.’

  ‘You’re not leaving. I’m leaving. I am the one who is going to the fucking pub.’

  I have the door open now, so there is a pathetic piece of push and shove in the porch – Hello, Booterstown! Tom, realising he is about to hit me otherwise, lifts his hands in the air. And there’s my answer, I suppose, to the question of his impulses and his actions, and the gap between the two. If I wanted to see it. Which I do not.

  ‘You can get the girls out in the morning,’ I say.

  Because this is where all our grand emotions end up, at who does the pick-ups and who does the porridge – at least it used to, until I gave in and tried to save my marriage by doing the lot. Christ, I could get bitter.

  ‘What do you mean, “the morning”?’

  I look at him, very hard. He lifts his hand to his lip, as though there might be something stuck there, which gives me the half a second I need to get over the threshold and back away from him down the drive.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  And I go to the Shelbourne, on my credit card.

  This is a mistake.

  The place is full of people having a good time. They sit and drink and talk and laugh. They all seem bursting with it – whatever it is. With the whole business of being themselves. That guy Dickie Kennedy is drinking in a corner, and I remember the story about how he got his wife for ‘deserting the family home’. And he also got the home.

  I should be wearing my light green tweed skirt, tight across the thighs – that would show them. I should be sitting here in one of those posh wrap dresses. This is what I think about, on the brink of my marriage (or is it my sanity) in the Shelbourne bar – I think clothes would make a difference.

  I sit and sip a gin and tonic from a heavy glass, and I realise that there are a limited number of ways for a woman like me to go.

  Two years ago, I had a letter from Ernest. He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains. And his bishop might have a few things to say about this, so he had decided not to tell his bishop – he was, in fact, telling no one except friends and family (but don’t tell Mammy!) that it was no longer ‘Father Ernest’, but just plain old ‘Ernest’ again. Once a priest always a priest, of course – so he wasn’t exactly telling lies by keeping his mouth shut. ‘I have no place left to live but in my own heart,’ he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms.

  And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all.

  And I wondered how many people around me are living with and sleeping with and laughing with their spouses on just this basis, and I wondered how sad they were. Not very, by the looks of it. Not sad at all.

  The last time I saw Dickie Kennedy was out in his amazing house in Glenageary. It must have been after Rebecca was born. And God he was a savage. ‘I see Brian’s got his hands full,’ he says, after some poor woman smoothes her skirt over a plump backside, because there seems to be no way she can reverse out of the room. We sit and listen to this stuff, and we eat mushroom risotto, followed by hake in a bright green sauce. The food is very good. Emer, the woman who made it all, has skin thickened to a hide by too much sun and too much cream. I am drawn to the V of her top as she shrugs, to see the whole business move and crease. She asks me some questions, and they are good questions, and I answer, and so the dinner proceeds to everyone’s satisfaction. She is really quite witty. She gets a bit drunk. She tells a story about a woman we all know who took off her top in Dickie’s office – the ugliness of her, you have no idea, the underwear – he came home shaking. And we all laugh. And then we go home.

  Even Tom, in the car afterwards, gives himself a little shake, like he can not believe the contract that was being offered to us, just there.

  ‘What was all that about?’ When I get back from dropping off the babysitter he is sitting in the living room, making his way through a bottle of whiskey, in the dark.

  Or maybe this was another night. For a while, all those nights were the same.

  ‘Do you want the light on?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Are you coming to bed?’

  Here we go, again. Always after a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on.

  ‘No, I’ll just sit up a while.’

  ‘It’s up to you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Push me pull you. Come here and I’ll tell you how much I hate you. Hang on a minute while I leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be. I know what it is now, though, because upstairs the baby shouts in her sleep. I move to go.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thanks for staying with me.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

  ‘No. Really.’

  Or some version of the above – we rarely shout, myself and Tom, we just hate.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I say.

  And one night – it might even have been this night, after the hake in green sauce, and Brian’s plump wife, and the ugly woman in the bad underwear, and all the winning and the losing – Tom takes the cigarette out of his mouth. He holds it up, high under my chin, and he scrunches it in his fist. The smell, when he opens his hand, is small and terrible.

  It clears my head.

  The thing is, if I go up to Rebecca and kiss her, she
will be happy. If I sit on the arm of the chair and kiss Tom, he will not be happy. So I stay with him for just a moment more, in the singed smell of his self-disgust. I hold his skull against my breast. I do this until Rebecca’s wailing grows to the exact pitch that pulls me to my feet, every time. Then I go.

  It was the children that did for us, at least for a while. I think he stopped hating me after I left work. Of course, Tom would say he never hated me, that he loved me all along. But I know hating when I see it. I know it, because there is a part of me that wants to be hated, too.

  There must be.

  Anyway.

  It did get easier over the years, but it never really did get fixed.

  I thought about this, as I sat in the Shelbourne bar – that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go ‘home’ where I could ‘have sex’ with my ‘husband’ just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn’t seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.

  28

  THE BRITISH, I decide, only bury people when they are so dead, you need another word for it. The British wait so long for a funeral that people gather not so much to mourn, as to complain that the corpse is still hanging around. There is a queue, they say on the phone (the British love a queue). They do not gather until the emotion is gone.

  What else am I to make of the ten days we have to wait for paperwork; the death certificates and removal orders, that have to find their separate ways into the one envelope that will accompany my brother on his journey home.

  Meanwhile, as computers wait and printers jam, as coroner’s assistants go to the gym, and registrars wrestle with the collapse of their central heating systems, Liam lies in some unspecified foreign fridge, and I – we all – get on with things. From time to time, as I move about the house, I am gripped by the thought that I have, shamefully, forgotten something: there is a tampon seeping into the water of the downstairs toilet; I have left half a biscuit on the arm of a chair, or forgotten to finish my tea. I can feel it going cold in my mouth, as I hunt around and finally find the empty cup.