The Gathering

by Anne Enright

  Every day I go over to Griffith Way and sit in a formal sort of way with my mother, and Bea if she is there, or Kitty. We talk about ordinary things. Or we settle her in front of the television set and retreat to the kitchen, where Kitty – where we all – look diminished, overgrown. I am shocked by the amount of products we need, each of us slicked up and greased down, until there is no surface free of cosmetic matt or sheen. This is what it is to be middle-aged in the place where we once were children, and now, highlights notwithstanding, we are being treated like children again, not so much by our mother, as by death itself. Except we are very good children this time around.

  I am a good daughter. I am a very good daughter. In some sort of middle-class fit, I go into Kilkenny Design and buy my mother a beautiful, spider-woven, cashmere shawl, in cream.

  She takes it out of the bag, entranced for a moment by the idea that she might look like an old lady off the telly.

  So this is what they give you, when your children die.

  She lets me put it across her, but her rounded old shoulders reject it, as does the set of her jaw. She pulls it down into her lap, saying, ‘It would make a lovely christening shawl, wouldn’t it? Ciara has one on the way.’ Because, although she never quite knows us when she sees us in the flesh, my mother counts over her progeny and their progeny to the third generation; she shifts through their names with pleasure and ease.

  ‘She’s due in February, isn’t she? Very cold.’

  All the Hegarty babies are baptised, because to do otherwise would be to rob this woman of what she rightfully owns, her little treasure of souls – we all traipse dutifully up to the font and hand them over. I didn’t mind, actually, but I thought Jem was pushing it. Who knows what the Hegartys believe? Mossie-the-psychotic goes to Mass every day during Lent, but we only know this because he tells us, being psychotic. The rest of us do our praying alone.

  I take the shawl from her, folding it and putting it back in the paper bag, saying as I do so, ‘Would you take something for yourself, Mammy, just once.’ And she gives me a beaky look, as if to say, What? You want me to be like you?

  I don’t know what is wrong with being me. And I don’t know if she would like me better, if she could remember my name. Mammy was always free to choose which ones she did and did not love. The boys first, of course, and after the boys, whichever of the girls were good.

  I was not good. I am not sure why. It is not that I ever did anything out of the way. I just didn’t buy it, and neither did Liam. We just didn’t buy the whole Hegarty poor Mammy thing.

  Poor Mammy sits and watches afternoon TV, as she does, and will do, before and after the death of any other human being. It is impossible to say what she is thinking about. When she speaks it is of things that happened long ago, before any of us came into the world: the adventure of the milkman’s horse, the day she set fire to the living-room carpet in Broadstone, her mother Ada at the thin end of the month, making a stew that was only vegetables – jungle stew, she called it, the carrots were ‘tiger meat’ and the parsnips ‘camel chews’.

  Around us, the house is empty and tatty; a warren of partitions, scuttling with the ghosts of the children we once were. Three dead – we are nearly a normal family now. A couple more and we will be just the right size.

  I had a guy in to clean the carpets once, and he told me he was the last of twenty-one. All big families are the same. I meet them sometimes at parties or in pubs, we announce ourselves and then we grieve – Billy in Boston, and Jimmy-Joe in Jo’burg, doing well – the dead first, then the lost, and then the mad.

  There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister. These are just trends, of course, and, like trends, they shift. Because our families contain everything and, late at night, everything makes sense. We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them – at least I do. The imponderable pain of my mother, against which I have hardened my heart. Just one glass over the odds and I will thump the table, like the rest of them, and howl for her too.

  This is what, over the years, my mother has made:

  1) Cups of tea.

  My mother has wet, in her lifetime, many thousands of pots of tea – she never made anything else, really. And we always fought over it. Midge liked hers stewed; Ernest, weak. Mossie liked to wave the pot around, but it was Ita who splashed me once, swinging it round in an arc – I can still see the dirty ribbon of water looping towards me, the line of pain across my midriff, and how cold the cotton was, as I tried to peel it off.

  Who’s for tea?

  Strange to say, she only made two alcoholics, of the actual would-you-ever-try-AA variety. But all the Hegartys are thirsty. All the Hegartys would kill for a decent cup of tea.

  2) Descendants.

  Most of the girls are genetic culs-de-sac and who would blame them, though Midge had six – she had them early and she had them often; her first coinciding with Mammy’s last (it’s not a competition, you know). Jem has two lovely babies. Mossie, the psychotic, has three careful children who have never left the family home in Clontarf.

  3) Money.

  No one has a proper job, except Bea who works as an office manager in a big estate agents in town, also Mossie who is an anaesthetist (we suspect that someday he will leave the gas on that tiny bit too long). But the rest of us just have euphemisms. Ita is a homemaker, Kitty is an actress, I am a night owl, Alice is a gardener. Both Ivor and Jem work in multimedia, which is the biggest euphemism of them all. Ernest is a priest (I rest my case).

  4) Heterosexuals.

  ‘Are you all straight?’ my friend Frank once said to me, in tones of great disbelief.

  ‘Hmmmmm ...’ I said.

  Midge? Not really relevant, is it? Once you are dead. Or, alternatively, once you’ve married a pub manager and bought a house in Churchtown. Midge was a mother; she was a wiper, a walloper, a panicker, a hoarder of pains, especially her biggest and last. She might have been gay or straight or sheep-shagging, it is too sad to think about, really. What Midge desired, never mattered in the slightest. As for the rest of them: half of Bea’s boyfriends are gay, but I don’t think she is. Ernest is celibate. Kitty sleeps with lots of men, and she loves each of them and they are all married. Is that a sexual orientation? It should be – the little bitch. She only shags the impossible dream.

  No one knows about Alice. But everyone knows about the twins Ivor and Jem who have very pleasant, normal sex (hurray!) – not with each other, I hasten to add, but with their partners, one of whom is a girl from Surrey and one of whom is a nice German radio producer (male).

  Meanwhile, Baby Stevie has little angel sex, up there in heaven, naked with the rest of the cherubs. He is queer as all get out. They make little noises when they kiss. It sounds just like their name. Putti. Putti. Putti.

  None of us is straight. It is not that the Hegartys don’t know what they want, it is that they don’t know how to want. Something about their wanting went catastrophically astray.

  This is what I sense as I look up the stairs to the room where we were all conceived: I sense the chaos of our fate – or not so much a chaos as a vagueness – the way that no one could find a groove. And I remember how proud we were. And how loyal. And the way we all stuck together. And wasn’t that just great?

  I always knew where everyone was. I used to sit on the window sill of our room, curled up against the fragile sheet of glass and track the entire house: Ita at the bathroom mirror, Midge at the sink. Mossie scratching his scalp into the seam of his biology book, Liam keeping company in the garden passage. Even at night I could tell who was where: each room cold and differently stale as the whole, soured day unloaded itself through my brothers’ sleeping skin; the scent of my mother’s tablets in the upstairs toilet, after she went in there
to pee.

  They are waking up. They are coming back home.

  Bea, Ernest, Ita, Mossie, Kitty, maybe Alice and definitely the twins, Ivor and Jem.

  They will thunder in overhead, in the huge bellies of planes. Ivor from Berlin and Jem from London, Ita from Tucson, the mysterious Alice from God knows where. Maybe even Father Ernest in a stripy ethnic hat, in from Lima via Amsterdam.

  A hosting of the Hegartys. God help us all.

  We will do the Hegarty thing. We will be brave and decent and hearty, we will cry and suffer through. There will be no bollocks, because the Hegartys don’t do bollocks; the great thing about being dragged up is that there is no one to blame. We are entirely free range. We are human beings in the raw. Some survive better than others, that is all.

  29

  THE BODY STILL has not arrived.

  Tom leaves the property supplement out on the kitchen table, with rings and ticks around derelict bits of the inner city. He underlines the words ‘In need of refurbishment’. I think he means me. I also think – thanks, Tom – that this is a great thing to do when your brother-in-law dies.

  I go in to exchange Mammy’s shawl and wander around town, and after a while I find myself crying on the escalator in Brown Thomas, which is only a shop. And the fact that makes me cry is that there is nothing here that I can not buy. I can buy bedlinen, or I can buy a bed. I can buy posh jeans for the girls or a Miu Miu jacket for myself, if it doesn’t look too boxy. I can buy the plastic Brabantia storage jars that I am now staring at on the third floor, that I actually might need for pasta and rice and lentils and pumpkin seeds and all sorts of dry goods, expecially the ones that are never cooked or used that live on my top shelf. I try to count. Should I get one for the polenta, that has been sitting in its packet for the last five years, waiting for the day when we would need all the dry goods we could get? What about the chickpeas? The jars are half price. I need nine, I think. I start piling them into the crook of my left arm, crying a little more now, as I imagine the flood, plague and nuclear bomb that has us locked in the house eating five-year-old polenta. If anyone asks me, I can tell them that I am crying for the end of the world. And suddenly I want to throw the nine Brabantia storage jars into the air and shout, or go over to the till and empty my bag on to the counter, and say, What about the starving people in Africa, with their bellies out and their eyes running with pus? because I can buy anything at all in this shop. My brother has just died and I can buy anything at all.

  ‘You need a challenge,’ says Rebecca, primly, being eight.

  And I say, ‘Sure haven’t I got you?’

  Are they good children? Are they decent human beings? In the main. Though Emily is a bit of a cat, and cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.

  Sometimes I wonder about Michael Weiss – whether he too has succumbed, with a high maintenance wife, and kids who live the middle-class dream, but with avidity, as my pair do. And I feel he would be able to manage that; he would be able to manage the world of pink, of liking Barbies but not too much, and buying them, or not bothering to buy them after all.

  Liam never went into a shop.

  So, in honour of Liam, I put the storage jars back and I drive home, pointing out all the changes to him, now that he is dead.

  ‘Look at that row of street lamps!’ I say.

  He is not convinced.

  I used to do this when he was still alive, actually: all the little changes and irritations, residential parking, gridlock, the seven million orange cones between here and Kinnegad, all of these things I pointed out to him, because he was living five hundred miles away. And though he came back in a sporadic way and took his holidays in the West, all of these changes went on without him. And though not one of them meant anything much, I was sad at the way he had been left behind. Liam existed in the seventies, somehow. He might, in reality, have been more cosmopolitan than we were – cooking curries over in London, having all sorts of amazing friends – but when he came home, he always seemed a bit of a throwback, a hick.

  My emigrant brother makes an old-fashioned ghost, and when he died, I dressed him in worn-out wellington boots, as the Irish seventies dipped back into the fifties in my mind.

  30

  I AM EXPECTING the house to be crammed, but Bea shakes her head slightly by the door.

  ‘Just us, really,’ she says. ‘A few neighbours.’

  ‘What do you expect?’ I want to say. ‘Who’s going to come and look at a dead body in your living room, when there isn’t even a decent glass of wine in the house?’ But I do not say this. Tom is behind me. He has taken my elbow, and is using it like a joystick to steer me around her, and I would be annoyed, but his grip is so old-fashioned. No one holds you like that any more, except Frank at work who was gay, and is now dead.

  ‘It’s all in the eyes,’ he said once, as he eased me into some awful corporate bash. And, Poor Frank, I think. Why did I not grieve for Frank? And I realise, suddenly and with great conviction, that I must carpet the upstairs, Frank would have been all for it. And get a cleaner again. I must get a cleaner to deal with the extra fluff. Then I remember Rebecca’s asthma – as I always do at this point – and before I finish remembering this I am looking at Liam’s dead body in the front room.

  Haven’t we met before?

  I can see the exact colour of the new carpet I want. ‘Driftwood’, I think they call it.

  Why do you keep following me around?

  The room is almost empty. There is no one here that I can talk to about children’s lungs or carpet colours, about weaves and nubbles and seagrass or percentages of wool. Dead or alive. Liam does not care about such things. I sit down. They have put him in a navy suit with a blue shirt – like a Garda. He would have liked that.

  Who dressed him?

  The young English undertaker, with the full mouth and the pierced ear; talking on his mobile to his girlfriend as he lifts the heavy head to slip the tie around.

  The suit, I am sure, will be on the bill.

  I expected the coffin to be set across the room, but there is not enough space for this. Liam’s head points towards the closed curtains and there are candles behind him, set on high stands. I can not see his face properly from where I sit. The wood of the coffin angles down, slicing across the bulge of his cheek. I can see a dip in the bone where his eyes must go, but I do not get up to see if this dip is correctly filled, or if the lids are closed. This lift and fall of bone is all I want to see of him, for the moment, thank you very much.

  The armchairs and the sofa have been pushed back, but Mrs Cluny, who has paused to pray, has chosen to sit on one of the hard chairs brought in from the kitchen. Kitty is on duty by the far wall in case a mourner should be left indecently alone with the corpse, in case the corpse should be left indecently alone. She looks at me as I perch on the arm of the sofa and she rolls her eyes. After a minute she comes over and says, quietly, ‘Will you stay?’

  ‘No,’ I tell her. She does not understand. The whole business is finished for me now, it is beyond finished. I just want to get the damn thing buried and out of the way.

  I say, ‘I’ll get Ita or someone. No. I can’t. I have the kids.’

  ‘Oh, the kids,’ she says, slightly too loud.

  ‘Yeah, you know. Kids.’

  And in fact Rebecca is in the room of a sudden, backing towards me until she bumps into my knees.

  ‘Where’s your father?’

  When I look over, I see Emily swinging out of the door handles with her eyes fixed on the coffin and her shoe kicking the paint.

  ‘Would you stop that,’ I say.

  She doesn’t.

  ‘Will you stop leaving scuff marks on your Granny’s door.’

  Then I realise where we are.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘He’s dead.’ Which is not, when I think about it, the most comforting thing I could say.

  In a sudden flare of kilt and sandy-coloured hai
r Rebecca is back at the door, and they are both gone. I hear them laughing in the hall, then running up the stairs, although they should not be running upstairs. I have a surge of rage against Tom who insisted on bringing the children but can not be bothered to mind them, not even with a corpse in the house, after which someone pushes the mute button again, and it is some time before I notice that Kitty has gone and I am the only living Hegarty in the room. I don’t know how long this lasts, but I feel like it is a long time, tracing the girls’ whispered hysteria through the upstairs – tied to them, wherever they go, and tied too to this piece of garbage in the front room. The back of the house is dense with the sound of people I do not want to meet, and so I stay where I am, and decide not to complain.

  So this is how Ernest finds me when he walks in the door, fresh off the plane. He is so incontrovertibly himself – it is some moments before I stop seeing him, my big brother, and pull back to see what he looks like, these days. He looks good, I find. His clothes are a bit sad, but at the top of the anorak and polyester slacks is his head, large and healthy and getting more handsome over the years. It is Grandpa Charlie’s pate, I realise, that is gleaming in the candlelight, and Grandpa Charlie’s two big hands that grab one of mine, and I don’t know, as I stand and Ernest clasps me to him, whether this is a priestly or grandfatherly hug – no breasts anyway: my small breasts are not, with this hug, in the way.

  How does he do it?

  It is his job. My brother has a trained heart; compassion is a muscle for him; he inclines his head when you speak. He barely looks at the coffin, but apprises, instead, the look in my eyes. Then he turns slightly towards the body.