The Gathering

by Anne Enright

  I don’t know why his pleasure should be the most terrible thing in the room for me. The inwardness of it. The grimace it provokes like a man with a bad fart making its way through his guts, or a man who hears terrible news that is nonetheless funny. It is the struggle on Lamb Nugent’s face that is unbearable, between the man who does not approve of this pleasure, and the one who is weak to it.

  I have slept since with men who are like this – they give nothing away until the last, and then they whimper, as though something terrible had happened. The pleasure that overtakes them is like some kind of ambush. And you feel to blame, of course. You feel it is all your fault.

  I say I have slept with ‘men’ but you know that is a sort of affectation, because what I mean is that when I sleep with Tom, that this is sometimes what he is like, yearning on the pull-back and hatred in the forward slam, and, ‘What are you looking at?’ he says, or a weird sarcasm at dinner with friends about coming, or me not coming, though you know I do come – at least I think I do – realising then, later, that what he wants, what my husband has always wanted, and the thing I will not give him, is my annihilation. This is the way his desire runs. It runs close to hatred. It is sometimes the same thing.

  ‘What did I ever do to you?’ I shout. ‘Except love you? What did I ever do to you?’ which question he finds too stupid for words.

  I know all men aren’t like this. Somewhere out there a hundred thousand Michael Weisses are walking their sons and daughters to saxophone lessons or piano lessons, living in some mellow American movie, where men are men and their hearts are easy. I know that these men exist, I have even met them, it is just that I could never love one, even if I tried. I love the ones who suffer, and they love me. They love to see me sitting on their nice Italian furniture, and they love to see me cry.

  And I know how silly it is. You don’t kill someone by having sex with them. You kill them with a knife, or a rope, or a hammer, or a gun. You strangle them with their tights. You do not kill them with a penis. So it is all – the I hate you, I love you, I hate – a dream of killing and dying, I understand that much; that when you roll away from each other to go to sleep, then the dream is over for another day.

  There is also the pleasure of the boy to consider. There is also the question of who he hated, or who he loved. Though Liam, in this memory or image, had his habitual face on, which was an open face of plain white, with two looping black eyelashes over eyes so dilated that they looked navy blue.

  He was terrified.

  And before the scene became clear to me, I remember thinking, So that’s what the secret is. The thing in a man’s trousers – this is what it does when he is angry; it grows into the shape of a miserable child.

  I remember it as being very cold. You remember the cold on some imaginary skin that does not quite coincide with your own and this is where I shiver, as I remember the dankness of the air that day in Ada’s front room.

  There is also a smell of Germolene, which will remain for me, for evermore, the smell of things going wrong.

  I think, often, of Nugent looking at me when he realises that I am at the door. The boy’s hand (surely it was moving) has stopped, and Nugent, leaning back from his difficult pleasure, takes a moment to notice this. For a moment, he wills the boy’s hand on, imagines it moving, once, twice, until his mind trips over its obstinate stillness and he opens his eyes to see me standing there.

  ‘Would you ever get out of that,’ he says, and when Liam takes his poor hand out of the man’s flies I feel that I have spoiled it for all concerned.

  I pause as I write this, and place my own hand over my face, and lick the thick skin of my palm with a girl’s tongue. I inhale. The odd comforts of the flesh. Of being me.

  I have seen great bleakness in Liam’s eyes, on that day and on many days since – but when Nugent saw me, a small girl in a school uniform holding the knob of the door, the look in his eye was one of very ordinary irritation.

  ‘Would you ever get out of that.’

  And I did. I closed the door and ran to the toilet upstairs, with an urge to pee and look at the pee coming out; to poke or scratch or rub when I was finished, and smell my fingers afterwards. At least, I assume that this is what I did if I was eight years old, but perhaps I just ran the taps and looked at the water, or trailed my fingertips over the bubbles of the bathroom glass, or walked the space in an absentminded way, pulling back from the vertigo of the toilet bowl, and the white bath, so mysteriously full of air.

  I look at my own children and I think you know everything at eight. But maybe I am wrong. You know everything at eight, but it is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

  23

  I HAVE TAKEN to driving at night. It was my headrest ghost who first called me out of the house – I caught him in the corner of my eye and thought, for a moment, that he was gone. Then I saw that he was slumped forward against the dash, patient as a stricken pensioner, trying not to pee. I had folded the seat forward to get Emily’s bicycle into the back, and did not set it straight when we came home. Now the seat had suffered a small but dreadful emergency out on the public roadway. I check the time: it is 3.30 a.m. At 3.45 the seat is still stuck. By 4.00 a.m. it has given up all pretence of a struggle, and is helplessly face down. I take my bottle of white out of the fridge a good half-hour before dawn and, on an impulse, pick up the car keys. Then, with glass, bottle and corkscrew I go out to my headrest ghost, in the rain.

  When I open the passenger door and pull the lever, the seat springs back, shocked and relieved. It stares for a moment, straight ahead. It is still game, my headrest ghost, like a thousand mechanical friends in a thousand cartoons. I sit in. The upholstery is cold. I pull the cork and pour myself a glass of wine, then I leave the bottle out on the tarmac and close the door. I relax into the seat and drink in its chilly embrace, quite happy; the whole encounter made private by the rain.

  I do this a few times in the next week or so. I go out and drink in the car. Sometimes, it is not raining and it makes me feel quite breathless to walk out into the dark alone, there is something so bare about our little estate at night; the neighbours, each in their madness, asleep in a row. Nothing matters. The wheelchair child in number seven, and ‘You Can’t Park Here’ in number ten, and my high-maintenance husband in number four, each dreaming their ordinary dreams.

  I put the key in the ignition, just for the company of the air-conditioning, and I turn the radio on low. The urge to drive is very strong, but the wineglass, when I try it, will not balance in the cup holder. Still – and I am officially mad now, I am a mad housewife – I ease the car away from the kerb and, drinking all the while, move around the estate in first gear. I want to fling the empty glass into somebody’s front garden, but of course I do not do this. I pull over and set it down on the road, opposite the bottle, and through this little glass gateway I drive – past the carved granite boulder at the mouth of our enclave, and into the city beyond.

  I am in a state of almost perfect fear as I work towards the centre of town; looking over my shoulder to check the emptiness in the car behind me, entering streets I have never entered before, always tending towards the sea. I hang on to the steering wheel, and brake too hard for the lights. I clip the kerb of a central island, and when the jolt clears my head I find that we are already, the car and me, on our way north, along the curve of Dublin Bay. I take satisfaction from the Hill of Howth, feeling, as I run the flat road along to it, that I am travelling over sand, that the tide still wants the ground under my wheels. In a car park at the top of the hill, I stop, and sit, and wait to be killed.

  It is all getting a bit hectic now. I don’t allow myself to leave the house for nights at a time, or I grab my stuff as soon as everything is still and I go. I do this maybe three or five times and wake out of a blank on the road behind the Sugarloaf, or running by a stud wall in Kildare. There is nothing illegal about driving, but it all feels forbidden to me, the housewife in her Sa
ab, abandoning her children while they sleep, leaving them unprotected from their dreams.

  Then, one night, I know the place I am avoiding and, with great and deliberate movements of the wheel, I overcome the car’s natural reluctance and drive it all the way to Broadstone.

  The streets are tiny. These are toy houses, children’s houses. We could not have lived here. Where did we fit? Before I know it I am out on Constitution Hill facing a low wall with a grey Virgin Mary standing on the grey, round world, but it is not the fortress I remember, with the buses in rows at the top. The bus station is further down the hill, though it is on a height, and as I sink towards the river I see, on my left, the church where we were caught robbing candles. It is a Capuchin Friary, says the board outside, and I feel that the horrible priest could not have come from there, because these are friars, lovely people with bare feet in sandals in the middle of winter. But then, why not? It might have happened in a friary all the same.

  I drive back up to Broadstone and find myself, too quickly, at the small gate into the Basin where I park and get out of the car. There it is! This is the place where Liam peed – not, as I see now, through wire mesh, but through old-fashioned railings, though the rest of it is the same. It is all the same. The water is the same. And the path. This is where it happened.

  I get back in the car and drive with no lights straight to Ada’s house. I park in the first vacant spot, and I sit there for fifteen, twenty minutes, doing lots of urgent, awful remembering, before I realise that I am on the wrong street, though the number on the door is the same.

  Tom meets me at the door. His nose flares at the fresh air on my coat and then he turns away.

  I say, ‘Where are the girls?’

  He says, ‘Where were you?’

  I start to laugh. ‘Ha ha,’ I chuckle as I put my bag down on the counter, as I take off my coat, as I hang my coat under the stairs. He has dropped the girls to school and doubled back to confront me. From the bunched-up look of him I think he might give me a thump.

  ‘Are you missing work, for this?’ I say.

  ‘Where were you?’ he says, and I’d love to say I was out, like he is out all the time. Doing, making, being – or even shagging. I’d love to say, ‘I was just out shagging,’ in a debonair sort of voice, but I don’t want to think about how wan my body has become since I have taken to the darkness. I put my hand gently against his shirt front and the gesture is so graceful, even as I watch it, that it leads me, quite easily, to the buckle of the belt, which I tug with my other hand, and so, by softly pushing him away while pulling him forward, I contrive to blow my husband, in our own kitchen. On a school day.

  This is real, I think. This is real.

  Though I am not sure that it is, actually. When we are done, Tom plants a dry, thoughtful kiss in the middle of my forehead. He can not claim that he has been fobbed off – not after his official, all-time favourite thing – but he knows that he has been fobbed off, all the same. And it makes him angry.

  ‘I just don’t know where you’re coming from,’ he says. A corporate phrase from my corporate boy.

  When he is gone, I go upstairs and lie down on Emily’s bed. Then I get up and pull the duvet back and lie down again. I do not know what she smells like, she is like a perfume you have been wearing too long, she is still too close to the inside of me. So I can not smell her, quite, but I know that her smell is there as I lie down with the thought of her beside me. I want to run my hand down her exquisite back, and over her lovely little bum. I want to check that it is all still there, and nicely packed, and happy, that my daughter’s muscles agree with her bones. I want to find the person that I built from my body’s own stuff, and grew on ten thousand plates of organic sausages and sugar-free beans, and I want to squeeze every part of her tight, until she is moulded and compact. I want to finish the job of making her, because when she is fully made she will be strong.

  24

  I TAKE THE train back from Brighton, and I meet Kitty in a pub in the ‘Gatwick Village’, for the flight home. The place is unnerving, all the usual slop of pint glasses and ashtrays, but on miniature tables to allow room for the trolleys and backpacks and bags; men falling asleep over their beers, unshaven and sad. The pub itself just a pretence of a pub, a painted corner of the concourse, a differently coloured floor. There are no doors. I pick my way through the filth of baggage and delayed lives to find Kitty – a woman weirdly like my little sister, though much too old.

  When I reach the table, I look down at the empty glasses in front of her and I ask, ‘Are they all yours?’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ she says.

  ‘Just asking.’

  ‘Two of them are mine, the rest aren’t mine. OK?’

  ‘Do you want another one?’

  ‘Yes thank you, I would love another one.’

  I turn to wade back towards the bar, and hear her say, ‘Bunny,’ which is the name she had for me when she was a child. I turn back to embrace her, my back twisted, my torso held away, as she half-rises to receive the hug, her thighs trapped under the little table of wood. Her hair feels fake, like a wig, but I think it is just crisping up under the dye and Frizz-Ease. From a distance, it was just as curly and beautiful and black as it ever was, though when I check her face I see that it has collapsed, quite fundamentally, and all the distraction of blue eyes, and mischievous cheeks, and winning smile – the whole Celtic chipmunk – has melted as easy as wax, leaving the flesh hanging on to bones, bones, bones.

  ‘How are you?’ I say.

  ‘How am I?’

  ‘Yes. How are you?’

  ‘Fine. I’m fine.’

  ‘What is it, anyway?’ I say.

  ‘It’s a G and T, thanks.’

  ‘Yes, I thought it was.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It is many years, I think, since I have ordered a drink at a bar. The barman ignores me for the longest time. I feel like shouting at him that I am quite grown up and want to give him some money now. I want to say, ‘My brother is dead! Serve me immediately!’ but then, so what? Some people haven’t seen their brothers in twenty years.

  I get Kitty’s gin and one for myself.

  ‘English measures,’ she says, holding the glass up and waggling it, like I am such a fool.

  Kitty always goes on about being hit as a child, though the fact is that she was a complete brat: she always came back for more, and she often got it; not just from me and Liam, who actually liked her, but also from Mossie-the-psychotic, who taunted and enraged her into a total Shirley Temple. There was something transcendental about her rage at six or seven, her body rigid and her temper whizzing around the room, until she caught it, somehow, and stuffed it back into herself. After which, she exploded into a fire-breathing fluff-pot, a cartoon little sister; fists yammering against Mossie’s chest. Which was just asking for trouble, because you shouldn’t take things too far with Mossie. At least with myself and Liam, we only did it to tease.

  And of course I feel guilty, when I think of it now, and I don’t believe in hitting anybody, at all, ever, but I still find a twitch of something more than amusement when she is being a prissy little bitch like this. The toss of the head, some small superiority, it makes me wish she was six all over again.

  I lift my glass to her, ever so slightly, and say, ‘Cheers.’

  She starts to cry as soon as we are on the plane; she weeps the whole way home. Pints of it. She moves from quiet leakage to sighs, heaves and judders, and then back again. It sounds to me like she is practising crying as much as actually doing it. I look out the window, while the air hostess kindly offers a brandy in her coffee and then charges five pounds sterling for it.

  ‘Are you all right? Are you sure now?’

  The man on the other side of her knows that someone has died. He wonders am I a social worker, or perhaps even a prison officer, and why am I not holding her hand. And I too wonder why I am not holding her hand, as I look down on the distant skin of the Irish sea. ‘We sle
pt in the same room for twenty years,’ I want to tell him. ‘Isn’t that enough for you, isn’t it already above and beyond?’

  Liam, meanwhile, is sitting one row up across the aisle. There is a slumbrous menace about his ghost that makes me realise how indifferent he was when he finally walked away from us all into the sea. I can feel his gaze on the skin of my cheek as he turns to look at me, uncanny and dead. I know what it is saying.

  The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.

  I look up too quickly, and he is gone.

  There is a big white house on Lambay Island – Georgian, at a guess, and worth gazillions. I saw it first, it must have been, from the beach, the day we went with Ada to visit our mad Uncle Brendan. And it suddenly kicks into me, this fact of Ada’s son lost to Largactyl and squalor. How many years of it? He probably died wondering who he actually was.

  I search up the coastline for a beach, a bridge, an estuary, back again to a headland – and there it is: a pencil of a round tower, a fat vase of a water tower and, beside that again, a group of buildings surrounded by trees. I have just caught sight of it when I have lost it again, the plane banks and grabs a view of sky.

  ‘What happened to Uncle Brendan?’ I shout at Kitty, over the noise.

  ‘What happened to Uncle Brendan?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle Brendan.’

  ‘What do you want to know about Uncle Brendan for?’

  The plane opens its underbelly and we wait for the wheels to lock. Getting its little leggies straight, digging down its heels.

  ‘He died,’ says Kitty, relenting.

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘I quite liked him.’

  ‘Did you?’

  I was sure I had never met him, though now here he is, suddenly at the Christmas table in Griffith Way, a face made fantastic by falling jowls, his nostrils rimmed red and his eyes – his eyes when I think of them were tired and unpleasant, as though madness was a tedious business; nearly as tedious as Christmas. My memory puts him in an orange paper hat, with a glass of brandy in his shaking hand, but there was no alcohol in our house until Liam started smuggling it in, and there were no paper hats either.