The Gathering

by Anne Enright

  Brendan is where we got our eyes from: Spillane eyes that met my father’s Atlantic blue to give us our undiluted, alcoholic’s eyes, of straight-no-chaser blue; beautiful and pathological and somehow absent, or absent-minded, until we ‘turn them on’, which is to say we notice someone and decide to give them the full blue.

  (My own eyes are like Ada’s, a sort of nothing grey they call ‘liath’ in Irish when they write about stone walls or the sea. Alice got these rainy eyes too, as did Ivor and Midge. We were not true, electric Hegartys, but a sort of subspecies; the Firbolg of Griffith Way.)

  Uncle Brendan is also where we got our mathematical streak – this, in fact, a fairly prosaic facility to do with remembering phone numbers and reprimanding girls at supermarket tills for overcharging on the mixed leaves. None of us have what Uncle Brendan had – this much we knew – because Uncle Brendan had Maths. We were always given to understand that our mother’s brother was too good for this world.

  And though Ernest reads up his String Theory by candlelight in the mountains of Peru, most of the clever Hegartys are just that – clever, which is to say unredeemed; earning more or less money than the next person and liable to smart remarks. I realise, as we land, that life in St Ita’s was not a romantic one, but more likely a long, dirty business of watching the piss gather in your lap, and nearly knowing what you were thinking, from time to time.

  ‘I know what I’m thinking!’ says the mad man in my mind, banging the wooden arm of his armchair. ‘I know what I’m thinking!’ and the passing nurse says, ‘Good for you!’

  The airport terminal starts to slide past the window and it looks so much like a picture of a building, the whole ritual of landing feels so cinematic and fake, that I don’t believe any of it for a while. Uncle Brendan is not dead now, or not properly dead, and there is something so skittish about the moving walkway, the escalators and the baggage carousels, something that will not adhere yet to Irish soil, that when I finally get the Saab out of the car park and hit the roundabout I turn north instead of south on the airport road.

  It is only a few miles away, this place. The little bridge is still there, and the railway line, slicing north. After which, there is a sudden slack in my mental map and the road unravels in front of me. I am just beginning to lose hope when it snaps back into the road that I remember – just the same, long and straight. There is a concrete path along the left-hand side, a line of disastrous trees along the right, beyond them a ditch that gives way to a low-lying field, where a vivid, wet green inclines, here and there, into a pool of water over grass.

  Beyond the trees is the raw white light of the sky over water.

  This is it. There is no shift between my mind’s eye and my real eye. I try to slow down to the pace of my memory, but it is slipping by me too fast.

  ‘Do you remember this road?’ I say to Kitty.

  ‘What road?’

  ‘This road.’

  ‘What about it?’

  Already she has eaten up half the past. Half my life is gone before she decides to understand.

  ‘Do I remember it?’ says Kitty.

  ‘Jesus,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  By now we are past the bungalow in its field of corn, though it is trimmed to stubble in the low autumn sun.

  ‘The man with two sticks?’

  And here, where she might well bring things to a pitch, Kitty just says, ‘Oh.’

  ‘Walking along here?’

  ‘Here?’ says Kitty. ‘No, not here.’

  At which moment I come to a halt, and make a right turn into the hospital drive.

  It is as though we are driving through a sudden brief mist, on the other side of which is the past. I push along in second gear, leaning over the steering wheel as we pass a terrace of warden’s cottages, the master’s house perhaps, and then the hospital itself, which is built in Victorian red brick, and the size of a small town.

  ‘Handicap Services,’ says the sign and I think, with relief, that the lunatics have gone now. The lunatics have turned, quite naturally, to dust. People are not mad, any more. The lunatics are just a residue of skin in these rooms; scratched off, or hacked off, or maybe just shed: a million flakes of skin, a softness under the floorboards, a quality of light.

  We pass a courtyard with a high chimney and a low boiler house, all in extravagant, industrial red brick. There are curious round windows on the boiler house, with the Star of David dividing the panes.

  ‘Jesus,’ says Kitty, thinking, as I am thinking for a second, that they are burning mental patients in there, just to keep the hospital radiators hot.

  I pause at the handball alley, engine idling, and look at the round tower and the water tower beyond. But it is not possible to pull up the handbrake and get out into the naked air of the asylum, with the casement windows still watching in their rows. I inch towards a bungalow down by the sea, my fat tyres creeping over the gravel, then I do a three-point turn, and leave.

  Once we are back out the gate, I scoot the few hundred yards to the sea itself, the public sea, the swimming sea. Salt water always makes me feel so sane; the height of the waves, and the flick of fish, and the huge press of it on the ocean floor all notwithstanding. There is a little housing estate coming down to the shore, a child on a bicycle, blank with curiosity, and, after I turn at the road’s end, a grey wall enclosing a small field. And in that field – it is quite small – is a Celtic cross that says:

  I get out of the car to look at it.

  1922–1989

  IN YOUR CHARITY,

  PLEASE PRAY

  FOR THE RESIDENTS OF

  ST ITA’S HOSPITAL

  BURIED IN THIS CEMETERY

  MAY THEY REST IN PEACE

  Just one cross – quite new – at the end of a little central path. A double row of saplings promise rowan trees to come. There are no markers, no separate graves. I wonder how many people were slung into the dirt of this field and realise, too late, that the place is boiling with corpses, the ground is knit out of their tangled bones.

  I look back, helpless, at Kitty in the front seat of the car.

  They have me by the thighs. I am gripped at the thighs by whatever feeling this is. A vague wind. It clutches at me, skitters between my clothes and my skin. It lifts every hair. It grazes my lip. And is gone.

  25

  I SAW A man with tertiary syphilis at Mass, once. He was sitting in the seat in front of us, minding his own business until Mossie pointed him out, because Mossie was the kind of guy who knew about such things. The flaps of the man’s ears had been eaten away; they had shrivelled back, like melted plastic. When he turned half-profile, you saw that the bridge of his nose had collapsed flat into his face, leaving a nub of flesh, low down where his nostrils were. His breathing was fussy and loud, but he did not look mad – Mossie said later they always went mad in the end. Still, there was no doubting the signs, on his face, of his history.

  Kitty said it in the car on the way home from Mass. She must have been about eleven. She said, ‘The man in front of us had tertiary syphilis.’

  My father’s head settled down into his neck as he drove, the whole back of him looked thicker. After a moment, my mother said, ‘Oh.’

  History is only biological – that’s what I think. We pick and choose the facts about ourselves – where we came from and what it means. I sit and clean the skin from under my nails and think of the last manicure given to Liam by that gentle English undertaker boy, the black rubbings from off a bar; polish and sweat, spilt beer and other people’s skin. What is written for the future is written in the body, the rest is only spoor.

  I don’t know when Liam’s fate was written in his bones. And although Nugent was the first man to put his name there, for some reason, I don’t think he was the last. Not because I saw anything else going on, but because this is the way these things work. Of course, no one knew how these things worked at the time. We looked at the likes of Liam and had a whole other story for it, a differen
t set of words.

  Pup, gurrier, monkey, thug, hopeless, useless, mad, messer.

  Now he is dead, I have to say that Liam had his glamour days too.

  My brother was unexpectedly beautiful at the age of fifteen – this, when I was still in the full grease and growth of adolescence. ‘Where d’you get those rat’s tails?’ Ita would say about my hair, or, ‘Why are your eyelids so red, do you think you’ve got an infection?’

  Ita was going to be ‘beautiful’, she was going to ‘get a man’, so there was something indestructible about her looks from an early age. Meanwhile, my own face became less readable to me, from week to week. ‘Where did you get that conk?’ she said. Which was a good question, Ita, which was a very good question, thanks.

  Liam had a funny hair thing going for a while and his lips flowered bizarrely and permanently one day when he was fourteen. But because he was small and, I suppose, ‘pretty’, his adolescence lasted about a week. At sixteen he was beautiful and bad, and the blue of his eyes was a dizzy thing. And though his restlessness made him finally unfit for the adult world, in his last years at school Liam was a princeling, a heartbreaker; he was beyond the rules.

  As soon as Mossie left home Liam moved to the garden passage, where the walls were whitewashed, and there was rough-cut lino on the floor. This space had the advantage of an outside door, so you never knew if he was in there or not. He had a little cohort that hopped over the back wall and looked in the kitchen window from time to time; boys mostly, and after a while, a few girls. He had a best friend, Willow, for hanging out and experiments – most of which seemed to involve stuffing things down their trousers pockets and looking idiotic any time I opened the door.

  I didn’t care. I was too old for them by then. I was busy doodling love-lorn fragments about Willow’s older brother Tanner on the covers of my school folders. I wrote them in French, so no one would understand – except Mrs Gogarty, of course, who was the French teacher. Mon amour est un petit oiseau brun/Blessé par toi,/Tanner. She read it all upside down and looked at me fondly, and smiled. I hated her for this. I hated her finding me out and loving me a little (which she seemed to do). The thing is, there was great privacy in a big family. No one got into your stuff except to steal it or slag you off. No one ever pitied you, or loved you a little, except maybe Ernest whose pity was, even then, too deliberate to matter. And we thought this was an honourable way to live. I still do, in a way.

  Meanwhile, I had two friends dropping in on the way home from school, of a sudden, and we had a fantastic good time – until Liam walked into the kitchen, when the good time got even better: Fidelma, who I didn’t mind one way or the other and my best friend Jackie, who I did mind, actually. Apart from anything else, I thought, he was too short for her. We drank together outside midnight Mass one Easter, sitting in the field where they would build a school; passing a naggin of vodka, which we mixed in our mouths with a slug of fizzy orange. It was with some reluctance that I let it all happen – though it did have to happen, I knew that. Or not reluctance – what was the feeling? Loneliness. The sight of Liam turning into the quietness of my friend Jackie’s face, in the dark. Meanwhile, Willow and I sat apart and swallowed loudly. Inside the church they passed the paschal flame from candle to candle until it looked like the whole place was on fire: then they switched on the fluorescent lights.

  I haven’t had vodka in years; even now there is something sweet and crotch-like about the smell of it, a big waft of earth and adolescence coming out of the glass and hitting you in the face. Jackie crying down the phone to me, and then Fidelma in her turn, until I shouted at Liam to leave my fucking friends alone. After which, he headed out for his Saturday-night solo and I hitched up with Joe Ninety – so-called because he was thirty years old – a man who, I now realise, wanted to break into me so badly he had to turn away from the kiss to push his forehead into the wall. I loved all that. Joe Ninety liked me to dress up and he got me into pubs, while Liam slid backwards from me, into his misspent youth.

  One night Bea picked up the phone in the hall.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is,’ she said and the whole house paused to listen. She got Daddy.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘Right. Right. Right so.’ Then he trudged upstairs and found his jacket and tie and went out into the autumn darkness, shutting the front door behind him.

  He never went out at night.

  An hour later, he walked back in the door as he had walked out of it, expressionless and sad. Behind him, Liam shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands, to say there was no need for the welcoming committee. Later, he told us he had been bailed out of the local copshop, or prised out more like, by Daddy, and it was nothing – they just gave him a slap and sent him home.

  We never found out why. Daddy wouldn’t speak of it – not then or ever – and he treated Liam with a new, and complete, contempt. It was over for them: no more shouting, no more leaning in from Daddy, who used to stick out his forefinger and poke the boys in the hollow of the shoulder.

  ‘What. Am I. After. Saying to you?’

  Poke. Poke. Poke.

  Sometimes I wonder why there wasn’t murder in that kitchen.

  ‘You’re pushing it, Da. Don’t push me now.’

  But Daddy didn’t even bother pushing Liam any more. The Gardai had rung the house and the shame of it was so total, there was nothing left to be said.

  When I think of it now – such carry-on. Liam, in the kitchen, lifting his hair to show the dried patch of blood, and a streak of red from cheek to neck, where he had caught his face on the handle of the cell door. I remember it in vivid technicolour: his hair very black, and the streak very red, and eyes an undiluted blue. They just ‘knocked him round a bit’, he said, gave him ‘a bit of a thump’.

  And I said, ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

  He looked at me.

  I think, now, that what I meant was that if they hit him then it must have been his fault. I also meant that, if pushed, I would disbelieve him even though what he said was, strictly speaking, true.

  If I am looking for the point when I betrayed my brother, then it must be here, too. I looked at the raised flesh on his cheek and I decided not to believe him, if there was any ‘believing’ to be done. That was all.

  I decided that he did not deserve to be believed.

  ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ I said.

  What else?

  We used to laugh about things: foothering priests, and little boys’ bollocks, and ‘Come here and sit on my knee, little man,’ and English choirboys and gay men’s backsides, and anything really to do with innocence and bums, though nobody mentioned – now that I pause to list all this – nobody mentioned your langer, or your wire, or getting your mickey licked. Now why is that? Why did we think it was all hilarious, but only in certain, almost ritual, ways?

  These conversations happened for a month or two one summer, and then they were gone. I liked them. I liked the silence after the laughter stopped. Liam’s silence was like he had just peed himself but no one had noticed, so it was all magically OK. And my silence was the smallest possibility – taken up, and then set down again – of pointing out the wet patch.

  For which pleasure, tiny but very keen, I would like to be forgiven. I would like to be forgiven, now, because I am very sorry for it.

  If I believed in such a thing as confession I would go there and say that, not only did I laugh at my brother, but I let my brother laugh at himself, all his life. This laughing phase lasted through his cheerful drinking, and through his raucous drinking, and only petered out in the final stinking stage of his drinking. But he never gave it up completely – the idea that it was all a complete joke.

  Liam never had any truck with self-pity, his own, or anyone else’s. When someone was miserable – Kitty, for example – it was always for the wrong reasons as far as he was concerned. Don’t get me wrong, Liam loved people who suffered – he loved the poor, the destitute, the lonely, the alcoholic, he pitied anyone with a probl
em, just so long as they didn’t pity themselves. Which doesn’t sound altogether fair to me. Which sounds like pride, to me.

  I know I sound bitter, and Christ I wish I wasn’t such a hard bitch sometimes, but my brother blamed me for twenty years or more. He blamed me for my nice house, with the nice white paint on the walls, and the nice daughters in their bedrooms of nice lilac and nicer pink. He blamed me for my golf-loving husband, though God knows it is many years since Tom had the free time for a round of golf. He treated me like I was selling out on something, though on what I do not know – because Liam did not allow dreams either, of course. My brother had strong ideas about justice, but he was unkind to every single person who tried to love him; mostly, and especially, to every woman he ever slept with, and still, after a lifetime of spreading the hurt around, he managed to blame me. And I managed to feel guilty. Now why is that?

  This is what shame does. This is the anatomy and mechanism of a family – a whole fucking country – drowning in shame.

  And, yes, sometimes I look at my nice walls and, like Liam, I say, ‘Pull the whole thing down.’ Especially after my nice bottle of nice Riesling. As if the world was built on a lie and that lie was very secret and very dirty. But I don’t think empires or cities or even five-bedroom detached houses are built on the sordid fact that people have sex, I think they are built on the sordid fact that people have mortgages. Even so, my husband shags me the night of my brother’s wake, and I wave my empty bottle at the Italian suedette seating system, and I too say, ‘Let it all come down.’

  One of the last times Liam was over, we were going open plan, actually – the back of the house was ripped out, and we were all camped in the front half, eating take-away. I think I blamed Liam, almost, and not the builders. He arrived in the middle of the rubble with a sad, too-tall woman, who seemed to have no opinions, not even about what she might want to eat. He drank constantly. After five days of it, they headed off to Mayo, and I hoped I would never see him again.