The Gathering

by Anne Enright

  ‘Don’t tell the rest of them I’m here, will you?’ he says. ‘Not yet,’ and sends me, with a nod, out the door. And of course, this is why I hate him too, in all his priestly candour – this fakery. Still, Ernest was always nice to me, growing up. We were just the right distance apart.

  Out in the hall, I give an ear to the voices in the kitchen – a sharpened American note, that must be Ita’s. And Mossie’s wife shushing her perfect kids.

  I turn and go upstairs to find my own.

  ‘Rebecca! Emily!’

  The stairs are narrow, and steeper than I remember. I can hear the sound of their laughter, above me, like children hiding in the branches of a tree, but when I reach the landing they are gone.

  It is a long time since I have been up here. This was the girls’ floor: Midge, Bea and Ita at the back; me, Kitty and Alice at the front, with a view of cherry blossom, and slanting black wires, and a white street light. It did not seem small, at the time. Kitty’s overnight bag is on her bed, the other two beds are bare. Framing the window is the maze of shelves and little cupboard doors my father built for us out of white MFI. A few schoolbooks are left on one shelf; none of them in English – perhaps this is why they were not thrown away. Das Wrack by Siegfried Lenz, and stories by Guy de Maupassant, one called ‘La Mer’ in which, as I recall from school, a sailor stores his severed arm in a barrel of salt in order to bring it home. The books look soiled as opposed to read, but we did read them too:

  Tá Tír na nÓg ar chúl an tí

  Tír álainn trína chéile

  I turn and find the girls at the door.

  ‘Come on, down you go.’ And these children, who never do a single thing I say, turn and walk ahead of me down the stairs. At the bottom, Rebecca takes my hand in hers and walks me to the kitchen, like a mislaid giant she has found in the hall.

  There was a thing Mossie would do with our hands. He would squeeze the small bones until you screamed, running the knuckles across each other, over and back. He is there in the kitchen, standing with Tom at the table: the two professionals in the room, talking man to man. Why do men never sit down, I think, then realise that all the chairs are in with the corpse. I look around. Ita is leaning back against the sink. She looks smaller. Even her face looks smaller – perhaps it is the light of the window behind that has her so reduced. But she is too well-preserved and I have, as I kiss her, a retching sense of the waxed flesh next door.

  Then the twins are hugging me from either side – as they do, being always delightful, and hard to see. I look around for Kitty and see her outside in the garden, smoking. The mysterious Alice is not here. Probably mad, I think suddenly. The mysterious Alice was probably always mad.

  Midge’s children stand in a gang and I turn gratefully towards them, but Bea throws a look at me, swinging her hair back over one shoulder.

  All right. All right.

  I go over to where my mother is sitting and stand by the wing of her chair while a neighbour finishes saying the ritual words.

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Yes.’

  The neighbour, Mrs Burke, is bent low, telling some great and particular secret into Mammy’s ear; stroking her hand, over and over.

  ‘Yes,’ says Mammy, again. ‘Thank you. Yes.’

  When Mrs Burke moves on, I step forward to kiss my mother.

  It has happened. She sat watching television for the past ten days, waiting for something which has now well and truly arrived. It has, as they say, ‘hit her’. Like a truck. There isn’t much of her left.

  Always vague, Mammy is now completely faded. I look her in the eye and try to find her, but she guards whatever she has left of herself deep inside. She looks at the world from this far place, and allows it all to happen, without knowing quite what it is. It is hard to tell how much she takes in, but there is a peacefulness to her too.

  ‘Oh. Hello,’ she says to me, and there is a hazy kind of love in her voice – for me, for the table set with food, for everyone here.

  ‘Mammy,’ I say, and bend down to kiss her cheek, and although she was never good at kissing or being kissed she does not flinch from me now, but angles her face like a debutante to receive the childish pucker of my lips. I suspect she has forgotten me entirely, but then she takes my hand, and sets it flat between her two light hands, and she looks up at me.

  ‘You were always great pals,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, Mammy.’

  ‘You were always great with each other, weren’t you? You were always great pals.’

  ‘Thanks, Mammy. Thanks.’

  Tom’s hand is warm on the base of my spine. At least I think it is him, but when I crook my head around, he is not there. Who has touched me? I straighten up and look at them all. Who has touched me? I want to say it out loud, but the Hegartys and the Hegartys’ wives and the Hegartys’ children are some distance away from me: they shift, and talk, and eat on, unawares.

  ‘Are you all right there, Mammy?’ I say, by way of taking my leave.

  ‘I need to see the children,’ she says.

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’

  ‘The children,’ she says again. ‘I need to see the children.’

  ‘They’re upstairs, Mammy,’ I say. ‘No. They’re here. I’ll go look for them, Mammy. I’ll find them for you.’

  Then Tom is finally, actually, at my side. He dips to take my mother’s hand in wordless sympathy, then straightens up to take my elbow again and wheel me around to the rest of the room.

  ‘Have you been in?’ I say.

  ‘He looks,’ says Tom. Then he stops. ‘It’s not him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t really know,’ I say.

  Tom’s fingers grip my arm. They are very full of themselves, these fingers of his. They do not leave me in any doubt. This is the man who will fuck me soon, to remind me that I am still alive. In the meantime he says, ‘He looks like an estate agent.’

  ‘It’s the shirt,’ I say.

  ‘Ah. It comes to us all.’

  Then the children come up: Rebecca, Emily, and Róisín, who is Mossie’s youngest – so often seen, so seldom heard. Such a cutie. She stands before me and swings her tummy from side to side.

  ‘Will you say hello to your Auntie?’ I say. ‘Will you say it, or will you squeak it, like a little mouse? Squeak. Squeak.’

  I tweak her tummy with my witchy old hands. Then I straighten up and mutter at Tom, ‘Mammy says she needs to see the children.’

  ‘Right so.’

  ‘Would you ever fuck off,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why does she need to see the children?’

  ‘Well,’ says Tom.

  ‘It’s not what children are for,’ I say, quite fiercely. And he gives me a look of sudden interest, before twisting the girls by the shoulders, to push them across to their Gran.

  ‘Give your Granny a kiss, there, go on.’

  The girls stand in front of my mother. There is a chance that Emily will actually wipe her mouth in front of her – she does not like wet kisses, she says, only dry ones ‘like her Daddy’s’. In the event, there are no fluids involved. My mother lifts her hand and places it on Rebecca’s head, then she turns, quite formally, and does the same to Emily, who receives the gesture with large eyes.

  I watch this configuration as from a great distance. It is as though I am not related to any of them. But there is a roaring in my blood, too.

  ‘So what are they for?’ says Tom.

  ‘They’re not for anything,’ I say. ‘They just are.’

  And I mean it too.

  Rebecca comes back to me. Her face is full of unshed tears and I take her outside for a minute. The other room is occupied by the coffin so we have nowhere to go except the stairs, where we sit while my gentle, drifting daughter weeps in my lap for something she does not understand. Then she sharpens up a little.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she says, still face down.

  ‘In a little bit.’

  ‘It’s not fair. I want to go home.’


  ‘Why is it not fair?’ I say. ‘What’s not fair about it?’

  She is insulted, in her youth, by the proximity of death. It is spoiling her ideas about being in a girl band, maybe – or so I think, with a sudden impulse to bring her in to the coffin and push her on to her knees and oblige her to consider the Four Last Things.

  Jesus. Where did that come from? I have to calm down.

  ‘This is not about you, all right? People die, Rebecca.’

  ‘I want to go home!’

  ‘And I want you to be a little bit grown up here. All right?’

  And so it goes.

  ‘I didn’t even like him,’ she says, in a final, terrible whimper, and this makes me laugh so much she stops crying to look up at me.

  ‘Neither did I, sweetheart. Neither did I.’

  Emily has come out to look for me, followed by Tom. So we stand up and dust ourselves down and turn around, one more time. I have my children about me and my husband at my side, and I walk back into yet another family gathering; every single one of them involving ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and butter, and supermarket coleslaw, and cheese-and-onion crisps for the side of your plate. There are cocktail sausages and squares of quiche, and fruit salad for Mossie, who complains about trans-fats. There are Ritz crackers with salmon pâté and a single prawn on top, others with a sprig of parsley over a smear of cream cheese. There is houmous for Kitty or Jem, whichever one of them is vegetarian this week, in a trio of dips with guacamole and taramasalata. There is my smoked salmon, and Bea’s lasagne, and fantastic packet jelly wobbling in little glass bowls, made by my mother with quiet deliberation and left to set the night before.

  There is no wine.

  No, I tell a lie. This time, for the first time – perhaps in honour of Liam’s prodigious drinking – there are two bottles on the table; one red, one white. Everyone knows they are there, and no one, but no one, is going to drink them. Mossie tries to pour a glass for Mrs Cluny, who nearly beats him away with her handbag. ‘No no, I couldn’t,’ she says. ‘No, absolutely not.’

  It is great to be nearly forty, I think, and lashing into the fizzy orange.

  Jem goes in to rescue some chairs from the room next door, and Bea passes around the plates, and we get the show on the road. For a while I try to keep the kids in check, and then I don’t bother. I lean against the wall and watch my family eat.

  When we were young, Mossie used to insist on silent chewing. He didn’t mind sitting with us, he said, and we could talk as much as we liked, but he would not abide the noise of the food being mashed up in our mouths, and any slurps, even the slightest squelch, would get you a thump across the side of the head. He kept his eyes on the table for the duration, but he moved fast and blind. I don’t know why we put up with it – it must have been fun, too – but, watching my family scoffing the funeral meats, I do sort of see where he was coming from.

  Ernest, the celibate, is particularly terrible to watch. Even my mother eats with a sudden greed, as though remembering how to do it. Some surge of recognition sends her scampering from one Ritz cracker to the next, she gets in people’s way, and they are, for a tiny moment, aggrieved. The neighbours take a little on their plates and set them down, and then, after a while, they forget themselves so much as to scoff the lot. A man I slowly recognise as my father’s brother is helping himself with thick fingers. He works pragmatically fast, amused by the array of little treats, concerned to get a decent amount of food into himself before night.

  Daddy came from County Mayo – which is to say he left County Mayo when he was seventeen years old. Liam was sentimental about the West of Ireland, but I don’t think Daddy was, and I am not. But I am sentimental about my Uncle Val – or so I find. I watch him, thinking that, if I stare hard enough, my childhood will rise to meet him. Also, I want to see what kind of a man he is, now that I have met many other men, out in the big world.

  Val is a bachelor farmer in his seventies, so he should, by rights, be half-mad. But he looks chipper enough. Also clever. He does one thing at a time, that is the notable thing about him. He wipes his fingers on a paper napkin and looks for a place to set it down, and when he finds none, he scrunches the tissue up and tucks it firmly under the rim of his empty plate. Then he looks at one or other of us as if guessing at our lives: the way they have gone and the way they will end up. Uncle Val loved endings. He was especially fond of suicides. He used to talk us through the neighbours’ houses, and tell us who shot himself and who used the rope. He told Liam a story about a local man who, when his wife refused to have sex with him, upped and got the kitchen knife and castrated himself in front of her.

  ‘The whole shooting gallery,’ he said. ‘The whole shooting works.’

  ‘Uncle Val,’ I say, shaking his hand, thinking I could have a panic attack, just by catching the smell of his suit.

  ‘Veronica, is it? I’m very sorry. He was a great lad. I think he was my favourite.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘He was very good company, always.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I have loved my Uncle Val, I realise, since I was six years old.

  ‘He always enjoyed his visits to you,’ I say. ‘He relished them.’

  ‘Ah well,’ says Val. ‘We did our best.’

  And it occurs to me that I wasn’t the only one who tried to save Liam – this man tried too, and this man, stuck out on his farm in Maherbeg, will always feel guilty that he did not succeed. The word ‘suicide’ is in the air for the first time – the way we all failed. So, thanks Liam. Thanks a bunch.

  Ita reaches behind her and takes a glass of water which she has set in the sink. It has been teasing me all evening – why is she keeping it there? Then I realise it is not water, but gin. Amazing. She looks the same as she did when I arrived, though her face is a little more swollen and set. There is also the fact of her nose, which is without doubt a different, and more American, shape. Ita is looking at us all with undisguised rage. Maybe it is because we are so ugly. Though I can hardly complain – the way I react to the sight of the Hegarty mouths moving around food.

  Meanwhile, Tom is back talking to Mossie again. ‘The only sane one, actually, in the whole family,’ as he says to me, annually, sometime around Christmas. And it is true, as I look at him, my brother does seem very normal, he has a nice job and a nice wife and he sends around a nice newsletter telling us how his little family is doing. ‘A big welcome for baby Darragh!!’ Truth be told Mossie has done nothing psychotic for twenty years. But still ha ha says Liam next door, as Tom my professional husband engages Mossie my professional brother in some political talk about the way the country is on the up and up. Ha bloody ha, says the corpse next door.

  I want to get drunk. Suddenly. This is a calamitous thing to want, but it can not be denied. I want rid of my children and my husband so I can get properly rat-arsed for once, because God knows I have never been properly rat-arsed before. And there is Kitty rolling her eyes at me, from the other side of the room. Ita! I drift by the sink (because alcoholics are always useful when you want a good time).

  ‘We need a bottle of something. Is there a bottle, for after?’

  And, through gritted teeth, Ita says, ‘I’ll have a look.’

  There is a shift in the room. It is time to move, or go. I must talk to Midge’s girls, quickly, before they leave with children and babies and toddlers in tow. My niece Ciara is five months’ pregnant, and her face is violently mottled in the heat.

  I dab at her forearm and she grazes my wrist, because pregnant women must touch and be touched, and my look, I know, is quite ardent as I say, ‘Are you sleeping? Did you get the new bed?’ Ciara strokes her stomach, then reaches towards me in another flutter of hands.

  ‘Jesus, life on a futon,’ she says.

  ‘That man of yours,’ I say. ‘He should be shot.’

  ‘It’s his back.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and we both laugh – dirtily, like we have been talking about
sex.

  Tom is beside me, liking all this. I turn to salute Uncle Val who is being led off, rather spookily, by Mrs Cluny, to stay next door. When Ciara goes to leave, Tom organises her nappy bag and rounds up Brandon, her toddler. Then he drifts back to me.

  He says, ‘Do you remember when you were pregnant with Rebecca and you wouldn’t go to the graveyard – whose funeral was it? You wouldn’t go anyway, because the child would be bandy, you said.’

  ‘Cam reilige.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what it’s called. In Irish.’

  ‘You’re a funny thing,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m a hoot.’

  Cam reilige, which is Irish for the twist of the grave.

  I walk away from him then, feeling, once more, the shadow of a child in me, the swoop of the future in my belly, black and open.

  I put my hand to my stomach. It is like a pain, almost.

  ‘Well it worked, anyway,’ says Tom, still at my shoulder. ‘She has a lovely pair of pins.’

  I don’t need you to tell me that. I turn around to say it to him, I don’t need you to tell me that, but instead of seeing my husband, I only see the opening circle of his eye. If we wanted another child, it is waiting for us now. I can almost see it. So it is not all his fault, the sex that happens later. It is not entirely his fault, that I do not enjoy it as sex goes.

  Meanwhile he gives me a nod. ‘I’ll take the kids. Any time. Come home any time.’

  ‘Don’t stay up,’ I say.

  And he says, ‘I might.’

  It was my sister Midge’s funeral, actually, and I was big as a house. My niece Karen had given birth a month before me, at the age of twenty-one. I remember sitting in the church and looking at the tiny, moist baby, churring on her mother’s shoulder, a white hairband across her little, new head. Anuna – all Midge’s grandchildren have silly names – is dressed now in an expensive red, puff coat, a knockout of a girl, with the dreaded Hegarty eye; cold and wild and blue.

  ‘Goodnight, Karen. Watch out for that one.’

  They are flickering at each other across the room now, blue to blue, as strangers and extras take their leave. Bea prises Mammy out of her chair.