The Gathering

by Anne Enright

  ‘You’re very tired, Mammy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come here and I’ll bring you upstairs.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll bring up your cup of tea.’

  But there is something she wants to do before she goes. Mammy escapes Bea’s grasp and comes over to the table. She puts her two hands down on the wood, so everyone knows to stop talking. In her gentle, sweet voice, she says, ‘He would have been so proud of you all.’

  We know she means, not Liam, but our father. She has got her funerals mixed up. Either that or all funerals are the same funeral, now.

  ‘He is,’ she says with horrible conviction. ‘Your Daddy is so very proud of you all.’

  Bea turns her around, to leave the room. ‘That’s it, Mammy.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ she says.

  ‘Goodnight Mammy,’ we say, in a little family patter.

  ‘Goodnight now.’

  ‘Sleep well, Mammy.’

  ‘Get some rest.’

  ‘Night night,’ all out of rhythm, like the first drops of rain.

  ‘Coladh sámh,’ says Ernest, by the door, and she turns to him for a blessing, which my brother – the lying hypocrite bastard of lapsed-priest atheist – does not hesitate to give (in Irish no less) and she leaves happy. At least ‘happy’ is the look on her face. Happy. She is pleased with the people she has made. She is happy.

  We are silent a moment after she is gone. Mossie sits. Ita takes a slug of her water, then her mouth twitches deeply down, in some riposte from the silent conversation she is having in her head. Kitty lights up a fag, which annoys everyone a little. And I think, I never told Mammy the truth. I never told any of them the truth.

  But what was I supposed to say? A dead man put his hand in a deader man’s flies thirty years ago. There are other things, surely, to talk about. There are other things to be revealed.

  Like what, though? Like what?

  I start to help Bea with the dishes, while Kitty brings a pile of plates over to the sink.

  ‘What are you doing?’ says Bea to her.

  ‘Clearing up,’ says Kitty.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh. No, please do. Please do clear up.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘No, there’s always a first time.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off.’

  ‘Well, scrape them first, would you? Scrape it, would you? Scrape it, and stack it over there.’

  Kitty lifts the plate over her head like she is going to bring it smashing down on the floor. No one looks. She holds it there for a long moment – then, with a toss of the head, she carries the thing, ceremoniously high, to the bin. She goes to scrape it, and then she just can’t help herself and stuffs the lot into the rubbish, plate, food and all.

  ‘Jesus!’ she screams, looking at the knife that is left in her hand, like it is dripping with blood. I glance at the ceiling – Mammy is still moving around upstairs.

  ‘Oh JesusJesusJesus!’ says Kitty, throwing the murder weapon into the bin, and she flees out into the garden to finish her fag.

  ‘Bea,’ I say.

  ‘What,’ says Bea, very fiercely, as she picks the crockery out of the bin. ‘What?’

  And I know what she means. She means, What use is the truth to us now?

  Ita comes in from the corpse room and plonks a bottle of peculiar whiskey in the middle of the yellow pine table.

  ‘It’s all I could find,’ she says. The bottle has a funny Irish name. It looks a bit decorative.

  ‘I could go to the off-licence,’ says Jem in a small voice.

  ‘No, no. Not to worry.’

  We uncork it anyway, and put it into glasses where it sits, thick and sweet. This ritual is strange for us because, although the Hegartys all drink, we never drink together.

  ‘Look at the legs on that,’ says Ivor, swilling it round and holding it to the light. We sip, and consider a moment, and suddenly Jem picks up his car keys, and leaves in a shower of large notes and instructions about red wine or white. The Hegartys have had a long day.

  Bea, still on her high horse, takes the first shift in the front room while the rest of us stay in the kitchen and mooch and talk. Ernest checks the cupboards – a little intensely, indeed; dipping his finger into ancient mango chutney and sniffing at the mustard. Mossie has the occasional large opinion at the pine table while Ita keeps him company, leaning back against the central counter, too immobilised by drink to wash a plate.

  It is like Christmas in Hades. It is like we are all dead, and that’s just fine.

  One by one we finish and sit, ready to uncork the wine when it arrives. And when it does arrive, we do not toast the dead but merely drink and chat, as ordinary people might do.

  There is some talk of the mysterious Alice, also the surprise appearance of Uncle Val, who is looking so spruce.

  Then Ivor says that he is thinking of buying up in Mayo.

  ‘What?’ says Kitty, who is turning stage Irish with the drink. ‘A bit of the old place?’

  ‘Well, maybe not exactly there.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Kitty stares ahead as if looking at it. She needs an angle of attack. We all do. We talk for a while about interest rates and flights to Knock airport.

  Then Ernest says, quite mildly, ‘Not a lot of money up there.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s the point,’ says Ivor. And realises he is already on his back foot.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I could never do that isn’t-it-all-lovely and aren’t-we-all-lovely touristy shite.’

  Kitty explodes. ‘Uncle Val could live for a month on the price of your jacket. How much was that fucking jacket?’

  ‘Also you’re gay, you eejit,’ says Jem. ‘Maherbeg is where gay men go to shoot themselves in the barn.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s where it is,’ says Liam. I start to laugh and turn to catch him, but he is not there. He is dead. He is laid out in the next room.

  A silence happens, as quick as a door clicking shut.

  ‘It’s a nice jacket,’ I say.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Ivor, trying to figure it all out. He has never been called ‘gay’ by a member of his family before. Never, not once. Like the bottle in the middle of the table, it only happens elsewhere.

  Mossie lifts his eyebrows, and dips his face into his glass. Still down there, he says, ‘What is it – Paul Smith?’

  ‘Em ...’ says Ivor, checking the inside pocket. As if he did not know.

  Nor do we talk about money – the idea that one of us, even an uncle, might be poor or rich, or that it might matter. Something has happened to this family. The knot has come loose. Then Ita gets up on her hind legs and gives it a yank.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘What a nice jacket.’

  Here it comes. Ita has been drinking so long she has been made sober by it, and slow, and violent. She has some terrible revelation to make and I wonder what it will be. You never told me I was beautiful. Or something worse: You stole my best hairband in 1973 (I did actually). Family sins and family wounds, the endless pricking of something that we find hard to name. None of it important, just the usual, You ruined my life, or What about me? because with the Hegartys a declaration of unhappiness is always a declaration of blame.

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’

  By which I mean, What use is the truth to us now?

  ‘I’m going to sit with Liam,’ says Ita, finally, because the Hegartys also love a bit of moral high ground. She pushes herself away from the table at a good angle to hit the door. It’s the gin she wants, I realise. The grand exit was just an excuse so she can go and raid her stash.

  I reach for the bottle, in a panic, and pour myself another glass. Liam taps his nose at me. But because Liam is dead I have to do it for him. So I tap my nose, three times.

  ‘What?’ says Kitty.

  ‘The nose,’ I say.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Ita. The nose job.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ she sa
ys.

  ‘The tilt,’ I say. ‘The tilt.’

  ‘I’m with you,’ says Ivor, feeling grumpy now that he has lost his country house.

  ‘What do you call that?’ I say. ‘Retroussé?’

  Mossie says, ‘What. Are. You. Talking about?’

  ‘The Hegarty nose,’ says Kitty. ‘Ita’s had a job done on our nose.’

  ‘I really think,’ says Mossie.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I really think. It’s her nose. At this stage.’

  And we roar laughing, for some reason.

  After the laughter is finished, Kitty and Mossie are left staring at each other across the table. Enough is enough, I think. I can’t do the Mossie thing as well as everything else. Yes, he hit us, Kitty. He was fifteen. He hit us all.

  I get up to go to the toilet, and meet Bea at the door.

  Ita has taken her turn with the corpse. She is leaning against the door jamb of the front room when I pass; a glass of thick water in her hand. She is crying. Or just leaking, perhaps. She does not turn as I climb the stairs. From the back, she looks beautiful. From the back she looks like Lauren Bacall.

  I go to the bathroom and pee and wash my hands and look at the same cabinet mirror that has reflected my face for thirty years or so. The silver backing is peeling at the edges. Who could blame it? I think. And turn away to go and face them all again downstairs.

  When I get out of the bathroom, my mother’s door is open, just a crack.

  ‘Bea?’ says her voice into the gap. ‘Bea?’

  ‘No, Mammy, it’s me.’

  I go to her. When I open the door fully, I find that she is already back sitting on her bed, weirdly, like a video that has been put on fast forward and then paused.

  ‘What do you want, Mammy, are you all right?’

  ‘I thought you were Bea,’ she says.

  ‘No, it’s me, Mammy. Do you want me to get her? Is that what you want?’

  But she can not quite remember.

  ‘Come on. Into bed, Mammy. Into bed,’ and she complies like the sweet child she has always been. She sleeps on her own side, I notice. She still leaves plenty of room.

  ‘They’re all gone now,’ she says, after she has settled into the pillow.

  ‘No they’re not, Mammy.’

  ‘All gone.’

  ‘I’m here, Mammy. Will I sit with you? Will I sit awhile?’

  There is no chair in the room. I perch on the end of the bed a moment, and I rub my mother’s ankle and foot through the counterpane.

  Heh heh, she breathes in like a woman crying. Haw, she exhales.

  Heh heh. Haw.

  Heh heh heh. Haw.

  And so, fitfully, she falls asleep, while I sit in the tang of her life: Nivea cream and Je Reviens and old age; the smell of my father, too, still minutely there, in the scorched wool of the electric blanket, maybe, and the slightly rancid paste that holds the paper to the walls.

  I am crying, I find. My mother is not asleep but looking at me. Her eyes, as they stare out over the top of the blankets are wide and young.

  ‘Sorry, Mammy.’ I stand to go.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, under this keenly intelligent gaze of hers, that still doesn’t quite know who I am.

  At the door, I do not look at her as I say, ‘Do you remember a man in Granny’s?’

  ‘What man?’ She was expecting a question. And she doesn’t like this one.

  ‘No man in particular. Just a man in Granny’s, used to give us sweets on a Friday. What was he called?’

  ‘The landlord?’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘We always called him the landlord,’ she says. And she gives me a most direct look.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was.’

  And, fussed of a sudden, she lifts the covers and swings her legs out over the side of the bed, the unreadable body under her nightie sliding this way and that as she pushes herself off the edge of the mattress and starts to wander about. She goes to the door of the wardrobe and opens it, and shuts it again. She doubles back to the bed, then squints at the top of the wardrobe, in case there might be something up there.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘What are you saying to me?’

  ‘Nothing, Mammy.’

  ‘What are you saying to me?’

  I look at her.

  I am saying that, the year you sent us away, your dead son was interfered with, when you were not there to comfort or protect him, and that interference was enough to send him on a path that ends in the box downstairs. That is what I am saying, if you want to know.

  ‘I just liked the sweets, Mammy. Get back into bed, now. I just remembered the sweets is all.’

  Because a mother’s love is God’s greatest joke. And besides – who is to say what is the first and what is the final cause?

  The murmur of voices strengthens in the kitchen below, and there is laughter, followed by the slam of the back door. Kitty again, storming off.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Mammy sits back on the bed. She is tired now. She doesn’t like anybody now.

  ‘I don’t know where it is,’ she says. ‘The house stuff: it’s somewhere up high. It’s up on a shelf. I don’t know.’

  But I have her by the shoulders, and am easing her around, to lie in the bed.

  ‘I’ll get Bea for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll get her for you now.’

  But I don’t.

  I close the door and look around the landing. I go over to the older girls’ bedroom, and I look on top of the wardrobes and open the cupboards, then I come out again and do the same in my own old room. I stand on Alice’s bed in the dingy yellow light and pull down a biscuit box marked ‘Papers’ in my mother’s weak and flowery hand. I am looking for what she failed to find, but the only things in the box are documents of the most arbitrary kind, certificates of confirmation, Kitty’s Irish Dancing; Ernest’s Public Speaking at the Feis Maithiu; my degree, strangely enough – my nice fat 2:1 from the NUI; Liam’s Leaving Cert., much good to him it is now. It seems that Mammy put away any bit of paper that was thick and rolled and useless. I cast my mind about the house wondering where the important stuff is, birth certificates and death certificates, photographs and contracts and deeds. I know where she keeps them, I think, suddenly, and put the box down on the bed.

  But I have disturbed the ghosts. They are outside the door of the room, now, as the ghosts of my childhood once were; they are behind the same door. Their story is there, out on the landing of Griffith Way, waiting for me one more time.

  Who are they?

  Ada first, pragmatically dead. A thin old thing, she is the kind of ghost who is always turning away. Ada just gets on with being dead. The past is a puddle around her feet.

  Charlie is there too, shambling and brown. Charlie, who had no badness in him and yet did everything bad – bad debts, and broken promises, and bad sex with shop girls and housewives and the occasional actress. Wanting his luck to turn, though his luck was always turning, and his luck was always the same. Charlie can not settle in to being dead until he can get it all back for Ada, his one true love.

  These are my nightmares. This is what I have to walk through to get downstairs.

  I turn the handle of the door and Nugent is a slick of horror on the landing. He moves like smell through the house. Nugent plays with his sister Lizzie, now they are both dead. They kiss each other and are consoled. They do not breathe; the tangle and slither of their tongues is endless and airless and cold.

  I get across the two feet of carpet that brings me to the lip of the stairs. I fall down them, one step at a time. I am nine years old, I am six years old, I am four again. I can not put my hand on the banister, in case I touch something I don’t understand. The light switch at the bottom seems to recede, the quicker I go. Who turned it off? Why is the light in the hall turned off, when there is a corpse in the house?

  The l
ast is always the worst. My Uncle Brendan, in knee socks and short pants. He stands in the hall outside the twins’ room, the room where baby Stevie died, and his middle-aged head is full to bursting with all the things he has to tell Ada, that she will not hear him say. Brendan’s bones are mixed with other people’s bones; so there is a turmoil of souls muttering and whining under his clothes, they would come out in a roar, were he to unbutton his fly; if he opened his mouth they would slop out over his teeth. Brendan has no rest from them, the souls of the forgotten who must always be crawling and bulging and whining in there; he reaches to scratch under his collar and handfuls come loose. The only places clear of them are his unlikeable blue eyes, so Brendan just stares as I reach for the light switch, and his shirt heaves, and his ears leak the mad and the inconvenient dead.

  The light comes on. Just as it always used to. And my body, in the light, is a merciful thirty-nine years old. And when I walk into the front room all is silent. There are no ghosts in with Liam’s body, not even his own.

  The candles have burned low.

  In the far alcove, near the window, is a piece of furniture – I think we used to call it ‘the dresser’ – a thing of heavy oak, with shelves for glasses and vases, and presses down below. I check these presses and find nothing. Which is to say I find everything: an old liquidiser in a clear plastic bag made grey by age; my mother’s few 78s from the unlikely time before she was wed, ‘Jussi Björling’, and ‘Furtwängler conducts’; Scrabble; a game called Camel Run; a net bag with four, chipped pieces of artificial fruit; a support bandage for someone’s knee that stopped hurting long ago. Then I think to look up. There, behind the ornamental fretwork that crests this thing, are some boxes. I push the doily aside and climb up, and reach for a green shoebox. I poke it down, and catch it, and fumble around the lid, on which my father once wrote the word, ‘Broadstone’. Then I climb down and stand on the ground, and open the thing.

  Inside, there is a brown paper bag containing a few photographs, all in sepia brown. Some receipts – the kind you would get in an old-fashioned butcher’s shop. A thick little fold of letters written on watermarked blue notepaper such as a woman might use, and held with a rubber band. A series of blue hardbacked notebooks, each circled on the vertical by a round of what Ada used to call ‘knicker elastic’, no matter what she was using it for.