The Gathering

by Anne Enright

  They are rent books; starting in 1937, when my mother was eight years old. The first covers fifteen years, at twelve weeks to a page. The same handwriting, the same fountain pen, on line after line of Fridays, a small increase every year. The fountain pen continues through the second volume and only changes to biro in the third – when the rent is paid monthly, and the handwriting begins to shift to pencil or red biro or whatever came to hand.

  What are these doing in our house in Griffith Way, sixteen or more years after the woman died? Why should anyone keep these things, except out of fear – of the long arm of the law, or of the Revenue Commissioners; investigating the tax situation on a house you never owned, and that your mother did not own before you? I have, as I put it back in the box, a sickening sense of what these books meant to the possessor, the rights they might afford.

  After 1975 there is nothing. Pages of nothing. I wonder was this the year that Nugent died? I lift the book and turn to show it to Liam, and I see Ada watching us from the doorway. There she is. I see her not as I ‘saw’ the ghosts on the stairs. I see her as I might see an actual woman standing in the light of the hall.

  31

  I DON’T KNOW how the rest of the night went, or who sat up with Liam’s body after I left; I suspect Bea and Ernest did the bulk of it, though at one stage, Kitty tells me, they all moved in there and played cards. Apparently, I made a bit of a fuss in the front room. Mossie pushed a sour little pill in my mouth, and Ernest tried to pray with me, but I refused point blank to rest in my old, childhood bed, so they put me in a cab and sent me home.

  The empty house, when I got there, was such a blessed relief – I think that is one of the reasons I walk around at night now, to get that feeling again; of sanity and emptiness, of one room giving way so easily to the next. So I stayed up for a while, and then I went upstairs and had sex with my husband for the last time.

  That was not my intention, of course. After the night I’d just had it wasn’t my intention to have sex of any sort, never mind terminal sex. But I slipped into bed and Tom was awake. And he was in love with me. There is really no point in going over his reasons: he loved me; he wanted to drag me back to the land of the living. And maybe, now that my soul was so soft, he wanted to leave his mark there too. My body was not soft, however. I wondered why he did not notice this. But I did all the moves, and I made way for him, and I did not tell him to stop. So I must have wanted it too, or something like it.

  He was not to know what had happened in Griffith Way after he left. Or that I had taken a pill (maybe it was the pill?) or that I felt like meat that had been recently butchered, even as he felt terribly moved. If that is what he felt. He was very gasping and juddery, at any rate, like his nerves were all alight.

  Afterwards, we lay face to face, buried up to the neck in the duvet. We have said too much to each other, over the years. We are judiciously silent.

  But he needs to say one more thing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  I think for a moment that he is apologising for the horrible sex, then I think he is sorry about the death of my brother, but in fact he is sorry for some infidelity he has committed in the past – he will tell me in a moment how little she meant – and this will be so silly and unbearable under the circumstances (I have just, I realise, slept with my husband for the last time), that I forestall him by saying, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’

  He takes this as a sign. Everything is going to get better. He says I should do something. Work part-time, or take a daily walk at least – what about a house, what about getting a house and doing it up, now that the market’s on the move? Money. I could earn money. He says he has been too busy, he’s had a bit of a dip, but that we are out of the woods, he is over it now. And I say, ‘A dip?’

  He says, ‘Please, not that again.’

  I say, ‘Your daughters will sleep with men like you. Men who will hate them, just because they want them.’

  And he says, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Jesus, you know. It’s just...’

  ‘Just what?’

  I think he means that there is a limit to these things, to the way men think. That it isn’t real. That no one gets killed, for example. I think he means that this side-by-side business is all we’ve got.

  He is probably right. So I lie there, side by side with him, and I contemplate the spreading bruise of my private parts.

  ‘Funny thing about men’s bodies,’ I say. ‘They never lie. That must be handy. I mean you’re built to tell the truth. On / off. Like / don’t like. Want / don’t want.’

  And Tom says, ‘Not really.’ There is no reliable connection, he says, between what you want and what your mickey wants; sometimes it’s hard to tell.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, and roll over, and go to sleep.

  32

  IT WAS ITA at the door, of course, I should have known. It was not Ada, it was my addled older sister; psychotic with drink, and with a stupid new nose.

  This is what I remembered, when I saw her.

  I remembered a picture. I don’t know what else to call it. It is a picture in my head of Ada standing at the door of the good room in Broadstone.

  I am eight.

  Ada’s eyes are crawling down my shoulder and my back. Her gaze is livid down one side of me; it is like a light: my skin hardens under it and crinkles like a burn. And on the other side of me is the welcoming darkness of Lambert Nugent. I am facing into that darkness and falling. I am holding his old penis in my hand.

  But it is a very strange picture. It is made up of the words that say it. I think of the ‘eye’ of his penis, and it is pressing against my own eye. I ‘pull’ him and he keels towards me. I ‘suck’ him and from his mouth there protrudes a narrow, lemon sweet.

  This comes from a place in my head where words and actions are mangled. It comes from the very beginning of things, and I can not tell if it is true. Or I can not tell if it is real. But I am sickened by the evil of him all the same, I am sweltering in it; the triangles of blackness under his sharp cheek-bones, the way his head turns slowly and his eyes spin, slower still, in their sockets, towards the light of the opening door where my grandmother stands.

  I do not believe in evil – I believe that we are human and fallible, that we make things and spoil them in an ordinary way – and yet I experience the slow turn of his face towards the door as evil. There is a bubble rising in his old chest: a swelling of something that might, at any moment, shoot out of his opening mouth and stain the entire world.

  What is it?

  I can not move. In this memory or dream, I can neither stop it, nor make it continue. Whatever comes out of his mouth will horrify me, though I know it can not harm me. It will fill the world but not mark it. It is there already in the damp of the carpet and the smell of Germolene: the feeling that Lamb Nugent is mocking us all; that even the walls are oozing his sly intent. The pattern on the wallpaper repeats to nausea, while hot in my grasp, and straight and, even at this remove of years, lovely, Nugent’s wordless thing bucks, proud and weeping in my hand.

  And the word that he says, when the door is fully open and his mouth is fully open, the bubble that bursts in the O of his mouth is the single word:

  ‘Ada.’

  Of course.

  Is she pleased with what she sees? Does this please her?

  When I try to remember, or imagine that I remember, looking into Ada’s face with Lamb Nugent’s come spreading over my hand, I can only conjure a blank, or her face as a blank. At most, there is a word written on Ada’s face, and that word is, ‘Nothing’.

  This is the moment for blame. The soiled air of Ada’s good room will rush out past her, as she stands in the yellow light of the hall. This is the moment when we realise that it was Ada’s fault all along.

  The mad son and the vague daughter. The vague daughter’s endlessly vague pregnancies, the way each and every one of her grandchildren went vaguely wrong. This is the moment when we ask what Ada did – for it must, surely, hav
e been something – to bring so much death into the world.

  But I do not blame her. And I don’t know why that is.

  I owe it to Liam to make things clear – what happened and what did not happen in Broadstone. Because there are effects. We know that. We know that real events have real effects. In a way that unreal events do not. Or nearly real. Or whatever you call the events that play themselves out in my head. We know there is a difference between the brute body and the imagined body, that when you really touch someone, something really happens (but not, somehow, what you had expected).

  Whatever happened to Liam did not take place in Ada’s good room – no matter what picture I have in my head. Nugent would not have been so stupid. The abuse happened in the garage, among the cars and bits of engine that Liam loved. And Nugent was horrible to my brother in ordinary ways, too, out there. He had his sadisms, I am sure, and his methods. I have to make this clear because, somewhere in my head, in some obstinate and God-forsaken part of me, I think that desire and love are the same thing. They are not the same thing, they are not even connected. When Nugent desired my brother, he did not love him in the slightest.

  That’s as much as I know.

  I could also say that Liam must have wanted him too. Or wanted something.

  ‘Now look at what you’ve got,’ says Nugent, as I cry and drive my car around the night-lit streets of Dublin town. ‘Now look at what you’ve got.’

  As for myself – I don’t think I liked the garage and I never went in there much. Though when I drive these nights, and when I stop the car, I wonder, among other things, did it happen to me too.

  What can I say? I don’t think so.

  I add it in to my life, as an event, and I think, well yes, that might explain some things. I add it into my brother’s life and it is crucial; it is the place where all cause meets all effect, the crux of the X. In a way, it explains too much.

  These are the things I do, actually know.

  I know that my brother Liam was sexually abused by Lambert Nugent. Or was probably sexually abused by Lambert Nugent.

  These are the things I don’t know: that I was touched by Lambert Nugent, that my Uncle Brendan was driven mad by him, that my mother was rendered stupid by him, that my Aunt Rose and my sister Kitty got away. In short, I know nothing else about Lambert Nugent; who he was and how Ada met him; what he did, or did not do.

  I know he could be the explanation for all of our lives, and I know something more frightening still – that we did not have to be damaged by him in order to be damaged. It was the air he breathed that did for us. It was the way we were obliged to breathe his second-hand air.

  Here I am back in St Dympna’s, with ink on my tongue. Liam does not sleep with me any more. I wear my knickers to bed. Then I get up and put on my tights. Then I get up and put on my school blouse; it is important to be ready, when the time comes. I get up again and put my gymslip over the back of a chair. I put my shoes under the chair, and turn the lot to face the door, so that when I dress I will not have to turn around to leave the room. Then I get up and fold my sash and put it in the right shoe, with the end trailing out along the floor. Then I get up and put the gymslip on, after which I fall asleep.

  In school, I smell tired. The box pleats of my gymslip are all shattered. I can not leave the feel of the sheets behind – ghost sheets rubbing and slipping against my gymslip, as my body turns in the bed, this way and that. Liam sleeps on the far side of the room, Kitty sleeps beside me. In front of me Sister Benedict teaches us how to pray:

  As I lay me down to sleep

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep

  And if I die before I wake

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  33

  ‘IF THE VIRGIN Mary was assumed bodily into heaven, then where does She go to the toilet?’

  ‘What did you say?’ Daddy is looking at me.

  ‘If the Virgin Mary was assumed bodily into heaven, then where does She go to the toilet?’ and my father has hit me before I see his hand move.

  This was shortly after we came back from Ada’s, when I was in the height of my religious phase.

  I remember it because, although my father used to hit his children all the time, more or less, it was never personal. He might slap three at a time and let the fourth go or he might stomp among us with his hand raised as we ran, shrieking, around him. The boys were different, of course, but in the main my father hit us, not because he was in charge, but because we were in charge. That is why, when Kitty starts throwing accusations around about hitting, I can not quite sympathise.

  But, BOK! the sound of all sound being sucked away from the side of your head, a numb silence that is cut through, after a while, by an expanding ring of pain.

  The question was almost worth it, though – because it is the only evidence I possess that our father was a Catholic. Of course Mammy is a Catholic, in the way that Mammys are, but for fourteen years or so I sat by or behind my father, on a wooden church bench, every Sunday morning and in all that time I never saw his lips move. I never heard him pray aloud, or saw him bend his head, or do anything that might be considered remarkable were he sitting on the top deck of a bus. When it was time for Communion he stood at the end of the bench as we trooped by, like letting sheep out at a gate, but I don’t know if he ever followed us up to the Communion rail. My father attended church in his official capacity. If I went looking for his personal belief I would not know where to begin, or in what part of his body it might inhere.

  I think about him at Liam’s removal. Ernest is on the altar in his priestly robes. The embroidery down his front has a Mayan theme, and he looks very fine.

  The diminishing Hegartys are sitting in the front row in order of age. Ernest enjoins us all to pray and I place my father’s stubby hands together, I fumble them a little around his lips, ‘Oh Lord,’ I say in his voice: but it all lacks conviction – which is to say, his conviction. My father was never pious and I do not think he was afraid of hellfire – so when he had the sex that produced the twelve children and seven miscarriages that happened inside my mother’s body (which is kneeling now at the end of the line), then that was all he was doing – he was having sex. It was nothing to do with what the priests told him or didn’t tell him, it was just something he needed to do, or wanted to do; it was just something he felt he deserved.

  He did love my mother. There is always that unpalatable fact – the fact that my father loved my mother, and she loved him right back. But he did not love her enough to leave her alone. No. My father, I suspect, had sex the way his children get drunk – which is to say, against his better judgement; not for the pleasure of it, so much as to make it all stop.

  This is the nearest I can get to the impulse that made the child who now lies in the coffin in the centre of the aisle. Because Liam, in his box, is a boy again. He does not fill it more than three-quarters of the way down. The years are drifting away from him. The years are being metabolised, until he pees the last of them out, standing by the railings of the Basin in Broadstone, at nine years old.

  Wheee!

  All the Hegarty children have a hangover, including the one in the box. It is a very peaceful, precious kind of feeling; a swelling of the senses, between pain and warmth. Liam has the biggest one, of all, of course, because Liam finally got really wasted. He got a skinful. Liam finally got out of his head. He will be sleeping his one off, for a while.

  At the end of the line, Mammy has been rendered transparent by sweetness and suffering. Bea stands beside her, attending church in an official capacity, just like Daddy used to do. Next is Mossie who says the responses out clear. The rest of us mumble and are silent. On one side of me, Kitty is hunched and fervent (but fervently what – that is the question), while on the other, Ita sits, her a mind like a stone.

  I try to believe in something, just for the heck of it. I pluck some absolute out of the air, some expanding thought that will open in my head like ether – God, or the future, or
the greater good. I bow my head and try to believe that love will make it better, or if love won’t then children will. I turn from the high to the humble and believe, for many seconds at a time, in the smallness and the necessity of being a mother.

  But it’s all a bit nice, for a Hegarty. Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find – blood, nails, a bit of anguish.

  So I catch my anguish. I look at Liam’s coffin and try to believe in love.

  Not easy.

  I do remember God’s love, that year in Ada’s when I was eight, and Liam was nine. I remember it very clearly. Sister Benedict told us to take Jesus ‘into our hearts’ and I did, no problem. I check my heart now, and I find that there is still a feeling there, of something hot and struggling. I roll my eyes back under my closed lids, and there is the sense of opening in the middle of my forehead. The chest thing is like fighting for words and the forehead thing is pure and empty, like after all the words have been said.

  There now.

  Belief. I have the biology of it. All I need is the stuff to put in there. All I need are the words.

  After Daddy hit me across the side of the head, he turned and walked away, in utter silence. He may have shocked himself. He certainly shocked me. But the truth was that I did not believe in heaven then, and never would. And when I thought about hell, it was just very quiet.

  34

  HERE IS ADA, sitting on the sofa in the good room in Broadstone. She has a piece of work in her hands, simple work, it must have been some hemming or darning. There is an eight-year-old girl in the room, who is me.

  I remember the curve of her back; her hands, dropped in her lap; the pick and lift of her fingers as she teases the thread through. The sofa behind her is a dark red, overlaid with a tangle of cushions, though Ada does not lean back into them. The two Turkish rolls with tassels at the end, from the set of some seraglio at the Gate Theatre; a red velvet round cushion with loose smocking around the rim, like the tread on a fabulous, fabric car; a series of little logs, their covers made out of metallic thread in purple and brown striations, like bark in a theatrical wood.