The Gathering Read online

  Yaroo!

  The whole party is, by now, so worn out by the surge and loss of each race, and by the endless waiting in between, that when Ada jumps and lifts her fists, nothing is hidden from any of them. She might stay like that – Ada ascending – frozen in victory, from her clenched hands to the tip of her down-pointed shoes. By the time she hits the ground again it has been settled: one of these men wants her to win, and the other wants her to lose.

  And she knows it.

  Ada’s horse came first. But it was only a horse – it’s not exactly her fault. So maybe it is her sense of justice that makes her choose Charlie, who is pleased for her, as opposed to Nugent who is insulted by her good luck. But there is no doubt – the choice has been made.

  On the trip home, Ellen sings in the front seat; the shreds of her lovely voice coming back to them on the wind, ‘When Other Lips’, ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt’. They understand each other completely, each person in this car. They sit and think what it all means: Charlie has won Ada, Nugent has lost her. And this stirs in them thoughts of other things.

  Charlie, for example, is thinking about all the girls he has pushed to the brink of ruin before letting each of them go. He is bidding it all farewell, the ravishing, tawdry, endless tristesse of one woman or another, one woman or another, until a man had to address his member as you might a dribbling dog, ‘Enough, sir! Enough!’

  Ellen is thinking that she will never get married.

  Nugent is trying to catch last night’s dream, sure that it was telling him that he had lost, already, before he ever tried. It was a dream about his soul, a gap opening in his chest – because the soul is a she – there is a girl flowering inside him, breaking through, there is a hole weeping nectar just above his heart, it is opening to his hand, there – just there – a place where all good things are, as hope and loving-kindness, a place he can find a gorgeous kind of rest, and enter or be entered, over and over again, over and again, finding as he does so, the soul’s own sweet ecstasy, until he wakes to the horror of his blasphemous thoughts and the after-shock of his seed just spent, and waits, in the dark, for the mess to go cold.

  I don’t know what Ada was thinking in the car on the way home. She was probably doing the sums in her head, wondering why she had to fall for the one who had a hole in his pocket. But even so she holds out her hand to Charlie and says, ‘Thank you for a lovely drive.’

  And to Nugent, ‘Thank you for a lovely day.’

  She looks Nugent in the eye. And she knows what he sees. And she doesn’t care.

  I do not know why Ada married Charlie when it was Nugent who had her measure. And though you could say that she did not marry Nugent because she did not like him, that is not really enough. We do not always like the people we love – we do not always have that choice.

  Maybe that was her mistake. She thought she could choose. She thought she could marry someone she liked and be happy with him, and have happy children. She did not realise that every choice is fatal. For a woman like Ada, every choice is an error, as soon as it is made.

  17

  ONE DAY, ADA packed a basket and took us to the seaside on the train. Or, I should say, she wrapped a few sandwiches in the waxed paper from the sliced pan, and she put them into her string shopping bag – she was turning into something off the BBC there, for a minute, walking down a country lane in a long skirt, with gnats and dust motes dancing in the sunlight around her hair. So no. Though this was the general mood, or the remembered mood, of the expedition, Ada did not wear a long skirt with mutton-chop sleeves, she wore a dress (what a rush, to remember this, now), a small-print floral dress in lilac – very like a housecoat print, if it were not for the exotic background of inky black. The collar and cuffs were bordered with the same floral print, except the flowers here were aqua blue, and this gave the dress some distinction, though it was also an ordinary flowery dress, with a nip in the waist and a full-enough skirt, and a slight glaze on the cotton, that hush-shushed as she moved.

  We sat on the train beside her all the way to Donabate, which was beside the sea, and we played with the leather pull on the top window, or opened the door to look down the length of the corridor, and then slid it shut again. Past the Hill of Howth and on to Malahide; the train moved into the flat sandy reaches of North County Dublin, which all the Hegartys knew meant ‘market gardening’ as Navan meant ‘carpets’ and Newbridge ‘cutlery and ropes’. We looked out the window, wondering what ‘market gardening’ might look like if we passed it by, and we played on the seats, and were, I suppose, entirely happy.

  We were going to a place called St Ita’s, and then we were going to the sea. This first was a peculiar destination. We had a sister Ita who was, even then, the most disliked among us, as perhaps each of the girls were, at the moment their breasts began to grow.

  St Ita was an early Irish nun who, out of love for the baby Jesus, prayed for the gift of nursing – and ‘the milk came’. So it was not to a place we were travelling, that day in the train, but towards some fuddled idea of ‘nursing’, whatever that meant to me at eight years old: a woman tenderly bandaging an infant’s mouth, or a nurse smiling and waiting – something odd and lovely behind the hanging watch and white cotton on her breast. It was into whiteness that we were travelling, clicketty-clack. And it is a whiteness I remember, when we finally arrived, a seared white sky, that met, in a final burn of white, a far, grey sea.

  Meanwhile, I sat in the carriage beside Ada’s floral skirt, pulling a string of plastic beads from my pursed lips, perhaps, and mouthing them back in again. It would have taken forty minutes at the most, this fantastic, endless trip by train. Kitty and I in differently coloured gingham prints, pink for her and green for me, and Liam, as boys always are, in shades of navy and grey. We chug along, bouncing nicely on the sprung seats, all together, as actors on stage. Then, off at the station! The steam hisses, and Ada is back in her mutton-chop sleeves, as we climb the steps up to the little village and the hump-backed bridge from which you can look at the tracks slicing off northwards to Rush and Lusk. There is a shop for ice-pops and you can smell the sea, but Ada has further to go and we stand at a bus stop and wait until a stranger pulls up in a mint-green car and we all climb in the back. ‘You’re going to the hospital?’ says the man behind the wheel and Ada says, ‘St Ita’s, yes,’ on a long exhalation. The stranger lets it lie, this heavy word now beside us in the car. He is not going as far as the gates, he says; he will let us down near enough. It is his habit, evidently, to pick people up at this bus stop, and I know by the way he says ‘hospital’ that St Ita’s is not a hospital. If we were going to a hospital, then Ada would have said.

  There is a girl sitting in the front passenger seat, about five years old. She has fantastically round eyes, no shoes, and no T-shirt, and she is sitting, happy as Larry with her father in the front seat. We look at each other when the car stops, and she keeps looking as we get out, like she would like to get out with us too, despite all her luck. And a part of me goes with her when the car drives away.

  Another part of me is still, these years later, walking along the road where the stranger set us down. It is a long straight road, a country road; though it has a proper concrete path along one side, and it is along this concrete path we walk, the three children and the woman with her string bag. There is a ditch beside the path and after that a large and shivering cornfield. On the other side of the road, there is a line of wonderful, wrecked trees and a low stretch of bog. Halfway along our side, a bungalow stands in the middle of the field, and we wait to see if there is a path up to it, or whether it had been altogether abandoned in the midst of the corn.

  Far ahead of us – and this was the longest, straightest road, at the age of eight, that I had ever been on – there is a man with two sticks, and he bundles himself along, one shoulder hunching over the top of the stick, and then the other, his legs working curiously against, or after this rhythm, like he is only using the sticks for show. He is a short man and very sturd
y. He twists his hand at the wrist, as the hunched shoulder comes down, and the stick might waver a little before he switches to the other side. Hunch twist waver step. Hunch twist wobble step. There is nothing wrong with his legs, as far as I can see, except that they are slow, and the road is very long. Hunch, twist, yaw, step. Shoulder, hand, and maybe, yes, leg. And we should be overtaking him, but the road is too long, and Ada is slowed by one or other of us children, until with the distance and the excitement of the day, I think that there is some other thing wrong with the man with two sticks, something we won’t know until we pass, a deformation of his face, or an expression that we can not yet see. We are closer but we are still not there, as he walks gainfully along, covering more ground than you would think for a man with two bad legs, and we might actually pass him except Kitty has skipped out on the road, or Ada is halted by the shiftings and manipulations required by the string bag, which contains, not just egg sandwiches in waxed paper, but also something else. There are other little parcels in there, that are too good for our picnic, old-lady parcels, done up in wrapping paper and Sellotape, one of them looks like a box of After Eights, and one is very misshapen, and could be anything at all. And Ada has them in a separate plastic bag inside the string bag, with a name scored in biro on the front. She is going to visit someone in the hospital, and then we are going to the beach. And of course I have known this all along – we are going to visit my Uncle Brendan, though because I am eight I do not understand that my uncle is necessarily Ada’s son, or I do not know what that means – ‘son’. But certainly I have known it all along that we are going to visit Uncle Brendan in St Ita’s which isn’t quite a hospital, and after that we are going to paddle in the sea.

  Liam, especially, is frisky and lonely, he wants to walk on the other side and look down into the low field that is turning into bog, but Ada will not let him, he must stick to the path, because that is what it is for, and what would our mother say if Ada brought him back to her all broken by a car? And at the mention of our mother everything gets a little bit worse, because what is Liam to me except a ‘brother’ and what is he to Mammy except her ‘son’, and when I look up old two-sticks is gone, and we have passed the long gap in the corn, if there was a long gap in the corn, and the bungalow sails on in the middle of the field behind us, up to its gunwales in golden brown.

  I don’t remember the hospital. At a guess, Ada did not take us inside. There was a handball alley in the grounds and she left us there, and we played between its concrete walls. On the rise behind the alley there was a round tower, like the Irish round tower on our copybook covers, and beside that was a huge vase of stone, perhaps a hundred feet high, and that was a water tower, and they stood watch from the hill, like a fat woman and a thin man, looking far out over the sea. There it was, at the bottom of the hill. A strong sea, under a hard white sky. And we might have run down there, but Ada had charged us to stay put, so we played a little in the handball alley, doing nothing, just liking the shape of it, and being in it; the back wall and the two slanting side walls, like cutting the end off a shoebox. On one side were the round tower and the water tower, and on the other was a wall of red brick. We did not look at this wall, or at the dirty casement windows with no bars, where the lunatics were, and we did not think of what lunatics did when they saw children – eat them, I thought, suck at their ears and jibber – so we played at being Nice Children for the watching loonies until Ada came back with her string bag half empty, pleased in a thorough sort of way, to see us playing there.

  ‘Come on,’ she would have said, and we did not tell her about the one loony we saw walking up the path from the sea, slow and stupid and dirty and terrible, who looked right at us as he shambled by.

  After that, there must have been the sea. Ada bringing us for red lemonade into a pub, that had a black roof with huge letters of white written across it. We must have caught the bus back to the station at the hospital gates, and taken the train back home.

  18

  AT AROUND THIS time, Liam became frightened at night, and though Kitty was supposed to sleep in the double bed with me, he would come across in the darkness and worm his way between us, elbowing her out and hissing at her to move into the bed he had left. Kitty looked so Victorian in her nightgown, her heels and ankles white on the floorboards, her hair mussed over a face made plump by sleep; I would almost miss her, the healing stillness of her breath on the next pillow, occupied now by Liam’s face, his eyes blinking and large, his hands rolling under the bedclothes as he rummaged a place for himself there. He was never still. He sank down off the pillow and looked up at me, or hooshed back towards the headboard, he fussed and squirmed, or he would freeze, appalled – there was a face at the window, or imagine if there was a volcano under Dublin, or if you fell down a hole and your mouth was full of maggots. All this was delivered with great gusto, so, though everything he said was terrible, I remember these as happy nights, talking until dawn. He must have been smaller than me by then, because he always ended up rolled into the line where my body met the mattress, and I would have to wake up to push him away.

  What did we talk about? I wish I knew. In our teens, we wrote slick and ‘hilarious’ letters to each other, any time we were parted, the summer he went to the Gaeltacht, or the time I went off on a French exchange.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ he writes from Gweedore, the year he was fourteen, ‘we get numb bums from sitting on the beach and not drinking vodka, or “bhodhca” as it is called here. Billy Tobin got sent back up for speaking English so Michael and me have developed a way of speaking English as if it is actually Irish which is great fun and not very comprehensible. Iubhsaid try it iurselbh some time.’

  He was the one who talked most, but I didn’t mind. I wish I could remember what exactly he said, but conversation doesn’t stick to my memory of Liam. We never sat, one across from the other in proper chairs, in a house or restaurant, or bar. We talked as brother and sister might, looking elsewhere, or we sat on the floor, smoking, with our backs against the same wall, and we talked incidentally while looking at the passers-by, thinking about other things. We talked a lot in the dark, differently arranged: side by side in the double bed at Ada’s, top to toe once or twice at home, or perpendicular in the dive in Stoke Newington, with two beds heading into the same corner of the wall. I used to see the yellow patch around his mouth as the cigarette crackled and glowed – then the red tip flew in an arc, as if thrown away. It made me feel slightly nauseous, endlessly lurching for the catch, and staying still at the same time. I am very frightened of fire. It was the summer, and sometimes we were still talking when the sun came up – but I have no idea what these conversations were. I put a phrase into the bedroom air, like ‘Joan Armatrading’, and I think, We would never talk about her. I suppose we talked about family, though there was a privacy to these things too. What else – quantum mechanics?

  We talked about anything and everything, maybe, and when I bumped my suitcase down the stairs of the dive in Stoke Newington, I knew that I would never have those conversations about anything and everything again.

  This was my second summer in London. Liam had just missed his final exams, and I was earning money for my last year, temping in Elephant and Castle. He had found this place to stay, a three-storey over-basement, that no one really owned. There was a hot little reek in the living room, a mixture of PVC and piss and sardines; finally traced to the sockets that sparked and blew everything you plugged into them. Black flares of smoke stained the white plastic, and while you peered and sniffed at them, the carpet left wet ovals on your knees. I can not actually recall the bedding, on which, room by room, each tenant had poor man’s sex, the bodies left afterwards in painterly abandon on the waves and wrinkles of the greying sheets. We were young, so I suppose it is possible that we were beautiful, though the miserable girl with her fishnet gloves just got on everyone’s nerves, and the Australian guy had to just lose the tan or shut up or get out, each of them, as I picture them now, impossibly
lovely, the hard little bones of her white shoulders shrugging and dipping as she pulled on her Gitanes: him, stripped to the waist in the kitchen, the central furrow on his torso pausing at his navel, before rushing, in a mess of blond hair, down his cheerful Australian shorts. These were the dilettantes of course, the tourists like myself, they did not twitch or yowl or throw punches, they did not sling their shit in packets out the windows in the middle of the night, because they forgot for a moment where they were. There was a dealer in the basement, but few enough drugs in the house itself, or maybe it was just that no one offered them to me – something about my sandy hair and narrow face, even then, that showed I was out of that particular loop. No one tried to shag me much either, though one night myself and the Australian got together, just because we could.

  I think about this encounter from time to time – when, for instance, I decide I should just go out there and ‘do it’ – I remember it as you might remember a scene from a film, bodies moving together in the afternoon light, limbs pulled into slow angles, tongues arcing out. This despite the fact that it took place, I am sure of it, in darkness, after bad wine and candlelight in the overgrown back garden. Something about the event, even at the time, meant that it was experienced almost entirely from the outside; my young body, his young body, all the postures and motions, and, above us, my hovering gaze, perhaps even his hovering gaze, or both conjoined. So wonderfully, cleanly pornographic we were, and quite friendly, it was just like dancing, and I felt nothing more than a dancer might, except for a little fist of feeling where I held on to the Australian, anxious that we should make this scene, with all its careful variations, last a while.