The Gathering Read online

  We parted with a smile that was as good as a handshake, and I went back to my own bed and lay down. It stayed with me for a day, maybe two; the freedom and chaos of fucking whoever caught your eye, the clarity of it, until suddenly I was prostrate and speechless with love for the Australian, endlessly lying there and listening to the house, the footsteps going through it, the voices and whispers; sorting through their rise and fall for the dull chirrup of his voice. I realised, too, that I was not in love with him, but condemned instead to a lifetime of such false intensities, that I would have to love each man I slept with in order not to hate myself, and the squalor in the house became suddenly insupportable to me, the damp and the mould, the fights over stolen cornflakes, the slow distance between Liam and the fishnet girl, garbled anguish from the room next door, and the dealer in the basement getting blow-jobs like a oneman brothel, with another girl always trembling outside on the stair.

  And still I lay there, in the funk of anybody’s sheets, waiting for the Australian to knock on the door, or the weather to change; waiting for some distant gear to catch and move my life along. I believe, now, that I could have been lost, just then – not that I am, these days, in any way found, but I think if my life had stalled there, I would have been lost in a more disastrous way.

  The room was officially Liam’s, so one of the things I looked at in those two or three days when I did not eat, and could not think, and moved only in the middle of the night, was his bed, at a right angle to mine; a yellowing wool blanket with a thick pink stripe along the top. Liam was always mysteriously elsewhere: this perhaps one of the effects of our stay at Ada’s, that if he made a home, it was only ever to leave it. I don’t know why I didn’t mind: I was jealous of his freedom, certainly, but I think I realised, even then, that the place he went to was always less interesting than the one he had left behind, or more terrible. Liam was prone to boredom and decline; he was too vague and restless to make a tragic object of himself, even then.

  I want to say that I was too middle class for Stoke Newington – in the infinite gradations of these things – but that isn’t quite true. No. I clicked my eyelids shut on the room and, when I opened them, I expected it to be gone, that is all: the maroon-coloured wreaths swinging across the wallpaper, the little turquoise skirting boards, the bare floor with a raw cut piece of carpet for a rug. When I opened my eyes, I wanted the room to be gone, or stripped, the house empty, the tenants dead, the beautiful and boring Australian turned to dust (or ‘Greg’ as he was called). I wanted Liam to rise out of his heap of blankets to say, ‘Jesus, Vee, let’s go and get a cup of coffee. Let’s go home.’

  This, though I knew that Liam would never come home now, either to this bed, or the bed in Griffith Way, or any other bed he made for himself, with the pillows plumped up, and the top sheet turned down.

  He fought with people too – and here in Stoke Newington, it annoyed me for the first time. There was a problem with the rent – he put the envelope under the door he said, it was a white envelope, a long one, with the guy’s name written on it in red biro. When Liam got into detail, I knew he was lying, also that he was starting to convince himself; he could see the biro and remember writing with it, once he recalled that it was red. These aimless wranglings just led to more mess and whining: Liam thrown outside this or another door at four in the morning or two in the afternoon with, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake. Come on!’

  He never fought with me. I was his sister. I was on his side.

  But he would have thought the Australian a cheap enough trick, and I knew this too as I lay rigid in the room we shared, for three days that I can not remember, until I got up and packed my stuff and bumped my suitcase down the stairs.

  I say that I did not leave the room for three days, but surely I had to drink sometimes, or go to the toilet. There was a problem with doors in the house: people were always putting locks on them, and the locks were always getting bust open, so the door to our room, as I see it in my mind’s eye, swings a little to, and it is that gap that tormented me as I lay on the bed, the fact that when I opened my eyes, it was all still there.

  I left Liam to the opening gap of the door, and to whatever was behind it. Something boring and horrible; Death, that rapist, who comes in and walks around, and will not say what it is he wants, until he takes it. And I wish I could remember what made me sit up and throw my things in the case, and leave: I fancy a piece of distant birdsong; the sense of someone calling me home, but the only person who might call was Liam and he was nowhere to be seen.

  The suitcase was air-force blue; stiff, with rounded corners. It belonged to my friend Deirdre Moloney from college, the one whose mother would throw her out three months before her final exams. At this stage she still lived a twee little life, where things like suitcases and, say, walking boots, were readily to hand. So it was an air hostess’s suitcase I carried down the stairs filled, just like an air hostess’s, with dirty clothes and squeezed-out tubes of spermicidal jelly; in the middle of it all, the tiny, smothered sloshing of a mostly empty bottle of gin.

  Bump bump bumpetty bump.

  Liam was in some other house, like this one or worse, and he wasn’t having a lot of sex, or drugs, or deep and spacey conversations. He was just the guy who stuck around, the one who would not go. He was the guy who could not be relied upon, the messer. ‘Mick,’ they called him. ‘Oy, Mick!’ or the Rastas’ soft, ‘Hullo, Irish!’

  Meanwhile, I wanted a shower. I wanted to be a girl. I wanted to have sex that meant something. I wanted a 2: 1 in my arts degree. There was a path, I thought – I really thought that there must be a path – and Liam had wandered off it, and I wasn’t going out there to look for him, not this time.

  19

  THIS WAS NOT the first time I left my brother, and it would not be the last. In his later, drinking years, I left him every time he arrived. But even before he hit the bottle, there were times when I just had to roll my eyes and walk away.

  The problem with Liam was never something big. The problem with Liam was always a hundred small things. He had cigarettes but no matches, did I have matches? Yes, but the match breaks, the match doesn’t strike, he can’t light these cheap Albanian trash matches. Do I have a lighter? Fuck, he has spilt the matches. Why don’t I have a lighter? He goes to find a lighter, rattling all the drawers in the kitchen. He walks out, leaving the back door open. He comes in the front door twenty minutes later with a lighter he found on the street – lying just outside the house actually – except that it is wet. He lights the oven from the pilot and lights his cigarette from the oven and burns his hand and after he has put his hand under the tap for a while he fusses in the cupboard for a baking tin and he puts the lighter – a cheap, plastic lighter – he actually puts it in the oven, and when I scream at him he shouts right back at me and there is a tussle at the oven door. After which, there is an hour of sulking because I do not trust him to dry a lighter in the oven without burning the house down. And after the sulk comes The Discussion.

  Liam is clever.

  No. Liam is dead.

  Liam was clever, I should say.

  Anyway. For someone who was blunderingly stupid most all of the time, my brother was very astute. And what he was astute about were other people’s lives, their weaknesses and hopes, the little lies they like to tell themselves about why and whether they should ever get out of bed. This was Liam’s great talent – exposing the lie.

  Drink made him vicious, but even sober he could smell what was going on in a room, I swear it. After Tom’s father died he did nothing but talk about rot. I saw Tom looking at him with a face that was completely blank, while Liam chuntered on about how long it took corpses to go off these days, because everyone was so full of E-numbers and preservatives. The thing is, I am not sure I even told him about my father-in-law dying, he just picked it up. Liam could be a completely shocking human being, but it was hard to say what exactly he had done to make you feel so off-key.

  ‘What was all that abou
t?’ said Tom, when he left, pretending not to have understood a single word – because the place Liam worked best was under your skin. I don’t think it was something he could control. It was like a contagion, he just had a contagious mind.

  And then, he’d take a few drinks.

  ‘Genital warts,’ he said, with a sneer, into the clear air of our family sitting room, discoursing with much hilarity about how they traced a particular strain of them through a chain of infidelities in the Hampstead Royal Free. ‘We called them the free warts,’ he said, this followed by sluice-room japes, and shocked consultants’ wives. Also patients in comas getting fucked, of course, or just waking up with sperm in their hair, and hey! Liam! you get everyone so excited, it’s great to have you around.

  Sober, he would miss buses and fail to make connections and lose things or steal things. Though Liam didn’t steal exactly – it was an intellectual problem for him, he just couldn’t figure out why you had something and he didn’t, and the only solution was to walk away with it, whatever stupid thing it was. Money sometimes, certainly from me, and probably from Kitty, though it is not something either of us would ever discuss, but also peculiar stuff. He took a phone off the wall of my kitchen in 1989, even though – or possibly because – I was renting at the time. Even though, and this is the stupidest thing, Irish phones did not plug into British Telecom. Liam, of course, would ‘know someone’ who could convert a phone, so the damn thing would be lying around his bedsit with the wires hanging out for God knows how long. All I know is that when I rang for the next six months, no one picked up an Irish, British, or any other phone. I also know that he took it because he sensed that he was going to disappear for a while, and he wanted to have something of mine with him, when it was time to leave. He wanted to keep the connection.

  So I left him and he left me. What else are siblings supposed to do? The very first time was when we went to St Dympna’s in Broadstone. He went in one doorway, and I went in another, and though we were still sleeping in the same bed at night, during the day he was a boy and I was a girl, and he could not be seen to talk to me in the school yard. So whose fault was that?

  This was 1967, the year that I grew taller than Liam, and I have remained so ever since. Other than the great bus-station adventure, nothing much happened in Broadstone. We mooched around the streets; two small raven-haired children with ice-blue eyes, and the lanky, sandy-haired one, which was me – this was the year I became dissatisfied with my hair, being stringy and under-washed. There were other intimations of adolescence. I stuck my face in the upstairs sink to see what killing yourself might be like, or I sewed the tips of my fingers together with one of Ada’s needles, while Liam played with her cigarettes. Though I think all that happened later, in the surprising springtime, when we were still not gone home.

  It was only supposed to be a summer holiday. One day the road was full of children and the next day they were gone, and we realised, myself and Liam and Kitty, that school had started without us. We had been left behind. We walked the streets past houses made intimate by silence. It seemed we could go anywhere. But we preferred to go back to our Gran’s and sit a while.

  There was sporadic talk of what to do with us. Ada would mention it to a neighbour on the doorstep – ‘Do you have someone in St Dympna’s?’ Myself and Kitty finally trailing down behind her to the nun who would make room for us; Sister Benedict, a black-eyed, passionate woman who kissed us mightily and laid one childish cheek after another on her bosom, stroking us and talking to Ada, while we listened to the buzz of her voice and the amazing drum of her heart.

  Looking down, I was fixated by her rosary beads, hanging to the floor, and by the great frankness of her toes, splayed in their monkish sandals beneath her robes.

  She pushed me back, and knelt down in front of me, and held my head in her two large hands. She actually put them over my ears, so it was again in the echo of her body that I heard her say I was a beautiful girl and the school was so very, very happy to have me. I would be in her own class, she told me, I would be one of God’s little soldiers – and this is how I remember my time with Benedict, as a time for marching, with all our desks in a row: Jesus in our hearts, and Mary looking over one shoulder, our Guardian Angel on the other side; God looking straight down, while the Holy Spirit dive-bombed the parting in our hair, exploding there in a harmless lick of flame. And there was no room anywhere for the Devil, who was a dark shadow over your left shoulder, just beyond the roll of your eye.

  The best thing about Benedict was her name. She had chosen it, she said, after the monk who was fed by a raven in the desert, because when she was little there was grey mould and beetles in the bread. The school was named for Dympna, an ancient Irish princess who refused to marry her father. When her mother the queen died, Dympna’s father looked all over the kingdom but could not find a bride. Then his eyes lit on his own daughter. Dympna escaped with her father-confessor, all the way to Belgium, where her father-the-king caught up with her and chopped her head off. What a fantastic story. St Dympna is the patron saint of the insane, Sister Benedict said, because her father was insane to want to marry her. Of course.

  My own name, Veronica – an ugly enough thing I had always thought, it sounded like either the ointment or the disease – was one of her great favourites. St Veronica wiped the face of Christ on the road to Calvary and He left His face on her tea towel. Or the picture of His face. It was the first-ever photograph, she said.

  I became quite fond of her; a figure leaning out of the crowd, both supplicatory and tender. I still think of her wherever wet towels are offered in Chinese restaurants and on old-fashioned airlines. We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch. I knew my fate must be linked to Veronica’s, in some way. Perhaps I would be a photographer. Perhaps there would come a moment when I would step out of the crowd, and then return – nothing more. I thought I might become a wiper of things when I grew up: blood, tears, all of that.

  I confused Veronica with the bleeding woman of the gospels, the one of whom Christ said, ‘Someone has touched me,’ and confused her again with the woman to whom He said, ‘Noli me tangere,’ which happened after the resurrection. ‘Do not touch me.’

  Why not?

  Why should she not touch Him? Thomas touched Him, Thomas was invited to put his hands inside His wounds. These things mattered to me very much, at the age of eight.

  For a while, I practised with my own wounds and scabs, and was taken, each time, by the brightness of the red on the white toilet paper I used instead of Ada’s tea towels. Children do not understand pain; they experiment with it, but you could almost say that they don’t feel it, or do not know how to feel it, until they are grown. And even then, it seems we always feel pain for the wrong thing. Or so it has been with me.

  I am not Veronica. Though I have done my fair share of wiping, in my day, and it is true that I am attracted to people who suffer, or men who suffer, my suffering husband, my suffering brother, the suffering figure of Mr Nugent. It is unfortunately true that happiness, in a man, does not do it, for me.

  I remember a slow afternoon with Ada’s sewing basket, trying acupuncture on my thigh, testing the depth of the needles as they went through fat and meat to the cartilage or the bone – maybe there was a tendon in there – I can’t get interested in what goes where. I can’t get interested in doctors, or bits, or gristle – give me the general anaesthetic, I say, give it to me now, before something goes wrong, and I also remember a night with Michael Weiss, hacking away at my inner leg, with a biro of all things, and then later, running through the ineffectual blue lines with his kitchen knife. And I remember the coolness of the cut.

  And after a while.

  After a while, the distant world came seeping back, beading at the edges, thick and red; rising up to join and flood the gap, then spilling slowly over the lip of flesh, with one engorged, delicious drop. The who
le world came bleeding back, a world that consisted first of Michael Weiss, or at least his voice, going, Would you just, would you please, would you ever just fucking stop!

  Such disgust. Such complete and utter disgust. Are you pleased with yourself now? Good, gentle, human Michael Weiss.

  Oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate.

  There is no blood here. There is no blood in this house. But I am residually interested, you might say. I am residually interested, in the bleeding face of Christ, and the woman who may have existed, but who was certainly not called Veronica, who wiped the blood away and with it some of the hurt.

  I don’t go to Mass now, and have passed little of it on to my children, though Rebecca, at eight, is going through a pious phase, probably to thwart me. They are surprisingly tall – eight-year-olds. They are surprisingly like real people. Of course your own babies are always real to you, they are all there from the word go, but even strangers’ children look like proper people by the age of eight, and, as if she has realised this, my eight-year-old has turned her new, fully human face to God.

  Liam liked St Catherine of Siena, the sore-licker. He also liked three Roman saints with funny names who were turned upside down and had milk and mustard put up their noses, which killed them, apparently. It didn’t seem to bother Kitty, as I recall.

  20

  AS I WRITE, I look out of the window and check with the corpse I have sitting in the Saab at the front gate. He is always there (it is always a he), a slumped figure in the front seat who turns out, on examination, to be the tilting headrest. But even though I know this, I am drawn to his stuffed, blank face, and wonder why he should be so patient. He lets his gaze rest endlessly on the dash, like a man who is listening to the radio and will not come into the house. A sign of the loneliness of men, and of their obduracy. He will not come into the house, my car corpse, the crash dummy in the front seat. He is waiting for the last of the football results.