The Gathering Page 5

  ‘Out!’ he shouted after me. ‘Out!’

  Various busmen turned to look as I sprinted for the gates, and then beyond.

  There was only one way to go and that was down Constitution Hill, until I was out of breath, at which place I would, no doubt, meet Kitty and Liam. But I did not find them until I came to the gates of a church: Liam, even then, with some idea of sanctuary – that even a bus conductor in his uniform couldn’t get to you here.

  We went in to pray – and I really believe this to have happened on the same day – we knelt up near the altar with the idea of pursuit at our backs, and after our hearts had settled we looked at each other, the need to laugh shifting even as we looked into a higher, more spiritual thing. So it was with a sense of pious elation that we gave thanks for our deliverance at the altar of St Felix by lighting a candle each and then, when we could find no slot for our pennies, lighting two or three more, until a priest marked Kitty’s upper arm with a ring of bruises, giving us, as he held on to her, a lecture on wickedness that was dense with rage. And I can not remember a single word of it, or what Ada later said about the state of Kitty’s arm, though I do recall the thick, vivid quality of the priest’s mouthing face, like undiluted fruit squash. And though common sense says that these two events should not have happened on the same day, I say that they did, and when a man followed me through the back streets of Venice, many years later, with his erection in his hand, I ducked into a church as though inviting something worse – instead of which, I got nothing: empty seats, mould on the wall, a piece of paper stuck under a muddy oil painting, with ‘di Tintoretto’ written in biro. There was a dark side chapel with heaven itself painted on the ceiling, at least when you put in a 100-lire coin for the lights to come on. Otherwise all was shabby, and calm. There was no worse thing waiting to happen to me. I knelt with my back to the flaring white rectangle of the open door, but the street Italian did not come up behind me, a child did not walk out of the confession box with his cupped hands holding a jigger of sperm, no saint moved. I bent my head and prayed like a woman in a fifties film, I prayed that it would leave me, the choking sense that this was the way I would die, my face jammed in filthy gabardine, of navy or black, a stranger’s cock in the back of my throat and what, what, what?

  Something turning in my stomach. A knife. No knife.

  It isn’t real.

  But ker-klunk. The lights in the side chapel came on, with a great noise, followed by the slow mechanical grind of someone’s money running out. I knelt and watched Germans and English come in and figure out the lire box and switch heaven on, while at my back the Italian with his erection lingered at the open door of the church, or not. (What was he going to do with it anyway?) At any rate he failed to cross the threshold, and when I finished my desperate, atheistical praying jag, I turned and found that he was gone. Which was fine. Except that now, when I walked the streets, he was everywhere.

  We were good children, mostly. I imagine that we were good children, in those days in Broadstone; a bit quiet, a bit worried, perhaps; Liam especially prone to sudden switches and changes of tack, but these were as often hilarious as awful, and though Kitty was a pain in the neck it was in a childish sort of way, and there was no harm in any of us, that I can think of – why would there be?

  9

  THE MAN BESIDE me on the train to Brighton lifts his pelvis slightly, and settles it back down. He is dozing in the flickering, sexual sunlight, lulled and unsettled by the movement of the train. I can sense the blood pooling in his lap; the thick oblong of his penis moving down the leg of his suit.

  Here comes another one.

  And then again, there is nothing to fuss about – a young businessman having a hard-on beside you on a train – even if you are recently bereaved. Given the state I am in, I find the hydraulics of it more than usually peculiar. Such small things to have such large consequences. I wonder, briefly, if Liam would still be alive if he had been born a woman and not a man. And there he is, suddenly, leering behind the tea trolley, in a Dick Emery headscarf and industrial support bra.

  ‘Cooeee! I’m alive!’

  And, ‘No thanks,’ I say to the perfectly respectable woman who offers, ‘Refreshments?’ as the man beside me reaches for a newspaper to hide his lap.

  Harmless. Harmless. Harmless.

  And I close my eyes.

  Liam walked into my hospital room the evening after Rebecca was born. He just showed up, with a bunch of pink flowers from the downstairs shop. Tom was gone home to get some sleep and the phone calls were done and people were leaving me time to recover, but I was high as a kite, showing the baby off to nurses and cleaners, wondering was it a football match or a terrorist attack, that had all her admirers stuck in some traffic jam?

  And there was Liam in the doorway – I didn’t even know he was home. And there was I, propped up on the pillows in a heap of extra sweat with a baby – untouchably fine – in the plastic cot by my side.

  He moved across the room to take a look and there was a solidity to him as he bent over the next generation, checking, in a proprietorial way, eyes, fingers, toes, the tiny pores on her nose plugged with yellow stuff that made me panic already about blackheads when she was grown.

  ‘How are you?’ he might have said.

  I don’t think we kissed. The Hegartys didn’t start kissing until the late eighties and even then we stuck to Christmas.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I would have said back.

  And he sat in the visitor’s chair and looked at this new scene: mother and child.

  ‘Was it all right?’ I remember he said that, and I remember I said, ‘Well, it’s all right now.’

  The walls were painted yellow and there was something thick and ecstatic about the sunshine, now that the baby was born.

  I remember thinking how good he looked; how handsome he might seem walking down a street of strangers, my slightly fat brother. He was happy to see the baby. He was reduced, by the sight of her, to someone I knew in my bones.

  The birth had given me back my sense of smell, which had been oddly thwarted while I was expecting, and so I was in an aromatic rush with my nose stuck into a glass of champagne that I refused to drink but sniffed all afternoon. I could tell, from one hour to the next, how the drink was spoiling as it met the air. This was the place where I existed – in the smell that drifted from the top of a pool of champagne – beside which, even Liam’s clothes felt loud.

  I told him our mother had phoned, and that she had cried.

  ‘Cried?’ he said.

  ‘She thought we were all barren,’ I said, though I felt my betrayal in a tinge. I had been pleased enough to hear from her at the time.

  We talked about her for a while.

  He was eyeing the glass on the bedside locker, and I told him it was only a little aeroplane sort of bottle. But he finished it off for me before he left, warm and flat and grubby as it was with whatever pungent stuff was spilling out of my pores as I deflated slowly into the room. I didn’t mind. I told him I was glad to have the smell of it gone.

  Sitting on the Brighton train I am trying to put a timetable on my brother’s drinking. Drink was not his problem, but it did become his problem, eventually, which was a relief to everyone concerned. ‘I’m a bit worried about his drinking,’ – so, after a while, no one could hear a thing he said, any more.

  Quite right too, it was all complete shite. Alcohol wrecked him, as it does. But I am trying to put a time on it – when I stopped worrying about him and started to worry about his drinking instead. Maybe then – with my new baby opening her eyes, over and over, as if to check that the world was still there. That was probably the moment. Just then.

  A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking. Or they only exist in flashes. Sitting against a yellow wall looking at your favourite sister, who has just unsheathed herself of a child. A look in your eye like old times. The rest is not to be trusted.

  I could smell the settler he had had
before he came in the hospital door, I could smell his lunch-time wine and last night’s beer. But there was also some metabolic shift, a sweetness to his blood and breath that I did not recognise. He didn’t eat much, those last years, his body already cycling on alcohol. And sitting on the train to Brighton I wonder if he had diabetes, if that was what was wrong. I suddenly think that if only he would get his bloods done, we could do something about this, because maybe his drinking isn’t the problem, after all.

  Then I realise that he is dead.

  And, of course, his drinking was an existential statement, how could I forget? There was certainly nothing metabolic about it. There was no cause.

  Was he pissed when he died? Probably. And now, what tide runs in his veins? Blood, sea water, whiskey. He was a maniac on whiskey. He probably thought he was swimming to fucking France.

  I close my eyes against the warm sunlight and doze beside the dozing stranger on the Brighton train.

  10

  HERE’S ADA AND Charlie in bed a year later. Charlie as sleek as a seal with his long, plump, stomach; his languid genitals blushing pink against his fat, white thigh. It is Saturday morning, and every stray breeze, every shift from Ada under the eiderdown can tease him aloft, until an angle is reached – say, fifty degrees – that seems to him both stern and kind. He muses on it for a while – forty might be considered awkward, any lower merely blundering and shy – and then it is something he has to share, this question of degree. He swims back under the bedcovers to Ada’s skinny shanks and she laughs and lifts her knees. They have done this so often in the last few hours that it is hard to tell the difference between outside and inside. Also the difference between the covers and the air of the room, between their clothes and their hands: everything seems to stroke them. They are a bundle of nerves, frayed at the ends. They are wearing each other away; both of them amazed by the thinness of skin that happens just there; how close they can be, blood to blood, so that the ticking, afterwards, of one inside the other, might be a joke, or a pulse – the beating in your veins of someone else’s heart.

  Of course Charlie, at thirty-three, has more sense than to end up inside Ada more often than he can help it (though sometimes, it is true, he can not help it at all), and so he hoists himself out at the last to flop like a drowning man, spilling sea water on the quay. And Ada is raw not just from love but also from the vinegar she uses in her special French bag; a present from Charlie – so outrageous and sly – after they were engaged. They are lovers. Even though they are married they are lovers. There is no talk of children: nothing happens in the dark. Their courtship was a violent affair; the engagement, it seemed, just an excuse to protract the sweetness, so by the time they got between legitimate sheets they were worn out from it all and looked to their wedding night as to a final wreck. Ada undressed by the side of the bed like a woman getting into a bath, Charlie squinted under the lamp to wind his watch. After which, with a sudden, awful intercourse – Ada’s eyes locked wide and open – they found they had everything to learn, after all.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ It seems as though Charlie has said nothing else since the day they met. ‘Don’t worry, you will come to no harm.’

  Ada did not know why she trusted him, but she did. And she was right. And that itself was a kind of triumph for her; skinny, practical Ada, with her weather eye. She trusted him at once, and she never stopped trusting him, even as, in time, he brought the bailiffs to the door. Now, on this Saturday morning, she picks up his hand and sets it down on her overused pubis, so the weight and warmth of it will settle her back together, somehow. Everything hurts a little. They are not very good at this yet. They have great intimations of what is to come.

  The bed is a mahogany affair, with two swags of little flowers joining in a bow on the headboard. It is a little soft – obliging the lovers, at some grinding extremity, to take to the floor. But it is luxury to lie in and Ada has come into her estate: her own bed, with her own bottles and potions on the chest of drawers, and all her things, books and breakfast, about her. She is married. She can live in this bed. She can eat in it, and read in, and take to it on a regular basis.

  And if the bed is a palace to her, then Charlie is her magnificent fat guest. Against the rose pink of the eider-down, his sandy hair is all aglow. It streams downwards, and swirls around his body’s dents. It stops in a line around each ankle before leaping, like an escaping fire, in little tufts from toe to toe. Golden hair courses down his belly. It hangs in little beardlets from under each pap and fizzes out from under his arms. Ada never tires of it, how it runs in currents, like he has just risen from a bath – and the joke at the top, where his head has been rinsed altogether clear. Because Charlie is very bald.

  He is the kind of man who looks like he should be wearing a bowler hat, but Charlie is vain of his pate – he used to sit me on his knee, as a child, to stroke it – and he often goes bareheaded, to give it the benefit of a breeze. He does favour a scarf, though, and has a tendency to growl and clear his throat, also to tap his chest, rewrap the scarf, and to settle and resettle the lapels of his camel-hair coat. Charlie is seldom without his coat. He fills a room in a way that is always confusing because, though he gives the impression of being small – the baldness, or maybe a stubbiness about his thighs – he is actually quite large and his refusal to settle may come from a concern that he will not fit. Charlie is only ever passing through. He never takes a cup of tea. It seems that he has information to impart though, after he has gone, it is often hard to know what that information might have been. His voice is low, and urgent, and very pleasant. He makes people feel warm and uncertain, as though they might have been conned – but of what? They look down to check their hands but nothing has been taken, there is nothing there to take. So he is not liked for it – not exactly. Charlie’s charm is completely pointless. And no one knows where he is from.

  Spillane is a Kerry name, but his accent is English, with a bit of Clare in there, and all of it Dublinified. There is no doubt, with his mangled vowels, that Charlie wanted to blend in – unless he wanted to stand out, in some way. Still, no one believed a word he said. I remember disbelieving him personally, at the age of eight.

  There was something about a horse (there was always a horse). There was the Lord Leinster story, and the endless Shelbourne Hotel stories, and the 1916 Rising story which was sometimes referred to, but never actually told. ‘Ah yes, Mr Spillane,’ says the man in the shop, winking at me over the counter, ‘that would have been in the Glory Days.’

  What did Charlie buy me? A sherbert fizz. Of course.

  I remember him best with my skin. The creeping delight as he bent down to whisper; the bristle of his moustache and the grease of his tweed. He tickled you with the idea that there was something hidden in his hand or pocket – and there never was. Charlie played Find the Lady with no lady: he just loved the flourish, and after the flourish he loved to leave.

  Poor Charlie. His was the first corpse I ever saw; massive and still under Ada’s rose-pink eiderdown. Which is why it is a kind of blasphemy to write of their marriage night in the same bed – though blasphemy seems to be my business here.

  I would love to remember how he died – whether with a noise in the night, or a lengthening silence in the middle of the afternoon. It must have happened while we were staying there. It might even have been the reason we went back home. But such details and dates were too terrible for a child to take in, it seems, because my mind has blanked them out – but completely. All I remember is the aftermath, trying not to laugh as we were brought up to the room.

  It must have been the February of 1968. I was still eight, Liam was nine, and we were going up to ‘say goodbye’ to Charlie. I think I knew, even at eight, that you can say goodbye all you like, but when someone is dead they’re not going to say anything back, so Liam had to stiff-arm me up past the neighbours reciting the rosary on the stairs. My memory has them all bundled in shawls; Ada’s back ascending in front of us corseted in black
taffeta. But this was 1968: there would have been patterned headscarves and big-buttoned coats that smelt of the rain. Ada would have worn her navy Crimplene with white piping, that came out for all occasions, with a matching navy bolero jacket and one of those hats that look like a bubble of felt, punched in on one side.

  The neighbours’ feet stuck out a surprising distance from the step where they each knelt: their shoes waggled midair, and there was something tripping and wrong about this other ladder, made of shin-bones in support tights, at cross purposes to the staircase we were trying to climb.

  A very loud woman was praying on the return. She saw me giggling with Liam and rolled a sad eyeball, like there are some things beyond rebuke. I remember that, all right; the slow-motion feeling of being utterly wrong-minded and unable to change. I did not, I realised then, want to go into my grandparents’ room. Not at all.

  A few more kneelers cluttered the second flight, and then, through the open door, I saw the end of the bed and the still, uneven lump of Charlie’s feet. I remember the straightness of his legs as revealed through the expanding door frame, the horrible little peaks of his knees, then the merciful swoop of the eiderdown up his fantastic belly’s rise. His hands were on his chest, knotted, and complacent, and tied together with rosary beads.

  The beads looked too tight, they looked like they were digging into his flesh. These little fierce formalities at the end; a sort of revenge on him, for being dead.

  Ada looked to check us behind her, and then moved out of the way to give us a better view. It was a view that I did not want to take.