The Gathering Read online

  Charlie did love to leave.

  ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ You never knew where he was going. He left in a fug of explanations that explained nothing at all. So Ada was proved right, at last – he was a most annoying man. You could tell by the way she twitched towards him as though to swat the dandruff from his lapel. And in fact there was something there – a fly crawling on the side of his neck. I thought it had come out from under his collar and I was much bothered by the idea of maggots – from that day on, really. It stopped my awful smiling at any rate, like Ada was going to swipe at me, and not the fly.

  She watched it rise and shift away from him, and hit the roller blind, once, twice. Then it came back to the bed. I was standing behind her; I could feel the still, raw rage as she saw it circle, and scoot away, and then come back to settle again on Charlie’s dead neck. It landed and ran across the skin, not bothered by the deep creases in the soft flesh, or by the few high strands of hair. Ada moved, or went to move, and the fly lifted and repeated its escape to the roller blind, this time finding a way around the bright edge of it to hit the window pane, where it buzzed and thumped. We listened to it for a while; the sound of the rosary outside, and the sound of the fly battering the glass. Ada was mortified. She looked to the corpse. She could not move. Then, of a sudden, she seemed to realise that this was her own bedroom, with her own husband in it, dead or not, and she simply walked around the bed. When she reached the window, she raised one hand and pressed the blind flat. The buzzing stopped. Ada the housewife, with a terrible spot on her blind. We children now exposed to Charlie’s bald head, naked in death.

  You might think there is something light about the dead – our lives feel so heavy to us, sometimes – but the dent Charlie’s head made in the pillow was living and deep.

  I remember him lying down in the Phoenix Park, his head like a rock in the grass. And I remember my hand in his mouth – the whole of my hand – while he garbled around it and laughed. I must have been very young, my hand all disappeared into this huge face and – somewhere else, it seemed – the surging chaos of his wet tongue, the gentle flats and tips of his molar teeth.

  The skull is the bone that is nearest the air. This is what I realised as I looked at the skin on the dome of Charlie’s head; it was bloodlessly transparent, and the tan was all on the surface, in the thinnest glaze. Ada was back from the window, urging us forward to view, or witness, or maybe even touch, this briefly sacred thing, our dead grandfather. And I suppose it is amazing. The viewing moment. When they have left, but are not yet gone. When you are not quite sure what it is you see.

  So I did look – at him, or it. And it was all fine and unsurprising, except for the moustache. Charlie, alive, had the most wonderful white bush of a moustache, lemon-scented and turned slightly at the tips. My grandfather was the only man I knew with a toy on his face. His moustache moved and distracted and dazzled. It was a sleight of mouth. And now it was still, and hiding nothing at all.

  There was no trick.

  That was the thing that made me cry – waiting for Charlie’s moustache to move, and finding that it did not move. There was no trick, after all. Ada back beside us whispering, ‘Say goodbye, now,’ and Liam, who was older than me by nearly a year, taking a step forward and then stopping, because he did not know what to do.

  ‘Shush,’ Ada said to me. ‘Stop crying.’

  I wonder did they take the blood out? I mean, I wonder if he was embalmed before he was laid out, was that the custom in those days? The blood that was pooling in his shoulders and buttocks, the blood that had fallen to the back of his head, seeking gravity, already wanting to leach down through the mattress: the blood that bruised or hardened in him now, as the front of him (you see it is true) grew infinitesimally lighter, and we stood there, letting him go: that blood, so heavy and sticky and wrong – I wonder if it was still inside him, because it is the same, or a quarter the same, as my own blood. If I cut myself, right now, I would see it running free.

  It’s funny, but I have never thought of myself as related to Charlie, even though he was my grandfather. He was a different kind of person. He danced with Ada in the kitchen. He didn’t have a job you could put a name on. He wasn’t always home.

  None of the Hegartys got his dog-brown eyes, or his fine, high nose – though it is true that his grandsons all went bald, in time. And this is something Liam could not have foreseen as he stood there waiting to do the proper thing, as soon as he knew what the proper thing was to do. He did not see that he would die bald as a coot, though I think we both knew, as he leaned forward to touch Charlie’s poor dead hand, that Liam would die.

  He was on his way.

  If you ask me what my brother looked like after he was dead, I can tell you that he looked like Mantegna’s fore-shortened Christ, in paisley pyjamas. And this may be a general truth about the dead, or it may just be what happens when someone is lying on a high, mortuary table, with their feet towards the door. That is how I knew that Liam was dead, when I finally saw him in Brighton, the fact that he was too high off the ground, and the thing he was lying on was too hard and flat, because the dead are never uncomfortable – even as we start forward to make them so. I don’t think I looked at the top of his head, or thought about his baldness, or thought about anything. And I was glad I had some practice in this whole business – the viewing business – because although I loved Charlie, it was with the easy, anxious love of a child, that is always ready to love someone new.

  But, dead or alive, you don’t spend time examining your brother’s body, its shape or parts, or the texture of its skin. So I can not recall Liam in any detail. All I know is that he looked completely different dead, while Charlie looked very like himself. And, as I wondered at the stupid, secondhand paisley pyjamas, I realised that this is why we were hauled up those stairs in Broadstone at the age of eight and just nine – because Ada had seen this day coming. She knew all along. She wanted us to be prepared.

  Or maybe her grief was so large that she had to drag everyone into it, even us children. Maybe she wanted the whole world to witness, and be horrified.

  I wasn’t horrified, I just felt lonely. Not because Charlie was gone – I didn’t care about Charlie, I hated Charlie, I hoped he was heaving with maggots under that suit. But because I didn’t want to be in that room, and nobody cared. My feelings were not relevant – not just to the occasion, but to the whole business of being alive.

  The rosary churned on in the stairwell, as Liam stepped back and I stood there and refused to move. Liam’s hand on my forearm, already livid with decay; Ada behind my shoulders, whispering me forward.

  I did not go.

  My grandmother had no patience. She moved on my behalf and put her hand on the corpse; once on the wrist, briefly, and then – impulsively, it seemed – along the line of his jaw. She laid her hand from his ear to his chin, cupping the length of bone.

  It was a while before we realised that she was stuck. And another while before someone came up behind her and pulled her palm away from the cold cheek, looking over his shoulder, as he did so, to say, ‘That’s enough now.’

  Like it was all our fault – this embarrassment of dead flesh, and the still-breathing love that was in Ada’s body, a love that did not know where to go.

  ‘That’s enough.’

  Mr Nugent. Of course.

  And now I remember Nugent there at the end, I must remember him in the room all along, sitting by the side of the wardrobe, so the fly, when it lifted from Charlie’s neck went right past him, before curling around to the light of the window and the blind. He was leaning forward, when we first came in, with his elbows on his knees and his rosary beads dangling towards the floor, and the mahogany behind him was nearly as dark as his black suit.

  I have never trusted men who pray. Woman have no option, of course – but what do men think about, when they are on their knees? I do not think it is in their nature to pray: they are too proud.

  But there he was, sighing throu
gh the Hail Marys as we trooped in the door: me, who was supposed to be in charge, my brother, gangly and raw in his grey school jumper, and Kitty coming up behind. And now of course I must add Kitty in from the start, my little sister, trailing up the stairs behind us, because she must have been there too. Kitty did the business like she did her Holy Communion – with her head down and her face piously cocked. Did she lay a daisy on Charlie’s chest, a childish buttercup on the pillowslip? No. As I recall, Kitty stepped forward, said, ‘Bye bye,’ and turned to leave the room. She was six. She loved her audience. I should know, I had to twist her hair into rags every night, to keep the ringlets tight.

  Nugent was there all along: for Liam’s bravery and Kitty’s cutey-pie piety and for the huge bubble of selfishness rising and bursting in my chest. The big, miserable fucking roar of it, telling me that I was alive.

  I remember that all right. I remember Kitty’s hair rags, though I can not, for the life of me, turn the memory of my sister around to look at her six-year-old face. I can not, for the life of me, remember Liam’s face, though I will never forget his nine-year-old hand touching Charlie’s dead hand – Liam’s mottled purple while Charlie’s was clear, because his body had already forgotten that it was winter, in that cold house. There are photographs. There is the hint of my brother’s smile in my own mirror, a tone of voice I sometimes hit. I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them, instead.

  The only things I am sure of are the things I never saw – my little blasphemies – Ada and Charlie in their marriage bed, her pubis like the breast of an underfed chicken under his large hand, or the sad weight of his tackle as she reaches under his long belly to pull him closer in. The sun in the flowered curtains.

  Happiness.

  11

  I WAS OPENING the car door for the girls one day before Liam died and, as it swung past, I saw my reflection in the window. It disappeared, and I looked into the dark cave of the car as the kids came out, or went back in to pick some piece of pink plastic junk off the floor. Then the reflection swung back again, swiftly, as I shut the door. The sun was breaking through high-contrast clouds, the sky in the window pane was a wonderful, thick blue, and in my dark face moving past was the streak of a smile. And I remember thinking, ‘So, I am happy. That’s nice to know.’

  I am happy.

  Rebecca is eight now, she looks like me. Emily is six, she has black hair and the ice blue eyes you get on the Atlantic seaboard – Hegarty eyes, only more so – and I think that, if we fix Emily’s teeth, and if Rebecca stops being dippy and learns how to be tall, then they both have a chance of being truly lovely, some day.

  My children have never walked down a street on their own. They have never shared a bed. They are a different breed. They seem to grow like plants, to be made of twig and blossom and not of meat.

  And yet, their parents wear them out. The last time we went on holiday, there was some bickering over directions, and in the middle of it I glanced in the car mirror and saw Rebecca staring straight ahead. Her mouth had sunk inwards and I saw, with terrible prescience, the particular thing that would go wrong with her face, either quickly or slowly, the thing that could grab her prettiness away before she was grown.

  I thought, I have to keep her happy. I have to be in love with her father and keep her happy, or this thing will happen to her, she will turn into one of those people that you pass every day on the street.

  ‘How did you meet Daddy?’ says Emily, my rival. ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘I met him at a dance.’

  ‘What were you wearing?’ says her sister, who is always on my side.

  ‘I was wearing ...’ It was a long time ago, I can not remember what I was wearing. I say, ‘I was wearing a blue dress.’

  This is probably not true, but they like it. And it is true that Tom was wearing a really sharp suit when I smiled at him, one night in Suzey Street – and kept smiling, in a melancholy way, until he finally stopped talking and just leaned in.

  ‘How did you know it was him?’ says Emily.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How did you know it was Daddy?’

  ‘I just did,’ I say. ‘I just did.’

  Which is true – but not in the way they might expect. I can’t exactly tell them that he was living with another woman at the time, and that the moment I saw them together I knew two things. The first was that he did not belong to her, and the second was that he belonged to me.

  I could make him happy. That was all. I knew that, in some exact way, I could make this man happy.

  ‘I knew it was your Daddy, because he was so tall.’

  This will do. It is true enough. I also liked the curve to his top lip, and the way his suit hung open as he leaned over to talk to me, the dent in his chest as he stooped, the mixture of arrogance and inclination.

  Tall men, they are so unwieldy. They cave in, like you have undone some secret hinge.

  But this is not what you tell your daughters ten years later: that their parents only had sex by accident, and it was weeks before they managed to get all their clothes off first. That their father was so maddened by guilt he actually frightened me – until the moment when I wasn’t frightened any more. That we were swept away. That afterwards we talked about her. And when we finished talking about her, when she was finally gone, some six months later, we had triumphant, tender sex, and after that.

  After that.

  It was time to buy a house, I suppose. But the early, frantic stuff was important. And the other woman was important too. A little ruthlessness. A pact. A spill of blood. Because we each knew we had met our match, in terms of ambition, or damage – call it what you like – we knew we would put it all right one day with this: two beautiful daughters in two beautiful bedrooms. Tall, no doubt, and clever. Who would attend their destined private school, and who would each be mapped, discussed, mulled over, well loved.

  At least that was the plan.

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘Then we got married.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Then we had you!’

  ‘Yes!!!’

  And your father took one look at you and ran out the door. (And that is certainly not true. Look! he is still here.)

  Tom was taught by the Jesuits – which explains it all, he says. He is very clear-sighted about the world, and yet he questions himself, constantly. He pushes himself hard, and is rarely satisfied. He is completely selfish, in other words, but in the poshest possible way. I look at him, a big, sexy streak of misery, with his face stuck in a glass of obscure Scotch, as he traces the watermark of failure that runs through his life, that is there on every page.

  And when he looks at his children, I do not know what he sees. He loves them, but they are in his way. And, whether he loves me or not, I too am in his way. But he is wrong. I am not in his way. I never have been.

  If this is a fight, then these are the facts: when Tom was starting out in his own business, and I had a small baby, I left that baby with a minder and worked day and night to keep up with the mortgage repayments. But when he began earning again, it was clear that his money was much more important than any money I might earn, that his job was an important job, that he couldn’t be expected to be doing pick-ups and Pampers and snot and drop-offs with so much importance around. And, eventually, I gave up work so that we would not be so much in his way.

  But although these are the facts, they are not completely true. I don’t miss work, for example. Not in the slightest. Even now, I can’t believe I wasted so much of my life writing about heated towel rails. Endless words. About the difference between mulberry leather and tan. About oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate.

  This is how we used to live our lives.

  I walk in the door after a terrible day at the office and kiss my husband, who is shattered after a day of work and baby-minding. Then I take Rebecca from him and change her nappy and put cream on the rash, and I fight with him about thi
s, or about the empty fridge, or the washing-up, and somehow the baby gets put down and around half nine when she is finally asleep, I come downstairs and get a large glass of wine and bitch heartily about my boss, then I tidy up and drink a bit too much and stay up a bit too late. At half eleven Tom clears his work from the kitchen table and says, ‘Don’t stay up all night,’ and, after a while, I hang the dishcloth over the kitchen tap and go up to bed. I know how unhappy he is. There is no doubt that my husband is unhappy, but also excited with his new business, and surely the mess can not last. Other people have children. Other fathers do not feel, as he does, unmanned by it – by the lack of money and the mayhem, and the fact that there is no place here for his considerable charm.

  I should allow him space for his considerable charm. I place my face against his back and reach around to cup the soft handful of his prick, because I have had a little too much wine, and I think he actually hates me now, I am so much to blame for it all.

  And he either turns, or he doesn’t.

  And in the gap I realise that he is having sex with someone else.

  No. In the gap I remember how much he wanted to have sex with someone else, when that someone else was me.

  A week after Liam’s funeral I look at my husband’s body. Asleep. Alive. I want to see all of it. It is a warm night. I take off the covers quickly, and he moves and is still again.

  Tom is sad in his sleep. His hands are gathered under his chin, his legs are impossibly long and large, they do not look bent so much as broken at the knee. The hollow under his ribcage slopes to a little low, pot-belly and the cushion of his scrotum rests in the V of his thighs. He is very pale.

  I remember making love to this body: a cloud of hair around the bridge of his penis, when I looked down from above; the little roof of his underarm, like a nave without a church, when I looked up from below. This was back in the early days, when we could not get enough of each other and he traced a candy-stripe of moles around my body, rolling me over as he went, until I was completely unwound, and tipped from the bed on to the floor.