The Gathering Page 7

  I remember the size and straightness of his collar-bones under his shirt, one night in the rain, in the early-early days, when it wasn’t like sex so much as like killing someone or being killed.

  There he is now, in our bed, still alive. The air goes into him and the air comes out. His toenails grow. His hair turns silently grey.

  The last time I touched him was the night of Liam’s wake. And I don’t know what is wrong with me since, but I do not believe in my husband’s body any more.

  12

  BAD NEWS FOR Bea and my mother and all the vultures who will flock to 4 Griffith Way for the wake – which is that there will be another ten days at least to wait before they can feast on Liam’s poor corpse, because of the paperwork involved.

  I hear this from an undertaker who looks about nineteen. He touched my arm in the corridor of the Brighton and Hove mortuary and took me away, somehow, in a car or a taxi – whether I sat in the back or the front of it, I can not recall. But I know that I will remember this, the hinterland of the funeral parlour, suburban and pastel: a desk with a chair on either side and, up on a swivel stand, a laminated catalogue of coffins, all kinds and varieties of them, except, when I enquire for the sake of distraction, the eco-warrior’s cardboard.

  ‘Did he like all that?’ says the boy in black.

  ‘Not really. A bit.’

  I know what I want, I have known all along, but it doesn’t look well to be too previous, so I turn the pages for the hideous silk linings, ruchings and slubbings, like being buried in a cinema curtain just as the projector snaps on and starts playing Looney Tunes. I say some of all this out loud while my undertaker listens a little, and lets me take my time.

  His mouth is a solid purplish red against the white of his skin. He has a tiny, wet hole in his ear where his earring should be but is not, while he is talking to the bereaved.

  ‘No hurry,’ he says.

  I love this undertaker. He has that thing that young people got, sometime after I grew up. He does not pretend. He does not judge. He talks about the caskets in a ‘whatever’ sort of way, like it is all just shopping – the real questions are elsewhere.

  ‘That’s the one,’ he says as I poke my finger at a plain limed oak, and I think that maybe one of my daughters will marry someone like this, someone who is able to sit easy with a woman in a room.

  ‘I can’t take the flight with him,’ I say. ‘It’s just too...’

  ‘“Would passengers requiring assistance please come to the front of the queue.”’

  And I laugh. Whatever he means.

  ‘Really, it will be fine in the hold,’ he says.

  He is not good-looking. His mouth is too squished and full; he is too soft and unformed. But there is nothing wrong with him. I look at his hands and they do not disgust me, and his eyelids, when he closes them, flickering, in order to make a point about buffed steel as opposed to chrome, have a faint pattern on them of medieval veins. His clothes do not mock his body. You could unpeel him, and he would still be true.

  I must ask his name again. (Azrael.)

  He touched my arm while I stood by Liam’s body and he led me away. He is the person who comes after you have seen the worst thing. He is the rest of my life.

  After I arrived at Brighton station, I walked around for a while, thinking that I should play this the way it happened – I should start at the place where Liam walked into the sea – because there is an order to these things that has to be obeyed. So at lunch-time, I am walking along the prom and Liam is still, residually, alive, and I am imagining this place in the darkness, and the lapping around my waist of black salt water. Liam is in the air. The figures that pass are scribbled with the graffiti of his gaze: everything they have spills over, or droops. An overweight child with breasts – a boy, it seems. An old man with a scab under his nose. A woman with a widening tattoo. A parade of lax flies and stained trousers and bra straps showing under other, shoestring straps. The living, with all their smells and holes. Liam was always a great man for people’s holes, and who stuck what into which hole.

  He is back in my head like an expanding smell – a space that clears to allow him look out of my eyes and be disgusted by arse or tit, or ‘cold tit’, even, by flesh that is never the right temperature or the right humidity, being too sweaty, or flesh that is saggy, or hairy, and the women, especially, who inhabit this sad human sack too craven or too beautiful (except, of course, for their holes), and in the end, who do you sleep with, who do you kiss? People with no pores? I say this to him, in my head. I argue it out, but I can’t shake him, I can’t win, as I pass old men and old women, with their eczemous creases, or lean over the railing, pulling in the sea air to keep the rising vomit down, while thinking of my brother’s own flesh and how it will look in two months’, then three months’ time.

  I look over the railing as though to examine the density and variety of brown stones on the beach below. And there it is: the open tang, the calling, the smell of the sea. Such a miracle, at the end of the Brighton line, with the town stacked behind me, and behind that all the weight of England, in her smoke and light, jammed to a halt here, just here, by the wide smell of the sea.

  The first time we took the ferry, myself and Liam, it was the end of his second year, and my first, in UCD. We were going to work in London for the summer. We sat in the space between carriages, from Holyhead to Euston, watching a man – who turned out, by some freak, to be our own postman – squeeze oranges into a bottle of duty-free vodka. He was giving the vodka to a drunken girl he had met on the crossing, and he waved the bottle at us too, and we may or may not have taken it, but what I liked was the way he winked to us before turning back to the girl – who was completely rat-arsed – as if we were all in this together, the seduction business, the business of, ‘Crikey! Quids in.’

  Liam never gave us a wedding.

  The Hegartys loved a wedding, and a few of us actually had them, small or large, and some of them secular, and in the centre of it all, this decorous thing, an honest man, a lovely girl, fucking, in the nicest possible way, to cheers and the chink of glasses – and this was a thing that Liam never learned how to do, how to switch in and out of sex, how to talk around it, or share it, so although there were girlfriends we never saw them, or if we saw them he did not like us, the Hegartys, to speak to them: a line of spindly, droopy human beings who held his hand and peered at us over his shoulder. Liam liked nice women. He liked women who were kind or gentle. He liked those translucent girls. And he was quite right not to share them with us, the Hegarty hyenas, myself and Kitty singing, ‘And they called it puppy lo—oo—oo-ove’ as soon as they left the room.

  The funny thing, apart from the horny postman, about that first journey through the British night for us – fresh off the boat, fifty paces across our first foreign soil and then stepping up again on to the iron floor of the train – was that we always thought that we were nearly there. We looked out the window and, after a period of darkness, there were so many lights we assumed they were the coming lights of London town. Except that we never arrived. And it seemed to us that England was a single city from one side to the other, without pause. Then, in the morning, when we had finally, definitely, absolutely arrived, we stood at the mouth of the underground in Euston, thinking that a train had just pulled in, and we would be able to make our way down when the crowd was gone. After a while we realised that the rush of people was not going to ease, that there was no one, particular train. London was all flow, it had no edges, it was everywhere.

  Liam never liked the English, or so he claimed. In this he was helped, he said, by the fact that the English did not like themselves.

  Clever Liam.

  And I can not manage to love them, this herd on the hoof down the Brighton front, all of them enjoying the sea where Liam drowned. But I manage not to hate them, even though they are alive and my brother is dead. And I wonder how I escaped it – Liam’s hatred of this or that arbitrary thing. Queers one year, Americans
the next.

  Who should I hate?

  We swam at night somewhere. When we were young, we swam at night, and I can not remember where that might have been.

  I look out at the wide, shifting sea, and, just for a moment, I think I have a smaller life, alive as I am in this sunlight, than my brother, walking out in the darkness; blood and whiskey into salt sea. Liam, pissed, just the skin that separated himself from his yearning self. Just for a moment, I think that it is more heroic not to be.

  I look at my hands on the railings, and they are old, and my child-battered body, that I was proud of, in a way, for the new people that came out of it, just feeding the grave, just feeding the grave! I want to shout it at these strangers, as they pass. I want to call for an end to procreation with a sandwich board and a megaphone – not that there are many children, I now notice, on the playground that is Brighton beach, at least not this Tuesday afternoon. England, the land of the fully grown.

  But I really don’t mind these people, one way or another, and I love the undertaker. My catalogue companion, my English boy. This trendy ease he has is almost spiritual. I wonder who he goes home to – friends he likes, or parents he likes – and how do you have sex with a guy like that. Does he have moods?

  When I am done, and have felt his harmless hand in my own (old) hand, I stand on the pavement outside his funeral parlour and I open my mobile to ring my difficult, middle-aged husband when what I want to do instead is lie down, just there, across the boy’s doorway, until he steps across my prone body and lifts me up.

  Azrael.

  ‘How are things?’ I ask Tom, and he tells me that the girls are going to friends’ houses after school, and everything is fine. It takes me a moment to figure out where he is.

  ‘Are you at work?’

  ‘Of course I’m at work.’

  ‘Rebecca has her Irish dancing,’ I say.

  ‘Well. Not today, she doesn’t.’

  ‘She has her showcase.’ I wail it out into the street, and disbelieve it at the same time. Because what Tom is saying (quite rightly) is that my concerns are not important, they are invented, they are something to keep me occupied while he does the serious stuff of earning money and being more properly alive.

  ‘Where are you?’ I say.

  ‘I told you, I’m at work.’

  ‘Where at work? Where are you, at work?’

  He can’t put the phone down on me because I am in Brighton and recently bereaved. There is a long pause.

  ‘Come home,’ he says. ‘When will you be home?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Everything,’ he says. ‘What do you think?’ And it is my turn now, to cut the connection, and fold up my phone.

  My boy undertaker is behind me with the door open, saying, ‘Do you need another coffee? Is there someone I can call?’

  He has put his earring back in; a little sleeper of gold.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s just the way it goes.’

  I fell in love, I am beginning to realise, in my early twenties, when I met and slept with a guy from Brooklyn called Michael Weiss. He was in Dublin for an MA in Irish studies or Celtic studies, or what have you – we despised those courses, they were just something the college did to get rich Americans, and so I was surprised to find myself in love with Michael Weiss; surprised too because he was not a tall American with big prairie bones, but an average-sized guy who smoked roll-ups and talked with a Brooklyn pebble in his mouth, part slur and part contemplation.

  Sleeping with him was very sweet, the way he would prop himself up to look at you and talk. He loved to chat while he was touching you, he loved even to smoke in this endless lazy foreplay that was all foreign to me then. I was twenty years old. I wasn’t used to sex that was so aimless and unspecific. I wasn’t used to sex that was sober, I suppose, and all this talking just made me uncomfortable: I thought he didn’t fancy me. I watched his face move and wished he would just get on with it – the astonishing bit, the thing we were both here for.

  I think, in his ironic, slow way Michael Weiss knew that he couldn’t hold on to me, and all he was doing in those drowsy afternoons was trying to talk me down, like a cat in a tree, or an air hostess in charge of the plane. ‘You see that leh-ver to your right? I want you to ease that leh-ver down to forty-five degrees.’

  And though we got through a surprising amount of it – sex, that is – all I can remember is my madness at the time, watching the day outside his window shift to dusk in jolts and patches. It was, perhaps, an adolescent thing; standing naked on the nylon carpet of his student bedsit and feeling the change of light to be impossible; like my skin was being stripped off, as the day gave way, in tics and lunges, to dark.

  Michael’s father was an artist and his mother was something else. I wasn’t used to that either – most of the parents I knew were just parents – but he had this semi-famous father and this mother who made appointments and met people and dressed up to go out, and so he had all of that dragging behind him. It was hard for him to know what he was going to do when he grew up, because he had been grown up, at a guess, since he was ten years old. He wrote some poems, and they were probably quite good poems, but the idea of getting anywhere was a problem for him. There was money – not a lot of money, but some – and he had decided I think, even then, just to exist, and see what came his way.

  So now he is just existing, as I am, though probably somewhere more interesting than Booterstown, Dublin 4. He is in Manhattan, say, or the canyons of LA, and he is taking his son to saxophone lessons, he is turning up to his daughter’s dance showcase on a Thursday afternoon, and finding all of that an important and amusing thing to do.

  I went out with Michael Weiss for two years, on and off; driven crazy by his languor – made inadequate by it, and impatient for the world ahead of us, that was full of things to do. I was not sure what these things were, but they would be better than just hanging around all afternoon, kissing and smoking, talking about – what? – whether Dirk Bogarde was actually good-looking, and how, or how not to be, a Jew.

  Now, of course, my afternoons are spent not watching the television, so I was undoubtedly right to distrust and finally leave Michael Weiss for a better, faster life, the one I have now, cooking for a man who doesn’t show up before nine and for two girls who will shortly stop showing up too. Having tear-streaked sex, once in a blue moon, with my middle-aged husband; not knowing whether to hit him or kiss him.

  Switch on the light, I want to say. Switch on the light.

  But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.

  I think I am ready for that now. I think I am ready to be met.

  I am sitting at a street café table, with perhaps my fifth latte of the day, when some American kids pass by, two girls and a guy. One of the girls is saying, ‘You know what really sucks? What really sucks are those button flies, when you miss a button?’ and the guy says, ‘And you’re like ... this, you know?’ with his hands crossed at the wrist in front of his crotch, like a picture of the flagellated Christ.

  This is what they were like, the Americans at college in Dublin – clear and loudish and interesting, at least to themselves. Maybe it is what we were all like, though no one wore long-sleeved T-shirts under short-sleeved T-shirts in our day. And I don’t know if ‘sucks’ was a big word back then. I think about the boy’s gesture, and I wonder why it is such a horrible thing to say. If someone sucks, then they are the worst possible type. A spoiler. Such a social word, I think, a gang word, for a very private muscular motion.

  This is the way my mind runs, as I fail to gather myself together and get back on a train to the airport while my brother is decanted and transported and embalmed (the whiskey must help), somewhere in the town behind me. I go into a
few shops and try normality for a while, and end up sitting still while the loud world passes by, with a long coffee spoon in my mouth, sucking.

  13

  WHEN I WAS in college, I decided that Ada had been a prostitute – the way you do. It must have been around the time she died. I remember discussing my theory with Michael Weiss, who liked it a lot, though, as he pointed out, it was just as possible that she had been a nun, which was in his opinion pretty much the same thing, probably because he came from Brooklyn.

  Well, yes.

  Michael Weiss was the kind of person who took milk in his tea one day and decided against it the next, and he would, no doubt, have driven me crazy over time. But I think he said something true about Ada, or about the distance between me and Ada. Because I, too, might as well have been from Brooklyn, looking at the mysterious fact of her life and deciding on the one story that would explain us all.

  I don’t think I made it to the removal, when she died – I probably spent the evening in Belfield bar – and the questions of who owned the house and where the money would go, once Ada’s body was taken out of it, were a matter of complete indifference to me. Though not this question, suddenly, of who or what she had been; the orphan, Ada Merriman.

  I made it to the funeral all right. There is the frizz of my mother’s hair in the row in front of me, with our father on one side and, on the other, her sister, our Aunt Rose. There was a third child, a brother called Brendan, but he was probably dead by then, so these were the sad remnants of Ada’s luck: our zonked-out mother, Maureen, and Rose the art teacher, who dressed in Interesting Tweeds of emerald green and cobalt blue. The Hegarty siblings were in the row behind them: in-laws and babies were sieved out into further pews, and it is possible that we sat, even then, in order of age; ‘steps and stairs’ as people used to croon, though the staircase was now bocketty, with gaps and broken planks and disproportion between one fat stoop and the next. Grown up, we all looked like cuckoos, every single one of us: we all looked wrong.