The Gathering Read online

  Later, I stood at the edge of the crowd and watched my grandmother’s coffin being lowered, with melancholy indifference. The Ada of recent years was an old lady living out her allotted span. She was nice, of course – she was my Gran – but she wasn’t the woman who woke me at four in the morning with the answer to it all: the Hegarty conundrum, the reason we were all so fucked up and so very much here.

  Lamb Nugent looks at Ada Merriman across the carpet of the Belvedere Hotel, and she looks right back at him, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  Fifty-six years later we had tea and sandwiches followed by self-congratulation in her surprisingly little house in Broadstone; the sprawling second generation, the beginnings of the third, my mother weakly enthroned in the good room, her sister complaining in the kitchen about whatever caught her eye. By then, the things that go wrong with people’s faces had gone thoroughly wrong with theirs; Rose’s mouth pulled into a jag of disapproval, my mother’s gaze now watery and vague. Ada might have been good with other people’s children, but she was manifestly terrible with her own. But, ‘Oh she was lovely,’ they said, the neighbours and few remaining friends: two men – I now realise they were gay – who were kind to her, the daughter of a dead actress who used to be on the telly. And didn’t Jimmy O’Dea send a basket of fruit on her birthday? And Frank Duff who was the actual head of the Legion of Mary called to her house every Christmas. Indeed he did: I remember him, it must have been the year we stayed there, arriving like a little spinster Santa Claus with a box of chocolates in a string bag. He handed it to Ada and pressed her forearm, like they had lived too much, each of them, to have anything left to say.

  That Christmas morning was as clean and crisp as it always is – my memory will not allow it to rain. But neither will it allow us home to Griffith Way, because this was the year that we were farmed out to Ada, me and Liam and Kitty, and we did not see our mother, not even for Christmas, though our father did arrive with a smug-looking Bea some time in the afternoon.

  ‘Mammy’s still not herself,’ she said, looking extra pious in her new tank top, a mohair thing in stripes of raspberry and blue. And in the evening, Mr Nugent dropped by with a box of jellied fruit, or jelly impersonating fruit, in semi-circles of orange and yellow and green.

  I was still too close to these things to care about them, the year that Ada died. The past was a bore to me, Ada’s death completely tedious, as we passed the sandwiches and suffered the overused air of these little rooms. And, ‘Oh she was terribly nice, your Granny,’ which was true, of course. Which was only true. And they sipped or refused their light sherries, and cleared the kitchen in a riot of grease-proof paper, and were gone, leaving my mother in her chair in the good room, my uxorious father standing beside her, slightly stooped; Auntie Rose upstairs sneaking a last fag out the bathroom window, because she still did not officially smoke, even though her mother was far too dead to care, and besides, she always knew.

  It might seem a little indecent, but it was at this point we were sent up to Ada’s bedroom, under instruction from our father to ‘take what you like’; the Hegarty girls enjoying the quietest screaming match we ever had, choked with fury and hating each other in whispers. I ended up with some strings of jet beads, the black ostrich feathers from Ada’s mantelpiece, and a little porcelain hand with a gap in the palm where she kept her rings. Someone else got the rings, of course – I didn’t have a chance. Kitty always needed things more than you did, Bea always deserved them more, while poor Midge – well, Midge always refused everything until she was persuaded to grab the lot. So I left the house with a howl of regret for all I had been denied, though there was nothing there I actually wanted. I had baggsed, on a whim, Ada’s swatches and books of cloth and they seemed such useless objects by the light of day that I pushed them into a bin on the street. I did not know how to want what she had left behind. I wanted out of there, that was all. I wanted a larger life.

  Liam missed all of this, because after the summer we went to work in London, he did not come home. Or rather he turned up now and then, and went to a few lectures: I would bump into him in the restaurant or bar, and he always had somewhere else to stay, and after a few wild months he was gone.

  It was his final year at college. Most nights, I missed the bus and stayed with Michael Weiss in his Donnybrook bedsit: two high rooms with a partition around the toilet that didn’t reach the ceiling and another around the kitchenette. The door into the bedroom was missing, and there was a massive old wardrobe beached against the wall. I fell asleep between these hunks of darkness – the black wardrobe, and the open block of the door frame, through which my senses swung – the sex still warm and hurting between my thighs, and no rest to be had anywhere.

  There were things I told Michael Weiss, that year, that I haven’t told anyone since. It was 1981. Nothing had happened yet, in Ireland – is that a funny thing to say? Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it. I obliged Michael Weiss to have whiskey – the theatrics of it – I obliged him, once, to manhandle me around the room and up and down the street to walk off an, admittedly small, overdose of paracetamol. I gave Michael Weiss a wonderful, hard time and I rode him rotten, when all he wanted to do was prop himself up on one arm, and look at my face, and talk me down.

  My image of these nights is of a woman (myself) lying on a bed, with her back arched, and her mouth open, and her hand scrabbling for the wall. No sound.

  14

  I THINK OF her when I do the dishes. Of course I have a dishwasher, so if I ever have to cry, it is not into the sink, quietly like Ada. The sink was her place for this. Facing out of the back of the house, something about the endless potatoes that needed peeling, or the paltriness of the yard, but, like all women maybe, Ada occasionally had a little sniffle and then plink, plink, a few tears would hit the water in the sink. Like all women Ada sometimes had to wipe her nose with her forearm because her hands were wet. There is nothing surprising about this. Though I have to say, I have a stainless-steel Miele dishwasher. And if I have any crying to do, I do it respectably, in front of the TV.

  Life was hard for my grandmother, I know that now. The surprising thing was that, most of the time, she did not cry, but just got on with it instead.

  Ada believed in very little. She believed in a clean house. But she did not believe, or ever suggest, that if you ate the pips an apple tree would grow out of your belly button. I don’t think she would believe in my picture of ‘the orphan Ada Merriman’; though it is technically true that her parents died before she was grown. Ada just didn’t do all that stuff. There was something about imagining things, or even remembering them, that she found slightly distasteful – like gossip, only worse. These days, of course, I do little else. And it is all her fault. Because if I look to where my imagining started, it was at Ada’s sink, in Broadstone.

  There was a red plastic mesh pad for the rough work, a dense green cloth for the close work and a sponge for finishing up. There was a white cotton cloth for wiping the oilcloth, that was never to be used for wiping the dishes. There was a cloth for the floor, that was never placed on the oilcloth. I had to know all this, because I was the oldest girl in the house. It was my job to take over sink duty, and do the washing-up.

  I didn’t mind it so much. I liked being close to her.

  But I did imagine things. Standing at that Belfast sink, with the view of the yard and the green door to the garage beyond, I imagined Ada with her suitcase at nine years old, or ten, or whatever age she was when her mother died and she faced the wide world alone. I tried to imagine a father for her, but I could not. I imagined my own mother dying at home in Griffith Way – over and over again, actually – Mammy died, and my father wept and died, and afterwards, when she was planted, I imagined great adventures for myself and Liam, now that we were orphans too.

  All this while Ada had me rinse the plates in water straight from the kettle, and Charlie winked at me, when her back was turned.

  She
called me into her room one morning. She was going out somewhere, getting dressed up. She was also wearing, I remember, a finger-stall in bandage pink, pulled tight by a loop of elastic around her wrist. For some reason I think she’d had an accident with the sewing machine, but this seems too vicious, really, to be true. I have no recollection of punctured nails, at any rate, or screams and commotion from the little boxroom. (And the fact that I can conjure this now – the runaway needle, the agonising extraction of the woman from the machine – makes me think that Ada was right; there is something immoral about the mind’s eye.)

  Anyway, the finger-stall was on her finger and I was called up to the top room and, ‘Come here,’ she said, looking over her shoulder and lifting her skirt a little, at the back. ‘Do me up.’ And she turned her leg to me for the side view.

  Her thigh was surprisingly little. It had an inky map of broken veins in a cluster, above the sag of her stocking, which was folded at the top to a thick orange band. Little white tabs dangled on concertinaed ribbon, from a place I could not see, or did not want to see, and it took me ages to realise what she was asking me to do. I had to crouch by the Gothic panels of her corset, and tether it to the stockings that were waiting beneath. I remember the soft clench of the rubber snaps around nylon that would not stay still, and the cool of her leg, and the sour smell of her respectability. And I imagined that every man who called to the door knew about these secret gaps between her clothes; the amazing two-leggedness of her, and the tight vault of her corset, all open to the air below.

  And perhaps they did.

  So when Frank Duff arrived at the door, I thought he was after her too.

  ‘Just a little something, Ada. No, I insist! Just a little something small.’

  Frank Duff that is, who was the actual head of the actual Legion of Mary, a religious organisation dedicated, in 1967, to inanity and the making of tea.

  ‘God bless now. Happy Christmas to all your brood.’ And he ran a loving hand down my cheek, catching my chin lightly, letting it go.

  Mr Nugent coming later with the box of jellied fruit. Ignoring Ada and talking to the children instead. It was Christmas: it was our day.

  In fact, Frank Duff spent his early years rescuing prostitutes off the streets of Dublin. This is what he was doing in 1925 – this dotey, clever man – he was organising missions; he was talking girls out of the brothels, and buying off their madams, and taking them on retreats. This was the Legion of Mary’s first, great work. In the Lent of 1925, when Ada met Charlie, Frank Duff was saying a lot more than his prayers.

  This I discovered, as I chased him through the college library stacks, working on an essay for my final college assessment, which I called (with no sense of irony, I think), ‘Paying for Sex in the Irish Free State’. Because I was suddenly certain of many things. Including the fact that people fucked, that was one of the things they did: men fucked women – it did not happen the other way around – and this surprising mechanism was to change, not just my future, which was narrowing even as I looked at it, but also the wide and finished world of my past.

  So I imagined for a while that Ada was one of Duff’s mended whores. She was not a blowsy whore, of course – she was an orphan. She was barely a whore at all. She was a poor girl, who turned her face to the wall as the coins clinked on to the bedside table, and the dark shape of a man left the room.

  Let us stick with this. A satin slip, with the lace a little torn. A picture of the Virgin put in a drawer, until he goes. A romance of falling. And shivering in the doctor’s waiting room, clutching your wool coat at the neck, where the button has gone. A dusty, middle-class fantasy, of crinkled stockings, and TB, and hunkering to wash over a basin on the floor.

  So there are priests in the front lounge of the Belvedere Hotel that evening in Lent: and a madam, and our man with the Milk Tray, Frank Duff. They are buying the madam off. Quietly. They are closing her down.

  Outside, Ada and Nugent listen, and then forget to listen to the thin line of talk that trickles out of the front lounge. For a moment at least, they merely sit across from each other – the man from the Legion and the little seamstress-whore. What odds? She is beautiful. And he is no better than he should be. The city is quiet and the hotel is quiet, and there is no one here to tell Lamb Nugent that he will sit in this woman’s good, front room for the rest of his life, holding out his little china cup for More tea, Lamb?

  No one, that is, until Charlie Spillane walks in the door.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he says, tipping his non-existent hat. ‘I hope this fellow has been keeping you amused.’

  Michael Weiss, as I say, loved it – but as soon as he loved it, I changed my mind. As soon as he said the word ‘prostitution’ it shrank away, my little snail of a story poking its way out into the world. He never met Ada. He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I was talking about family. I was talking about what we were doing, three times a night. I was talking about the meaty flower of my cunt, under his hand.

  Meanwhile Liam turned up and left again. He had a room going in a dive in Stoke Newington, and he was twitchy about the exams; our father going beetroot when he talked about the waste of his talent and of the good money thrown away on fees.

  ‘Tell that brother of yours. If you see him. Tell that brother of yours to face me if he can. Tell him from me.’

  ‘Oh, what Daddy? Tell him what?’

  ‘What do you mean, what?’

  ‘All right. I’ll tell him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’

  Mammy saying, ‘Who? Tell who?’

  The American part of Michael Weiss thought the Hegarty family a blast. He met Liam in the Belfield bar now and then, and the two of them got on in that surprising way that men have – the man you are sleeping with and your brother, for example, who look at each other, and nod, and get on. It drove me slightly bats, actually, watching the two of them go off for a game of pool, while I sat there on my own with a glass of Satzenbrau.

  But we had some good nights, the three of us, myself and Liam doing a thing we started that first summer in London, which was telling stories about our family like they were all made up. We had a double act about Ernest’s ordination, the horrible yellow soles of his feet as he lay prostrate on the altar, the sight of our mother, when all the voodoo was done, tottering across to dress him in his robes, and then later, at a sort of wedding reception, the two of them cutting the cake together, my brother and my mother, and kissing when it was done.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Michael Weiss. ‘Your mother! I don’t believe it!’ and he might start in on something about his own bar mitzvah, which we, of course, ignored.

  Though some of the things we found funny about our family he didn’t find funny at all. My older baby brother Stevie – the one who died when he was two – ‘She did it,’ said Liam. ‘She put a pillow over his face,’ and we’d laugh our heads off. ‘Well, come on, she was pregnant all the time. All the time.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  It wasn’t long before Michael wanted to call to the house. I didn’t know how to explain to him that no one cared if he called or not, but everyone would laugh at him for a year if he showed up at the door. In the event he rang the bell with a very American corsage the night of the rag ball, and walked right in like Cary Grant, through the hall and the living-room extension, and beyond that to the extension that was the kitchen, my father hopping up out of his chair to shake the boy’s hand, and, ‘Oh. Hello,’ said my mother, as she would say, will say perhaps, to the alien who beams himself down on to her lino, or the junkie with the knife, as she will say on her deathbed to the nurse, or to the opening tunnel of light.

  ‘Oh. Hello.’

  ‘Michael Weiss, sir,’ said Michael Weiss, reaching out a frank and manly hand; my father, to his credit, swallowing the need to ask if this is a Jewish class of a name, though he asks it of me later.

  ‘Weiss, isn’t that a Jew name?’ insisting that he
can’t be an anti-Semite when he doesn’t know any blithering Jews.

  ‘Well, you know one, now.’

  All of this before I started to stay out all night and the fights came. You might wonder where he got the energy. My father had a flaring temper, but he rarely lost it with his daughters. He lost it with his sons, but only when they confronted him. Of course his sons confronted him all the time, but as far as his daughters were concerned, he could ignore all sorts of late-night homecomings as long as you didn’t ask him for the taxi money, he could let you walk in pissed, as long as you went by him and straight up the stairs, he would fail to hear you throwing up in the toilet as long as you cleaned up afterwards, but when he asks you for a cigarette and you pull out a box of Durex, like a catastrophic schoolgirl, then he is obliged to erupt, and keep erupting, like Old Faithful, until you have found yourself alternative accommodation.

  Apart from anything else they were illegal. Everyone had them. Whether we needed them or not.

  There was nothing Daddy would not say. He had no sense of distance. He might have been talking to himself, almost. I was whoring all over Dublin. I was second-hand goods, I was turning myself into a toilet – I kid you not – though I think what he really wanted to say was that I was not doing what I was told.

  The shouting happened two or three months before my finals. And though it was a bit of a laugh in its way, it did affect my exams – and I was serious about exams. Maybe this was why I felt so unconnected: there I was sitting in the kitchen thinking about Robespierre, not to mention Frank Duff, my father cooking up a rage – he was a small man, Daddy – and I suppose I did my fair share of shouting too, but a part of me was just looking at him, all fizzed up, the redness in his neck, while his face was chalk white, then the redness boiling up around his blue eyes, until his face was suddenly, uniformly red, and ranting. There was also the red dome of his bald head to consider. I remember thinking that he himself didn’t believe what he was saying, and that it was this lack of belief, combined with my own, that drove him to such extremes.