The Gathering (20 page)

I turn the handle of the door and Nugent is a slick of horror on the landing. He moves like smell through the house. Nugent plays with his sister Lizzie, now they are both dead. They kiss each other and are consoled. They do not breathe; the tangle and slither of their tongues is endless and airless and cold.

I get across the two feet of carpet that brings me to the lip of the stairs. I fall down them, one step at a time. I am nine years old, I am six years old, I am four again. I can not put my hand on the banister, in case I touch something I don’t understand. The light switch at the bottom seems to recede, the quicker I go. Who turned it off? Why is the light in the hall turned off, when there is a corpse in the house?

The last is always the worst. My Uncle Brendan, in knee socks and short pants. He stands in the hall outside the twins’ room, the room where baby Stevie died, and his middle-aged head is full to bursting with all the things he has to tell Ada, that she will not hear him say. Brendan’s bones are mixed with other people’s bones; so there is a turmoil of souls muttering and whining under his clothes, they would come out in a roar, were he to unbutton his fly; if he opened his mouth they would slop out over his teeth. Brendan has no rest from them, the souls of the forgotten who must always be crawling and bulging and whining in there; he reaches to scratch under his collar and handfuls come loose. The only places clear of them are his unlikeable blue eyes, so Brendan just stares as I reach for the light switch, and his shirt heaves, and his ears leak the mad and the inconvenient dead.

The light comes on. Just as it always used to. And my body, in the light, is a merciful thirty-nine years old. And when I walk into the front room all is silent. There are no ghosts in with Liam’s body, not even his own.

The candles have burned low.

In the far alcove, near the window, is a piece of furniture–I think we used to call it ‘the dresser’–a thing of heavy oak, with shelves for glasses and vases, and presses down below. I check these presses and find nothing. Which is to say I find everything: an old liquidiser in a clear plastic bag made grey by age; my mother’s few 78s from the unlikely time before she was wed, ‘Jussi Björling’, and ‘Furtwängler conducts’; Scrabble; a game called Camel Run; a net bag with four, chipped pieces of artificial fruit; a support bandage for someone’s knee that stopped hurting long ago. Then I think to look up. There, behind the ornamental fretwork that crests this thing, are some boxes. I push the doily aside and climb up, and reach for a green shoebox. I poke it down, and catch it, and fumble around the lid, on which my father once wrote the word, ‘Broadstone’. Then I climb down and stand on the ground, and open the thing.

Inside, there is a brown paper bag containing a few photographs, all in sepia brown. Some receipts–the kind you would get in an old-fashioned butcher’s shop. A thick little fold of letters written on watermarked blue notepaper such as a woman might use, and held with a rubber band. A series of blue hardbacked notebooks, each circled on the vertical by a round of what Ada used to call ‘knicker elastic’, no matter what she was using it for.

They are rent books; starting in 1937, when my mother was eight years old. The first covers fifteen years, at twelve weeks to a page. The same handwriting, the same fountain pen, on line after line of Fridays, a small increase every year. The fountain pen continues through the second volume and only changes to biro in the third–when the rent is paid monthly, and the handwriting begins to shift to pencil or red biro or whatever came to hand.

What are these doing in our house in Griffith Way, sixteen or more years after the woman died? Why should anyone keep these things, except out of fear–of the long arm of the law, or of the Revenue Commissioners; investigating the tax situation on a house you never owned, and that your mother did not own before you? I have, as I put it back in the box, a sickening sense of what these books meant to the possessor, the rights they might afford.

After 1975 there is nothing. Pages of nothing. I wonder was this the year that Nugent died? I lift the book and turn to show it to Liam, and I see Ada watching us from the doorway. There she is. I see her not as I ‘saw’ the ghosts on the stairs. I see her as I might see an actual woman standing in the light of the hall.

I DON’T KNOW
how the rest of the night went, or who sat up with Liam’s body after I left; I suspect Bea and Ernest did the bulk of it, though at one stage, Kitty tells me, they all moved in there and played cards. Apparently, I made a bit of a fuss in the front room. Mossie pushed a sour little pill in my mouth, and Ernest tried to pray with me, but I refused point blank to rest in my old, childhood bed, so they put me in a cab and sent me home.

The empty house, when I got there, was such a blessed relief–I think that is one of the reasons I walk around at night now, to get that feeling again; of sanity and emptiness, of one room giving way so easily to the next. So I stayed up for a while, and then I went upstairs and had sex with my husband for the last time.

That was not my intention, of course. After the night I’d just had it wasn’t my intention to have sex of any sort, never mind terminal sex. But I slipped into bed and Tom was awake. And he was in love with me. There is really no point in going over his reasons: he loved me; he wanted to drag me back to the land of the living. And maybe, now that my soul was so soft, he wanted to leave his mark there too. My body was not soft, however. I wondered why he did not notice this. But I did all the moves, and I made way for him, and I did not tell him to stop. So I must have wanted it too, or something like it.

He was not to know what had happened in Griffith Way after he left. Or that I had taken a pill (maybe it was the pill?) or that I felt like meat that had been recently butchered, even as he felt terribly moved. If that is what he felt. He was very gasping and juddery, at any rate, like his nerves were all alight.

Afterwards, we lay face to face, buried up to the neck in the duvet. We have said too much to each other, over the years. We are judiciously silent.

But he needs to say one more thing.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

I think for a moment that he is apologising for the horrible sex, then I think he is sorry about the death of my brother, but in fact he is sorry for some infidelity he has committed in the past–he will tell me in a moment how little she meant–and this will be so silly and unbearable under the circumstances (I have just, I realise, slept with my husband for the last time), that I forestall him by saying, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’

He takes this as a sign. Everything is going to get better. He says I should do something. Work part-time, or take a daily walk at least–what about a house, what about getting a house and doing it up, now that the market’s on the move? Money. I could earn money. He says he has been too busy, he’s had a bit of a dip, but that we are out of the woods, he is over it now. And I say, ‘A
dip
?’

He says, ‘Please, not that again.’

I say, ‘Your daughters will sleep with men like you. Men who will hate them, just because they want them.’

And he says, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Jesus, you know. It’s just…’

‘Just what?’

I think he means that there is a limit to these things, to the way men think. That it isn’t real. That no one gets killed, for example. I think he means that this side-by-side business is all we’ve got.

He is probably right. So I lie there, side by side with him, and I contemplate the spreading bruise of my private parts.

‘Funny thing about men’s bodies,’ I say. ‘They never lie. That must be handy. I mean you’re built to tell the truth. On / off. Like / don’t like. Want / don’t want.’

And Tom says, ‘Not really.’ There is no reliable connection, he says, between what you want and what your mickey wants; sometimes it’s hard to tell.

‘Oh,’ I say, and roll over, and go to sleep.

IT WAS ITA
at the door, of course, I should have known. It was not Ada, it was my addled older sister; psychotic with drink, and with a stupid new nose.

This is what I remembered, when I saw her.

I remembered a picture. I don’t know what else to call it. It is a picture in my head of Ada standing at the door of the good room in Broadstone.

I am eight.

Ada’s eyes are crawling down my shoulder and my back. Her gaze is livid down one side of me; it is like a light: my skin hardens under it and crinkles like a burn. And on the other side of me is the welcoming darkness of Lambert Nugent. I am facing into that darkness and falling. I am holding his old penis in my hand.

But it is a very strange picture. It is made up of the words that say it. I think of the ‘eye’ of his penis, and it is pressing against my own eye. I ‘pull’ him and he keels towards me. I ‘suck’ him and from his mouth there protrudes a narrow, lemon sweet.

This comes from a place in my head where words and actions are mangled. It comes from the very beginning of things, and I can not tell if it is true. Or I can not tell if it is real. But I am sickened by the evil of him all the same, I am sweltering in it; the triangles of blackness under his sharp cheek-bones, the way his head turns slowly and his eyes spin, slower still, in their sockets, towards the light of the opening door where my grandmother stands.

I do not believe in evil–I believe that we are human and fallible, that we make things and spoil them in an ordinary way–and yet I experience the slow turn of his face towards the door as evil. There is a bubble rising in his old chest: a swelling of something that might, at any moment, shoot out of his opening mouth and stain the entire world.

What is it?

I can not move. In this memory or dream, I can neither stop it, nor make it continue. Whatever comes out of his mouth will horrify me, though I know it can not harm me. It will fill the world but not mark it. It is there already in the damp of the carpet and the smell of Germolene: the feeling that Lamb Nugent is mocking us all; that even the walls are oozing his sly intent. The pattern on the wallpaper repeats to nausea, while hot in my grasp, and straight and, even at this remove of years, lovely, Nugent’s wordless thing bucks, proud and weeping in my hand.

And the word that he says, when the door is fully open and his mouth is fully open, the bubble that bursts in the O of his mouth is the single word:

‘Ada.’

Of course.

Is she pleased with what she sees? Does this please her?

When I try to remember, or imagine that I remember, looking into Ada’s face with Lamb Nugent’s come spreading over my hand, I can only conjure a blank, or her face as a blank. At most, there is a word written on Ada’s face, and that word is, ‘Nothing’.

This is the moment for blame. The soiled air of Ada’s good room will rush out past her, as she stands in the yellow light of the hall. This is the moment when we realise that it was Ada’s fault all along.

The mad son and the vague daughter. The vague daughter’s endlessly vague pregnancies, the way each and every one of her grandchildren went vaguely wrong. This is the moment when we ask what Ada did–for it must, surely, have been something–to bring so much death into the world.

But I do not blame her. And I don’t know why that is.

I owe it to Liam to make things clear–what happened and what did not happen in Broadstone. Because there are effects. We know that. We know that real events have real effects. In a way that unreal events do not. Or nearly real. Or whatever you call the events that play themselves out in my head. We know there is a difference between the brute body and the imagined body, that when you really touch someone, something really happens (but not, somehow, what you had expected).

Whatever happened to Liam did not take place in Ada’s good room–no matter what picture I have in my head. Nugent would not have been so stupid. The abuse happened in the garage, among the cars and bits of engine that Liam loved. And Nugent was horrible to my brother in ordinary ways, too, out there. He had his sadisms, I am sure, and his methods. I have to make this clear because, somewhere in my head, in some obstinate and God-forsaken part of me, I think that desire and love are the same thing. They are not the same thing, they are not even connected. When Nugent desired my brother, he did not love him in the slightest.

That’s as much as I know.

I could also say that Liam must have wanted him too. Or wanted
something.

‘Now look at what you’ve got,’ says Nugent, as I cry and drive my car around the night-lit streets of Dublin town. ‘Now look at what you’ve got.’

As for myself–I don’t think I liked the garage and I never went in there much. Though when I drive these nights, and when I stop the car, I wonder, among other things, did it happen to me too.

What can I say? I don’t think so.

I add it in to my life, as an event, and I think, well yes, that might explain some things. I add it into my brother’s life and it is crucial; it is the place where all cause meets all effect, the crux of the X. In a way, it explains too much.

These are the things I do, actually know.

I know that my brother Liam was sexually abused by Lambert Nugent. Or was probably sexually abused by Lambert Nugent.

These are the things I don’t know: that I was touched by Lambert Nugent, that my Uncle Brendan was driven mad by him, that my mother was rendered stupid by him, that my Aunt Rose and my sister Kitty got away. In short, I know nothing else about Lambert Nugent; who he was and how Ada met him; what he did, or did not do.

I know he could be the explanation for all of our lives, and I know something more frightening still–that we did not have to be damaged by him in order to be damaged. It was the air he breathed that did for us. It was the way we were obliged to breathe his second-hand air.

Here I am back in St Dympna’s, with ink on my tongue. Liam does not sleep with me any more. I wear my knickers to bed. Then I get up and put on my tights. Then I get up and put on my school blouse; it is important to be ready, when the time comes. I get up again and put my gymslip over the back of a chair. I put my shoes under the chair, and turn the lot to face the door, so that when I dress I will not have to turn around to leave the room. Then I get up and fold my sash and put it in the right shoe, with the end trailing out along the floor. Then I get up and put the gymslip on, after which I fall asleep.

In school, I smell tired. The box pleats of my gymslip are all shattered. I can not leave the feel of the sheets behind–ghost sheets rubbing and slipping against my gymslip, as my body turns in the bed, this way and that. Liam sleeps on the far side of the room, Kitty sleeps beside me. In front of me Sister Benedict teaches us how to pray: