The Gathering (5 page)

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.

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 eiderdown, 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 camelhair 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.

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 foreshortened 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.