The Gathering (6 page)

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, second-hand 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 through 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.

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 this, 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.

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.