The Gathering (14 page)

I SAW A
man with tertiary syphilis at Mass, once. He was sitting in the seat in front of us, minding his own business until Mossie pointed him out, because Mossie was the kind of guy who knew about such things. The flaps of the man’s ears had been eaten away; they had shrivelled back, like melted plastic. When he turned half-profile, you saw that the bridge of his nose had collapsed flat into his face, leaving a nub of flesh, low down where his nostrils were. His breathing was fussy and loud, but he did not look mad–Mossie said later they always went mad in the end. Still, there was no doubting the signs, on his face, of his history.

Kitty said it in the car on the way home from Mass. She must have been about eleven. She said, ‘The man in front of us had tertiary syphilis.’

My father’s head settled down into his neck as he drove, the whole back of him looked thicker. After a moment, my mother said, ‘Oh.’

History is only biological–that’s what I think. We pick and choose the facts about ourselves–where we came from and what it means. I sit and clean the skin from under my nails and think of the last manicure given to Liam by that gentle English undertaker boy, the black rubbings from off a bar; polish and sweat, spilt beer and other people’s skin. What is written for the future is written in the body, the rest is only spoor.

I don’t know when Liam’s fate was written in his bones. And although Nugent was the first man to put his name there, for some reason, I don’t think he was the last. Not because I saw anything else going on, but because this is the way these things work. Of course, no one knew how these things
worked
at the time. We looked at the likes of Liam and had a whole other story for it, a different set of words.

Pup, gurrier, monkey, thug, hopeless, useless, mad, messer.

Now he is dead, I have to say that Liam had his glamour days too.

My brother was unexpectedly beautiful at the age of fifteen–this, when I was still in the full grease and growth of adolescence. ‘Where d’you get those rat’s tails?’ Ita would say about my hair, or, ‘Why are your eyelids so red, do you think you’ve got
an infection
?’

Ita was going to be ‘beautiful’, she was going to ‘get a man’, so there was something indestructible about her looks from an early age. Meanwhile, my own face became less readable to me, from week to week. ‘Where did you get that conk?’ she said. Which was a good question, Ita, which was a very good question, thanks.

Liam had a funny hair thing going for a while and his lips flowered bizarrely and permanently one day when he was fourteen. But because he was small and, I suppose, ‘pretty’, his adolescence lasted about a week. At sixteen he was beautiful and bad, and the blue of his eyes was a dizzy thing. And though his restlessness made him finally unfit for the adult world, in his last years at school Liam was a princeling, a heartbreaker; he was beyond the rules.

As soon as Mossie left home Liam moved to the garden passage, where the walls were whitewashed, and there was rough-cut lino on the floor. This space had the advantage of an outside door, so you never knew if he was in there or not. He had a little cohort that hopped over the back wall and looked in the kitchen window from time to time; boys mostly, and after a while, a few girls. He had a best friend, Willow, for hanging out and experiments–most of which seemed to involve stuffing things down their trousers pockets and looking idiotic any time I opened the door.

I didn’t care. I was too old for them by then. I was busy doodling love-lorn fragments about Willow’s older brother Tanner on the covers of my school folders. I wrote them in French, so no one would understand–except Mrs Gogarty, of course, who was the French teacher.
Mon amour est un petit oiseau brun/ Blessé par toi,/ Tanner
. She read it all upside down and looked at me fondly, and smiled. I hated her for this. I hated her finding me out and loving me a little (which she seemed to do). The thing is, there was great privacy in a big family. No one got into your stuff except to steal it or slag you off. No one ever pitied you, or
loved you a little
, except maybe Ernest whose pity was, even then, too deliberate to matter. And we thought this was an honourable way to live. I still do, in a way.

Meanwhile, I had two friends dropping in on the way home from school, of a sudden, and we had a fantastic good time–until Liam walked into the kitchen, when the good time got even better: Fidelma, who I didn’t mind one way or the other and my best friend Jackie, who I did mind, actually. Apart from anything else, I thought, he was too short for her. We drank together outside midnight Mass one Easter, sitting in the field where they would build a school; passing a naggin of vodka, which we mixed in our mouths with a slug of fizzy orange. It was with some reluctance that I let it all happen–though it did have to happen, I knew that. Or not reluctance–what was the feeling? Loneliness. The sight of Liam turning into the quietness of my friend Jackie’s face, in the dark. Meanwhile, Willow and I sat apart and swallowed loudly. Inside the church they passed the paschal flame from candle to candle until it looked like the whole place was on fire: then they switched on the fluorescent lights.

I haven’t had vodka in years; even now there is something sweet and crotch-like about the smell of it, a big waft of earth and adolescence coming out of the glass and hitting you in the face. Jackie crying down the phone to me, and then Fidelma in her turn, until I shouted at Liam to leave my fucking friends alone. After which, he headed out for his Saturday-night solo and I hitched up with Joe Ninety–so-called because he was thirty years old–a man who, I now realise, wanted to break into me so badly he had to turn away from the kiss to push his forehead into the wall. I loved all that. Joe Ninety liked me to dress up and he got me into pubs, while Liam slid backwards from me, into his misspent youth.

One night Bea picked up the phone in the hall.

‘Yes. Yes, it is,’ she said and the whole house paused to listen. She got Daddy.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘Right. Right. Right so.’ Then he trudged upstairs and found his jacket and tie and went out into the autumn darkness, shutting the front door behind him.

He never went out at night.

An hour later, he walked back in the door as he had walked out of it, expressionless and sad. Behind him, Liam shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands, to say there was no need for the welcoming committee. Later, he told us he had been bailed out of the local copshop, or prised out more like, by Daddy, and it was nothing–they just gave him a slap and sent him home.

We never found out why. Daddy wouldn’t speak of it–not then or ever–and he treated Liam with a new, and complete, contempt. It was over for them: no more shouting, no more
leaning in
from Daddy, who used to stick out his forefinger and poke the boys in the hollow of the shoulder.

‘What. Am I. After.
Saying
to you?’

Poke. Poke.
Poke
.

Sometimes I wonder why there wasn’t murder in that kitchen.

‘You’re pushing it, Da. Don’t push me now.’

But Daddy didn’t even bother pushing Liam any more. The Gardai had rung the house and the shame of it was so total, there was nothing left to be said.

When I think of it now–such carry-on. Liam, in the kitchen, lifting his hair to show the dried patch of blood, and a streak of red from cheek to neck, where he had caught his face on the handle of the cell door. I remember it in vivid technicolour: his hair very black, and the streak very red, and eyes an undiluted blue. They just ‘knocked him round a bit’, he said, gave him ‘a bit of a thump’.

And I said, ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

He looked at me.

I think, now, that what I meant was that if they hit him then it must have been his fault. I also meant that, if pushed, I would disbelieve him even though what he said was, strictly speaking, true.

If I am looking for the point when I betrayed my brother, then it must be here, too. I looked at the raised flesh on his cheek and I decided not to believe him, if there was any ‘believing’ to be done. That was all.

I decided that he did not deserve to be believed.

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ I said.

What else?

We used to laugh about things: foothering priests, and little boys’ bollocks, and ‘Come here and sit on my knee, little man,’ and English choirboys and gay men’s backsides, and anything really to do with innocence and bums, though nobody mentioned–now that I pause to list all this–nobody mentioned your
langer
, or your
wire
, or
getting your mickey licked
. Now why is that? Why did we think it was all hilarious, but only in certain, almost ritual, ways?

These conversations happened for a month or two one summer, and then they were gone. I liked them. I liked the silence after the laughter stopped. Liam’s silence was like he had just peed himself but no one had noticed, so it was all magically OK. And my silence was the smallest possibility–taken up, and then set down again–of pointing out the wet patch.

For which pleasure, tiny but very keen, I would like to be forgiven. I would like to be forgiven, now, because I am very sorry for it.

If I believed in such a thing as confession I would go there and say that, not only did I laugh at my brother, but I let my brother laugh at himself, all his life. This laughing phase lasted through his cheerful drinking, and through his raucous drinking, and only petered out in the final stinking stage of his drinking. But he never gave it up completely–the idea that it was all a
complete joke.

Liam never had any truck with self-pity, his own, or anyone else’s. When someone was miserable–Kitty, for example–it was always for the wrong reasons as far as he was concerned. Don’t get me wrong, Liam loved people who suffered–he loved the poor, the destitute, the lonely, the alcoholic, he pitied anyone with a problem, just so long as they didn’t pity themselves. Which doesn’t sound altogether fair to me. Which sounds like
pride
, to me.

I know I sound bitter, and Christ I wish I wasn’t such a hard bitch sometimes, but my brother blamed me for twenty years or more. He blamed me for my nice house, with the nice white paint on the walls, and the nice daughters in their bedrooms of nice lilac and nicer pink. He blamed me for my golf-loving husband, though God knows it is many years since Tom had the free time for a round of golf. He treated me like I was selling out on something, though on what I do not know–because Liam did not allow
dreams
either, of course. My brother had strong ideas about justice, but he was unkind to every single person who tried to love him; mostly, and especially, to every woman he ever slept with, and still, after a lifetime of spreading the hurt around, he managed to blame me. And I managed to feel guilty. Now why is that?

This is what shame does. This is the anatomy and mechanism of a family–a whole fucking country–drowning in shame.

And, yes, sometimes I look at my nice walls and, like Liam, I say, ‘Pull the whole thing down.’ Especially after my nice bottle of nice Riesling. As if the world was built on a lie and that lie was very secret and very dirty. But I don’t think empires or cities or even five-bedroom detached houses are built on the sordid fact that people have sex, I think they are built on the sordid fact that people have mortgages. Even so, my husband shags me the night of my brother’s wake, and I wave my empty bottle at the Italian suedette seating system, and I too say, ‘Let it all come down.’

One of the last times Liam was over, we were going open plan, actually–the back of the house was ripped out, and we were all camped in the front half, eating take-away. I think I blamed Liam, almost, and not the builders. He arrived in the middle of the rubble with a sad, too-tall woman, who seemed to have no opinions, not even about what she might want to eat. He drank constantly. After five days of it, they headed off to Mayo, and I hoped I would never see him again.

I have a picture from that visit, of Liam with Emily on his knee one night after her bath. He is a small grey heap of a man, settled back into an armchair that is covered in a dust sheet. Emily is two; naked, straight as a die, and more beautiful than I have words to say. Liam’s hands are big, stuffed hands, wrapped around her middle, as he holds her on. Her bum is neat and sharp, sitting side-saddle on one of his thighs. Behind her, the cloth of his trousers wrinkles and sags around a crotch that is a mystery no one is interested in any more. His face is amused.

Liam understood Emily–they liked each other. Of Rebecca, who is more like me, he said, ‘Pity about the teeth.’

I have to forgive that too, I suppose.

Pity about the teeth.

Soon after the Gardai took him in and our father got him out again, he threw the breadknife across the kitchen at my mother, who was probably just trying to say something nice, and the whole family piled into him, and kicked him around the back garden.

‘Ya fucken eejit.’

‘You missed, you thick.’

And there was great satisfaction to it, as I recall. Like a scab that needed to be picked.
He had it coming to him.

(And perhaps, more secretly, so did she.)