The Gathering (17 page)

I AM EXPECTING
the house to be crammed, but Bea shakes her head slightly by the door.

‘Just us, really,’ she says. ‘A few neighbours.’

‘What do you expect?’ I want to say. ‘Who’s going to come and look at a dead body in your living room, when there isn’t even a decent glass of wine in the house?’ But I do not say this. Tom is behind me. He has taken my elbow, and is using it like a joystick to steer me around her, and I would be annoyed, but his grip is so old-fashioned. No one holds you like that any more, except Frank at work who was gay, and is now dead.

‘It’s all in the eyes,’ he said once, as he eased me into some awful corporate bash. And,
Poor Frank
, I think.
Why did I not grieve for Frank?
And I realise, suddenly and with great conviction, that I must carpet the upstairs, Frank would have been all for it. And get a cleaner again. I must get a cleaner to deal with the extra fluff. Then I remember Rebecca’s asthma–as I always do at this point–and before I finish remembering this I am looking at Liam’s dead body in the front room.

Haven’t we met before?

I can see the exact colour of the new carpet I want. ‘Driftwood’, I think they call it.

Why do you keep following me around?

The room is almost empty. There is no one here that I can talk to about children’s lungs or carpet colours, about weaves and nubbles and seagrass or percentages of wool. Dead or alive. Liam does not care about such things. I sit down. They have put him in a navy suit with a blue shirt–like a Garda. He would have liked that.

Who dressed him?

The young English undertaker, with the full mouth and the pierced ear; talking on his mobile to his girlfriend as he lifts the heavy head to slip the tie around.

The suit, I am sure, will be on the bill.

I expected the coffin to be set across the room, but there is not enough space for this. Liam’s head points towards the closed curtains and there are candles behind him, set on high stands. I can not see his face properly from where I sit. The wood of the coffin angles down, slicing across the bulge of his cheek. I can see a dip in the bone where his eyes must go, but I do not get up to see if this dip is correctly filled, or if the lids are closed. This lift and fall of bone is all I want to see of him, for the moment, thank you very much.

The armchairs and the sofa have been pushed back, but Mrs Cluny, who has paused to pray, has chosen to sit on one of the hard chairs brought in from the kitchen. Kitty is on duty by the far wall in case a mourner should be left indecently alone with the corpse, in case the corpse should be left indecently alone. She looks at me as I perch on the arm of the sofa and she rolls her eyes. After a minute she comes over and says, quietly, ‘Will you stay?’

‘No,’ I tell her. She does not understand. The whole business is finished for me now, it is beyond finished. I just want to get the damn thing buried and out of the way.

I say, ‘I’ll get Ita or someone. No. I can’t. I have the kids.’

‘Oh, the kids,’ she says, slightly too loud.

‘Yeah, you know. Kids.’

And in fact Rebecca is in the room of a sudden, backing towards me until she bumps into my knees.

‘Where’s your father?’

When I look over, I see Emily swinging out of the door handles with her eyes fixed on the coffin and her shoe kicking the paint.

‘Would you stop that,’ I say.

She doesn’t.

‘Will you
stop
leaving scuff marks on your Granny’s door.’

Then I realise where we are.

‘It’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘He’s dead.’ Which is not, when I think about it, the most comforting thing I could say.

In a sudden flare of kilt and sandy-coloured hair Rebecca is back at the door, and they are both gone. I hear them laughing in the hall, then running up the stairs, although they should not be running upstairs. I have a surge of rage against Tom who insisted on bringing the children but can not be bothered to mind them, not even with a corpse in the house, after which someone pushes the mute button again, and it is some time before I notice that Kitty has gone and I am the only living Hegarty in the room. I don’t know how long this lasts, but I feel like it is a long time, tracing the girls’ whispered hysteria through the upstairs–tied to them, wherever they go, and tied too to this piece of garbage in the front room. The back of the house is dense with the sound of people I do not want to meet, and so I stay where I am, and decide not to complain.

So this is how Ernest finds me when he walks in the door, fresh off the plane. He is so incontrovertibly himself–it is some moments before I stop seeing him, my big brother, and pull back to see what he looks like, these days. He looks good, I find. His clothes are a bit sad, but at the top of the anorak and polyester slacks is his head, large and healthy and getting more handsome over the years. It is Grandpa Charlie’s pate, I realise, that is gleaming in the candlelight, and Grandpa Charlie’s two big hands that grab one of mine, and I don’t know, as I stand and Ernest clasps me to him, whether this is a priestly or grandfatherly hug–no breasts anyway: my small breasts are not, with this hug, in the way.

How does he do it?

It is his job. My brother has a trained heart; compassion is a muscle for him; he inclines his head when you speak. He barely looks at the coffin, but apprises, instead, the look in my eyes. Then he turns slightly towards the body.

‘Don’t tell the rest of them I’m here, will you?’ he says. ‘Not yet,’ and sends me, with a nod, out the door. And of course, this is why I hate him too, in all his priestly
candour
–this fakery. Still, Ernest was always nice to me, growing up. We were just the right distance apart.

Out in the hall, I give an ear to the voices in the kitchen–a sharpened American note, that must be Ita’s. And Mossie’s wife shushing her perfect kids.

I turn and go upstairs to find my own.

‘Rebecca! Emily!’

The stairs are narrow, and steeper than I remember. I can hear the sound of their laughter, above me, like children hiding in the branches of a tree, but when I reach the landing they are gone.

It is a long time since I have been up here. This was the girls’ floor: Midge, Bea and Ita at the back; me, Kitty and Alice at the front, with a view of cherry blossom, and slanting black wires, and a white street light. It did not seem small, at the time. Kitty’s overnight bag is on her bed, the other two beds are bare. Framing the window is the maze of shelves and little cupboard doors my father built for us out of white MFI. A few schoolbooks are left on one shelf; none of them in English–perhaps this is why they were not thrown away.
Das Wrack
by Siegfried Lenz, and stories by Guy de Maupassant, one called ‘La Mer’ in which, as I recall from school, a sailor stores his severed arm in a barrel of salt in order to bring it home. The books look soiled as opposed to read, but we did read them too:

I turn and find the girls at the door.

‘Come on, down you go.’ And these children, who never do a single thing I say, turn and walk ahead of me down the stairs. At the bottom, Rebecca takes my hand in hers and walks me to the kitchen, like a mislaid giant she has found in the hall.

There was a thing Mossie would do with our hands. He would squeeze the small bones until you screamed, running the knuckles across each other, over and back. He is there in the kitchen, standing with Tom at the table: the two professionals in the room, talking man to man.
Why do men never sit down
, I think, then realise that all the chairs are in with the corpse. I look around. Ita is leaning back against the sink. She looks smaller. Even her face looks smaller–perhaps it is the light of the window behind that has her so reduced. But she is too well-preserved and I have, as I kiss her, a retching sense of the waxed flesh next door.

Then the twins are hugging me from either side–as they do, being always delightful, and hard to see. I look around for Kitty and see her outside in the garden, smoking. The mysterious Alice is not here. Probably mad, I think suddenly. The mysterious Alice was probably always mad.

Midge’s children stand in a gang and I turn gratefully towards them, but Bea throws a look at me, swinging her hair back over one shoulder.

All right. All right.

I go over to where my mother is sitting and stand by the wing of her chair while a neighbour finishes saying the ritual words.

‘Yes. Thank you. Yes.’

The neighbour, Mrs Burke, is bent low, telling some great and particular secret into Mammy’s ear; stroking her hand, over and over.

‘Yes,’ says Mammy, again. ‘Thank you. Yes.’

When Mrs Burke moves on, I step forward to kiss my mother.

It has happened. She sat watching television for the past ten days, waiting for something which has now well and truly arrived. It has, as they say, ‘hit her’. Like a truck. There isn’t much of her left.

Always vague, Mammy is now completely faded. I look her in the eye and try to find her, but she guards whatever she has left of herself deep inside. She looks at the world from this far place, and allows it all to happen, without knowing quite what it is. It is hard to tell how much she takes in, but there is a peacefulness to her too.

‘Oh. Hello,’ she says to me, and there is a hazy kind of love in her voice–for me, for the table set with food, for everyone here.

‘Mammy,’ I say, and bend down to kiss her cheek, and although she was never good at kissing or being kissed she does not flinch from me now, but angles her face like a debutante to receive the childish pucker of my lips. I suspect she has forgotten me entirely, but then she takes my hand, and sets it flat between her two light hands, and she looks up at me.

‘You were always great pals,’ she says.

‘Yes, Mammy.’

‘You were always great with each other, weren’t you? You were always great pals.’

‘Thanks, Mammy. Thanks.’

Tom’s hand is warm on the base of my spine. At least I think it is him, but when I crook my head around, he is not there. Who has touched me? I straighten up and look at them all. Who has touched me? I want to say it out loud, but the Hegartys and the Hegartys’ wives and the Hegartys’ children are some distance away from me: they shift, and talk, and eat on, unawares.

‘Are you all right there, Mammy?’ I say, by way of taking my leave.

‘I need to see the children,’ she says.

‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’

‘The children,’ she says again. ‘I need to see the children.’

‘They’re upstairs, Mammy,’ I say. ‘No. They’re here. I’ll go look for them, Mammy. I’ll find them for you.’

Then Tom is finally, actually, at my side. He dips to take my mother’s hand in wordless sympathy, then straightens up to take my elbow again and wheel me around to the rest of the room.

‘Have you been in?’ I say.

‘He looks,’ says Tom. Then he stops. ‘It’s not him.’

‘I wouldn’t really know,’ I say.

Tom’s fingers grip my arm. They are very full of themselves, these fingers of his. They do not leave me in any doubt. This is the man who will fuck me soon, to remind me that I am still alive. In the meantime he says, ‘He looks like an estate agent.’

‘It’s the shirt,’ I say.

‘Ah. It comes to us all.’

Then the children come up: Rebecca, Emily, and Róisín, who is Mossie’s youngest–so often seen, so seldom heard. Such a cutie. She stands before me and swings her tummy from side to side.

‘Will you say hello to your Auntie?’ I say. ‘Will you say it, or will you squeak it, like a little mouse? Squeak. Squeak.’

I tweak her tummy with my witchy old hands. Then I straighten up and mutter at Tom, ‘Mammy says she needs to see the children.’

‘Right so.’

‘Would you ever fuck off,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Why does she
need
to see the children?’

‘Well,’ says Tom.

‘It’s not what children are for,’ I say, quite fiercely. And he gives me a look of sudden interest, before twisting the girls by the shoulders, to push them across to their Gran.

‘Give your Granny a kiss, there, go on.’

The girls stand in front of my mother. There is a chance that Emily will actually wipe her mouth in front of her–she does not like wet kisses, she says, only dry ones ‘like her Daddy’s’. In the event, there are no fluids involved. My mother lifts her hand and places it on Rebecca’s head, then she turns, quite formally, and does the same to Emily, who receives the gesture with large eyes.

I watch this configuration as from a great distance. It is as though I am not related to any of them. But there is a roaring in my blood, too.

‘So what are they for?’ says Tom.

‘They’re not
for
anything,’ I say. ‘They just are.’

And I mean it too.