The Gathering (3 page)

This is all my romance, of course. Everyone had a beautiful grandmother–something to do with sepia and the orange blossom in their hair. Also the steady look in those old-fashioned eyes. We do not know how to be brave, any more, as a bride was brave in those days. Here is Ada’s wedding picture: she wears the low veil of the 1920s and the silk of her dress shows its tender, hand-sewn stitches in a line of dents around the hem. She was pure and she burned. Ada Merriman, my modest, ardent grandmother, was the thing poets wrote about, in 1925.

She has my feet. Or I have hers: long, with scraggly toes. Also the large-boned ankles and endless, flat shins that made me feel so gawky at school, before I learned how to put them to use. I have an expensive body, I realised, sometime in 1979. It isn’t a sex thing. Lawyers want to breed out of me and architects want me to sit on their new Eames chairs. Nothing too big at the front, just rangy and tall. So I dress up well, I suppose–though nothing would persuade me into a skirt that stopped mid-calf, to show my transvestite ankles and my poor knobbly toes.

So there is something pathetic about Ada’s big feet in satin shoes. She is married. She is happy. Or so I fancy, as I put her photo back into the shoebox that holds all that remains of her story, now.

She did not marry Nugent, you will be relieved to hear. She married his friend Charlie Spillane. And not just because he had a car.

But he never left her. My grandmother was Lamb Nugent’s most imaginative act. I may not forgive him, but it is this–the way he stayed true to it–that defines the man most, for me.

I RING THE
bereavement people in Brighton and Hove from Mammy’s phone in the hall, and they give me the number of an undertaker who, very nicely, takes my credit card details while I have it handy. There is the coffin to consider, of course, and for some reason I already know that I will go for the limed oak–a decision that is up to me, because I am the one who loved him most. And how much will all that cost? I think as I put down the phone.

Mrs Cluny comes in from next door, utterly silent. She swarms through the hall and into the kitchen and closes the door. After a little while, I hear my mother’s voice start up, very low.

I don’t have the patience for the old, circular dial, so I switch to my mobile and walk around the house as I go, ringing the lot of them, in Clontarf and Phibsboro, in Tucson, Arizona, to say, ‘Bad news, about Liam. Yes. Yes, I’m afraid so.’ And, ‘I’m in Mammy’s. Shocked. Really shocked.’ The news will be discussed along lines too slight and tender to trace. Jem will ring Ivor, and Ivor will ring Mossie’s wife, and Ita will source Father Ernest, somewhere north of Arequipa. Then they will all ring back here later–or their wives will–for times and reasons and gory details and flights.

I walk through the dimness of our childhood rooms and I touch nothing.

All the beds are dressed and ready. The girls slept upstairs and the boys on the ground floors (we had a system, you see). It is a warren. The twins’ bunk-beds are in a little room on the left of the hall door–the one where baby Stevie died. On the other side of this room is a doorway to the garage extension, with its three single beds. Beyond that again is the garden passage, where Ernest slept on a mattress on the floor, then Mossie, when Ernest left, and Liam last of all.

The slanting roof of the passage is made of clear, corrugated perspex. The mattress is still there, pushing up against the yellow garden door, with its window of pebbled glass. Liam’s Marc Bolan poster is gone, but you can still see the soiled tabs of Sellotape dangling from the breeze-block wall.

I had my first ever cigarette in here.

I sit on the mattress, which is covered with a rough blue blanket, and I ring my last, baby brother.

‘Hi Jem. No, everything’s fine. I have bad news, though, about Liam.’ And Jem, the youngest of us, the easiest and best loved, says, ‘Well, at least that’s done.’

I try Kitty’s again and listen to the phone ringing in her empty London flat. I lie down and look at the corrugated perspex roof, and I wonder how you might undo all these sheds and extensions, take the place back to the house it once was. If it would be possible to unbuild it all and start again.

When Bea arrives, I open the hall door and take her by both forearms, and we swing around like this as she passes me in the dark hall. I follow her into the kitchen’s yellow light and see that my mother has aged five, maybe ten years in the time it took me to make the calls.

‘Goodnight, Mammy. Do you want to take something? Do you want a doctor now, for something to help you sleep?’

‘No, no. No thanks.’

‘I’m going over there, to sort things out,’ I say.

‘England?’ she says. ‘Now?’

‘I’ll ring, OK?’

Her cheek, when I kiss it, is terribly soft. I glance over at Bea who gives me a dark look, full of blame.

Don’t tell Mammy.

Like it is all my fault.

My father used to sit in the kitchen watching telly until eleven o’clock, with the newspaper adrift in his lap. After the news he would fold the paper, get out of the chair, switch the telly off (no matter who was watching it) and make his way to bed. The milk bottles were rinsed and put on the step. One of the twins might be lifted on to a potty and tucked back into sleep. Then he would go into the room where he slept with my mother. She would already be in bed, reading and sighing since half past nine. There would be some muted talk, the sound of his keys and coins as he left them down. The rattle of his belt buckle. One shoe hitting the floor.

Silence.

There were girls at school whose families grew to a robust five or six. There were girls with seven or eight–which was thought a little enthusiastic–and then there were the pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit.

Instead of turning left outside Mammy’s, I turn right for the airport road. I don’t think about where I am going, I think about the rain, the indicator, the drag of the rubber wiper against the glass. I think about nothing–there is nothing to think about. And then I think about a drink. Nothing messy. A fierce little naggin of whiskey, maybe, or gin. I float towards it in my nice Saab 9.3–towards the idea of it, flowering in my mouth.

I am always thirsty when I leave that house–something to do with the unfairness of the place. But I won’t drink. Not yet. Kitty was so slammed when she rang earlier that all I could hear down the line was a stupid yowling.

‘Owjz. Hizz,’ she said. ‘Hizz. Hizj im. Ohsfs. Hi.’ By which I was supposed to gather that a policewoman had just called to her door too. And, yes it was a bad wait; though not such a long one. The trick
being
, I wanted to say to her down the line, the trick being to get drunk after the news and not before. It is a thin line, Kitty, but we think it is important. Out here, in the real world, we think it makes a difference. Fact / Conjecture. Dead / Alive. Drunk / Sober. Out in the world that is not the world of the Hegarty family, we think these things are Not The Same Thing.

I didn’t say any of this, of course. I said, ‘Huh huh ho God.’

And she said, ‘Ay ghai Ay Hizj.’

And I said, ‘Ho ho ho oh ho God.’

And this went on until a man took the receiver and said, ‘Is that Kitty’s sister?’ in a nice South London accent. And I had to be polite to him, and apologise a little that my brother had died all over his Thursday afternoon.

I realise that I am driving the wrong way for home, so I stop and ring my husband Tom at the traffic lights and say I won’t be back tonight. I don’t want the girls to see me, or worry about me, until I have got this thing done.

He says everything will be fine, just fine. Everything will be fine. His voice is trembling a little and I realise that if I do not end the call he will tell me that he loves me, that this is the next thing he is going to say.

‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘Bye bye. Bye bye.’ And I pull back into the traffic and the airport road.

There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest. And the girls will be picked up from school, and dropped off again in the morning. Your eldest daughter can remember her inhaler, and your youngest will take her gym kit with her, and it is just as you suspected–most of the stuff that you do is just stupid, really stupid, most of the stuff you do is just nagging and whining and picking up for people who are too lazy even to love you, even that, let alone find their own shoes under their own bed; people who turn and accuse you–scream at you sometimes–when they can only find one shoe.

And I am crying by now, heading down the airport road, I am bawling my eyes out behind the wheel of my Saab 9.3, because even the meeting your husband has, the vital meeting, was not important (how could you ever, even for a moment, think such things were important?) and he loves you completely for the half an hour, or half a week in which your brother is freshly dead.

I should probably pull over but I do not pull over: I cry-drive all the way. At Collins Avenue, a man stuck in the oncoming traffic looks across at me, sobbing and gagging in my posh tin box. He is two feet away from me. He is just there. He gives me a look of complete sympathy, and then he eases past. It has happened to us all.

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy–and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.

In the airport, I drive round and round the car park, floor after floor, until I am out under the evening sky. Liam used to laugh at me for this. Everyone used to laugh at me. The way I always park in the space that is nearest the planes: and that space is up on the roof, out in the rain.

I turn the engine off and watch the drops shunting down the windscreen.

The last time I brought him here, I could not wait to see him gone.

Seriously. The last time I brought him here, I sat for a moment, looking straight ahead, and the bulk of him in the front seat beside me was remarkable: the dark heap of him, when I turned and spoke to the brother that I knew–Christ! this grey thing in an unwashed shirt, this horrible old fucker, that I turned to and said, ‘So. Plenty of time.’

I walked him all the way to the departure gates and watched him go through. I wondered was it possible for him to come back out again. It occurred to me that it could not be against the law. You can go right up to the gate and change your mind. You can even spring out of your seat on the plane and change your mind and walk back the way you came, back out into Ireland, where you can make everyone miserable, for another little while.

Usually, people’s brothers become less important, over time. Liam decided not to do this. He decided to stay important, to the end.

A plane roars low overhead and, when it is gone, I am hanging on to the steering wheel, with my mouth wide open. We stay locked like this for a while, me and the car, then I sit back up and open the door.

While I am doing this–my mute screaming in my convertible Saab in the airport car park in the rain–I can feel Liam laughing at me. Or I feel his absence laughing at me. Because, somewhere, over there to the side–the place you can’t quite see–he is completely there, and not there at all. He is not unhappy, I realise, now that he is dead. But it is not just his
mood
I feel as a warmth at the base of my spine. It is his disappeared, dead, essential self. It is the very heart of him, all gone, or going now.

Goodbye Vee

Goodbye

Goodbye

I open the door and climb out into the rain.

HERE IS MY
grandfather, Charlie Spillane, driving up O’Connell Street towards his future wife in the Belvedere Hotel.

It is half past ten on a Tuesday night. It is Lent. A few profane couples drift out of the Gresham or the Savoy Grill to take the tram or start the walk home, but otherwise the town is quiet. Charlie’s car is a thick grey and when it slips under a streetlamp a pool of blue leather opens to the night. The hood is down, the brasses gleam and Charlie’s head gleams. It is a beautiful thing, this car–which is not quite Charlie’s car: though he has had it so long we can assume the man who left it with him is not coming back.

This is the car that lived in Ada’s garage when I was a child, a Bullnose Morris, with a cracked old hood, like the hood of a giant pram. By the time I saw it, there wasn’t much of it left, even the doors were missing. I used to sit in the front seat and listen to the mice running through the engine, in the stillness of the summer afternoons.

Or, ‘Vroom vroom!’ Liam would say, beside me. ‘Vroom vroom.’

In 1925 the car is still a beautiful thing. Charlie revs it along with tremendous shifting of gears and pedals–Nugent thinks he shouldn’t be driving it at all, so ruinous is this pumping, grinding technique to clutchsprings and valves. The front brakes are split open in a pool of their own fluid, on a table in his digs–Nugent is not the owner of the car either, but he does love it. Standing in the foyer of the Belvedere Hotel, he listens for the engine without knowing what he is listening for. Charlie, meantime, is running about Dublin on the back brakes only, seeing a man about a dog.

He is a swerver, Charlie. He does not like endings. He does not even like beginning things. When he does fall in love it is only because he finds that it is already slipping away from him. He grabs Ada, in other words, just at the moment that she turns to go.

But Ada does not know Charlie yet. Ada Merriman stands in the foyer of the Belvedere Hotel and looks at Lamb Nugent, while outside, Charlie Spillane cruises into Great Denmark Street, towards the wife he has not yet met. He is about to pull in at the door of the Belvedere Hotel, he is nearly there, when the spire of the Findlater’s Church puts him in mind of something, and he roars off to the The Hut in Phibsboro, to see a man about a dog.

Nugent cocks an ear after the escaping motor. There is a pause as the engine fades, and then the silence starts to spread. It seeps into the foyer of the Belvedere; the distant rustle of streets turning over from day into evening, as the night deepens and the drinking begins–elsewhere. As women shush their babies, and men ease their feet out of boots, and girls who have been working all evening wash themselves in distant rooms and check a scrap of mirror, before going out to work again.

On the other side of the room, Ada’s breathing is so shallow and mild she might be an angel occupying, for the moment, the figure of a doll. Her throat is a pillar, as the poet might say, and her lips are sculpted shut in the light.

A spent coal slips in the grate with a whispering ‘chink’.

Here come the dead.

They hunker around the walls and edge towards the last heat of the fire: Nugent’s sister Lizzy; his mother, who does not like being dead at all. Nugent’s ghosts twitter, soft and unassuaged, while Ada’s make no sound at all.

Why is that?

She is an orphan. Of course.

A face appears at the front-door glass, and pushes open the door. A quick, pokey little face, with a beard. It looks around, and withdraws. The dead are scattered, but after a moment they start to return and, as though Ada can not bear it, she rises swiftly and walks over to the desk, where she rings the bell.

Ding ding!

They are standing beside each other–at last!–Ada and Nugent at the desk, and she is amused by it. The freedom and the ease of her is insult and provocation to Nugent–poor Nugent, who feels the eighteen inches between them more keenly than any other measure of air. Who would push any part of himself into any part of her and find relief in it. Who might put his hands into her belly, to feel the heat and slither of her insides.

Do not mock.

‘This much,’ he wants to say. ‘I already love you this much.’

‘Hello. Hello in there.’

The concierge swims out from the darkness of his back room.

‘Do you have such a thing for the jarvey as a hot rum? For the man outside?’ She turns to Nugent and says, ‘I don’t know why I do it for him, he’s never there when you’re looking. Only to stop him sneaking off I suppose.’

Then she walks back towards her chair by the door. She is only nineteen after all. And he is only twenty-three.

‘I have a friend who owns a car,’ he says, all of a sudden.

‘Do you?’ She stops; interested and pert.

‘He should be here any minute, he should be here by now.’

‘I’d love a go in a car,’ says Ada. ‘I’d be mad for a go in a car.’

And she swivels about to sit in her chair.

Oh for a rope to pull it from under her–Nugent skidding across the room to catch her in his arms. They could kiss in black and white, she turning away for the caption:

Stop!!

Because it is not only Lent, but spring. How else would you have it? Ada Merriman is beautiful and Lamb Nugent is no better than he should be, and this is all we need to know–that when she walked in through the door, and sat with such quiet grace on that little oval-backed chair, he saw a life in which no one owed anyone a thing. Not a jot.

A car pulls up outside. Nugent hears the engine’s throbbing and the look he gives to Ada turns to one of pain and farewell–as if their situation were in some way impossible. But it is not impossible, and the alarm that flares between them now is just another kind of delight.

There is nothing that they do alone. Not any more.

Together they turn, as Charlie Spillane arrives through the door, raffish with drink, hearty with promises broken and appointments missed. His eye checks Nugent leaning up against the front desk–then he casts about him until he sees the figure in blue, sitting at the wall by the door. Oh.

‘Ma’am,’ he says, doffing his (imagined) bowler hat, ‘I hope this fellow has been keeping you amused.’

And Ada laughs.

Just like that. With a sweep of his arm, Charlie has changed the maths of it–of his future and of my past.

Here are the two friends, leaving Ada Merriman.

Charlie indicates the hotel door to his pal and walks outside. He sits back into the Bullnose Morris and picks up his driving gloves. Then he rubs his face with them. He rubs his face as a man who has stopped crying, after crying for a long time. Nugent climbs in beside him. Charlie gives her some choke, struggles over the sharp hump of the forgotten chock, and drives on.

Conways is dark. They circle the Rotunda and stop back on Parnell Street where they find a lock-in in the back room of the Blue Lion–an unholy pub. There is an air of recent hurt; the smell of something burnt coming out of the jakes in the yard.

‘A bottle and a lemonade,’ says Charlie.

They taste their drink and look with circumspection at the murderous clientele of the Blue Lion. Charlie has a small opinion about the car while Nugent examines the grain of the wood and the shine of the low brass rail.

On the way home, Nugent tilts out of his seat to stand with his head a little higher than the car’s front window, and he lets the night air lap his face. As they bowl along the Green, he glances at the girls who are waiting, even in Lent, for the nobs to come out of the Shelbourne: a series of white ovals, their faces twist around like turning leaves, at the sound of a car.

He plumps back into his seat as they slide to a stop, some distance beyond his door.

‘Give it a look, will you?’ says Charlie, meaning the brake drum, split open on the table in Nugent’s digs.

‘I will,’ he says, and waves Charlie off at the front door.

Inside, Nugent looks around his little room; the narrow bed, the window, with two lace curtains like hair parted over a little square face and tied on either side. He looks at his small table–the broken brakes of the Bullnose Morris, beautiful as a picture of apples in the moonlight. He starts to unbutton his shirt, standing in the darkness. His shirt opens one button at a time. It parts in a V over the flesh of his chest. Further and further down. And Nugent is on his knees. He pulls off his shirt on his knees, and swings it around behind him, so the buttons hit his back, once, twice; and then he starts his night prayers.

Here she comes.

Lizzy.

His sister. Younger than him. She died. The room they grew up in was full of the wet rattle of her chest; the horrible gurgle of phlegm and the shocking bright blood. Nugent can not forget the nightly rosary, said at a terrible, safe distance from her bed; her white knuckles fumbling on the coverlet for the dropped beads, or the dark light in her eyes as she looked at him, like she saw right through to his bones. His own puberty going unnoticed–almost to himself–as her little breasts swelled under the nightdress. She moved towards death and womanhood at the same pace, the nipples like a spreading bruise, the breasts growing, and failing to grow, over lungs hard with disease. And so, she died.

Is that enough for him to think about, while he is on his knees?

That when he holds his penis in the night-time, it feels like her thin skin; always damp, never sweating. Because, in those days, people used to be mixed up together in the most disgusting ways..