The Gathering (22 page)

ONE NIGHT I
give up steering the car one way or the other and let it go where it wants, which is north, as always, this time past the hump of Howth Head and on to the Swords road, all the way to Portrane.

I make my way past the asylum and turn down to the sea, then I stop at the gate of the small field, in the middle of whose rubbish is my uncle’s mathematical head. More than five thousand people are buried here, according to Ernest, who knows the local priest. I am not surprised. A cube of panic rises out of these walls. The air at the gates has the same hum as you find under high-voltage wires.

I stand for a while, and feel my hair stand to.

The moon is up. In the distance a line of white wave unfurls itself along the strand, and makes no sound. The sea slaps at the rocks below me, upset by cross-currents and by some distant storm. There is no wind.

I stand there and think that there is no worse place for me to go. This is the worst place there is.

In which case, it is not too bad. If this is as mad as I get then it is not too mad. My children will not be harmed by it; though I may have to change my life a little; get out more, trade in the Saab.

This week’s property supplement–Tom’s little offering on the kitchen table–had a house for sale on Ada’s street. It is not Ada’s house, or not yet; but everyone is selling and moving, it might come up any time. I could stalk it, Ada’s house. I could buy this house up the road, and make it over, and sell on, until the day comes–not too far away, I feel sure–when I am standing in Ada’s front room, pulling up a corner of the wallpaper, talking to some nice architect about gutting the place. I will wear a sober trouser suit and incredibly silly heels and click-clack my way across the bare boards, while telling him to rip out the yellow ceiling and the clammy walls; to knock down the doorway to the front room, but save the Belfast sink in the little kitchen, over which, looking out the back window, I learned how to imagine things. We will exclaim together, my architect and I, over the little ceiling rose, and the pretty fireplace where things were burnt: letters, bookies’ dockets, pork fat, the hair from Ada’s hairbrush going in with a sizzle. I will ask him to get the place cleaned out with something really strong, I don’t want a woman with a mop, I will say, I want a team of men in boiler suits with tanks on their backs and those high-pressure steel rods.

And the garage–we will turn the garage into a studio space, with skylights and white walls, and I will put wide plank flooring over the old cement. Oak.

‘What do you think about oak?’ I will say.

I will rent the house out for a while. And I will be nice to the tenants. And when I am finished. When I am good and finished. When I have beaten the shit out of the place and made it smell, in a wonderfully clean but old-fashioned way, of wood soap and peonies, I will sell it on for twice the price.

Is that all right, Liam?

There he is. Standing at the water’s edge, looking out over the waves.

Is that all right?

He looks like an extra in a film. He is wearing a baggy brown suit, that he would never wear in real life, and a Paddy cap over his young curly black hair. His eyes of Irish blue crinkle at the corners as he looks out into the night. He is not alone. There is another man further up, there is a boy standing on a headland; at each peak and promontory these watchers stand, looking out to sea.

It is like a Guinness ad, but no one moves.

Overhead, a huge plane comes in to land. The first of the day, trailing Arctic frost. New York, Newfoundland, Greenland, Portrane. It is six a.m. Time for me to turn home.

I get in the car, and reach for the key, gone cold in the ignition. It is March. It is nearly five months since Liam died. Ciara’s baby, who met him coming in the door, is now one month old. My own last child, the one I might have with Tom, is getting tired waiting. I turn the key and start the car.

Liam turns to watch me as I go. He does not know who I am, or what the sea is, or what sort of a place Broadstone might be. He is full of his own death. His death fills him as a plum fills its own skin. Even his eyes are full. It is a serious business, being dead. He would like to do it well. He turns from the confusing lights of the car, and sets his face towards the sea.

I drive back up to the main road, but the car does not turn for home. I go to the airport instead and, after a little while, I get on a plane.

SUICIDES ALWAYS PULL
a good crowd. People push in: they clog the doors and sidle along the back benches, gathering on the rim of the church: they turn up on principle, because a suicide has left everyone behind.

I wish they had stayed at home.

I stand in the church porch waiting for the mourners’ car to arrive from Griffith Way. Tom is chasing Emily along a bench. Rebecca stands beside me and will not let go of my hand. I am glad I have got the distraction of children among these people, strangers and friends, who check my face and will not say hello, or not yet. I fuss around the kids, and scold Emily and send them off with their father: he will need a head start to get them past the box at the top of the aisle.

A woman makes her way towards me through the crowd. I know her from somewhere–if I could just remember from where, then her name might come to me, and what she might want. She has been crying, that is the disconcerting thing. Anyone can slobber over you, I think, once you are dead.

She is tall and pale and black-haired and this should be enough, I should recognise her by this, and by the slightly harried look she has of a woman both wounded and mild. She looks around until she finds me–I knew it was me she was looking for–and she comes over, pushing her way through the other people with awkward grace. She is all hip and shoulder, in a mushroom-coloured trench coat and a beige jersey dress.

And then I remember her from that awful visit Liam made, the one when I had the builders in, and there was no floor in the girls’ bedrooms, in the middle of which mayhem, Liam arrives with this woman who seems to have no opinions about anything at all. Not even about what she wants to eat.

I don’t know how long Liam lived with her or slept in her single bed, or did whatever he did with these disastrous girls. And I can not, for the life of me, remember her name. But I do remember loving her a little, by the time they left for Mayo; with her long nervous hands, and her blue-veined skin, and her hair in a drippy chignon. I do remember hoping that she would give him some rest.

She is older now, though the same sense of flickering hurt is there, as the stained-glass colours fly up her chest and pull at the corner of her eye. But this is gone by the time she reaches me. She levels her face at me, and is full of the story she has to tell. It is pushing its way out through her, this thing. It is not, in any way, her fault.

And I still can not remember her name.

‘Did Kitty get you?’ I say. ‘It’s a long way to come.’

And suddenly I feel very Irish as I reach out to take her hand in both my hands, to thank her for making the journey, to welcome her in and allow her to grieve.

‘You’ll come back to the hotel? Do you know where it is? Will you want a lift?’

‘I just came,’ she says. ‘I just arrived.’

‘You heard?’ I say, meaning his suicide, and she nods, as if this was slightly beside the point.

‘This is Rowan,’ she says, reaching round to extract a child from behind her elegant legs, and I look down, for the first time, at my brother’s son.

He has a curious large head and forward-leaning little body and I realise, after a second, that this is because he is only three years old. Because he is only three–going on four–years old, his head pivots beautifully on the stem of his neck as his face tilts up to examine me, with my brother’s blue eyes, though when his mother tells him to, ‘Say hello,’ he squirms round the back of her trench coat again. He peers out and dives back, and I realise that I am supposed to play hide-and-seek with this child. I am supposed to duck and weave around either side of his mother’s narrow thighs. And I do. I say, ‘Hello Rowan,’ and ‘Were you on an aeroplane?’ Then I say, ‘Hello Rowan,’ again, ‘Hello sweetie-pie,’ wondering how I can trick or induce this child into my arms and, after a while, kiss him, or inhale him. How I will steal or filch permission to rub my cheek along the skin of his back, and play the bones of his spine, and blow thick kisses into the softness of his arms? Perhaps over time. Perhaps I will be able to do it over time.

‘Oh, he’s terribly like,’ I say to his mother, whose name, I realise, is Sarah. I knew all along that this is what she was called.

‘Yes,’ she says.

And the look that passes between us is one of absolute regard.

‘Will you come and sit with us?’ I say, indicating the top of the church, though I know this might not be the best moment to break the news.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Oh, no. I’m sorry, I just got in.’

‘That’s all right,’ I say. ‘You’ll come back after?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ she says. ‘I think I should.’

‘Yes, you should. You should.’

The mourners’ car has arrived outside, but I can not, I find, leave the boy. I get down on my hunkers and I smile. He hides again. I reach out my arms and he edges further back. He knows my need for him is too great. And then, evil person that I am, I say, ‘Afterwards, you know, if you come back with all of us, there will be
buckets and buckets
of ice cream.’

He likes that one all right.

Here they come: my mother, tiny and round and bobbing on Bea’s elegant arm. Mossie on the other side, also tall, and handsome in the way that professional men can be; his gentle wife; his three too-perfect children; Ita in a slow march; the twins, Ivor and Jem, who bump together and separate, all the way up the aisle. Kitty, my little sister, stops to take my hand, in a quietly theatrical way. As I turn to leave, Sarah nods to say that she will not disappear, that she knows who she is, and what she has come here for.

I make my way up to the top of the church and am drowned in the emotion, whether love or sadness, that floods my chest. My face sets into the mask of a woman weeping, one half pulled into a wail that the other half will not allow. There are no tears. My head twists away from whichever side of the church is more interested in my grief, only to show it to the other side. Here it is. The slow march of the remaining Hegartys. I don’t know what wound we are showing to them all, apart from the wound of family. Because, just at this moment, I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive.

Tom turns, and when he sees my face, he stops. He hands me in to the seat in front of him, and the girls follow me on the other side.

‘All right?’ he says, slipping his hand over mine, while Emily turns in to cling to me–or, if the truth be told, to stroke my breasts while pretending to admire (or console, perhaps) the covered buttons of my good, funeral coat.

‘Leave your mother alone,’ says Tom.

Indeed. I have been so much touched these last few days. I cross my legs over the memory of the sex we had the night of the wake. Or he had. And wait for the Mass to begin. Everyone wants a bit of me. And it has nothing to do with what I might want, or what my body might want, whatever that might be–God knows it is a long time since I knew. There I am, sitting on a church bench in my own meat: pawed, used, loved, and very lonely.

Actually, I do know what I want. I want whoever touched the small of my back in Mammy’s kitchen to declare himself. To say, again, that everything will be all right. Because I felt someone’s loving touch, and I was–but completely–reassured by it, before I turned to see that there was no one there.

Also, I want Rowan. I yearn for him, not with lips or hands, but with my entire face. My skin wants him. I want to nuzzle him, and feel his light hair tickle my chin. I want to flutter my eyelashes against his cheek.

This spooling fantasy runs through my head through all that follows: the Mass and the stupid old priest and Ernest’s few words from the altar.

Liam was never interested in material things, says Ernest. He had a great sense of humour.

‘My brother had a rage for justice,’ he says, not mentioning how this might turn to bus-kicking, in drink. But it is done well enough. The words are well enough spoken, while behind me, my great, and soon-to-be-broken, secret shouts, ‘Hallo! Hallo!’ in broad South London at the back of the church.

We do the whole thing. We follow the box out down the aisle again and as soon as we hit open air, I say it to Tom.

‘Do you remember the girl? That girl who came with him the last time, or the second-last time.’

‘What girl?’

‘Remember the girl who wouldn’t eat, with a face on her, when we had the builders in?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

‘He was horrible to her.’

‘Oh, yeah. Her.’

‘She was pregnant,’ I say. ‘She was pregnant at the time.’

‘By him?’

‘Oh, there’s no doubting the child,’ I said. ‘It’s Liam. To the life.’

The Hegartys are stuck in the porch, shaking five hundred people’s hands. I don’t know half of them, and I don’t care. I am waiting for Sarah to come through so I can take her aside and figure how to do this thing.

‘I’m very sorry for your trouble.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘It’s a great loss.’

All of them apologising for the fact that someone you love is dead, when the world is full of people you don’t.

‘I knew him at school,’ says one man to me, transforming, even as the words happen, from a middle-aged stranger to Willow of the vodka naggin and the beautiful older brother. He is absolutely himself, and this confuses me. I can’t get the picture of a middle-aged man back, now that I know who he is.

‘Oh, Willow,’ I say, like a schoolgirl fool. Love is one thing, but there are so many people in the world to like, that we never see.

It’s a heady business, burying the dead.

I wait until we are at the hotel, and even then I am reluctant to break the news. I can not hand it to Bea, the owner of all the Hegartys. I can’t expose it to Ivor’s irony, or Ita’s intelligence, or Mossie’s wonderful
management skills
. I need a child to do this, or a grown-up child.

‘Come here, Jem,’ I say to my little brother; the youngest and best loved. And I watch him go round the others; Mammy last. Bea tries to make her sit down, but she will not sit down. Mammy stands up and undoes the top button of her blouse, and, wild-eyed, pulls off her coat, casting around her as she does so, stuck in the second sleeve. She finds Sarah and the child, as Bea yanks the last of the coat off her arm, and she hurries over, runs even, to set her hands on the child’s shoulders, then up on either side to graze his lovely face. She looks at Sarah, with a terrible contract in her eye, and Sarah steps forward, very politely, to shake her hand. After which, as though none of this had happened, Mammy turns away.

It is hard to describe the effect of the boy on the assembled Hegartys.

‘Rowan?’ they say. ‘
Rowan.
’

It is like we had never seen a child before. He has the Hegarty eyes, we say–delighted, like they weren’t a curse–and we look to see what human being looks out through them, this time. It is too uncanny. Everyone wants to touch him. They just have to–they reach out and he shies away; flinches, even. The one he chooses for safe haven is, of all people, Mossie, who sits him on one long leg and jounces him, hard,
Ride a cock horse
, threatening to spill him on to the floor. Mossie, who was for Liam a dark mirror, loves the boy and the boy loves him. Mossie’s own children gather round, and for the first time I see how happy they are–that is why they are so well-behaved, with their gentle mother and their father who is
firm but fair
: they are content.

This seems like an amazing thing to notice about your own brother, after so many years–it is almost more amazing than the fact of Liam’s son. Maybe that is because the accident of Liam’s son is too fantastic to contemplate, in the middle of a hotel reception room, in the suburbs of Dublin, where two hundred people I sort of know are sitting down to soup or melon, followed by salmon or beef.

We eat it all up. Down to the apple tart and ice cream. We do not stint. We put slabs of butter on bad white rolls, and we ask for second cups of tea. I am inordinately interested in the food. I look up from my plate to Rowan and then I look down again to stab a potato croquette.

There are other things to notice, whenever I have the strength to pull my eyes away from the boy. Ivor talking to Liam’s friend Willow for several moments too long. A look that passes between them and the priest, no less, who gets his coat and looks again, before he goes out the door. Ernest sees this last glance too and takes note. And there is Ita sitting at a right angle to Ernest, holding on to his forearm with both hands and talking into the side of his face, which has that drawn, mortified look I remember from confession. Someone has given Kitty a microphone, and she stands there while Mossie taps a glass with his knife. Then she lays the microphone down on the table, and lifts her face to sing, with utter sweetness, Liam’s favourite song:

But of course. This stupid thing. I have to push hard against my eyelids, the tears are so sudden and sharp.