Anne Enright - The Gathering

After which, in the pool, we would ignore each other on the grounds of gender, and if there were no boys for him to hang out with, he swam alone, and if there were no girls I did the same. Sometimes we knew nobody, but we did not give up the chance of getting to know someone by ever speaking to each other. And if he did come over to me, with his skinny wet chest and his face all red in patches, I would be completely annoyed with him for blowing my cover. Because who can be a mysterious object of the deep when their brother is hanging around, saying, ‘You’ve got a snotter.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Big green one.’

‘No, I haven’t. Go away.’

‘There it is.’

‘Fuck off!! Go away!’

His skinny chest arching backwards. His messy, purple mouth going under. His foot churning water in my face, as he swims off to join the monstrous boys at the other end of the pool.

Natalie would have been there too, a fat little ten-year-old with a few pubic hairs like an old woman’s chin-she lost the bottom of her bikini every time she dived off the edge of the pool. Four years later I ask Liam was he messing with her , and he gives me a look from a distance that I do not know how to cross.

I do now.

Now I know that the look in Liam’s eye was the look of someone who knows they are alone. Because the world will never know what has happened to you, and what you carry around as a result of it. Even your sister-your saviour in a way, the girl who stands in the light of the hall-even she does not hold or remember the thing she saw. Because, by that stage, I think I had forgotten it entirely.

Over the next twenty years, the world around us changed and I remembered Mr Nugent. But I never would have made that shift on my own-if I hadn’t been listening to the radio, and reading the paper, and hearing about what went on in schools and churches and in people’s homes. It went on slap-bang in front of me and still I did not realise it. And for this, I am very sorry too.

EMILY TURNS HERcat’s eyes to me.

‘How did Uncle Liam die?’ she says.

‘He drowned,’ I say.

‘How did he drown?’

‘He couldn’t breathe in the water.’

‘In the sea water?’

‘Yes.’

It is important to be clear about these things-Emily needs to dismantle the world before she can put it together again. Rebecca’s mind is a vaguer sort of machine, anxiety sets her adrift. Sometimes I wish she would focus up, but who is to say which is the better way to be?

‘I can swim,’ says Emily.

‘Yes, you can swim, you’re a great swimmer.’

‘Couldn’t he not swim?’

‘Sweetie, he didn’t want to.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you want a hug?’

‘No.’

‘No what ?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well, I want a hug. Come here and give your poor mother a hug.’

And she comes over with outstretched arms and a big fake smile for the ‘Poor Mummy’ pantomime. I should think of her as selfish, but I don’t-I think of her as utterly beautiful in her selfishness.

‘I think it’s OK to kill yourself,’ she says into my chest. ‘You know, when you’re old.’

It is hard to remember that they don’t mean to hurt-or don’t know that they do. I push her back from me and I say, in a tear-thickened shame-on-you voice, ‘Your Uncle Liam was not old, Emily. He was sick. Do you hear me? Your Uncle Liam was sick, in his head.’

She lingers at my knee and draws with her fingernail in the smooth nylon of my tights.

‘Like seasick sick?’

‘Oh forget it, all right? Just forget it.’

She jumps in to hug me, her victory won over all my concerns . And then she runs off to play.

For a week, I compose a great and poetic speech for my children about how there are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts-they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared.

I am all for sadness, I say, don’t get me wrong. I am all for the ordinary life of the brain. But we fill up sometimes, like those little wooden birds that sit on a pole-we fill up with it, until donk , we tilt into the drink.

ABOUT A MONTHafter the funeral, Tom comes home as usual and he slings his coat into the sofa and sets his briefcase down, then he comes over to the dining area, working his tie loose, taking off his jacket, hanging it on the back of a hardback chair; he mooches over to the island to pick a piece of fruit from the bowl, and I think, It never happened, Liam never died, it is all the same as it ever was. Instead of which, I say, ‘You’d fuck anything.’

‘What?’ he says.

I say, ‘I don’t know where it starts and where it ends, that’s all. You’d fuck the nineteen-year-old waitress, or the fifteen-year-old who looks nineteen.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I don’t know where the edges are, that’s all. I don’t know where you draw the line. Puberty, is that a line? It happens to girls at nine, now.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he says.

‘Or not to your actual fucking. Of course. But just, you know, to your desire . To what you want. Is there a limit to what you want to fuck, out there?’

I have gone mad.

‘Jesus Christ,’ says Tom.

He plucks his jacket from the chair and heads for the front door, but I’ve got my bag and I’m there before him, scrabbling for the latch.

‘You’re not leaving,’ I say.

‘Get out of the way.’

‘You’re not leaving. I’m leaving. I am the one who is going to the fucking pub.’

I have the door open now, so there is a pathetic piece of push and shove in the porch-Hello, Booterstown! Tom, realising he is about to hit me otherwise, lifts his hands in the air. And there’s my answer, I suppose, to the question of his impulses and his actions, and the gap between the two. If I wanted to see it. Which I do not.

‘You can get the girls out in the morning,’ I say.

Because this is where all our grand emotions end up, at who does the pick-ups and who does the porridge-at least it used to, until I gave in and tried to save my marriage by doing the lot. Christ, I could get bitter.

‘What do you mean, “the morning”?’

I look at him, very hard. He lifts his hand to his lip, as though there might be something stuck there, which gives me the half a second I need to get over the threshold and back away from him down the drive.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

And I go to the Shelbourne, on my credit card.

This is a mistake.

The place is full of people having a good time. They sit and drink and talk and laugh. They all seem bursting with it-whatever it is. With the whole business of being themselves. That guy Dickie Kennedy is drinking in a corner, and I remember the story about how he got his wife for ‘deserting the family home’. And he also got the home.

I should be wearing my light green tweed skirt, tight across the thighs-that would show them. I should be sitting here in one of those posh wrap dresses. This is what I think about, on the brink of my marriage (or is it my sanity) in the Shelbourne bar-I think clothes would make a difference.

I sit and sip a gin and tonic from a heavy glass, and I realise that there are a limited number of ways for a woman like me to go.

Two years ago, I had a letter from Ernest. He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains. And his bishop might have a few things to say about this, so he had decided not to tell his bishop-he was, in fact, telling no one except friends and family (but don’t tell Mammy!) that it was no longer ‘Father Ernest’, but just plain old ‘Ernest’ again. Once a priest always a priest, of course-so he wasn’t exactly telling lies by keeping his mouth shut. ‘I have no place left to live but in my own heart,’ he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms.