Anne Enright - The Gathering

And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all.

And I wondered how many people around me are living with and sleeping with and laughing with their spouses on just this basis, and I wondered how sad they were. Not very, by the looks of it. Not sad at all.

The last time I saw Dickie Kennedy was out in his amazing house in Glenageary. It must have been after Rebecca was born. And God he was a savage. ‘I see Brian’s got his hands full,’ he says, after some poor woman smoothes her skirt over a plump backside, because there seems to be no way she can reverse out of the room. We sit and listen to this stuff, and we eat mushroom risotto, followed by hake in a bright green sauce. The food is very good. Emer, the woman who made it all, has skin thickened to a hide by too much sun and too much cream. I am drawn to the V of her top as she shrugs, to see the whole business move and crease. She asks me some questions, and they are good questions, and I answer, and so the dinner proceeds to everyone’s satisfaction. She is really quite witty. She gets a bit drunk. She tells a story about a woman we all know who took off her top in Dickie’s office-the ugliness of her, you have no idea, the underwear-he came home shaking. And we all laugh. And then we go home.

Even Tom, in the car afterwards, gives himself a little shake, like he can not believe the contract that was being offered to us, just there.

‘What was all that about?’ When I get back from dropping off the babysitter he is sitting in the living room, making his way through a bottle of whiskey, in the dark.

Or maybe this was another night. For a while, all those nights were the same.

‘Do you want the light on?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Are you coming to bed?’

Here we go, again. Always after a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on.

‘No, I’ll just sit up a while.’

‘It’s up to you.’

‘Yes.’

Push me pull you. Come here and I’ll tell you how much I hate you. Hang on a minute while I leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be. I know what it is now, though, because upstairs the baby shouts in her sleep. I move to go.

‘Thanks,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Thanks for staying with me.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘No. Really.’

Or some version of the above-we rarely shout, myself and Tom, we just hate.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I say.

And one night-it might even have been this night, after the hake in green sauce, and Brian’s plump wife, and the ugly woman in the bad underwear, and all the winning and the losing-Tom takes the cigarette out of his mouth. He holds it up, high under my chin, and he scrunches it in his fist. The smell, when he opens his hand, is small and terrible.

It clears my head.

The thing is, if I go up to Rebecca and kiss her, she will be happy. If I sit on the arm of the chair and kiss Tom, he will not be happy. So I stay with him for just a moment more, in the singed smell of his self-disgust. I hold his skull against my breast. I do this until Rebecca’s wailing grows to the exact pitch that pulls me to my feet, every time. Then I go.

It was the children that did for us, at least for a while. I think he stopped hating me after I left work. Of course, Tom would say he never hated me, that he loved me all along. But I know hating when I see it. I know it, because there is a part of me that wants to be hated, too.

There must be.

Anyway.

It did get easier over the years, but it never really did get fixed.

I thought about this, as I sat in the Shelbourne bar-that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go ‘home’ where I could ‘have sex’ with my ‘husband’ just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn’t seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.

THE BRITISH, Idecide, only bury people when they are so dead, you need another word for it. The British wait so long for a funeral that people gather not so much to mourn, as to complain that the corpse is still hanging around. There is a queue, they say on the phone (the British love a queue). They do not gather until the emotion is gone.

What else am I to make of the ten days we have to wait for paperwork; the death certificates and removal orders, that have to find their separate ways into the one envelope that will accompany my brother on his journey home.

Meanwhile, as computers wait and printers jam, as coroner’s assistants go to the gym, and registrars wrestle with the collapse of their central heating systems, Liam lies in some unspecified foreign fridge, and I-we all-get on with things. From time to time, as I move about the house, I am gripped by the thought that I have, shamefully, forgotten something: there is a tampon seeping into the water of the downstairs toilet; I have left half a biscuit on the arm of a chair, or forgotten to finish my tea. I can feel it going cold in my mouth, as I hunt around and finally find the empty cup.

Every day I go over to Griffith Way and sit in a formal sort of way with my mother, and Bea if she is there, or Kitty. We talk about ordinary things. Or we settle her in front of the television set and retreat to the kitchen, where Kitty-where we all-look diminished, overgrown. I am shocked by the amount of products we need, each of us slicked up and greased down, until there is no surface free of cosmetic matt or sheen. This is what it is to be middle-aged in the place where we once were children, and now, highlights notwithstanding, we are being treated like children again, not so much by our mother, as by death itself. Except we are very good children this time around.

I am a good daughter. I am a very good daughter. In some sort of middle-class fit, I go into Kilkenny Design and buy my mother a beautiful, spider-woven, cashmere shawl, in cream.

She takes it out of the bag, entranced for a moment by the idea that she might look like an old lady off the telly.

So this is what they give you, when your children die.

She lets me put it across her, but her rounded old shoulders reject it, as does the set of her jaw. She pulls it down into her lap, saying, ‘It would make a lovely christening shawl, wouldn’t it? Ciara has one on the way.’ Because, although she never quite knows us when she sees us in the flesh, my mother counts over her progeny and their progeny to the third generation; she shifts through their names with pleasure and ease.

‘She’s due in February, isn’t she? Very cold.’

All the Hegarty babies are baptised, because to do otherwise would be to rob this woman of what she rightfully owns, her little treasure of souls-we all traipse dutifully up to the font and hand them over. I didn’t mind, actually, but I thought Jem was pushing it. Who knows what the Hegartys believe? Mossie-the-psychotic goes to Mass every day during Lent, but we only know this because he tells us, being psychotic. The rest of us do our praying alone.

I take the shawl from her, folding it and putting it back in the paper bag, saying as I do so, ‘Would you take something for yourself, Mammy, just once.’ And she gives me a beaky look, as if to say, What? You want me to be like you?

I don’t know what is wrong with being me. And I don’t know if she would like me better, if she could remember my name. Mammy was always free to choose which ones she did and did not love. The boys first, of course, and after the boys, whichever of the girls were good.