Anne Enright - The Gathering

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 THEbereavement 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.