Anne Enright - The Gathering

I ring Kitty, suddenly.

‘Are you all right?’ I say.

‘Sorry?’

‘Are you all right?’ And for a second, I think she knows what I am talking about.

‘Yes, I’m all right. Are you all right?’

‘Yes, I am. Yes, me too.’

And we talk on about other things.

I know what I have to do-even though it is too late for the truth, I will tell the truth. I will get hold of Ernest and tell him what happened to Liam in Broadstone, and I will ask him to break this very old news to the rest of the family (but don’t tell Mammy!) because I can not do it myself, I do not have the arguments for it. I just couldn’t face Bea’s disapproval, or Ita’s dank sorrow, or Ivor, crisply saying, ‘How come you guys had all the fun?’ God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.

And what a pathetic attempt this is, at running away from them all. Gatwick bloody airport. I should be in Barcelona, looking for a sign. I should be walking the streets of Paris waiting to be found; some man who will walk up to me and say, ‘I have been expecting you for so long,’ and later, weeks later, I will watch some children playing in the Luxembourg Gardens and start up with the cry, ‘No! No! This can not be.’

But I do not want a different destiny from the one that has brought me here. I do not want a different life. I just want to be able to live it, that’s all. I want to wake up in the morning and fall asleep at night. I want to make love to my husband again. Because, for every time he wanted to undo me, there was love that put me back together again-put us both back together. If I could just remember them too. If I could remember each time, as you remember different places you have seen-some of them so amazing; exotic, or confusing, or still. If I could say this is what it was like the time Rebecca was started, or Emily made herself known. Or once, I remember, some afternoon, when he sat at the end of the bed in the white curtains’ light, and he looked like someone I knew from the very beginning, whenever the beginning might have been.

I stand in the queue for tickets and I have to close my eyes suddenly. I stand there with my lids squeezed shut, my driver’s licence tight in my hand, and my hand pressed against the lurching, empty feeling in my stomach-the future, come back to annoy me. Some new soul, with eyes like plums.

A boy.

Hey, Tom, let’s have this next baby. Just this one. The one whose name I already know. Oh, go on. It’ll cheer you up, no end.

Well, yes.

And though it would be amazing to have another child, this is not what I want most as I stand in the queue in Gatwick airport with my eyes closed: a woman with no luggage, no sharp objects, and nothing I haven’t packed myself. I just want to be less afraid. That’s all. Because it is fear that I feel as I wait to go up to the lip of the counter for a flight out today or, if the price is too extortionate, first thing tomorrow. I do not know if I can get up those tin steps and on to the plane.

Gatwick airport is not the best place to be gripped by a fear of flying. But it seems that this is what is happening to me now; because you are up so high, in those things, and there is such a long way to fall. Then again, I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now.

Thanks to Sinéad for checking my Irish, and to Mary Chamberlain for checking everything else. Thanks, as ever, to Robin Robertson and Gill Coleridge.

Anne Enright

Bray, 2006