I WOULD LIKE to write down what happened in my grandmother’s
house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am
not sure if it really did happen. I need to bear witness to
an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me – this thing
that may not have taken place. I don’t even know what
name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the
flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure
what hurt may linger in the bones.
My brother Liam loved birds and, like all boys, he loved
the bones of dead animals. I have no sons myself, so when
I pass any small skull or skeleton I hesitate and think of
him, how he admired their intricacies. A magpie’s ancient
arms coming through the mess of feathers; stubby and
light and clean. That is the word we use about bones:
Clean.
I tell my daughters to step back, obviously, from the mouse
skull in the woodland or the dead finch that is weathering
by the garden wall. I am not sure why. Though sometimes
we find, on the beach, a cuttlefish bone so pure that I have
to slip it in my pocket, and I comfort my hand with the
secret white arc of it.
You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console
them.
So I offer Liam this picture: my two daughters running
on the sandy rim of a stony beach, under a slow, turbulent
sky, the shoulders of their coats shrugging behind them.
Then I erase it. I close my eyes and roll with the sea’s loud
static. When I open them again, it is to call the girls back
to the car.
Rebecca! Emily!
It does not matter. I do not know the truth, or I do not
know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night
thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns.
All I have are ravings, more like. She loved him! I say. She
must have loved him! I wait for the kind of sense that dawn
makes, when you have not slept. I stay downstairs while
the family breathes above me and I write it down, I lay
them out in nice sentences, all my clean, white bones.
Chapter Two
SOME DAYS I don’t remember my mother. I look at her
photograph and she escapes me. Or I see her on a Sunday,
after lunch, and we spend a pleasant afternoon, and when
I leave I find she has run through me like water.
‘Goodbye,’ she says, already fading. ‘Goodbye my
darling girl,’ and she reaches her soft old face up, for a
kiss. It still puts me in such a rage. The way, when I turn
away, she seems to disappear, and when I look, I see only
the edges. I think I would pass her in the street, if she
ever bought a different coat. If my mother committed a
crime there would be no witnesses – she is forgetfulness
itself.
‘Where’s my purse?’ she used to say when we were children
– or it might be her keys, or her glasses. ‘Did anyone
see my purse?’ becoming, for those few seconds, nearly there,
as she went from hall, to sitting room, to kitchen and back
again. Even then we did not look at her but everywhere else:
she was an agitation behind us, a kind of collective guilt, as
we cast about the room, knowing that our eyes would slip
over the purse, which was brown and fat, even if it was quite
clearly there.
Then Bea would find it. There is always one child who
is able, not just to look, but also to see. The quiet one.
‘Thank you. Darling.’
To be fair, my mother is such a vague person, it is possible
she can’t even see herself. It is possible that she trails her
fingertip over a line of girls in an old photograph and can
not tell herself apart. And, of all her children, I am the one
who looks most like her own mother, my grandmother
Ada. It must be confusing.
‘Oh hello,’ she said as she opened the hall door, the day I
heard about Liam.
‘Hello. Darling.’ She might say the same to the cat.
‘Come in. Come in,’ as she stands in the doorway, and
does not move to let me pass.
Of course she knows who I am, it is just my name that
escapes her. Her eyes flick from side to side as she wipes
one after another off her list.
‘Hello, Mammy,’ I say, just to give her a hint. And I
make my way past her into the hall.
The house knows me. Always smaller than it should
be; the walls run closer and more complicated than the
ones you remember. The place is always too small.
Behind me, my mother opens the sitting room door.
‘Will you have something? A cup of tea?’
But I do not want to go into the sitting room. I am not
a visitor. This is my house too. I was inside it, as it grew;
as the dining room was knocked into the kitchen, as the
kitchen swallowed the back garden. It is the place where
my dreams still happen.
Not that I would ever live here again. The place is all
extension and no house. Even the cubby-hole beside
the kitchen door has another door at the back of it, so
you have to battle your way through coats and hoovers
to get into the downstairs loo. You could not sell the
place, I sometimes think, except as a site. Level it and
start again.
The kitchen still smells the same – it hits me in the base
of the skull, very dim and disgusting, under the fresh, primrose
yellow paint. Cupboards full of old sheets; something
cooked and dusty about the lagging around the immersion
heater; the chair my father used to sit in, the arms shiny
and cold with the human waste of many years. It makes
me gag a little, and then I can not smell it any more. It just
is. It is the smell of us.
I walk to the far counter and pick up the kettle, but
when I go to fill it, the cuff of my coat catches on the
running tap and the sleeve fills with water. I shake out my
hand, and then my arm, and when the kettle is filled and
plugged in I take off my coat, pulling the wet sleeve inside
out and slapping it in the air.
My mother looks at this strange scene, as if it reminds
her of something. Then she starts forward to where her
tablets are pooled in a saucer, on the near counter. She takes
them, one after the other, with a flaccid absent-mindedness
of the tongue. She lifts her chin and swallows them dry
while I rub my wet arm with my hand, and then run my
damp hand through my hair.
A last, green capsule enters her mouth and she goes still,
working her throat. She looks out the window for a
moment. Then she turns to me, remiss.
‘How are you. Darling?’
‘Veronica!’ I feel like shouting it at her. ‘You called me
Veronica!’
If only she would become visible, I think. Then I could
catch her and impress upon her the truth of the situation,
the gravity of what she has done. But she remains hazy,
unhittable, too much loved.
I have come to tell her that Liam has been found.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Oh, Mammy.’
The last time I cried in this kitchen I was seventeen years
old, which is old for crying, though maybe not in our
family, where everyone seemed to be every age, all at once.
I sweep my wet forearm along the table of yellow pine,
with its thick, plasticky sheen. I turn my face towards her
and ready it to say the ritual thing (there is a kind of glee
to it, too, I notice) but, ‘Veronica!’ she says, all of a sudden
and she moves – almost rushes – to the kettle. She puts her
hand on the bakelite handle as the bubbles thicken against
the chrome, and she lifts it, still plugged in, splashing some
water in to heat the pot.
He didn’t even like her.
There is a nick in the wall, over by the door, where Liam
threw a knife at our mother, and everyone laughed and
shouted at him. It is there among the other anonymous
dents and marks. Famous. The hole Liam made, after my
mother ducked, and before everyone started to roar.
What could she have said to him? What possible provocation
could she have afforded him – this sweet woman?
And Ernest then, or Mossie, one of the enforcers, wrestling
him out through the back door and on to the grass for a
kicking. We laughed at that too. And my lost brother,
Liam, laughed: the knife thrower, the one who was being
kicked, he laughed too, and he grabbed his older brother’s
ankle to topple him into the grass. Also me – I was also
laughing, as I recall. My mother clucking a little, at the
sight of it, and going about her business again. My sister
Midge picking up the knife and waggling it out the window
at the fighting boys, before slinging it into the sink full
of washing-up. If nothing else, our family had fun.
My mother puts the lid on the teapot and looks at me.
I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a
terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want
to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling
– somewhere between diarrhoea and sex – this grief that
is almost genital.
It must have been over some boyfriend, the last time I
cried here. Ordinary, family tears meant nothing in this
kitchen; they were just part of the general noise. The only
thing that mattered was, He rang or, He didn’t ring. Some
catastrophe. The kind of thing that would have you scrabbling
at the walls after five bottles of cider. He left me.
Doubling over, clutching your midriff; howling and gagging.
He didn’t even call to get his scarf back. The boy with the
turquoise eyes.
Because we are also – at a guess – great lovers, the
Hegartys. All eye-to-eye and sudden fucking and never,
ever, letting go. Apart from the ones who couldn’t love at
all. Which is most of us, too, in a way.
Which is most of us.
‘It’s about Liam,’ I say.
‘Liam?’ she says. ‘Liam?’
My mother had twelve children and – as she told me one
hard day – seven miscarriages. The holes in her head are
not her fault. Even so, I have never forgiven her any of it.
I just can’t.
I have not forgiven her for my sister Margaret who we
called Midge, until she died, aged forty-two, from pancreatic
cancer. I do not forgive her my beautiful, drifting sister
Bea. I do not forgive her my first brother Ernest, who was
a priest in Peru, until he became a lapsed priest in Peru. I
do not forgive her my brother Stevie, who is a little angel
in heaven. I do not forgive her the whole tedious litany of
Midge, Bea, Ernest, Stevie, Ita, Mossie, Liam, Veronica,
Kitty, Alice and the twins, Ivor and Jem.
Such epic names she gave us – none of your Jimmy, Joe
or Mick. The miscarriages might have got numbers, like
‘i962’ or ‘i964’, though perhaps she named them too, in
her heart (Serena, Aifric, Mogue). I don’t forgive her those
dead children either. The way she didn’t even keep a notebook,
so you could tell who had what, when, and which
jabs. Am I the only woman in Ireland still at risk from
polio myelitis? No one knows. I don’t forgive the endless
hand-me-downs, and few toys, and Midge walloping us
because my mother was too gentle, or busy, or absent, or
pregnant to bother.
My sweetheart mother. My ageless girl.
No, when it comes down to it, I do not forgive her the
sex. The stupidity of so much humping. Open and blind.
Consequences, Mammy. Consequences.
‘Liam,’ I say, quite forcefully. And the riot in the kitchen
quiets down as I do my duty, which is to tell one human
being about another human being, the few and careful
details of how they met their end.
‘I am afraid he is dead, Mammy.’
‘Oh,’ she says. Which is just what I expected her to say.
Which is exactly the sound I knew would come out of her
mouth.
‘Where?’ she says.
‘In England, Mammy. Where he was. They found him
in Brighton.’
‘What do you mean?’ she says. ‘What do you mean,
“Brighton”?’
‘Brighton in England, Mammy. It’s a town in the south
of England. It’s near London.’
And then she hits me.
I don’t think she has ever hit me before. I try to remember
later, but I really think that she left the hitting to other people:
Midge of course, who was always mopping something, and
so would swipe the cloth at you, in passing, across your face,
or neck, or the back of the legs, and the smell of the thing,
I always thought, worse than the sting. Mossie, who was a
psycho. Ernest, who was a thoughtful, flat-handed sort of
man. As you went down the line, the hitting lost authority
and petered out, though I had a bit of a phase, myself, with
Alice and the twins, Ivor-and-Jem.
But my mother has one hand on the table, and she swings
around with the other one to catch me on the side of the
head. Not very hard. Not hard at all. Then she swings back,
and grabs for the counter, and she suspends herself there,
between the counter and the table; her head dipping below
the spread of her arms. For a while she is silent, and then
a terrible sound comes out of her. Quite soft. It seems to
lift up off her back. She raises her head and turns to me,
so that I can witness her face; the look on it, now, and the
way it will never be the same again.
Don’t tell Mammy. It was the mantra of our childhoods,
or one of them. Don’t tell Mammy. This from Midge, especially,
but also from any one of the older ones. If something
broke or was spilt, if Bea did not come home or
Mossie went up to live in the attic, or Liam dropped acid,
or Alice had sex, or Kitty bled buckets into her new school
uniform, or any number of phone messages about delays,
snarl-ups, problems with bus money and taxi money, and
once, catastrophically, Liam’s night in the cells. None of
the messages relayed: the whispered conference in the hall,
Don’t tell Mammy, because ‘Mammy’ would – what?
Expire? ‘Mammy’ would worry. Which seemed fine to me.
It was, after all, of her own making, this family. It had all
come – singly and painfully – out of her. And my father
said it more than anyone; level, gallant, There’s no need to
tell your mother now, as if the reality of his bed was all the
reality that this woman should be asked to bear.
After my mother reaches over and hits me, for the first
time, at the age of seventy to my thirty-nine, my mind
surges, almost bursts, with the unfairness of it all. I think
I will die of unfairness; I think it will be written on my
death certificate. That this duty should devolve to me, for
a start – because I am the careful one, of course. I have a
car, an accommodating phone bill. I have daughters who
are not obliged to fight over who is wearing the other one’s
knickers in the morning before they go to school. So I am
the one who has to drive over to Mammy’s and ring the
doorbell and put myself in a convenient hitting position
on the other side of her kitchen table. It is not as if I got
these things by accident – husband, car, phone bill, daughters.
So I am in a rage with every single one of my brothers
and sisters, including Stevie, long dead, and Midge, recently
dead, and I am boiling mad with Liam for being dead too,
just now, when I need him most. Quite literally, I am
beyond myself. I am so angry I have a second view of the
kitchen, a high view, looking down: me with one wet sleeve
rolled up, my bare forearm lying flat on the table, and on
the other side of the table, my mother, cruciform, her head
drooping from the little white triangle of her bare neck.
This is where Liam is. Up here. I feel him like a shout
in the room. This is what he sees; my bare arm, our mother
playing aeroplane between the counter and the table.
Flying low.
‘Mammy.’
The sound keeps coming out of her. I lift my arm.
‘Mammy.’
She has no idea of how much has been done for her in
the six days since the first phone call from Britain. She was
spared all that: Kitty running around London and me
around Dublin for dental records; his height, and the colour
of his hair, and the tattoo on his right shoulder. None of
this was read back to her as it was to me, this morning, by
the very nice bean garda who called to the door, because I
am the one who loved him most. I feel sorry for policewomen
– all they do is relatives, and prostitutes, and cups
of tea.
There is saliva falling from my mother’s bottom lip now,
in gobs and strings. Her mouth keeps opening. She keeps
trying to close it but her lips refuse to stay shut and, ‘Gah.
Gah,’ she says.
I must go over and touch her. I must take her by the
shoulders and lift her gently up and away. I will squeeze
her arms back down by her sides as I push and guide her
to a chair, and put sugar in her cup of tea, though she does
not take sugar. I will do all this in deference to a grief that
is biological, idiot, timeless.
She would cry the same for Ivor, less for Mossie, more
for Ernest, and inconsolably, as we all would, for the lovely
Jem. She would cry no matter what son he was. It occurs
to me that we have got something wrong here, because I
am the one who has lost something that can not be replaced.
She has plenty more.
There were eleven months between me and Liam. We
came out of her on each other’s tails; one after the other,
as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity. Sometimes I
think we overlapped in there, he just left early, to wait
outside.
‘Are you all right, Mammy? Will you have a cup of tea?’
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Gathering
by Anne Enright
Copyright © 2007 by Anne Enright.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
BLACK CAT
Copyright © 2007
Anne Enright
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7039-2
