The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,13

room they grew up in was full of the wet rattle of her chest; the horrible gurgle of phlegm and the shocking bright blood. Nugent can not forget the nightly rosary, said at a terrible, safe distance from her bed; her white knuckles fumbling on the coverlet for the dropped beads, or the dark light in her eyes as she looked at him, like she saw right through to his bones. His own puberty going unnoticed–almost to himself–as her little breasts swelled under the nightdress. She moved towards death and womanhood at the same pace, the nipples like a spreading bruise, the breasts growing, and failing to grow, over lungs hard with disease. And so, she died.

Is that enough for him to think about, while he is on his knees?

That when he holds his penis in the night-time, it feels like her thin skin; always damp, never sweating. Because, in those days, people used to be mixed up together in the most disgusting ways..

6

THIS IS HOW I live my life since Liam died. I stay up all night. I write, or I don’t write. I walk the house.

Nothing settles here. Not even the dust.

We bought eight years ago, in 1990; a new five-bedroom detached. It’s all a bit Tudor-red-brick-with-Queen-Anne-overtones, though there is, thank God, no portico and inside I have done it in oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate. It is a daytime house so late at night I leave all the lights on with the dimmers turned up high and I walk from room to room. They open into each other so nicely. And I am alone. The girls are just a residue; a movie protruding from the mouth of the machine, a glitter lipstick beside the phone. Tom, my high-maintenance man, is upstairs dreaming his high-maintenance dreams of hurt and redemption in the world of corporate finance, and it is all nothing to do with me.

Oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate.

I started with all sorts of pelmets when we moved in, even swags. I wanted the biggest floral I could find for the bay window at the front–can you imagine it? By the time I had the stuff sourced, I had already moved on to plain Roman blinds and now the garden is properly grown in I want…nothing. I spend my time looking at things and wishing them gone, clearing objects away.

This is how I live my life.

I stay up all night. At half eleven, if he is home, Tom puts his head around the door of the small study and says, ‘Don’t stay up all night!’ as if he didn’t know that I will not sleep with him, not for a good while yet, and perhaps never again–which is how all this started, in a way, my refusal to climb in beside my husband a month or so after Liam died, my inability to sleep in any other bed than the one we used to share. Because I will not have the girls find me in the spare room.

What else can I do? We could not afford a divorce. Besides I do not want to leave him. I can not sleep with him, that is all. So my husband is waiting for me to sleep with him again, and I am waiting for something else. I am waiting for things to become clear.

So we do nothing. We divide our time. At least I do. I take what Tom has left me of the day–there is plenty of it–and I live in his sleep. At seven a.m., when his alarm goes off, I get into bed and he turns to me and complains at the coldness of my rump. He says, ‘Did you stay up all night again?’

‘Sorry.’

As if this was the problem. As if we would have sex, if it weren’t for the coldness of my ass and the eternal, infernal awkwardness of our schedules.

He gets the girls up and out, and so I sleep until three when I drag my face around to the school gates. After which, I ferry them to their ballet or Irish dancing or horse riding, or just home, where they might be allowed to watch telly before tea. I limit the telly–I say it is for their own good, but really it is for me. I like to talk to them. If I don’t talk to them I think I will die of something–call it irrelevance–I think I will just fade away.

So I get a daughter on the sofa and manhandle her into loving me