The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,27

rests in the V of his thighs. He is very pale.

I remember making love to this body: a cloud of hair around the bridge of his penis, when I looked down from above; the little roof of his underarm, like a nave without a church, when I looked up from below. This was back in the early days, when we could not get enough of each other and he traced a candy-stripe of moles around my body, rolling me over as he went, until I was completely unwound, and tipped from the bed on to the floor.

I remember the size and straightness of his collar-bones under his shirt, one night in the rain, in the early-early days, when it wasn’t like sex so much as like killing someone or being killed.

There he is now, in our bed, still alive. The air goes into him and the air comes out. His toenails grow. His hair turns silently grey.

The last time I touched him was the night of Liam’s wake. And I don’t know what is wrong with me since, but I do not believe in my husband’s body any more.

12

BAD NEWS FOR Bea and my mother and all the vultures who will flock to 4 Griffith Way for the wake–which is that there will be another ten days at least to wait before they can feast on Liam’s poor corpse, because of the paperwork involved.

I hear this from an undertaker who looks about nineteen. He touched my arm in the corridor of the Brighton and Hove mortuary and took me away, somehow, in a car or a taxi–whether I sat in the back or the front of it, I can not recall. But I know that I will remember this, the hinterland of the funeral parlour, suburban and pastel: a desk with a chair on either side and, up on a swivel stand, a laminated catalogue of coffins, all kinds and varieties of them, except, when I enquire for the sake of distraction, the eco-warrior’s cardboard.

‘Did he like all that?’ says the boy in black.

‘Not really. A bit.’

I know what I want, I have known all along, but it doesn’t look well to be too previous, so I turn the pages for the hideous silk linings, ruchings and slubbings, like being buried in a cinema curtain just as the projector snaps on and starts playing Looney Tunes. I say some of all this out loud while my undertaker listens a little, and lets me take my time.

His mouth is a solid purplish red against the white of his skin. He has a tiny, wet hole in his ear where his earring should be but is not, while he is talking to the bereaved.

‘No hurry,’ he says.

I love this undertaker. He has that thing that young people got, sometime after I grew up. He does not pretend. He does not judge. He talks about the caskets in a ‘whatever’ sort of way, like it is all just shopping–the real questions are elsewhere.

‘That’s the one,’ he says as I poke my finger at a plain limed oak, and I think that maybe one of my daughters will marry someone like this, someone who is able to sit easy with a woman in a room.

‘I can’t take the flight with him,’ I say. ‘It’s just too…’

‘“Would passengers requiring assistance please come to the front of the queue.”’

And I laugh. Whatever he means.

‘Really, it will be fine in the hold,’ he says.

He is not good-looking. His mouth is too squished and full; he is too soft and unformed. But there is nothing wrong with him. I look at his hands and they do not disgust me, and his eyelids, when he closes them, flickering, in order to make a point about buffed steel as opposed to chrome, have a faint pattern on them of medieval veins. His clothes do not mock his body. You could unpeel him, and he would still be true.

I must ask his name again. (Azrael.)

He touched my arm while I stood by Liam’s body and he led me away. He is the person who comes after you have seen the worst thing. He is the rest of my life.

After I arrived at Brighton station, I walked around for a while, thinking that I should play this the way it happened–I should start at the place where Liam walked into the sea–because there is an order to these things that has to be obeyed. So at lunch-time, I am walking along the