The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,36

sorts of late-night homecomings as long as you didn’t ask him for the taxi money, he could let you walk in pissed, as long as you went by him and straight up the stairs, he would fail to hear you throwing up in the toilet as long as you cleaned up afterwards, but when he asks you for a cigarette and you pull out a box of Durex, like a catastrophic schoolgirl, then he is obliged to erupt, and keep erupting, like Old Faithful, until you have found yourself alternative accommodation.

Apart from anything else they were illegal. Everyone had them. Whether we needed them or not.

There was nothing Daddy would not say. He had no sense of distance. He might have been talking to himself, almost. I was whoring all over Dublin. I was second-hand goods, I was turning myself into a toilet–I kid you not–though I think what he really wanted to say was that I was not doing what I was told.

The shouting happened two or three months before my finals. And though it was a bit of a laugh in its way, it did affect my exams–and I was serious about exams. Maybe this was why I felt so unconnected: there I was sitting in the kitchen thinking about Robespierre, not to mention Frank Duff, my father cooking up a rage–he was a small man, Daddy–and I suppose I did my fair share of shouting too, but a part of me was just looking at him, all fizzed up, the redness in his neck, while his face was chalk white, then the redness boiling up around his blue eyes, until his face was suddenly, uniformly red, and ranting. There was also the red dome of his bald head to consider. I remember thinking that he himself didn’t believe what he was saying, and that it was this lack of belief, combined with my own, that drove him to such extremes.

Back in Belfield, my best friend Deirdre Moloney had just been thrown out by her mother for nothing at all: a very low-key sort of girl, she’d only ever had sex twice. Children were being chucked out all over Dublin. All our parents were mad, in those days. There was something about just the smell of us growing up that drove them completely insane.

For a few weeks, Daddy could not look at me, and this hurt me in the Daddy-loves-his-little-girl place; the place where you trust and flirt. But though it hurt, I found that I was able to draw on more ancient hurts than that–and this is how I survived. This is how we all survive. We default to the oldest scar.

What hurts now is the fact that Daddy is dead. He died in 1986. So he never did walk into a shop where they sold condoms by the cash register. He never had to change his mind, not even slightly. I think of him, too, when I palm the cuttlefish bone that Rebecca finds on the beach, because it reminds me of a mango pip; the fact that when Daddy died no one in Ireland ate mango, though I think kiwi was all the rage by then. And I feel I must console him for mangoes. I must console him for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped.

His ghost, incidentally, could not give a damn about who I slept with. His ghost is beyond sex. And sometimes I think that so am I.

Still, there was Michael, before the storm, shaking my father’s hand and my father not saying, ‘Weiss? What class of a name is that, at all?’

Me coming into the kitchen in a bronze-coloured Jenny Vander dress, looking, at a guess, pretty good. The two of us walking away from the house where I grew up, Michael Weiss beside himself with delight.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. Everything you said. It’s all true.’

And I was–I still am, even as I write this–mortified.

15

ADA’S HALL DOOR was flat against the street. There was no garden or path up to it so people passed by, very close, without ever coming in. This arrangement was as implacable as Ada herself, and as exciting. She was, in my mind, always at cross purposes to the world.

In the summer, the door had a cream canvas cover, with thick and thin rust stripes. There was a horizontal mouth cut out for the letterbox, a long slit for the knocker, and a little round hole