The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,53

difficult question for her to answer at forty-seven, and it is the one that is raised by Nugent’s hand to her hip: the question of whether she ever loved anybody, her vagrant husband, or her children, or herself, or the parents she never had.

What of it? Ada does not love people so much as feed them and keep them clean, and this is a form of loving too, but he has sucked it out of her, this man with his four healthy children and his perfectly nice wife, he has taken her domestic love and found it wanting, and for a moment Ada does not recognise the lie–that all women are heartless because they are desired. For a moment, Ada stands there and thinks that it is true (and perhaps it is true), she has never loved a single soul. She is alone. There is nothing left for her to do.

By the time they move, it is all over. Ada’s love has been tried and found wanting, also Nugent’s, also love in general–they are in agreement about this. So there is nothing consoling about the slide of her hand to the back of Nugent’s melancholy head, or in the pull of his hand that brings her to her knees, as he shifts down from the low chair to join her on the floor, and there is something martyred in the lift of Ada’s chin as she clears a place for his head on her shoulder and his face against her neck. And they move in this way, by shivering pauses and deliberate starts, through the body’s chess until she is fully prepared, and on her own living-room floor, waiting.

I would like to think something else happened, when he entered her. But I do not know what. They were in love, suddenly. Or they were in pain. Or what?

They had a nice time.

They pulled the house down around their ears: God smashed in the grate, History, in tatters, festooned like Ada’s tights on the fire-irons.

The bookie fucks the whore (I had forgotten she was a whore), and we are near to the truth of it here, we are getting to the truth of it–of man’s essential bookieness and woman’s essential whoreishness–we are pushing for it now as Nugent pushes into Ada, the fact of her baseness, the fact that she wants it too. Or is this enough? Would he not, to prove his point, need to do more?

I can twist them as far as you like, here on the page; make them endure all kinds of protraction, bliss, mindlessness, abjection, release. I can bend and reconfigure them in the rudest possible ways, but my heart fails me, there is something so banal about things that happen behind closed doors, these terrible transgressions that are just sex after all.

Just sex.

I would love to leave my body. Maybe this is what they are about, these questions of which or whose hole, the right fluids in the wrong places, these infantile confusions and small sadisms: they are a way of fighting our way out of all this meat (I would like to just swim out, you know?–shoot like a word out of my own mouth and disappear with a flick of my tail) because there is a limit to what you can fuck and with what, Nugent opening Ada’s belly with his wicked, square fingers, delving into her cavities, taking with careful desire the beautiful lobes of her lungs and caressing–‘Oh,’ gasps Ada, as the air rushes out of her–squeezing her pink lungs tight.

‘Oh.’

I reach the end of what they might do, what they might have done, and it all shrivels back to this:

Ada reaches her hand to Nugent’s shoulder and he, in the manner of a person who knows her these many years, looks up and lifts his hand to her hip. They stay like that for a moment, and then Ada dips to lift the tray, and turns to leave the room.

22

THERE ARE FACTS about the way that Liam died, that I wish I did not know. All the things I have forgotten in my life, and I can not forget these small details. I have forgotten my twenty-first birthday, also my eighteenth birthday, I have forgotten every New Year’s Eve but two, I have forgotten what my dead brother looked like at the age of nine or ten or twelve, but I will never forget the three little facts the nice people in Brighton told me about the body that they