The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,61
and I think, with relief, that the lunatics have gone now. The lunatics have turned, quite naturally, to dust. People are not mad, any more. The lunatics are just a residue of skin in these rooms; scratched off, or hacked off, or maybe just shed: a million flakes of skin, a softness under the floorboards, a quality of light.
We pass a courtyard with a high chimney and a low boiler house, all in extravagant, industrial red brick. There are curious round windows on the boiler house, with the Star of David dividing the panes.
‘Jesus,’ says Kitty, thinking, as I am thinking for a second, that they are burning mental patients in there, just to keep the hospital radiators hot.
I pause at the handball alley, engine idling, and look at the round tower and the water tower beyond. But it is not possible to pull up the handbrake and get out into the naked air of the asylum, with the casement windows still watching in their rows. I inch towards a bungalow down by the sea, my fat tyres creeping over the gravel, then I do a three-point turn, and leave.
Once we are back out the gate, I scoot the few hundred yards to the sea itself, the public sea, the swimming sea. Salt water always makes me feel so sane; the height of the waves, and the flick of fish, and the huge press of it on the ocean floor all notwithstanding. There is a little housing estate coming down to the shore, a child on a bicycle, blank with curiosity, and, after I turn at the road’s end, a grey wall enclosing a small field. And in that field–it is quite small–is a Celtic cross that says:
I get out of the car to look at it.
1922–1989
IN YOUR CHARITY,
PLEASE PRAY
FOR THE RESIDENTS OF
ST ITA’S HOSPITAL
BURIED IN THIS CEMETERY
MAY THEY REST IN PEACE
Just one cross–quite new–at the end of a little central path. A double row of saplings promise rowan trees to come. There are no markers, no separate graves. I wonder how many people were slung into the dirt of this field and realise, too late, that the place is boiling with corpses, the ground is knit out of their tangled bones.
I look back, helpless, at Kitty in the front seat of the car.
They have me by the thighs. I am gripped at the thighs by whatever feeling this is. A vague wind. It clutches at me, skitters between my clothes and my skin. It lifts every hair. It grazes my lip. And is gone.
25
I SAW A man with tertiary syphilis at Mass, once. He was sitting in the seat in front of us, minding his own business until Mossie pointed him out, because Mossie was the kind of guy who knew about such things. The flaps of the man’s ears had been eaten away; they had shrivelled back, like melted plastic. When he turned half-profile, you saw that the bridge of his nose had collapsed flat into his face, leaving a nub of flesh, low down where his nostrils were. His breathing was fussy and loud, but he did not look mad–Mossie said later they always went mad in the end. Still, there was no doubting the signs, on his face, of his history.
Kitty said it in the car on the way home from Mass. She must have been about eleven. She said, ‘The man in front of us had tertiary syphilis.’
My father’s head settled down into his neck as he drove, the whole back of him looked thicker. After a moment, my mother said, ‘Oh.’
History is only biological–that’s what I think. We pick and choose the facts about ourselves–where we came from and what it means. I sit and clean the skin from under my nails and think of the last manicure given to Liam by that gentle English undertaker boy, the black rubbings from off a bar; polish and sweat, spilt beer and other people’s skin. What is written for the future is written in the body, the rest is only spoor.
I don’t know when Liam’s fate was written in his bones. And although Nugent was the first man to put his name there, for some reason, I don’t think he was the last. Not because I saw anything else going on, but because this is the way these things work. Of course, no one knew how these things worked at the time. We looked at the likes of Liam and had a whole other story for