The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,62

it, a different set of words.

Pup, gurrier, monkey, thug, hopeless, useless, mad, messer.

Now he is dead, I have to say that Liam had his glamour days too.

My brother was unexpectedly beautiful at the age of fifteen–this, when I was still in the full grease and growth of adolescence. ‘Where d’you get those rat’s tails?’ Ita would say about my hair, or, ‘Why are your eyelids so red, do you think you’ve got an infection?’

Ita was going to be ‘beautiful’, she was going to ‘get a man’, so there was something indestructible about her looks from an early age. Meanwhile, my own face became less readable to me, from week to week. ‘Where did you get that conk?’ she said. Which was a good question, Ita, which was a very good question, thanks.

Liam had a funny hair thing going for a while and his lips flowered bizarrely and permanently one day when he was fourteen. But because he was small and, I suppose, ‘pretty’, his adolescence lasted about a week. At sixteen he was beautiful and bad, and the blue of his eyes was a dizzy thing. And though his restlessness made him finally unfit for the adult world, in his last years at school Liam was a princeling, a heartbreaker; he was beyond the rules.

As soon as Mossie left home Liam moved to the garden passage, where the walls were whitewashed, and there was rough-cut lino on the floor. This space had the advantage of an outside door, so you never knew if he was in there or not. He had a little cohort that hopped over the back wall and looked in the kitchen window from time to time; boys mostly, and after a while, a few girls. He had a best friend, Willow, for hanging out and experiments–most of which seemed to involve stuffing things down their trousers pockets and looking idiotic any time I opened the door.

I didn’t care. I was too old for them by then. I was busy doodling love-lorn fragments about Willow’s older brother Tanner on the covers of my school folders. I wrote them in French, so no one would understand–except Mrs Gogarty, of course, who was the French teacher. Mon amour est un petit oiseau brun/ Blessé par toi,/ Tanner. She read it all upside down and looked at me fondly, and smiled. I hated her for this. I hated her finding me out and loving me a little (which she seemed to do). The thing is, there was great privacy in a big family. No one got into your stuff except to steal it or slag you off. No one ever pitied you, or loved you a little, except maybe Ernest whose pity was, even then, too deliberate to matter. And we thought this was an honourable way to live. I still do, in a way.

Meanwhile, I had two friends dropping in on the way home from school, of a sudden, and we had a fantastic good time–until Liam walked into the kitchen, when the good time got even better: Fidelma, who I didn’t mind one way or the other and my best friend Jackie, who I did mind, actually. Apart from anything else, I thought, he was too short for her. We drank together outside midnight Mass one Easter, sitting in the field where they would build a school; passing a naggin of vodka, which we mixed in our mouths with a slug of fizzy orange. It was with some reluctance that I let it all happen–though it did have to happen, I knew that. Or not reluctance–what was the feeling? Loneliness. The sight of Liam turning into the quietness of my friend Jackie’s face, in the dark. Meanwhile, Willow and I sat apart and swallowed loudly. Inside the church they passed the paschal flame from candle to candle until it looked like the whole place was on fire: then they switched on the fluorescent lights.

I haven’t had vodka in years; even now there is something sweet and crotch-like about the smell of it, a big waft of earth and adolescence coming out of the glass and hitting you in the face. Jackie crying down the phone to me, and then Fidelma in her turn, until I shouted at Liam to leave my fucking friends alone. After which, he headed out for his Saturday-night solo and I hitched up with Joe Ninety–so-called because he was thirty years old–a man who, I now realise, wanted to break into me so badly