The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,63

he had to turn away from the kiss to push his forehead into the wall. I loved all that. Joe Ninety liked me to dress up and he got me into pubs, while Liam slid backwards from me, into his misspent youth.

One night Bea picked up the phone in the hall.

‘Yes. Yes, it is,’ she said and the whole house paused to listen. She got Daddy.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘Right. Right. Right so.’ Then he trudged upstairs and found his jacket and tie and went out into the autumn darkness, shutting the front door behind him.

He never went out at night.

An hour later, he walked back in the door as he had walked out of it, expressionless and sad. Behind him, Liam shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands, to say there was no need for the welcoming committee. Later, he told us he had been bailed out of the local copshop, or prised out more like, by Daddy, and it was nothing–they just gave him a slap and sent him home.

We never found out why. Daddy wouldn’t speak of it–not then or ever–and he treated Liam with a new, and complete, contempt. It was over for them: no more shouting, no more leaning in from Daddy, who used to stick out his forefinger and poke the boys in the hollow of the shoulder.

‘What. Am I. After. Saying to you?’

Poke. Poke. Poke.

Sometimes I wonder why there wasn’t murder in that kitchen.

‘You’re pushing it, Da. Don’t push me now.’

But Daddy didn’t even bother pushing Liam any more. The Gardai had rung the house and the shame of it was so total, there was nothing left to be said.

When I think of it now–such carry-on. Liam, in the kitchen, lifting his hair to show the dried patch of blood, and a streak of red from cheek to neck, where he had caught his face on the handle of the cell door. I remember it in vivid technicolour: his hair very black, and the streak very red, and eyes an undiluted blue. They just ‘knocked him round a bit’, he said, gave him ‘a bit of a thump’.

And I said, ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

He looked at me.

I think, now, that what I meant was that if they hit him then it must have been his fault. I also meant that, if pushed, I would disbelieve him even though what he said was, strictly speaking, true.

If I am looking for the point when I betrayed my brother, then it must be here, too. I looked at the raised flesh on his cheek and I decided not to believe him, if there was any ‘believing’ to be done. That was all.

I decided that he did not deserve to be believed.

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ I said.

What else?

We used to laugh about things: foothering priests, and little boys’ bollocks, and ‘Come here and sit on my knee, little man,’ and English choirboys and gay men’s backsides, and anything really to do with innocence and bums, though nobody mentioned–now that I pause to list all this–nobody mentioned your langer, or your wire, or getting your mickey licked. Now why is that? Why did we think it was all hilarious, but only in certain, almost ritual, ways?

These conversations happened for a month or two one summer, and then they were gone. I liked them. I liked the silence after the laughter stopped. Liam’s silence was like he had just peed himself but no one had noticed, so it was all magically OK. And my silence was the smallest possibility–taken up, and then set down again–of pointing out the wet patch.

For which pleasure, tiny but very keen, I would like to be forgiven. I would like to be forgiven, now, because I am very sorry for it.

If I believed in such a thing as confession I would go there and say that, not only did I laugh at my brother, but I let my brother laugh at himself, all his life. This laughing phase lasted through his cheerful drinking, and through his raucous drinking, and only petered out in the final stinking stage of his drinking. But he never gave it up completely–the idea that it was all a complete joke.

Liam never had any truck with self-pity, his own, or anyone else’s. When someone was miserable–Kitty, for example–it was always for the wrong reasons as far as he was concerned. Don’t get me wrong, Liam loved people who suffered–he loved the poor, the destitute, the lonely, the alcoholic, he