The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,65

looked at me.

What if he had raped her? Isn’t that one of the things that men do? What if there was blood on her leg, tears on her face? Snot. What else?

I was sixteen and I knew nothing at all about sex. Isn’t that strange? Whatever I knew of the mechanics of it was not available to me, somehow. I did not know how these things went. It seems that the years of my adolescence were years of increasing innocence, because by sixteen I was completely passionate and completely pure. We would all become poets, I thought, we would love mightily, and Liam, in his anger, would change the world.

Even so, there was something I couldn’t quite get a handle on: something that was highly relevant, that I really needed to know. In the end I had to ask him.

‘Was it Natalie–the cop thing?’

Liam looked at me. And the gap that opened between us was the gap that exists between a woman and a man–or so I thought, at sixteen–the difference between what a man might do, or want to do, sexually, what a woman might only guess at.

‘Were you messing with her?’ I said.

And he said, ‘Don’t be so thick.’

There was a wood we walked through once. It was autumn, perhaps even that autumn. The trunks of the trees were grey and bright, and the leaves that clung to them were as theatrical an orange as leaves could get. It was an avenue of beech trees, I think now, with the roots lifting massively out of the earth in front of us.

That’s all.

It was a romantic scene, walking along this avenue of orange leaves, so I would have been thinking of Tanner or Joe Ninety or whoever it was that week: I would have been thinking of the unknown man I was destined to love. Instead of which I was stuck, in all this beauty, with my brother.

There were mountains in the distance; massive with rock and heather. We walked under a high, pale sky and we felt, in this landscape, so small, and there was no one to judge. That’s all. There was an immense feeling of Godlessness about it. Which made it sort of funny, in a way–all of it: the mountains and the pale sky and the overly orange leaves that refused to fall, in these, the closing days of our unholy alliance.

What was the best time?

When Liam was fourteen or so, he had a bike and I had none and he used to give me a crossbar down to the shops or up to the local swimming pool. I don’t know how he saw over my shoulder to do it. There was always a fight over the steering–me holding the handlebars rigid, him trying to pull them one way or the other, with his chin digging into my back, and my hair in his eyes. He cycled bandy, and my legs were stuck out to one side; so we were a thing of elbows and knees, the poke of handlebar ends and the vicious jab of stainless-steel pedals. You would think we did it for fun, but it was a fight from first to last.

After which, in the pool, we would ignore each other on the grounds of gender, and if there were no boys for him to hang out with, he swam alone, and if there were no girls I did the same. Sometimes we knew nobody, but we did not give up the chance of getting to know someone by ever speaking to each other. And if he did come over to me, with his skinny wet chest and his face all red in patches, I would be completely annoyed with him for blowing my cover. Because who can be a mysterious object of the deep when their brother is hanging around, saying, ‘You’ve got a snotter.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Big green one.’

‘No, I haven’t. Go away.’

‘There it is.’

‘Fuck off!! Go away!’

His skinny chest arching backwards. His messy, purple mouth going under. His foot churning water in my face, as he swims off to join the monstrous boys at the other end of the pool.

Natalie would have been there too, a fat little ten-year-old with a few pubic hairs like an old woman’s chin–she lost the bottom of her bikini every time she dived off the edge of the pool. Four years later I ask Liam was he messing with her, and he gives me a look from a distance that I do not know how