The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,66

to cross.

I do now.

Now I know that the look in Liam’s eye was the look of someone who knows they are alone. Because the world will never know what has happened to you, and what you carry around as a result of it. Even your sister–your saviour in a way, the girl who stands in the light of the hall–even she does not hold or remember the thing she saw. Because, by that stage, I think I had forgotten it entirely.

Over the next twenty years, the world around us changed and I remembered Mr Nugent. But I never would have made that shift on my own–if I hadn’t been listening to the radio, and reading the paper, and hearing about what went on in schools and churches and in people’s homes. It went on slap-bang in front of me and still I did not realise it. And for this, I am very sorry too.

26

EMILY TURNS HER cat’s eyes to me.

‘How did Uncle Liam die?’ she says.

‘He drowned,’ I say.

‘How did he drown?’

‘He couldn’t breathe in the water.’

‘In the sea water?’

‘Yes.’

It is important to be clear about these things–Emily needs to dismantle the world before she can put it together again. Rebecca’s mind is a vaguer sort of machine, anxiety sets her adrift. Sometimes I wish she would focus up, but who is to say which is the better way to be?

‘I can swim,’ says Emily.

‘Yes, you can swim, you’re a great swimmer.’

‘Couldn’t he not swim?’

‘Sweetie, he didn’t want to.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you want a hug?’

‘No.’

‘No what?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well, I want a hug. Come here and give your poor mother a hug.’

And she comes over with outstretched arms and a big fake smile for the ‘Poor Mummy’ pantomime. I should think of her as selfish, but I don’t–I think of her as utterly beautiful in her selfishness.

‘I think it’s OK to kill yourself,’ she says into my chest. ‘You know, when you’re old.’

It is hard to remember that they don’t mean to hurt–or don’t know that they do. I push her back from me and I say, in a tear-thickened shame-on-you voice, ‘Your Uncle Liam was not old, Emily. He was sick. Do you hear me? Your Uncle Liam was sick, in his head.’

She lingers at my knee and draws with her fingernail in the smooth nylon of my tights.

‘Like seasick sick?’

‘Oh forget it, all right? Just forget it.’

She jumps in to hug me, her victory won over all my concerns. And then she runs off to play.

For a week, I compose a great and poetic speech for my children about how there are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts–they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared.

I am all for sadness, I say, don’t get me wrong. I am all for the ordinary life of the brain. But we fill up sometimes, like those little wooden birds that sit on a pole–we fill up with it, until donk, we tilt into the drink.

27

ABOUT A MONTH after the funeral, Tom comes home as usual and he slings his coat into the sofa and sets his briefcase down, then he comes over to the dining area, working his tie loose, taking off his jacket, hanging it on the back of a hardback chair; he mooches over to the island to pick a piece of fruit from the bowl, and I think, It never happened, Liam never died, it is all the same as it ever was. Instead of which, I say, ‘You’d fuck anything.’

‘What?’ he says.

I say, ‘I don’t know where it starts and where it ends, that’s all. You’d fuck the nineteen-year-old waitress, or the fifteen-year-old who looks nineteen.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I don’t know where the edges are, that’s all. I don’t know where you draw the line. Puberty, is that a line? It happens to girls at nine, now.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he says.

‘Or not to your actual fucking. Of course. But just, you know, to your desire. To what you want. Is there a limit to what you want to fuck, out there?’

I have gone mad.

‘Jesus Christ,’ says Tom.

He plucks his jacket from the chair and heads for the front door, but I’ve got my bag and I’m there before him, scrabbling for the latch.

‘You’re not leaving,’ I say.

‘Get out of the way.’

‘You’re not leaving. I’m leaving. I am the one who is going