The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,70

I do. The imponderable pain of my mother, against which I have hardened my heart. Just one glass over the odds and I will thump the table, like the rest of them, and howl for her too.

This is what, over the years, my mother has made:

1) Cups of tea.

My mother has wet, in her lifetime, many thousands of pots of tea–she never made anything else, really. And we always fought over it. Midge liked hers stewed; Ernest, weak. Mossie liked to wave the pot around, but it was Ita who splashed me once, swinging it round in an arc–I can still see the dirty ribbon of water looping towards me, the line of pain across my midriff, and how cold the cotton was, as I tried to peel it off.

Who’s for tea?

Strange to say, she only made two alcoholics, of the actual would-you-ever-try-AA variety. But all the Hegartys are thirsty. All the Hegartys would kill for a decent cup of tea.

2) Descendants.

Most of the girls are genetic culs-de-sac and who would blame them, though Midge had six–she had them early and she had them often; her first coinciding with Mammy’s last (it’s not a competition, you know). Jem has two lovely babies. Mossie, the psychotic, has three careful children who have never left the family home in Clontarf.

3) Money.

No one has a proper job, except Bea who works as an office manager in a big estate agents in town, also Mossie who is an anaesthetist (we suspect that someday he will leave the gas on that tiny bit too long). But the rest of us just have euphemisms. Ita is a homemaker, Kitty is an actress, I am a night owl, Alice is a gardener. Both Ivor and Jem work in multimedia, which is the biggest euphemism of them all. Ernest is a priest (I rest my case).

4) Heterosexuals.

‘Are you all straight?’ my friend Frank once said to me, in tones of great disbelief.

‘Hmmmmm…’ I said.

Midge? Not really relevant, is it? Once you are dead. Or, alternatively, once you’ve married a pub manager and bought a house in Churchtown. Midge was a mother; she was a wiper, a walloper, a panicker, a hoarder of pains, especially her biggest and last. She might have been gay or straight or sheep-shagging, it is too sad to think about, really. What Midge desired, never mattered in the slightest. As for the rest of them: half of Bea’s boyfriends are gay, but I don’t think she is. Ernest is celibate. Kitty sleeps with lots of men, and she loves each of them and they are all married. Is that a sexual orientation? It should be–the little bitch. She only shags the impossible dream.

No one knows about Alice. But everyone knows about the twins Ivor and Jem who have very pleasant, normal sex (hurray!)–not with each other, I hasten to add, but with their partners, one of whom is a girl from Surrey and one of whom is a nice German radio producer (male).

Meanwhile, Baby Stevie has little angel sex, up there in heaven, naked with the rest of the cherubs. He is queer as all get out. They make little noises when they kiss. It sounds just like their name. Putti. Putti. Putti.

None of us is straight. It is not that the Hegartys don’t know what they want, it is that they don’t know how to want. Something about their wanting went catastrophically astray.

This is what I sense as I look up the stairs to the room where we were all conceived: I sense the chaos of our fate–or not so much a chaos as a vagueness–the way that no one could find a groove. And I remember how proud we were. And how loyal. And the way we all stuck together. And wasn’t that just great?

I always knew where everyone was. I used to sit on the window sill of our room, curled up against the fragile sheet of glass and track the entire house: Ita at the bathroom mirror, Midge at the sink. Mossie scratching his scalp into the seam of his biology book, Liam keeping company in the garden passage. Even at night I could tell who was where: each room cold and differently stale as the whole, soured day unloaded itself through my brothers’ sleeping skin; the scent of my mother’s tablets in the upstairs toilet, after she went in there to pee.

They are waking up. They are coming back home.

Bea, Ernest, Ita, Mossie, Kitty, maybe Alice and definitely the