The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,72

having all sorts of amazing friends–but when he came home, he always seemed a bit of a throwback, a hick.

My emigrant brother makes an old-fashioned ghost, and when he died, I dressed him in worn-out wellington boots, as the Irish seventies dipped back into the fifties in my mind.

30

I AM EXPECTING the house to be crammed, but Bea shakes her head slightly by the door.

‘Just us, really,’ she says. ‘A few neighbours.’

‘What do you expect?’ I want to say. ‘Who’s going to come and look at a dead body in your living room, when there isn’t even a decent glass of wine in the house?’ But I do not say this. Tom is behind me. He has taken my elbow, and is using it like a joystick to steer me around her, and I would be annoyed, but his grip is so old-fashioned. No one holds you like that any more, except Frank at work who was gay, and is now dead.

‘It’s all in the eyes,’ he said once, as he eased me into some awful corporate bash. And, Poor Frank, I think. Why did I not grieve for Frank? And I realise, suddenly and with great conviction, that I must carpet the upstairs, Frank would have been all for it. And get a cleaner again. I must get a cleaner to deal with the extra fluff. Then I remember Rebecca’s asthma–as I always do at this point–and before I finish remembering this I am looking at Liam’s dead body in the front room.

Haven’t we met before?

I can see the exact colour of the new carpet I want. ‘Driftwood’, I think they call it.

Why do you keep following me around?

The room is almost empty. There is no one here that I can talk to about children’s lungs or carpet colours, about weaves and nubbles and seagrass or percentages of wool. Dead or alive. Liam does not care about such things. I sit down. They have put him in a navy suit with a blue shirt–like a Garda. He would have liked that.

Who dressed him?

The young English undertaker, with the full mouth and the pierced ear; talking on his mobile to his girlfriend as he lifts the heavy head to slip the tie around.

The suit, I am sure, will be on the bill.

I expected the coffin to be set across the room, but there is not enough space for this. Liam’s head points towards the closed curtains and there are candles behind him, set on high stands. I can not see his face properly from where I sit. The wood of the coffin angles down, slicing across the bulge of his cheek. I can see a dip in the bone where his eyes must go, but I do not get up to see if this dip is correctly filled, or if the lids are closed. This lift and fall of bone is all I want to see of him, for the moment, thank you very much.

The armchairs and the sofa have been pushed back, but Mrs Cluny, who has paused to pray, has chosen to sit on one of the hard chairs brought in from the kitchen. Kitty is on duty by the far wall in case a mourner should be left indecently alone with the corpse, in case the corpse should be left indecently alone. She looks at me as I perch on the arm of the sofa and she rolls her eyes. After a minute she comes over and says, quietly, ‘Will you stay?’

‘No,’ I tell her. She does not understand. The whole business is finished for me now, it is beyond finished. I just want to get the damn thing buried and out of the way.

I say, ‘I’ll get Ita or someone. No. I can’t. I have the kids.’

‘Oh, the kids,’ she says, slightly too loud.

‘Yeah, you know. Kids.’

And in fact Rebecca is in the room of a sudden, backing towards me until she bumps into my knees.

‘Where’s your father?’

When I look over, I see Emily swinging out of the door handles with her eyes fixed on the coffin and her shoe kicking the paint.

‘Would you stop that,’ I say.

She doesn’t.

‘Will you stop leaving scuff marks on your Granny’s door.’

Then I realise where we are.

‘It’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘He’s dead.’ Which is not, when I think about it, the most comforting thing I could say.

In a sudden flare of kilt and sandy-coloured hair Rebecca is back at the door, and they are both gone. I hear