The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,23

it and laughed. I must have been very young, my hand all disappeared into this huge face and–somewhere else, it seemed–the surging chaos of his wet tongue, the gentle flats and tips of his molar teeth.

The skull is the bone that is nearest the air. This is what I realised as I looked at the skin on the dome of Charlie’s head; it was bloodlessly transparent, and the tan was all on the surface, in the thinnest glaze. Ada was back from the window, urging us forward to view, or witness, or maybe even touch, this briefly sacred thing, our dead grandfather. And I suppose it is amazing. The viewing moment. When they have left, but are not yet gone. When you are not quite sure what it is you see.

So I did look–at him, or it. And it was all fine and unsurprising, except for the moustache. Charlie, alive, had the most wonderful white bush of a moustache, lemon-scented and turned slightly at the tips. My grandfather was the only man I knew with a toy on his face. His moustache moved and distracted and dazzled. It was a sleight of mouth. And now it was still, and hiding nothing at all.

There was no trick.

That was the thing that made me cry–waiting for Charlie’s moustache to move, and finding that it did not move. There was no trick, after all. Ada back beside us whispering, ‘Say goodbye, now,’ and Liam, who was older than me by nearly a year, taking a step forward and then stopping, because he did not know what to do.

‘Shush,’ Ada said to me. ‘Stop crying.’

I wonder did they take the blood out? I mean, I wonder if he was embalmed before he was laid out, was that the custom in those days? The blood that was pooling in his shoulders and buttocks, the blood that had fallen to the back of his head, seeking gravity, already wanting to leach down through the mattress: the blood that bruised or hardened in him now, as the front of him (you see it is true) grew infinitesimally lighter, and we stood there, letting him go: that blood, so heavy and sticky and wrong–I wonder if it was still inside him, because it is the same, or a quarter the same, as my own blood. If I cut myself, right now, I would see it running free.

It’s funny, but I have never thought of myself as related to Charlie, even though he was my grandfather. He was a different kind of person. He danced with Ada in the kitchen. He didn’t have a job you could put a name on. He wasn’t always home.

None of the Hegartys got his dog-brown eyes, or his fine, high nose–though it is true that his grandsons all went bald, in time. And this is something Liam could not have foreseen as he stood there waiting to do the proper thing, as soon as he knew what the proper thing was to do. He did not see that he would die bald as a coot, though I think we both knew, as he leaned forward to touch Charlie’s poor dead hand, that Liam would die.

He was on his way.

If you ask me what my brother looked like after he was dead, I can tell you that he looked like Mantegna’s foreshortened Christ, in paisley pyjamas. And this may be a general truth about the dead, or it may just be what happens when someone is lying on a high, mortuary table, with their feet towards the door. That is how I knew that Liam was dead, when I finally saw him in Brighton, the fact that he was too high off the ground, and the thing he was lying on was too hard and flat, because the dead are never uncomfortable–even as we start forward to make them so. I don’t think I looked at the top of his head, or thought about his baldness, or thought about anything. And I was glad I had some practice in this whole business–the viewing business–because although I loved Charlie, it was with the easy, anxious love of a child, that is always ready to love someone new.

But, dead or alive, you don’t spend time examining your brother’s body, its shape or parts, or the texture of its skin. So I can not recall Liam in any detail. All I know is that he looked completely different dead, while Charlie looked very like himself. And, as