The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,32

Ada might have been good with other people’s children, but she was manifestly terrible with her own. But, ‘Oh she was lovely,’ they said, the neighbours and few remaining friends: two men–I now realise they were gay–who were kind to her, the daughter of a dead actress who used to be on the telly. And didn’t Jimmy O’Dea send a basket of fruit on her birthday? And Frank Duff who was the actual head of the Legion of Mary called to her house every Christmas. Indeed he did: I remember him, it must have been the year we stayed there, arriving like a little spinster Santa Claus with a box of chocolates in a string bag. He handed it to Ada and pressed her forearm, like they had lived too much, each of them, to have anything left to say.

That Christmas morning was as clean and crisp as it always is–my memory will not allow it to rain. But neither will it allow us home to Griffith Way, because this was the year that we were farmed out to Ada, me and Liam and Kitty, and we did not see our mother, not even for Christmas, though our father did arrive with a smug-looking Bea some time in the afternoon.

‘Mammy’s still not herself,’ she said, looking extra pious in her new tank top, a mohair thing in stripes of raspberry and blue. And in the evening, Mr Nugent dropped by with a box of jellied fruit, or jelly impersonating fruit, in semi-circles of orange and yellow and green.

I was still too close to these things to care about them, the year that Ada died. The past was a bore to me, Ada’s death completely tedious, as we passed the sandwiches and suffered the overused air of these little rooms. And, ‘Oh she was terribly nice, your Granny,’ which was true, of course. Which was only true. And they sipped or refused their light sherries, and cleared the kitchen in a riot of grease-proof paper, and were gone, leaving my mother in her chair in the good room, my uxorious father standing beside her, slightly stooped; Auntie Rose upstairs sneaking a last fag out the bathroom window, because she still did not officially smoke, even though her mother was far too dead to care, and besides, she always knew.

It might seem a little indecent, but it was at this point we were sent up to Ada’s bedroom, under instruction from our father to ‘take what you like’; the Hegarty girls enjoying the quietest screaming match we ever had, choked with fury and hating each other in whispers. I ended up with some strings of jet beads, the black ostrich feathers from Ada’s mantelpiece, and a little porcelain hand with a gap in the palm where she kept her rings. Someone else got the rings, of course–I didn’t have a chance. Kitty always needed things more than you did, Bea always deserved them more, while poor Midge–well, Midge always refused everything until she was persuaded to grab the lot. So I left the house with a howl of regret for all I had been denied, though there was nothing there I actually wanted. I had baggsed, on a whim, Ada’s swatches and books of cloth and they seemed such useless objects by the light of day that I pushed them into a bin on the street. I did not know how to want what she had left behind. I wanted out of there, that was all. I wanted a larger life.

Liam missed all of this, because after the summer we went to work in London, he did not come home. Or rather he turned up now and then, and went to a few lectures: I would bump into him in the restaurant or bar, and he always had somewhere else to stay, and after a few wild months he was gone.

It was his final year at college. Most nights, I missed the bus and stayed with Michael Weiss in his Donnybrook bedsit: two high rooms with a partition around the toilet that didn’t reach the ceiling and another around the kitchenette. The door into the bedroom was missing, and there was a massive old wardrobe beached against the wall. I fell asleep between these hunks of darkness–the black wardrobe, and the open block of the door frame, through which my senses swung–the sex still warm and hurting between my thighs, and no rest to be had anywhere.

There were things I told Michael