The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,68

a little shake, like he can not believe the contract that was being offered to us, just there.

‘What was all that about?’ When I get back from dropping off the babysitter he is sitting in the living room, making his way through a bottle of whiskey, in the dark.

Or maybe this was another night. For a while, all those nights were the same.

‘Do you want the light on?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Are you coming to bed?’

Here we go, again. Always after a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on.

‘No, I’ll just sit up a while.’

‘It’s up to you.’

‘Yes.’

Push me pull you. Come here and I’ll tell you how much I hate you. Hang on a minute while I leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be. I know what it is now, though, because upstairs the baby shouts in her sleep. I move to go.

‘Thanks,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Thanks for staying with me.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘No. Really.’

Or some version of the above–we rarely shout, myself and Tom, we just hate.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I say.

And one night–it might even have been this night, after the hake in green sauce, and Brian’s plump wife, and the ugly woman in the bad underwear, and all the winning and the losing–Tom takes the cigarette out of his mouth. He holds it up, high under my chin, and he scrunches it in his fist. The smell, when he opens his hand, is small and terrible.

It clears my head.

The thing is, if I go up to Rebecca and kiss her, she will be happy. If I sit on the arm of the chair and kiss Tom, he will not be happy. So I stay with him for just a moment more, in the singed smell of his self-disgust. I hold his skull against my breast. I do this until Rebecca’s wailing grows to the exact pitch that pulls me to my feet, every time. Then I go.

It was the children that did for us, at least for a while. I think he stopped hating me after I left work. Of course, Tom would say he never hated me, that he loved me all along. But I know hating when I see it. I know it, because there is a part of me that wants to be hated, too.

There must be.

Anyway.

It did get easier over the years, but it never really did get fixed.

I thought about this, as I sat in the Shelbourne bar–that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go ‘home’ where I could ‘have sex’ with my ‘husband’ just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn’t seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.

28

THE BRITISH, I decide, only bury people when they are so dead, you need another word for it. The British wait so long for a funeral that people gather not so much to mourn, as to complain that the corpse is still hanging around. There is a queue, they say on the phone (the British love a queue). They do not gather until the emotion is gone.

What else am I to make of the ten days we have to wait for paperwork; the death certificates and removal orders, that have to find their separate ways into the one envelope that will accompany my brother on his journey home.

Meanwhile, as computers wait and printers jam, as coroner’s assistants go to the gym, and registrars wrestle with the collapse of their central heating systems, Liam lies in some unspecified foreign fridge, and I–we all–get on with things. From time to time, as I move about the house, I am gripped by the thought that I have, shamefully, forgotten something: there is a tampon seeping into the water of the downstairs toilet; I have left half a biscuit on the arm of a chair, or forgotten to finish my tea. I can feel it going cold in my mouth, as I hunt around and finally find the empty cup.

Every day I go over to Griffith Way and sit in a formal sort of way with my mother, and Bea if she is there, or Kitty. We talk about ordinary things. Or we settle her in front of the television set