The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,77

in some political talk about the way the country is on the up and up. Ha bloody ha, says the corpse next door.

I want to get drunk. Suddenly. This is a calamitous thing to want, but it can not be denied. I want rid of my children and my husband so I can get properly rat-arsed for once, because God knows I have never been properly rat-arsed before. And there is Kitty rolling her eyes at me, from the other side of the room. Ita! I drift by the sink (because alcoholics are always useful when you want a good time).

‘We need a bottle of something. Is there a bottle, for after?’

And, through gritted teeth, Ita says, ‘I’ll have a look.’

There is a shift in the room. It is time to move, or go. I must talk to Midge’s girls, quickly, before they leave with children and babies and toddlers in tow. My niece Ciara is five months’ pregnant, and her face is violently mottled in the heat.

I dab at her forearm and she grazes my wrist, because pregnant women must touch and be touched, and my look, I know, is quite ardent as I say, ‘Are you sleeping? Did you get the new bed?’ Ciara strokes her stomach, then reaches towards me in another flutter of hands.

‘Jesus, life on a futon,’ she says.

‘That man of yours,’ I say. ‘He should be shot.’

‘It’s his back.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ and we both laugh–dirtily, like we have been talking about sex.

Tom is beside me, liking all this. I turn to salute Uncle Val who is being led off, rather spookily, by Mrs Cluny, to stay next door. When Ciara goes to leave, Tom organises her nappy bag and rounds up Brandon, her toddler. Then he drifts back to me.

He says, ‘Do you remember when you were pregnant with Rebecca and you wouldn’t go to the graveyard–whose funeral was it? You wouldn’t go anyway, because the child would be bandy, you said.’

‘Cam reilige.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what it’s called. In Irish.’

‘You’re a funny thing,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m a hoot.’

Cam reilige, which is Irish for the twist of the grave.

I walk away from him then, feeling, once more, the shadow of a child in me, the swoop of the future in my belly, black and open.

I put my hand to my stomach. It is like a pain, almost.

‘Well it worked, anyway,’ says Tom, still at my shoulder. ‘She has a lovely pair of pins.’

I don’t need you to tell me that. I turn around to say it to him, I don’t need you to tell me that, but instead of seeing my husband, I only see the opening circle of his eye. If we wanted another child, it is waiting for us now. I can almost see it. So it is not all his fault, the sex that happens later. It is not entirely his fault, that I do not enjoy it as sex goes.

Meanwhile he gives me a nod. ‘I’ll take the kids. Any time. Come home any time.’

‘Don’t stay up,’ I say.

And he says, ‘I might.’

It was my sister Midge’s funeral, actually, and I was big as a house. My niece Karen had given birth a month before me, at the age of twenty-one. I remember sitting in the church and looking at the tiny, moist baby, churring on her mother’s shoulder, a white hairband across her little, new head. Anuna–all Midge’s grandchildren have silly names–is dressed now in an expensive red, puff coat, a knockout of a girl, with the dreaded Hegarty eye; cold and wild and blue.

‘Goodnight, Karen. Watch out for that one.’

They are flickering at each other across the room now, blue to blue, as strangers and extras take their leave. Bea prises Mammy out of her chair.

‘You’re very tired, Mammy.’

‘Yes.’

‘Come here and I’ll bring you upstairs.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll bring up your cup of tea.’

But there is something she wants to do before she goes. Mammy escapes Bea’s grasp and comes over to the table. She puts her two hands down on the wood, so everyone knows to stop talking. In her gentle, sweet voice, she says, ‘He would have been so proud of you all.’

We know she means, not Liam, but our father. She has got her funerals mixed up. Either that or all funerals are the same funeral, now.

‘He is,’ she says with horrible conviction. ‘Your Daddy is so very proud of you all.’

Bea turns her around, to leave the room. ‘That’s it, Mammy.’

‘Goodnight,’ she says.

‘Goodnight Mammy,’ we say, in a little