The Gathering by Anne Enright Read Free Book Online

that is whatever it is ‘removed’.
    Oh! he was desperate–that is what we will say. He was a terrible messer. He was always full of it. He just couldn’t get it together. He had a good heart. He was all there. He was the best of company, we will say. Oh! but the wit. He had a tongue in his head, there’s no doubt about that! But he was very sensitive. It was a sensitivity thing with Liam. You wanted to look after him. He was not able for this world. Not really.
    ‘Yes,’ I will say. ‘He was a messer.’
    I don’t know if it is my earliest, but certainly one of my strongest memories of Liam is of him peeing through a wire fence into a smooth lake of water on the other side.
    ‘Wheee!’
    The pee spattering against the mesh, and then not, while I skated past. Skates! When I remember them now, I think that Ada must have spoiled us, too.

8
    WHEN I WAS just eight and Liam was nearly nine, we were sent with our little sister, Kitty, to stay with Ada in Broadstone. This was just a few miles from where we lived–I know that now, of course, but when we were children it might as well have been Timbuctoo. It was a world unto itself; a little enclave of artisan cottages close to the centre of Dublin, that fitted together like Lego.
    I think we might also have been sent there when Kitty was just a baby. There is a gap in my mother’s reproducing around then, and I think of these as the dead children years, the ones that marked her and turned her into the creature I later knew.
    I don’t know what they called these episodes. Single women had ‘breakdowns’, but in those days married women just had more babies, or no more babies. Mammy got going again, anyway, with Alice in 1967 (what would we have done without Alice!) and right after that came Ivor and Jem. I suppose the unfairness of twins might have provoked her final bout of ‘nerves’. Certainly there were always tranquillisers in there among the Brufen and warfarin on her saucer of pills, and she has been, as long as I have known her, subject to the shakes, and inexplicable difficulties, and sudden weeps.
    I sometimes wonder what she was like before we had to go away, or if I knew what was lost when we returned each time–if some ‘Mama’ who danced with the sweeping brush and kissed the baby’s tummy was replaced by this piece of benign human meat, sitting in a room.

    Ada’s house was very quiet. It was hard to forget the sound of your breath–going in, faltering out–until you were smothered, slightly, by your own hesitation. It was the quiet of a house that had no children and the rooms were full of things. There were things on mantelpieces and little things on tables, that you might not touch. There were drawers full of things that had not been used for years, or were only used once a year. All of these were separate from each other, and special, in a way that things were never separate at home.
    Ada herself existed in a distinct way that my mother could not. She fought with Charlie or flirted with him in the kitchen. My parents never flirted, they did not seem capable of it.
    ‘Turn the telly up now, so Daddy can hear the news.’
    They spoke to each other through their children, like every other couple I knew. And if there were no sweet nothings there were no fights either–though sometimes a grinding tone came into their conversation that might have been a sign of private coldness or disgust. I don’t know.
    Maybe I am wrong. Maybe they talked to each other all the time, but there was something so intimate about their speech I could not hear it, or retain it–the way it is hard to remember the particular laugh of someone you have loved.
    But Ada flirting with Charlie–I do remember that: Ada swaying from cooker to table, and singing as she laid Charlie’s dinner down. And I remember her things–the chest of drawers on the upstairs landing that was full of swatches and scraps of cloth; sample books with pages that you could turn like the soft