The Gathering
Anne Enright
Language: English
Pages: 260
ISBN: 0802170390
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
bus conductor in his uniform couldn’t get to you here. We went in to pray – and I really believe this to have happened on the same day – we knelt up near the altar with the idea of pursuit at our backs, and after our hearts had settled we looked at each other, the need to laugh shifting even as we looked into a higher, more spiritual thing. So it was with a sense of pious elation that we gave thanks for our deliverance at the altar of St Felix by lighting a candle each and then, when we could
Charlie is vain of his pate – he used to sit me on his knee, as a child, to stroke it – and he often goes bareheaded, to give it the benefit of a breeze. He does favour a scarf, though, and has a tendency to growl and clear his throat, also to tap his chest, rewrap the scarf, and to settle and resettle the lapels of his camel-hair coat. Charlie is seldom without his coat. He fills a room in a way that is always confusing because, though he gives the impression of being small – the baldness, or
pancreatic cancer. I do not forgive her my beautiful, drifting sister Bea. I do not forgive her my first brother Ernest, who was a priest in Peru, until he became a lapsed priest in Peru. I do not forgive her my brother Stevie, who is a little angel in heaven. I do not forgive her the whole tedious litany of Midge, Bea, Ernest, Stevie, Ita, Mossie, Liam, Veronica, Kitty, Alice and the twins, Ivor and Jem. Such epic names she gave us – none of your Jimmy, Joe or Mick. The miscarriages might have
or want to do, sexually, what a woman might only guess at. ‘Were you messing with her?’ I said. And he said, ‘Don’t be so thick.’ There was a wood we walked through once. It was autumn, perhaps even that autumn. The trunks of the trees were grey and bright, and the leaves that clung to them were as theatrical an orange as leaves could get. It was an avenue of beech trees, I think now, with the roots lifting massively out of the earth in front of us. That’s all. It was a romantic scene,
do you want, Mammy, are you all right?’ ‘I thought you were Bea,’ she says. ‘No, it’s me, Mammy. Do you want me to get her? Is that what you want?’ But she can not quite remember. ‘Come on. Into bed, Mammy. Into bed,’ and she complies like the sweet child she has always been. She sleeps on her own side, I notice. She still leaves plenty of room. ‘They’re all gone now,’ she says, after she has settled into the pillow. ‘No they’re not, Mammy.’ ‘All gone.’ ‘I’m here, Mammy. Will I sit with