The Gathering by Anne Enright

his name again. (Azrael.)
    He touched my arm while I stood by Liam’s body and he led me away. He is the person who comes after you have seen the worst thing. He is the rest of my life.
    After I arrived at Brighton station, I walked around for a while, thinking that I should play this the way it happened–I should start at the place where Liam walked into the sea–because there is an order to these things that has to be obeyed. So at lunch-time, I am walking along the prom and Liam is still, residually, alive, and I am imagining this place in the darkness, and the lapping around my waist of black salt water. Liam is in the air. The figures that pass are scribbled with the graffiti of his gaze: everything they have spills over, or droops. An overweight child with breasts–a boy, it seems. An old man with a scab under his nose. A woman with a widening tattoo. A parade of lax flies and stained trousers and bra straps showing under other, shoestring straps. The living, with all their smells and holes. Liam was always a great man for people’s holes , and who stuck what into which hole.
    He is back in my head like an expanding smell–a space that clears to allow him look out of my eyes and be disgusted by arse or tit, or ‘cold tit’, even, by flesh that is never the right temperature or the right humidity, being too sweaty , or flesh that is saggy , or hairy , and the women, especially, who inhabit this sad human sack too craven or too beautiful (except, of course, for their holes ), and in the end, who do you sleep with, who do you kiss? People with no pores? I say this to him, in my head. I argue it out, but I can’t shake him, I can’t win, as I pass old men and old women, with their eczemous creases, or lean over the railing, pulling in the sea air to keep the rising vomit down, while thinking of my brother’s own flesh and how it will look in two months’, then three months’ time.
    I look over the railing as though to examine the density and variety of brown stones on the beach below. And there it is: the open tang, the calling, the smell of the sea. Such a miracle, at the end of the Brighton line, with the town stacked behind me, and behind that all the weight of England, in her smoke and light, jammed to a halt here, just here, by the wide smell of the sea.
    The first time we took the ferry, myself and Liam, it was the end of his second year, and my first, in UCD. We were going to work in London for the summer. We sat in the space between carriages, from Holyhead to Euston, watching a man–who turned out, by some freak, to be our own postman–squeeze oranges into a bottle of duty-free vodka. He was giving the vodka to a drunken girl he had met on the crossing, and he waved the bottle at us too, and we may or may not have taken it, but what I liked was the way he winked to us before turning back to the girl–who was completely rat-arsed–as if we were all in this together, the seduction business, the business of, ‘Crikey! Quids in.’
    Liam never gave us a wedding.
    The Hegartys loved a wedding, and a few of us actually had them, small or large, and some of them secular, and in the centre of it all, this decorous thing, an honest man, a lovely girl, fucking, in the nicest possible way, to cheers and the chink of glasses–and this was a thing that Liam never learned how to do, how to switch in and out of sex, how to talk around it, or share it, so although there were girlfriends we never saw them, or if we saw them he did not like us, the Hegartys, to speak to them: a line of spindly, droopy human beings who held his hand and peered at us over his shoulder. Liam liked nice women. He liked women who were kind or gentle. He liked those translucent girls. And he was quite right not to share them with us, the Hegarty hyenas, myself and Kitty singing, ‘And they called it puppy lo—oo—oo-ove’ as soon as they left the room.
    The funny thing, apart from the horny postman, about that first journey through