The Gathering by Anne Enright Page A

the British night for us–fresh off the boat, fifty paces across our first foreign soil and then stepping up again on to the iron floor of the train–was that we always thought that we were nearly there. We looked out the window and, after a period of darkness, there were so many lights we assumed they were the coming lights of London town. Except that we never arrived. And it seemed to us that England was a single city from one side to the other, without pause. Then, in the morning, when we had finally, definitely, absolutely arrived, we stood at the mouth of the underground in Euston, thinking that a train had just pulled in, and we would be able to make our way down when the crowd was gone. After a while we realised that the rush of people was not going to ease, that there was no one, particular train. London was all flow, it had no edges, it was everywhere.
    Liam never liked the English, or so he claimed. In this he was helped, he said, by the fact that the English did not like themselves.
    Clever Liam.
    And I can not manage to love them, this herd on the hoof down the Brighton front, all of them enjoying the sea where Liam drowned. But I manage not to hate them, even though they are alive and my brother is dead. And I wonder how I escaped it–Liam’s hatred of this or that arbitrary thing. Queers one year, Americans the next.
    Who should I hate?
    We swam at night somewhere. When we were young, we swam at night, and I can not remember where that might have been.
    I look out at the wide, shifting sea, and, just for a moment, I think I have a smaller life, alive as I am in this sunlight, than my brother, walking out in the darkness; blood and whiskey into salt sea. Liam, pissed, just the skin that separated himself from his yearning self. Just for a moment, I think that it is more heroic not to be.
    I look at my hands on the railings, and they are old, and my child-battered body, that I was proud of, in a way, for the new people that came out of it, just feeding the grave, just feeding the grave! I want to shout it at these strangers, as they pass. I want to call for an end to procreation with a sandwich board and a megaphone–not that there are many children, I now notice, on the playground that is Brighton beach, at least not this Tuesday afternoon. England, the land of the fully grown.
    But I really don’t mind these people, one way or another, and I love the undertaker. My catalogue companion, my English boy. This trendy ease he has is almost spiritual. I wonder who he goes home to–friends he likes, or parents he likes–and how do you have sex with a guy like that. Does he have moods?
    When I am done, and have felt his harmless hand in my own (old) hand, I stand on the pavement outside his funeral parlour and I open my mobile to ring my difficult, middle-aged husband when what I want to do instead is lie down, just there, across the boy’s doorway, until he steps across my prone body and lifts me up.
    Azrael.
    ‘How are things?’ I ask Tom, and he tells me that the girls are going to friends’ houses after school, and everything is fine. It takes me a moment to figure out where he is.
    ‘Are you at work?’
    ‘Of course I’m at work.’
    ‘Rebecca has her Irish dancing,’ I say.
    ‘Well. Not today, she doesn’t.’
    ‘She has her showcase.’ I wail it out into the street, and disbelieve it at the same time. Because what Tom is saying (quite rightly) is that my concerns are not important, they are invented, they are something to keep me occupied while he does the serious stuff of earning money and being more properly alive.
    ‘Where are you?’ I say.
    ‘I told you, I’m at work.’
    ‘Where at work? Where are you, at work ?’
    He can’t put the phone down on me because I am in Brighton and recently bereaved. There is a long pause.
    ‘Come home,’ he says. ‘When will you be home?’
    ‘What’s it to you?’
    ‘Everything,’ he says. ‘What do you think?’ And it is my turn now, to cut