The Gathering Read Online Free PDF Page A

and round the car park, floor after floor, until I am out under the evening sky. Liam used to laugh at me for this. Everyone used to laugh at me. The way I always park in the space that is nearest the planes: and that space is up on the roof, out in the rain.
    I turn the engine off and watch the drops shunting down the windscreen.
    The last time I brought him here, I could not wait to see him gone.
    Seriously. The last time I brought him here, I sat for a moment, looking straight ahead, and the bulk of him in the front seat beside me was remarkable: the dark heap of him, when I turned and spoke to the brother that I knew–Christ! this grey thing in an unwashed shirt, this horrible old fucker, that I turned to and said, ‘So. Plenty of time.’
    I walked him all the way to the departure gates and watched him go through. I wondered was it possible for him to come back out again. It occurred to me that it could not be against the law. You can go right up to the gate and change your mind. You can even spring out of your seat on the plane and change your mind and walk back the way you came, back out into Ireland, where you can make everyone miserable, for another little while.
    Usually, people’s brothers become less important, over time. Liam decided not to do this. He decided to stay important, to the end.
    A plane roars low overhead and, when it is gone, I am hanging on to the steering wheel, with my mouth wide open. We stay locked like this for a while, me and the car, then I sit back up and open the door.
    While I am doing this–my mute screaming in my convertible Saab in the airport car park in the rain–I can feel Liam laughing at me. Or I feel his absence laughing at me. Because, somewhere, over there to the side–the place you can’t quite see–he is completely there, and not there at all. He is not unhappy, I realise, now that he is dead. But it is not just his mood I feel as a warmth at the base of my spine. It is his disappeared, dead, essential self. It is the very heart of him, all gone, or going now.
    Goodbye Vee
    Goodbye
    Goodbye
    I open the door and climb out into the rain.

5
    HERE IS MY grandfather, Charlie Spillane, driving up O’Connell Street towards his future wife in the Belvedere Hotel.
    It is half past ten on a Tuesday night. It is Lent. A few profane couples drift out of the Gresham or the Savoy Grill to take the tram or start the walk home, but otherwise the town is quiet. Charlie’s car is a thick grey and when it slips under a streetlamp a pool of blue leather opens to the night. The hood is down, the brasses gleam and Charlie’s head gleams. It is a beautiful thing, this car–which is not quite Charlie’s car: though he has had it so long we can assume the man who left it with him is not coming back.
    This is the car that lived in Ada’s garage when I was a child, a Bullnose Morris, with a cracked old hood, like the hood of a giant pram. By the time I saw it, there wasn’t much of it left, even the doors were missing. I used to sit in the front seat and listen to the mice running through the engine, in the stillness of the summer afternoons.
    Or, ‘Vroom vroom!’ Liam would say, beside me. ‘Vroom vroom.’
    In 1925 the car is still a beautiful thing. Charlie revs it along with tremendous shifting of gears and pedals–Nugent thinks he shouldn’t be driving it at all, so ruinous is this pumping, grinding technique to clutchsprings and valves. The front brakes are split open in a pool of their own fluid, on a table in his digs–Nugent is not the owner of the car either, but he does love it. Standing in the foyer of the Belvedere Hotel, he listens for the engine without knowing what he is listening for. Charlie, meantime, is running about Dublin on the back brakes only, seeing a man about a dog.
    He is a swerver, Charlie. He does not like endings. He does not even like beginning things. When he does fall in love it is only because he finds that it is already slipping away from him.