The Gathering Read Online Free PDF Page B

delight.
    There is nothing that they do alone. Not any more.
    Together they turn, as Charlie Spillane arrives through the door, raffish with drink, hearty with promises broken and appointments missed. His eye checks Nugent leaning up against the front desk–then he casts about him until he sees the figure in blue, sitting at the wall by the door. Oh.
    ‘Ma’am,’ he says, doffing his (imagined) bowler hat, ‘I hope this fellow has been keeping you amused.’
    And Ada laughs.
    Just like that. With a sweep of his arm, Charlie has changed the maths of it–of his future and of my past.

    Here are the two friends, leaving Ada Merriman.
    Charlie indicates the hotel door to his pal and walks outside. He sits back into the Bullnose Morris and picks up his driving gloves. Then he rubs his face with them. He rubs his face as a man who has stopped crying, after crying for a long time. Nugent climbs in beside him. Charlie gives her some choke, struggles over the sharp hump of the forgotten chock, and drives on.
    Conways is dark. They circle the Rotunda and stop back on Parnell Street where they find a lock-in in the back room of the Blue Lion–an unholy pub. There is an air of recent hurt; the smell of something burnt coming out of the jakes in the yard.
    ‘A bottle and a lemonade,’ says Charlie.
    They taste their drink and look with circumspection at the murderous clientele of the Blue Lion. Charlie has a small opinion about the car while Nugent examines the grain of the wood and the shine of the low brass rail.
    On the way home, Nugent tilts out of his seat to stand with his head a little higher than the car’s front window, and he lets the night air lap his face. As they bowl along the Green, he glances at the girls who are waiting, even in Lent, for the nobs to come out of the Shelbourne: a series of white ovals, their faces twist around like turning leaves, at the sound of a car.
    He plumps back into his seat as they slide to a stop, some distance beyond his door.
    ‘Give it a look, will you?’ says Charlie, meaning the brake drum, split open on the table in Nugent’s digs.
    ‘I will,’ he says, and waves Charlie off at the front door.
    Inside, Nugent looks around his little room; the narrow bed, the window, with two lace curtains like hair parted over a little square face and tied on either side. He looks at his small table–the broken brakes of the Bullnose Morris, beautiful as a picture of apples in the moonlight. He starts to unbutton his shirt, standing in the darkness. His shirt opens one button at a time. It parts in a V over the flesh of his chest. Further and further down. And Nugent is on his knees. He pulls off his shirt on his knees, and swings it around behind him, so the buttons hit his back, once, twice; and then he starts his night prayers.
    Here she comes.
    Lizzy.
    His sister. Younger than him. She died. The room they grew up in was full of the wet rattle of her chest; the horrible gurgle of phlegm and the shocking bright blood. Nugent can not forget the nightly rosary, said at a terrible, safe distance from her bed; her white knuckles fumbling on the coverlet for the dropped beads, or the dark light in her eyes as she looked at him, like she saw right through to his bones. His own puberty going unnoticed–almost to himself–as her little breasts swelled under the nightdress. She moved towards death and womanhood at the same pace, the nipples like a spreading bruise, the breasts growing, and failing to grow, over lungs hard with disease. And so, she died.
    Is that enough for him to think about, while he is on his knees?
    That when he holds his penis in the night-time, it feels like her thin skin; always damp, never sweating. Because, in those days, people used to be mixed up together in the most disgusting ways..

6
    THIS IS HOW I live my life since Liam died. I stay up all night. I write, or I don’t write. I walk the house.
    Nothing settles here. Not even the dust.
    We bought eight years ago, in