The Gathering Quotes
"You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console them."
"All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns."
"SOME DAYS I don’t remember my mother. I look at her photograph and she escapes me."
"THE SEEDS OF my brother’s death were sown many years ago."
"There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important."
"THE MAN BESIDE me on the train to Brighton lifts his pelvis slightly, and settles it back down."
"I am always thirsty when I leave that house – something to do with the unfairness of the place."
"We were good children, mostly. I imagine that we were good children, in those days in Broadstone."
"I remember him best with my skin. The creeping delight as he bent down to whisper."
"I have never trusted men who pray. Woman have no option, of course – but what do men think about, when they are on their knees?"
"I remember Kitty’s hair rags, though I can not, for the life of me, turn the memory of my sister around to look at her six-year-old face."
"The only things I am sure of are the things I never saw – my little blasphemies."
"The first was that he did not belong to her, and the second was that he belonged to me."
"If this is a fight, then these are the facts."
"I don’t miss work, for example. Not in the slightest."
"Other fathers do not feel, as he does, unmanned by it."
"And in the gap I realise that he is having sex with someone else."
"He loves them, but they are in his way."
"She was a poor girl, who turned her face to the wall as the coins clinked on to the bedside table."
"Everyone had them. Whether we needed them or not."
"I was turning myself into a toilet – I kid you not."
"I remember nothing like I remember that silence after he closed Ada’s front door."
"He was the guy who could not be relied upon, the messer."
"And when I opened my eyes, I wanted the room to be gone, or stripped, the house empty, the tenants dead."
"I left Liam to the opening gap of the door, and to whatever was behind it."
"We talked about anything and everything, maybe, and when I bumped my suitcase down the stairs of the dive in Stoke Newington, I knew that I would never have those conversations about anything and everything again."
"I say that I did not leave the room for three days, but surely I had to drink sometimes, or go to the toilet."
"And though you could say that she did not marry Nugent because she did not like him, that is not really enough. We do not always like the people we love – we do not always have that choice."
"I think of him, too, when I palm the cuttlefish bone that Rebecca finds on the beach, because it reminds me of a mango pip."
"But even so she holds out her hand to Charlie and says, ‘Thank you for a lovely drive.’"
"The best thing about Benedict was her name."
"St Veronica wiped the face of Christ on the road to Calvary and He left His face on her tea towel."
"We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing."
"Children do not understand pain; they experiment with it, but you could almost say that they don’t feel it."
"I am not Veronica. Though I have done my fair share of wiping, in my day."
"I remember a slow afternoon with Ada’s sewing basket, trying acupuncture on my thigh."
"After a while, the distant world came seeping back, beading at the edges, thick and red."
"Such complete and utter disgust. 'Are you pleased with yourself now?' Good, gentle, human Michael Weiss."
"There is no blood here. There is no blood in this house."
"I don’t go to Mass now, and have passed little of it on to my children."
"The tides in Brighton are fast and they range far. He wore the jacket so he would be seen going into the water."
"The lack of underpants that makes me cry. Liam was never together, but he was always clean."
"Here it comes – the four o’clock wake-up call."
"I take my bottle of white out of the fridge a good half-hour before dawn and, on an impulse, pick up the car keys."
"I clip the kerb of a central island, and when the jolt clears my head I find that we are already, the car and me, on our way north."
"I take the train back from Brighton, and I meet Kitty in a pub in the ‘Gatwick Village’."
"‘What do you want to know about Uncle Brendan for?’"
"I have a picture from that visit, of Liam with Emily on his knee one night after her bath."
"The thing is, if I go up to Rebecca and kiss her, she will be happy."
"The British, I decide, only bury people when they are so dead, you need another word for it."
"Poor Mammy sits and watches afternoon TV, as she does, and will do, before and after the death of any other human being."
"I am a good daughter. I am a very good daughter."
"It is important to be clear about these things – Emily needs to dismantle the world before she can put it together again."
"I am expecting the house to be crammed, but Bea shakes her head slightly by the door."
"The back of the house is dense with the sound of people I do not want to meet, and so I stay where I am, and decide not to complain."
"Why do men never sit down, I think, then realize that all the chairs are in with the corpse."
"It has happened. She sat watching television for the past ten days, waiting for something which has now well and truly arrived."
"‘You were always great pals,’ she says."
"This is the man who will fuck me soon, to remind me that I am still alive."
"‘It’s not what children are for,’ I say, quite fiercely."
"‘I didn’t even like him,’ she says, in a final, terrible whimper, and this makes me laugh so much she stops crying to look up at me."
"‘They’re not for anything,’ I say. ‘They just are.’"
"‘Oh, comfort me with apples,’ at the Fairyhouse Races, a lifetime ago."
"‘People do not change, they are merely revealed.’"
"‘I just liked the sweets, Mammy. Get back into bed, now. I just remembered the sweets is all.’"
"‘He’s all heart,’ she used to say, by which she meant that, on the day he died, she would order a quiet custard slice in Bewley’s, and really quite enjoy it."