We used to laugh about things: foothering priests, and little boys’ bollocks, and ‘Come here and sit on my knee, little man,’ and English choirboys and gay men’s backsides, and anything really to do with innocence and bums, though nobody mentioned-now that I pause to list all this-nobody mentioned your langer, or your wire, or getting your mickey licked. Now why is that? Why did we think it was all hilarious, but only in certain, almost ritual, ways?
These conversations happened for a month or two one summer, and then they were gone. I liked them. I liked the silence after the laughter stopped. Liam’s silence was like he had just peed himself but no one had noticed, so it was all magically OK. And my silence was the smallest possibility-taken up, and then set down again-of pointing out the wet patch.
For which pleasure, tiny but very keen, I would like to be forgiven. I would like to be forgiven, now, because I am very sorry for it.
If I believed in such a thing as confession I would go there and say that, not only did I laugh at my brother, but I let my brother laugh at himself, all his life. This laughing phase lasted through his cheerful drinking, and through his raucous drinking, and only petered out in the final stinking stage of his drinking. But he never gave it up completely-the idea that it was all a complete joke.
Liam never had any truck with self-pity, his own, or anyone else’s. When someone was miserable-Kitty, for example-it was always for the wrong reasons as far as he was concerned. Don’t get me wrong, Liam loved people who suffered-he loved the poor, the destitute, the lonely, the alcoholic, he pitied anyone with a problem, just so long as they didn’t pity themselves. Which doesn’t sound altogether fair to me. Which sounds like pride, to me.
I know I sound bitter, and Christ I wish I wasn’t such a hard bitch sometimes, but my brother blamed me for twenty years or more. He blamed me for my nice house, with the nice white paint on the walls, and the nice daughters in their bedrooms of nice lilac and nicer pink. He blamed me for my golf-loving husband, though God knows it is many years since Tom had the free time for a round of golf. He treated me like I was selling out on something, though on what I do not know-because Liam did not allow dreams either, of course. My brother had strong ideas about justice, but he was unkind to every single person who tried to love him; mostly, and especially, to every woman he ever slept with, and still, after a lifetime of spreading the hurt around, he managed to blame me. And I managed to feel guilty. Now why is that?
This is what shame does. This is the anatomy and mechanism of a family-a whole fucking country-drowning in shame.
And, yes, sometimes I look at my nice walls and, like Liam, I say, ‘Pull the whole thing down.’ Especially after my nice bottle of nice Riesling. As if the world was built on a lie and that lie was very secret and very dirty. But I don’t think empires or cities or even five-bedroom detached houses are built on the sordid fact that people have sex, I think they are built on the sordid fact that people have mortgages. Even so, my husband shags me the night of my brother’s wake, and I wave my empty bottle at the Italian suedette seating system, and I too say, ‘Let it all come down.’
One of the last times Liam was over, we were going open plan, actually-the back of the house was ripped out, and we were all camped in the front half, eating take-away. I think I blamed Liam, almost, and not the builders. He arrived in the middle of the rubble with a sad, too-tall woman, who seemed to have no opinions, not even about what she might want to eat. He drank constantly. After five days of it, they headed off to Mayo, and I hoped I would never see him again.
I have a picture from that visit, of Liam with Emily on his knee one night after her bath. He is a small grey heap of a man, settled back into an armchair that is covered in a dust sheet. Emily is two; naked, straight as a die, and more beautiful than I have words to say. Liam’s hands are big, stuffed hands, wrapped around her middle, as he holds her on. Her bum is neat and sharp, sitting side-saddle on one of his thighs. Behind her, the cloth of his trousers wrinkles and sags around a crotch that is a mystery no one is interested in any more. His face is amused.
Liam understood Emily-they liked each other. Of Rebecca, who is more like me, he said, ‘Pity about the teeth.’
I have to forgive that too, I suppose.
Pity about the teeth.
Soon after the Gardai took him in and our father got him out again, he threw the breadknife across the kitchen at my mother, who was probably just trying to say something nice, and the whole family piled into him, and kicked him around the back garden.
‘Ya fucken eejit.’
‘You missed, you thick.’
And there was great satisfaction to it, as I recall. Like a scab that needed to be picked. He had it coming to him.
(And perhaps, more secretly, so did she.)
But still I wondered, for a long time, what the cops had lifted him for. I thought about it a lot. It might have been for a broken window, or nicking drink in the offie, or just the look in his eye. Or it might have been for something I could not even guess at. There was a girl, Natalie, who was weepy and shouting at the corner of the road-maybe it was her. I thought there might have been some misunderstanding, that my father was obliged to straighten out with further information about the girl and her messy ways, and the length of her Saturday-night skirt.
In the end, I had to ask him. I said, ‘Was it Natalie? Was it that wan?’ and he just looked at me.
What if he had raped her? Isn’t that one of the things that men do? What if there was blood on her leg, tears on her face? Snot. What else?
I was sixteen and I knew nothing at all about sex. Isn’t that strange? Whatever I knew of the mechanics of it was not available to me, somehow. I did not know how these things went. It seems that the years of my adolescence were years of increasing innocence, because by sixteen I was completely passionate and completely pure. We would all become poets, I thought, we would love mightily, and Liam, in his anger, would change the world.
Even so, there was something I couldn’t quite get a handle on: something that was highly relevant, that I really needed to know. In the end I had to ask him.
‘Was it Natalie-the cop thing?’
Liam looked at me. And the gap that opened between us was the gap that exists between a woman and a man-or so I thought, at sixteen-the difference between what a man might do, or want to do, sexually, what a woman might only guess at.
‘Were you messing with her?’ I said.
And he said, ‘Don’t be so thick.’
There was a wood we walked through once. It was autumn, perhaps even that autumn. The trunks of the trees were grey and bright, and the leaves that clung to them were as theatrical an orange as leaves could get. It was an avenue of beech trees, I think now, with the roots lifting massively out of the earth in front of us.
That’s all.
It was a romantic scene, walking along this avenue of orange leaves, so I would have been thinking of Tanner or Joe Ninety or whoever it was that week: I would have been thinking of the unknown man I was destined to love. Instead of which I was stuck, in all this beauty, with my brother.
There were mountains in the distance; massive with rock and heather. We walked under a high, pale sky and we felt, in this landscape, so small, and there was no one to judge. That’s all. There was an immense feeling of Godlessness about it. Which made it sort of funny, in a way-all of it: the mountains and the pale sky and the overly orange leaves that refused to fall, in these, the closing days of our unholy alliance.
What was the best time?
When Liam was fourteen or so, he had a bike and I had none and he used to give me a crossbar down to the shops or up to the local swimming pool. I don’t know how he saw over my shoulder to do it. There was always a fight over the steering-me holding the handlebars rigid, him trying to pull them one way or the other, with his chin digging into my back, and my hair in his eyes. He cycled bandy, and my legs were stuck out to one side; so we were a thing of elbows and knees, the poke of handlebar ends and the vicious jab of stainless-steel pedals. You would think we did it for fun, but it was a fight from first to last.