The Gathering by Anne Enright

into my hospital room the evening after Rebecca was born. He just showed up, with a bunch of pink flowers from the downstairs shop. Tom was gone home to get some sleep and the phone calls were done and people were leaving me time to recover, but I was high as a kite, showing the baby off to nurses and cleaners, wondering was it a football match or a terrorist attack, that had all her admirers stuck in some traffic jam?
    And there was Liam in the doorway–I didn’t even know he was home. And there was I, propped up on the pillows in a heap of extra sweat with a baby–untouchably fine–in the plastic cot by my side.
    He moved across the room to take a look and there was a solidity to him as he bent over the next generation, checking, in a proprietorial way, eyes, fingers, toes, the tiny pores on her nose plugged with yellow stuff that made me panic already about blackheads when she was grown.
    ‘How are you?’ he might have said.
    I don’t think we kissed. The Hegartys didn’t start kissing until the late eighties and even then we stuck to Christmas.
    ‘I’m fine,’ I would have said back.
    And he sat in the visitor’s chair and looked at this new scene: mother and child.
    ‘Was it all right?’ I remember he said that, and I remember I said, ‘Well, it’s all right now .’
    The walls were painted yellow and there was something thick and ecstatic about the sunshine, now that the baby was born.
    I remember thinking how good he looked; how handsome he might seem walking down a street of strangers, my slightly fat brother. He was happy to see the baby. He was reduced, by the sight of her, to someone I knew in my bones.
    The birth had given me back my sense of smell, which had been oddly thwarted while I was expecting, and so I was in an aromatic rush with my nose stuck into a glass of champagne that I refused to drink but sniffed all afternoon. I could tell, from one hour to the next, how the drink was spoiling as it met the air. This was the place where I existed–in the smell that drifted from the top of a pool of champagne–beside which, even Liam’s clothes felt loud.
    I told him our mother had phoned, and that she had cried.
    ‘Cried?’ he said.
    ‘She thought we were all barren,’ I said, though I felt my betrayal in a tinge. I had been pleased enough to hear from her at the time.
    We talked about her for a while.
    He was eyeing the glass on the bedside locker, and I told him it was only a little aeroplane sort of bottle. But he finished it off for me before he left, warm and flat and grubby as it was with whatever pungent stuff was spilling out of my pores as I deflated slowly into the room. I didn’t mind. I told him I was glad to have the smell of it gone.
    Sitting on the Brighton train I am trying to put a timetable on my brother’s drinking. Drink was not his problem, but it did become his problem, eventually, which was a relief to everyone concerned. ‘I’m a bit worried about his drinking,’–so, after a while, no one could hear a thing he said, any more.
    Quite right too, it was all complete shite. Alcohol wrecked him, as it does. But I am trying to put a time on it–when I stopped worrying about him and started to worry about his drinking instead. Maybe then–with my new baby opening her eyes, over and over, as if to check that the world was still there. That was probably the moment. Just then.
    A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking. Or they only exist in flashes. Sitting against a yellow wall looking at your favourite sister, who has just unsheathed herself of a child. A look in your eye like old times. The rest is not to be trusted.
    I could smell the settler he had had before he came in the hospital door, I could smell his lunch-time wine and last night’s beer. But there was also some metabolic shift, a sweetness to his blood and breath that I did not recognise. He didn’t eat much, those last years, his body already cycling on alcohol. And