The Gathering by Anne Enright Page B

with a very American corsage the night of the rag ball, and walked right in like Cary Grant, through the hall and the living-room extension, and beyond that to the extension that was the kitchen, my father hopping up out of his chair to shake the boy’s hand, and, ‘Oh. Hello,’ said my mother, as she would say, will say perhaps , to the alien who beams himself down on to her lino, or the junkie with the knife, as she will say on her deathbed to the nurse, or to the opening tunnel of light.
    ‘Oh. Hello.’
    ‘Michael Weiss, sir,’ said Michael Weiss, reaching out a frank and manly hand; my father, to his credit, swallowing the need to ask if this is a Jewish class of a name, though he asks it of me later.
    ‘Weiss, isn’t that a Jew name?’ insisting that he can’t be an anti-Semite when he doesn’t know any blithering Jews.
    ‘Well, you know one, now.’
    All of this before I started to stay out all night and the fights came. You might wonder where he got the energy. My father had a flaring temper, but he rarely lost it with his daughters. He lost it with his sons, but only when they confronted him. Of course his sons confronted him all the time, but as far as his daughters were concerned, he could ignore all sorts of late-night homecomings as long as you didn’t ask him for the taxi money, he could let you walk in pissed, as long as you went by him and straight up the stairs, he would fail to hear you throwing up in the toilet as long as you cleaned up afterwards, but when he asks you for a cigarette and you pull out a box of Durex, like a catastrophic schoolgirl, then he is obliged to erupt, and keep erupting, like Old Faithful, until you have found yourself alternative accommodation .
    Apart from anything else they were illegal. Everyone had them. Whether we needed them or not.
    There was nothing Daddy would not say. He had no sense of distance. He might have been talking to himself, almost. I was whoring all over Dublin . I was second-hand goods , I was turning myself into a toilet –I kid you not–though I think what he really wanted to say was that I was not doing what I was told.
    The shouting happened two or three months before my finals. And though it was a bit of a laugh in its way, it did affect my exams–and I was serious about exams. Maybe this was why I felt so unconnected: there I was sitting in the kitchen thinking about Robespierre, not to mention Frank Duff, my father cooking up a rage–he was a small man, Daddy–and I suppose I did my fair share of shouting too, but a part of me was just looking at him, all fizzed up, the redness in his neck, while his face was chalk white, then the redness boiling up around his blue eyes, until his face was suddenly, uniformly red, and ranting. There was also the red dome of his bald head to consider. I remember thinking that he himself didn’t believe what he was saying, and that it was this lack of belief, combined with my own, that drove him to such extremes.
    Back in Belfield, my best friend Deirdre Moloney had just been thrown out by her mother for nothing at all: a very low-key sort of girl, she’d only ever had sex twice. Children were being chucked out all over Dublin. All our parents were mad, in those days. There was something about just the smell of us growing up that drove them completely insane.
    For a few weeks, Daddy could not look at me, and this hurt me in the Daddy-loves-his-little-girl place; the place where you trust and flirt. But though it hurt, I found that I was able to draw on more ancient hurts than that–and this is how I survived. This is how we all survive. We default to the oldest scar.
    What hurts now is the fact that Daddy is dead. He died in 1986. So he never did walk into a shop where they sold condoms by the cash register. He never had to change his mind, not even slightly. 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; the fact that when