Yesterday's Weather

by Anne Enright

  ‘All the same, I could have spent the rest of my life with him, having bad sex. Honestly. He made love like I was a walrus, something huge and strange. Spent half an hour kind of paddling his hand on my left buttock which must be the least interesting, the most mistaken part of my body. Then sort of dodged in, like I was an alley on the way to school. I didn’t know whether he had come, or a picture had slipped on the wall … True love.’

  He stayed the next day and she didn’t go into class. She opened a bottle of good wine to educate him and they forgot to eat. They lifted the sash of the bedroom window and were surprised by the taste of the air. He was so thin it hurt her and his laugh was huge.

  ‘We came across this swimming pool, in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. It was empty, with blue tiles and weeds growing out through the cracks. There was a metal ladder just going nowhere in the corner. So we climbed down and it was like being underwater somehow. Like we swam through the air. Then this crazy guy, he stood on the edge and he said he was going to dive in. My God was I freaked. I could just see his head splitting on the tiles. I screamed until I fell over. Men always think I’m neurotic and I suppose it’s true.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  He was grateful for it, whatever it was. Compared to her body, her mind was easy to understand. There were wine stains on the sheets which he wrapped around him like Caesar. He sang, and paced the room, and looked at his naked feet, which weren’t ugly anymore. The razor in her bathroom confused him and he asked about other men. So she made love to him at the sink and he looked at his face in the mirror, as if it was blind.

  He wasn’t so amazed by sex as by people, who did this all the time and never told. Never did anything but laugh in the wrong way. ‘They do this night and day,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t show. Walking down the street and you think they’d look different. You think they’d recognise and smile at each other, like “I know and you know”. It’s like the secret everyone was in on, except me.’

  The light deepened. ‘What is it like for a woman?’ he asked.

  ‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘What is it like for a man? Sometimes, after a while, it’s like your whole body is crying, like your liver even, is sad. It’s more sweet than sore. In here. And here.’

  ‘Where?’

  Her touch saturated him to the bone and he had to pull away from her, in case something untold might happen. Which it did.

  The next day he rang up the matinée man whose astonishment was audible from the other side of the room. He asked for clothes from his flat and looked at her and laughed as the questions kept pouring out of the phone.

  The matinée man’s name was Jim and he entered her place with a comic air of apology. Kevin poked his head around the jamb of the open doorframe and asked for his clothes. ‘You bollocks.’ They all went out for a drink.

  What she noticed in the pub were his eyelids, that disappeared when he looked at her, and made him look cruel. She couldn’t understand most of what they were saying and they laughed all the time. He was wearing a nylon-mix jumper, cheap denim and bad shoes.

  ‘I thought the friend was the kind of Oh-so-interesting bastard,’ said the letter, ‘with that glint in his eye that cuts me right up. You know capital P. Primitive, the kind that want to see the blood on the sheet or the bride is a slut. What I mean is … Attractive to the Masochistic, which, as we all know, is the street I’ve been living on even though the rent is so high. What I need is a romantic Irish farmer who is sweet AND a bastard at the same time. So he’s looking at us anyway like we’ve been Sinning or something equally Catholic and I just started to fight him, all the way. He says “Did you have a good time then?” and I said that “Kevin was the best fuck this side of the Atlantic.” DUMB! I KNOW THAT! and Kevin laughed and so that was … fine. And then I said “Maybe that surprises you?” “Not at all,” he says. “That’s what they are all saying down Leeson Street,” which is their kind of Fuck Alley. And I laughed and said “Hardly,” I said, “seeing as he’s never done it before …” and there was this silence.’

  She went to the toilet, and when she came back, his friend was gone.

  ‘Why did you pick me, if it doesn’t mean anything? That’s what you are saying, isn’t it? You’re saying I shouldn’t have stayed.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re great. You’ll make some woman a great lover.’

  ‘You should have fucked Jim. He understands these things. You both understood each other like I was an eejit.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  He was no longer polite. He walked her back to the flat when he should have gone home.

  ‘So. Welcome to aggressive sex,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed that.’ He had broken her like a match.

  ‘You’re all talk.’

  After a while he turned to her and felt her body from her shoulders to her hips, passing his hands slowly and with meaning over the skin. She felt herself drifting off the bed through the black space where the door should have been. It seemed to grow in the dark and swallow the room.

  ‘When I was a kid, there was a monumental sculptors in the local graveyard and the polishing shed was covered in marble dust. The table was white, the floor was white, the coke can in the corner was white. There was an old wardrobe up against the wall with the door hanging off, all still and silent like they were made out of stone. And outside was this rock with “Monumental Enquiries” carved into it like a joke. Which just goes to show.’

  After he left, she saw the shadow of flour on the carpet, where his clothes had lain, like the outline of a corpse, when the clues are still fresh.

  HISTORICAL LETTERS

  1.

  So. I wouldn’t wash the sheets after you left, like some tawdry El Paso love affair. No one is unhappy in El Paso. There is lithium in the water supply. So it all still smells of you and at four in the morning that’s a stink and at five it’s a desert hum, with cicadas blooming all over the ceiling. Because you are on the road.

  I am not hysterical. We have mice – just to go with all this heat and poverty and lust business, two flatmates with grownup salaries and lives to run after. Actually, it is hot, which I hate. If I want weather I pay for it, besides, the sun only came out for you. Actually, also, there is something in the water supply.

  I have prehensile toes because you made my feet grip like a baby’s fist. That’s not something you forget so easily.

  You, on the other hand, do forget – easily and all the time. This is something I admire. You don’t make up little stories to remember by. Which means that I am burdened with all the years that you passed through and neglected. I can handle them, of course, with my excellent synapses that feel no pain.

  There is something about you that reminds me of the century. You talk like it was Before as well as After and you travel just to help you think – as if we were all still living in nine-teen-hundred-and-sixty-five. There’s nothing special about you, Sunshine, except how gentle you are. And you talk like it was nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-four. ‘Live a quiet life, be true, try to be honest. Work, don’t hurt people.’ You said all this while putting on your socks, which were bottlegreen, very slowly.

  Sleeping with you is like watching a man in a wet suit cleaning the aquarium glass, in with the otters on the other side.

  All I want to say, before you disappear into that decade of yours, all I want to say is how things became relevant, how the sugar-bowl sits well on the table, how the wood seems to agree.

  But it is a gift, like snow. It is a gift the way the bowl sits so well on the table, it is a gift how it all, including you, was pushed out through a cleft in time. Pop! I can move my hand from the bowl, over a fork, to my own blue cup, and the distance between them makes me content.

  2.

  You may say, in you turn, that I am an aquatic kind of girl, an underwater sort of thing. Since you left I spend most of my time on my back, as it were. I can see the street in a fan of light on the bedroom ceilin
g. When someone walks past, they move a line of shadow like the needle on a dial. Cars make everything shiver.

  I remember most of what you said and I said. I don’t see the point of this landscape of yours, blank and full of frights with no clock in it. All your pain strikes me as very nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-seven. I come from the generation that never took drugs, the generation that grew up. I am a woman that was born in 1962.

  And you know what that means.

  Despite the fact that I was born in nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-two, I go around the house mouthing words like they were new, like the whole problem of words was as fresh as Paris. You have infected me with the fifties, une femme d’un certain âge who knows how to dress but not how to speak. Sweetheart.

  Tell me. When was the Spanish Civil War? Is that where you are? Having a serious discussion about reification and blood, rubbing alcohol and the future. I bet the people you meet all have stories, perplexities, Slavic bones.

  When I was ten a white horse ran into the side of the school bus and died. I saw the blood bubble out of his nose.

  You should go to Berlin in nineteen-hundred-and-eighty-nine, with the wall coming down. You could put the Cabaret and the Jews back in perhaps. I am there, watching it all on TV, getting everything wrong. I am wrong about remote-control televisions, denim, history in general. I can’t tell where the party is. I do not have a democratic mind, but if I watch the right movie, the horse dies every time. (Why is it always white?)

  So I am supposed to sit here with my finger in my gee until you come back – from Moscow in 1937 where you discover what music really is. From New Orleans in 1926 where you are eating the heart out of artichokes. From Dublin in 1914 where you are walking, pretentiously enough, on the beach. When I just got my credit cards, the sign of a woman who does not wait around.

  History is just a scum on reality as far as I am concerned. You scrape it away.

  Listen.

  When de Valera died, I didn’t care either way, but a girl in my class was delighted, because her granny was buried half an hour before him, and all the soldiers along the road saluted as they went by.

  I saw them landing on the moon, but my mother wasn’t bothered. She wanted to finish drying the dishes, so she said, ‘Sure I can see the moon, right here in the window.’

  When I was ten a white horse ran into the side of the school bus and died. I saw the blood bubble out of his nose.

  That is what I want to say. I was not washed up on the beach of your life like Venus on the tide. I know the distance between the cup and the bowl. I have seen Berlin. I have seen the moon. I will find out how to speak again and change the sheets, because it must change, I say, in order to give pleasure.

  Never mind the horse.

  LUCK BE A LADY

  The bingo coach (VZE 26) stopped at the top of the road and Mrs Maguire (no. 18), Mrs Power (no. 9) and Mrs Hanratty (no. 27) climbed on board and took their places with the 33 other women and 0 men who made up the Tuesday run.

  ‘If nothing happens tonight …’ said Mrs Maguire and the way she looked at Mrs Hanratty made it seem like a question.

  ‘I am crucified,’ said Mrs Hanratty, ‘by these shoes. I’ll never buy plastic again.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ said Mrs Power, wiping the window with unconcern.

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Hanratty. ‘There’s something astray in my head. I wouldn’t let the kids do it.’

  Nothing in her tone of voice betrayed the fact that Mrs Hanratty knew she was the most unpopular woman in the coach. She twisted 1 foot precisely and ground her cigarette into the plastic mica floor.

  When Mrs Hanratty was 7 and called Maeve, she had thrown her Clarks solid leather, solid heeled, T-bar straps under a moving car and they had survived intact. The completion of this act of rebellion took place at the age of 55, with fake patent and a heel that made her varicose veins run blue. They pulsed at the back of her knee, disappeared into the fat of her thigh, ebbed past her caesarean scars and trickled into her hardening heart, that sat forgotten behind two large breasts, each the size of her head. She still had beautiful feet.

  She kept herself well. Her silver hair was rinsed and set and there was black jet hanging from her ears. She was the kind of woman who squeezed into fitting rooms with her daughters, to persuade them to buy the cream skirt, even though it would stain. She made her husband laugh once a day, on principle, and her sons were either virgins or had the excuse of a good job.

  Maeve Hanratty was generous, modest and witty. Her children succeeded and failed in unassuming proportions and she took the occasional drink. She was an enjoyable woman who regretted the fact that the neighbours (except perhaps, Mrs Power) disliked her so much. ‘It will pass,’ she said to her husband. ‘With a bit of luck, my luck will run out.’

  At the age of 54 she had achieved fame in a 5-minute interview on the radio when she tried to dismiss the rumour that she was the luckiest woman in Dublin. ‘You’ll get me banned from the hall,’ she said.

  ‘And is it just the bingo?’

  ‘Just the bingo.’

  ‘No horses?’

  ‘My father did the horses,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t touch them.’

  ‘And tell me, do you always know?’

  ‘Sure, how could I know?’ she lied – and diverted 126,578 people’s attention with the 3 liquidisers, 14 coal-scuttles, 7 weekends away, 6,725 paper pounds, and 111 teddy bears that she had won in the last 4 years.

  ‘If you ever want a teddy bear!’

  ‘Maeve …’ she said, as she put down the phone. ‘Oh Maeve.’ Mrs Power had run across over the road in her dressing gown and was knocking on the kitchen door and waving through the glass. There was nothing in her face to say that Mrs (Maeve) Hanratty had made a fool of herself, that she had exposed her illness to the world. Somehow no one seemed surprised that she had numbered and remembered all those lovely things. She was supposed to count her blessings.

  There were other statistics she could have used, not out of anger, but because she was so ashamed. She could have said ‘Do you know something – I have had sexual intercourse 1,332 times my life. Is that a lot? 65% of the occasions took place in the first 8 years of my marriage, and I was pregnant for 45 months out of those 96. Is that a lot? I have been married for 33 years and a bit, that’s 12,140 days, which means an average of once every 9.09 days. I stopped at 1,332 for no reason except that I am scared beyond reason of the number 1,333. Perhaps this is sad.’ It was not, of course, the kind of thing she told anyone, not even her priest, although she felt a slight sin in all that counting. Mrs Hanratty knew how many seconds she had been alive. That was why she was lucky with numbers.

  It was not that they had a colour or a smell, but numbers had a feel like people had when you sense them in a room. Mrs Hanratty thought that if she had been in Auschwitz she would have known who would survive and who would die just by looking at their forearms. It was a gift that hurt and she tried to stop winning teddy bears, but things kept on adding up too well and she was driven out of the house in a sweat to the monotonous comfort of the bingo call and another bloody coal-scuttle.

  She was 11th out of the coach, which was nice. The car parked in front had 779 on its number plate. It was going to be a big night.

  She played Patience when she was agitated and on Monday afternoons, even if she was not. She wouldn’t touch the Tarot. The cards held the memory of wet days by the sea, with sand trapped in the cracks of the table that made them hiss and slide as she laid them down. Their holiday house was an old double-decker bus washed up on the edge of the beach with a concrete block where the wheels should have been and a gas stove waiting to blow up by the driver’s seat. They were numberless days with clouds drifting one into the other and a million waves dying on the beach. The children hid in the sea all day or played in the ferns and Jim came up from Dublin for the weekend.

  ‘This is being happy,’ she thought, scattering the contents of the night bucket over the scutch grass or trekk
ing to the shop. She started counting the waves in order to get to sleep.

  She knew before she realised it. She knew without visitation, without a slant of light cutting into the sea. There was no awakening, no manifestation, no pause in the angle of the stairs. There may have been a smile as she took the clothes pegs out of her mouth and the wind blew the washing towards her, but it was forgotten before it happened. She just played Patience all day on the fold-down table in a derelict bus and watched the cards making sense.

  By the age of 55 she had left the cards behind. She found them obvious and untrustworthy – they tried to tell you too much and in the wrong way. The Jack of Spades sat on the Queen of Hearts, the clubs hammered away in a row. Work, love, money, pain; clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades, all making promises too big to keep. The way numbers spoke to her was much more bewildering and ordinary. Even the bingo didn’t excite or let her down, it soothed her. It let her know in advance.

  5 roses: the same as

  5 handshakes at a railway station: the same as

  5 women turning to look when a bottle of milk smashes in the shop: the same as

  5 children: the same as

  5 odd socks in the basket

  5 tomatoes on the window-sill

  5 times she goes to the toilet before she can get to sleep. and all different from

  4 roses, 4 shakes of the hand, 4 women turning, 4 children, 4 odd socks, 4 tomatoes in the sun, 4 times she goes to the toilet and lies awake thinking about the 5th.

  The numbers rushed by her in strings and verification came before the end of any given day. They had a party all around her, talking, splitting, reproducing, sitting by themselves in a corner of the room. She smoked them, she hung them out on the line to dry, they chattered to her out from the TV. They drummed on the table-top and laughed in their intimate, syncopated way. They were music.