by Anne Enright
I could have killed myself then. I allowed myself to fantasize cancers and car accidents. I might have killed myself even before Felix, but I didn’t have a life before, so it was ridiculous to think of throwing it away. Felix made everything possible, including dying, and it is for this that I am grateful, more than for anything else. I lived, of course. For a while I thought of finding a replacement, combing housing estates like a queen bee, waiting for the look of recognition. There was one supporting lead in a school play, but that blank gleam in his eye was only stage fright.
Recently I discovered their dolls’ graveyard; decapitated plastic, split by my spade. There was clay in the artificial hair and I thought about – I longed for – the clay that would clog my own.
So. Adieu Adieu Adieu. Self-indulgent, I know, but what do you want me to become? My husband’s nurse? (Oh, the grateful took in his paralysed eyes.) And then one of the army of widows, with headscarf and shopping bag, who stop in the middle of the street, shake their heads and say ‘Someone must have walked over my grave.’ Felix.
Felix sitting on my headstone, with an apple in his fist, like he sat at the bottom of the bed, laughing, puzzled, amazed at every inch of me. Felix at that particular point of refinement where wonder, cruelty and hair-trigger skin make even the imaginary and the ridiculous real. He could look at offal, at grass, at the streaks his fingers made on my thigh with the same indifferent glee.
It is easier to die when you have seen your own flesh; as I saw my own flesh for the first time, some five years ago. It was, at that moment, on the very cusp of decay. But decay, I have since discovered, takes far too long. I don’t want to drift away, I want to splatter.
I met him in the local shop one day at the height of it all.
‘How’s your mamma, Felix, and haven’t you grown?’ and he turned to his friends.
‘Stupid old bat,’ he said. Making up was very sweet, and his tears tasted hot as needles.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
‘Luck Be a Lady’ first appeared in the Summer Fiction series in The Irish Times, July 1990; ‘The Portable Virgin’ was first published in Revenge (Virago, 1990), edited by Kate Saunders. Both of these stories, along with ‘The House of the Architect’s Love Story,’ ‘Men and Angels,’ ‘(She Owns) Every Thing,’ ‘Indifference,’ ‘Historical Letters,’ ‘Revenge,’ ‘What Are Cicadas?’ and ‘Mr Snip Snip Snip,’ first appeared in The Portable Virgin (Secker & Warburg, 1991). ‘Seascape’ and ‘Felix’ were first published in First Fictions: Introduction 10 (Faber and Faber, 1989).
Thanks to Mary and Bernard Loughlin, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, where many of these earlier stories were written.
The rest of the stories in this collection were first published in Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008). ‘Pale Hands I Loved, Besides the Shalimar’ first appeared in The Paris Review; ‘Pillow’ was first published in Picador New Writing: 11 (Picador, 2002), edited by Colm Tóibín and Andrew O’Hagan; ‘In the Bed Department, ‘Nathalie,’ ‘Taking Pictures,’ and ‘Della’ first appeared in The New Yorker; ‘Little Sister’ first appeared in Granta; ‘The Bad Sex Weekend’ first appeared in The Dublin Weekend; ‘Honey’ first appeared in The Irish Times – it was written for, and won, the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award in the Bloomsday centenary; ‘Green’ first appeared in The Literary Review (Radio 4); ‘Shaft’ first appeared in Granta 85 (Radio 4); ‘Yesterday’s Weather’ was first published in Irish Stories 06; ‘What You Want’ first appeared in Prospect, March 2008 (Radio 3); ‘Here’s To Love’ first appeared in The Guardian’s Christmas edition, December 2007; ‘Caravan’ first appeared in The Guardian, October 2007; ‘Until The Girl Died’ first appeared on RTE Radio; ‘Cruise’ first appeared on Radio 4.
Thanks to Bill Buford and Deborah Treisman, Brigid Hughes, Ian Jack and Matt Weiland, David Marcus, Brendan Barrington, Colm Tóibín and Andrew O’Hagan, who published and commented on the original texts. Thanks also to Caroline Walsh, Tobias Hill, and A. L. Kennedy, who adjudicated the Davy Byrne Award, and to Duncan Minshull, Heather Larmour, Kevin Reynolds, and Kathryn Brennan, who commissioned and directed the work for radio. ‘Until the Girl Died’ was written for the voice of actress Eleanor Methven.
Thanks to Mary Chamberlain who braved my punctuation for the final copy-edit, and to Lucy Luck who worked to place these stories as they were written. Thanks, as ever, to Gill Coleridge and Melanie Jackson, and to my editors Robin Robertson and Amy Hundley.
Copyright © 1989, 1991, 2008 by Anne Enright
Cloth edition published 2008
Emblem edition published 2009
Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Enright, Anne, 1962–
Yesterday’s weather / Anne Enright.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-314-0
I. Title.
PR6055.N73Y48 2009 823’.914 C2009-901625-7
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
These stories first appeared in First Fictions: Introduction 10, published in 1989 by Faber and Faber, in The Portable Virgin, published in 1991 by Secker & Warburg, and in Taking Pictures, published in 2008 by Jonathan Cape.
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