Yesterday's Weather (2 page)

Which is nice, too. In a way.

Oh, what the hell.

The first time it happened, my father was in having some tests, actually, and I was far too busy to shout at my husband, or go through his pockets, or sniff at his clothes before I put them in the washing machine. I had more important things on my mind. In the end, everything went so well, Daddy didn’t even have to have chemo – after which, I was too relieved to double back and start shouting at my husband, or sniffing at his clothes. It was over by then, and besides, I had learned something about myself. I’d learned that I was not that sort of woman – the sniffing sort, the type to rage and scream. And that was an odd kind of feeling, I must say. Because I grew up with the same dreams as every other girl, but when the chips were down … When the chips were down, I kept my head held high.

What was I supposed to do?

One part of me thought he deserved a holiday, to be honest; that if I had the chance I might take one myself. Another part of me thought, ‘Someone must die.’ I really thought I might kill someone for this. I might kill her. Or I might kill him. Or I might leave them to it and kill myself. Well, that’s no use, is it? This stupidity, this
incontinence
of my husband’s was too small to bother about. And it was too large to leave us all standing; all still alive.

But maybe it was in my head, from that time. In both our heads. The idea that someone must die.

So what are we looking at? Two or three more, over the course of the years? A scattering of ‘accidents’, and then, one day, this, whatever it is. A man crying on the sofa. Grief.

It was half past five. The children were watching telly before tea. I cleared them out of there – my daughter, the apple of her father’s eye, welling up a bit herself at the tragic look of him, with his coat thrown beside him and his briefcase still in the other hand.

Kids bury that sort of stuff very deep. I thought it would be better if she talked about it, but when I asked her, a week later, about her father crying on the sofa she just looked at me, like I had landed in from outer space.

‘What sofa?’ she said. ‘Which sofa?’

That’s Shauna for you, who is nine. There’s no point talking to her brothers about it, they’ve already gone into the grunting phase.

And then I think, Why not? Why not talk to your sons about things? Why not rear men who can speak?

Because there’s my husband, collapsed against the oatmeal-coloured linen mix, staring mortality in the face. And what else? His own smallness. Looking as though he had killed her himself, although he had not killed her, he had not even loved her. Thinking (as I imagine) about some beautiful part of her, mangled by the door or bonnet, and turning already to clay.

And there is no one he can talk to about this. No one at all.

Men don’t have friends like that – guys you might ring and say, ‘Take him out for a drink. Talk it over. Sort him out.’ No. The only friend he has is me.

And he can’t tell me, because I really do not want to know.

All this in hindsight, of course. At the time, I looked at him and I thought that our marriage was finished, or that he was finished. I was looking at extended sick leave and then what? My husband crying on the sofa was forty-nine years old. And if you think forty-nine is a tough station, try fifty-five.

I was looking at a long future with a man who had forgotten what he was for.

So when he pushes the tears off his face with his hand, and when he lifts his face to tell me all about it, there is only one thing I can say to him, and that is:

‘I don’t want to know.’

How did we get through the next week? Normally, at a guess. That’s how we did it. We got through the week in a completely normal way. While I waited for some hint or clue. The back page of the paper that he stares at too hard and too long. And then, on Tuesday morning, I come in from the school run and he’s still there, in his dark suit, putting on his funeral tie.

‘Who’s dead?’

‘Some girl,’ he says.

‘What girl? Someone’s daughter?’ He doesn’t answer. He brushes his shoulders off in the mirror.

He says, ‘We only get them trained and they’re gone.’

‘Well, I’m sure she didn’t mean to.’

Round and round goes the funeral tie, down through the knot. Pull it tight, ease it a little loose again. Kiss the wife goodbye.

‘You don’t want me to show?’ I say, because I am raging now. I know what has happened, now. I want to twist the knife.

‘No,’ he says. ‘She was only in the door.’

‘You sure?’

‘No, no.’ Pick up your briefcase, pull your phone off the charger, check for your keys.

‘Home for tea?’ I say.

‘What is it?’

‘I thought I’d grill a bit of salmon.’

Forget where your good coat is kept, open one door of the wardrobe, the other door of the wardrobe, look to your wife who says, ‘It’s under the stairs.’

Look your wife in the eye as she says this, reach out to touch her neck and hair.

Say, ‘Thanks,’ then off you go.

Oh, I know what you are thanking me for
.

The front door clicks shut on my husband in his funeral tie and I wander downstairs to tidy away the breakfast things and make my usual cup of coffee. I fill the kettle and plug it in. I take out my mug and put it on the counter. And then, before the water is boiled, I have the recycling bin spilt all over the floor, and I’m going through the old newspapers for death notices.

Samantha ‘Sammy’ MacHale, tragically, abroad
. Easy. I get out the phone book and look that up too.

The church is in Walkinstown, so that’s her family off the Cromwellsfort Road. She might have lived at home still, at twenty-four – the price of everything these days. I could go there now, if I wanted to. I could drive there in my little car. I wonder do her parents know what she got up to? I have a
shameful desire to tell them – so sharp, I have to stand still until it subsides.

I am not that kind of person.

No.

I make my cup of coffee and I calm down.

Still, I wonder what she looked like. What school did she go to; do they have pictures in the corridors, of former girls in a row, the class of – what year would she be? – the class of 1998.

So young.

Who could be that young?

All the time I am loading the dishwasher and pulling out the hoover and doing my morning round, the funeral is happening in my head. But I am not going to jump in the car and hack my way across town to Walkinstown. I am not that kind of person. I am not going to panic at the last minute and show up at the cemetery to check the faces at the grave and pick up a few words here and there, about what a fine girl she was, ‘irrepressible’, ‘full of fun’. Bloody right she was full of fun.

Or not. Maybe she was shy, unassuming. Easily impressed. She might have been a quiet kind of girl. A girl who was anxious to please.

No.

I am not going to find this out, or anything else. Because that would be obscene. I am not going to show up like a ghost at the wedding – what’s the opposite of that? – like a flesh and blood wife, at this last dance with the dead.

We had the salmon when he came home. Potatoes. A bit of asparagus.

‘Lovely,’ says my husband. ‘Delicious.’ Then he gets up afterwards and makes himself a sausage sandwich, cold from the fridge. Butter, mayonnaise, the lot.

And I say, ‘Why don’t you stick some lard in there, while you’re at it?’

This is the last real thing I say to him, for a long while.
Where’s the gas bill gone when will you be home would you pick up Shauna from her ballet?
We could do this for ever. After a few
weeks of it, my husband gets a nervous cough: he wonders if it could be lung cancer. His toe is numb, isn’t that a sign of MS? And I just say, ‘Get it checked out.’ Because the girl is dead. So let’s not bother with the fuss and foother of getting back together. Let’s not do all that again. Not this time. This time let us mourn.

I am too proud. I know that. And in my pride I watched him – my fantastic, stupid man – lurch around in his life. And I did not offer him a helping hand.

Where’s the key to the shed when will you be home would you buy a pack of plastic blades for the Flymo?

The girl was with us, all this time. Dead or alive. She was standing at the bus stop on the corner, she was sitting in our living room watching
Big Brother
, she was being buried, night after night, on the evening news.

I think that milk’s gone off when will you be home I really don’t want the children having TV sets in their rooms
.

After a month of this, I looked at my husband and saw that he was old. It did not happen overnight; it happened over thirty nights or so. My husband shaking hands with death. And what else? Thinking about it. Thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to be dead, after all. Like she was.

Whenever I woke in the night, he was awake too. Once I heard him crying again; this time in the shower. He thought the noise of the water would cover it. I listened to him snuffling and choking in the spray and I realised it was time to put my pride away. It was time to call him back home.

On Saturday, after the supermarket run, I put on my good coat and my leather gloves. And a hat, even – my funeral hat. And when my husband said, ‘Where are you off to?’ – because God knows I never go anywhere without drawing a map – I said, ‘I’m going to visit a grave.’

I had a beautiful bunch of white lilies, all wrapped up in cellophane. I picked them off the kitchen counter and walked past him – I cradled the lilies against my shoulder and I walked past my husband, who was now old – and I did not look back, as I went out the door.

She did not matter to him, I know that. I know she did not
matter. So I went to the cemetery and sought out her grave. I wandered through the headstones until I found her, and I put the lilies on the ground under which she lay, and I told her that she mattered. Then I went home and said to my husband. Then I went home and said to Kevin:

‘Let’s do something for Easter, what do you think. Something nice. Where would you like to go?’

Y
ESTERDAY’S
W
EATHER

Hazel didn’t want to eat outside – the amount of suncream you had to put on a baby and the way he kept shaking the little hat off his head. Also there were flies, and her sister-in-law Margaret didn’t have a steriliser – why should she? – so Hazel would be boiling bottles and cups and spoons to beat the band. Then John would mooch up to her at the cooker and tell her to calm down – so not only would she have to do all the work, she would also have to apologise for doing all the work when she should be having a good time, sitting outside and watching blue-bottles put their shitty feet on the teat of the baby’s bottle while everyone else got drunk in the sun.

She remembered a man in the hotel foyer, very tall, he handled his baby like a newborn lamb; setting it down on its stomach to swim its way across the carpet. And Hazel had, briefly, wanted to be married to him instead.

Now she grabbed a bowl of potato salad with the arm that held the baby and a party pack of crisps with the other, hoofed the sliding door open and stepped over the chrome lip on to the garden step. The baby buried his face in her shoulder and wiped his nose on her T-shirt. He had a summer cold, so Hazel’s navy top was criss-crossed with what looked like slug trails. There was something utterly depressing about being covered in snot. It was just not something she had ever anticipated. She would go and change but the baby would not be put down and John, when she looked for him, was playing rounders with his niece and nephews under the apple trees. He saw her and waved. She put down the bowl and the crisps on the garden table, and shielded the baby’s head against the hard ball.

The baby’s skin, under the downy hair, breathed a sweat so fine it was lost as soon as she lifted her hand. Women don’t even know they miss this until they get it, this smoothness, seeing as
men were so abrasive or – what were they like? She tried to remember the comfort of John’s belly with the hair stroked all one way, or the shocking silk of his dick, even, bobbing up under her hand, but he was so lumbering and large, these days, and it was always too long since he had shaved.

‘Grrrr …’ said Margaret, beside her, rummaging a bag of crisps from out of the party pack. This is what happens when you have kids, Hazel thought, you eat all their food – while Margaret’s children, as far as she could see, ate nothing at all. They ate nothing whatsoever. Even so, everyone was fat.

‘Come and eat,’ Margaret shouted down the garden, while Hazel turned the baby away from the sudden noise.

‘Boys! Steffie! Please! Come and eat.’

Her voice was solid in the air, you could almost feel it hitting the side of the baby’s head. But her children ignored her – John too. He had lost his manners since coming home. He pretended his sister did not exist, or only barely existed.

‘How’s the job coming?’ she might say and he’d say, ‘… Fine,’ like,
What a stupid question
.

It made Hazel panic, slightly. Though he was not like that with her. At least, not yet. And he lavished affection on his sister’s three little children, he threw them up in the air, and he caught them, coming down. Still, Hazel found it hard to get her breath; she felt as though the baby was still inside her, pushing up against her lungs, making everything tight.

But the baby was not inside her. The baby was in her arms.

‘Come and eat!’ shouted Margaret again. ‘Come on!’

Still, no one found it necessary to hear. Hazel would shout herself, but that would definitely make the baby cry. She stood by the white wrought-iron table, set with salads and fizzy orange and cut ham, and she watched this perfect picture of a family at play, while beside her Margaret said, ‘God between me and prawn-flavoured Skips,’ ripping open one of the crinkly packets and diving in.

The ball thumped past Hazel’s foot. John looked up the length of the garden at her.

‘Hey!’ he called.