Yesterday's Weather (12 page)

It never ends. Cleaning. It never ends. Here we go, back to the start, clean what has been cleaned and then clean it again. I start at the top of the house and work down, parterre, boxes, stalls. I hear the other girls hoovering or calling, and we pass each other on the stairs. I don’t smoke. A lot of the girls smoke. But it puts miles on you, trekking up and down to get out to the back door. No. I get an early start – something pleasant – the brasses, or the woodwork, way at the back where no one goes. Sometimes they start rehearsing before we are done, just bits and scraps, but I love the singing. And the odd time, there’s something special on, and the audience are in on top of you before you know it. Not that they notice me. People don’t. They look but they don’t see – which is fine by
me. I’m the invisible woman, that’s what I say. I could shimmy backwards across that stage on my hands and knees and no one would bother, so long as I had a floorcloth going. Everyone so dressed up, they see nothing, except looking for their own reflection in the fancy togs.

I was down there on the circle steps, one time, trying to get some chewing gum out of the carpet, horrible stuff, when a man walks by, in his full rig, and he says to me, ‘You’re singing!’ and I said, ‘Am I? I didn’t even notice,’ and he says, ‘Ah! you’re Irish. Isn’t it marvellous the way the Irish sing while they work?’ And I said, ‘Yes, isn’t it?’

And you know, I have about sixteen things to say to him if he ever stopped by again. Like, ‘Oh, that’s not me, that’s just a tape of Maria Callas I’ve got stuck up my arse.’ Or, ‘A cat can look at a king.’ I might say that, ‘A cat can look at a king.’

I am allowed to like the music. My son Jimmy loves it. He has a voice, he never touched a cigarette. He might come here, even, only he doesn’t want to bump into his old mother rooting for the dustpan in the cupboard by the bar.

I might like the opera, you see, but my son Jimmy owns the opera. Jimmy has all the CDs in their box sets. Jimmy was even gay for a while, and then he wasn’t gay, and I said to him, I can’t keep up. And I think, after all, that he wasn’t looking for sex of one kind or another, he was just looking for an education. Which he got. And he has it all now, down to the slice of lime in his gin and tonic, and he never – he very rarely – gives himself away.

Oh, be careful what you want.

I never wanted money – wasn’t that lucky? Because if I’d wanted it I might have got it, and wouldn’t that be an awful tragedy, an endangerment to my soul? And I never wanted fame. I just wanted stupid things, like knowing the right thing to wear for a christening, or my mother not dying so early, or someone to help out at home.

So, maybe my first wish would be that my mother was still alive – but alive at the age she was before she died, not the age she would be, if she hadn’t died in the first place, like a
hundred and two. So, with all her faculties and the body of – here we go again – the body of a fifty-year-old. A healthy fifty-year-old. A healthy fifty-year-old woman. As opposed to man. Or horse.

‘Oh, be careful what you want.’ It was my mother who used to say that to me – when I was young, and all I wanted was Séamas Molloy. When all I wanted was the fella in the whitest shirt in the crowd outside the dance hall, on a long summer’s evening that was turning into night.

And if I had the devil himself appear to me, on the stairs, like your man in his tuxedo – ‘Aren’t the Irish marvellous!’ – he was a good-looking man, I remember that about him. But if Old Nick came up to me in white tie and tails, and he took me up on the roof and he said, ‘Look out over London town – all of this can be yours,’ I’d tell him that I’ve heard that guff before. I heard it from the boy in the whitest shirt, that I spent the next six years of my life trying to keep white. My Bobby Dazzler.

Or if he said, ‘Fling yourself down there and the angels will catch you before you hit the ground.’ Well, what sort of a temptation is that? You go to all the trouble of killing yourself and you don’t even die? That’s what I call a swizz. Besides, it just sounds like falling in love, to me. Which Jesus never did, when you think about it. Which I did, like a fool – because my mother was right, of course: he was an awful messer, Séamas Molloy.

It’s a nice view up there – all the lights of London town. I go up, sometimes; the last little flight of steps. No one has to know.

We didn’t need the devil, Séamas and me: we thought the town was ours for the taking. Except of course he couldn’t take it at all. He couldn’t take not knowing who anyone was; he couldn’t take the humiliation every time he opened his mouth and the accent came out: it didn’t suit him at all. Because Séamas Molloy was a big man, he was the man in the whitest shirt, and I had to throw him out, finally, before the baby came to any harm.

I have a terrible dread of finding him on the street some day, his beautiful eyes all bloodshot, with the memory of me held somewhere behind them, and the kisses we had. Something about me; my hands or my ankles – they’re still slim – some giveaway.

But sure drink wipes everything, even your soul.

Come on, Old Nick, offer me London town, and free flying lessons and – what was the third thing? Stones into bread. We’ll call that getting your breakfast brought in to you on a tray. He was just trying to get Jesus to show his hand. ‘Go on,’ he was saying. ‘Prove it. Prove it!’ And Jesus didn’t prove it. He wasn’t bothered.

I know what he meant, sometimes. Up there on the roof on a summer’s night with the city sparkling and you feel you could just close your eyes and blast it all away. One big hot breath. And when you opened your eyes again the place would be reduced to cinders. Every light gone out. Every miserable room I slept in with baby Jimmy after his father left. Every hall and office and sitting room that I swept and hoovered and polished and shone. Whooosh. Gone.

And then you do open your eyes, and it is still there. Gorgeous. Never mind Old Nick.

I stopped going to Mass for the religion long ago. I just go for the company. I had my lapse, I gave up God, but I said, I’m not going to give up every sinner I know too. They don’t know it, of course – that I don’t believe a word the priest says, that I am laughing up my sleeve at him, and at his God – they would find it very sort of blasphemous. But I don’t care. There were years when these people were all I had.

Except for Jimmy, of course. I always had him.

Talking to that child – that’s been my education. His little face. If you ever want to know what you really think, talk to a four-year-old. Is there a heaven? Where do we go when we die? Why do people shoot each other? Why does purple not go with green?

And there you are, lying your head off, and trying to tell the truth at the same time. You offer them the world, worse than
any devil. You say, ‘When you grow up, my darling, you can be anything you want, you can earn your own money and buy as many toys and records as you like, and you can fly all the way to Timbuctoo.’ He comes home crying from school because Shane Fox says he’s a nancy boy, or whatever word it was in those days, and I say, ‘In twenty years’ time you won’t care a bit what Shane Fox says,’ because you only have to take one look at that child to know where he will end up. And sure enough, time goes by and Jimmy gets his money and his toys and Shane Fox gets ten years for aggravated assault. There’s my amazing son, who changes jobs the way men used to change their shirts. He takes a year out to travel, goes to Asia and South America, and he comes back to another job, with even more money. And now he has a wife, who is really quite nice, and they’ve no plans for babies, he says, even though they can afford it, and she’s thirty-nine.

I don’t know.

Jimmy tells me I’m wasting my time on the lottery. He says, anyway, rich people don’t spend their money, they invest it. And I say, You might as well not have any in the first place – but I see what he means, he means the only way to keep it is pretend it isn’t there. He says that rich people live cheap, they’re the meanest lot. They have holidays in other people’s summer houses, and dinner on expenses, and some company sends them tickets for the ballet or the opera, and all they have is the hire of the suit. Except they don’t hire the suit, they use their grandda’s suit. And so on. Jimmy wanted me to cut up my credit card, he said it wasn’t plastic money it was plastic debt, and I said he sounded like a socialist, which is the last thing he is, the absolute last thing. His father shouting at the radio, throwing it out into the back yard when Kennedy made that speech over Cuba. But sure I never got into debt.

I never wanted much.

I wanted Jimmy, though, and I had him.
Violà!
So I thought he might break the curse of it, somehow. I thought my child could want things, and have them, all at the same time. I thought he could love someone and it would go right for him. And it does go right for him. Though I don’t know who he
loves, properly speaking. I don’t know if Jimmy ever loved anyone at all.

Except, of course, for his dear old ma.

Then he turns around the night before his wedding day, and he says, ‘I never had a father,’ like it was all my fault. ‘I never had a father,’ shouting it. ‘Better off, too,’ I said – which we both know is true. But still.

All right, here it is; it’s an angel, it’s the devil, it’s anything you want. It’s three wishes. And what you have to watch for, is the trick.

So, pick something small. You want to get rid of the creaks in your knees and the one that is moving into your right hip. You say, ‘I wish that my body was twenty years younger.’ Hang on. Careful. Careful does it. ‘I wish that my body was twenty years younger – not including my brain, which must remain the same age as it is now, with the same experiences to remember.’ Or. Hang on. ‘Not including my brain, which must remain the same age as it is now, but with no early Alzheimer’s in it, like the Alzheimer’s that stops me from remembering my own mother’s maiden name.’ Now is that one wish or is it three? It sounds like six.

‘Oh, be careful what you want,’ said my mother. Whose maiden name was Mary Kearney, thank you very much.

She would have loved this: the opera. She would have loved the glam.

All right, I’ll tell you what I want. ‘I want a small win on the lottery, just a small one, just a few thousand, so I could feel, for once, LUCKY. I want my son to call me on the mobile phone he bought me for a present, that never, ever rings. I also want him to have sex with the right people, meaning female people, in particular the female person who is his wife. I want grandchildren. More than anything, I want grandchildren. Because grandchildren are simple. You wish for them and you have them. And I don’t care if they are ashamed of me. I want my son who has everything to have something, for once. Something real. To have a heart that isn’t withering in his chest. That little smile when he looks at me.

‘Hello, Mum.’

And when the man stops on the circle stairs, I want to look up at him, in his tux. I want to peruse the length of him, and meet him, eye to eye. Old Nick, my friend. I want him to know me, and be very scared of me. And I want to open my mouth, and sing.

T
HE
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S
EX
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EEKEND

He said he had been in New York for a while. He talked about a rat in his sleeping bag in a hostel on Forty-second Street and a guy who got his kidney stolen in the next bed. He said the cockroaches poured out of every hole: the pipes, the flooring, the plasterboard; the room felt like a ship that was sinking in a sea of cockroaches. He was a boy – he did not talk about skating in Central Park, he talked about vermin in a Sligo accent. What did she expect? (What did she ever expect? He had nice eyes.)

She knew Sligo. It was beautiful. She got drunk there once, with some local heads who had a rockabilly band. One of them was in plaster up to the thigh – a car crash, he said. Then he sank nine pints and left to drive home again, pivoting with a hoot, at the door of the pub, on his little prosthetic heel. Sometimes, in her sleep, she tried to figure out how he managed the accelerator and the clutch, jabbing one or the other foot into the duvet and waking up dead. That was Sligo. A place where it rained all day and the rent-boys hung out for the blokes down from Northern Ireland, and they called a housing estate after W. B. Yeats, and you could rot, or you could run, as he did, to somewhere far away.

Now he was back, living in Dublin, talking about the whores in Bangkok, where he had never been, and the way they could blow smoke rings with their pussies, and she liked the way he said ‘pussies’ in a Sligo accent. He was such a sexy boy. All that self-loving self-loathing – that was very Sligo, and the little business with the razor blade after they did a couple of lines, the way his bad eyes said, ‘You can be the edge and you can be the cut.’

It did not turn her on much, truth be told – the promise of damage. It hit her in the heart and not in the groin and, ‘Oh,
shit,’ she thought. Chaos. That was what was on offer. Driving home pissed with only one leg working. Total, sneering hatred, and then crying on her chest with his dick still wet. Oh, shit. The sex, when it happened, an aimless battering around the nub of him, which was sadly distant and, she supposed, numb with drink.

‘What do you do?’ he said afterwards, like it had turned into a job interview, now that he had (sort of) come.

‘Music stuff,’ she said. ‘I work with bands, coming through town.’

To which he said nothing, not even, ‘Which ones?’ And in the dull gap of his surprise, she fell asleep.

She dreams about a boy walking along a cliff road in the wet light; the mountains spilling water, the sea pushing against the cliff.

The boy’s wellingtons are worn to cloth, but that is the least of it. The socks are wriggling off his feet, putting a clump in his stride, leaving the bare backs of his calves to be sucked and left by the boots at every step. His shirt has a tinge of lilac to it and is riding up. You can see the elastic of his underpants and the pearly lump of his hip, where the hand-me-down trousers gape.