Yesterday's Weather (15 page)

Go for it, Gertie. St Matilda’s is proud of you yet.

She rang me up yesterday. She actually rang me up. She was terribly nice. I was terribly nice. I was smiling and nodding at the phone receiver like something demented.

‘Aha!’ I said. ‘Unhum!’ Then I put down the phone and went out and hacked down the sycamore that had suckered by the back wall. And of course it was too big for me, so the place is a mess of branches now, with an ignorant-looking stump left, all mutilated and half alive.

Because, strange to relate, I did marry a local man. And he does have a four-wheel drive. Which we need for the farm. But whatever way you cut it, eleven years after I left, I was back again in a white dress, walking down the aisle of the town church, that Gothic barn, the ghost of my childhood shifting her sticky knees on the green leatherette,
Behave yourself now
. The place was so cold my arms were mottled red and orange, poking out of the white dress like chicken legs. I was shaking – and not just with the cold. But sure they loved that too. Walking like something plucked in front of the sentimental, small eyes of that town.
Isn’t she lovely?
Saying later I had terrible circulation problems because of the drugs I did in New
York, was it? Or Paris? Believe me, this is an outrageous place. But all places are outrageous, and I was in love.

Still am.

I don’t think Gertie understands ‘organic’. She rings me up yesterday out of the blue, and says she wants enough radicchio for forty.

‘Also,’ she says, and then a list as long as your arm.
Well
, I thought, the pure gall of it. But, ‘Aha!’ I said. ‘Unhum!’ I said I’d see what I had, because ‘with organic you don’t always have it on demand’.

‘Oh,’ she said.

I went out to polytunnels and I couldn’t find J.P. so I went to the toolshed and got out the handsaw and hacked at the poor sycamore until it was just a bleeding mess of green. It is very satisfying, cutting down a tree. You work small and the result is catastrophic: stand out of the way and, whoosh, the sky falls.

J.P. came up after a while.

‘What gives?’ he says.

‘Gertie wants radicchio for forty,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s good.’

‘Jesus, J.P.,’ I said. ‘Never buy a chainsaw.’

That evening I was all depressed. I walked under the plastic and listened to the sprinklers. I am not sentimental about vegetables, but I think I was crying. All the beautiful rows of green. I felt like ringing Gertie and saying that rabbits had got into the crop, or sawfly. Paraquat in the irrigation system. Anything. No more radicchio. The radicchio is all dead, Gertie.

Mam said, ‘Maybe it’s the start of something new. A change of heart. She’ll be ringing you up now, all the time.’ I don’t think Mam understands about the way my business is these days. I gritted my teeth and said, ‘Mam … I have two refrigerated vans a day going up to Dublin. One of them goes all the way to the airport because they eat my cima di rapa, which are just fancy turnip leaves, let’s face it, in effing London town. And now Gertie rings up
ten years too late
and says she wants
my product. Ten years of her saying my carrots were delicious, of course, but a bit funny looking, and there was no demand for cima de rapa around here, and some of her customers actually picked the basil leaves out of their pasta and so what could you do?’

‘So what?’ says Mam. ‘You’ve won now.’

But it doesn’t feel like I’ve won. It didn’t
sound
like I’d won when I was talking to Gertie on the phone. It was a wedding, she said. The bride wanted organic – was very firm about it. And why wouldn’t she be, when her father ran half the cattle in the county? ‘If anyone knows what’s in the beef,’ said Gertie, ‘she does.’ And we had a bit of a laugh about that, before I hung up and went looking for some implement of destruction – any implement of destruction – and a tree to cut down.

I’m throwing my radicchio before swine.

When I married J.P. and turned him organic, Gertie ran the only restaurant for fifty miles. For the first five years we put off having kids, worked all the hours God sent – all that – and Gertie did take some stuff, now and then, to help us out. But she had one cook who was a demon for ‘posh’ food, everything drowned in ‘French’ sauce, and lots of spuds of course, and
Has your daddy had enough?
I think Gertie was afraid of her, actually. The other one had done a course at Ballymaloe and was very uppity for the first while. Of course, my problem was that I was uppity all the time (thank you, St Matilda’s) and so neither of them would touch one of my crooked, delicious carrots if her life depended on it. All that
cleaning
, they said. I know this because, for five years, every Saturday night, in the dim hopes of rustling up a bit of business, myself and J.P. took off our wellingtons, put on something half decent and went to eat in Gertie’s restaurant in town. We ate until it choked us. We ate, more precisely, until the children came along. And when we stopped, I actually missed it – there was nowhere else to go.

We have sandy soil, red and light. I went all the way to Westmeath for the organic manure, and brought the first lot back by trailer. We couldn’t afford a lorry. I made five trips.

‘Muck into gold,’ said J.P., shovelling it on. ‘Muck into gold.’ Now the tilth is so fine, it crumbles under your hand.

In year three I swung a deal with a small supplier in Smithfield. In year four I got our organic stamp. Prices went up. Over at Gertie’s, Has-Your-Daddy-Had-Enough said that there were ‘maggots’ in the potatoes, and the uppity one said that she ‘quite liked’ organic, but ‘you could get better organic elsewhere’. I bought my first van. I bought my second van. Every day they roared past Gertie’s door.

‘You know what kills me?’ I used to say to J.P. ‘If they started taking the stuff now, they’d say it was because it had improved. Or they’d decide the cos was OK, but the rest was as bad as ever. They’d tell me I should stick to cos. And there I’d be, selling cos to them and smiling. That’s what kills me.’

J.P. is out of sorts with all this. He is a reluctant sort of man. He likes working the land. I pretend this drives me mad, but of course it’s the thing that keeps me sane. Tonight he takes off his clothes as though they are a trial to him, as though that shirt of his has been at him all day. He puts them into the laundry basket and slaps the lid shut. Then, naked, he gets into bed: my organic man. He closes his eyes, rolls over to kiss my shoulder, rolls back, and sleeps.

At four in the morning I look out the bathroom window and see the poor sycamore oozing sap under a scudding sky. Such greedy trees, sycamores, nothing grows in their shade. I look into the mirror and think about Gertie. The sight of her praying in the school chapel at fifteen, with those lumpy-looking white gloves that girls used to wear when they were all overcome by the Virgin Mary. I think about the little bully she married; her mother, who always had some vague symptom. Her mother’s funeral, then, later. And my own father’s funeral, later again. Shaking Gertie’s hand.

‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

God, I hate that woman. I put my hands on the side of the sink and lean forward and close my eyes. And I think of the food I must gather for Gertie: the beautiful plump lettuces, the purple sprouting broccoli, the early beans. I think about pulling them from the earth when they are still cool with the
morning; settling them into their boxes, with the sweet air trapped among their leaves. I think about how I will gather them up, and pick them over, and pack them with a little knotted sprig of rosemary and thyme. I think how Gertie will take this little bouquet, and look at it, and like it. And I sigh.

Ronan, our youngest, comes in, holding the front of his pyjamas, his face muddled with sleep. I help him go to the toilet and he says something about camels which makes me smile, about how camels hold their water for such a long time.

‘Hydroponics,’ I say to J.P. as I get back into bed. ‘Ebb and flood.’

‘You always say that,’ he says. It is nearly dawn. He might get up now, and let me sleep on. The light outside our window is undecided and we lie there, intimately awake. J.P. has heard it all before – a dream I have of water, an infinity of lettuce, row upon row of the stuff, coming out of a lake smooth as glass, so all you see is the lettuce and the reflection of the lettuce. And maybe, as I fall asleep, me also, floating in there, utterly still amidst the green.

S
HAFT

As soon as I walked in, I knew he wanted to touch it. It was a small lift, just a box on a rope really. You could hear the churning of the wheel high above, and the whole thing creaked as it wound you up through the building.

I stood over to give him room – not easy when you are so big. Then, of course, I realised I hadn’t pressed the button yet, so I had to swing by him again, almost pivot, my belly like a ball between us. I was sweating already as I reached for the seventh floor.

You know those old bakelite buttons – loose, comfortable things, there’s a nice catch to them when they engage. If someone’s pushed it before you, of course, they just collapse in an empty sort of way and your finger feels a bit silly. So I always pause a little, before I hit number seven. And in that pause, I suppose, I get the feeling that this bloody box could go anywhere.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, even though there was no need for it. American. In a suit. Quite tall.

‘Oh. Sorry.’ I said it too. Well, you do, don’t you?

The button went in with a soft crunch – wherever he was going, it wasn’t to my floor. He eased back into the far corner and we waited for the doors to close.

This blasted lift. Six times a day I go up and down in this box, maybe more, waiting for the machine to make up its mind; waiting for it to finish thinking; checking the building, floor by floor. It’s so ancient – it should have those screechy trellis gates, like a murder mystery. (I should have an ash-blonde permanent wave, the American should be packing a snub little gun.) But it doesn’t. There are just these two endlessly reluctant doors of metal, that click and surge, as though to close, and then change their mind.

I gave a little social sigh –
Well, here we all are –
and flicked a glance his way. He was looking at my stomach, but staring at it. Well, people do. So I blinked a bit and smiled my most pregnant smile, all drifty and overwhelmed,
Isn’t nature wonderful?
These days, my skin smells of vegetable soup. I mean quite nice soup, but
soup –
you know? I tell you – reproduction, it’s a different world.

He looked up at my face then, and smiled. The doors heaved a little in their furrows and then decided against it. Very serious eyelashes. Very bedroom.

‘So. When’s the happy day then?’ he said.

As if it was any of his business. As if we had even been introduced. When you’re pregnant, you’re public property, you’re fair game. ‘Well, hello,’ they say in shops. ‘How are
you
today?’ It’s as though the whole world has turned American, in a way, and here was the genuine article, corn fed, free range; standing there in his nice suit and inquiring after my schedule.

‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to say. ‘I am just suffering from bloat.’ Or, ‘Who says it’s going to be happy? It might be the most miserable day of my life. I might be, for example, screaming in agony, or haemorrhaging, I might be dead.’

‘Oh.’ I looked down at my belly like I’d just realised it was there –
What, this old thing?

‘Six weeks,’ I said.

‘Hey!’ he said back. Like a cheerleader. I thought he might reach out and give me a playful little punch on the arm –
Go for it!

I turned and jabbed the ‘doors close’ button. At least I thought it was the ‘doors close’ button, it was actually the ‘doors open’ button – there is something so confusing about those little triangles – so the doors which were, at that exact moment, closing, caught themselves –
Ooops! –
and slid open again.

We looked out into the small lobby. Still empty.

‘Well, good luck!’ he said.

And he gave a little ‘haha’ laugh; rocking back on his heels a bit, while I jabbed at the other button, the correct one this
time, the one where the triangles actually point towards each other, and,
OK
, said the doors –
Now we close
.

Someone got a pot of gloss paint and dickied them up, years ago. Thick paint, you can see the swirl of the brush still in it, a sort of 1970s brown. The doors meet, and sigh a little, and you look at the place where the paint has flaked. You look at the place where the painter left a hair, in a big blond S. You stand three inches away from another human being, and you think about nothing while the lift thinks about going up, or down.

Decisions decisions.

Good luck with what? The labour? The next forty years?

The lift started to rise.

‘I’ll need it,’ I said.

This building used to be a hotel. I can’t think of any other excuse, because there is dark green carpet, actual carpet, on the walls of the lift, up to what might be called the dado line. Above that, there’s mirror made of smoked glass, so that everyone in it looks yellow, or at least tanned. Actually, the light is so dim, people can look quite well, and basically you look at them checking themselves in the glass. Or you look at yourself in the glass, and they look at you, as you check yourself in the glass. Or your eyes meet in the glass. But there is very little real looking. I mean, the mirror is so hard to resist – there is very little looking that goes straight from one person across space to the other person, in the flesh as it were, as opposed to in the glass.

Or glasses. One reflection begs another, of course, because it is a mirror box – all three walls of it, apart from the doors. So your eyes can meet in any number of reflections, that fan out like wings on either side of you. The American in the corner was surrounded by all my scattered stomachs, but he was staring straight at the real one. And,
No, you can’t
, I thought.
Don’t even think about it
.