Yesterday's Weather (21 page)

So it is easy, under the sheets, to lie beside him and think about nothing much. My hairy old baby. Who would do anything for me. He spends money on me, it seems to give him pleasure – more pleasure than what he is buying at the day’s end, because dead men don’t know the difference between things that are alive (me, for example, or even My Cunt) and things that are dead, namely His Money, which is just so many dried-out turds and not worth living in the house of the dead for. And so I keep talking and he keeps dying, and giving me things that have already decayed (a ‘lovely’ silk scarf, a car that I might want to drive some place, two books that are quite like real books I might want to read). There is the conspiracy of the dead all around us and the head waiters still smirk, as head waiters do, while the food fucks on the tabletop in an encouraging sort of way.

I am sick now. This life does not suit me. His old wife has cyst problems, something horrible with her back, some disintegration. I hear her silence on the other end of the phone. I see the cheque-book with her name in it, printed under his. I am thinner now. My clothes are more expensive. Weekends he sees his daughters – always a little bit better at their maths, their smiles always sweeter, their ribbons that little bit straighter; their cheekbones beginning to break through the skin of their faces now, too early, beautiful and aghast.

I meet Fintan in the afternoons and we have sex sweet as rainwater. I need the sun more than anything and we undress in the light. I open the curtains and look towards the sea. He is madder now than he ever was. I think he is quite mad. He is barely there. Behind my back I hear the sound of threads snapping. I turn to him, curled up on the sheet in the afternoon light, the line of bones knuckling down his back, the sinews curving up behind his knees and – trembling on the pillow, casually strewn – the most beautiful pair of hands in the world.

I say to him, ‘I wish I had a name like yours. When I’m talking to you, you’re always “Fintan”. It’s always “Fintan this,” “Fintan that”. But you never say my name. Sometimes I think you don’t actually know it – that no one does. Except maybe him. I listen out for it, you know?’

T
AKING
P
ICTURES

Words spoil it. They make it sound silly.

When he showed me the ring I just laughed. I don’t know what it is to be in love, even less to be married. I thought, ‘What can I say?’ I wanted to bury his head in my coat. I wanted to wrap my coat around him and tuck him under my arm. Except that he is so big.

‘So what brought this on?’ said Sarah at work – the bitch.

‘Just,’ I said.

‘Just,’ she said. ‘You’re
just
getting married.’

‘Yes.’

‘But that’s wonderful.’

Later – drunk, of course – she leans back in her chair and says, ‘So he’s into pain then, is he?’

‘Well, obviously.’ But in my head later, for days later, I’m saying, ‘He is not even interested in pain, Sarah. He will not have it in the room.’

Some nights I stay at his place and some nights I stay back at mine. All this moving around makes us impatient, with the multiplying toothbrushes and a permanent pair of knickers, clean or worn, at the bottom of my bag. But I still don’t know what it is to be in love. I know it is different from being married. But just for now, married seems to me more. And less, of course. But mostly more.

Sarah at work, I can’t stop believing in Sarah at work, just because I am getting married, just because she is jealous. Here is a description of Sarah. She is a washed-out sort of strawberry blonde with fine bones and small features. She is fading to white. She is constantly insulted by men.

Back at his place, I bite my fiancé on the ear. Sometimes I come up behind him and chew at the muscles of his back. Or when he is sitting down I worry my teeth inside his thigh,
along the seam of his jeans. If I hurt him, he reads the paper. If he laughs, we go to bed. Or more often do not go to bed, but rumble a while and then talk. He likes to spoon. He likes to go to bed after it is all over. Which is lovely. Which is always a little bit more.

So Sarah at work has a personality problem. Which is to say, her problem is that she does not like other people’s personalities.

My mother had a friend who was always too much, and very clever. I know these things can last a lifetime, so I am careful of Sarah, and careful of my man – too careful to use his name with her. Despite which I end up saying it all the time. ‘Oh, Frank,’ I say. ‘Frank says this,’ ‘Frank doesn’t like that.’

‘Really?’ says Sarah.

She is seeing a guy herself – sort of. He isn’t married, he isn’t with someone else, but there is a problem, I can tell – a sick mother, maybe, or even a child. The only thing Sarah will say is, ‘The fucker won’t do Saturdays’. Maybe he’s a bisexual. Sarah has no breasts, truth be told. And you can’t win with a bisexual, I say, because bisexuals can’t lose.

Of course, I don’t say it out loud. Sarah is the witty one. At the time, I just look at her skinny little chest, and think.

We are going over the wedding list for the fourteenth time. I pause over Sarah’s name, and Frank says, ‘Don’t invite her then, if you don’t like her. Just leave her out.’

And I say, ‘I can’t leave her out.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s Sarah,’ I say. ‘Because it just doesn’t work that way.’

The wedding is only four months away. I have a feeling that something massive is going to hit me. I feel like I have been fighting in the surf all my life. Now, out beyond the last, the biggest wave, there is open sea.

I tell Sarah about the dress I tried on over the weekend.

‘White, is it?’

‘Cream, actually.’

‘Sounds lovely.’

‘Sarah!!!’ I say. We have nipped out for a coffee. Something has to break.

‘Sarah what?’

‘Just stop it. All right?’

And then, because she is Sarah, she changes the subject, makes me laugh about Gary in security’s hairy neck. I talk about my sister’s children, while she sprinkles the table with sugar and draws her finger through it, and then she asks about the dress. Seriously this time.

Apparently, I can’t do a dropped waist. I’ll have to get on a sunbed
now
, and go for white.

Once when she was drunk she said, ‘You know your problem? You’ll be all right. That’s your fucking tragedy, you know that? You’ll always be all right.’

But I don’t feel all right, Sarah. Just because I don’t make a song and dance about it. Doesn’t mean I’m always, or even sometimes,
all right
. You know?

‘I just wanted to get married,’ says Frank.

‘Profiteroles,’ I say, ‘or chocolate mousse. It’s just a decision. A stupid decision, that’s all.’

But there is an extraordinary thing happening in bed. As if he wants to wreck us both, sink to the bottom, while all the invitations and the profiteroles and the satin shoes wash up on shore.

And because I am more miserable about Sarah all the time, because I think she will spoil everything like the bad fairy at the christening, he says, ‘Bring her over. All the two of you do is get hammered and miserable. I’ll cook. Bring her over.’

We don’t just get hammered, we have a laugh. And we talk too. We talk about lots of things. But when I ask her to dinner, it feels odd. And somehow, because I am getting married, the bisexual boyfriend has to come too.

Frank’s flat is better than mine for these things. He has a big living room, split by a kitchen counter, and a table of a decent size. I put candles on the table and on top of the TV. By the time I’m finished cleaning, Frank has all the vegetables on different plates, chopped up and ready to go.

Sarah turns up before it gets dark. She moves sort of sideways and looks at things in the room, picking up an old birthday card, a list of messages, and then Frank’s tax cert. which she puts back down again. She is wearing black, and jewellery. I feel I should change, to put her at ease, but it’s too late now.

Frank has a dish of olives on the table, but she will not eat them. Like it’s all a bit hilarious. When she walked in the door she said, ‘Kisses!’ as if she’d known him for years. But she still hasn’t looked at him. She picks at scraps of paper and touches things. She checks her watch.

‘So married bliss, Frank,’ she says.

‘Yeah,’ says Frank.

‘What do you mean, “Yeah”?’

‘Well, it’s … I don’t know,’ says Frank. ‘It’s such a production.’

And she gives me an arch look, while his back is turned. He comes over to the table with the dips and cut bread. She looks at him then. She gives him a good look, and her eyes falter.

He puts the food on the table.

‘Isn’t he a treasure?’ she says, and I don’t want Frank to cook any more. It makes him look silly. I follow him to the kitchen counter and, ‘Ack ack ack!’ he says, and swipes my hand away from all the vegetables, in their neat rows.

‘So, honeybunch,’ I say. ‘When’s this guy of yours going to show?’

At dinner we talk about sex. Everyone is drunk quite quickly, except maybe Frank who is worried about the food. But when it is all served up, he goes too. Wham. There are two red blotches flaring over his cheeks from the side of his nose.

Sarah’s man sits all hunched over and bundled up in a T-shirt and a knitted thing and a jacket that he won’t take off, so I can’t tell what his body is like, but his hands are very small and unpleasant. He reaches on to his plate and lifts little pieces up with glistening fingertips.

So, his name is Fiach. He works part-time for his father and he takes photographs and he wants to get into advertising but
more like short films, blah blah, you know the type. When he turns his head you can see the tail end of a tattoo coming out from under his hair.

But it seems that Sarah is mad about him. She looks at him with her entire face, then she gets embarrassed and looks down at her plate. I wonder what he does to her in bed, or makes her do.

And then we are all talking at once. I say that the real porn on the Internet is the property pages from France. A house in the Auvergne for fourteen grand, that’s the real porn, and Sarah is trying to tell her hitch-hiking story from Italy and Fiach is talking about the first porn shop he went into in London where the women in the magazines were like housewives, all trussed up with clothes pegs and Marigold gloves.

Amazing. We are people who have sex. Frank fills the glasses and I see it all stretching out ahead of me. Couples. I look at the rest of my life and despair.

Now everyone is excited, jumping in with their particular tic: politicians who put things up their bottoms, and the one about the lesbian journalists, and then some film star who took a shit, literally, on a beautiful black woman, this last from Sarah.

‘Oh, come on,’ says Frank.

‘Come on, what?’

‘It’s just because she’s black.’

‘Well, exactly.’

‘I mean, the
story
is just because she’s black.’

‘Oh, Frank,’ says Sarah. ‘Oh, you poor boy,’ and she squeezes his forearm.

Frank gets up then and goes to the counter and there is a pause around the table. He swings back with the coffee cups and says to Fiach, ‘I was looking for a camera in the duty free last month, but it’s all gizmos and auto-focus. Like for eejits.’

Sarah snorts into her glass of wine. Then she just keeps laughing. Fiach looks at her and says, ‘Don’t bother. I started with a second-hand Olympus. Bog basic. Lovely thing.’

‘Olympus,’ says Frank, but before Fiach can turn away from her, Sarah says, ‘Fiach likes taking pictures. Don’t you, Fiach?’

Then it is her turn to get up. She leaves the room and the two boys talk on about cameras and she doesn’t come back. I think she’s left the flat; I think she’s in the other room doing something dreadful, something I can’t even imagine. I try to think of what it might be, but whatever comes to mind isn’t really dreadful, after all.

Still, the air of it is in the room, the feel of something appalling, until Sarah comes back with her hair brushed and the eyeliner wiped away from under her left eye. She sees us looking, sweeps up her drink and decides to dance. Glass in one hand, she waves the other in the air. The skin of her underarm is dark and stained, and not particularly strawberry blonde. I say, ‘Sarah.’

‘What?’

But, as if she guesses, she lowers her arm, shimmies over and hooks her finger into the neck of Fiach’s T-shirt. She smiles close into his face. Then she gives up and slumps back into her seat.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she says. ‘Let’s go somewhere. Let’s go for a bop.’

Which is when Frank brings out the brandy, still talking to Fiach about lenses, and I ask Sarah about her mother. Sarah hates her mother, though it is her father who is the manic depressive, probably. But it is the father she loves and the mother she despises, so we talk about this for a while. Then I tell her about Mammy taking the bottle out of the hot press and saying, ‘Well, at least I’m not drinking any more,’ as she pours herself another vodka. But it is an old conversation. It doesn’t work any more. It is time to go – or would be if Sarah weren’t so drunk. She leans back and looks at the boys and tests the edge of her front teeth with her tongue.

‘Fiach,’ she says.

‘What?’

On the other side of the table, Fiach is talking about some kind of goose. He says he goes to Bull Island every Saturday to take pictures of this goose. He is throwing it out like it’s a sort of trendy thing to do, but he’s also actually started listing the names of gulls and terns and Frank is looking at him with a face like setting concrete. I think he’s too astonished or too bored to speak,
but then I see that he is completely interested, that he is nine years old.

‘Maybe Fiach could do the wedding pictures,’ I say, but no one is listening. Fiach is on to curlews now, he seems to be talking about their feet.

‘I said, maybe Fiach can do the wedding, Frank.’

Beside me, Sarah is trying to set her drink on fire. She has the lighter pushed down into the glass, and she’s flicking the wheel. When the spark catches, she pulls back in fright and the glass falls over. The flaming brandy licks out across the table.