Yesterday's Weather (29 page)

At three o’clock in the morning the urge to subvert got very strong. He could feed in the word ‘FRAUD’ behind Charlie Haughey, for a micro-second that would hit the heart of the nation. He could put a dog whistle on the other track, so that all the dogs in the country would bark at the same time. He could slow down an interview the fraction it took to make someone slur like a drunk. Of course he resisted this need, because he was responsible, and part of the broadcasting machine. (Frank’s sister beat him up when he was five, for drawing over the walls with her lipstick, and the pain ticked at the edge of his mind when he was very tired, and subversion was at his fingertips.)

Frank sometimes wondered where it all went, the stuff he threw away; smiles, swear-words, faces that slid out of focus. There is a parallel universe, he thought, in ‘Star Trek’, made up of all the out-takes; the fluffs, blunders and bad (worse) acting that never made it to the final cut. A world where Captain Kirk says ‘shit’ and Spock’s ears become detached. Perhaps the story is better over there. He thought of a universe made up of all the different silences that are nipped, tucked and disposed of. The silence of a hospital at night, the silence when a woman forgets what to say, the silence of a politician. They have to go somewhere. It is a terrible crime, Frank thought, to throw away a silence.

It was the sheer waste that depressed him; the waste of a movement. The woman in the interview raises her arm to smooth an eyebrow and the editor throws away a feast of under-arm hair. He had that gesture, there in his hand, and he threw it away.

When the signal is beamed all the way to Alpha Centauri, the aliens will never see a hairy woman. They will wait for centuries for that one signal, the one they expect and recognise as a call to come and save the world. Who is to say otherwise? Beautiful hairy aliens who never throw anything away except what is deliberately made. Spontaneous Aliens who talk in semaphore and discover everything by accident, in the dustbins of science – which is why they are so advanced.

Frank was dreaming of aliens. He was dreaming of better pay and probably of under-arms. He was dreaming about someone’s laugh that he threw out that day. He was dreaming of the split-second where a man wavered and Frank cut him dead.

Over his monitors, Frank had pasted a sign ‘The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.’

Soon after he started the job, Frank began to pick up the pictures on the side of the road and string them together in his head. His car stops at the lights beside some road-workers. They talk over the pneumatic drill in glances and a toss of the head. The age of the men is surprising, they have pot bellies and cement dust has settled in the creases of their clothes. Everything is coated with the road; there is cement caked under their fingernails, and their boots are encrusted with tar – in three weeks’ time they will be altogether solid. Frank turns the dust, the wheelbarrow full of flaming tar, the traffic cones, and the way the drill turns everything mute, into a beer commercial, where the world is tinted blue. He catches the looks between the men to the rhythm of the song ‘Heart of Stone’. It is a good piece, but short. Someone changes the station on a remote control as the traffic lights go green.

It got worse. Frank dreamt of the slice of time between shots, so thin, it couldn’t be said to exist at all. He edits and re-edits the film of his father in his sleep. The story of his father is a loose montage that also involves clay and calloused hands, a boot on the side of a spade, a figure moving over the brow of a hill. Sometimes the music is sentimental, sometimes unsettling. Most often he uses the sound of a distant wireless
where a quiz show is being played out, and the sound gets closer when his father walks into the room.

The Sunday dinner table is composed of glances from one child to another, and warning looks from his mother. The camera goes under the table, where one small foot in a long grey schoolboy sock kicks out at another. He sees his father’s mouth chewing, he sees his knife and fork cutting the meat with delicate violence. The sound-track is silent, except for the scrape of cutlery.

Frank twitches in his sleep. He is running along a mile of tape where his family are caught like ants in amber. Sometimes he feels as though he will fall into the picture, as though the dinner table is under a stretch of water, or glass. Every few seconds he leaps over the gap between one shot and the next, and the gaps become wider.

His father at the table lifts his fork and points it at the camera. Frank leaps away to the salt-cellar, then drives over to his mother’s face, jerks back to his father’s hand. His father is talking. Frank cuts out the word ‘slut’ and, before he can stitch it up, falls headlong into the thin, deep hole that he has made. ‘You were dreaming.’ Moira wakes him with a smile.

Moira makes it easier for him. Every time she moves, she throws it away. She has an abandoned grace. She hardly notices him there on the other side of the table, and he picks up the casual pieces as her hand drops into her lap.

‘I don’t know.’ It is a sigh. She doesn’t know that she has spoken. Her hand scratches the top of her leg and Frank drives into work thinking about sex that is entirely random, the way people graze each other in their sleep.

It would be nice to have a child, to go into work wrecked after a night of two-hourly feeds and claim it was the pints. It would be nice to say that no matter how frantic the work got, no matter how much the world was cut up into shots and the producer at his back paced the room, there was something of his that had its own slow time. He would do a gardening programme that looked at a rose growing for half an hour, or use a single shot of waves on a beach that went on for as long as
the tape was in the camera. No tricks. He would take the memory of his father’s cigarette smoke, coming from a hand that had fallen by the side of the chair, and he would stay with it until the cigarette burned down and was dropped on the floor. Force himself to look. Don’t cut away.

Moira is hard to find these days. She spends a lot of time in various attitudes around the house. The evening is like a locked-off shot on the sitting room as she fades from the armchair and appears at the table, then fades again and is standing at the window, one hand holding a cigarette at an angle and the other cupped around an elbow that should be wearing evening gloves. When they talk she looks at the carpet as though she sees something growing there. There is a small eddy in her eyes, a slight shift of the current that strays from where she is looking. Moira was always aimless, casual, troubled. It was a look that mothers have and it made his lovemaking hopeful and direct, like a man posting a letter that would change everything.

On Sunday morning Frank surprises himself by getting up early and cleaning the house. He washes the kitchen floor, runs a cloth along the skirting-boards, cleans out the toilet and talks to Moira over the sound of the hoover with a nod of the head. On Monday she wakes up to find him standing by the window with no clothes on, scratching his stomach and staring. He goes to the supermarket on his own and buys some trout and almonds which he makes for her that night, with a salad full of vegetables that he never knew existed until he was twenty-one. He kisses her back while she sleeps and puts his hand over the Y of her legs, to keep her safe.

In unguarded moments while he is at work, Moira flicks into the corner of his eye. There is no pattern to it. She has taken to reading children’s books. She has eaten her way through Dr Doolittle and enthuses about Dab Dab the duck.

‘What is the difference,’ she asks him, ‘between doing something and not doing something? When I was a kid, hell would open up if you stepped on the crack in the path and the devil would kiss you – but he never did.’

‘You sound disappointed.’

She rubs the corner of her mouth hard with the tip of a finger, as though her lipstick was beginning to smear.

‘I want to go somewhere.’

‘Anywhere you like.’

‘Bolivia?’

‘Sure.’

For some reason everyone is using Spanish music in their programmes that week. It makes the cutting very fast and the colours as sharp as an ad for washing powder. He passes a small girl in her communion dress in the street and there are flamenco flounces down the back of her white skin.

‘How about Barcelona? We can afford that.’ But she just laughs.

It came together in all the things she threw away. As he sat working at his console, the pictures knitted one into the other. Moira glancing at the phone. Moira rubbing at her thigh, as though there was a burr caught between her leg and her jeans. She comes in through the hall door, with the keys between her teeth and they drop to the floor. She wakes in the morning surprised and her mouth seems caught on the pillow.

It is all in the fraction of the second before he cuts away.

They are sitting in the dining room, in an endless two-shot.

‘I love you,’ Moira says; she leans over to put her hand on his arm but stops. ‘I love you more than anything. Anything. It happened by accident. I don’t understand the why. I stepped on the crack in the path by accident and nothing happened. It didn’t open up. I didn’t fall into hell.’

Reaction shot Frank. The film goes on fire.

‘Frank, I can’t tell the difference between things. I can’t tell the difference between what I want to do, what I mean to do, and something that just happens.’

‘What was his name?’

She opens her mouth to speak. He cuts away to the hand that holds the cigarette and before he can stitch it up, falls headlong into the thin, deep hole that he has made.

S
EASCAPE

He stood like a young seminarian at the water’s edge, refusing to see the bodies that were strewn all around him. His eyes rested on the cool line of the horizon, and sweat gathered in the white creases of his face. His only concessions to the sun were the jumper he had removed, which never left his hand, and the thick boots that stood waiting in the sand behind him. He seemed to be standing quite still, but in fact was edging his feet forward, inch by inch. After a while, a thin film of water pulled at his bare toes, and he leapt back. The jump was awkward, and when he turned to walk back up the beach, he had the loping, twisted stride of an old tramp. He belonged to the street, and not to the sea, because his eyes had that puzzled, childish look, and his mouth was hard.

A woman rose from the sea behind him, the water running from her shoulders and hair.

‘Daniel!’ He stooped to pick up his boots, without turning around, so she ran up the slope after him, her body scattering a wet trail on the sand. The swimsuit she wore was azure blue, with a triangle of viridian at the neck, and her wet blonde hair had a greenish sheen in the strong light.

‘Daniel,’ she said again, catching up with him, ‘are you coming in?’

‘Nope.’ He still didn’t turn around.

‘You grunter! You pig!’ She shook herself at him like a wet dog and he pulled away from the drops. When she was done, he caught her by the arms and pushed her into the sand, then laughed and walked on. There was a moment’s shock before she screamed and scrabbled up again, then charged after him up the beach. The old boots banged together in his hand as he evaded her, but when he reached the towels he turned around and let himself be caught. She pushed him down and sat on his chest.

‘You need the wash, you old pig. I should throw you in like a drowned cat.’

‘I can’t swim.’

‘You can’t swim? Sure everyone can swim. I’ll teach you.’

‘Of course I can swim.’

‘Liar.’ She swung off him.

‘You are a liar,’ she said, picking up the towel, which was yellow like her hair. ‘You’re always lying to me.’

He lay on his back, his eyes slits in the glare of the sun. He seemed to be watching the sky. She flicked her body with the towel to get rid of the grit that had lodged in the creases, but he still didn’t turn around. The laces of the boots were tangled in his hand and there were sweat marks and the marks of her wet body on his thick, old shirt.

‘You like it,’ he said and rolled on his belly to watch her. She covered herself with the towel to block his gaze.

‘And anyway … I don’t,’ and he rolled back again with a small grunt.

He pursed his mouth. ‘Pour us a cup of tea, will you?’ It was an old joke.

‘Pour it yourself, you bad bastard. You’re not in your mother’s house now.’

She sat there, for what seemed like a long time, and watched him sprawled damply on the sand. She did not stretch out, ignoring the freak weather with the confidence of one who already had the perfect tan. The colours of her swimsuit brightened in the sun.

After a while, she became aware of someone staring. It was a small child, naked as a cherub. He turned away from her when she looked up, and put his hands up to his face, but continued to watch her through his fingers.

‘Hello.’ She smiled at him and he ducked away at the sound of her voice.

‘Look,’ he said, suddenly bold, and with one hand still to his face, he pissed delicately on to the sand.

‘Lovely,’ she said, at a loss – trying not to give the child a complex.

‘No, it’s not,’ he said, ‘it’s very bold,’ and he ran off as his
mother lumbered up after him; ‘Come back here and I’ll give you a belt!’

‘That’s the woman for you,’ she told Daniel, as she caught the struggling child and trapped his legs in a pair of pants.

‘A good, pink-skinned Irish ma with strap marks.’

Daniel lay still.

‘Strap marks and stretch marks and Dunne’s nighties. A fine hoult for you in the bed at night.’ Daniel grunted assent.

‘Well, take the old shirt off at least. You look like a maggot under a rock.’

‘I look,’ he said carefully, ‘like something the tide washed up.’

Affairs, she thought, should stay in the place where they were conceived, they do not transplant well. He lay on the sand as though it were the gutter, while she turned her patch of towel into a little piece of the Riviera. Her face was drawn with effort.

‘All I want’, she finally said, with deliberation and a fake smoothness, ‘is an intelligent life. You
know
what I mean.’ He turned to face her and his eyes were both puzzled and wary.