Yesterday's Weather (3 page)

‘What?’

‘The ball.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The ball!’

It seemed to Hazel that she could not hear him, even though his words were quite clear to her. Or that she could not be heard, even though she was saying nothing at all. She found herself walking down the garden, and she did not know why until she was standing in front of him, with the baby thrust out at arms’ length.

‘Take him,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Take the baby.’

‘What?’

‘Take the fucking baby!’

The baby dangled between them, so shocked that when John fumbled it into his arms, the sound of wailing was a relief – at least it turned the volume in her head back on. But Hazel was already walking back up to the ball. She picked it up and slung it low towards the apple trees.

‘Now. There’s your ball.’ Then she turned to go inside.

John’s father was at the sliding door; his stick clutched high against his chest, as he managed his way down the small step. He looked at her and smiled so sweetly that Hazel knew he had just witnessed the scene on the lawn. Also that he forgave her. And this was so unbearable to her – that a complete stranger should be able to forgive her most intimate dealings in this way – that Hazel swung past the tiny old man as she went inside, nearly pushing him against the glass.

John found her hunkered on the floor in the living room searching through the nappy bag. She looked up. He was not carrying the baby.

‘Where’s the baby?’ she said.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said.

‘I have to change my top. What did you do with the baby?’

‘What’s wrong with your top?’

Snots
. Hazel could not bring herself to say the word; it would make her cry, and then they would both laugh.

But there was no clean T-shirt in the bag. They were staying in a hotel, because Hazel had thought it would be easier to get the baby asleep away from all the noise. But there was always a teething ring left in the cool of the mini-bar, or a vital plastic spoon in the hotel sink, and so of course there was no T-shirt in the bag. And anyway, John would not let her bring the baby back to the hotel for a nap.

‘He’s fine. He’s fine,’ he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.

‘Why should he be unhappy?’ she wanted to say. ‘He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?’

Instead she kept her head down, and rummaged for nothing in the nappy bag.

‘Go and get the baby,’ she said.

‘He’s with Margaret, he’s fine.’

Hazel had a sudden image of the baby choking on a prawn-flavoured Skip – but she couldn’t say this, of course, because if she said this, then she would sound like a snob. It seemed that, ever since they had arrived in Clonmel, there was a reason not to say every single thought that came into her head.

‘I hate this,’ she said, eventually, sinking back from the bag.

‘What?’

‘All of it.’

‘Hazel,’ he said. ‘We are just having a good time. This is what people do when they have a good time.’

And she would have cried then, for being such a wrong-headed, miserable bitch, were it not for a quiet thought that crossed her mind. She looked up at him.

‘No, you’re not,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You are not having a good time.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Right. Whatever you say,’ and turned to go.

Margaret hadn’t, in fact, asked the baby to suck a prawn-flavoured Skip. She had transformed the baby into a gurgling stranger, sitting on the brink of her knee and getting its hands
clapped. The baby’s brown eyes were dark with delight, and his mouth was fizzing with smiles and spit. At least it was, until he heard Hazel’s voice, when he turned, and remembered who his mother was, and started to howl.

‘Well, don’t say you didn’t like it,’ said Hazel, taking him on to her shoulder, feeling betrayed.

‘Sorry,’ said Margaret, ‘I was dying to have a go.’

‘Oh, any time,’ said Hazel, archly. ‘You can keep him if you like,’ listening already to her housewife’s camp.

Why not? She sat down at the table and threw a white baby cloth over the worst of the slug trails on her chest and lifted her face to the weak Easter sun.

‘How’s the new house?’ said Margaret.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Hazel. ‘You can’t get anything done.’

‘Five years,’ said Margaret. ‘Five years I have been trying to get carpet for the back bedrooms.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘I mean, five years I’ve been trying to get to the shop to look at the carpet books to start thinking about carpet for the back bedrooms.’

‘What did you used to have?’ said Hazel, then realised she shouldn’t ask this, because it was John’s parents’ house, and talking about the old carpet was talking about his dead mother, and God knows what else.

‘I mean, did you have lino or boards, or what?’

‘I couldn’t look at them,’ said Margaret. ‘I got down on my hands and knees and I got – you know – a claw hammer, and I prised them up.’

Hazel looked at the laughing children running after John, who was also laughing.

‘The dirt,’ said Margaret.

‘John!’ said Hazel. ‘Tea-time. Now please.’ Then she said to her sister-in-law, ‘A friend of mine found amazing stuff on the Internet. Stripes and picture rugs, and I don’t know what else.’

‘Really,’ said Margaret, and started to butter a round of bread.

* * *

John’s father turned to them, and either shook his fist, or just lifted his hand – he had such a bad tremor, it was hard to tell. And this was another thing that Hazel could not figure out: what part of him was affected by the Parkinson’s, or was it Parkinson’s at all? Was his speech funny? Truth be told, she never understood a word he said.

‘Hffash en silla?’

‘Well, they’re kids, Daddy,’ said Margaret without a blink – so maybe it was just her, after all. They watched him for a while, poking at the flower bed with his stick.

‘He used to love his sweet pea along that wall,’ Margaret said, like the man was already dead.

Hazel said nothing.

‘Will you take a bite to eat, Daddy, pet?’ but he ignored her, like all the rest.

Hazel had a sudden pang for her little garden in Lucan. The seeded grass was sprouting, and the tulips were about to bloom. She had planted the bulbs the week they got the keys: kneeling on the front path, seven months pregnant, digging with the little shovel from the fire-irons; a straight line from the gate to the door of fat, red tulips, the type you get in a park – ‘a bit municipal,’ as her mother had said, squinting at the pack – that were now flaming red at the tips, like little cups of green fire.

‘That’s what I love about this place,’ she said. ‘This wonderful stretch of garden.’

‘Yes,’ said Margaret, carefully.

‘John. Divorce! Now,’ shouted Hazel, and he finally brought the laughing children to the tableside.

The baby didn’t cry when she shouted. That was something she hadn’t known, that the baby didn’t actually mind shouting. Or maybe he just didn’t mind her shouting.

Still, it was an advance.

‘Who wants ham?’ Hazel said to the kids; loading it on to the bread, helping out.

‘I don’t like ham,’ said Stephanie, who was nearly four.

‘No?’

‘No, I don’t like it.’

‘I don’t like ham.’ They were all saying it now, the big brother and the little brother. ‘I don’t like ham.’ It was all a bit intense, Hazel thought, and accusatory.

‘I think you are confusing me with someone who gives a fuck,’ she said – changing at the last moment, of course, to, ‘Someone who cares whether, or not, you like ham.’

John gave her a quick glance. The child, Stephanie, gazed at her with blank and sophisticated eyes.

‘Maybe a little bit of ham?’ said Hazel.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Stephanie.

‘Right.’

John picked an apple out of the pile on the table.

‘A is for?’ he said, holding it high.

‘Answer,’ said Stephanie. ‘A is for A-A-Answer,’ and the children laughed, even though they didn’t quite know what the joke was. They laughed on and on, and then they laughed at the sound of their own laughter, for a little while more.

‘How do you spell “wrong”?’ said Kenneth, the eldest.

‘W-R-O-N-G,’ said Hazel.

‘W is for Wrong,’ he said. ‘W is for Wrong Answer,’ and they were off again; this amazing, endless, senseless sound – and this time the baby joined in, too.

He was asleep before they reached the hotel. The weather had changed and they carried him through a wind-whipped car park that did not even make him stir. Nor did he wake up in the room, when Hazel prised him out of the car seat – so she lay him on the bed as he was, profoundly asleep, in a dirty nappy and milk-encrusted babygro.

‘He’ll wake up in a minute,’ she said. ‘He needs a feed.’ But he still didn’t wake up: not for his feed, not when John went down to the bar for drinks. He slept through the remains of a film on the telly and another round of drinks, and he slept through the sound of his parents screaming at each other from either side of the bed where he lay. It blew up from nowhere.

‘And you can tell your fucking sister that I don’t want her fucking house.’

‘No one says you want it.’

‘Jesus, sometimes I think you’re just pretending to be thick and sometimes I think you actually are thick. You can’t talk about the carpets without her thinking what you’d put down on the floors if you got her out of there when the old man died.’

‘Oh, you are,’ he said, with his voice quite trembly. ‘Oh, you really are …’

‘You fucking bet I am.’

‘No, well done. Well done.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘Carpet, is it? I thought you were talking about my father.’

‘Whatever.’

‘I thought you were talking about my father, there, for a minute.’

‘Well, I am not talking about your father. That is exactly what I am not talking about. You are the one who is talking about your father. Actually. Or not talking about him. Or whatever passes in your fucking family for talking.’

‘You are such an uppity cunt, you know that?’

‘Yes, I am. Yes, I fucking am. And I don’t want your fat sister’s fat house.’

‘Well, actually, it’s not her house.’

‘Actually, if you don’t mind, I don’t want to talk about whose house it is. We can get our own house.’

‘We have our own house.’

‘A proper fucking house!!!’

Hazel was so angry she thought she might pop something, or have some style of a prolapse; her body, after the baby, being a much less reliable place. Meanwhile, the reason they needed a house in the first place slept on. His blissful flesh rose and fell. His mouth smiled.

The baby slept like he knew just what he was doing. The baby slept like he was eating sleep; his front stiff with old food and his back soft with shit. He slept through the roaring and the thrown hairbrush, and the storming of his father off to the residents’ bar. He slept through the return of his father twenty seconds later to say something very level and very telling, and
the double-fisted assault as his mother pushed him back out to the corridor crying that he could sleep in the fucking bar. He slept through his mother’s anguished weeping, the roar of the taps, and the sad slosh and drip of her body shifting in the bath. It was, in fact, only when Hazel had fallen asleep, crawling for a moment in under the covers, that the baby decided to wake up and scream. Maybe it was the silence that woke him. Mind you, his screaming sounded the same as every other night’s screaming, she thought, so it was impossible to know how much he had been damaged by it all; by the total collapse of the love that made him. Could anger hurt him, when he had never heard it before?

Hazel plugged his roars with the bottle that was still floating, forgotten, in the hotel kettle. She undid the poppers on his babygro, as he sucked, and extracted him from it, one limb at a time. She reached between his soft legs to undo the poppers of his vest, which had a wet brown stain across the back, and she rolled the vest carefully under itself to keep the shit on the inside. When the vest was finally off, she pushed two baby wipes down into the nappy to stop the leak. All of this while the baby sat in her naked lap, with her left hand propping up the bottle and his eyes on hers.

The baby was huge. Maybe it was because she had no clothes on, but he seemed twice as big as the last time she had him in her arms. Hazel felt like she kept losing this baby, and getting someone new. She thought that she would fall in love with the baby if only it would stay still, just for a minute, but the baby never did stay still. Sometimes it seemed like it was all around her, as though there was nothing in her world except the baby, but every time she looked straight at the baby, or tried to look straight at the baby … whatever it was, just wasn’t there.

She was looking at him now.

But she still clung to it, whatever it was. She still hoped and hung on. Was this enough? Was this the way you loved a baby?

The line of milk pulsed and bubbled as it sank down into the teat, and the baby started to suck air. Hazel pulled the
empty bottle out with a pop and set him on her shoulder, holding him with her forearms now, because she thought there might be shit on her hands.

The baby was full, his belly taut. She would get some wind out of him, and then clean up. Meanwhile, the feel of his bare skin against her own made Hazel vague with pleasure. She brushed her cheek against his fine hair, and the baby belched fantastically down the skin of her back.

‘Oh! so clever,’ she said, dipping and turning around. ‘Oh! so clever,’ dipping and turning back again. She did it a few more times, just to get the weight and poise of it, with the fat baby against her fat chest, and her crossed hands dangling beneath his bum. Dip and turn, dip and turn. The baby’s cheek a millimetre away from her own cheek – a hair’s breadth, that is what that was called. A hair’s breath.

Outside, the wind had picked up.

Rock a bye baby, she sang in a whisper, On the tree top.

She was nearly out of wipes. She did not have the courage to put him in a slippery bath. She would dunk a hotel towel in the sink and use that, no matter who had to pick it up, or use it afterwards. God, this baby business brought you very low, she thought, and turned with a smile to the opening door.