Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

‘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.