Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

She felt sure it was a baby, now — that she had not been fooled. Her stomach was still warm and aching from it. The deer chewed on and did not mind her, while the toy plane buzzed and sputtered and fell to ground.

The change of life.

Her life was changing, that was for sure, though she seemed to be standing still. But, ‘Up or down?’ she wondered. ‘Up or down?’ The children threw the plane back in the air and it circled again on the end of its wire. Kitty walked on. It had been a baby, she knew it. She had been visited. How could it be down, when she felt such joy.

The year I’m talking about, the year my sister left (or whatever you choose to call it), I was twenty-one and she was seventeen. We had been keeping our proper distance, that is to say, for seventeen years. Four years apart — which is sometimes a long way apart, and sometimes closer than you think. Some years we liked each other and some years we didn’t. But near or far, she was my sister. And I suppose I am trying to say what that meant.

Serena always thought she would pass me out some day, hence the underage drinking and the statutory sex. But even though she was getting into pubs and into trouble before I was in high heels, I knew, deep down and weary, that I was the older one — I always would be the older one, and the only way she would get to be older than me, is if I got dead.

And of course, I liked it too. It was fun having someone smaller than you. She always said I bossed her around, but I know we had fun. Because with Serena you are always asking yourself what went wrong, or even, Where did I go wrong? But, believe me, I am just about done with all that — with shuffling through her life in my mind.

There was the time when she was six and I was ten. I used to take her to the bus at lunchtime, because she still only had a half-day at school. So I spent my break waiting at the bus stop with my little sister instead of playing German jumps in the playground, which is not me complaining, it is me saying that she was cared for endlessly, by all of us. But there are just some things you can not do for a child. There are some things you can not help.

This particular day, we were walking out of the school lane and on to the main road when a girl sailed through the air and landed on the roof of a braking car. Serena said, ‘Look!’ and I pulled her along. It was far too serious. And as if she knew it was far too serious she came along with me without a fuss. A girl landed on the roof of a braking car. She turned in the air, as though she was doing a cartwheel. But it was a very slow cartwheel. There was a bicycle, if you thought hard about it, skidding away from the car, the pedal scraping the tarmac and spraying sparks. But you had to think hard to remember the bike. What you really remembered was this girl’s white socks and the pleated fan of her gymslip following her through the air.

The next day there were rumours of an accident, and my mind tells me now that the girl died but they didn’t want to tell us in case we got upset. I don’t know the truth of it. At the time there was just the two of us on an empty road, and a girl turning her slow cartwheel, and my hand finding Serena’s little hand and pulling her silently by.

That was one incident. There was another incident when she was maybe eight and I was twelve when a man in plaid trousers said, ‘Hello girls,’ and took his thing out of his fly. Maybe I should say he let his thing escape out of his fly, because it sort of jumped out and curled up, in a way that I now might recognise. At the time it looked like giblets, the same colour of subdued blood, dark and cooked, like that piece of the turkey our parents liked and called ‘the pope’s nose’. So we ran home all excited and told my mother about the man in plaid trousers and the pope’s nose, and she laughed, which I think was the right thing to do. By the lights of the time. And we had the same three brothers, who went through their phases of this or that. Nothing abnormal — though the year Jim wouldn’t wash was a bit of a trial. Look at me, I’m scraping the barrel here. We had a great childhood. And I’m fine, that’s the bottom line of it. I’m fine and Serena is no longer alive.

But the year I am talking about, it was 1981 and I was finished uni and starting a job. I had money and was buying clothes and I was completely delighted with myself. I even thought about leaving home, but my mother was lonely with us all growing up. She said she felt the creak of the world turning and she talked about getting old. She cried more; a general sort of weep, now and then — not about her life, but just about the way life goes.

I came home one day and Serena was in the doghouse, which was nothing new, because my mother smelt cigarettes off her, and also Something Else. I couldn’t think what this something else might be; there was no whiff of drink — perhaps it was sperm, I wouldn’t be surprised. It was three weeks before her final school exams and Serena was trashing our bedroom while my mother stood in the kitchen — wearing her coat, strangely enough — and chopping carrots. I went in and sat with Mam for a while, and when the silence upstairs finally settled, I went to check the damage. Clothes everywhere. One curtain ripped down. My alarm clock smashed. A bottle of perfume snapped at the neck — there was a pool of Chanel No. 5 soaking into the chest of drawers. I had a boyfriend at the time. The room stank. I didn’t blow my top. I said, ‘Clean yourself up, you stupid moron, Da’s nearly home.’

None of us liked our father, except Serena, who was a little flirt from an early age. I don’t think even my mother liked him — of course she said she ‘loved’ him, but that was only because you’re supposed to when you marry someone and sleep with them. He had a fused knee from some childhood accident and always sat with his leg sticking out in front of him. He wasn’t a bad man. But he sat and looked at us shouting and laughing and fighting, as though we were all an awful bore.

Or maybe I liked him then, but I don’t like him since — because after Serena he got a job managing a pub and he started sleeping over the shop. So that’s another one, now, who never comes home.

For three weeks the bedroom was thick with the smell of Chanel, we did not speak, and Serena did not eat. She fainted during her maths exam and had to be carried out, with a big crowd of people fanning her on the corridor floor. All of June she spent in the bathroom squeezing her spots, or she sat downstairs and did nothing and wouldn’t say what she wanted to do next. And then, on the fourteenth of July, she went out and did not come home.

We waited for ninety-one days. On Saturday the thirteenth of September there was the sound of a key in the door and a child walked in — a sort of death-child. She was six and a half stone. Behind her was a guy carrying a suitcase. He said his name was Brian. He looked like he didn’t know what to do.

We gave him a cup of tea, while Serena sat in a corner of the kitchen, glaring. As far as we could gather, she just turned up on his doorstep, and stayed. He was a nice guy. I don’t know what he was doing with a girl just out of school, but then again, Serena always looked old for her age.

It is hard to remember what it was like in those days, but anorexia was just starting then, it was just getting trendy. We looked at her and thought she had cancer, we couldn’t believe this was some sort of diet. Then trying to make her eat, the cooing and cajoling, the desperate silences as Serena looked at her plate and picked up one green bean. They say anorexics are bright girls who try too hard and get tipped over the brink, but Serena sauntered up to the brink. She looked over her shoulder at the rest of us, as we stood and called to her, and then she turned and jumped. It is not too much to say that she enjoyed her death. I don’t think it is too much to say that.