Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

But I’m stuck with Brian in the kitchen, and Serena’s eye sockets huge, and her eyes burning in the middle of them. Of course there were tears — my mother’s tears, my tears. Dad hit the door jamb and then leant his forehead against his clenched fist. Serena’s own tears, when they came, looked hot, as though she had very little liquid left. My mother put her to bed, so tenderly, like she was still a child, and we called the doctor while she slept. She woke to find his fingers on her pulse and she looked as though she was going to start yelling again, but it was too late for all that. He went out to the phone in the hall and booked her into hospital on the spot.

Ninety-one days. And believe me, we lived them one by one. We lived those days one at a time. We went through each hour of them, and we didn’t skip a single minute.

I met Brian from time to time in the hospital and we exchanged a few grim jokes about the ward; a row of little sticks in the beds, knitting, jigging, anything to burn the calories off. I opened the bathroom door one day and saw one of them in there, checking herself in the mirror. She was standing on a toilet seat with the cubicle door open and her nightdress pulled up to her face. You could see all her bones. There was a mile of space between her legs, and her pubis stuck out, a bulging hammock of flesh, terribly split. She pulled the nightdress down when she heard the door open, so by the time I looked from her reflection to the cubicle, she was decent again. It was just a flash, like flicking the remote to find a sitcom and getting a shot of famine in the middle, or of porn.

Serena lay in a bed near the end of the row, a still shape in the fidgeting ward. She read books, and turned the pages slowly. I brought her wine gums and LLC gums, because when she was little she used to steal them from my stash. Serena was the kind of girl whose pocket money was gone by Tuesday, and who spent the rest of the week in a whine. Now, it was a shower of things she might want — wine gums, Jaffa Cakes, an ice-cream birthday cake, highlights in her hair — all of them utterly stupid and small. We were indulging a five-year-old child, and nothing was enough, and everything was too late.

Then there was the therapy. We all had to go; walking out the front door in our good coats, as though we were off to Mass. We sat around on plastic chairs: my father with his leg stuck silently out; my mother in a welter of worry, scarcely listening or jumping at some silly thing and hanging on to it for dear life. Serena sat there, looking bored. I couldn’t help it, I lost my temper. I actually shouted at her. I said she should be ashamed of herself, the things she was putting Mam through. ‘Look at her,’ I said. ‘Look!’ I said I hoped she was pleased with herself now. She just sat there listening, and then she leaned forward to say, very deliberate, ‘If I got knocked down by a bus, you’d say I was just looking for attention.’ Which made me think about that car crash when she was small. Perhaps I should have mentioned it, but I didn’t. Brian, as official boyfriend, sat in the middle of this family row with his legs set wide and his big hands dangling into the gap. At the end of the session he guided her out of the room with his palm on the small of her back, as though he was her protector and not part of this at all.

It takes years for anorexics to die, that’s the other thing. During the first course of therapy they decided it would be better if she moved out of home. Was there another family, they said, where she could stay for a while? As if. As if my parents had a bunch of cheerful friends with spare rooms, who wanted to clean up after Serena, and hand over their bathroom while she locked herself in there for three hours at a time. We got her a bedsit in Rathmines, and I paid. It was either that or my mother going out to work part-time.

So Serena was living my life now. She had my flat and my freedom and my money. It sounds like an odd thing to say, but I didn’t begrudge it at the time. I just wanted it to be over. I mean, I just wanted my mother to smile.

Five months later she was six stone and one ounce, and back in the ward after collapsing in the street. I expected to see Brian, but she had got rid of him, she said. I went to pick up some things from the flat for her, and found that it was full of empty packets of paracetamol and used tissues that she didn’t even bother to throw away. They were stuck together in little lumps. I don’t know what was in them — cleanser? Maybe she spat into them, maybe her own spit was a nuisance to her. I had to buy a pair of rubber gloves to tackle them, and I never told anyone, not the therapist, not the doctor, not my mother. But I recognised something in her face now, as though we had a secret we were forced to share.

I went through her life in my head. Every Tuesday night before the goddamn therapy, I sifted the moments: a cat that died, my grandmother’s death, Santa Claus. I went through the caravan holidays and the time she cried halfway up Carantoo-hill and sat down and had to be carried to the top. I went through her first period and the time I bawled her out for stealing my mohair jumper. The time she used up a can of fly-spray in an afternoon slaughter and the way she played horsey on my father’s bocketty leg. It was all just bits. I really wanted it to add up to something, but it didn’t.

They beefed her up a bit and let her go. A couple of months later we got a card from Amsterdam. I don’t know where she got the money. The flat was all paid up till Christmas and I might have taken it myself, but one look at my mother was enough. I could not do a thing to hurt her more.

Then one day I saw a woman in the street who looked like my gran, just before she died. I thought it was my gran for a minute: out of the hospice somehow ten years later and walking towards St Stephen’s Green. Actually, I thought she was dead and I was terrified — literally petrified — of what she had come back to say to me. Our eyes met, and hers were wicked with some joke or other. It was Serena, of course. And her teeth by now were yellow as butter.

I stopped her and tried to talk, but she came over all adult and suggested we go for coffee. She said Brian had followed her somehow to Amsterdam. She looked over her shoulder. I think she was hallucinating by now. But there was something so fake about all this grown-up stuff, I was glad when we said, ‘Goodbye, so.’ When I looked after her in the street, there she was, my sister, the little toy walk of her, the way she held her neck — Serena running away from some harmless game at the age of seven, too proud to cry.

The phone call from the hospital came six weeks later. There was something wrong with her liver. After that it was kidneys. And after that she died. Her yellow teeth were falling out by the end, and she was covered in baby-like down. All her beauty was gone — because, even though she was my sister, I have to say that Serena was truly, radiantly beautiful in her day.

So, she died. There is no getting away from something like that. You can’t recover. I didn’t even try. The first year was a mess and after that our lives were just punctured, not even sad — just less, just never the same again.

But it is those ninety-one days I think about — the first time she left, when it was all ahead of us, and no one knew. The summer I was twenty-one and Serena was seventeen, I woke up in the morning and I had the room to myself. She was mysteriously gone from the bed across the room, she was absolutely gone from the downstairs sofa, and the bathroom was free for hours at a time. Gone. Not there. Vamoosed. My mother, especially, was infatuated by her absence. It is not enough to say she fought Serena’s death, even then — she was intimate with it. To my mother, my sister’s death was an enemy’s embrace. They were locked together in the sitting room, in the kitchen, in the hall. They met and talked, and bargained and wept. She might have been saying, ‘Take me. Take me, instead.’ But I think — you get that close to it, you bring it into your home, everybody’s going to lose.