Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

‘So, honeybunch,’ I say. ‘When’s this guy of yours going to show?’

At dinner we talk about sex. Everyone is drunk quite quickly, except maybe Frank who is worried about the food. But when it is all served up, he goes too. Wham. There are two red blotches flaring over his cheeks from the side of his nose.

Sarah’s man sits all hunched over and bundled up in a T-shirt and a knitted thing and a jacket that he won’t take off, so I can’t tell what his body is like, but his hands are very small and unpleasant. He reaches on to his plate and lifts little pieces up with glistening fingertips.

So, his name is Fiach. He works part-time for his father and he takes photographs and he wants to get into advertising but more like short films, blah blah, you know the type. When he turns his head you can see the tail end of a tattoo coming out from under his hair.

But it seems that Sarah is mad about him. She looks at him with her entire face, then she gets embarrassed and looks down at her plate. I wonder what he does to her in bed, or makes her do.

And then we are all talking at once. I say that the real porn on the Internet is the property pages from France. A house in the Auvergne for fourteen grand, that’s the real porn, and Sarah is trying to tell her hitch-hiking story from Italy and Fiach is talking about the first porn shop he went into in London where the women in the magazines were like housewives, all trussed up with clothes pegs and Marigold gloves.

Amazing. We are people who have sex. Frank fills the glasses and I see it all stretching out ahead of me. Couples. I look at the rest of my life and despair.

Now everyone is excited, jumping in with their particular tic: politicians who put things up their bottoms, and the one about the lesbian journalists, and then some film star who took a shit, literally, on a beautiful black woman, this last from Sarah.

‘Oh, come on,’ says Frank.

‘Come on, what?’

‘It’s just because she’s black.’

‘Well, exactly.’

‘I mean, the story is just because she’s black.’

‘Oh, Frank,’ says Sarah. ‘Oh, you poor boy,’ and she squeezes his forearm.

Frank gets up then and goes to the counter and there is a pause around the table. He swings back with the coffee cups and says to Fiach, ‘I was looking for a camera in the duty free last month, but it’s all gizmos and auto-focus. Like for eejits.’

Sarah snorts into her glass of wine. Then she just keeps laughing. Fiach looks at her and says, ‘Don’t bother. I started with a second-hand Olympus. Bog basic. Lovely thing.’

‘Olympus,’ says Frank, but before Fiach can turn away from her, Sarah says, ‘Fiach likes taking pictures. Don’t you, Fiach?’

Then it is her turn to get up. She leaves the room and the two boys talk on about cameras and she doesn’t come back. I think she’s left the flat; I think she’s in the other room doing something dreadful, something I can’t even imagine. I try to think of what it might be, but whatever comes to mind isn’t really dreadful, after all.

Still, the air of it is in the room, the feel of something appalling, until Sarah comes back with her hair brushed and the eyeliner wiped away from under her left eye. She sees us looking, sweeps up her drink and decides to dance. Glass in one hand, she waves the other in the air. The skin of her underarm is dark and stained, and not particularly strawberry blonde. I say, ‘Sarah.’

‘What?’

But, as if she guesses, she lowers her arm, shimmies over and hooks her finger into the neck of Fiach’s T-shirt. She smiles close into his face. Then she gives up and slumps back into her seat.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she says. ‘Let’s go somewhere. Let’s go for a bop.’

Which is when Frank brings out the brandy, still talking to Fiach about lenses, and I ask Sarah about her mother. Sarah hates her mother, though it is her father who is the manic depressive, probably. But it is the father she loves and the mother she despises, so we talk about this for a while. Then I tell her about Mammy taking the bottle out of the hot press and saying, ‘Well, at least I’m not drinking any more,’ as she pours herself another vodka. But it is an old conversation. It doesn’t work any more. It is time to go — or would be if Sarah weren’t so drunk. She leans back and looks at the boys and tests the edge of her front teeth with her tongue.

‘Fiach,’ she says.

‘What?’

On the other side of the table, Fiach is talking about some kind of goose. He says he goes to Bull Island every Saturday to take pictures of this goose. He is throwing it out like it’s a sort of trendy thing to do, but he’s also actually started listing the names of gulls and terns and Frank is looking at him with a face like setting concrete. I think he’s too astonished or too bored to speak, but then I see that he is completely interested, that he is nine years old.

‘Maybe Fiach could do the wedding pictures,’ I say, but no one is listening. Fiach is on to curlews now, he seems to be talking about their feet.

‘I said, maybe Fiach can do the wedding, Frank.’

Beside me, Sarah is trying to set her drink on fire. She has the lighter pushed down into the glass, and she’s flicking the wheel. When the spark catches, she pulls back in fright and the glass falls over. The flaming brandy licks out across the table.

For a moment, all four of us watch the flames spill across the wood. Frank lifts his napkin but does not bring it down. It is such a beautiful blue. The fire gathers the air and loses it; drinking it, slurping it down. Fiach pulls his chair back as a rivulet of flame drips over the edge of the table and lands on the floor. Then I pick up a bottle of water and put it all out.

Sarah is silent in the bedroom, putting on her coat. Then she turns to say that she is delighted. Of course, she said it when I first showed her the ring — with a big fake scream like the rest of them — but now she says it properly, she takes both my arms and says she is just delighted, just so pleased. She says that Frank is just so brilliant.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Oh, Jesus, Sarah, I’m scared.’

We hug then, and I show her back into the big room.

After they are gone I go over to the stereo, turn it up and start to dance. I swing my backside. I sit down on the air and then push up into it. I say, ‘Fuck you , Sarah. Hey, fuck you,’ pushing up with my joke penis, made of air.

Frank sits on the sofa and looks at me. Then he closes his eyes and seems to sleep.

I used to drink to bring the house down, just because I saw a few cracks in the wall. But Truth is not an earthquake, it is only a crack in the wall and the house might stand for another hundred years.

‘Let it come down,’ I would say, perhaps a little too loudly. ‘Let it come down.’ The others knew what I meant alright, but the house stayed still.

I gave all that up. We each have our methods. I am good at interior decoration. I have a gin and tonic before dinner and look at the wallpaper. I am only drunk where it is appropriate. I am only in love where it stays still. This does not mean that I am polite.

Three years ago I hit a nurse in the labour ward, because I had the excuse. I make housewife noises in the dark, to make your skin crawl. I am glad he has given me a child, so I can drown it, to show the fullness of my intent.

I boast, of course.

Of all the different love stories, I chose an architect’s love story, with strong columns and calculated lines of stress, a witty doorway and curious steps. In the house of an architect’s love story the light is always moving, the air is thick with light. From outside, the house of the architect’s love story is a neo-Palladian villa, but inside, there are corners, cellars, attics, toilets, a room full of books with an empty socket in the lamp. There are cubbyholes that smell of wet afternoons. There are vaults, a sacristy, an office with windows set in the floor. There is a sky-blue nursery where the rockinghorse is shaped like a bat and swings from a rail. And in the centre of it all is a bay window where the sun pours in.