Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

I am sitting on Dollymount Strand going through Mary’s handbag, using her little mirror, applying her ‘Wine Rose and Gentlelight Colourize Powder Shadow Trio’, her Plumsilk lipstick, her Venetian Brocade blusher and her Tearproof (thank God) mascara.

I will be bored soon. I will drown her slowly in a pool and let the police peg out the tatters to dry when they pick up the bag on the beach. It affords me some satisfaction to think of her washed up in the hairdressers, out of her nylon shift and newly shriven, without the means to pay.

My revenge looks back at me, out of the mirror. The new fake me looks twice as real as the old. Underneath my clothes my breasts have become blind, my iliac crests mottle and bruise. Strung out between my legs is a triangle of air that pulls away from sex, while my hands clutch. It used to be the other way around.

I root through the bag, looking for a past. At the bottom, discoloured by Wine Rose and Gentlelight, I find a small, portable Virgin. She is made of transparent plastic, except for her cloak, which is coloured blue. ‘A present from Lourdes’ is written on the globe at her feet, underneath her heel and the serpent. Mary is full of surprises. Her little blue crown is a screw-off top, and her body is filled with holy water, which I drink.

Down by the water’s edge I set her sailing on her back, off to Ben, who is sentimental that way. Then I follow her into his story, with its doves and prostitutes, its railway stations and marks on the skin. I have nowhere else to go. I love that man.

The young man in the corner was covered in flour. His coat was white, his shoes were white and there was a white paper hat askew on his head. Around his mouth and nose was the red weal of sweating skin where he had worn a mask to keep out the dust. The rest of him was perfectly edible and would turn to dough if he stepped outside in the rain.

He was with a pal. They were assessing her as she sat across the room from them with a glass of Guinness and an old newspaper that someone had left behind.

‘What do you think?’ asked the white man.

‘I wouldn’t go near her with a bag of dicks,’ said his companion, who was left-handed — or at least that was the hand that was holding his pint. He had the thin Saturday-matinée face of a villain; of the man who might kidnap the young girl and end up in a duel with Errol Flynn. She saw him swinging out of velvet drapes, up-ending tables and jumping from the chandelier, brandishing, not a sword, but a hessian bag from which come soft gurgles and thin protesting squeaks.

Errol Flynn wounds him badly and is leaning over his throat ready for the final, ungentlemanly slash when the bag of dicks escapes, rolls down a flight of steps, shuffles over to the beautiful young girl and starts to whine. She unties the knot and sets them free.

‘What a peculiar language you speak,’ she said mentally, with a half-smile and a nod, as if her own were normal. ‘Normal’ usually implied American. I am Canadian, she used to say, it may be a very boring country, but who needs history when we have so much weather?

Irish people had no weather at all apart from vague shifts from damp to wet, and they talked history like it was happening down the road. They also sang quite a bit and were depressingly ethnic. They thought her bland.

Of course I am bland, she thought. You too would be bland if you grew up with one gas pump in front of the house and nothing else except a view that stretched over half the world. Landscape made me bland, bears poking in the garbage can stunted my individuality, as did plagues of horseflies, permafrost, wild-fire, and the sun setting like a bomb. So much sky makes ones bewildered — which is the only proper way to be.

She rented a flat in Rathmines where the only black people in the country seemed to reside and the shops stayed open all night. The house was suitably ‘old’ but the partition walls bothered her, as did the fact that the door from her bedroom into the hall had been taken off its hinges. The open block of the doorframe frightened her as she fell asleep, not because of what might come through it, but because she might drift off the bed and slide through the gap to Godknowswhere. (In the shower she sang ‘How are things in Glockamorra?’ and ‘Come back, Paddy Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff’.)

The white man was beside her asking to look at her paper and he sat down to read.

‘Go on, ask her does she want to come,’ said the matinée man across the deserted bar.

‘Ask her yourself.’

‘Where are you from?’ said the matinée man picking up their two pints and making the move to her table.

‘God that’s a great pair of shoes you got on,’ he said looking at her quilted moon-boots. ‘You didn’t get them here.’

‘Canada,’ she said.

‘She can talk!’ said the villain. ‘I told you she could talk.’

‘You can’t bring him anywhere,’ said the white man, and she decided that she would sleep with him. Why not? It had been a long time since Toronto.

‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked, and was surprised at the silence that fell.

‘I’m skiving off,’ said the white man. ‘I’m on the hop. Mitching. I’ll get the sack.’ She still didn’t seem to understand. ‘Look at me,’ he opened up his palms like a saint to show her the thin rolls of paste in the creases. ‘I work over there. In the bakery.’

‘I guessed that,’ she said. ‘I could smell the fresh bread.’

She wrote this story in a letter to her flatmate in Toronto. It is a story about A Bit of Rough. It includes furious sex in redbrick alleyways. It has poignant moments to do with cultural distinctions and different breeds of selfishness. Unfortunately the man in question is not wearing leather, nor is he smelling like Marlon Brando. He is too thin. His accent is all wrong. He is covered, not with oil and sweat, but with sweat and flour.

The furious sex took him by surprise. She looked at a man sliding down the wall on to his hunkers with his hands over his face. He had lost his paper hat. There was flour down her front congealing in the rain. ‘I’ve never done that before,’ he said.

‘Well, neither have I.’

‘I’ve never done any of that before.’

‘Oh boy.’

‘And I’ve got the sack.’ So she brought him home.

‘Erections. What a laugh. My ancient Aunt Moragh bounced out of her coffin on the way to the cemetery. I will never forget it. You could almost hear the squawk. It was my cousin Shawn driving the pick-up when the suspension went. Now he was a bit simple — or at least that is, he never talked so you couldn’t tell. But he took her dying so hard that he was swinging the wheel with one hand and crying into the other and he drove regardless, with his ass dragging in the dirt. I swear I saw Moragh rise to her feet like she was on hinges, like she was a loose plank in the floor coming up to hit you in the face. And she yelled out “Shawn! You come back here!” I was only six, but I wouldn’t deny it, no matter how much they said I was a liar.’

There was a thin white man in her bed, and when he got up to go to the toilet he disappeared through the doorframe like the line of light from a closing door. They were no longer drunk. He stayed, because he didn’t know what else to do. He was fragile, like a man let out of prison, who bumps into a stranger on the street and feels a lifetime’s friendship. He stared, and she felt all the stories she had inside her looking for him like home.

‘So Todd tells me about this woman that he is in love with. I mean that’s OK, but why do men have to take all their clothes off before they can tell you about the woman they love? So there we were, sitting in the U of T canteen and I’m saying “Todd, please, it’s OK, I’ll survive, please put your clothes back on.”’