Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

She took to her bed with shame, while a zillion a trillion a billion a million numbers opened up before her and wouldn’t be pinned down at 6 or 7 or 8. She felt how fragile the world was with so much in it and confined herself to Primes, that were out on their own except for 1.

‘The great thing about bingo is that no one loses,’ Mrs Power had told him about their Tuesday and Thursday nights. Mrs Hanratty felt flayed in the corner, listening to him and his pride. Her luck was leaking into the seat as he invited himself along, to keep himself away from the drink, he said. He had nothing else to do.

The number of the coach was NIE 133. Mrs Maguire, Mrs Power and Mrs Hanratty climbed on board and took their places with the 33 women and 1 man who made up this Thursday run. He sat at the back and shouted for them to come and join him, and there was hooting from the gang at the front. He came up the aisle instead and fell into the seat beside Mrs Hanratty with a bend in the road. She was squeezed over double, paddling her hand on the floor in search of 1 ear-ring which she may have lost before she got on at all.

He crossed his arms with great ceremony, and not even the violence with which the coach turned corners could convince Mrs Hanratty that he was not rubbing her hand, strangely, with his 3 fingers, around and around.

‘I am a 55-year-old woman who has had sex 1,332 times in my life and I am being molested by a man I should never have spoken to in the first place.’ The action of his hand was polite and undemanding and Mrs Hanratty resented beyond anger the assurance of its tone.

All the numbers were broken off the car parked outside the hall, except 0, which was fine — it was the only 1 she knew anymore. Mrs Hanratty felt the justice of it, though it made her feel so lonely. She had betrayed her own mind and her friends were strange to her. Her luck was gone.

The 3-fingered man was last out of the coach and he called her back. ‘I have your ear-ring! Maeve!’ She listened. She let the others walk through. She turned.

His face was a jumble of numbers as he brought his hand up in mock salute. Out of the mess she took: his 3 fingers; the arching 3 of his eyebrows, which was laughing; the tender 3 of his upper lip and the 1 of his mouth, which opened into 0 as he spoke.

‘You thought you’d lost it!’ and he dropped the black jet into her hand.

‘I thought I had.’

He smiled and the numbers of his face scattered and disappeared. His laughter multiplied out around her like a net.

‘So what are you going to win tonight then?’

‘Nothing. You.’

‘O.’

I work for a firm which manufactures rubber gloves. There are many kinds of protective gloves, from the surgical and veterinary (arm-length) to industrial, gardening and domestic. They have in common a niceness. They all imply revulsion. You might not handle a dead mouse without a pair of rubber gloves, someone else might not handle a baby. I need not tell you that shops in Soho sell nuns’ outfits made of rubber, that some grown men long for the rubber under-blanket of their infancies, that rubber might save the human race. Rubber is a morally, as well as a sexually, exciting material. It provides us all with an elastic amnesty, to piss the bed, to pick up dead things, to engage in sexual practices, to not touch whomsoever we please.

I work with and sell an everyday material, I answer everyday questions about expansion ratios, tearing, petrifaction. I moved from market research to quality control. I have snapped more elastic in my day etcetera etcetera.

My husband and I are the kind of people who put small ads in the personal columns looking for other couples who may be interested in some discreet fun. This provokes a few everyday questions: How do people do that? What do they say to each other? What do they say to the couples who answer? To which the answers are: Easily. Very little. ‘We must see each other again sometime.’

When I was a child it was carpet I loved. I should have made a career in floor-coverings. There was a brown carpet in the dining room with specks of black, that was my parents’ pride and joy. ‘Watch the carpet!’ they would say, and I did. I spent all my time sitting on it, joining up the warm, black dots. Things mean a lot to me.

The stench of molten rubber gives me palpitations. It also gives me eczema and a bad cough. My husband finds the smell anaphrodisiac in the extreme. Not even the products excite him, because after seven years you don’t know who you are touching, or not touching, anymore.

My husband is called Malachy and I used to like him a lot. He was unfaithful to me in that casual, ‘look, it didn’t mean anything’ kind of way. I was of course bewildered, because that is how I was brought up. I am supposed to be bewildered. I am supposed to say ‘What is love anyway? What is sex?’

Once the fiction between two people snaps then anything goes, or so they say. But it wasn’t my marriage I wanted to save, it was myself. My head, you see, is a balloon on a string, my insides are elastic. I have to keep the tension between what is outside and what is in, if I am not to deflate, or explode.

So it was more than a suburban solution that made me want to be unfaithful with my husband, rather than against him. It was more than a question of the mortgage. I had my needs too: a need to be held in, to be filled, a need for sensation. I wanted revenge and balance. I wanted an awfulness of my own. Of course it was also a suburban solution. Do you really want to know our sexual grief? How we lose our grip, how we feel obliged to wear things, how we are supposed to look as if we mean it.

Malachy and I laugh in bed, that is how we get over the problem of conviction. We laugh at breakfast too, on a good day, and sometimes we laugh again at dinner. Honest enough laughter, I would say, if the two words were in the same language, which I doubt. Here is one of the conversations that led to the ad in the personals:

‘I think we’re still good in bed.’ (LAUGH)

‘I think we’re great in bed.’ (LAUGH)

‘I think we should advertise.’ (LAUGH)

Here is another:

‘You know John Jo at work? Well his wife was thirty-one yesterday. I said. “What did you give her for her birthday then?” He said, “I gave her one for every year. Beats blowing out candles.” Do you believe that?’ (LAUGH)

You may ask when did the joking stop and the moment of truth arrive? As if you didn’t know how lonely living with someone can be.

The actual piece of paper with the print on is of very little importance. John Jo at work composed the ad for a joke during a coffee-break. My husband tried to snatch it away from him. There was a chase.

There was a similar chase a week later when Malachy brought the magazine home to me. I shrieked. I rolled it up and belted him over the head. I ran after him with a cup full of water and drenched his shirt. There was a great feeling of relief, followed by some very honest sex. I said, ‘I wonder what the letters will say?’ I said, ‘What kind of couples do that kind of thing? What kind of people answer ads like that?’ I also said ‘God how vile!’

Some of the letters had photos attached. ‘This is my wife.’ Nothing is incomprehensible, when you know that life is sad. I answered one for a joke. I said to Malachy ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner?’

I started off with mackerel pâté, mackerel being a scavenger fish, and good for the heart. I followed with veal osso buco, for reasons I need not elaborate, and finished with a spiced fig pudding with rum butter. Both the eggs I cracked had double yolks, which I found poignant.