Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

I hoovered everything in sight of course. Our bedroom is stranger-proof. It is the kind of bedroom you could die in and not worry about the undertakers. The carpet is a little more interesting than beige, the spread is an ochre brown, the pattern on the curtains is expensive and unashamed. One wall is mirrored in a sanitary kind of way; with little handles for the wardrobe doors.

‘Ding Dong,’ said the doorbell. Malachy let them in. I heard the sound of coats being taken and drinks offered. I took off my apron, paused at the mirror and opened the kitchen door.

Her hair was over-worked, I thought — too much perm and too much gel. Her make-up was shiny, her eyes were small. All her intelligence was in her mouth, which gave an ironic twist as she said Hello. It was a large mouth, sexy and selfish. Malachy was holding out a gin and tonic for her in a useless kind of way.

Her husband was concentrating on the ice in his glass. His suit was a green so dark it looked black — very discreet, I thought, and out of our league, with Malachy in his cheap polo and jeans. I didn’t want to look at his face, nor he at mine. In the slight crash of our glances I saw that he was worn before his time.

I think he was an alcoholic. He drank his way through the meal and was polite. There was a feeling that he was pulling back from viciousness. Malachy, on the other hand, was over-familiar. He and the wife laughed at bad jokes and their feet were confused under the table. The husband asked me about my job and I told him about the machine I have for testing rubber squares; how it pulls the rubber four different ways at high speed. I made it sound like a joke, or something. He laughed.

I realised in myself a slow, physical excitement, a kind of pornographic panic. It felt like the house was full of balloons pressing gently against the ceiling. I looked at the husband.

‘Is this your first time?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘What kind of people do this kind of thing?’ I asked, because I honestly didn’t know.

‘Well they usually don’t feed us so well, or even at all.’ I felt guilty. ‘This is much more civilised,’ he said. ‘A lot of them would be well on before we arrive, I’d say. As a general kind of rule.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t really drink.’

‘Listen,’ he leaned forward. ‘I was sitting having a G and T in someone’s front room and the wife took Maria upstairs to look at the bloody grouting in the bathroom or something, when this guy comes over to me and I realise about six minutes too late that he plays for bloody Arsenal! If you see what I mean. A very ordinary looking guy.’

‘You have to be careful,’ he said. ‘And his wife was a cracker.’

When I was a child I used to stare at things as though they knew something I did not. I used to put them into my mouth and chew them to find out what it was. I kept three things under my bed at night: a piece of wood, a metal door-handle and a cloth. I sucked them instead of my thumb.

We climbed the stairs after Malachy and the wife, who were laughing. Malachy was away, I couldn’t touch him. He had the same look in his eye as when he came home from a hurling match when the right team won.

The husband was talking in a low, constant voice that I couldn’t refuse. I remember looking at the carpet, which had once meant so much to me. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing.

I thought that we were all supposed to end up together and perform and watch and all that kind of thing. I was interested in the power it would give me over breakfast, but I wasn’t looking forward to the confusion. I find it difficult enough to arrange myself around one set of limbs, which are heavy things. I wouldn’t know what to do with three. Maybe we would get over the awkwardness with a laugh or two, but in my heart of hearts I didn’t find the idea of being with a naked woman funny. What would we joke about? Would we be expected to do things?

What I really wanted to see was Malachy’s infidelity. I wanted his paunch made public, the look on his face, his bottom in the air. That would be funny.

I did not expect to be led down the hall and into the spare room. I did not expect to find myself sitting on my own with an alcoholic and handsome stranger who had a vicious look in his eye. I did not expect to feel anything.

I wanted him to kiss me. He leant over and tried to take off his shoes. He said, ‘God I hate that woman. Did you see her? The way she was laughing and all that bloody lip-gloss. Did you see her? She looks like she’s made out of plastic. I can’t get a hold of her without slipping around in some body lotion that smells like petrol and dead animals.’ He had taken his shoes off and was swinging his legs onto the bed. ‘She never changes you know.’ He was trying to take his trousers off. ‘Oh I know she’s sexy. I mean, you saw her. She is sexy. She is sexy. She is sexy. I just prefer if somebody else does it. If you don’t mind.’ I still wanted him to kiss me. There was the sound of laughter from the other room.

I roll off the wet patch and lie down on the floor with my cheek on the carpet, which is warm and friendly. I should go into floor-coverings.

I remember when I wet the bed as a child. First it is warm then it gets cold. I go into my parents’ bedroom, with its smell, and start to cry. My mother gets up. She is half-asleep but she’s not cross. She is huge. She strips the bed of the wet sheet and takes off the rubber under-blanket which falls with a thick sound to the floor. She puts a layer of newspaper on the mattress and pulls down the other sheet. She tells me to take off my wet pyjamas. I sleep in the raw between the top sheet and the rough blanket and when I turn over, all the warm newspaper under me makes a noise.

Cold women who drive cars like the clutch was a whisper and the gear stick a game. They roll into petrol stations, dangle their keys out the window and say ‘Fill her up’ to the attendant, who smells of American Dreams. They live in haciendas with the reek of battery chickens out the back, and their husbands are old. They go to Crete on their holidays, get drunk and nosedive into the waiter’s white shirt saying ‘I love you Stavros!’ even though his name is Paul. They drive off into a countryside with more hedges than fields and are frightened by the vigour of their dreams.

But let us stay, as the car slides past, with the pump attendant; with the weeping snout of his gun, that drips a silent humiliation on the cement; with the smell of clean sharp skies, of petrol and of dung. The garage behind him is connected in tight, spinning triangles as his eyes check one corner and then the next. There is an old exhaust lying on a shelf in the wall, there is a baseball hat stiff with cobwebs, hanging in the black space over the door. There is a grave dug in the floor, where the boss stands with a storm lamp, picking at the underside of cars. Evenly spaced in the thick, white light that circles from the window are rings set in the stone, to tether cows long dead.

He has a transistor radio. He has a pen from Spain with a Señorita in the casing who slides past a toreador and a bull, until she comes to rest under the click, waiting for his thumb. He has a hat, which he only wears in his room.

He is a sensitive young man.

What are cicadas? Are they the noise that happens in the dark, with a fan turning and murder in the shadows on the wall? Or do they bloom? Do people walk through forests and pledge themselves, while the ‘cicadas’ trumpet their purple and reds all around?

It is a question that he asks his father, whose voice smells of dying, the way that his mother’s smells of worry and of bread.

They look up the dictionary. ‘“Cicatrise,”’ says his father, who always answers the wrong question — ‘“to heal; to mark with scars” — I always thought that there was only one word which encompassed opposites, namely …? To cleave; to cleave apart as with a sword, or to cleave one on to the other, as in a loyal friend. If you were older we might discuss “cleavage” and whether the glass was half empty or half full. Or maybe we can have our cake and eat it after all.’