Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

It is easier to die when you have seen your own flesh; as I saw my own flesh for the first time, some five years ago. It was, at that moment, on the very cusp of decay. But decay, I have since discovered, takes far too long. I don’t want to drift away, I want to splatter.

I met him in the local shop one day at the height of it all.

‘How’s your mamma, Felix, and haven’t you grown?’ and he turned to his friends.

‘Stupid old bat,’ he said. Making up was very sweet, and his tears tasted hot as needles.

‘Luck Be a Lady’ first appeared in the Summer Fiction series in The Irish Times , July 1990; ‘The Portable Virgin’ was first published in Revenge (Virago, 1990), edited by Kate Saunders. Both of these stories, along with ‘The House of the Architect’s Love Story,’ ‘Men and Angels,’ ‘(She Owns) Every Thing,’ ‘Indifference,’ ‘Historical Letters,’ ‘Revenge,’ ‘What Are Cicadas?’ and ‘Mr Snip Snip Snip,’ first appeared in The Portable Virgin (Secker & Warburg, 1991). ‘Seascape’ and ‘Felix’ were first published in First Fictions: Introduction 10 (Faber and Faber, 1989).

Thanks to Mary and Bernard Loughlin, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, where many of these earlier stories were written.

The rest of the stories in this collection were first published in Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008). ‘Pale Hands I Loved, Besides the Shalimar’ first appeared in The Paris Review; ‘Pillow’ was first published in Picador New Writing: 11 (Picador, 2002), edited by Colm Tóibín and Andrew O’Hagan; ‘In the Bed Department, ‘Nathalie,’ ‘Taking Pictures,’ and ‘Della’ first appeared in The New Yorker; ‘Little Sister’ first appeared in Granta; ‘The Bad Sex Weekend’ first appeared in The Dublin Weekend; ‘Honey’ first appeared in The Irish Times — it was written for, and won, the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award in the Bloomsday centenary; ‘Green’ first appeared in The Literary Review (Radio 4); ‘Shaft’ first appeared in Granta 85 (Radio 4); ‘Yesterday’s Weather’ was first published in Irish Stories 06 ; ‘What You Want’ first appeared in Prospect , March 2008 (Radio 3); ‘Here’s To Love’ first appeared in The Guardian ’s Christmas edition, December 2007; ‘Caravan’ first appeared in The Guardian , October 2007; ‘Until The Girl Died’ first appeared on RTE Radio; ‘Cruise’ first appeared on Radio 4.

Thanks to Bill Buford and Deborah Treisman, Brigid Hughes, Ian Jack and Matt Weiland, David Marcus, Brendan Barrington, Colm Tóibín and Andrew O’Hagan, who published and commented on the original texts. Thanks also to Caroline Walsh, Tobias Hill, and A. L. Kennedy, who adjudicated the Davy Byrne Award, and to Duncan Minshull, Heather Larmour, Kevin Reynolds, and Kathryn Brennan, who commissioned and directed the work for radio. ‘Until the Girl Died’ was written for the voice of actress Eleanor Methven.

Thanks to Mary Chamberlain who braved my punctuation for the final copy-edit, and to Lucy Luck who worked to place these stories as they were written. Thanks, as ever, to Gill Coleridge and Melanie Jackson, and to my editors Robin Robertson and Amy Hundley.