Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

‘Are you happy now?’ said his daughter, still sulky despite the Magnum in her hand.

‘Put your seat belt on,’ he said, but she was too busy with the ice cream. He pulled out into the traffic anyway — he did not want to go home, but home was the only place there was to go. He knew what he was looking for — as he let his daughter in under the arm that put the key in the door. He was looking for the kind of pain he could bury himself in.

‘Are you back already?’

‘That’s us,’ he said. And he looked at his wife.

The clothes hissed as she wrung them out and a little fizz of bubbles sprang out of the weave.

‘I thought we were supposed to be doing well?’ she said.

‘What?’

Michelle was bent over the shower tray. Dec was just behind her, standing at the cooker.

‘I thought we were doing well?’

‘We’re not doing well,’ he said. ‘We’re doing all right.’

‘Hah!’ she said. If he stooped to get a saucepan out from under the sink, their backsides would collide through the bathroom door. The van, she called it. Le tin can. The kids were messing on the bunk-bed, and the wall above Michelle’s head buckled where they kicked. If you could call it a wall. It was more like a piece of wallpaper, gone hard.

‘Stop that!’ she said.

‘They’re back,’ said Dec, looking out through the back window.

‘Stop it now!’ said Michelle. She had to remember not to shout. ‘Or I won’t pick up the hamster when we get home.’

Complete silence. A car door clunked a foot away from the sink, and you could hear the neighbours — two sweet little girls and their perfect parents — climbing the wooden steps on to the deck outside their own mobile home.

Michelle straightened up and her back put out a fiery twinge. Oh, yes. A good, old-fashioned sort of pain, that. The campsite washing machines were a disaster so she was reduced to Wipp Express and the plastic box she had brought for the kids’ toys. She dangled the shower head into the box and threw the twists of clothes on top of it, to stop it writhing around when she turned on the water. She watched the cloth relax, and lift, and start to float, then she bent over again to knead and swirl and wring the clothes out for a second time. It was actually quite pleasant, as work went; tending to your family when they weren’t there to annoy you; loving them up, in the shape of their clothes. She threw the twists into the sink: Emmet’s blue cotton shorts, Katy’s kitten T-shirt with the diamanté crown, worn to a flitter; Dec’s heavyweight T-shirt that he wore because she liked it, though, as he said, all T-shirts looked the same to him. Finally there was her own crinkle skirt, a cheap cotton thing that looked exactly like what it was. Time to move on, she thought. Time to look like people who were doing ‘all right’. Not to mention ‘well’.

‘Emmet! Katy!’ said Dec. ‘Your pals are here.’

You could feel the rustle and the suck of air as the kids debunked. They were, as she craned out of the bathroom, already standing stock-still at the front door. The two perfect girls were on the threshold, in matching pink capri pants and light-up trainers.

Stand-off.

‘Would you like to go out and play?’ she said.

Katy turned to check with her mother, but Emmet didn’t need the distraction. He stared at the girls some more. Then he said, in a large sort of way, ‘I had half a doughnut in the car.’

The girls thought about this. And were impressed.

‘Did you go somewhere nice?’ said Michelle.

‘We went under the bridge,’ said the bigger girl.

‘Lovely.’ And all four of them were gone. She would have given a sigh of relief, as her mother used to do, but Michelle could not let go. She was not used to it. She tracked the sound of their voices up and down the path outside, as she lumped the clothes back into the plastic box. Katy was shy and Emmet was only three: they had never been out on their own before and any silence would bring her out to check where they were gone. Much better to actually go out there and pretend to do something, or really do something, as now, chasing the little patches of sunlight along the wooden rail of the deck to hang the clothes in, because the site they had been given was in the shade.

On the sunny side of the little road, a woman was sitting outside her mobile home with a glass of rosé in her hand. She let the other hand dangle over the arm of her white plastic chair, and turned her face up to the sun. Bliss. Not a child in sight. She had six at least, maybe more — two of them slept in the car. It was Dec who finally twigged it.

‘His, hers and theirs,’ he said one evening, watching them all at dinner. Which made them both pause, and look again.

‘She’s in good nick,’ said Michelle.

‘Do you think?’

Most people on the campsite had two. Most people, like them, were doing ‘all right’. They probably weren’t doing ‘well’ — the women hadn’t lost the baby weight, and the men’s legs looked a bit self-conscious in shorts — but even ‘all right’ cost a fucking fortune.

They were in the Vendée, which was Co. Louth, basically. Flat. It was the least French place in the whole of France, she thought, with scutty little houses and no style. The campsite pool was crammed and there was bingo every second night, but it was great for the kids, as everyone said. It was great for the kids.

‘Emmet! Katy!’

They were already nowhere to be seen. Michelle hurried up the path between the two rows of mobiles, and tried not to shout for them.

‘Emmet! Now!’

She went right to the end, and then ran back again.

‘Declan! Declan!’

He came out on to the deck.

‘What?’

‘Where are the kids?’

He stood there for a moment, listening. Then he said, ‘They’re in the hedge.’

It started to rain.

By the time she had hustled the kids inside Michelle had forgotten all about the clothes, and she ran out again, pulling them off the wooden railing and stumbling down the steps to get at the few things on the line. They sat in a heap in the shower tray, wetter than before, while she sorted out Katy who was screaming crying because she wasn’t allowed go into the perfect girls’ mobile.

‘There is one rule,’ said Michelle. ‘There one rule. What is the rule? I have to be able to see you. I have to be able to see you.’

Dec said he would take them to the pool. The crying stopped.

‘In the rain?’ said Michelle.

‘Why not?’

When she found the swimming bag, the togs were damp and smelly from the day before and the towels sticky with salt. Also wet.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Dec, over and over, as she wrestled the kids into the stinking things. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

She watched them go down the path, her children: their straight and pliable backs, the exquisite waddle of their beautiful bums, as they walked with their daddy through the warm rain. The smell, she thought, would get knocked out by the chlorine.

While they were off at the pool, Michelle took the clothes out of the shower tray and wrung them out again, and hung them around the mobile. She put the towels across the pelmets and small things on the rungs of the bunk ladder. The adult stuff, she put on clothes hangers, and she suspended these from the plastic curtain wire that ran across the front door. The place looked like a second-hand clothes shop, after the Flood.

The kids came back from the pool barking and raving with hunger, so she stuffed them full of ham before they were even out of their togs. They ate it from the packet, dancing and jigging around the open fridge door.

‘I thought we were going to eat out?’ said Dec.