Yesterday's Weather (11 page)

He insisted on using a map. Elaine said that if he didn’t bother with the map, then they wouldn’t get lost, because it didn’t matter where they went, it was all beautiful and all the same. Or all awful, maybe. After dinner, they ended up walking the periphery in the dark. There was a puzzle of streets to the left of them and, to the right, the open waters of the lagoon with real waves, just like the real sea. They walked a hopeful semicircle until the causeway came into view, then they cut back into the ghetto. They came across a fiesta in a small square, with trestle tables and bunting, accordion music and jugs of wine. The real people of Venice sat and laughed under a home-made banner for the Communist Party. They did not see the tourists pushing their way through the square, in the way that they did not see the pigeons at their feet.

Elaine lay in the hotel room, which was cheap for Venice, but which had, even so, a slightly tatty chandelier. It also had damp. She read the guidebook. It said that during the time of the Doges the prostitutes had to wear their underwear on the outside. Another guidebook said that they had to wear their clothes inside out. There was a problem of translation here – the prostitutes had to wear their inside clothes on the outside. They had to wear their hearts on their sleeves, they had to
wear their wombs in a prolapse – not that that would be much use. She thought of wearing her bra outside her T-shirt, just here in the room, as a conversation piece, as a precursor to some vaguely syphilitic Venetian sex. But she just lay there until Tim came back, which he did, with a pistachio-flavoured ice cream to cheer her up. And because it was Venice, she had her period, so his penis was stained with the brown blood of it, marinating half the night, until he suddenly woke and went over to the wash-hand basin on the wall.

She thought that it was the cuttlefish in its dark ink that had brought it on. Or perhaps it was the canal, running black outside the restaurant door.

4.

In Mexico, they booked a beach hut from an old man who had lost the fingers of his right hand. He waved the stubs at them and mimed hauling in nets over the side of a boat.

‘Fiss,’ he said. ‘Fiss.’

They swam all day or hung in hammocks and tried to forget their diarrhoea. The coast road was full of crazy pick-ups with kids hanging off the back, but at dusk the people sank back into the forest and there was nothing left, except for a rare murmuring under the trees. The locals did not seem to shout much, or even speak. When they ate, their plates and spoons made no clatter.

Zipolite, the next beach up, was full of tourist trash who slept on the sand with their surfboards tied to their wrists; older types too, hippies and junkies who were madder than his great-aunt Louise.

One of them sat on the sand nearby as they were having dinner. He looked about seventy years old. A beach-bum, afflicted by sores – they were infected mosquito bites, or needle marks, perhaps. He stretched out his legs and looked in horror at the scabs, his face puzzling and straining, as though he expected maggots to crawl out of them. Then he attacked one with his nails, tearing at the skin.

It put them off their food.

Tim said he might have come down to dodge the draft.

They looked at him. History, there on the beach. Elaine said he looked more like a prisoner of war – the last GI, the one who couldn’t go home.

They paid the bill, and Elaine felt, as he put the money down, the pull in him to Be An American – a man who looked at the movies and saw his own home up there on the screen.

Do you ever want to go back?

You have no idea what my high school was like, he said. Everyone had a car. Everyone crashed their car. It wasn’t enough to score a girl, you had to score the girl’s coked-up mother. I went to school with guys so stupid, you look at them on the football field and you think, Why don’t we just eat them? The whole herd of them. That might be more useful.

The sun was sinking like a stone. The meal and the beer made their skin crawl in the heat. The food pulled at their blood, leaving the surface of them a sheet of sensation; prickles and irritations and the sense of someone at your shoulder, leaning in to whisper – what? – your name, or your other name, your secret. At the end of every day in Mexico they were brushed by shame; a dirty bird’s wing someone had dropped on the sand.

For fuck’s sake, she said. The whole world is about America, these days. It’s not a country, it’s a fucking religion. And I don’t mind. I am perfectly happy with you as you are. I am perfectly happy with you as an ethnic
product
. But can we, from now, for ever, forget the froth on the milk and the weather in my fucking hair?

The next morning at breakfast, she looked at the fried eggs on her plate and thought she must be pregnant, and she gripped the edge of the table in her fright.

But it was Tim who got sick. They went inland, and he stayed in the hotel room, while she took a day trip out of San Cristóbal de las Casas. There was talk of rebels in the hills. Elaine sat in the back of a pick-up truck, high up in the scrublands, and
watched a group of men labouring uphill with sacks of coffee beans on their backs.

After an hour or so, they stopped at a café – just a roof with a table under it, and a broken fridge full of a bright pink cola. In the middle of the table there was a bowl of powdered coffee, turning to gleaming syrup on the communal spoon. A filthy little girl looked at them, with perfect awe as they drank out of plastic cups. Her eyes were the only clean things about her, apart from, when she laughed, the inside of her mouth.

The other people in the pick-up were Swiss. They worked for FIFA, the football organisation, they said: two men and a sharp, hilarious woman, all wearing company baseball caps. She didn’t know what they were here for. She didn’t see boys playing football in the villages they passed; she saw a lot of wooden, evangelical churches, and dirt.

They passed a coffee plantation and Elaine said it was a pity the people didn’t drink the coffee that was growing right there on their own hillsides, that they had to drink horrible dried Nestlé instead. The Swiss looked at her. After a moment, one of the men said, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes.’ He glanced at the woman and gave a little smirk. She smirked back at him. Then the other man chanced a sneaky little smile. They turned away from each other, airily, and went back to looking at the poor people on the side of the road.

The fucking Swiss. They spoke perfect English to her and perfect Spanish to the guide. They could probably say, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes,’ in French, Italian and German too.
So geht es. C’est comme ça
.

Is the war over yet?
La guerre, est-elle terminée?

She tried to figure out which one of the men was sleeping with the woman; a good-time sort of girl, who wasn’t a girl any longer. Forty-five at least. She was having a brilliant time on the back of a pick-up truck in Chiapas.

The men were middle-aged. It happened to men all of a sudden, she thought. First the baldness thing, and then Boof! big lunches, cars, overtime, fat already. Well, that’s the way the
world goes. She wondered if it would happen to Tim, stuck back in the hotel with what might be amoebic dysentry – at least that is what they thought it was, opening the guidebook every few hours to peer at diagrams of what looked like little shrimp, wondering if these were the things that were swimming around in his gut.

When she got back, he was feeling a bit better, and she told him about the Swiss bastards who were so pleased with the way the world went, because it always went their way. Tim started giving out about Nestlé reps going around in white coats with powdered-milk samples, telling women not to breastfeed. But this really annoyed her, somehow. This was not what she was talking about. He did not understand. She said it was almost a sex thing. They smirked because – all three of them – they liked being
bad
.

The way she said ‘bad’, they might have had sex themselves, if it weren’t for his little shrimp. Instead, they got irritated and fought. She found herself defending Switzerland, when she meant to say the opposite. The Swiss didn’t actually do anything wrong, she said, they just let other people do it. They made their money out of other people’s greed. Because that is the way the world goes. And, Yes, he said. Yes, exactly.

Later, in the dark, she said she was tired of the hurt she caused, just by being alive. She was tired of her own endless needs. And him too. She was tired of him, and of the fact that she would hurt him, too. She could do it now, if he liked, but certainly she would hurt him, over time.

He said it was up to him, really. All of that.

They were in San Cristóbal de las Casas. It was a beautiful town and there were books in the shops and real coffee in the tourist cafés. It was the centre of the rebel movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and Elaine felt that she was in an important place at an important time. She hoped it would work out well for the people here, and also for her and Tim, that they would always be in love, and drink good coffee, and that he would always keep his hair.

5.

Back in Dublin, she unpacked the dressing gown with the flowers on the back and said, I have to get another job, I have to do something, I can’t stand this fucking country. It’s all right for you.

We could live in France, he said.

She rounded on him and said, What do you do? What are you
for?

He lifted his empty hands in the air.

This fucking country, she said. You have no idea. Come down to Cork with me. That’ll change your mind.

But he loved them all, and they loved him. Her brothers bringing him down to the local for a pint and her father talking about tornadoes in America, and was he ever in one, at all? And it was all the Big Yank in the front parlour, and no one asked them once about Italy, or Mexico, or the North Circular Road for that matter. No one asked anything, except would he like a cup of tea, because in this house, it became clear, questions were out of the question. She had never noticed this before. Questions were impolite. And Tim better at this game than any of them – not looking at the tablecloth or at the cup in his hand, or at any of their sad, accumulated objects, but instead engaging in a vast discussion about all kinds of weather, from the ice on Lake Michigan to the storm in Bucharest that made your hair stand up with the static.

You don’t say, said her father, his small stash of books behind him, dead on the shelf.

They gave him the sofa to sleep on, so Elaine crept downstairs in the middle of the night and they had the quietest sex known to mankind. They inched their way along the floor and ended up under the table where, looking up, Elaine saw a crayoned boat she had drawn, one endlessly idle afternoon, when she was nine or ten. A green boat with a blue sail. Her own secret sign.

Where do you want to go? he said. Where do you want to go, now?

W
HAT
Y
OU
W
ANT

If I had three wishes; the thing to do is get three more. ‘Hello,’ says the angel, says the fairy, says the devil even, ‘What do you want? One. Two. Three.’ And I say, ‘Well, first off, I’ll have three more of those please,’ and then you have five, you see, to play with, which is two extra, because there’s always a trick.

Like you might say, ‘Well, for my first wish, I’d like to have a beautiful body,’ and azzakazzam, ‘There’s your beautiful body,’ says the angel and, when you look down, you’re still the same old yoke and the angel says, ‘Well, it is beautiful – the way one bone fits into another, and the blood flows, and the brain works and all that,’ and maybe, yes – in the scheme of things – but, ‘No!’ you say, ‘No!’ and you blurt out something like, ‘I want a body like Raquel Welch,’ and of course she’s ancient, these days, so all you get is a heap of silicone and arthritis. Or even worse, you ask for a body like Marilyn Monroe, who is actually dead, not to mention rotten, or you ask for the body of ‘a film star’ and the angel gives you Marlon Brando. Or you get the actual body of an actual film star like, say, Nicole Kidman’s body, and she sues – quite right too – because there she is wandering around in your old sack and everyone says it’s just prosthetic, like that stupid nose she wore. Serve her right.

So the third wish then, has to put it all right. You think about it really hard and you say nothing for ages, and then very carefully you say, ‘I’d like a body like the one Raquel Welch had in
One Million Years B.C.,’
and dah dah! – the full thing down to the furry bikini, except it leaves out your face, and you’re some sort of monster oul’ wan with a dynamite bosom, like those plastic things men wear on stag nights. Or your face does change – because your face is part of your body, of course it is – and your grandchildren don’t recognise you and no one
will let you back into your own house and you end up in a state of semiprostitution just trying to get the bus fare back to the place where the angel disappeared into the clear blue sky.

It’s all just semantics, as my son Jimmy would say.

The thing to do, I say, is to ask for the extra three wishes first, then you have enough to put it right. And the way you put it right is to ask for the body you had in the first place, of course, the same heap of old bones that gets you up on to the bus in the morning, and after that you still have a couple of wishes left. And with the next wish you say, ‘I would like to have three more wishes, please.’

You see?

Mad. It’s the kind of thing that rolls through your head, in this job, when you’re sweeping or wiping – it’s very repetitive, cleaning. It’s all over and back: over and back again. Your mind starts to run in some terrible groove, and you have to pick the right one or you end up with bombs on the underground and everybody you ever loved lying in the morgue. I can go from a cigarette butt to the Great Fire of London before I have the ashtray cleaned, so I stay in late and listen to the singing. I stand in the dark at the back of the hall, because you have to watch your head, you have to pick something positive to think about, as my son Jimmy tells me, like winning the lottery, though he doesn’t approve of that, either. Because I’ve had my ups and downs.