Yesterday's Weather (17 page)

It was not until she bought three pots of apricot jam that the penny dropped. She did not even bother to take a test. She felt that swooping blankness she had felt with each of the boys, so delicious, like diving into a pool and finding you could breathe. The child was no bigger than a pip in the flesh of her stomach. She took it for walks and little outings. She gave it a go on the escalators and on a park swing, scuffing the coarse sand under her feet and feeling a little mad. What would she tell the boys? As for the people in the bed department – Jackie, who shared the floor with her, and the customers who came in to look or buy – they all looked empty to her, like husks. As though she were the only real thing left. It was like that film with the pods, and she wanted to run away somewhere, to a deserted lighthouse, or a shack by the beach, and sit in a shaft of light while her baby grew.

Tom rang. His voice was a shock.

‘I just thought I’d check up on you.’ He sounded close, he sounded right inside her ear. Kitty had to remind herself that there were miles of cable between them, a maze of electricity and static.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘How are things?’

‘Good. Good.’

In the pause, she felt sorry for him. He wasn’t used to this kind of thing.

‘And yourself?’ he said.

‘Oh, flying,’ she said. ‘Flying form.’ And he took the hint and let it go.

Then one morning the down elevator sighed and stopped. People clumped down the steps carefully, almost aslant, squinting
at the lines that were strangely solid, though they still seemed to shift beneath their feet. Kitty was glad she wasn’t on the thing when it ground to a halt. It would make you look so foolish. As it happened, the escalators had been empty apart from a young woman on the other side, who seemed to surge suddenly up. Whoosh.

Kitty knew it didn’t mean anything, but she feared for her baby, that was now just eleven weeks old. She could not bear the lopsided sight of the stalled steps, like someone endlessly limping at the other end of the shop floor. She took a very long lunch and when she came back a man had taken the panel off the bottom of the broken side. She was right about the chain – there it was, looping around the steps that were wedges, actually, when you looked at them side-on. They packed around the central pivot like big slices of metal pie, then separated out on the way up, dangling their triangular bases into space.

The escalator man glanced at her as she stared into the works, and then went back to his phase tester, tipping the metal gently here and there. He had hair on the backs of his hands, fine and light: one of those big, furry men with cushioned muscles and uncertain eyes. Kitty stood for a long time, making him uneasy. He glanced over his shoulder again, but he did not really see her – which was fine.

Kitty lost the baby at thirteen weeks, or lost something, at any rate. She looked at the blood on the wad of toilet paper and wondered if it was the change of life, after all. Perhaps she had imagined the baby, perhaps it had never been there in the first place. She called in sick and went to bed and could not cry.

At the weekend she drove her youngest to his soccer game in the Phoenix Park. She had to park a distance away, because he was embarrassed by the car. Also, he did not like having his mother on the sidelines any more, so Kitty, amused, went for a walk instead. She thought she might look for the deer. And almost as she thought it, there they were, a herd of does and their fawns, standing or lying, and all of them chewing; watching, as she now watched, a pair of children and their toy plane buzzing at the other end of the glen.

She felt sure it was a baby, now – that she had not been fooled. Her stomach was still warm and aching from it. The deer chewed on and did not mind her, while the toy plane buzzed and sputtered and fell to ground.

The change of life.

Her life was changing, that was for sure, though she seemed to be standing still. But, ‘Up or down?’ she wondered. ‘Up or down?’ The children threw the plane back in the air and it circled again on the end of its wire. Kitty walked on. It had been a baby, she knew it. She had been visited. How could it be down, when she felt such joy.

L
ITTLE
S
ISTER

The year I’m talking about, the year my sister left (or whatever you choose to call it), I was twenty-one and she was seventeen. We had been keeping our proper distance, that is to say, for seventeen years. Four years apart – which is sometimes a long way apart, and sometimes closer than you think. Some years we liked each other and some years we didn’t. But near or far, she was my sister. And I suppose I am trying to say what that meant.

Serena always thought she would pass me out some day, hence the underage drinking and the statutory sex. But even though she was getting into pubs and into trouble before I was in high heels, I knew, deep down and weary, that I was the older one – I always would be the older one, and the only way she would get to be older than me, is if I got dead.

And of course, I liked it too. It was fun having someone smaller than you. She always said I bossed her around, but I know we had fun. Because with Serena you are always asking yourself what went wrong, or even, Where did I go wrong? But, believe me, I am just about done with all that – with shuffling through her life in my mind.

There was the time when she was six and I was ten. I used to take her to the bus at lunchtime, because she still only had a half-day at school. So I spent my break waiting at the bus stop with my little sister instead of playing German jumps in the playground, which is not me complaining, it is me saying that she was cared for endlessly, by all of us. But there are just some things you can not do for a child. There are some things you can not help.

This particular day, we were walking out of the school lane and on to the main road when a girl sailed through the air and landed on the roof of a braking car. Serena said, ‘Look!’ and
I pulled her along. It was far too serious. And as if she knew it was far too serious she came along with me without a fuss. A girl landed on the roof of a braking car. She turned in the air, as though she was doing a cartwheel. But it was a very slow cartwheel. There was a bicycle, if you thought hard about it, skidding away from the car, the pedal scraping the tarmac and spraying sparks. But you had to think hard to remember the bike. What you really remembered was this girl’s white socks and the pleated fan of her gymslip following her through the air.

The next day there were rumours of an accident, and my mind tells me now that the girl died but they didn’t want to tell us in case we got upset. I don’t know the truth of it. At the time there was just the two of us on an empty road, and a girl turning her slow cartwheel, and my hand finding Serena’s little hand and pulling her silently by.

That was one incident. There was another incident when she was maybe eight and I was twelve when a man in plaid trousers said, ‘Hello girls,’ and took his thing out of his fly. Maybe I should say he let his thing
escape
out of his fly, because it sort of jumped out and curled up, in a way that I now might recognise. At the time it looked like giblets, the same colour of subdued blood, dark and cooked, like that piece of the turkey our parents liked and called ‘the pope’s nose’. So we ran home all excited and told my mother about the man in plaid trousers and the pope’s nose, and she laughed, which I think was the right thing to do. By the lights of the time. And we had the same three brothers, who went through their phases of this or that. Nothing abnormal – though the year Jim wouldn’t wash was a bit of a trial. Look at me, I’m scraping the barrel here. We had a great childhood. And I’m fine, that’s the bottom line of it. I’m fine and Serena is no longer alive.

But the year I am talking about, it was 1981 and I was finished uni and starting a job. I had money and was buying clothes and I was completely delighted with myself. I even thought about leaving home, but my mother was lonely with us all growing up. She said she felt the creak of the world
turning and she talked about getting old. She cried more; a general sort of weep, now and then – not about
her
life, but just about the way life goes.

I came home one day and Serena was in the doghouse, which was nothing new, because my mother smelt cigarettes off her, and also Something Else. I couldn’t think what this something else might be; there was no whiff of drink – perhaps it was sperm, I wouldn’t be surprised. It was three weeks before her final school exams and Serena was trashing our bedroom while my mother stood in the kitchen – wearing her coat, strangely enough – and chopping carrots. I went in and sat with Mam for a while, and when the silence upstairs finally settled, I went to check the damage. Clothes everywhere. One curtain ripped down. My alarm clock smashed. A bottle of perfume snapped at the neck – there was a pool of Chanel No. 5 soaking into the chest of drawers. I had a boyfriend at the time. The room stank. I didn’t blow my top. I said, ‘Clean yourself up, you stupid moron, Da’s nearly home.’

None of us liked our father, except Serena, who was a little flirt from an early age. I don’t think even my mother liked him – of course she said she ‘loved’ him, but that was only because you’re supposed to when you marry someone and sleep with them. He had a fused knee from some childhood accident and always sat with his leg sticking out in front of him. He wasn’t a bad man. But he sat and looked at us shouting and laughing and fighting, as though we were all an awful bore.

Or maybe I liked him then, but I don’t like him since – because after Serena he got a job managing a pub and he started sleeping over the shop. So that’s another one, now, who never comes home.

For three weeks the bedroom was thick with the smell of Chanel, we did not speak, and Serena did not eat. She fainted during her maths exam and had to be carried out, with a big crowd of people fanning her on the corridor floor. All of June she spent in the bathroom squeezing her spots, or she sat downstairs and did nothing and wouldn’t say what she wanted to do next. And then, on the fourteenth of July, she went out and did not come home.

We waited for ninety-one days. On Saturday the thirteenth of September there was the sound of a key in the door and a child walked in – a sort of death-child. She was six and a half stone. Behind her was a guy carrying a suitcase. He said his name was Brian. He looked like he didn’t know what to do.

We gave him a cup of tea, while Serena sat in a corner of the kitchen, glaring. As far as we could gather, she just turned up on his doorstep, and stayed. He was a nice guy. I don’t know what he was doing with a girl just out of school, but then again, Serena always looked old for her age.

It is hard to remember what it was like in those days, but anorexia was just starting then, it was just getting trendy. We looked at her and thought she had cancer, we couldn’t believe this was some sort of diet. Then trying to make her eat, the cooing and cajoling, the desperate silences as Serena looked at her plate and picked up one green bean. They say anorexics are bright girls who try too hard and get tipped over the brink, but Serena sauntered up to the brink. She looked over her shoulder at the rest of us, as we stood and called to her, and then she turned and jumped. It is not too much to say that she enjoyed her death. I don’t think it is too much to say that.

But I’m stuck with Brian in the kitchen, and Serena’s eye sockets huge, and her eyes burning in the middle of them. Of course there were tears – my mother’s tears, my tears. Dad hit the door jamb and then leant his forehead against his clenched fist. Serena’s own tears, when they came, looked hot, as though she had very little liquid left. My mother put her to bed, so tenderly, like she was still a child, and we called the doctor while she slept. She woke to find his fingers on her pulse and she looked as though she was going to start yelling again, but it was too late for all that. He went out to the phone in the hall and booked her into hospital on the spot.

Ninety-one days. And believe me, we lived them one by one. We lived those days one at a time. We went through each hour of them, and we didn’t skip a single minute.

I met Brian from time to time in the hospital and we exchanged a few grim jokes about the ward; a row of little sticks
in the beds, knitting, jigging, anything to burn the calories off. I opened the bathroom door one day and saw one of them in there, checking herself in the mirror. She was standing on a toilet seat with the cubicle door open and her nightdress pulled up to her face. You could see all her bones. There was a mile of space between her legs, and her pubis stuck out, a bulging hammock of flesh, terribly split. She pulled the nightdress down when she heard the door open, so by the time I looked from her reflection to the cubicle, she was decent again. It was just a flash, like flicking the remote to find a sitcom and getting a shot of famine in the middle, or of porn.

Serena lay in a bed near the end of the row, a still shape in the fidgeting ward. She read books, and turned the pages slowly. I brought her wine gums and LLC gums, because when she was little she used to steal them from my stash. Serena was the kind of girl whose pocket money was gone by Tuesday, and who spent the rest of the week in a whine. Now, it was a shower of things she might want – wine gums, Jaffa Cakes, an ice-cream birthday cake, highlights in her hair – all of them utterly stupid and small. We were indulging a five-year-old child, and nothing was enough, and everything was too late.

Then there was the therapy. We all had to go; walking out the front door in our good coats, as though we were off to Mass. We sat around on plastic chairs: my father with his leg stuck silently out; my mother in a welter of worry, scarcely listening or jumping at some silly thing and hanging on to it for dear life. Serena sat there, looking bored. I couldn’t help it, I lost my temper. I actually shouted at her. I said she should be ashamed of herself, the things she was putting Mam through. ‘Look at her,’ I said. ‘Look!’ I said I hoped she was pleased with herself now. She just sat there listening, and then she leaned forward to say, very deliberate, ‘If I got knocked down by a bus, you’d say I was just looking for attention.’ Which made me think about that car crash when she was small. Perhaps I should have mentioned it, but I didn’t. Brian, as official boyfriend, sat in the middle of this family row with his legs set wide and his big hands dangling into the gap. At
the end of the session he guided her out of the room with his palm on the small of her back, as though he was her protector and not part of this at all.