Yesterday's Weather (18 page)

It takes years for anorexics to die, that’s the other thing. During the first course of therapy they decided it would be better if she moved out of home. Was there another family, they said, where she could stay for a while? As if. As if my parents had a bunch of cheerful friends with spare rooms, who wanted to clean up after Serena, and hand over their bathroom while she locked herself in there for three hours at a time. We got her a bedsit in Rathmines, and I paid. It was either that or my mother going out to work part-time.

So Serena was living my life now. She had my flat and my freedom and my money. It sounds like an odd thing to say, but I didn’t begrudge it at the time. I just wanted it to be over. I mean, I just wanted my mother to smile.

Five months later she was six stone and one ounce, and back in the ward after collapsing in the street. I expected to see Brian, but she had got rid of him, she said. I went to pick up some things from the flat for her, and found that it was full of empty packets of paracetamol and used tissues that she didn’t even bother to throw away. They were stuck together in little lumps. I don’t know what was in them – cleanser? Maybe she spat into them, maybe her own spit was a nuisance to her. I had to buy a pair of rubber gloves to tackle them, and I never told anyone, not the therapist, not the doctor, not my mother. But I recognised something in her face now, as though we had a secret we were forced to share.

I went through her life in my head. Every Tuesday night before the goddamn therapy, I sifted the moments: a cat that died, my grandmother’s death, Santa Claus. I went through the caravan holidays and the time she cried halfway up Carantoo-hill and sat down and had to be carried to the top. I went through her first period and the time I bawled her out for stealing my mohair jumper. The time she used up a can of fly-spray in an afternoon slaughter and the way she played horsey on my father’s bocketty leg. It was all just bits. I really wanted it to add up to something, but it didn’t.

They beefed her up a bit and let her go. A couple of months later we got a card from Amsterdam. I don’t know where she got the money. The flat was all paid up till Christmas and I might have taken it myself, but one look at my mother was enough. I could not do a thing to hurt her more.

Then one day I saw a woman in the street who looked like my gran, just before she died. I thought it was my gran for a minute: out of the hospice somehow ten years later and walking towards St Stephen’s Green. Actually, I thought she was dead and I was terrified – literally petrified – of what she had come back to say to me. Our eyes met, and hers were wicked with some joke or other. It was Serena, of course. And her teeth by now were yellow as butter.

I stopped her and tried to talk, but she came over all adult and suggested we go for coffee. She said Brian had followed her somehow to Amsterdam. She looked over her shoulder. I think she was hallucinating by now. But there was something so fake about all this grown-up stuff, I was glad when we said, ‘Goodbye, so.’ When I looked after her in the street, there she was, my sister, the little toy walk of her, the way she held her neck – Serena running away from some harmless game at the age of seven, too proud to cry.

The phone call from the hospital came six weeks later. There was something wrong with her liver. After that it was kidneys. And after that she died. Her yellow teeth were falling out by the end, and she was covered in baby-like down. All her beauty was gone – because, even though she was my sister, I have to say that Serena was truly, radiantly beautiful in her day.

So, she died. There is no getting away from something like that. You can’t recover. I didn’t even try. The first year was a mess and after that our lives were just punctured, not even sad – just less, just never the same again.

But it is those ninety-one days I think about – the first time she left, when it was all ahead of us, and no one knew. The summer I was twenty-one and Serena was seventeen, I woke up in the morning and I had the room to myself. She was
mysteriously gone from the bed across the room, she was absolutely gone from the downstairs sofa, and the bathroom was free for hours at a time. Gone. Not there. Vamoosed. My mother, especially, was infatuated by her absence. It is not enough to say she fought Serena’s death, even then – she was intimate with it. To my mother, my sister’s death was an enemy’s embrace. They were locked together in the sitting room, in the kitchen, in the hall. They met and talked, and bargained and wept. She might have been saying, ‘Take me. Take me, instead.’ But I think – you get that close to it, you bring it into your home, everybody’s going to lose.

So, it was no surprise to us when, after ninety-one days, Serena walked back into the house looking the way she did. The only surprise was Brian, this mooching, ordinary, slightly bitter man, who watched her so helplessly and answered our questions one by one.

I met him some time after the funeral in a nightclub and we ended up crying at a little round table in the corner, and shouting over the music. We both were a bit drunk, so I can’t remember who made the first move. It was a tearful, astonishing kiss. All the sadness welled up into my face and into my lips. We went out for a while, as though we hoped something good could come of it all – a little love. But it was a faded sort of romance, a sort of second thought. Two ordinary people, making do. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mind that he had loved Serena, because of course I loved her too. And her ghost did not bother us: try as we might, it did not even appear. But I tell you, I have a child now and who does she look like? Serena. The same hungry, petulant look, and beautiful, too. So that is my penance I suppose, that is the thing I have to live with now.

I am trying to stop this story, but it just won’t end. Because years later I saw a report in the newspaper about a man who murdered his wife. The police said he was worried she would find out about his financial problems, and so he torched the house when she was asleep. He made extraordinary preparations for the crime. He called out the gas board twice to complain about a non-existent leak and he started redecorating so
there would be plenty of paint and white spirit in the hall. He wrote a series of threatening letters to himself, on a typewriter that he later dumped in the canal. I read the article carefully, not just for the horror of it, but because his name was Brian Dempsey. The name of the broody, handsome man who had slept with my sister – and also with me. Which sounds a bit frank, but that was the way it was. Brian. I could not get those threatening letters out of my head. He started writing them two whole months before he set the fire. I thought about those eight weeks he had spent with her, complaining about the dinner or his lack of clean shirts, annoyed with her because she did not,
would
not, realise that she was going to die. I even wanted to visit him in prison before the trial, just to look at him, just to say, ‘Brian.’ When the case finally came to court, there was a picture in the paper, and I thought he looked old, and terribly fat. I looked and looked at the eyes, until they turned into newspaper dots. Then, when I read the court case, I realised it was another Brian Dempsey altogether, a man originally from Athlone.

That was last month, but even now, I find myself holding my breath in empty rooms. Yesterday, I set a bottle of Chanel No. 5 on the dressing table and took the lid off for a while. I keep thinking, not about Brian, but about those ninety-one days, my mother half crazed, my father feigning boredom, and me, with my own bedroom for the first time in years. I think of Serena’s absence, how astonishing it was, and all of us sitting looking at each other, until the door opened and she walked in, half-dead, with an ordinary, living man in tow. And I think that we made her up somehow, that we imagined her. And him too, maybe – that he made her up, too. And I think that if we made her up now, if she walked into the room, we would kill her, somehow, all over again.

P
ILLOW

‘Alison,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘What is a homosexual?’

I did not know what to say.

‘It’s a man who loves another man.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what
is
it?’

‘They are in love,’ I said.

‘But how?’ she said. ‘How are they in love?’ And I thought I knew what she meant then. I said they put their things up each others’ bottoms, though I used the word ‘anuses’, to make it sound more biological.

‘Ah,’ she said and I tried to see what she was thinking.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

But I didn’t feel right about it, so when the next day Karen says to me, ‘What are you telling Li about gay sex for?’ I felt awful already.

‘She doesn’t even know the other thing,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t even know what
people
do.’ Then she gave me a very hard time. She did not try to make me feel better, at all. I think that is one of the things about Americans: when they decide to blame you for something, they really want you to know that you are to blame.

Karen had requested me from the college accommodations office. She told me this when I arrived; that they liked ‘an ethnic mix’, so she had asked for someone Irish. I was a bit jet-lagged. I said I’d be Irish for her of a Tuesday, but could I have the rest of the week off? Actually, I couldn’t believe this place, the size of it. When they said ‘dorm’ I expected rows of beds. I put my suitcase down and asked when there was hot water for a shower. Karen didn’t understand. She said that there never
wasn’t
hot water, unless something was broken – the tap
had an ‘H’ on it because the water that came out of it was ‘hot’.

There were four bedrooms off the central living room and she told me to take my pick. They each had a bunk-bed with a desk built in underneath and there were fancy pin lights on the underside of the bed to light the desk. I took the one nearest the hall, climbed the little ladder in all my clothes and lay down in the underglow. I was in college. I was in America. Fly me to the moon.

I stayed in the room for weeks. I couldn’t sit in the living room and the kitchen belonged to Li and Wambui. They put things on to marinate before they went to class: bowls of liver covered in honey and chilli, or fish turning grey in some strange sauce. Amazing food. They giggled in there like children and cooked like grown-ups. I didn’t even know how to boil an egg. Karen, wouldn’t you know, got in takeaway.

I did want to go into the bathroom but she showered three times a day in there. Vast amounts of water, then the sound of her humming, and the low squirt – the slap or squelch of her ‘products’. Little grunts, as well. I had to wait until everyone was asleep before I could take a crap. One night I stumbled out in a T-shirt and Karen was sitting at the living-room table. All the time we were talking she looked at my legs like she wanted to retch. I think it was the hair. I think she found it
morally
offensive. Karen would rather have an abortion than a bikini line. Or so I said to Li who looked at me and blinked a few times. Then, chomp!

‘Alison.’

‘Yes?’

‘What is a bikini line?’ Of course she knew what an abortion was, being mainland Chinese.

Karen had a boyfriend, who was built like a brick shit house, and made no noise at all. They closed her bedroom door and disappeared. Complete silence. Afterwards, he would sit in the living room and look us over. Wambui stayed out in the hall talking on the phone all evening, which was one way of dealing with it. I just said the first thing that came into my head.

‘God,’ I said, coming out of the bathroom. ‘Why does hair conditioner always look like sperm?’

The next morning the hair conditioner was gone. Bingo. I was good at that sort of thing, though I hadn’t really had a lot of sex myself. I mean, I had done it – or I did it that first term – and I liked it, but it also freaked me out. I shaved my head, for example. Though I had wanted to do that for a long time. But the next day I woke up and decided that today was the day to shave my head. So when the guy saw me across the dining hall, he nearly ducked. Physically. He flinched and checked the floor for a piece of cutlery he might have dropped. Anyway. I made him do it one more time, with my bald head, and then I didn’t want to see him any more. But I liked the stubble. For a while, I looked pretty jaunty with my bristles and the little Muslim prayer cap I had bought in a thrift shop, embroidered black and gold.

I used Karen’s razor to shave my head. I’m pretty sure she noticed, because the next day she had a new electric gizmo and all the old plastic razors were in the bin. Neither of us said anything, but that kind of thing makes you feel dizzy, you could shoot yourself, actually shoot yourself through the head. Or you could just not give a damn. Like the fact that I know Li stole a pair of my knickers; plain cotton knickers, that I saw distinctly one evening being stuffed into her drawer.

‘Shit,’ said Karen when I told her. ‘No shit!’

Neither of us had ever seen her underclothes. We said maybe she didn’t have any, but Karen discovered a pair of nylon socks tucked into a pair of plasticky shoes under her desk. They were see-through nylon, like pop socks but even shorter. Like ankle-high tights.

‘Oh, God, don’t touch them,’ said Karen. ‘Oh, what are we going to do about her?’ she said. ‘What are we going to do about the smell?’

It was pretty clear that Li didn’t wash her clothes, because the week before she had asked me how the laundry machines worked; so we were looking at three months here. But the smell wasn’t that bad – sort of dry and old and sexless.

‘Oh, my God,’ said Karen. ‘Oh, my God.’

We had gone in during Li’s early-morning class. Karen wanted to get out of there, but Li never cut a class. She used words like ‘catalepsy’, and ‘dramaturgy’, which amazed me. She was from China and knew more English than I did. She was nineteen.

I opened one of the drawers in her desk and found it was full of tablets. Rows and rows of little plastic jars with Chinese labels. I tried an orange one, and a purple one. They were huge. They tasted of talcum.

‘Come
on,’
said Karen, who was holding the door handle and bobbing up and down, like she wanted to pee. Karen was at law school. If it didn’t work out she would become a realtor. I had to ask her what a realtor was, and when she told me it was selling houses I felt pretty stupid, but not as stupid as she was for wanting to sell them.