Yesterday's Weather Page 4

  ‘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.

  ‘Listen,’ she hissed with sudden rage. Then put her hand over her face and went into their bedroom. There was nowhere to stand in there, so she sat on the bed.

  ‘Will you dress them?’ she said, quietly through the wall.

  And he did.

  It was past bedtime when they finally got to the crêperie and the kids were beyond themselves. Impossible. It was like talking to a pair of junkies.

  ‘I don’t want a proper crêpe! I don’t want a proper crêpe, I just want ice cream!’ Dec suddenly white around the mouth, saying, ‘Do you want to go home? Do you want to go home right now?’

  Of course, the ice cream just jizzed them right up again, and it was ten o’clock before they were finished bouncing off the walls. They had to be caught and forcibly stripped and put in their pyjamas, one kicking leg at a time, and it was nearly eleven before they had stopped writhing around in their sheets, like souls in torment.

  Peace. Dec opened the fridge.

  ‘Do you know how much this beer cost?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have a guess.’

  ‘Just open it, would you?’

  ‘How much?’ he said, holding up a bottle of Leffe.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Michelle.

  ‘Guess!’

  ‘Oh dear God give me patience,’ said Michelle.

  ‘One euro forty-nine. For a bottle of Belgian beer. One euro forty-nine!’ and, now that she was duly impressed, he cracked the top off and poured her a glass.

  ‘We should have brought Scrabble,’ she said.

  After the second beer they went to bed and had sex, in utter silence; staying so close and tight for the first while, Michelle thought she might shout if he drew back an inch. But she didn’t shout and, when they were finished, the children were still asleep.

  ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘What did you say your name was again? Christ.’ Then she dragged herself off the bed and into the living room. It was odd being naked in this little space – everything was too near, the ceiling was very low, and there was a ghost sitting at the table as she walked past to the bathroom. At least that was what she called it at the time, though she was sitting on the toilet before she thought to wonder at the fact of it. A ghost. And when she got up, it was gone.

  The next day there was patchy sunshine in the morning, so Michelle draped a few things outside, and packed up the still-wet swimming gear, and they headed for the beach.

  ‘I don’t like the beach,’ said Emmet. ‘I don’t like the beach!’

  The beach was beautiful. The kids ran down the slope of it, shedding clothes, and could not stand still for the suncream.

  Michelle didn’t get into her own togs. She wondered if she ever would again. She sat on the edge of the dunes and pulled back her skirt to let the sun get at her legs.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said to Dec. ‘From here, right? They look OK. The way the fat falls down, I can’t actually see it. From where I’m looking, is what I am saying, everything looks OK.’

  ‘So it’s not that you’re fat,’ said Dec. ‘It’s just that your eyes are in the wrong place.’

  ‘Well, exactly.’

  ‘Come on. Have a swim.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on. It’ll do you good.’

  ‘In a minute.’

  She sat on the sand watching the shapes of her children, black against the glittering sea; Dec running down to the wave’s edge for buckets of water to throw on them, making them run and scream. It was all so delicious: the squirm of Katy’s shoulders away from the flung water, the heavy splash of it on the sand; it was all so like a picture of a family having fun that Michelle found herself thinking about the caravan ghost – the way it was like a picture too; flat-looking, almost a bit creased. A woman. Young or old, it was hard to tell. But really horrible. Seething. She was sitting on the banquette behind the little table, and Michelle got the strong impression that she couldn’t leave – that she was just stuck.

  There was no trace of her when they got back from the beach. They had been chased off by the rain and the clothes left out that morning were wet again. Michelle picked them up and draped them back on pelmets and hangers, and in the middle of lunch she got up to hang some stuff from the spokes of the big umbrella outside. Nothing had dried, inside or out. She gathered yesterday’s clothes and threw them into the plastic box under the shower.

  While she was rubbing and wringing, Michelle thought maybe it was this that brought the ghost on. She was a hand-wash ghost – some woman who had wrung out clothes all her life, and moved them round from place to place, and failed to get them dry. But Michelle didn’t mind the work, as work goes. There was something else about this woman: the set of her face; there was some other wreckage in her that Michelle did not yet recognise.

  The kids were rattling around the place; pul
ling the cushions off the banquette, unscrewing the plastic catch on the bathroom door. Kids got in everywhere. How many of them had been through this one mobile, over the years? Every inch of it had been touched and pawed and used. Michelle made room for the new wet clothes beside yesterday’s damp clothes, and rigged another few hangers in the shower. Across the way, the woman with six children and a good pair of legs was packing up, in the rain.

  The perfect girls arrived. They sat outside under the umbrella and the kids played with them, quite formally, like ladies having tea. Michelle brought out some white French peaches, and she kissed the hard, round foreheads of both her children, whose soft skin still smelt of the sea. The perfect girls looked at her as she did this, in a polite sort of way. Perhaps they were not much kissed. Maybe that was her problem – too much kissing – maybe that was the thing Michelle was doing wrong. Ten minutes later the perfect girls were still perfect, while her own two were drenched in peach juice and once again, she had to find something clean and strip them down.

  Around four o’clock, the sky began to clear and Michelle took the least wet clothes outside. She put them in the sunny spots, and the wetter things in the shade. She wondered if she was doing this the wrong way around – did she want a few dry clothes, or a lot of damp ones? How many days were left anyway? She had to use her fingers to count. She stood in front of the kids’ wardrobe, touching shorts and dresses, saying, ‘Wednesday, Thursday …’ and then starting over again.

  The ghost, she decided, was a woman who had actually died in the mobile. Some stiffening kind of death. She died rigid, sitting on that banquette, playing solitaire. Michelle was bizarrely convinced of this. She could feel the sandy slither of the cards on the table, as she set them down.

  ‘How old are these yokes, would you say?’

  Dec considered it. ‘Ten years? I dunno. Twelve?’

  That was it. She died playing cards while her children slept, within hands’ reach, in the room next door.

  Knock knock.

  Michelle tapped on the thin little wall.

  Knock knock.

  On the sunny side of the little road, the adulterers, with all their brood, drove off for the last time. Michelle was over there in a flash, stealing the bit of sunshine they had left behind. She spent the next while ferrying the rest of the stuff over, checking the sky, turning Emmet’s shorts like a slice of toast under the grill. She thought, as she did all this, of the next family that would come here, and the one after that; the fattening wives and the steadfast husbands and all the beautiful children; the thousands of beautiful children, growing in the rain. It was a while before she noticed that she couldn’t hear her own pair, hadn’t in fact heard them for some time. She looked down the little road, and she started to run.

  She must have just missed them, because when she came around the block, she saw the two perfect girls peering under their mobile. Emmet’s sandalled feet were sticking out from under there, quite still. Michelle stopped. The world stopped. The ghost turned in the window of their own mobile, and looked out through a glaze of reflected sky.

  And then his little feet moved. Of course they did. When she hurried closer, Michelle saw that both her children were in under there, wriggling on their bellies in the dirt.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  The girls’ father put his head, briefly, out of the door.

  ‘It’s a pussy!’ said Emmet. And it could have been the stupid word, or the dirt of the clothes she would have to change and wash again, but, the next thing she knew, she was pulling Katy out backwards by one leg, and Emmet was wriggling further into the gloom, and she was hissing at him to get out of there immediately, get out of there now.

  The two perfect girls were not so much mortified by the scene as saddened, and their father came out, to grin and reassure. And she probably hadn’t, as she said to Dec later, used the word ‘fuck’ to her child, as in ‘get the fuck out of there’, but Katy was roaring crying that her knee was scraped, and Michelle, after swiping at her son a couple of times, had to stand up and turn the other way, until he decided to crawl out on his own. Which he did not, of course, because she was so cross. Michelle stood, and looked up, and wished that she was a different kind of mother – if there was a different kind of mother – while Katy cranked up the wails.

  ‘Shut up!’ she said, wrenching the top of the child’s arm like a woman you might see on the side of the street. Then, just to achieve the full crescendo, she strode away from them both until they came, howling and screaming, after.

  Her gorgeous children. Her pride and joy.

  Three days later they were out of there. The plastic box was filled with toys, the wet laundry was rotting cheerfully somewhere in a bag; they sat in the car, ripe in their unwashed clothes, and headed north.

  Half a mile down the road, Katy said, ‘That was the most absolutely fantastic holiday I have ever had.’

  ‘Was it?’ said Michelle.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you like about it?’

  ‘Best?’

  ‘All right, best.’

  ‘I liked our little house best.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Did you like our little house?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I did.’

  Dec glanced over and gave a small smile. Michelle was still light-headed from cleaning it before they hit the road. Something drove her to wipe every inch of it, as she backed out of the damn thing. There was a sort of madness to it, throwing the cloth, finally, into the rubbish outside the front door. She had used the same cloth for the kitchen counter and the toilet bowl, and she wondered, suddenly, if she had done it the right way round. She wondered what was in the boot and what was in the roof box – had they left anything behind? Did she have the correct number of children in the back seat, and were they bringing an extra corpse with them, all the way home?

  THE CRUISE

  In the spring of that last year, Kate’s parents took a notion and went on a cruise. Seven days out of Miami to the eastern Caribbean: Puerto Rico, Haiti, Turks and Caicos, St Thomas. Watching them go through the departure gate at Dublin airport – her mother in a powder-blue tracksuit and her father in white running shoes – Kate realised that they would die. It was the tracksuit that did it.

  She hoped her father would wear a hat in the sun. But not his usual hat, the one that said ‘Clondalkin Tyre Remoulds’ across the front. He wasn’t even a mechanic. Her father was an insurance agent, long retired, and Kate hoped that he would buy himself a decent hat somewhere in the Caribbean, and wear that instead.

  ‘The place is full of shops,’ she said, looking at the brochure. ‘I don’t mean the Caribbean, I mean the boat is full of shops. Sure where would you be going?’ she said. ‘Look!’

  Her father looked – he was a man who avoided shops at all costs. But it wasn’t just shops: the boat had an ice rink, and a climbing wall, and some kind of perpetual-motion wave on the top deck, where you could surf the night away.

  ‘Sure where would you be going?’ said Kate again, thinking there were probably card clubs and bingo and places to get your hair done, too.

  ‘Yes. Even the drink is free,’ said her mother, and she gave a little laugh. ‘Apparently it comes out of a tap.’

  Kate knew her mother would not drink too much, or probably would not drink too much. At worst she’d have something pink with an umbrella in it. Her mother had always loved the sun – just the sun shining was glamour enough for her. And her father loved to romance her, once in a long while: he would take her hand in a stolid sort of way, and move her across some hotel dance floor.

  They would have a great time. It was a great thing for them to do. Though, it had to be said, they were very out of sorts on the airport road. Kate had to pull over on the hard shoulder to check that her father’s pills were buried in a bag in the boot; half the country tearing past.

  ‘Who needs tablets?’ Kate shouted at her mother over the noise of the traffic, ‘when we can just get him run
over by an articulated truck?’ She felt immediately guilty. Though it cheered her up too.

  ‘In! Get in, you eejit. And put your seat belt on!’

  So she got them there. She managed the suitcases, and the see-through bags for their toiletries, and the old supermarket bag her father had brought for his slippers and for the in-flight stockings he would wear on the plane – and they walked through the departure gates, and were gone.

  They sent a few e-cards, painfully picked out on a keyboard in the ship’s Internet café. ‘St Maarten beautiful! Hope all well!’ One evening, an image of her mother’s face appeared – or could he be dreaming it? – on the site where Kate’s youngest, Jimmy, spent his time; sending goofy messages to other nine-year-olds in front of their slowly uploading webcams.

  ‘It’s Granny!’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  Kate crossed to the living room to look, and there indeed was her mother’s face in a corner of the screen, straining upwards, blue and silent.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ she said, as the image faltered and froze.

  It looked like something out of a science-fiction film. A message from another star, sent many years before.

  Then, just as soon as they were gone, they were home. Kate looked at the calendar to check, but it seemed that a week on a cruise liner had the same number of days and nights in it as a week in her kitchen, after all.

  She caught up with them the evening they flew in. The tan made them look younger but – maybe it was the jet lag – she could tell they were tired. They talked dutifully about the islands – the size of the spiders, the palm trees, a manta ray they had seen from the harbour wall in a place called Labadee – but they seemed slightly disappointed with the world, now that seeing it was so easy. Her mother was very taken by the warmth and the endless beauty of the sea, though there wasn’t much time for a swim, she said, when they went on shore. Besides, the ship had jacuzzis and what have you. The big excitement was the ship.