Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright Read Free Book Online

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?

T HE C RUISE
    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 longwhile: 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