Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    ‘Amazing,’ said her father.
    They didn’t feel sick at all, said her mother, apart from once, on the second day. It was huge. It was like being in a shopping centre, only you knew you were moving, somehow, you could just sense it.
    Then you got off, said her father, and the ground set solid.
    ‘The thump of it,’ he said. ‘Under your feet.’
    ‘Did you get a hat?’ Kate asked him, unaccountably jealous.
    ‘I did not.’
    ‘I told you to get yourself a hat.’
    ‘Sure I have a hat,’ he said.
    But they stopped talking about the ship, and asked instead about the family, children and grandchildren; who was where, this week – Kevin, Kate’s brother, was in Maryland on business, coming back via New York.
    ‘You might have flown up to meet him, for a day or two. Seen Manhattan,’ said Kate, knowing, as she said it, that such a thing was beyond them. They had had their adventure. They would never leave the country again.
    ‘You forgot all about the sea,’ her mother said, wistfully. The middle of the boat was hollow.
    ‘Like a spaceship,’ she said. ‘Oh, it was huge.’ It was the size of two football pitches, said her father, set end to end.
    ‘And four storeys high,’ said her mother, with every type of restaurant and bar; Thai, Mexican – a lot of it very spicy, so they steered clear.
    ‘Hard to sleep,’ said her father.
    Yes, it was funny how hard it was to sleep. You would think it would rock you, like a baby. And sometimes, even with the size of the thing, you’d hear a booming in the metal walls.
    ‘Very far away,’ her father said.
    The air conditioning was perfect, but there the two of them were – wide awake. She got up out of bed one night with an urge to see the water, walked for miles, past the nightclub and shut-up restaurants, looking for the right lift, the one that went all the way to the top. And when she got out into the fresh air, she said, the stars were so beautiful, you could almost see