Yesterday's Weather Read Free

not that kind of person. I am not going to panic at the last minute and show up at the cemetery to check the faces at the grave and pick up a few words here and there, about what a fine girl she was, ‘irrepressible’, ‘full of fun’. Bloody right she was full of fun.
    Or not. Maybe she was shy, unassuming. Easily impressed. She might have been a quiet kind of girl. A girl who was anxious to please.
    No.
    I am not going to find this out, or anything else. Because that would be obscene. I am not going to show up like a ghost at the wedding – what’s the opposite of that? – like a flesh and blood wife, at this last dance with the dead.
    We had the salmon when he came home. Potatoes. A bit of asparagus.
    ‘Lovely,’ says my husband. ‘Delicious.’ Then he gets up afterwards and makes himself a sausage sandwich, cold from the fridge. Butter, mayonnaise, the lot.
    And I say, ‘Why don’t you stick some lard in there, while you’re at it?’
    This is the last real thing I say to him, for a long while. Where’s the gas bill gone when will you be home would you pick up Shauna from her ballet? We could do this for ever. After a fewweeks of it, my husband gets a nervous cough: he wonders if it could be lung cancer. His toe is numb, isn’t that a sign of MS? And I just say, ‘Get it checked out.’ Because the girl is dead. So let’s not bother with the fuss and foother of getting back together. Let’s not do all that again. Not this time. This time let us mourn.
    I am too proud. I know that. And in my pride I watched him – my fantastic, stupid man – lurch around in his life. And I did not offer him a helping hand.
    Where’s the key to the shed when will you be home would you buy a pack of plastic blades for the Flymo?
    The girl was with us, all this time. Dead or alive. She was standing at the bus stop on the corner, she was sitting in our living room watching Big Brother , she was being buried, night after night, on the evening news.
    I think that milk’s gone off when will you be home I really don’t want the children having TV sets in their rooms .
    After a month of this, I looked at my husband and saw that he was old. It did not happen overnight; it happened over thirty nights or so. My husband shaking hands with death. And what else? Thinking about it. Thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to be dead, after all. Like she was.
    Whenever I woke in the night, he was awake too. Once I heard him crying again; this time in the shower. He thought the noise of the water would cover it. I listened to him snuffling and choking in the spray and I realised it was time to put my pride away. It was time to call him back home.
    On Saturday, after the supermarket run, I put on my good coat and my leather gloves. And a hat, even – my funeral hat. And when my husband said, ‘Where are you off to?’ – because God knows I never go anywhere without drawing a map – I said, ‘I’m going to visit a grave.’
    I had a beautiful bunch of white lilies, all wrapped up in cellophane. I picked them off the kitchen counter and walked past him – I cradled the lilies against my shoulder and I walked past my husband, who was now old – and I did not look back, as I went out the door.
    She did not matter to him, I know that. I know she did notmatter. So I went to the cemetery and sought out her grave. I wandered through the headstones until I found her, and I put the lilies on the ground under which she lay, and I told her that she mattered. Then I went home and said to my husband. Then I went home and said to Kevin:
    ‘Let’s do something for Easter, what do you think. Something nice. Where would you like to go?’

Y ESTERDAY’S W EATHER
    Hazel didn’t want to eat outside – the amount of suncream you had to put on a baby and the way he kept shaking the little hat off his head. Also there were flies, and her sister-in-law Margaret didn’t have a steriliser – why should she? – so Hazel would be boiling bottles and cups