Yesterday's Weather Read Free Page A

and spoons to beat the band. Then John would mooch up to her at the cooker and tell her to calm down – so not only would she have to do all the work, she would also have to apologise for doing all the work when she should be having a good time, sitting outside and watching blue-bottles put their shitty feet on the teat of the baby’s bottle while everyone else got drunk in the sun.
    She remembered a man in the hotel foyer, very tall, he handled his baby like a newborn lamb; setting it down on its stomach to swim its way across the carpet. And Hazel had, briefly, wanted to be married to him instead.
    Now she grabbed a bowl of potato salad with the arm that held the baby and a party pack of crisps with the other, hoofed the sliding door open and stepped over the chrome lip on to the garden step. The baby buried his face in her shoulder and wiped his nose on her T-shirt. He had a summer cold, so Hazel’s navy top was criss-crossed with what looked like slug trails. There was something utterly depressing about being covered in snot. It was just not something she had ever anticipated. She would go and change but the baby would not be put down and John, when she looked for him, was playing rounders with his niece and nephews under the apple trees. He saw her and waved. She put down the bowl and the crisps on the garden table, and shielded the baby’s head against the hard ball.
    The baby’s skin, under the downy hair, breathed a sweat so fine it was lost as soon as she lifted her hand. Women don’t even know they miss this until they get it, this smoothness, seeing asmen were so abrasive or – what were they like? She tried to remember the comfort of John’s belly with the hair stroked all one way, or the shocking silk of his dick, even, bobbing up under her hand, but he was so lumbering and large, these days, and it was always too long since he had shaved.
    ‘Grrrr …’ said Margaret, beside her, rummaging a bag of crisps from out of the party pack. This is what happens when you have kids, Hazel thought, you eat all their food – while Margaret’s children, as far as she could see, ate nothing at all. They ate nothing whatsoever. Even so, everyone was fat.
    ‘Come and eat,’ Margaret shouted down the garden, while Hazel turned the baby away from the sudden noise.
    ‘Boys! Steffie! Please! Come and eat.’
    Her voice was solid in the air, you could almost feel it hitting the side of the baby’s head. But her children ignored her – John too. He had lost his manners since coming home. He pretended his sister did not exist, or only barely existed.
    ‘How’s the job coming?’ she might say and he’d say, ‘… Fine,’ like, What a stupid question .
    It made Hazel panic, slightly. Though he was not like that with her. At least, not yet. And he lavished affection on his sister’s three little children, he threw them up in the air, and he caught them, coming down. Still, Hazel found it hard to get her breath; she felt as though the baby was still inside her, pushing up against her lungs, making everything tight.
    But the baby was not inside her. The baby was in her arms.
    ‘Come and eat!’ shouted Margaret again. ‘Come on!’
    Still, no one found it necessary to hear. Hazel would shout herself, but that would definitely make the baby cry. She stood by the white wrought-iron table, set with salads and fizzy orange and cut ham, and she watched this perfect picture of a family at play, while beside her Margaret said, ‘God between me and prawn-flavoured Skips,’ ripping open one of the crinkly packets and diving in.
    The ball thumped past Hazel’s foot. John looked up the length of the garden at her.
    ‘Hey!’ he called.
    ‘What?’
    ‘The ball.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘The ball!’
    It seemed to Hazel that she could not hear him, even though his words were quite clear to her. Or that she could not be heard, even though she was saying nothing at all. She found herself walking down the garden, and she did not