Yesterday's Weather Read Online Free PDF Page A

five.
    Of course there was no scarlet lipstick; the woman was a faded sort of creature in a blue-check nylon coat. Still, she made him feel quite jaunty. Noel did not know how many times he had seen her – he only went in there for the weekend papers, or sometimes for a pint of milk if they ran out, and maybe a packet of Maltesers for his wife. Besides, the girls behind the counter changed all the time, he didn’t even see the good-looking ones any more – which was sad, but there you go. And he was halfway back to the house before he realised that the good-looking girls didn’t see him any more: he had it the wrong way around.
    But the woman with the scar saw him. She was alert to where people’s eyes went and where they stayed, and even though she didn’t look at you when she handed over your change, still she was noticing every bit of you. Noel couldn’t tell what age she might be – he never could, with women – even her wrinkles sat lightly on her face, like they hadn’t theenergy to cut into the skin. Who would bother trying to murder her? Someone she had bored into a frenzy. Or a stranger in an alleyway. Christ, it didn’t bear thinking about. Then again, maybe she had put the scar there all by herself. Maybe, in some sudden surge of strength, she had done it herself.
    Noel threw the Maltesers across the kitchen to his wife, who said, ‘God, I love you.’ Then he went into the sitting room, and sat for a while reading the papers.
    ‘Your mother rang,’ his wife said – or shouted – from the next room.
    ‘What? When?’
    ‘When you were out.’
    ‘Well, thanks for telling me,’ he said. And was ignored.
    He went back to his paper but it was spoiled, slightly, and he folded it and let it drop to the ground beside the leg of the chair.
    ‘I wish you’d tell me these things,’ he called out.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I wish you’d tell me when I get a call to the house.’
    ‘Jesus, Noel, I was hardly keeping it from you. You’re only in the door.’
    She had come out into the hall and was looking in at him.
    ‘Are you all right?
    ‘What?’
    Ten years ago he might have pointed out that just because she failed to pass on a phone message did not mean that he was suffering from some larger emotion. But that was ten years ago. These days, he didn’t bother. So things were looking up, then. ‘Course I’m all right.’
    And he went into the hall to phone his mother.
    His mother wanted to talk about the upstairs tap. The upstairs tap had been dripping for decades, but now she was a widow Noel’s mother wanted something to fuss about. As if it was his father’s fault – the drip – and she could finally get it fixed, now that he was out of her way.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Noel. ‘Forty euros’ call-out, anyway – or used to be when I last got someone – which is a long time ago.’
    ‘Forty euros!’
    His mother was on the new phone with the walk-around handset, which sort of cut out when she wasn’t speaking, so you couldn’t read the silences any more. What did she want?
    ‘Someone could do it. I could do it. It’s just a washer, probably.’
    ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘That’s not what I meant at all.’
    But he bribed the youngest into the car and went over there, anyway, with his wrench beside him on the front seat. His daughter in the back was making up a song, and laughing through the words which, when he listened in to them, were all about ‘poo’. Noel looked at her in the mirror.
    ‘Would you ever?’ he said.
    The night before she had broken the last, pink string that held one of her bottom teeth, and her gum had surged with blood. Now she was laughing through the fresh gap, singing:
    ‘And in that poo there was a plop,
    A rare plop, a poo-poo plop.’
    ‘Ah, stop it, ’said Noel. But she didn’t stop, so he switched on the sports news and listened to that instead.
    She ran up to the door and rang the bell to her granny’s, while Noel followed up the path, testing the