Yesterday's Weather Read Online Free PDF Page B

said. ‘We’re doing all right.’
    ‘Hah!’ she said. If he stooped to get a saucepan out from under the sink, their backsides would collide through the bathroom door. The van, she called it. Le tin can. The kids were messing on the bunk-bed, and the wall above Michelle’s head buckled where they kicked. If you could call it a wall. It was more like a piece of wallpaper, gone hard.
    ‘Stop that!’ she said.
    ‘They’re back,’ said Dec, looking out through the back window.
    ‘Stop it now!’ said Michelle. She had to remember not to shout. ‘Or I won’t pick up the hamster when we get home.’
    Complete silence. A car door clunked a foot away from the sink, and you could hear the neighbours – two sweet little girls and their perfect parents – climbing the wooden steps on to the deck outside their own mobile home.
    Michelle straightened up and her back put out a fiery twinge. Oh, yes. A good, old-fashioned sort of pain, that. The campsite washing machines were a disaster so she was reduced to Wipp Express and the plastic box she had brought for the kids’ toys. She dangled the shower head into the box and threw the twists of clothes on top of it, to stop it writhing around when she turned on the water. She watched the cloth relax, and lift, and start to float, then she bent over again toknead and swirl and wring the clothes out for a second time. It was actually quite pleasant, as work went; tending to your family when they weren’t there to annoy you; loving them up, in the shape of their clothes. She threw the twists into the sink: Emmet’s blue cotton shorts, Katy’s kitten T-shirt with the diamanté crown, worn to a flitter; Dec’s heavyweight T-shirt that he wore because she liked it, though, as he said, all T-shirts looked the same to him. Finally there was her own crinkle skirt, a cheap cotton thing that looked exactly like what it was. Time to move on, she thought. Time to look like people who were doing ‘all right’. Not to mention ‘well’.
    ‘Emmet! Katy!’ said Dec. ‘Your pals are here.’
    You could feel the rustle and the suck of air as the kids debunked. They were, as she craned out of the bathroom, already standing stock-still at the front door. The two perfect girls were on the threshold, in matching pink capri pants and light-up trainers.
    Stand-off.
    ‘Would you like to go out and play?’ she said.
    Katy turned to check with her mother, but Emmet didn’t need the distraction. He stared at the girls some more. Then he said, in a large sort of way, ‘I had half a doughnut in the car.’
    The girls thought about this. And were impressed.
    ‘Did you go somewhere nice?’ said Michelle.
    ‘We went under the bridge,’ said the bigger girl.
    ‘Lovely.’ And all four of them were gone. She would have given a sigh of relief, as her mother used to do, but Michelle could not let go. She was not used to it. She tracked the sound of their voices up and down the path outside, as she lumped the clothes back into the plastic box. Katy was shy and Emmet was only three: they had never been out on their own before and any silence would bring her out to check where they were gone. Much better to actually go out there and pretend to do something, or really do something, as now, chasing the little patches of sunlight along the wooden rail of the deck to hang the clothes in, because the site they had been given was in the shade.
    On the sunny side of the little road, a woman was sitting outside her mobile home with a glass of rosé in her hand. She let the other hand dangle over the arm of her white plastic chair, and turned her face up to the sun. Bliss. Not a child in sight. She had six at least, maybe more – two of them slept in the car. It was Dec who finally twigged it.
    ‘His, hers and theirs,’ he said one evening, watching them all at dinner. Which made them both pause, and look again.
    ‘She’s in good nick,’ said Michelle.
    ‘Do you think?’
    Most people on the campsite