Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright

an overdose, maybe, just for a joke.
    So he watched her.
    Walking around her flat on the North Circular Road, or in his room in Harold’s Cross, trying to put a date on her, or a place – naked as she was – trying to fix her, even as he lost her to some small thing; the angle of her eyelashes, or the grain of skin pulled to a slant, when she turned to reach for the bedside lamp.
    She said that sex was an act of the imagination, but he said it was a speech act. He felt that he was blurting something into her. And afterwards, he told her about his father’s death.
    He remembered his mother’s friend, Caitlin, taking him and his brother to the park, to get them out of the house, leaving his mother to the extravagance of her grief. He was so young when it happened, he didn’t want to leave his mother behind. He thought she was being punished, somehow. He pictured her reeling from window to window, smashing things, stuffing her mouth with the back of her hand, when, what is more likely, she sat quietly in the dark, in a chair. There was no question that she loved his father. No question at all. And two years later she put on her gloves and walked out the door and got herself another one, another husband, just like that.
    He liked the new guy well enough, but between the smiling lover and the dead father, he sometimes wondered how he grew up straight. For this, of course, they must thank his mother. Thank you, Mom. They must thank the extravagance of her grief. Because this is where he travelled now – into the heart of that disturbance. He was always running back to the house to look for her, and he found – sometimes one thing, sometimes another. In Thailand, he saw a model boat made out of chicken bones. In Berlin he saw a woman breastfeeding in a pavement café, and her eyes were animal; those big wide pavements with plaques every three yards to mark the houses of the slaughtered Jews. And in Dublin, he found …
    You.
    Ah, she said.
    You know what I like about Irish women? he said. I like the way they still call themselves ‘girls’. And I like the weatherin their hair. Which is romantic of me, but I am Irish too, you know. So I like your big family; all those brothers and sisters bubbling up, like the froth on milk. And, I hate to say this, but I love your accent. Also your dark lipstick, and all the history flowering up your back.
    3.
    They went to Venice for the weekend, and bought an umbrella.
    They found it in a poky shop that sold umbrellas and nothing else. She thought it should be a black umbrella with a wooden handle – old-fashioned, because they were in Venice – but he picked up a green telescopic thing and said, What about this?
    It has to be black.
    What do you want a black one for?
    Because we’re in Venice.
    Already, the man behind the counter despised them. Tim picked up a big striped golf umbrella and tried to open it in the shop. Elaine ran into the street.
    Come out. Come out here, she said. But he just kept working at the catch. She had to reach in to the dark shop and drag him out.
    What? What? he said.
    You can’t open it inside.
    Why not?
    The umbrella-seller was, by now, just about sickened by them; he was about to reach for his antacid tablets, or his gun.
    It’s unlucky, she said.
    Tim looked at her. Then he cocked his head and looked, for a long time, at the Venetian sky.
    It was still raining.
    All right, he said, and they went back in and asked for a black umbrella and they walked back out with it tucked under her arm and hoisted it in the narrow street, and then they lost it before dinner-time.
    Everywhere they went in that town, she remembered the last time she was in Venice, with a different man some years before. It was like another town shifting under this one, a pentimento of cafés and churches that had all become smaller or bigger since she had last seen them; shops or squares that were always around the next corner, until she realised that the corner itself had disappeared.