Free Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright Page B

over the border in Laos, and the other does not want to see his father again. When he was a young man, Hoa thought that Paris was the centre of the universe. After three years in a government re-education camp, he had no thoughts about Paris at all.
    ‘I got married,’ I say, suddenly. ‘Did I tell you?’
    ‘Christ!’ says Shay. ‘No, you did not tell me. You certainly did not tell me.’
    He looks at me with great excitement. Then something drains from the back of his eyes.
    The thing Shay actually likes about me – the thing they all liked about me – is that I didn’t want to marry them. I didn’t even want to fall in love. As far as I was concerned, you slept with someone or you didn’t. It was quite simple. Men reallylike that; or they think they do. But the only person who understood it – and perfectly – is my husband, who took me by the hand, one ordinary evening, and led me into the next room.
    ‘We only did it for the visa.’
    This is a terrible betrayal. It is not even true.
    ‘So tell us,’ says Shay. But I have already told him too much. So I make a little story out of it: about my work with refugees, and how we met over a table spread with photographs and chopped-up text and sticks of glue. I could say that the photographs on the table were of this or that victim, but that there was nothing of the victim about Hoa, though I could feel, as I stood beside him, the fact of his pain and the way he transcended his pain. But I don’t say this, because Shay will think I am some kind of pervert. And perhaps I am.
    He is looking at me now, smiling with a slight and social disgust. He doesn’t quite know what to say. Then he comes over all Irish and asks what they think of it ‘back home’. Well, I think it is none of their business, actually. My mother died when I was six years old, which means that we are a more than usually fucked-up family; more than usually restrained.
    ‘I haven’t told them,’ I say.
    ‘No?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Fair enough,’ says my friend Shay, who loves a sad little gymnast and gets her to load his dishwasher for him, every night of the week.
    I wonder about my husband’s wife; if she too was disappointed by the smallness of her life, before it suddenly got very small indeed. I don’t know. I know that I am jealous of her, sometimes; a woman who was born twenty-five years before I was, and who is now long dead. I think that he must have loved her more than he loved me. I say this to him one morning when I wake up and find him sitting by the window in the dawn light. He looks out at the sky for a few moments.
    ‘She was very nice,’ he agrees, and thinks about her for a while.
    ‘I don’t remember her so well,’ he says finally, in his careful sing-song. ‘Je ne me rappele bien d’elle.’
    I realise that I have no idea what it was to love a woman – or just to marry her – in Saigon, in the middle of the war. I have scarcely any idea what it is to love the man that I love now.
    ‘So tell us,’ says Shay. ‘What brought him over here?’
    ‘What brought him here?’
    I start to laugh. Then I stop.
    My husband sleeps in the afternoon. When he wakes, he folds the duvet at the bottom of the bed. He is a creature of routine. But he does not shout or cry if the duvet gets messed up again. He does not sit, as Shay’s wife might sit – weeping, at the state of the house and the destruction of all her dreams.
    ‘Well,’ I say carefully. ‘He always liked France. He is a Francophone.’
    I talk about him some more and Shay starts to realise how old Hoa is. He does the thing men do when they think I might not be getting the ride; amused but surprisingly vicious, too. I’d fuck you .
    And I smile.
    My husband sleeps every afternoon, quite simply. Sometimes I wander in and out again, without noticing that he is there. I cannot hear his breathing. He might as well be a sheet of paper – a blank sheet of paper – stretched out on the bed. Then he opens his eyes,