Listen for the Weather

by Justine Delaney Wilson

Genres: General Fiction; Marriage & Divorce

Synopsis

Every act has a consequence. Every marriage has a breaking point. Beth Rogers and her family have settled well into their new life in New Zealand, far from the stifling containment of the life they knew at home in Ireland. Everything is idyllic. The children are happy and settled. Beth's marriage to Steve, and their love for each other, seems solid. Until a bombshell lands, in the form of a letter Steve receives from a woman from his past. In the envelope is a photograph of a three-year-old girl -- Beth and Steve's papered-over past has caught up with them, in the shape of this child ... Beth forgave Steve once before -- can she do it again? Does Steve want her to? Listen for the Weather is the story of a marriage. It's a story about consequences. And how we make our own weather.

Release date: May 3, 2018

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 272

Sample

My mother finishes cleaning her fridge on the other side of the world. Then she empties the contents of the washing machine into the laundry basket and starts to hang them – a handful of tiny things. Underwear.

‘I like to clear it as it builds up, Beth. To keep ahead,’ she says loudly into the room. ‘You should get into that habit.’

She hunches over the table and her face fills my laptop screen. The skin around her eyes is slick and pale, the lines of age and stress luscious with just-applied cream.

‘Oh, yes, I knew there was something I had to tell you.’ Her clipped voice speaks from her kitchen in Dublin and resonates in mine, here in New Zealand. ‘I saw your old neighbour Moirah in the car park at the supermarket. She was scolding her son. Didn’t know I was watching her, of course.’ My mother’s words are full of tone.

She moves on to prising open a jar.

‘It turns out she has a tongue that could burst a balloon. I must say I was very surprised. She’s always so put-together.’

I sit, engaged by the stubbornness of the lid, not caring about Moirah or her son or any of the put-together others we left behind in the desiccating routines of Vesey Hill, or dwelling on the fact that my mother could be describing herself.

She holds the jar under the hot tap, then goes to work on it with pincers. We are both quiet now. The lid is everything.

Silence across the miles as I stare and my mother grimaces. Then the jar yields to her will and opens. She brushes at her forehead with the back of her hand, satisfied. Dramatic. Now there’s space for us to speak.

‘Did you get the card Mae sent you?’ I say, to avoid more non-gossip about old neighbours.

‘Oh, yes, with some sort of a strange house drawn on the front. Lovely.’

‘That’s a marae. A Maori ancestral home. She was learning about them at school.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, that’s nice.’

‘I think you might like to visit one,’ I say. And then I come over all tourist board, the way I do when I speak to my parents. ‘The Maori believe in valuing each person and their ancestors.’ I can’t seem to stop myself. ‘They’re very welcoming to outsiders.’

‘Isn’t it well for them! Sounds like they’ve nothing to do all day. I’d never find the time for that. I can barely welcome the people I do know.’

That’s true.

‘I’ll speak to your father and look into the idea, but to be honest, Beth, I don’t think we’ll bother with this – this marae.’ She dismisses it with her hand, shaking the idea of it off her fingers.

Over the past year or so, she has been scrupulously picking through all the places she and my father will go and the running order for each day when they arrive here on the trip that will never happen.

‘It might give him something to think about, though. He hasn’t been in very good form since he reversed his car into the wall in the garden yesterday. He said that the thing – you know, the sensor thing – didn’t beep. But I mean, honestly,’ she bends over to pick something up, a piece of fluff, perhaps, from the carpet, and her voice drops out as she does, ‘we’ve been here long enough.’ Her voice rises again as her face looms large on the screen. ‘You’d think he’d know where the boundaries are by now.’

I smile.

‘I told him that this is precisely the kind of thing that you can expect when you come to rely on technology. Of course, he pretended to be listening to me. Much like you are now, darling.’

My parents can’t imagine our lives. They confuse the move, our freedom, with recklessness. Leaving our beautiful home in a prestigious suburban housing estate with measured-out hours and days, in favour of what my mother gravely calls ‘sunshine and lifestyle’. It’s nothing more than a dropping out of reality, middle-aged foolishness. Her friends frown and shake their heads with her.

And I can’t explain the containment of our old life to her. The cult of home improvements and order. The unnerving lack of sensation. I can’t articulate it well enough to make her hear me. But, then, I’ve always been useless around my mother, a hollowed-out version of myself. I’m even physically lumbering and incapable when she’s in the room. I can’t iron in a straight line if I think she’s watching. But she doesn’t know that it’s just her watchful presence that disables me. That I’m not so entirely helpless when she isn’t there to see. So she wonders, perhaps not unreasonably, how I survive, how I get anything done.

However do you manage things, Beth?

When we speak, I think she sounds as far away as she is. Oceans away.

And I don’t get much of a chance to describe our life to my father. We don’t speak a lot any more. He gives a little salute into the camera as he passes, bellows a clownish hello at my children, Al and Mae. Occasionally he’ll stop to ask me about the weather here. Then he’ll check the app on his phone to corroborate what I’ve said.

As far as he’s concerned, only slackers expect to enjoy their lives.

Slackers, and him.

I’ve wanted to shout at him for a long time. I never have, though.

Sometimes I’ll feel a memory suddenly, like a slap – my father advising me on my wedding day in the heat of the Spanish sun, mopping at his brow and telling me not to set the bar too high, how nobody can ever really make promises, and I shouldn’t think that somehow Steve and I can, promises only leading to disappointment.

Years after this, I learned of his affair. An affair. One, or one of many? Who can tell?

And who would want to think about that anyway?

I boxed up and stored away the knowledge of it, of promises made to my mother now broken, of my own disappointment in him and in love. My father. I haven’t stayed quiet about it to preserve the peace – the gentleness of peace isn’t theirs – but rather to preserve their glassy silence. It isn’t mine to break.

He doesn’t know I saw him that evening, leaning into Gloria in the darkness of the golf club car park, his arms around her under her cashmere coat, her hair loose and wild across her shoulders. He’ll never know I saw him, his polished shoe catching our car’s lights as we passed.

He had tried to warn me. Kind of.

My mother has lived her life smiling too brightly, hiding her various hurts, turning her earring in its lobe and looking the other way. Love chooses not to see, chooses to ignore what doesn’t suit it.

I’m glad to be away from it all. And I’m as far away as possible. If I was any further down the globe, I’d be on my way back up. I live my life differently, knowing they aren’t watching, knowing I can’t watch them. And it feels good, like cycling without holding on.

We say our awkward goodbyes and my mother ends the call.

I breathe out, feeling further from her than I did before I rang.

I suspect she does too.

* * *

Some spring mornings, like this one, it feels warm when I waken. The days are already generous with their time. It will be summer soon, another Christmas. The holly wreaths and fairy lights will hide in the brightness of the long evenings and the bursting blooms of the trees.

It’s a change from the months of festive mayhem I knew in Dublin. That circus of distraction starting in October, turning our heads from the bleak winter and dragging us into the new year towards brighter showers of February, via the stacked mess of rails in the January sales. Scuttling along for weeks, dark mornings and afternoons, shopping and eating, until something catches the dead light – the first clump of golden daffodils bold as brass and there to save us.

Our first day here was in December, nearly three years ago. Like four birds, we had flown south from Ireland to escape the cold. And all the shopping. The warmth eased the frost from us – the trees awash with the light of early mornings, and the late-evening skies a deep pink as the sun reluctantly bowed out for the night.

My son Alex had no associations when we arrived, which suited him at sixteen. Starting out. Breaking out. No old childhood cliques and schoolyard history to shrink to fit any more. He gained a freedom in New Zealand that he hadn’t known he’d lacked. Being physically dwarfed by the mountains and the sea made him feel small and separate from old things. Took him out of his head.

‘I never understood that expression before, you know? “I’m out of my head.” But I do now,’ he said. ‘And it’s good.’ And then, after a pause, ‘Sweet as.’

He is nineteen now and plans to study art at college next year. He has a new girlfriend, Lisa. ‘We’re together but I’m in it all the way up to my ankles, so don’t worry, Mum.’ He smiles, and doesn’t look like himself any more. Or maybe it’s that he does – for the first time.

He’s already better at being an adult than he ever was at being a child. Those years spent trying to be less serious, kicking a ball and applying himself to being carefree, like the others, as if that was how it worked. Now, the world is opening up for him and he feels his place in it. He is happy.

My daughter Mae is asleep in the shade of the tree on our lawn. She is lying on her side, legs and arms stretched out in front of her as though she fell to the ground so relaxed that she sank into it. She will always have associations, ties. Her face gives her away. Down syndrome. But here, at least, she is warm to the touch. Not mottled and cold, living a half-life in a damp country. She rides her bike all year round now.

I can feel her contentment lying there – her arms open to the world, her crescent eyelids closed making two still and tiny smiles. The tip of her white-faded scar peeks out at the neck of her T-shirt, a heart surgery from before. Before we left. It changes colour to a line of blush in the water when she swims, which is most days now. It has lost its teeth, this scar. I see it as a mark of courage and strength. Mostly.

‘You’re so lucky she had citizenship,’ my neighbour Moirah had said, when we were leaving Dublin. ‘Very lucky. That she had it automatically, because of her dad.’ I’d said nothing as she explained my own family circumstances to me. ‘They don’t allow you in if they think – well, you know – that you’re going to be a drain on the country.’

This brown-eyed girl. Draining a country. Imagine it.

From our front garden, I see the harbour lights at the end of the hill, our street sloping down to reassuring waters. The tops of the sails are flags marking the blue of the Pacific Ocean meeting the Tasman Sea. I have confidence in us, here. I had suspected there could be a life like this, an ease and a freedom. Steve had told me, and the enchantment in his face when he spoke of it was contagious.

The first time he and I walked to the beach at the end of this road. The salt taste on his mouth when my face tilted to meet it. We would thrive here in the sea air. This would be our real beginning, the past dragged out of sight by the endless pull of the waves. Pulling things away, pulling the weight of my old life from me.

I never look about me and wonder what I’m doing here. This white wooden house, with its wrap-around porch and giant swing, feels like the best version of us, a place where we talk. The cinder bowl of Mount Eden behind us has our back, gives us shelter.

And I’m writing again, like I did years ago. Before Mae, before shock, before. I work part-time as a copywriter, and I write stories and poetry of my own. And all of it feels like a moving forward – even more than that: it feels like a little uprising. My days full of sensation.

To wish for nothing more than your own life, as it is. Who would’ve known there was such a feeling?

I walk around the side of our house now, lifting the latch on the wooden gate. The glowing coals from the barbecue move shadows across Steve’s hands. Hands that felt my desire for change and took me away from what I knew. Their form is seductive to me still. The past few years have been altitude training for our marriage: no supports, nothing familiar, Steve and I stripped back and leaning on each other, getting through, facing only forward.

Our lives put through a sieve, with only the gems remaining after the shake.

Hearing the gate, he looks up. He is holding tongs, and waves a piece of chicken. Our meals seem to taste of sunshine here, the sun plumping the food, drawing out the flavours, our plates a riot of juice and colour.

Steve is no longer a visitor. His feet are back on his land, so he feels comfortable and sure of himself. My connection is recent, a blink, not enriched by stories or generations. But I like that. I have no history with this new place, no hang-ups, no inheritance – other than it being a part of my children’s make-up. A world of different places with strange names and poetic sounds – Aramoana, Whitianga, Rotorua. I don’t feel dislocated. Being an outsider in a foreign land is preferable to being an outsider in my homeland.

I’m a ball shot from a cannon that has cleared the smallness of old routines. So I’m exiled but, also, I belong. I do. I belong among the pohutukawa trees with their blood-vivid blossoms in the spring sun. Following their pattern, the clear changing of the seasons. You know where you are when there are distinct seasons.

The smell of food and charcoal hangs in the air and I overhear some of the conversation. Al is in the swing chair on the back deck, his voice carrying: ‘It’s not all marshmallows on fondue forks when you’re camping properly, you know, Dad.’

Steve’s pushing a lime wedge into the neck of a beer bottle. ‘See? Like this,’ he says to Al, his voice rosy with beer and happiness. The lime squirts into his eye. Steve laughs and rubs his face, then stretches his arms high and leans back, listening to Al’s chatter, taking the words in, making room for them. He is generous in conversations with me too, enthusiastic to listen. It’s a sea of difference from the bitty, sulky exchanges he and I had grown used to. The silences and misunderstandings have been left behind. Perhaps they’re in our house in Dublin, stored in one of the many cardboard boxes. Old sorrow and betrayal seeping from the attic into the lives of the family renting our rooms below.

This is where my life happens. Mountains to street to sea.

No boxes.

‘Bring your bags, leave your baggage,’ my friend Sommer had said.

Mae is awake now, standing by the barbecue, sleepily scratching her nose. Her cheeks are full of colour and a band of freckles crosses her forehead. She is seven. The age of reason for children. In the normal run of things.

Steve hunkers down to her level, speaks quietly to her.

‘Can I play now, Mama?’ She turns to me, her eyes suddenly wide. ‘Can I? Before food?’

The Kiwi accent that swept around her soft words soon after we arrived here has settled in.

Teeny Wahine, Steve calls her.

I nod.

She turns back. ‘Okay, Dad.’ She gives him a little thumbs-up and sets off across the lawn.

The muscles in his calves form hard rectangles as he runs after her. She throws her head back and laughs, her open mouth showing tiny straight teeth. ‘Twenty-one teeth,’ she told us proudly after her first visit to the dentist last week. She held a little mirror and counted them along with him, his tiny mirror touching each one in turn. She sat up sideways on the big seat, her legs dangling – no reclining in this strange room. He had taken off his mask and put it into a drawer when she’d looked at it, stared at it. Such small kindnesses smooth over her worries and keep her happy.

So I am happy too.

I have a good friend here, a new friend, I suppose – Claire. She and I had been told of each other many times before we met. Someone else with a child of the same age who also has an extra chromosome, which, to be fair, is pretty common ground between us, as it’s not common at all in Auckland. It means we both gather a lot of acquaintances as we go about our days. Claire and I encounter a lot of . . .