Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright Page B

all her hair fell out and she was sick as a parrot, and Billy’s just looking at his da and his da is looking at him – and you know, there is nothing wrong with Billy’s da, he’s a genuinely lovely man – and he is bringing her four hundred cups of green tea a day while she lies on the sofa with a face on her that says, As soon as this is done, then I am out that door.
    My boyfriend looks it up online and he says ovarian cancer is a complete doozey – and who’s going to tell Billy? Like who is going to tell him that her percentages are basically on the floor? We are sitting in the chipper waiting for Billy to get off the phone to his mother – he is outside the plate-glass window trying to get good reception and he is looking at the sky and his face looks so difficult, so old and childish at the same time, that the sight of him is like a pain for each of us. It is like each of us has a pain in our side.
    Then Natalie says, ‘Fuck the statistics. You just have to be in the right per cent. That’s all. You just have to be in the per cent that survives.’ And I understand she’s a bit defensive, I mean she is literally, actually defending her new boyfriend’s peace of mind here, but another part of me thinks that she is also marking her territory, which I quite respect, except I’ve known Billy’s mother for five years now and if she dies, I too will cry.
    His mother, incidentally, is what made Billy bonkers – long before she got sick, his mother was what made Billy interesting and unhappy, so she’s a bit of a bitch, too, but I don’t say that to Natalie, I say, ‘You think she is going to survive?’
    ‘I think,’ says Natalie after a minute, ‘that we don’t know. And until we do know, then there’s not much point getting in a fizz.’
    Which is so like something my boyfriend would say that I think they’d be better off with each other really, they could roll their eyes up to heaven and not get in a fizz together –while having sex, for example. And afterwards, Natalie could make tea.
    So I accuse my boyfriend of fancying her, all the way back to his place, but that is just to get him going – that’s just to clear out the memory of Billy coming back in after the phone call, saying, ‘No, no. Just the usual,’ and pushing his chips away. It is also to distract me from the fact that Natalie’s aversion to ‘fizz’ is not something reasonable, and considered and right; that what she is actually saying is, You don’t own Billy’s mother.
    Dead or alive.
    It was only a tiny moment, you know?
    As I say, I really did respect Natalie for holding the line, and somehow we seemed to feel, all through that long winter, that if Natalie didn’t flicker, if she didn’t blink, and if we all stayed nice, and stayed separate, and only had emotions that were appropriate to our actual situation vis-à-vis Billy’s mother, then Billy’s mother would survive.
    I just thought, What a great sense of decorum Natalie has – and God knows, there’s not much of that around. And I really admired her, that’s all. I began to see how beautiful she is close up and I started asking her advice on chip-proof nail polish, even though these things don’t interest me as much as I think they do. And that makes it worse, the fact that I don’t give a fuck about Rouge Noir , really, so a sort of wheedling, messy thing starts to happen, and it is a while before I realise that what I want is for Natalie to be my friend .
    I say this to my boyfriend and he says, ‘She is your friend,’ which just shows how much he knows about these things. And after a while she does start to like us, though she doesn’t have a lot of choice, really. It can’t have been easy: her boyfriend up to ninety, and his mother lying on the sofa, and me gabbling on about some day, maybe, getting my legs waxed – I mean, Natalie just does things, she doesn’t talk about them first, and it seems that all those months were about getting nothing