Prosperity Drive (2 page)

She'd only opened the door a fraction. It was a partial view, she kept telling herself, years afterwards. A sliver. She'd sent Norah in there for backchat. Norah was six and had acquired a stubborn lower lip and a fascination with the word ‘no' since starting school. She was Edel's firstborn, a blackberry of a child, with her dark brown eyes and almost black hair and her ripe cheeks and her little breathy voice with its appealing hoarseness. That day – it was a humid summer's day, hot and broodily grey after days of rain as the sun tried to burn away the cloud – Norah had run into the garden and sunk up to her ankles in the newly rotovated earth. Victor was only then getting round to the garden. For the first six years they were in the house, the garden was a wilderness, choked with weeds and scutch grass growing up around the builders' debris. Now Victor had taken it in hand and it was a churned-up mess, a ploughed field rather than the manicured lawn and privet hedges Edel had in mind. These things take time, Victor had said. But the earth had been turned in April; now it was June and no progress had been made. New shoots of grass were already growing in the overturned clods.

Norah had a high-tide mark of mud on her legs and was refusing to change her socks and sandals. Trish had just woken from her nap and was being grizzly about her food. When Edel told Norah a second time, instead of ignoring her, Norah simply said no. Then she stamped her foot and, for good measure, said no again. Edel caught Norah by a dimpled arm and with Trish straddled awkwardly across her hip, busily making a sodden pulp of a rusk in her fist, Edel opened the door under the stairs and propelled Norah inside. She was rougher than she had intended to be, but she was furious. Norah always seemed to play up when Edel had her hands
full, as if she sensed Edel's fluster. Edel swiftly locked the door and breathed a sigh of relief with her back to it. Norah beat on the door with her fists and started to bawl. Tears of injustice and complaint and, of course, then Trish chimed in. Victor's head appeared over the banisters. Freshly out of bed and in the middle of shaving, his face was awash with lather.

‘Jesus, Edel, what the hell is going on?'

She felt tears sprout in her own eyes.

‘It's Norah,' she wailed like a wronged child, ‘she just will not do as she is told.'

Victor sighed.

‘Let me finish this,' he said above the din, ‘and I'll talk to her.'

She went back into the kitchen, set Trish down unceremoniously on the high chair, and wiped the child's face clean of the mealy mess. Then she took two or three deep breaths. She hated Victor to see her like this as if she were unable to manage her own children. As if she needed some kind of supervision. She stepped out into the yard, a small apron of concrete beyond the kitchen door bounded on one side by two outhouses – one a lavatory, the other a coal bunker. Thanks to Victor, this was what they were reduced to for a place for the children to play. It was a real sun trap, though, and the next-door neighbour's roses hung over the wall and dropped their petals on the Elworthys' side. Unlike Edel, Miss Larchet had plenty of time to cultivate her garden. The petals gave the place an exotic air. Edel imagined a lover scattering them for her. The sun broke free of the gunmetal clouds. She thought she would sit out in the gratifying sun for a bit, until she had calmed down. It was a chore moving the high chair out and finding a shady spot so that Trish would not be scorched in the early afternoon heat. Having dispensed with the rusk, Trish had decided she wanted a drink so Edel had to retreat into the kitchen to make up a bottle. All was quiet within, she noticed, and she relented on her hardness of heart against
Norah and decided to fetch her out and interest her in doing something with the fragrant petals strewn in the yard.

Before she had opened the door she heard the low murmur of talk within. She inched it open a fraction. It was Norah she saw first, astride her father's knee. He was down on his hunkers. She had one arm resting on Victor's bare shoulder – he was still in his vest, his newly ironed shirt was hanging in the kitchen – the other one entwined around his neck. Norah was wearing that nice, smocked sundress that had come in a parcel from America with the little cap sleeve slightly off the shoulder and her head was turned at an angle that Edel could only describe to herself afterwards as seductive, her shoulder cocked like a model posing for a calendar. Her little leg was dangling – she seemed to have shed the sandals and socks – and her small, plump foot was cupped lovingly – that was the only word she could use – in Victor's hand. And then one of them, Edel didn't know which one, maybe Victor with his fist, slammed the door shut on her. She backed off, feeling as if she'd been struck. The low murmur resumed inside. She hurried back through the kitchen and stood in the small yard among the fallen petals trying to quell the quick pulse of alarm racing through her. Trish had fallen asleep at a comical angle, one arm flung over the side of the high chair, the other bunched at her heart in a fistful of terry-towelling bib. She didn't know how long she had stood there when Victor came to the back door.

‘There, see,' he said, ‘everything's quiet now. I've told her she's got to stay in there for another ten minutes.'

Edel turned slowly. Victor was busily buttoning up his shirt; she could see the crease lines on the sleeves that she had left with the iron.

‘You've got to talk to her, Edel, that's what does the trick,' he said, giving her a look she couldn't decipher.

She suddenly felt adrift in her own world, as if her understanding had slipped its moorings. Victor spoke to her as if
in rebuke but the expression on his face, where had she seen that before? After making love, that's when; just after he had relieved himself. That's how it always seemed to Edel, as if relief was the most explicit proof of Victor's affections. As long as she saw that look of rueful satisfaction, Edel was happy. It was enough.

With Victor gone, the house returned to a squeamish silence. Edel went to fetch Norah. Victor had not locked the door but Norah had stayed inside in the gloom, sitting on an upturned orange box, still barefoot and crooning to herself, which stopped as soon as Edel opened the door. Norah looked up. Her face was rapt, blissful. It startled Edel. Norah's socks like grubby slugs were on the floor, as were her sandals, the buckles still tied as if they had been torn off in a hurry. Edel quelled her irritation – she was forever telling Norah that she would ruin her shoes if she didn't open the buckles. But it wasn't Norah she was irritated with, but Victor; he'd obviously encouraged her.

‘Well,' Edel said, ‘don't you want to come out? Trish and I are in the garden.'

‘No,' Norah said simply, without the usual jib of her mouth.

The air inside the room was stuffy and rank. And Norah, despite her persistent negatives, was placid now, appeased, her ‘no' dreamy and abstracted. No amount of
her
talk, Edel realised, could produce this kind of calm.

She blamed it on the day, two children made stroppy by the thundery heat, her own fearfulness about Vic as she called him when they were alone or in bed. It returned him to the perilously good-looking man she'd fallen in love with. She worried about his night-time life, the shifts at the newspaper. Putting the paper to bed. Even that had an illicit air as if his very work were about conquest. But she was lucky; not every wife knew for sure where her husband was at night. Afterwards, though, she watched Norah. No, she watched
them together. The tip and tig in the garden when finally he put grass down, the Sundays in the paddling pool, the bedtime stories when Victor was around to tell them. She manoeuvred him out of bath-times. Only in the car did she relax. There Victor had strict rules; he became his father behind the wheel. In the back even
their
children were subdued, Edel noticed. But she never saw that look on Norah's face again. Though perhaps – and this tormented her more – Norah had learned to hide it.

Four years later, Victor was diagnosed. He couldn't bear to be touched. The chemo had given him thrush in his mouth. But often in the afternoons she would find the pair of them snuggled up on the sofa together, Victor, bald and bloated, spooning up to Norah in another dark room. The light gave him headaches, he said. Norah had filled out, turning to puppy fat that had dampened down all her fiery little-girlness. Clothed in her protective shell of flesh she seemed more childlike than the sassy, nay-saying six-year-old. There's so little time, Victor would say, a dumb terror flickering across his distorted features, as he cupped the children's heads or threaded their fine hair through his fingers. It was the only time he acknowledged the truth – mostly he just toughed it out – so how could Edel refuse him? But towards the end, she had sent Trish away. Irene Devoy had offered to take her on holiday to Courtown with her boys.

‘Better,' she told Irene, ‘that Trish isn't around all this sickness …'

Suddenly, it is all flurry. Norah bounds up the stairs, elbows her way under Edel's shoulders so that she is propped now on Norah's lap. The effort has winded Norah and so they sit there like some afflicted representation of the Pietà, Edel thinks. Norah rubs the papery skin of her legs, which are bare and goose-pimpled. Her slippers seem to have got lost in the
fall and Norah tries to work some feeling back into her frigid feet.

Remember, Edel begins, remember, but the sound she makes is a gurgle. Norah strokes her hair.

Remember, Edel tries again.

‘Mother,' Norah half-croons, half-sighs, a tender reprimand. ‘Mother.'

Edel feels herself lapsing, sinking.

Remember …

Gone now the beautiful clarity.

Remember, remember, remember what?

Fat Norah Elworthy sits on the bonnet of the family car. It is a black Austin, portly, round-bottomed and it sits brooding in the garage. It has not been moved for months, not since her father died. A stepladder is lodged near the passenger door, leaning up against the wall. By the boot, several bulging bags of coal nuzzle. The old fridge, white and enormous, has been wedged up against the front bumper, its open door emitting a polar yawn. A green hose coiled loosely around a nail on an overhead beam drips lazily down, grazing the car's roof. It's as if these items know the failing power of the car, as they move in to colonise new territory.

Norah sits splay-legged so that her calves bulge out on the glossy surface. She leans back against the windscreen, clutching the edges to steady herself, trying to ape the sinuous drape of a starlet at a motor show. But it is too awkward a pose and after a few minutes she straightens up and sits cross-legged instead. Her father would have a fit if he could see this. The car was his pride and joy, washed and tended to like a baby, the leather interior polished, the dashboard dusted. Clambering up on it was expressly forbidden. Even inside the car, she and Trish were not allowed to put their feet on the seats for fear their shoe buckles would scrape the leather.

It is hot and airless inside the dark garage. A broiling summer's day has driven Norah inside to seek shade, and solace, oddly. The beloved car is like a temple, some male essence of
her father enshrined in it. And its days are numbered. It is going to be sold. Norah's mother does not drive and as she says matter-of-factly – talking to herself though in the children's presence – no point in letting it rust away in the garage.

Norah supposes her mother needs the money. At eleven she has a hazy idea of adult finances but without a breadwinner – this is how her mother refers to her father in company as if he had been engaged in some kind of floury lottery – belts will have to be tightened. Whatever that means. Well, it means selling the car, for one. Her mother puts an ad in the paper. One careful owner, it says. Her father had traded in his Zodiac to buy the Austin A40. He used to talk about the sherbet-coloured predecessor as if she were a brassy blonde. (Cars and boats are always she, her father used to say.) The Zodiac was apparently sporty-looking with flashy fins and banquette seats. A young man's plaything, her mother had said, not a family car.

Men with hats have been calling round to look it over: a neighbour cranks it up and reverses it out into the driveway for these occasions. These men walk up and down, frowning at the rusting foreparts. They rap their knuckles on the exterior and kick the tyres. They tut-tut when the engine is slow to start.

‘The battery,' her mother offers in a helpless kind of voice.

Norah detects an unseemly kind of courtship in this, as if the selling of the car is a ploy to acquire a new father for them. She is having none of it. She is autocratic about their loss. She will not stand to listen to her mother talk fondly of the past. Mrs Devoy, their honey-haired neighbour, encourages her mother's nostalgia. Norah has come across them in the kitchen, nursing cups of instant coffee, while her mother softens and grows tearful. Norah shoots her mother a warning glance, and if that doesn't work, she leaves the room abruptly. Her mother's grief is too threatening. Norah feels it is her duty to guard against disintegration.

But selling the car is another thing. It is too irreverent, too pragmatic. As long as Norah knows that the car sits there, albeit fading to a dusty pallor, its oiled working parts slowly deteriorating, its battery going dead, some process is still going on. Decay, reduction. She wants to watch that, she wants to see her father fade away, to lose his authority, his power. She wants to see the ephemera of the house already encroaching on the car to take over, to bury it completely. Her father's vanity, eclipsed.

He was a printer. He worked the night shift at the
Press
, disappearing after a mid-afternoon dinner and not returning until the small hours. On the days he wasn't working he would examine the newspaper forensically, not reading it but hunting down widows and orphans. These were stray singular words, or sometimes pairs, left stranded on the top or bottom of columns. A complete no-no, he would say. Who let this through, he would demand, smacking the offending page with the back of his hand. It grieved him, this absence of symmetry. After he died, the
Press
ran a brief obituary. He leaves a wife and two daughters, it read.