Prosperity Drive (30 page)

There is a smothering sound; Trish wiping her face with her sleeve.

‘Louis,' she says simply.

‘What do you mean, Louis?'

‘Nothing happened, Norah, I swear it.'

For some reason the group photograph at her wedding comes to Norah's mind. The guests scattered artfully on the lawn in front of the hotel and the photographer calling out designations – ‘Bridal party, the bridesmaid, best man and the groom's parents, please.' There is Trish, swathed in the full-length plum taffeta with the spaghetti straps Norah had chosen, and Louis in his penguin suit, nuzzling his nose into her corsage. And Norah, foolish and deluded bride, thinking how lovely they get on so well. Like a brother and sister.

‘It was me,' Trish is wailing now, ‘all me, all in
my
head.'

And what about Louis's head, Norah wants to scream.

‘He never knew … I swear to God. How could I tell him something like that? But I couldn't stay, that's why I went away. I couldn't be near the pair of you, feeling what I did …'

Norah puts her hand up to stop Trish though it's a useless gesture; she can't be seen. She doesn't want to be party to this, some secret Morse of her marriage being tapped out in front of her after the fact.

‘I was trying to do the right thing …' Trish has moved on now to self-justification; Norah has to stem that.

‘Do you want to say hello to Mother?' She hears Trish's intake of breath.

Norah places the receiver in the crook of her mother's neck. Her mother beams – a special smile for the prodigal. She leaves them to it. She rushes down the stairs, out the front door and into the street. It's early summer and Prosperity
Drive looks at its most benign. A phantom moon graces the still-bright sky. Windblown blossoms from the cherry trees nestle at the kerbsides; laburnums weep over the pebble-dash walls. The first street games would be starting about now – hopscotch, skipping and football. Standing outside the garden gate, she sees Finn Motherwell in his Aertex shirt, his ragged V-neck jumper, a pair of crumpled shorts and those spindly legs, knees like doorknobs. He's standing in goal, between two sweaters acting as goalposts, and he's sucking on his inhaler. When he fell over, all the boys thought he was fooling. When they couldn't rouse him, someone went for his mother. Norah remembered Mrs Motherwell in her flour-daubed pinny, hurrying up the street, then dropping to her knees at this spot. (One of the older girls had thoughtfully made a pillow of one of the goalpost sweaters.) Mrs Motherwell, a squat homely woman with prominent teeth, keened and moaned, while all the kids watched, aghast at this demonstration of passion. She crushed Finn's head to her breast like the marble Pietà in the Servants' Church. This must have been what it was like for Our Lady, Norah had thought; only begotten son took on a whole new meaning.

What she'd done or failed to do hadn't made any difference to Finn. As it wouldn't with her mother. Only the secrets and lies would persist, leaving their indelible marks.

Suddenly, miles inland, Trish can hear the sea. It's in the middle of Beginners' English in an upstairs room at the Eureka Language School on the Corso Vannucci, the wooden casements thrown open to a lilac dusk and the lazy, muted purr of the
passeggiata
drifting up from the street. Seven eager Italians gaze up at her as, mid-sentence, her hearing ebbs away and the ocean rushes in. They are doing The Body. She is pointing to her calves –
polpaccii
– when the hissing starts. By the time she's got to
orecchio
, her ear is a seashell seething with tide. She dismisses the class early; it is too disorientating to hear their plaintive chorus of body parts coming at her in waves, as if on a staticky radio. She tries worrying at her ear to clear the sibilant fog. She remembers the sensation from childhood, the chlorine-clogged hum of the swimming pool. The trick then was to tilt her head sideways and wait for a trickle to emerge. She leans over but it only intensifies the underwater boom. She feels she's drowning in waves of home …

For as long as she could remember Trish had wanted to be elsewhere. When she was eight a new estate had been built at the end of Prosperity Drive. There were a half a dozen bungalows, detached, all of them different. These houses had lush open spaces in front in place of hemmed-in gardens and some of them had names emblazoned on timber signs or engraved
on small boulders in the grass like the tombstones of deceased pets. For Trish it was like straying into a small patch of TV America. Here a boy in jeans and a baseball cap might appear out of one of the doorways and drive off in his father's Buick. Her best friend might live in Number 4 and be a cheerleader rather than Connie Long, fat, loyal and haunted by the Third Secret of Fatima, who lived over a newsagent's shop in the village. Trish pestered her mother to move.

‘Don't be ridiculous, Patricia, they're way beyond our means.'

Means were often mentioned by her mother. It infuriated Trish; everything about her mother's candid widowhood infuriated her. Even the gritty courage of her mother's loneness made her mad. She remembered camping trips where her mother played the dad, collecting the kindling, lighting the fire, or outings to the countryside in an unreliable Volkswagen that she had belatedly learned to drive. Not many mothers drove then, and the necessity that had prompted her mother to take up driving (several years after her father's death) seemed to make it a heroic undertaking. She worked nights at the telephone exchange so she could be with her girls when they got home from school. Leaving Trish's sister Norah in charge, she would rush out of the house at eight in the evening oozing crisp scent and a daytime efficiency. She would ring from work on the hour to check that everything was okay. In the mornings Norah prepared breakfast and packed their lunches, while their mother slept. The house seemed hungover; she and Norah tiptoed about and talked in whispers while the golden glow from the bedside lamp leaking under the door of their mother's room gave off hints of bordello. Although there were only five years between them, Norah had always seemed much older. It was she who had been mother's little helper, witness to their father's death, a grave and stubborn child schooled in the intricacies of adult grief, a vigilant reader of moods. Because she remembered their father (Trish would practise calling him Dad but it seemed as slangy as referring to Christ's father
as Joe) Norah had always seemed as weighty and grounded as a parent. For her the word had been made flesh. But for Trish her father hovered, incorporeal, like a notion of Christian perfection. Dead and revered he belonged to a time before the world had fallen. Or was it before Trish had fallen?

Trish liked to hear her mother talk about work – the flirty conversations she had with men while connecting them to far-off places, the gossip about the ‘girls' at the exchange, their doomed romances, their broken engagements. When they rang up they would simply ask for Edel, and Trish would have to do a double take to remember that it was her mother they were talking about. This night-time place that her mother escaped to bristled with a youthful, dangerous energy, a far cry from Prosperity Drive where she and Norah were stranded among mothers and fathers. Trish despised all couples – those walking arm in arm on the street, or even the ones clearly at odds, hurling insults at each other like Connie Long's parents. The taunting confidence of even badly working families, the rectangular rectitude of them, made the world their mother had built seem rickety and frail as an isosceles triangle. All that work, all her mother's labours, only emphasised what they could never have: the seamless symmetry of family.

Trish does not remember her father; any knowledge of him comes through Norah. She conjures up Fifties films, a man with a hat and pipe and flecked tweed overcoat, the brilliance of hair oil, the complicated mysteries of shaving. She was six – and absent – when he died. A neighbour, Mrs Devoy, had taken her away for a few days to give her mother a break so that her father's death, for Trish, has become a time of lazy blur and unexpected reward. A seaside chalet, the crash of waves, the rough gaiety of the Devoy boys. This is as far back as her memory goes – to that china-blue timber hut, Mrs Devoy in a black bathing suit, her skin glistening with tiny specks of sand, lifting her high into the air against a shimmer of sea. When Trish thinks of her birth it is that moment on the beach
as if Mrs Devoy had delivered her there on the sand. As if she had just popped out, shiny and new. It doesn't matter that it doesn't fit; wrong mother, for one. It is a milestone for Trish, the first conscious memory she is sure is hers.

As a teenager, Trish imagined her life as a film, as if every moment of her day was being recorded by an electronic eye. It buoyed her up to imagine the drum of a soundtrack in her ear, the glide of a camera in her wake, a voiceover more knowing than she was. It was the only way she could transform the stifling landscape of Prosperity Drive into the vast meanwhile of movies. (That and taking two European languages at school, shunning History for Italian.) Even when she went further afield, Trish could not shake off the sensation that they were living in an abandoned outpost. In the summer she and Norah would pedal for miles along the coast road to the public baths. They were open-air sea baths, penned in by whitewashed walls but with the wide open horizon clearly visible. The windswept esplanade pushed out into a thin, dirty sea with the lofty leftover bustle of Empire; the dingy seafront houses peeled. The Irish Sea sucked and slapped and retreated so far it seemed to disappear, leaving the strand puddled and bereft. When Trish thought of it now, she felt sorry for it, if it was possible to feel sorry for a place. From this distance she realised that her vision of home was coloured with a good deal of self-righteous, adolescent gloom. She had to concede that there had been moments when, in a sudden burst of winter sunshine, the cobalt-blue sea and the seagull-chequered beach could have been an exotic and undiscovered Arctic shore. But these transformations had always been fleeting, and as an adult, Trish could only achieve them when she was stoned.

In Italy she is emphatically elsewhere. In the ten years she's been in Perugia, her mother's mild eccentricities have given way to the bottomless pit of regression that is Alzheimer's. Early onset. She has to be spoon-fed – infant food, egg in a
cup, milky tea from a beaker with a teat. When she drifts off in mid-chew, Norah has to bark to retrieve her attention. ‘Mother, Mother!' (Both of them have stopped calling her Mam; it is too soft, too companionable.)

‘They get stuck in a certain time,' the doctor has explained to Norah. ‘Often the richest time of their lives, courtship say, or early marriage.'

‘Which must be why she keeps on telling me to be quiet or I'll wake the baby,' Norah remarks when Trish rings home. ‘She'll use the commode for the day nurse, but not for me, oh no! I have to take her to the loo …'

Norah's reports of their mother are marked by a cruel frankness, and although her talk disturbs Trish, she lets Norah continue. It's a trade-off for not being there.

‘It's like potty training in reverse …'

Trish switches off, preferring to remember holidays years ago when her mother would gaily pee in the middle of a field in full view. There was no skulking in the bushes for her.

‘In our day,' she would tell the girls, ‘we just went in the orchard and buried it.'

Trish, a fastidious child, would avert her eyes as her mother lifted her skirts with flirtatious abandon. The only thing that would stop her was the witness of cows. Whenever her mother saw the black-and-white plaid of a herd she would turn and run. The cows would stare complacently, intent on their placid, lugubrious chewing, but for her mother they were somehow a threat: it was the only dark spot in her gaiety. Now she seems all dark spots, a querulous patient, reduced to the soiled intimate whiff of an invalid.

Trish steps out on to the Corso. There are things she should pick up – bread from the bakery, vegetables for dinner, some fresh pasta. But how can she function, half deaf, in the interrogative clamour of the marketplace? Besides, it is soothing to walk like this, melding with the drifting crowd, her jilted
ear unable to tune into the sharp fragments of conversations all around her. It reminds her of her early days in Italy, surrounded by the babble of a language she didn't understand. It was a kind of newborn sensation to sit in a café or a bus assaulted by the racket of conversation whose meaning she couldn't hope to decipher. For several glorious months she was like a mute infant, wordless and uncomprehending, feasting on strange beauties, depending on exaggerated gesticulation. Innocent. But, like babyhood, it was a passing phase. She couldn't pinpoint the day when she didn't have to look out the windows of the train to check on the names of the stations, when she had ceased to remark on the nutmeg hills, or register the sentried cypresses and the umber church towers, when the landscape had retreated to a homely distance. It took several years but she had certainly reached that stage when Norah announced that she was coming to visit.

Even with Louis out of the picture, Trish dreaded the prospect. Norah would probably want to talk about her marriage break-up even though almost a year had passed since it had happened. If it were anyone else, Trish might have relished a post-mortem. Her early twenties were spent in such tortuous inquisitions with her pals. Long winey nights in perpetual dusk picking through the entrails of broken love with inferior men. But she'd never done that sort of thing with Norah. Norah didn't confide; she was too elder for that. And if she did bring the marriage up, Trish was afraid Norah would detect her guilt and mistake it for the fatal lack of empathy that had always dogged their relationship. Would she be able to last a week in Norah's company without succumbing and mentioning Louis's name?

When Norah arrived, Trish showed off shamelessly. The balmy nights, the lavender hue of Perugia's medieval streets co-operated in the ruse. Away from home where she was so rootedly righteous, Norah had seemed at sea, ponderous and heavy-limbed. She'd got sunburnt on her first day, which Trish
saw as a ridiculous failing; she was bamboozled by the noughts in the currency. While Trish was out teaching during the day, Gianni showed Norah the sights. They zoomed around on Gianni's scooter with Norah riding pillion, clinging perilously to his slender frame. He was a Classics scholar but doing hours at the Università per Stranieri to pay the rent. Gianni's training meant he was the perfect tour guide. He spoke of the ancients as if they were immediate relatives; he read the architecture as if it were as obvious as motorway signage. For him history was not something separate, whereas for Trish the charm of Italy was its lack of associations. She did not want to have it all explained away, by Gianni or anyone else. But she was delighted that he was around for Norah's visit (though they had broken up shortly afterwards). He looked good with his dark shoulder-length hair and his unexpected green eyes and he had impressed Norah as thoughtful and steady. He had been a vital part of her armour; he had helped to throw Norah off the scent. But, she kept on reassuring herself, there was no need to worry. Norah had no idea, no idea at all.