Prosperity Drive (7 page)

‘Well, you see, often at your age the voice changes, modulates because of …'

Because of breasts and periods was what he wanted to say, she suspected, but couldn't.

‘And sometimes it's best not to train the voice during puberty, to let it develop in its own way. Then in a couple of years, if you're still interested we can work with what will be a fine, mature voice, I hope.'

The room was dark, shadowy. It was winter, the clocks had just been put back. The lights should be turned on, she thought, but the mood was gloomily in tune with Mr Polgar's mortifying verdict. Somehow, she thought, somehow he has found out.

‘But it's been fun, hasn't it?' He said this with a false brightness, the brightness he used to jolly things along.

He was absolutely wrong about that, she thought vehemently. The singing classes had been a lot of things for Ruth Denieffe. But fun, never.

* * *

The piano lessons petered out too, though she managed to get as far as Grade 5 before, three years later, she simply gave up. It wasn't that she lost interest; it was Mrs Bradley who changed. Towards the end, Mrs Bradley – stout, whiskered, irritable – seemed content to let her play on, faults and all. Once she would have stood over Ruth; drumming time on the lid of the upright, stopping Ruth so often that in an hour-long lesson she would never get through a piece from beginning to end. But latterly she had taken to sitting by the window looking out dreamily over the roofs of the city. She seemed sunk in a kind of trance so that Ruth would have to cough loudly when she had finished to attract her attention. Ruth could read the signs, indifference as a prelude to rejection.

Meanwhile all around them music flourished – the brash din of the college orchestra, the smooth and fluid bow of some bright young violinist, the urgent arpeggios of a soprano yearning towards cadence.

‘Well,' Ruth says, gathering together her papers. ‘I hope I haven't put you off completely.' She's taking bets with herself that Miss Furlong and Mrs Longworth will not be back next week. It's better this way, to weed out the faint-hearted at the start before they can do any harm.

The students heave themselves out of their miniature traps, and file out. The drinker at the back is the last to leave. Perry is his name. Robert Anthony Perry. The furnishing of a full name gives him away, its titular pretension, its striving self-importance. Anthony is probably his Confirmation name. He pauses at the desk smiling in a gamey way; an old reflex, Ruth imagines, drawing on some ancient source of shabby charm. After-class approaches like this are usually a form of special pleading, a false frankness. Between you and me, the hanger-on is saying, I'm different, not part of the common herd. I'm worthy of your individual attention.

‘So what does it mean, then?' He gestures towards the motto on the blackboard.

Ruth has forgotten about it; usually she asks the class to guess at the end, to lighten things up a bit, but something has distracted her with this group.

‘Oh that,' she says distractedly, hoping to put Mr Perry off. Jean Fleming saves her. She bounces back into the classroom having left her gloves behind.

‘Oh, by the way, I meant to ask,' Jean says on her way out. ‘Are you the same Miss Denieffe who used to teach at St Ignatius's? My niece went there and spoke so highly of you.'

Jean Fleming is lying. With merciless adolescent judgement, Marie used to call Miss Denieffe a total bitch. Jean's sister Molly, hushing her daughter, would concede that Miss Denieffe had a reputation for standing no nonsense; she could face down a class of unruly boys with the set of her shoulders and the fix of her stare.

‘You should see her, Jean,' she used to say, ‘she's
tiny
, five foot nothing, mop-top ginger hair like Shirley Temple, or one of those other child stars.'

She was a great loss to the school when she went, Molly said. Played the piano for all the school operettas and would gladly do Beatles numbers and ragtime during the intervals at concerts and open days though she wasn't even the music teacher. No one was surprised, though, when she moved into Adult Ed; she was always a bit of a crusader, Molly said.

‘Yes,' Ruth says, ‘that's me.'

‘Still tickling the ivories, then?' Jean asks brightly.

Ruth is suddenly furious. Furious about the years of practice, the tantalising promise of perfection, all that cruel vocational energy expended. For what? For this –
tickling the ivories
. Mr Perry is still standing there. He shuffles his feet conspicuously.

‘Oh, I'm sorry,' Jean says, ‘I interrupted you.'

‘No,' he says, switching his gelid attention to Jean, ‘I was just asking Miss Denieffe about this.' He points again at the blackboard.

‘Yes, what does that mean? I was wondering too, but to tell you the truth, I was a bit afraid to ask.' Jean laughs nervously.

Ruth pushes past both of them. She hits the light switch as she reaches the door, plunging them both into darkness.

Mo Dark is coming out of the Gents toilet in the terminal when he sees her. He's left Keith looking after his trolley. Can't be too careful these days. Security would nab it in a nanosecond and blow it up. He's tucking his shirt into the drawstring waist of his shorts when she walks across his field of vision. Is it her? Or has he been smoking too much? The terminal is almost deserted. Through the huge plate-glass windows there's a golden spear of light on the horizon that will become sunrise. Torpedoes of maroon clouds cruise the blanched sky like a Sunday painter's vision of the Day of Judgement. Pathetic fallacy, he thinks.

She's wearing a floral sundress and some silky kind of jacket the colour of mushrooms that breezes behind her as she hurries along. That was always her mode. Quick impatience. She looks prosperous; yes, that's the word. Large pouchy handbag slung over her shoulder, and one of those wheelie bin cases on a stick. Her hair seems to be a different colour. It's long now, copper tinted and rippling behind her like an ad for shampoo. The last time he saw her she'd had it short, a close shave growing out. (She was going for the Sinead O'Connor look.) But despite her best efforts – the shaggy jumpers, the bolt in her ear – Trish could never have been anything other than pretty. Rinsed grey eyes, those pert delectable breasts. They're still in evidence, he notices. A memory of her comes to him, in her school uniform. Navy blue tunic, designed to
shroud sexuality, the regulation shirt and skewed tie, dishevelled white knee socks. Those socks really did it. Phew! Did the nuns not realise how girls of a certain age just –
sprouted
– out of that prison gear? The memory of Trish, rather than her presence 20 feet away, arouses him. Jesus! Stirring of the loins. Early morning job. Down, boy, down. Pathetic phallus, more like.

God, she's going to miss her flight. She can't believe it. Well, no, she can. Trish has missed dozens of flights. All that security business! She clings to a time before terror when you could just rock up with an hour to spare before a European flight and step aboard. The world may have changed, but Trish, in this one mulish aberration from her usual efficiency, baulks at the new demands. Cosmetic miniatures banished to see-through baggies, the pulling-off of coats, the shedding of shoes. Ridiculous! She's lost count of the number of tweezers she's forfeited, the bargain-sized shampoo containers she's been forced to abandon. It's a futile kind of defiance but she constantly runs the gauntlet, the last adrenalin rush left to the modern-day traveller. She halts under the board with its fluttering eyelids of information. Rome. Go to gate, it flashes furiously.

Hi there, he practises. Hi there. Trying to sound casual. He reaches for films – of all the gin joints in all the world … no, maybe not. Should he say
Hola
? Trouble is, he's out of practice. Not used to talking to people. In any language. He talks to Keith and Manny but that's not the same. Real people, he means. Anyway, talking to Trish Elworthy, with the distance of years yawning between them, would be immediately freighted with the need to explain. Explain
this
.

She was his first love, his childhood sweetheart. The vocabulary of the distant past sounds archaic to his ears. Childhood. Sweetheart. This is the foreign language for him
now. And then there's how he looks. Living like he does changes how you look, or how you appear to other people. Like being disfigured or emaciated by illness. Would she even recognise him? Would he
want
her to recognise him? Would he want her to peer at him and say questioningly, Mo? Mo Dark?

She rummages in her bag, hunting for her mobile phone.

‘An interview?' Gianni said, disbelieving, when she told him about the trip, and in the next breath, ‘you're leaving me, aren't you?'

‘Madonna!' she'd exploded. (It had taken her years to get the hang of pious cursing in Italian.) ‘This is not about you! If I get this I could be a director of a school, my own boss.' When she said it, it sounded like ambition, something she's been studiously avoiding for years.

‘Your Spanish isn't good enough,' Gianni said.

‘That's what you used to say about my Italian,' she replied hotly.

But he has hit the nail on the head. She
is
trying to get away from him. Nothing he did; it's her, her sneaking propensity for betrayal. (Recently, she filled in one of those online personality questionnaires – who's your favourite biblical character? St Peter, she answered. Her ringtone is a crowing cock.) Gianni's phone goes to message.

‘Leaving Malaga now, should be in Perugia by evening,' she informs the silence as a bing-bong sounds and her flight is announced. Last call.

What to call him. That was always the trouble; people were never sure about him. Never sure who he was. The confusion started at school. First day. They were late – they were always late. His mother could never achieve the oiled management of the nuclear family. Mo saw it capitalised: the Nuclear Family, efficient, deadly. Neet heaved the heavy door open. It had a
heraldic escutcheon brassily marked
PULL
. They stepped into a tantrum of noise, a miniature world of protest. Letterbox mouths, brimming eyes, anger-pocked faces, the about-to-be abandoned. Neet handed him over at the door of Low Babies. The teacher, standing at the desk, was a faded-looking woman in an Indian smock with ash-blond hair and denim eyes. Twenty pasty faces stared back at him. That was the first time he noticed. Noticed the difference.

‘Is this little Maurice?' the teacher asked sweetly, bending down and peering intently at him.

‘We call him Mo,' Neet said helplessly.

He was picked on, of course. Where did he live? Sesame Street? There were older boys who wouldn't let him play ball, who told him to feck off back to where he came from – which they imagined was Africa, since all nig-nogs came from Africa. But look, if they hadn't fixed on his skin colour they'd have found something else. A big nose, freckles, glasses. The girls took his hand and led him around the playground like a pet. They allowed him to turn rope and in time he could skip for Ireland.

The roped-off alleyways leading to the X-ray machines look like a stage set for some glitzy red-carpet event. Bloody place is deserted but still you have to wind your way through the maze. Trish halts at the mouth of the security area and fingers her jacket – is that considered a coat? She's wearing sandals, but they have wedges – could the goon in the uniform mistake her for a heel bomber? She decides to brazen it out. Why volunteer? She will only take off what she absolutely has to. She places her carry-on in the grey plastic tray and puts her phone beside it. As she waits to be beckoned through, she looks behind her. Across the butter-coloured distance she sees a figure coming out of the Gents toilet. Loud shirt, rumpled shorts. For some unaccountable reason she thinks of Mo. Mo Dark. (Burnt Sienna, that's the colour of your skin, she had
said to him. I'm not a fucking paint chart, he had barked back.) That was Mo. Difficult, touchy.

‘
Señorita
?'

The goon points to her shoes.

Back then, he counted himself lucky. He had two mothers, Neet and his nan. Nan lived with them and looked after him when Neet was out at work – in a grey office with a yucca plant in the Admin Block of St Jude's. Nan was a rosy grandmother, a ruddy crab apple of a woman, bright as a bead and his stoutest defender.

‘He's a growing boy,' was her justification to Neet for any misbehaviour. Nan was obsessed with growth.

‘Eat that up,' she'd command, ‘or you won't grow up to be a big boy.'

Nan liked to ramble with the pushchair up and down the tree-lined avenue of St Jude's, skirting the Outpatients Department and coming back by the morgue. The expeditions with Nan were less about rambling than talking. She talked all the time even before Mo could answer back. Pushed ahead, skirting the arthritic roots of trees cracking through the paving slabs, Mo was fuelled by Nan's chatter.

‘You're going to be a fine big lad, you're going to grow into a man, tall and strong like Victor Mature or Charlton Heston. You're going to be the biggest lad in this family, taller even than Pops Dark and he was no midget. You're going to go to the university, no reason why not. You could be a doctor, or a pilot …' (This was a concession on Nan's part. She knew how Mo loved the chalky vapour trails of planes in the high blue sky; he'd follow their crayoned streaks with his finger.) When he was with Nan, he felt like a pilot, swaddled in his little cockpit on wheels, propelled by Nan into his big future. Here's my future, Nan, he thinks, as a jet takes off, roaring behind plate glass.

* * *

In the sonic thunder, Trish bends to unbuckle her sandals and the world of Prosperity Drive comes swimming back. God, how she hated that place! Crossroads to nowhere. The avenue leading to St Jude's Hospital formed the upright, patches of green on either side with ancient oak trees, low clumps of whitethorn and forsythia, and wild clusters of snowdrops in the spring. Prosperity Drive was the cross-beam, bisecting the avenue. It was a later addition, an afterthought; a paved street of pebble-dashed houses petering out in two bland cul-de-sacs. The hospital dominated. Crushed-looking men paced the grounds in dressing gowns and slippers, their faces marked biblically where they'd had radiation treatment. There was the slow glide of hearses up and down the avenue. Not that when she was a kid Trish took much notice of that. St Jude's and its discreet morbidity was normal. She only knew it wasn't a normal hospital because when she fell off the swing in the Devoys' garden, she was taken to St Vincent's. Girls with broken arms did not go to St Jude's. It was for hopeless cases, she'd heard her mother say.