A Lazy Eye
Mother of Pearl
The Pretender
The Rising of Bella Casey
All the characters in this mesmerising book begin their journeys on Prosperity Drive. Everything radiates out – often internationally – from this suburban Dublin street, and everything eventually returns to it. It is an Ireland in miniature. Like an exploded novel, Prosperity Drive is laid out in stories, linked by its characters who appear and disappear, bump into each other in chance encounters, and join up again through love, marriage or memory.
The form of Prosperity Drive reflects and embodies the theme of dislocation. Exploring family ties and small coincidences, the stories are united by recurring imagery, echoing a kind of collective unconscious, and the magnetic force of place. While each story is discrete, and stands perfectly alone, when read together they have an extraordinary cumulative effect. Through the central drama of the Elworthy family, the collection has a strong narrative arc, very similar to that of a novel, making explicit to the reader secrets withheld from the characters.
A stunningly original construction, this journey in stories is very much like life itself: a series of circles and trajectories, a process of learning how to love and how to lose that love. Heartbreaking and hilarious in turn, always incisive and exquisitely written, this is a thrilling book by a major Irish writer.
Mary Morrissy has published three novels – Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey – and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (1993). She has won a Hennessy Award and a Lannan Literary Foundation Award and currently teaches at University College Cork.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN: 9781473520981
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Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,
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Copyright © Mary Morrissy 2016
Mary Morrissy has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Jonathan Cape in 2016
(First published in the United Kingdom by Random House in 2016)
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
for Colbert
She is lying at the top of the stairs, her shoulder crushed against the newel post, her hands clawing for the banister. Her hair is fanned about her. It is too long; she would never have let it grow this much, though Norah – or is it the nurse, the foreign girl? – keeps it clean. The shampoo they use smells of nettles; she gets whiffs of it now as if she were lying in a field. She cannot remember the last time she had colour in her hair, though once she would have been particular about such things. Was it weeks ago, or months? Time has bloated and clogged. These days, oddly, it is only when she has fallen that she comes to her senses. It brings her to know mostly the unpalatable. Just now, for example, a flight below – down to the return, then down again – sitting at the kitchen table is her daughter watching a small portable TV while she lies here, stricken.
A microwave with pictures is how Norah has described it. It is one of the new things that has been added to the house.
‘So you can have the big TV upstairs,’ Norah had said, ‘all to yourself.’
The ground floor of her own house is a mystery to her now, like upstairs might be to a child frightened of the dark. It is so long since she’s been in the kitchen that she has to work to imagine it. In her mind’s eye she sees it flooded with a gauzy early morning light coming in through the French window Victor had installed forty years ago when the walls smelled of lime and the house had a bald, ripening air; as did their lives.
Norah is at the table, a pale full moon of melamine on a tubular pod – unless it has been changed too – eating a meal. She can hear the lonely scrape of cutlery. Norah had brought dinner upstairs to her on a tray earlier and had fed her, spoon by spoon, though she hadn’t much interest. Appetite evades her these days. In the end Norah had whipped the dish away. Or was that the nurse? Sometimes she gets them mixed up.
She may be confused about some things, but just now, Edel Elworthy – that is her name, she is sure of that – knows that as she lies here, her daughter has turned up the volume on the TV. She can hear the unctuous urgency of a hair advertisement – gloss and sheen and self-worth all rolled into one voice of honey – and she knows that Norah is deliberately ignoring her.
It isn’t as if Norah doesn’t know she’s fallen. When Edel falls, she finds herself making whimpering sounds; they seem to just come out of her as if the child in her is talking. Which is the opposite to what she feels. Because when she’s stretched like this, incapable and dependent, everything else about her situation is for once, clear; luminously so. It’s one of the reasons she tries to get out of bed, against Norah’s wishes and the strict command of the nurse. Because once she’s upright she feels a clarifying rush in her head just as the power drains from her legs. It’s a sensation like flying, but sickening like vertigo. And there’s an exhilaration in it too, a nauseous euphoria. She’s not aware of even wanting to be vertical until she’s out of bed on mottled legs that seem so gelid and blue they can’t be hers. And then before she crashes, there’s another sensation, a monstrous feeling like the discovery of a squalid secret. And then she goes down.
She imagines what she must look like to Norah, or the nurse, or whoever might be looking down at her. Everyone has an arm’s length view, people trying to keep their distance. Her hair wild and ragged like an ancient wizard’s, her mouth open – it must be, she’s making noises – her body gnarled and frozen in this arch and petrified pose. She thinks of a poster one of the girls used to have tacked on to the wall of their bedroom when they were teenagers. She can’t remember if it was Trish or Norah. (Even before this calamity their combined adolescence had blurred into a general fug of secretive passions and obstinate grievance.) It was a picture of a creature painted in a wavery, sick kind of way; it must have been Trish, she was the arty one. Edel couldn’t even tell if it was meant to be human. It had big hollows for eyes, its paws clasped in horror to its cheeks and its mouth open emitting the soundless howl of a nightmare. Maybe that’s what people do now when they see her, hold their hands up in horror and scream silently? Or is that creature her? Though she is making sounds and drooling on her quilted breast, and Norah knows and still won’t come.
Between her and Norah is the cupboard under the stairs. She can hear Norah rummaging in there sometimes. Well, it is where the Hoover is kept as well as the iron and board, a box with shoe polish and rags, tins of gumption and cartons of detergent giving its normal musty smell a purged overtone. One of the first things Norah did when she moved back in was to get a light installed in there with a 100-watt bulb, though Edel is sure that 60 watts is all the fixture can take.
‘So that we can see what’s in there,’ Norah explained.
Edel knows what’s in there. Boxes of old Christmas decorations, tangled threads of fairy lights, Victor’s dressing gown packed in tissue paper because she couldn’t bear to part with it. Her own wedding veil – for one of the girls, she had thought. Something borrowed. Or something old. But Norah didn’t want it and Trish showed no inclination to walk down the aisle. There is Victor’s toolbox – he was handy, she’ll give him that – still with its trays of nails and washers, its accordion floors packed with chisels and screwdrivers and tins of 3-in-One oil. There are brooms and mops and dustpans, her gardening shoes, spare bulbs, some defunct lampshades – quite sound but out of fashion now. It’s not chaotic; well, it wasn’t the last time Edel was in there. No, it was always orderly. But it is the only place in the house where useless things are still kept – too good to throw out, but not old or precious enough to be of value.
Usually, as soon as Edel hits the floor, Norah is up to rescue her. She rarely even gets to the top of the stairs, but lately, Edel notices, her response has become slower. It is as if she knows Edel is deliberately defying her. And once Edel is lying down again she can’t explain, not when Norah has manoeuvred her back into bed with a firmness of touch that seems, somehow, more impersonal than the nurse’s. Not when Norah is looming over her. Edel doesn’t have the words in her head then for the sensation of clarity that comes over her when she is upright.
She thinks she understands why lately Norah has refused to come running. Payback. When the girls were babies and woke in the night and she was an exhausted young mother, she would often lie in bed just listening. She would be wide awake but resistant to the drowsy peeved wails of Norah or Trish. Often it was Victor who, just shortly abed from the night shift, would nudge her in the ribs and say: ‘Edel, it’s Norah.’
Victor always knew which one of them was calling. She’d tell herself that it was only laziness that kept her horizontal, or the hope that it was one of those cries that might die away rather than rev up into something more hostile and aggrieved, but she knows, too, there was sadism in her refusal. Let them cry for a bit, she would think, why don’t I just let them cry.
If Norah would come now, Edel might be able to say what she gets up to say every time she makes one of her escape attempts. She would say to Norah – thirty-seven last birthday, she thinks – remember when you were a little girl? A few times she has managed to blurt out these words but Norah has only hushed her. Then she leans down and with great effort – Edel is not heavy but she’s a dead weight – puts her arms under Edel’s shoulders and lifts her with that brusque tenderness Edel has come to know as her elder daughter’s signature touch.
‘Try not to talk,’ Norah always says.
And Edel surrenders, saying to herself, not to worry, Norah knows, she knows already.
Victor said she was too hard on the girls. Her word carried weight – a sharp smack on the bottom or across the back of the legs. It was how children were brought up in those days. And it was how Victor had been raised. His mother, revered for her sanctimonious indulgence and his father, stern and forbidding, who used his belt when it was necessary. He wasn’t cruel, Victor used to say, he was efficient. It pained his father to punish them and so it was done in silence. Children were meant to be subdued, Victor would say, we were dealt with, not talked to. His father thought most people – particularly women – talked too much. Yack, yack, yack, he would mime when he came across Edel and her mother-in-law trading stories about Victor. This was in the early days of her marriage and Edel liked to discuss Victor with anyone who’d listen. His mother was a natural ally in this. Victor was her favourite and she talked of her eldest son as if she was similarly smitten. After a while, Edel felt they were like a pair of teenagers nursing a crush that could only be deliciously speculated about but never requited. Victor’s father, emphysemic and tethered to his tank of air, said listening to them made him breathless. When the children came, Edel was pleased to see how good a father Victor was and how much he wanted to help. If the girls misbehave, he would say to her, I’ll talk to them. So though it was Edel who would send them under the stairs for serious wrongdoing – tantrums, smacking one another, giving cheek – it was Victor who dealt with them. He talked to them in the velvet darkness.
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.
One of the men in hats finally comes up trumps. He and her mother haggle on the driveway. Gone now the flirtatious tone of distress.
‘My late husband was very mechanically minded. The engine is clean as a whistle. And, as you can see, not a mark on the bodywork,’ she says proudly. ‘He was devoted to it.’
Devoted to her, Norah wants to say.
She cannot believe the car is actually going to be sold. She thought her mother’s air of plaintive ineptitude would make the men in hats think she was trying to sell them a pup. But no, this large bald man (he has taken his hat off and it sits territorially on the roof of the car) is now patting his chest pocket in search of a pen to write out a cheque. Norah, standing at the other side of the car, wants to raise her hand and say stop in a commanding tone that will make the adults pause, and obey. But though she can stem the slow tide of her mother’s mourning with an angry glare, she cannot battle against the calculated transactions of survival.
‘Come inside, won’t you?’ her mother says to the man.
Norah loiters outside as the man follows her mother into the house. When they are out of sight, she fishes out a coin from her pocket and digs it into the Austin’s paintwork. She draws a line from the front passenger door backwards, a searing, silent protest. Spite fuels her, or is it revenge? Whatever it is, it is deeply satisfying. When the man emerges, she is sitting on the garden wall, legs swinging. She smiles sweetly and waves as he reverses the Austin out on to the road. He drives off unaware of the damage she has done on his blind side.
Norah Elworthy, seventeen, is going out on her first date. She is slimmer now, her puppy fat having fallen away. She thinks, of course, that her thighs are too big, and wishes she could fit into a size 12 and a B cup. She has just stopped being a schoolgirl. The intervening years have been unremarkable. They have passed in a blur of brisk normality, a normality Norah’s mother considers a triumph. Your father would have been proud of the way we’ve managed, her mother says, generously including both Norah and Trish in the achievement. There is still an air of financial hazard, unspecified but ever present. The absence of a breadwinner, Norah has learned, does not mean that they’ve gone hungry. But there is a constant impoverishment of confidence. Nothing is ever as solid again. This is what not having a father means.
What has changed is that Norah would now welcome the chance to share in her mother’s ruminative wistfulness that once seemed so dangerous. She would like to be the companion in the kitchen talking about the fleeting and seemingly unnecessary presence that their managing has reduced her father to. But it is too late for that. Having fended off the bereaved companionship her mother offered, she is left only with a field of combat.
‘What do we know about this boy?’ her mother asks, standing by the bedroom door as Norah wrestles into a pair of jeans.
‘Nothing,’ Norah replies. ‘That’s the whole point.’ Then she relents. ‘I told you I met him at the bicycle shop.’
He mended her puncture then asked her out.
‘A bicycle mechanic, that’s all we need,’ her mother says, sighing.
‘I’m not marrying him, Mother,’ Norah says, ‘we’re just going out.’
She feels a fluttering anticipation. She could soon be engaged in a romance, a hazy notion of chaste kisses and hand-holding.
‘He has a car,’ she adds, as proof of his suitability.
His name is Dave. At twenty-one, he is enormously older than her. He is small, dapper-looking with a little goatee beard and moustache and he is wearing a suit and tie, which he straightens as he sits into his squat, low-slung Mini, catching his reflection in the wing mirror. Norah feels scruffy and more knowing than she is. She regrets not having worn a dress.
‘Why don’t we go for a drive first?’ he says as she gets in beside him.
It is the dirtiest car she has ever been in. Motor magazines with lurid covers, maps and pieces of paper wash up on the floor. In the dish-like dashboard a bruised apple sits, some leaking pens, a half-eaten sandwich, a blackened cloth, a silvery spanner. There is an oily smell and something else, something rancid like milk gone off. But he seems hardly to notice so she stifles her disgust.
‘Nice car,’ she says.
‘Oh, it’s just a runaround.’
She’s just a runaround, Norah corrects him in her head.
‘I don’t know much about cars,’ she says and immediately regrets it. She has successfully stubbed out the conversation. He drives rakishly, too fast she thinks, but she is glad that he is taking charge. She concentrates on the exterior, the neon-lit suburbs giving way to overgrown country lanes.
‘I know just the spot,’ he says, ‘you can see the whole city spread out, the lights and the harbour. A lovers’ lane,’ he adds, looking at her and smiling slyly.
The word lovers frightens her.
They are climbing now into the foothills that overlook the city. Through the gaps in the hedges she can see the intricate embroidery of lights as if sewn on to the inky sky. He takes a sudden left turn and drives in an extravagant arc on to a gravelled open space. They come to a piercing halt at a metal barrier and he switches the engine off. The keyring jangles nervously in the ignition. They sit for several minutes in the busy darkness. She is about to admire the view when he shifts, reaching his arm across and dragging her towards him.
‘Come here,’ he says.
He crushes his bristly mouth on hers while he fumbles with his fly.
‘Here,’ he commands, ‘take this.’
He forces her free hand down on his penis, wrapping her fingers expertly round it and thrusting with his own hand. He has stopped kissing her now and she gazes at the moon face of the speedometer while he works away fiercely. The spanner on the dash glints dully. Within minutes he has come. Her fingers are a mess of clammy ooze.
‘I’ve been waiting for that all week,’ he says, sighing luxuriantly.
He gazes ahead as if the twinkling panorama was what he’d been missing. Her hand still rests on his thigh. She is afraid to move it. He rummages in his pocket and produces a handkerchief which he uses to wipe himself off, then hands it to her. She finds herself saying thank you. He zips up and then puts the car into reverse and with a great screech of wheels he spins it around and roars back out on to the road again.
He tries small talk on the way back. How many in her family, what she’s going to do next, his job at the bike shop. What he really wants to be is a car mechanic and run a garage of his own.
‘What about a drink?’ he asks.
Norah knows she cannot face that, not after this brute business between them.
‘No,’ she says, ‘I think you should drop me home. My mother will worry.’
Shamefully, she is back in Prosperity Drive by nine o’clock. As she gets out of the car she grabs the spanner from its nest of litter on the dashboard.
‘Going to put a spanner in the works?’ he jokes.
She walks around to his side of the car. He rolls down the window – is he expecting a kiss? – and sticks his head out companionably then withdraws it quickly as Norah lifts the spanner and smashes the wing mirror in one deft swipe.
‘Hey!’ he says.
His reflection is splintered into a malevolent spider’s web.
‘Cars,’ she yells at him. ‘Cars are she!’
The YMCA was like coming home, in a weird unwanted way. Well, he was a Catholic, and a man, and if you counted thirty-eight as young (habitual covering-up can make your life seem long) then he qualified on all counts. They started him small with Polliwogs (Get your child acquainted with the pool, introduce them to front paddlestroke and wetball ). He couldn’t believe his luck. Angels with water wings. Little legs cycling chubbily in the blue, fat digits clutching his shoulders. All glorious trust for him – Gabe Vance. Mister Vance to the kiddies. The Y insists on it, Yelena Markova had told him with a Brighton Beach twang. Miss this, Miss that, she sneered. He was disappointed she hadn’t a trace of the treacly Slavic accent her name suggested. She was a fiercely angular woman – no, girl, he would have said – with a cruel mouth and bleached tresses. How did she maintain them, he wondered; as a veteran he knew what a lethal cocktail pool chlorine and hair colour was. Back home he used to teach Seniors’ Sessions. The old birds’ hair turned copper and ochre and all class of strange lurid hues because of the chemical mix. He recalls with a shiver their lumpy bodies squeezed into Lycra, bulging arms, gnarled hands threaded with blue-rinse veins. Bunions shiny as tubers and knees flapping like elephants’ ears. He remembers mostly the banality of decay.
He’d opted for the elderly at a time when he was still struggling with his … predilections. When he still believed; believed in a cure, that is. When he had thought that staying out of the way of temptation could save him and avoidance might banish his worst cravings. But the withdrawal symptoms had been agony; not being in contact with children every day had made him distraught and reckless. That time at the Municipal Baths – long after he’d left the seminary – he’d almost been ruined sneaking into the female changing rooms. A convent school had rented the pool out. He’d hidden in an empty cubicle dragging a CLEANING IN PROGRESS sign across its mouth and pulled the curtains to. His feet had given him away. His size tens under the jellyfish hem of the curtain. A fat girl, plump and juicy, her towel wrapped like a tube around her, sneaked up on him and poked her head slyly through the crack in the curtains he was using to peer out. Fish eyes met. She let out a piercing shriek and dropped the towel, revealing her ample puppy-fat thighs, her chillingly bare pubes. It was worth it, well, almost.
‘There’s a man in there,’ she yelled, pointing a finger while he shrank into a corner of his dank, wet little room. ‘Miss Malone, there’s a …’
There was a kerfuffle, the flurry of little girls’ wet feet slapping on tile – he was surrounded by babble, a tableau of pink, offended-looking damp flesh and gaping chatter. He squared his shoulders, straightened his tracksuit bottoms and yanked the curtains from their moorings with a decisive whiplash. The metal rings screamed as if they’d been molested; a whistle blew. Miss Malone strode in – a ramrod-straight greyhound of a woman with steely hair. Spare and lean.
‘What, sir, are you doing in here?’
The Sir threw him off. Last time he’d heard Sir was at school – Yes Sir, No Sir, three bags full Sir. Mister Vance, Sir – rich with polite irony and armed with a cane – bend over.
‘Maintenance,’ he said. ‘Curtains.’ He gestured emptily to the still shivering rings and added Ma’am to match her Sir.
‘Can’t you see there are children here?’ she demanded, placing a protective manacle on the shoulder of the one who’d caught him out. Oh yes, he wanted to say.
‘Very sorry, Ma’am,’ he answered, backing away, stumbling into the foot-bath, fumes of disinfectant reaching his nostrils while he fumbled blindly behind him for the door to the pool. The girls tittered. How quickly he had turned from bogeyman to figure of fun.
‘I’ve a good mind, young man …’ Miss Malone began and he thought, I must stop her.
‘The manager told me the pool was free. I’m very sorry, Ma’am. Please don’t tell the manager or else I’ll lose …’
‘Very well,’ she interrupted. He knew she was the type who could not bear abjection. ‘On your way.’
That was when he knew that abstinence was not the answer.
All behind him now. New life, new country, fresh start. Here at the Y on 21st Street, Yelena Markova by his side and a classful of bobbing Guppies in the pool. Leave the flotation devices behind! Learn to synchronise basic strokes! The Y likes to exhort, some old evangelism still at work, even with seven-year-olds. About the age he was when he got his first inkling. You’re kidding, his American friends say, the ones he trusts enough to tell. He’s wary, obviously. You knew at seven? It is the age of reason, he starts, then starts again. Well, I was being groomed. That’s the way it was, even in the Sixties. His Uncle Pascal was a missionary priest in Africa. He appeared first (completely without warning, his mother muttered, and no cake in the house) on a summer’s evening, a beautiful balmy St John’s Eve, when the days only barely surrender to darkness.
‘It’s like Finland here,’ Uncle Pascal had said, as if he were a tourist in his own place. ‘Land of the midnight sun.’
He was very geographical in his references. As if his head were a globe, Gabriel’s mother said afterwards, noting his receding hairline, resentful of his name-dropping. ‘Finland, how are you!’
Uncle Pascal was unlike any priest Gabriel had come across before. He was burly and tanned with freckled hairy forearms, an open-necked shirt you might play golf in, and no sign of a dog collar. And he had a dream, a pipe dream.
‘We’re thousands of miles from water where I am.’ A village in the Sudan. ‘And I was thinking, what we need is pipes, man. If we could import the piping and lay it down, then we could bring the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak.’
He paced, gesturing with one hand, whiskey tumbler in the other. To Gabriel’s ears it sounded like business, not religion. Pascal’s plan was to beg sufficient lengths of pipe from factories in Ireland and export them to his desiccated African mission.
‘That’s a hell of a lot of piping,’ Gabriel’s father said.
‘Granted,’ Uncle Pascal conceded, ‘but it’s a damn sight easier than trying to irrigate with natural resources. My God, man, there hasn’t been rainfall there in three years!’
As if to mock him, the eaves dripped. Outside was all green blur and drench; balmy St John’s Eve giving way to the deluge.
‘What do you think, Gabriel?’
Gabriel, agog at this paunchy man, his red face like impossible plumage, said nothing.
‘I don’t suppose,’ Pascal said to his father but flashing a beady eye on Gabriel, ‘that this fella has a vocation?’
And that’s how it started. Afterwards, Gabriel was never sure. Was it for the piping, or for him, Uncle Pascal had come?
Minnows are his favourites. Darting in quick spurts across the pool. Flashes of brilliance, nipples erect – theirs and his. Can breathe on side and swim back crawl. Advanced beginners, in other words, though the Y is intent on this euphemistic ranking system. But why fish? Why cold-blooded invertebrates when these creatures are all warm flesh and soft surfaces and mouths like damp rosebuds? They’re leggier now, their feet no longer plump cushions of flesh. But when he holds them in the water or catches them under the armpits, the wet slap of their suits excites him. Luckily, the water covers it; covers a multitude.
Swimming made him feel clean. All that purging, the showers before and after, the baptismal plunging in, the transubstantiation of a new element. It saved him from bullying at school. He was small and wiry, a late bloomer, and he’d had some success. Relay medals at schoolboy meets, mostly. He was never going to be a champion. His stroke was workmanlike, not stylish. He had no acceleration. Anyway, he didn’t like the competition – all that thrashing about, the turbulence, swallowing great green mouthfuls of chlorinated water. No, he preferred an empty pool, watery sun-scribble on the ceiling, an empty lane ahead. That was his primal instinct – to be wet and alone.
Fish can dive from a kneeling position. His heart sinks each time the water parts to receive, unaided, the sleek spears of their beautiful bodies. It means he can no longer touch the trembling small of their backs or count the knobs of their spines arched like an eternal question mark.
‘Ready?’
He delights when, at the last moment, flustered, they lift their heads or lose their concentration and are consumed in the torrid explosion of a belly flop. Failure endears. Success means they move on.
As he has. He’s not Gay, or Gabriel or the priest in the family any more, but Gabe, standard dependable bloke. Regular guy. He can’t opt for total denial, of course. There’s the accent, though there are only a few words left now that have remained uncontaminated. The flat A in bath, car, and father. If anyone asks him does he miss home, he says no immediately without hesitation. Because what is home now? Not the jagged outlines of a small island on a map, or the fusty seminary with the nineteenth-century beams still reputed to be infected with TB. Not even the house he grew up in, now no longer in the family. When he thinks of Prosperity Drive, it’s the hollowed-out scoop of dried earth under the swing in the back garden he remembers. Cracks in the dried mud like fault lines, parched as Uncle Pascal’s desert, carved out by the foot-dragging of years. This was the place you had to return to when the flying was done. A whole new generation must have been launched from that old green chipped frame by now. Girls, he hopes. And when he’s asked about Ireland, what comes to mind is the sheep field, though he doesn’t talk of what happened there.
The sheep field was an overgrown plot at the end of Prosperity Drive, officially out of bounds. Why it was so called Gabriel didn’t know; he’d never seen any sheep there. It was a piece of scrub, high with reeds and scutch grass and middens of dumped clay and builders’ rubble sprouting with loosestrife and valerian and sometimes poppies. The thrill of the place was that you could get lost in it. He was lost there that summer’s day lying on his stomach in a scratchy hollow resting on his elbows and gazing up at the sky muddled with cloud when he heard a rustle behind him. Alarmed, he rolled over and stared up at a figure turned to silhouette because it stood between him and the sun. When his eyes adjusted he saw it was a woman, a woman he vaguely knew. People called her Aggie. She was his mother’s age and known to be odd. Harmless, they said, simple. Most of the time she sat in the window of an abandoned shop in the village on a kitchen chair staring out at the passers-by, as if she was the last item of stock as yet unsold. (By the time he left school the shop had become a Chinese takeaway and who knew what became of Aggie?) Her hair, the colour of faded heather and cropped like a man’s, stood on end, her pale eyes popped, there were gaps between her teeth and her face was dirty. Boys he knew said Aggie wore no knickers.
Gabriel had never seen her outside and that was what gave him the biggest fright. To see her here, standing over him, with her soiled gabardine coat and her bare legs stuck into a pair of unlaced shoes.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked. She had a flat, phlegmy voice. That was a surprise – one of the other rumours about Aggie was that she was a deaf mute. The fact that she could speak made him afraid.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Were you swimming?’ she asked, though it wasn’t like a question. There was no rise and fall to her voice, no hint of animation.
‘But there’s no water,’ he said. It was true what they said of her, she was a sandwich short of a picnic.
‘There doesn’t have to be water,’ Aggie said. ‘Turn over and I’ll show you.’
He hesitated.
‘Go on,’ she said. He rolled back on to his stomach and she lay on top of him. He felt winded by the weight of her and smothered by her rancid stink. That was why he didn’t cry out. But he wasn’t sure he would have, even if he could. This was the very reason children were warned not to go into the sheep field. Strangers might nab you. But no one mentioned women. Aggie’s arms circled in arcs at the corner of his vision as if she were doing the front crawl. He turned his head away.
‘That’s right,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘breathe to the side.’
Her fingernails grazed the spears of dry grass flattened beneath them. He saw how filthy they were. He could feel the nylon stuff of whatever she was wearing underneath her coat against the back of his legs and something else – soft, damp, tufty – pressed against his buttocks. She swam a full length, after which she was exhausted. Gabriel found he had bitten his lip and associated the blood with whatever had been going on. For several minutes they lay there, so still that Gabriel wondered if she were dead. But then she stood up and fixed herself; he could hear her. He was about to raise his head and look behind him but she said no, commandingly.
‘Remember,’ she said, ‘Lot’s wife.’
So he lay there, hectic and flushed, with a damp patch on the front of his shorts, until the sun went down and he was cramped and hungry.
‘What have you been doing?’ his mother demanded crossly, pointing to the dried blood on his lip.
But he couldn’t say, except that it had been pleasurable, Aggie’s rank body up against him, pressing down on him and producing a sensation he knew only as perilous ecstasy. It never went any further with Aggie, though he returned every day that summer, and so did she.
Flying Fish (50 yards front and back crawl, breast and dolphin kick) can evade him; they can swim away. Anyway, they’re already beginning to lose their allure. Buds of breasts, down on their upper lips – and below – and an idea of themselves not tied up with trying to please him. He can still mentor them pool-side, though.
‘Stretch your arms, fingers steepled, bend at the waist – like so, here.’
He places a hand gently on their shivering rumps or on their rubbery caps – their heads sheathed in condoms – and sometimes, with the merest tip, he can help launch them into mid-air, into that extravagant distance between bank and water.