Prosperity Drive (18 page)

‘Hi, I'm Henrietta Gardner, but my friends call me Hetty.'

Julia was sitting on the wall of the front garden swinging her legs and chewing on a toffee when the little American girl approached. Up close, she was round and very pleased with herself, despite the silly name that sounded like a character in a prissy children's book. Julia, in mid-chew, felt in the presence of a commanding adult.

‘Wanna come and play?' Hetty persisted.

Julia shrugged and slid down from the wall; she found such directness unnerving but compelling. She followed Hetty, several paces behind.

‘Mawm!' Hetty yelled when they entered the Vances' house by the back door.

The house remained much as the Vances had left it. The red-and-white kitchen cabinets with the corrugated glass, the faded striped wallpaper scattered with illustrations of kettles and bread bins and tea canisters, the same mud-coloured lino. The kitchen table was new – glaring yellow Formica on tubular legs with matching chairs. Hetty went directly to the fridge when there was no response from her mother and lifted out a bottle of orange squash. This added to her precocious air of command. In the bluish glare of the open door, Julia caught a glimpse of cities. Cartons and bottles, tubs teetering on the shelf edges, an impression of largesse.

Hetty climbed on a stool and fetched down two plastic beakers, setting them on the counter and filling them noisily. She popped a straw into both. Solemnly, she handed Julia one.

‘Candy?' Hetty asked.

‘No, Julia,' Julia replied, ‘my name is Julia.'

‘I mean would you like a candy, Julia?' Hetty repeated very slowly making Julia feel utterly stupid. She burrowed into one of the kitchen cupboards and fished out a tin, opening it with a flourish to reveal a stash of chocolate bars. Julia snaffled one quickly, fully expecting the arrival of an ogre mother who would insist on her putting it back. She slurped noisily on the straw, thinking how exotic this was. The only time she'd used one was in Cafolla's when they'd gone there for ice-cream sundaes on the twins' Confirmation day; she didn't think of them as domestic accoutrements.

Hetty's mother appeared then.

‘Who's this little citizen?' she asked – not what are you doing eating me out of house and home?

She was a slight woman, her heavy blond hair tied back in a bouncing ponytail, a leafy freckling on her cheeks; she wore a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her features were sharp; her candour interrogative.

‘Mom, this is my new friend.'

Julia felt thoroughly appropriated by this declaration. Hetty hadn't gone through the ritual Julia was used to, in which you slunk into a loose kind of alliance and if you didn't fall out you supposed it was a friendship. But it wasn't an altogether unpleasant sensation to be taken in hand like this.

‘Name, rank and serial number?' Mrs Gardner asked.

Julia looked to Hetty for translation.

‘Don't mind Mom,' Hetty said in an aside. ‘She's a bit kooky.'

‘You're spending a lot of time around there,' her mother would say, as if there was something suspect about her new friendship. ‘Are you hoping some of their Yankiness will rub off on you?'

Yes, Julia wanted to say fiercely, yes.

But no, it was more than that. She wanted both to own the Gardners and be possessed by them. In their company she felt singular, but what she longed for was to be indispensable.

Information was one way. She scavenged for biographical detail. Bob was from Faithful, Arkansas, Jenny from New York, New York. That's the way she said it. So good they named it twice, Hetty would add. Secrets were another. They had met at a monument in Paris, Hetty said, and love blossomed.
Love blossomed
. Julia puzzled over such phrases of Hetty's. She was full of declarations which sounded adult to Julia and too emphatic to be queried.

‘I'm a love child,' Hetty informed her gravely. (Julia could not shift the image of the Gardners delivering Hetty in front of some grand equestrian statue.) ‘What about you?'

Julia had no idea. As far as she was concerned she had sprung from some dark mood of her father's and a blind eye turned by her mother.

Hetty and her parents presented a united front; they were part of her play as if they were enjoying a second childhood. They went to the Stella Cinema together for the double-bill Saturday afternoon matinées; they made their own popcorn and shouted out answers in unison when
Quicksilver
came on the TV.

‘We're making memories,' Hetty said, ‘that's what Mom says.'

Julia was so casually included in their lives that it made her feel, at times, that she was more witness than participant. She would watch all three of them cavorting around the living room in a cushion fight and feel a creeping wariness she could not explain. She could not entirely trust this gaiety. In the midst of the laughter she got the whiff of loss.

‘I don't know why they're such a great hit,' her father would complain mildly. ‘Sure, isn't he on the run?' Her father's theory was that Bob Gardner was a draft dodger. ‘Although, he doesn't
look like a yobbo.' (Yobbos had long hair and wore – ironically enough – army surplus.)

Mr Gardner – no, Bob, she corrected herself, for such Mr Gardner liked to be called even by children – had a sharp haircut and wore a smart suit to work. The shiny kind that Mormons wore. She imagined him going door to door peddling religion although she knew he worked in the airport. But her father's speculations made her anxious and prone to drawing up inventories of impermanence. Well, they were renters, weren't they? They used Bakelite dishes instead of delft as if they were on an extended camping trip. She noticed, too, that instead of loose covers Mrs Gardner – Jenny – used tie-dyed throws on the sofa and chairs. They were like conjuring props as if with one swift movement Jenny could make the furniture disappear. And her father was on a contract, Hetty told her, and could at any time be called home, a phrase Julia had only seen on gravestones. It was this air of contingency that made the Gardners' tenure so imperilled. One day she might knock on
their
door and be greeted by silence. She would peer in through the letterbox and see only a shaft of hazy light falling in an abandoned hallway. These things happened, she knew; she and Hetty watched
The Fugitive
. The soundtrack boomed in her head.

Julia awoke, startled. She pressed her temples to rid herself of the ghostly echoes and realised that the rat-a-tat was at her door. Rumpled, she rose from the bed and opened the door. It was Gloria again. She looked at her watch – half past midnight. Still on Irish time.

‘You ready then?'

Gloria was wearing a crown-shaped party hat. She sipped from a pale green cocktail with a cherry floating on the top.

‘You don't want to miss my Japanese slippers!' she said, gesturing to the glass.

Julia allowed herself to be led into Gloria's room. If Julia's room was merely used, Gloria's was possessed. Every available
space had been filled. There were bookshelves and a display cabinet, a table under the window. In the corner near the bathroom Gloria had set up a breakfast cooker. As well as the Christmas tree there were streamers and balloons and golden paper chains hanging from the light fittings and draped over the picture frames. She raised a jug and poured Julia a large cocktail. She handed her a paper hat. Inasmuch as she had thought about it, Julia had somehow expected that this would be a party but now she realised that she was the only guest. Was this woman trying to pick her up? Or adopt her?

‘Come on, come on, it's Christmas. Don't they celebrate Christmas where you come from?' Gloria chided, sensing her reluctance. She invited Julia to sit and don the papery headgear. Then she went to a corner of the room and dropped a stylus noisily on a record. Frank Sinatra eased his way into the room.

‘The anthem of New York,' Gloria said, mouthing the words.

In response Julia thought: I want to sleep in a city that never wakes.

The Gardners used to listen to music like this and smooch around the sitting room while she and Hetty played upstairs. They would hear giggling and sometimes whoops of laughter followed by strange silences. Hetty would put her finger to her lips. The secretive gesture made Julia feel thrillingly included.

‘They're making a sister for me,' she would say, nudging Julia as they sat at Hetty's white melamine dressing table brushing each other's hair. The trick of the triptych mirror made Julia believe that there was already a third presence in the room. When she got excited, Hetty would often grab her hand or clutch her arm. Her touch made Julia agitated. She would feel a terrible seizing at her throat that could have been tears or fright. She remembered once lying next to Hetty on her bed. Hetty was chattering as usual but instead of listening, Julia found herself contemplating the plump satin pile of her instep and inexplicably wanting to kiss it. It had made her blush all over.

The bed had a canopy of white netting over it and she had stared intently at its tiny honeycomb pattern until the shameful desire passed.

‘This is like a four-poster bed,' she said, trying to change the potent mood.

‘Mosquito net,' Hetty explained, wrinkling her nose. ‘Mom thought there'd be mosquitoes here.'

For the first time Julia considered that Prosperity Drive might be an exotic destination for the Gardners, a far-flung, wild place with who knows what hidden dangers.

How they spent those seemingly endless hours of childhood, Julia couldn't catalogue afterwards, hard as she tried to piece them together. The activities seemed too banal to bear the weight of charged memory: Ludo and cards, the disrobing of dolls. Hetty had three Barbies – air hostess, party girl and nurse – while Julia had only a battered Sindy, a hand-me-down from Rose. The plastic pellet that was her right breast had been chewed by the dog (a bitch, of course) that the Fortunes had briefly owned before it was run down on the avenue by an ambulance on its way to St Jude's. The clothes that Sindy had come with were long vanished, compensated only slightly by a host of rough-looking replicas that Greta had run up on the sewing machine. (Thanks to Greta, the Fortunes' pants and jackets sported pale patches where the pockets had been removed to tart up Sindy's wardrobe.)

Once or twice, Julia was allowed to stay the night. A sleepover, Jenny Gardner called it. Julia would wake in the small hours, the light from the landing creeping in under the lip of the door, the steady rise and fall of Hetty's breath in the bed beside her, the wispy canopy overhead and she would feel, however briefly, a certainty about her place in this world. Emboldened she would reach out and stroke the little dark hairs on Hetty's forearm. But it was a feeling that could only flourish while the household slept.

‘You look done in,' Gloria said after the third Japanese slipper.

‘Jet lag.'

‘You flew in from Ireland today?'

Julia nodded.

‘Say, hon, I don't even know your name,' Gloria said.

Julia took a deep breath. Now was as good a time as any.

‘Henrietta,' she said. ‘Henrietta Gardner. But most people call me Hetty.'

She took a large gulp of Japanese slipper to damp down the wail she could feel rising in her throat. As if Hetty had just died, as if she had just killed her. She stood up, dropping her glass. Gloria rushed to the bathroom and came back with a cloth. She righted Julia's glass and began to mop up the seething stain which was spreading on her pale rug. Julia in her silly paper hat watched and sobbed.

‘Hetty, honey, what is it? What's troubling you?'

Gloria was on her knees gazing up at her. In all these years no one had asked her so directly.

‘My friend,' she started. Gloria's extravagant eyebrows were arched in compassionate query.

‘My friend died.' There, it was said.

Gloria stretched up her hand and grasped Julia's.

‘Why don't you sit back down and tell me all about it, hon.'

On Christmas Eve, fifteen years before, Hetty had cycled to the shops on an errand for her mother. Crackers, Jenny Gardner kept on repeating at the funeral, a box of Christmas crackers. Julia was at home. The Fortunes had one house rule: after nightfall on Christmas Eve was family time. So even before Hetty's death, Christmas had felt to Julia like a day of bereavement, a zone of female disappointment. It was a cold, wet night and Hetty had pedalled down Classon's Hill near the old dye works which every child in the neighbourhood had been told to dismount for. Conditions were bad, greasy underfoot with poor visibility. Hetty must have been travelling at some speed, hurtling down the forbidden hill. A pebble
must have struck the spokes, or maybe she had hit a pothole. She applied the brakes. The cable snapped. She went over the handlebars and hit her head against the stone balustrade of the bridge. Stone dead, they said as if a gravestone had been instantly erected. Stone dead.

Julia came to a full stop. How could she explain that in her adult life she had met no one who could match the captivating passion – wasn't that what it was, passion? – that a dead twelve-year-old playmate had inspired. Not even Eric; especially not Eric. If it had just been Hetty, she might have recovered. Hetty at least was safe in her memory, a constant companion, the wise child who would never enter the treacherous gangland of adolescence or know the guile and wrangles of adulthood. She remained embalmed for Julia, like a child martyr of the Church. No, it was the loss of Jenny Gardner that had really stung. Jenny had simply cut her out. She couldn't bear to see Julia. She would cross the street if she saw her coming. Even at the funeral she refused to make eye contact; it made Julia feel invisible, as if
she
were the one who had died. Weren't mothers supposed to cleave to the companions of their dead children, treat them as substitutes, invest them with the souls of their lost angels? Not Jenny Gardner. Julia was like an insult to her. A smack in the face. She was as antagonistic as if Julia had pushed Hetty over the parapet. Or as if she had intuited, somehow, Julia's first spiteful thoughts that summer's day she saw Hetty on the swing.