Prosperity Drive (20 page)

‘Plovers nesting. Please do not disturb the birds.'

It was while they were considering this that they were attacked. The birds seemed to come from nowhere. Flocks of
them, clamouring and hostile, swooping low and aiming straight for their faces. Ted could hear their beaks clacking rustily at his ears as they squawked and screeched and constantly regrouped. This was no murmuration of starlings like you might see at home, where the sky would be sooted with waltzing swathes of birds, scattering and re-forming in an aerial show. No, these birds were killer squadrons. The racket was terrible, louder even than the howling gale.

‘Duck,' he roared at Sandy as the plovers drilled towards them.

‘Mother birds,' Sandy shouted back. Instead of keeping low, she stood and waved her arms about. ‘Shush there, now, we're not going to touch your babies,' she roared at them. ‘We wouldn't harm a hair on their little heads, would we, Ted?'

Feathers, he wanted to say, they have feathers on their heads; he didn't want to be implicated in this coochy-coo baby talk. Sandy smooched up her lips and made clucking sounds herself.

‘Oh, mommies …' she went on, pursing her lips and pouting like a child, ‘there, there, don't fret' as the demented birds nose-dived about her, pecking at the tails of her hair whipped into a frenzy by the wind. Even as she shielded her face, she continued her high-octane crooning. The tendernesses screamed at such decibels made Ted want to turn on her, just as the birds were doing. In the midst of the screeching flurry, he could hear only how loud and insistent Sandy's love would become. He threw his coat over her (her hair in a rage around her head seemed to particularly aggravate the birds) and steered her jaggedly back towards the car.

‘Jesus,' he said once they were safely inside. ‘That was like something out of Hitchcock.'

But far from being upset, Sandy seemed exhilarated by the encounter, her face speckled with sea spray, her hair damply aflame.

‘That was motherhood,' she said. ‘Fierce motherhood.'

‘Time for a drink,' he said and they repaired to the Blarney Stone.

Nothing personal, he told Sandy when they broke up. It was straight after they'd graduated. She was going back to Cleveland, he to a summer on the buildings in New York. Why, she kept on asking him, tenderly but persistently. How could he say it? It was the way you talked to those effing birds.

When he had arrived in Faithful, Ted had been invited to several faculty dinners. He was always on his best behaviour. He just didn't feel he could let his hair down among people who watered their wine or drank Dr Pepper. Delia Myerson, the chair of the department, was a middle-aged medievalist who threw vegetarian dinners for her staff with missionary zeal. She was new to the job.

‘You'd imagine given her speciality she should be serving huge sides of ham and great big drumsticks,' Ted said to Miles Sandoval, one of the faculty poets. They were out on Delia's deck where the smokers were banished.

‘She's desperate to be liked,' said Miles. ‘Tries too hard.'

Miles steered Ted to the edge of the decking.

‘You've got to find a circle here,' he said confidentially. ‘Something outside the university, preferably. Else you'll be stuck with this bunch all the time.' They both surveyed the scene – the littered remains of a dinner party, a heated discussion of the masculinism of Ernest Hemingway.

‘Like what?'

‘Well, there's the Church,' Miles started.

‘I don't think so – can't see a lapsed Catholic making it as a born-again Baptist, can you?'

‘There's always hunting …'

Ted didn't want to admit that he'd never seen a gun, let alone picked one up to shoot small furry animals.

‘Or the gentlemen's clubs,' Miles went on, using the euphemism Faithful employed for its strip joints.

‘I'm not that sad, Miles, thanks.'

‘What about a writing group? Great way of getting chicks.' Thrice-married Miles inhaled his considerable paunch and ran a large paw through his luxuriant mane of bottle-black hair.

‘God, no. Sounds like a busman's holiday.'

‘Really, Ted, they're so grateful to have a guy in these groups they'll offer all sorts of favours. I love those serious artistic types. So intense.'

Oily fucker, Ted thought.

‘Two workshops and an Irish lit. class a week is intense enough for me, thanks.'

‘Or find some of your compatriots. There's an Irish dame …' he paused, frowning. ‘Say,' he roared, sliding back the glass doors that led into the dining room. ‘What's the name of that Irish gal who works for Hillbilly Realty?'

My God, Ted thought, is this for real? Property and irony lying down together.

‘Hetty, you mean,' Delia called back. ‘Hetty Gardner.'

Delia rose from the table and came out on to the deck.

‘Yes,' she agreed. ‘You Irish should stick together.'

Delia gave him Hetty's card at the end of the evening. Realtor, it read, with the Hillbilly logo. He imagined Delia thinking with an efficient and good-natured sigh of relief – well, that's Ted Gavin sorted. But he knew the last thing he would do was to ring Hetty Gardner. Moving in these circles he already felt like an impostor. He could scarcely believe himself that only five years ago he was a hod carrier, working away on scraps of short stories. The same stories that had been published by a university press with a tiny print run. But this Hetty Gardner wouldn't necessarily be impressed by the slim volume entitled
Diaspora
, sparsely and grudgingly reviewed (‘A tough new voice from the land of the Celtic mists,' said one. ‘But where are the women?' another complained.) He told himself he might look her up when he had the novel finished. He was used to putting things off; wasn't his whole life in hock to this effing book? How else to
explain his monk-like existence in Faithful, the long solitary hours spent in his dreary flat, poring over the derelict manuscript when he could have been out chasing women? Time enough for that, he kept on telling himself, when the book was done. If he felt momentarily tempted to contact Hetty Gardner, he soon argued himself out of it. She probably wouldn't be his type; her name alone made him think she was Anglo and a Prod. Anyway, she was probably here to get away from tribal associations. What other reason would there be for winding up in Faithful, Arkansas?

His was shame. The baby of the family, sent to college while his sisters Brenda and Joan worked in a hairdressing salon to supplement his fees. Ted, who had gone to the US on a J–1 visa in the final year of his arts degree and had never gone home.

‘Is this what we educated you for?' his mother wrote. It was the strangest sensation receiving a letter from his mother – the first time ever. ‘Your sisters scrubbing their fingers to the bone, so that you could hightail off to America? (Amerikay, he could hear her say it, like in some poor-mouth emigrant song.) To work on the buildings?'

He couldn't tell her that the reason he wouldn't go home was her. That he couldn't face the claustrophobic disappointment that was their two-up, two-down house in Main Street, Mellick. Couldn't face another day with his mother sitting in the good room with the blinds drinking whiskey miniatures from a teacup and melting into grandiose tears. Couldn't bear his sisters, all hair lacquer and nail polish, dancing attendance on her, trying to make up for the shortcomings of the man of the house. And latterly that meant Ted, not his unlamented father.

His poor da was straight from Irish father central casting. A pigeon fancier, the only time he was at peace with the world was when he was whispering to his cooing birds locked in
barracks in the back yard. Otherwise, he was an emotional caveman. He was given to volcanic rages in which he would slice and joust with anything at close quarters. Dinners were upended if the portions weren't large enough; furniture broken and knick-knacks smashed if he were thwarted. What saved his father from caricature was that he didn't drink – he wore a pioneer pin – but that made his moods even more unpredictable. Nowadays some underlying mental condition would probably be diagnosed – bipolar disorder, schizophrenia – but what difference did it make having a name for it? His father had made their lives a misery. But at least he'd had the grace to exit early, keeling over in the midst of one of his choleric outbursts when Ted was twelve. For Ted's mother, though, that was his father's greatest crime. That he'd had the cheek to die, leaving her with three dependent children. His sisters were promptly apprenticed out, while his mother's life became a pooled and rancid stillness. The only thing that animated her was her punishing ambition for Ted.

‘You're going to be a doctor,' she would say, ‘or an engineer … that'll show him.' As if Ted's whole purpose in life was to spite the memory of his father.

It was his mother who took to drinking. Messily. Alcohol made her cravenly sentimental and affectionate; queasily so. She'd take Ted's hand and caress it, fingering the lines of his palm like a foolish astrologer.

‘Oh Ted, Ted,' she would say, ‘what would I do without you?'

Sometimes he wondered whom she was seeing when she planted a sloppy kiss on his fourteen-year-old lips.

‘I never touched a drop until I was thirty,' his mother used to say, ‘it was your father drove me to it.'

Ted knew what was coming next.

‘Do you know that when I got married to your father, my boss offered us a case of whiskey for the reception and I was disappointed.' His mother had been a barmaid in The
Thirsty Scholar. ‘I had no value for it. I'd have preferred a canteen of cutlery.'

This was what Ted wanted to retrieve in his novel, the girl his mother had been, the one who would have chosen a case of knives.

Ted thought of himself as a social drinker; well, he liked to have other people to drink with. Days would go by and he wouldn't even think of alcohol, but once he stepped into Skipper's on a Thursday evening it was the beginning of a roll that would finish up as a dull ache and a thick head on Monday morning. (Luckily, he didn't teach on Mondays.) He didn't have blackouts, he didn't have bruises and scrapes he wasn't quite sure how he'd acquired, he'd never arrived at school drunk. He cleaned up well, and usually he had prepared his classes. Usually.

One Tuesday in February he was saddled with a giant hangover and a workshop devoted – as he'd decreed the week previously – to the study of character. Snow had started to fall that morning in lazy swirls; by the time workshop was over it would be slick underfoot. Bypassing the present was a favourite trick of his when he wasn't in the mood for teaching. He turned to face the students sitting in boardroom formation waiting for him to start. Paula was on his mind. She hadn't shown up at Skipper's on Thursday; she'd obviously had a better offer. He had camped out at the bar for the rest of the night expecting her to arrive at any moment and feeling both anxious and peeved that she had left him in the lurch. He brooded on her absence over the weekend, drinking steadily as he did. It was still rankling with him as he stood before his workshop. Three hours of unprepared class time yawned ahead of him. He improvised.

‘Take a woman,' he began.

Someone snickered.

‘Early forties, victim of a violent marriage, who finally leaves her husband and then has her kids taken away from her because she drinks too much. A woman who lives in the vain hope she can get them back …'

Was it vain? He felt the first stab of misgiving.

‘Delusional, in other words.' That was Valerie Kleber. A professed Christian ( her email tag was JCdiedforme), she was a severe beauty, with long black glossy hair, serious glasses and the kind of mouth which was pert now, and later, Ted suspected, would grow thin and judgemental. Her father was some class of a minister.

‘Let's not reach for labels, Valerie,' he said, riled at her diagnostic certainties. ‘This is a study of character, not a case history.'

There was a sharp rustling of papers and searching for pens.

‘What does she do?' Valerie asked.

‘Does it matter?' He was playing for time. Already, he felt seedlings of betrayal sprouting.

‘What's her name?' Taylor Payne demanded.

‘Let's call her Paula,' he said. How pathetic was he that he couldn't even think up an alias for her? ‘She works in a store, on the register.'

‘This sounds like a total cliché.' That was Taylor again shaking his shoulder-length blond locks, emanating a glassy boredom. A poet by aspiration, forced to dirty his hands with fiction. When he wrote in class a smirk played on his features as if he were contemptuously amused by his own trifles.

‘Some clichés are true,' Ted said.

‘You mean this is a real person?' Sonia Matheson was either incredulous or sceptical; Ted couldn't work out the difference. He thought of her as large, sweet-natured and dim, but sometimes there was a gleam in her fat eye that could have been sarcasm.

‘What I want you to do is to get inside the biography, so to speak. Find something authentic in the seemingly banal. See beyond the cliché.'

‘But is she real?' Sonia persisted.

‘Let's go,' Ted directed, anxious for the soothing silence that is fifteen students scribbling furiously, one eye on the clock, and would be a blessed balm for his hangover. The next best thing to the hair of the dog. But the class sat there, pens poised, waiting for something else, something more from him. At the corner of his eye, snow danced.

‘Is she?' Sonia asked again.

‘Okay,' he relented. ‘She's a character in my novel.'

Jesus!
Ted had a few golden rules, one of which was never to be confessional with his students.
Talk about their work, never your own
. So why had he just blurted that out? Because he thought it would divert attention from the truth: that he was using his best friend as writing fodder. It was Paula's biography that had been creeping into his novel, or, as he had taken to calling it euphemistically, his work-in-progress. He'd spent the last couple of months not writing but taking notes. Little nuggets Paula had given him – the way Larry's voice would go all soft before he struck her, how for months she had spied on him emerging naked from the shower and felt the scalding burn of desire, how once she'd sucked him off with the baby watching. Ted listened avidly. Paula's experiences were so far removed from his mother's that they would give his book the burning frisson of fiction. And that was okay, he told himself. Divorced from their origins, even the most intimate details could be used, once you disguised them enough.