Prosperity Drive (33 page)

When the doctor made his pronouncement, Edel drew her breath in sharply then sighed as if someone had taken a burden from her. The consultant, dressed in a white coat like a posh grocer, said the word.

‘How long?' Victor asked. Isn't that what you're supposed to ask?

The consultant pulled a face like a boy found out in a lie. Victor doesn't even remember what he said; he only knows it sounded like a job estimate – in single figures.

The day before yesterday he was on shift; now he's ordered to be idle. Because of what the doctor knows. He's lying on
the couch in the back room because it's darker in here and light disturbs him. He's always worked nights so he's got used to being sunk in a kind of twilight. Now he's been thrust into the daylight and it seems too bright, too busy for him. It's two in the afternoon and he can hear the girls scampering in and out of the house; Edel has the front door open to save her having to let them in all the time. They're involved in organising some kind of a bazaar – at least Norah is, and Trish is doing her bidding. Norah's been back and forth several times with a swag-bag of goodies she's begged from the neighbours. Tomorrow they're going to set up stalls on the avenue and sell the donations for a good cause.

‘For the dying children of Biafra,' Norah says when he asks. She seems to stress the word dying. Or is that just him?

The children don't know, of course. Not yet. How could he and Edel tell them when he cannot believe it himself? He can't believe that this blustery day of early summer, with a little hint of rain on the wind, is his last. He's alive still, of course, but every day is his last now. He can't believe that this is how it's going to end – so soon, so bloody unfinished. He is panicky and calm in equal measure. In the calm moments he lapses into a post-mortem view of himself and his life – like what went wrong with him and Edel. He can admit now that things between them have not been right for years. He thinks it was Patrick – the baby son they lost between Norah and Trish. He'd been dead for some time in the womb, they told Edel, but she hadn't noticed. That's when things started to sour, Victor believes. Edel seemed to think that all he'd ever wanted was a son and heir, and that she had failed to deliver. She pre-empted his disappointment by presuming he already blamed her. To tell the truth, he hadn't cared that much then about his name carrying on. There was time, after all. Now there isn't and he's furious.

When they came out of the consultant's office, he even thought of saying to Edel why don't we climb into the back
of the car and do it there and then, like I'm a kerb crawler and you're on the game. But he didn't. Edel would have been repulsed. As if the only thing the news had made him feel was that he wanted to give her one. When that's not it at all. Being in the waiting room has made him greedy. Greedy to have and to hold. He wants to grab hold of the girls, Norah in particular. He doesn't know why. He shouldn't have favourites but damn it, man, he's dying, and she's his firstborn and it's Norah he wants. To touch her and hang on to her for dear life.

‘Norah,' he calls, weakly. ‘Norah?'

The stalls were laden with battered treasures. An armless doll with eerily closed eyes, any number of cheap gawdy ornaments, a box of marbles, several Dinky cars, a set of dominoes, stacks of comics and women's magazines, some
Reader's Digest
s, a couple of furry toys, jigsaws, moth-eaten paperbacks … The children crowded together behind the stalls – there must have been a dozen of them – as Audrey fingered their lovelorn merchandise.

When she looked up, there was Mo Dark. He was the only child she knew by name because he lived in the porter's lodge with his mother, Nita, who worked in Accounts Payable. He would stand out, anyway, what with the colour of his skin. The fat girl, who seemed to be the ringleader, prodded Mo forward.

‘He's a Biafran orphan,' she said. ‘He was smuggled out in the last airlift by an Irish missionary.' Despite herself, Audrey smiled. Mo looked sheepish. He knew she knew it was a lie. But a lie in a good cause. And Mo was skinny and dark enough to fit the bill.

‘These are his Airfix models,' the girl went on, ‘he's donated three of them.' The spindly planes sat on the counter – beautiful and intricate.

The blue-rinse doll was the next to catch Audrey's eye.

‘It's had a hair transplant,' the smallest of the girls told her, a dark, sprite-like creature. ‘See!' She parted the doll's middle-aged perm to demonstrate. A bald doll with a new head of hair. Audrey wanted to laugh out loud. Has God done this, she wondered. Has God got a sense of humour?

‘Lemonade?' another girl demanded, perilously holding up a large jug filled to the brim. ‘Only thruppence!'

‘Hetty's mother made it,' the ringleader informed her. Hetty poured it gingerly into a paper cup. Audrey grimaced as she swallowed; it was eye-wateringly bitter.

‘Fairy cake?' Hetty urged.

‘Julia baked them,' the ringleader said, pointing at a tall girl with a grey gaze and a brown fringe that kept catching in her eyelids.

‘Or these glossy magazines?' prompted a gangly boy, holding up copies of
Vogue.

‘Woo-hoo!' another boy jeered. ‘Barry likes ladies' magazines!!!' He had the knotty look of a scrapper but then he broke into a terrifying wheeze, smothered by a deep draw on an inhaler.

Surrounded, Audrey scoured her uniform pockets for small change. Soon, she would have to go back, explain herself. She'd probably be fired; a dereliction of her duty of care. If you can't deal with grief, you're in the wrong job, she could hear Matron say. What about the parents? How do you think they feel? Audrey peeled back the paper casing around the fairy cake and bit into the sawdusty taste of desiccated coconut.

Irene Devoy was doing the ironing on a midsummer's Friday afternoon in an empty house. Rory and Owen in Irish college for a glorious three weeks; Fergal over at his Nana's, Liam at work. Six months pregnant, she found the silence of the house oppressive with the children away and had to have the transistor radio on, even if it was turned down low, so as not to
feel completely alone. When the boys were about, there was no respite; they brought the flurry of the street with them. They were always grappling with one another, pushing and wrestling and no matter how many times Irene sent them back upstairs to come down properly, they thumped about the house as if they were intent on bringing the very walls down. But without them, it seemed too solid, too enclosing, and seethed with absence.

When the doorbell rang – a set of chimes that rang once when the bell was pushed and sounded a lower note with a disappointed cadence when the finger of the caller was lifted off – Irene knew by the length of the exhale that it was a child. One of the neighbourhood kids looking for the boys, she supposed. When she answered she found Norah Elworthy on the threshold with her younger sister Trish in tow.

‘Rory and Owen are not here, girls,' she said brightly. A bright tone could be deflective, especially with children, and often worked to dispel her own gloom.

Irene always had difficulty placing Norah in terms of age – was she older or younger than her Rory? She could never remember. But she knew Trish was nearly six. She was born the same day as Fergal, she and Edel Elworthy like twin barges on the street, eyeing each other's bumps competitively. Norah was uncertainly plump, hair tied wispily in two limp plaits with a severe middle parting. Despite Edel's best efforts, Irene noticed that she always looks slightly dishevelled as if keeping her hair pert and her clothing straight was all too much for the girl. Trish, on the other hand, was scampish-looking, much darker and prettier than her sister. Her hair was cropped short – not the way Irene would do it if she had a girl, too tomboyish – but her clothes, a navy pinny over a white T-shirt, were just so. Hard to believe those two came out of the same house.

‘We're looking for donations,' Norah said, ‘for the starving children of Biafra.'

Irene had seen the photographs. The flyblown faces, the distended stomachs, ribcages like bared teeth.

‘Money?' Irene asked, sighing. They were plagued during the summer by children with their hands out – bob-a-job, selling lines for charity.

‘No, we don't want money,' Norah said, ‘we want things. We're having a sale. A bring and buy sale. You bring something and then you buy something else.'

The girl might find it hard to keep her hair and clothes straight but Norah could be a haughty miss. Still, it was a good cause.

‘I might have some cast-offs from the boys. In the garage. Follow me.'

The Elworthy girls trailed after her as she heaved the up-and-over garage door. She rummaged first in the shelves on the dim back wall of the garage. More Liam's domain. Nothing much there – some neglected-looking tools (Liam was not what you would call a handyman), the blade of a hacksaw, some fishing line on a spool. On the floor there were a number of cardboard boxes filled with miscellaneous items, old toys, things that no longer worked. The first items of her own she came across were a stack of her magazines.
Women's Weekly
,
Women's Own
,
Women's Realm
. At the bottom of the pile she found years-old issues of
Vogue
. She didn't know why she kept these. The fashions displayed inside – the floral shirtwaist dresses, the Chanel suits – which used to give her so much pleasure, were now very dated. They belonged to a world that was as impossibly glossy as the paper they were printed on. But Irene had belonged to such a world once, if only in a minor key. In her early twenties she had been a beauty queen. Now she was rummaging through boxes in her suburban garage, the mother of three sons with another on the way, a mound of ironing to get done and no help in the house. She threw the
Vogue
s after the other magazines, into Norah's large plastic bag.

In one of the wooden crates there were some old soft toys belonging to the boys, too grubby to be passed on to the new baby, a couple of jigsaw boxes with thousands of pieces, half of them missing, probably – in they went. This was handy, she thought, a way to control the rising tide of stuff that three boys and a grown man generate. In another of the boxes marked in Liam's hand
DO NOT THROW AWAY
she found some
Reader's Digest
s. She looked at the dates – some of them went back to before they were married. They were clutter, pure and simple, taking up space that could be used more productively. If she could clear away these boxes on the floor, then Liam could park the car in here again. Wouldn't he thank her for that? He was always saying they were turning into the Fortunes, whose car had moss growing in the window frames from being left out in all weathers. There were a couple of Ed McBain paperbacks – Liam liked those tough guy kind of books; private dicks, wasn't that what they were called? And he liked war. Here were some Nevil Shutes. Holiday reading, he said, but she felt sure he wouldn't read these again. Maybe it was his work that made Liam hang on to everything. He was in the Department of Public Works. He was forever talking about restoring and renovating, cleaning monuments, resurrecting the past. Remembrance. That's when she thought of the postcard. Afterwards, she would wonder if the idea had been there all along, because the thing Irene really wanted rid of was tiny. A needle in a haystack.

‘Hold on there,' she ordered Norah and Trish and hurried back into the house. She climbed the stairs and went into Rory and Owen's room. She reached in under Owen's bed, her fingers finding dust-bunnies until they hit something solid, a rectangular tin box that once contained a selection of Turkish Delight, a Christmas present from one of Liam's maiden aunts. It was Owen's treasure box. Irene rummaged through a set of football cards, a shiny conker, two small marbles (or were they the eyes of a blinded teddy?), a pencil
sharpener, a sticky badge from the Horse Show, until she found the card lying face down on the floor of the tin like a groundsheet. She considered for a moment getting rid of the entire box. That would be easier to explain. But none of these other things were offensive to her. Just this, the card. Irene lifted it out and looked for one last time at the girl in the picture from five summers ago. The girl who'd been their maid. The girl who was dead now. Who had killed herself in this house. Who was dead and mourned, not by Irene, but by her nine-year-old son who kept this as a memorial to her. Irene slid the card into the patch pocket of her apron. She closed the lid of the box and pushed it back under the bed, sending it as far as she could into the cobwebby darkness. Maybe Owen would forget there ever was a tin box. She went downstairs, out the front door and back into the garage where Norah was still patiently waiting. She heaved a set of
Reader's Digest
s from Liam's box and slipped the card into one of them before tossing them into the gaping mouth of Norah Elworthy's bag.

The doll's name was Flossie, and it was given specifically to her by Auntie Babs – not like most of her other toys, which were hand-me-downs from Norah. Auntie Babs, who was her godmother, sometimes stayed over in their spare room when Daddy was at work and Mam wanted to have some fun. Flossie had a plastic head, arms and legs but her body was soft and pillow-like. She had shoulder-length blond hair and a fringe. She was Trish's favourite doll. She'd had Flossie since she was three. Which was ages ago. Flossie went everywhere. To bed, on holidays, to school. She had been chewed on, been sick over, trampled on, driven over by Daddy in the car, even put through the washing machine and the wringer, but as Mam always said – Flossie was indestructible. But that wasn't true, was it? Flossie had got sick. Her gorgeous blond hair began to come away in handfuls.
There were bald patches all over the top of her head; her fringe disintegrated. Trish was inconsolable. When she took Flossie out on the street, Mary Elizabeth Noone said the doll must have picked up nits at school and that's why her hair was falling out.