Prosperity Drive (35 page)

Edel had no real desire to learn to drive. She had been quite happy to sit back and be a passenger. But Victor was insistent.

‘Come on,' he said, ‘there's nothing to it.'

But when she sat behind the wheel she felt it was intrinsically wrong. She should not be in charge of something so large and powerful. And she wasn't in charge of it. Even turning the key in the ignition made her fear the car would suddenly leap into life.

‘Not until you put her into gear,' Victor said, snorting with laughter.

They inched around the back haggard in Mellick, Edel nosing the car tentatively around the perimeter, past the black doorways of the outhouses, circling the water pump on its altar of concrete, the rusting mangle in its bed of nettles. These things seemed grounded and necessary, while she sat in a candyfloss car, playing. She did not feel so bleakly inauthentic in the city with Victor. In fact, he was considered
quite a catch, a man with a job and a car, good-looking in a neat, presentable way, smart, keen. Keen at first, Edel thought. Lately she had noticed a certain creeping reserve and she wasn't sure if it was her own nervousness about losing him, or a cooling on his part. Some reserve of her own prevented her from asking. The nerve she had used to attract him deserted her at close quarters. She had begun to brood about what a young man with a car and a salesman's good looks could get up to on sunny afternoons when he was free to wander the city alone. She felt acutely the need for something definitive to happen. Perhaps that was why she had asked him to come home with her for the summer holidays.

‘Well,' Victor said finally, laughing. ‘We can't just sit here. Let's try again. And remember … the clutch.'

Damn him, she thought. Teaching her to drive had been all his idea, anyway. Edel suspected that it was boredom; they were into their second week at Mellick and in this setting Victor had seemed ill at ease, his jocular manner a handicap in the face of the busy disapproval of the Forristal household. It was the haymaking season so the house was empty for the long hot afternoons and Victor was at a loose end. He had offered to help but Ned, Edel's brother, had considered this preposterous. As he did Victor's presence. He was a city boy; what would he know about such things? He might as well have been a woman, as far as Ned was concerned.

The Zodiac was Victor's only trump card. It conferred on him a status he would not have otherwise enjoyed. He ran Edel's mother into town to do the shopping; he drove Ned to the creamery. Ridiculous and all as they thought the large sugared lozenge of a car was, the Forristal family found it – and Victor – useful.

After a few days Victor took her out on the open road. Strangely, it was easier away from familiar sights and Ned's reproachful looks when he returned to the house in the evening
to find Edel stranded in the yard with Victor, helpless with laughter, as the car juddered and stalled. Her mother considered the whole driving business unseemly. She just about tolerated being driven about by her daughter's young man. She suffered Victor's eager offers of transport with a mute embarrassment. But seeing Edel behind the wheel was another thing altogether. It just wasn't proper. That's what she thought, Edel knew. Away from the sceptical eyes of home, and out on the empty tarred road, Edel could build up some speed. She wanted to succeed at driving, not for her own sake, but for Victor's. Particularly if he was having doubts about her.

Edel had never been as conscious of her background before. But seeing the way her mother and Ned lived through Victor's eyes made her feel anxious. Ned's spattered wellingtons standing splay-footed on the brush mat inside the back door, the crude washboards and tin bath they used for the laundry, the chipped crockery, even the scummy top on the milk carried in an enamel jug straight from the dairy, spoke of a dour futility. The constant feeding of the range, the endless hauling and carrying, the grinding impoverished repetition of their routine began to oppress her. Ned had made his peace with Victor in the way that men did. They had found their common ground and traded information about cars and tractor parts, engines and horsepower. But her mother had been more resistant. Victor was the first man Edel had ever talked about, let alone brought home.

‘You're getting to be a bit of a speed merchant,' Victor said, interrupting her thoughts: ‘50 mph, no less!'

She braked immediately.

‘No, no,' he said, ‘don't do that. You're really getting the hang of it now.'

Gliding through the dappled countryside in the glinting sunlight with Victor, she convinced herself he was right. She
was
getting the hang of it. She rounded a bend and almost collided with a herd of cows.

‘Whoa,' Victor said as if it were he who was driving the animals.

Edel geared down and applied the brakes gently. All she could see ahead were the black-and-white rumps of a dozen beasts lazily swaying while a young lad with a stick hollered at them.

‘Great,' Victor muttered under his breath, ‘we could be behind this lot for hours.'

‘They won't have far to go,' Edel said, ‘probably to the next gate.'

She was happy to chug along behind the chequered cows, watching their flaky flanks and skeetering hooves on the tar and keeping a safe distance. They were in no hurry, after all.

‘Come on, come on,' Victor urged.

The slow patience of the countryside irritated him.

After about half a mile, the young boy swung open a gate on their right and urged the cattle in off the road, threatening and cajoling by turns. He stopped as Edel eased the car by, and stood almost in salute as they passed. He had heavy straw-coloured hair, a knotted little face, small contemptuous eyes. He stood for several minutes looking after them. Edel watched him in the rear-view mirror, a small, defiant figure standing at a gate.

The sun was very low now and they were driving due west. A mile further on, they veered around another bend in the road into the full glare of the setting sun. Victor leaned over to pull down the visor to shield Edel's eyes. As he did, something solid and heavy blundered across her vision. Everything seemed to go dark as if a large rain cloud had plunged the sky into stormy relief. But this thing, a corpulent shadow, kept moving. Edel braked, the car slewed dangerously and she came face to face with the petrified eye of a Friesian just as the bonnet of the car ploughed into its mud-caked flank. There was a soft, cushioned thud as the car glanced off the animal and spun wildly, skidding headlong towards the ditch.

‘Jesus!' Victor yelled as they came to a jolting halt on the rough camber, and the engine cut out.

He peered out the passenger window at the felled cow lying on its side and thrashing ineffectually. Blood wept from a jagged gash in its belly that showed its livid innards and streamed on to the tar road in a sticky pool. Edel, lifting her head from between her hands which were still gripping the steering wheel, saw only the cow's eye watching her with mute, terrified appeal. Then the animal moaned.

‘Let's get out of here,' Victor said.

‘What?'

‘I said, let's get out of here.'

Edel hesitated. She knew exactly what should be done. She should get out of the car, run back to the youngster who had been driving the cattle, and get him to summon his father. He would come with a knife and cut the animal's throat to put it out of its misery. Edel had seen it done several times. But going back would mean owning up.

‘Shouldn't we … ?' she began.

‘Ignition,' Victor commanded and for the first time behind the wheel she was swift and decisive, as if all the hours of instruction had been for this moment. She did as she was bid, turning the key, feeling the power surge up through the accelerator as the car righted itself and moved confidently forward. But by the time the power had reached her fingertips it had been reduced to a faint but pervasive trembling.

A couple of miles further on, she pulled in at a shady crossroads. The sun had gone down. Victor got out slowly and went to examine the front of the car. There was a large dent in the radiator and a blood-flecked hollow in the left wing where metal had met flesh.

‘Thirty quid's worth at least,' he said, coming round to her side and opening the driver's door.

She dragged herself over to the passenger side. Her limbs felt like lead.

On Edel's instructions, they hid the car in the outhouse of the abandoned house with the oak tree. The large shed was out of sight of the boreen and no one would have any business going in there, she told Victor. They told the Forristals they'd run out of petrol.

‘Typical,' Ned said, ‘that's women for you!'

And so the ill-advised expedition became all Edel's doing.

Victor left first thing in the morning to take the car back to the city and get it fixed. Edel invented excuses for his departure. Egypt taking control of the Suez Canal, she said, they'll be needing him at the paper.

‘Took fright, didn't he?' her mother said.

She and Victor would never talk of it again; not then, nor after they were married. It was only a dead cow, Edel would tell herself. Or a dying cow, dead now one way or another. But in her nightmares it would resurface, Victor shouting, ‘Clutch, clutch!' and she wailing, ‘No, no, I can't. I can't do this!' She would awake aghast in the dawn hours (Victor beside her, still on nights, newly asleep) with a windscreen image of the scene vivid in her head. The beast's bewildered eye, its baffled pain, the bloodied haunch of the sugarplum car and Victor hissing at her to put her foot down.

Some of these stories have previously appeared in the following publications:

Arrows in Flight
(Scribner/Townhouse),
Bridges: A Global Anthology of Short Stories
(Temenos),
The Chattahoochee Review
,
The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories
,
Glimmer Train
,
The Honest Ulsterman
,
If Only
(Poolbeg),
Irish Short Stories
(Phoenix),
New Irish Short Stories
(Faber), and
The Threepenny Review

I have a loyal band of first readers who saw this work at various stages and offered insight and advice – Rosemary Boran, Joanne Carroll, Orla Murphy and Terri Scullen. To them, a heartfelt thanks. Thanks are also due to the Arts Council of Ireland for a literature bursary awarded in the course of writing the collection.

Mary Morrissy, October 2015

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Copyright © Mary Morrissy 2016

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First published by Jonathan Cape in 2016

(First published in the United Kingdom by Random House in 2016)

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