‘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?
THE GENDER OF CARS
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!’
LOT’S WIFE
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 mo
stly 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.
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