She rummages in her bag, hunting for her mobile phone.
‘An interview?’ Gianni said, disbelieving, when she told him about the trip, and in the next breath, ‘you’re leaving me, aren’t you?’
‘Madonna!’ she’d exploded. (It had taken her years to get the hang of pious cursing in Italian.) ‘This is not about you! If I get this I could be a director of a school, my own boss.’ When she said it, it sounded like ambition, something she’s been studiously avoiding for years.
‘Your Spanish isn’t good enough,’ Gianni said.
‘That’s what you used to say about my Italian,’ she replied hotly.
But he has hit the nail on the head. She is trying to get away from him. Nothing he did; it’s her, her sneaking propensity for betrayal. (Recently, she filled in one of those online personality questionnaires – who’s your favourite biblical character? St Peter, she answered. Her ringtone is a crowing cock.) Gianni’s phone goes to message.
‘Leaving Malaga now, should be in Perugia by evening,’ she informs the silence as a bing-bong sounds and her flight is announced. Last call.
What to call him. That was always the trouble; people were never sure about him. Never sure who he was. The confusion started at school. First day. They were late – they were always late. His mother could never achieve the oiled management of the nuclear family. Mo saw it capitalised: the Nuclear Family, efficient, deadly. Neet heaved the heavy door open. It had a heraldic escutcheon brassily marked PULL. They stepped into a tantrum of noise, a miniature world of protest. Letterbox mouths, brimming eyes, anger-pocked faces, the about-to-be abandoned. Neet handed him over at the door of Low Babies. The teacher, standing at the desk, was a faded-looking woman in an Indian smock with ash-blond hair and denim eyes. Twenty pasty faces stared back at him. That was the first time he noticed. Noticed the difference.
‘Is this little Maurice?’ the teacher asked sweetly, bending down and peering intently at him.
‘We call him Mo,’ Neet said helplessly.
He was picked on, of course. Where did he live? Sesame Street? There were older boys who wouldn’t let him play ball, who told him to feck off back to where he came from – which they imagined was Africa, since all nig-nogs came from Africa. But look, if they hadn’t fixed on his skin colour they’d have found something else. A big nose, freckles, glasses. The girls took his hand and led him around the playground like a pet. They allowed him to turn rope and in time he could skip for Ireland.
The roped-off alleyways leading to the X-ray machines look like a stage set for some glitzy red-carpet event. Bloody place is deserted but still you have to wind your way through the maze. Trish halts at the mouth of the security area and fingers her jacket – is that considered a coat? She’s wearing sandals, but they have wedges – could the goon in the uniform mistake her for a heel bomber? She decides to brazen it out. Why volunteer? She will only take off what she absolutely has to. She places her carry-on in the grey plastic tray and puts her phone beside it. As she waits to be beckoned through, she looks behind her. Across the butter-coloured distance she sees a figure coming out of the Gents toilet. Loud shirt, rumpled shorts. For some unaccountable reason she thinks of Mo. Mo Dark. (Burnt Sienna, that’s the colour of your skin, she had said to him. I’m not a fucking paint chart, he had barked back.) That was Mo. Difficult, touchy.
‘Señorita?’
The goon points to her shoes.
Back then, he counted himself lucky. He had two mothers, Neet and his nan. Nan lived with them and looked after him when Neet was out at work – in a grey office with a yucca plant in the Admin Block of St Jude’s. Nan was a rosy grandmother, a ruddy crab apple of a woman, bright as a bead and his stoutest defender.
‘He’s a growing boy,’ was her justification to Neet for any misbehaviour. Nan was obsessed with growth.
‘Eat that up,’ she’d command, ‘or you won’t grow up to be a big boy.’
Nan liked to ramble with the pushchair up and down the tree-lined avenue of St Jude’s, skirting the Outpatients Department and coming back by the morgue. The expeditions with Nan were less about rambling than talking. She talked all the time even before Mo could answer back. Pushed ahead, skirting the arthritic roots of trees cracking through the paving slabs, Mo was fuelled by Nan’s chatter.
‘You’re going to be a fine big lad, you’re going to grow into a man, tall and strong like Victor Mature or Charlton Heston. You’re going to be the biggest lad in this family, taller even than Pops Dark and he was no midget. You’re going to go to the university, no reason why not. You could be a doctor, or a pilot …’ (This was a concession on Nan’s part. She knew how Mo loved the chalky vapour trails of planes in the high blue sky; he’d follow their crayoned streaks with his finger.) When he was with Nan, he felt like a pilot, swaddled in his little cockpit on wheels, propelled by Nan into his big future. Here’s my future, Nan, he thinks, as a jet takes off, roaring behind plate glass.
* * *
In the sonic thunder, Trish bends to unbuckle her sandals and the world of Prosperity Drive comes swimming back. God, how she hated that place! Crossroads to nowhere. The avenue leading to St Jude’s Hospital formed the upright, patches of green on either side with ancient oak trees, low clumps of whitethorn and forsythia, and wild clusters of snowdrops in the spring. Prosperity Drive was the cross-beam, bisecting the avenue. It was a later addition, an afterthought; a paved street of pebble-dashed houses petering out in two bland cul-de-sacs. The hospital dominated. Crushed-looking men paced the grounds in dressing gowns and slippers, their faces marked biblically where they’d had radiation treatment. There was the slow glide of hearses up and down the avenue. Not that when she was a kid Trish took much notice of that. St Jude’s and its discreet morbidity was normal. She only knew it wasn’t a normal hospital because when she fell off the swing in the Devoys’ garden, she was taken to St Vincent’s. Girls with broken arms did not go to St Jude’s. It was for hopeless cases, she’d heard her mother say.
Mo lived in the hospital’s gate lodge with his mother – Neet, he always called her just Neet. It made mother and son seem hip and matey, like a pair of blues musicians. Neet had a vaguely hippyish air with her ragged-hemmed gypsy skirts, porridge-coloured cardigans, her undernourished footwear. She had lived in Australia once, Mo had told Trish – was that where he’d come from, she’d wondered. Wherever Neet had been, she was a world away from Trish’s mother in homely Fair Isle twinsets and stippled Crimplene hurrying off to her night-time job at the telephone exchange. Although she barely remembered it, Trish was nostalgic for that time of sweet domesticity when her father was still alive, a time she was permanently excluded from now. What she liked about Mo was a similar sense of deficit.
He asked Nan about his daddy.
‘You’re our little foundling,’ she told him.
Here was the story Nan told him. He had been left on the doorstep of the gate lodge by his real mother, who had mistaken the cottage for the official face of the institution. She had placed him in a plastic carrier bag on the worn well of the doorstep and melted away into the summer’s night. It was August, nine in the evening and Nan was inside the umber glow of the cottage when she heard him wail. She was in her dressing gown, a damp turban of towel around her head.
‘I’d just washed my hair; it was dripping everywhere,’ she said. ‘Bloody cats, that’s what I thought.’
Set on silencing the enraged love mewls of the neighbourhood tabbies she threw open the door and almost fell over the writhing package. Nan picked up the baby and crushed him to her damp breast. Beneath her fingers, she could feel the tiny pulse of his fontanelle. She wandered into the snail-littered garden.
‘I don’t know why. I don’t know what I was looking for,’ Nan said. ‘Your poor mother was long gone.’
She planted a kiss on the baby’s forehead. She called out Neet’s name, lovelorn in the night. Neet pushed aside a net in an upstairs casement, lifted the metal hatch and leaned out into th
e stock-scented night.
‘Look what the stork left!’
Sounds outlandish now. A fairy tale. Like something out of Thomas Hardy. (He’d seen Far From the Madding Crowd on TV one night with Neet.) But, look, he was five years old. And hey, it was the Sixties. Those things happened then. Around the same time, Nan had told him, another little boy, a toddler, was abandoned in the doorway of Woolworth’s coming up to Christmas, a note pinned to his coat collar with a heartfelt plea for someone to look after him. Only difference was he was white. And that story was true.
The contents of her bag on the monitor are in sepia and as plain and unadorned as a child’s drawing – all outline, no substance. The goon beckons to her magisterially. She looks over her shoulder towards the concourse, rattled by the thought, however unlikely, that once again she’s turned her back on Mo Dark. The bloke’s still standing there but she’s further away now and she hasn’t got her contacts in. Even if she could see clearly, she couldn’t exactly abandon her shoes and her bag and run in bare feet after a stranger who looks like Mo Dark. That would make her look guilty. Guilty of something. She passes barefoot through the empty doorway.
Despite her tall tales, he was sure of Nan, sure of her uncomplicated love, in a way he wasn’t of Neet. He saw himself and Neet as semi-detached, like a pair of movie Nazis – his mother helmeted at the controls, Mo dwarfed in the little sidecar. His was a life of female demarcation. Nan did the birthday parties, Neet the trips to the cinema, the camping trips. Nan did Hallow’een. She made costumes, cowboys and pirates – eyepatches and fringed hats. The masks helped, the sleek shades of the Lone Ranger, the dripping plastic of the ghoul. His favourite, though, was the ghost. Shrouded in a white sheet with holes scorched out for the eyes, nobody could guess who he was.
Trish is thinking of the first time with Mo. She’d had an argument with her mother and had stormed off, heading for St Jude’s. Down by the mortuary was a good spot for a sulk. The dead centre of St Jude’s – a place the living avoided superstitiously. There was a funeral that day. She watched as the attendants opened up the double doors of the mortuary and slid a coffin surreptitiously off the trestles and on to the brassy tray of the hearse. They worked silently and stealthily as if even here, in the house of death, discretion was required. She stretched out on the grass and let the soughing of summer leaves crowd out the rerun of hostilities with her mother playing in her head. A shadow fell across her. How was it that even with your eyes closed, you could sense someone was there? When she opened her eyes to a silhouette against sun-glare, that someone was Mo Dark.
They had played together as kids. Sprawling soccer matches − more stoppages than play while the boys argued over fouls and penalties − complicated street games with chanting and finger-pointing, the lonely hiding and frantic seeking. But educational segregation and puberty had put paid to their childish ease. Now she was shy of him, locked in her convent blues while he swaggered about in ripped jeans, a sanctioned drop-out.
‘Hi,’ she said and he silently took that as an invitation. He lay down beside her on the grass. She sat up, pulling at her school pinafore where it had rumpled up underneath her. It was one of those drowsy summer afternoons, the riled bee-hum of a lawnmower somewhere in the distance, and the sway of leaves overhead, and suddenly – not even suddenly, lazily (that was the curse of adolescence – the awful tedium of it) Mo leaned over her and stroked her cheek. She remembered still the rapture of it, the silky feel of his hand on her skin, soothing after the aggravation with her mother, as if he was trying to quiet the clamour in her head. Then his lips were on hers and her swoony acquiescence gave way to enraged passion, as if some switch had been thrown. She was eating his face and clawing at his belt and they probably would have done it, there and then, if some busybody nurse hadn’t come along.
‘Mo?’
The nurse was a burly creature with butch hair, a corpulent body encased in white armour; her name tag read Audrey Challoner. She stood towering over them, flushed with indignation – and embarrassment – as they hurriedly tried to fix themselves. Mo rose up to sitting, cross-legged, trying to quell his erection. Trish fidgeted with the buttons on her shirt.
‘Hi, Aud,’ Mo said, shading his eyes against the glare. The nurse’s? The sun’s?
‘Come on, Mo,’ she said in that infuriatingly reasonable tone adults used to suggest candour rather than judgement. ‘Not here, okay? Just not here.’
She turned away without a backward glance, leaving Trish and Mo in a queasy backwash.
‘Will she tell on you?’ she asked Mo.
‘Aud?’ he queried. He knew most of the hospital staff by their first names. ‘Nah,’ he said lazily – as lazy as his first move.
Although nothing had really happened, there was no going back from the day of trespass in St Jude’s. Sometimes Trish thought she and Mo were loyal to the transgression rather than to each other. Their trysts always followed the same pattern – fevered groping and lecherous disarray always teetering on the brink of the absolutely forbidden.
When her mother found out that she and Mo were an item – that’s how she put it − she issued florid warnings.
‘Remember Shan Mohangie,’ she said. ‘He was from Africa, murdered his Irish girlfriend. A teenager, just like you. Worked in a restaurant, what was it called? The Green Rooster, that’s it! Killed her in a jealous fit, and then chopped her into little pieces and put her in a pot!’
‘This is Mo, Mum, Mo from St Jude’s,’ Trish said. Exasperated.
Looking back on it, Trish could see only the other fascinations about Mo. He was a sometime roadie for Wingless Stock, a vegetarian heavy metal band. He was nineteen and out in the world. And like her, he had no father. Except where hers was indisputably dead, his was just missing. She couldn’t resist prying. Hadn’t his mother ever talked about it, told him the story? He would shake his head. So she invented her own scenario – his father might have been a student, at the College of Surgeons, maybe? They had loads of foreign students. Africans, Indians. Who knew? Maybe your dad’s still around, she pestered Mo, maybe we could track him down? She envied him this live connection somewhere out there, far away from the confines of Prosperity Drive. But Mo refused to co-operate.
‘I’m Neet’s son,’ he said, ‘isn’t that enough for you?’
The trouble with Trish’s questions was they made the silences between him and Neet manifest. Nan was gone by then; she’d been taken by a stroke that had left her lopsided and speechless. He was angry. Angry with Neet; angry that she didn’t seem to miss Nan at all, barely mentioned her even, angry that she had let him drop out of school with barely a protest, angry that she had allowed him to move out. It was only across the yard, mind you, to an aluminium caravan like a piece of downed artillery parked at the gable of the house. It had lain idle for several years but Neet had helped him fix it up. Nevertheless, he had pinned a skull and crossbones on the door with a KEEP OUT signed scrawled underneath – meant, of course, for her. He’d turned it into a fetid hole, subverting the tight-lipped presses, the picture window with its scrawny nets and the fierce tidiness it was designed for. Everything in it was two-faced. The toilet hid behind what looked like a cupboard door, the banquette seats with the table wedged between them turned into a bed. And though he had opted to move, he had felt banished there as if Neet had sent him into exile. He still went into the house for his grub but, ridiculously, he felt Neet had turned him into a latchkey lodger.
‘Lucky you!’ Trish said enviously.
When he and Neet passed in the kitchen they only found things to quarrel about. There was just one area of truce. The movies. Neet loved the cinema and even when they became estranged they still trooped once a week to the local fleapit. His friends – with the exception of Trish who found it touching – jeered him for going out with his old lady, but he made the weekly pilgrimage to keep faith with Neet. He owed her that much. The deal was that he would pick the film one week, and she the next. Thanks to Neet he got
to see a lot of period dramas and some awful French turkeys. What he hated was the subtitles. He felt as if he was being duped. There always seemed too many words on screen for what was being said, sound clogged up with too much explanation. The exact opposite of his life with Neet, where there wasn’t enough.
An alarm goes off, a red light flashes. Her watch. She reverses, throws it into a plastic tray and tries again. Again the buzzer goes off. A female guard steps forward, thick heavy hair crowded on her shoulder like a burden, with the eyes of a stricken Madonna. She forces Trish to extend her arms like a child playing aeroplanes. With a seamstress’s finesse she runs her fingertips down Trish’s hips and thighs. She nods, gives her the all-clear. Trish steps to the side to retrieve her jacket, her shoes, the watch. When she’s reassembled, put back together again, she turns to check. Is he still there?
Trish! He could still call out; it’s not too late. But he finds himself locked in a paroxysm of indecision. Look, she’s in a hurry. Must be the Rome flight she’s aiming for. (He knows the schedules by heart.) 6.55, connecting in Madrid. Stirrings of curiosity now. What’s she doing in Rome? But if he had questions about her and the years that have intervened – he feels suddenly archival – then she, too, would have questions and he’s not sure he would be able to explain. Explain how he got here. He’s tried Munich, Düsseldorf, Bremerhaven. But Malaga is the most comfortable; the weather is kinder. Keith raves about Paris. Not the airport (‘Charles de Gaulle is poxy! That hub system, all about crowd control!’) but the city, where you can get three square meals a day. Early morning breakfast at the convent in Picpus, lunch in Belleville, an evening meal with the monks on Rue Pascal. But Mo never got in on that circuit. Anyway, Paris is brutal in the winter and he’s mistaken for a Berber. Funny that – here he’s seen as vaguely white. In Paris he felt like a tramp. Here, he’s permanently in transit; he could be just about to get back on the carousel of life. One ticket away from normality. And it’s sheltered, he’s under cover. He collects plastic bottles in the morning, scavenged from the litter bins, and takes them to the supermarket on the ground floor of the terminal, which gives cash back. He hoovers up food left on the café tables when passengers’ flights are called. The security guards know him and mostly turn a blind eye. Last month someone nicked his trolley and it was a parking attendant who located it in the underground car park and returned it to him. Who the hell would want to steal his trolley? Sad fucks. He pictures it now with the plastic bags swinging from the handles and his bed roll bent over inside, lolling like a sludgy tongue. His life is a small, smelly trove locked up in a wire basket on wheels.
Prosperity Drive Page 6