She could try a wave, on the off-chance it is Mo. Just like she did the last time she saw him. A sad little wave because she was seventeen and she didn’t have the words to say I’m scared. She wasn’t scared of the big adventure, the delicious and longed-for escape from Prosperity Drive, the tantalising whiff of freedom. No, she was scared of cool, knowing Mo Dark with the absent father and the quicksilvery temper and the brooding silences, scared of all his unknowns. But she couldn’t say that, out of a sort of politeness. Because he wasn’t white. It would only hurt him, she told herself, covering up for her cowardice. And because she couldn’t speak, she did the cruellest thing of all. She said nothing.
They were going to run away to London when she’d finished her Leaving Cert. They had it all planned, the mailboat to Holyhead, then the train to Euston. They’d find a squat – he had muso friends there and an address in Kilburn. They would live together where no one would know them. No parents, Mo said emphatically. Trish imagined them as a plucky, mixed-race Romeo and Juliet without the bad ending. Mo would get work as a roadie or a sound man, maybe even join a band himself – he played bass guitar – and, somehow, though they had never discussed this, Trish’s life would begin in some way too.
They had travelled through the early morning – two bus journeys – to be at the pier at seven in the morning. She’d rehearsed what she was going to say but she couldn’t get started.
‘It’ll be alright,’ Mo kept saying as if he suspected what her tense silence was about.
He was comforting her because, unlike him, Trish was running away. He’d told Neet he was leaving, whereas Trish had just left a note for her mother. She didn’t say anything at the terminal as they queued to go through the barrier. He let go of her hand to fish out the tickets and she simply fell out of step with him. She held back. The crowd surged between them and suddenly he was on one side, and she was on the other. She watched as his army surplus knapsack jogged ahead and waited for him to realise she wasn’t with him. He was probably still talking to her, not realising. Then he turned around. The crowd streamed either side of him. She watched as his face registered bafflement, then hurt and resignation. The three stages of grief in a couple of minutes.
Probably wasn’t her, anyway. And if it was, serve her right. It would be sweet revenge for him to turn his back on her. Fifteen years ago the positions were reversed. He was the one left standing at the terminal, the black hatch of the ferry yawning behind him while she stood at the visitors’ side of the gate shaking her head.
‘Come on,’ he’d shouted, ‘Trish? Trish!’
And her only answer was to wave, or not even a wave, a kind of falling gesture with her hand as she turned away and trailed off across the forecourt, through the glassy doors and into the pearly morning, while he, like some lost child, kept on calling her name. Trish, Trish, Trish, until one of the porters came up to him and said, ‘Come on, sonny, are you embarking or not?’
And that’s when he saw how it was, how it would be. Trish’s essential caution and her respectably dead father versus Mo with his uncertain skin colour, his illegitimacy and a flaky mother. They might have grown up on the same street but they were worlds apart. Just as they are now, him on one side of the barrier, and her on the other.
Trish had never heard from him again. She took to avoiding his mother, crossing the avenue if she saw Neet coming, afraid she would attack, like some enraged lioness. But Neet never said a word to her. Did she even know that Trish had been planning to run away to London with Mo? He was so close with information, he might never have mentioned it. Or her.
There’s a guy, Keith has told him about, a prof at some university in the UK who’s doing a study of airport people. An anthropologist.
‘What’s that?’ Mo had to ask.
‘A zoologist for people,’ Keith said. ‘Gave me a hundred quid for info about airport vagrants. That’s what they call us.’
Mo likes the sound of it because it makes him, this, sound transitory, a rite of passage, not a destination. Unlike London where he did have a fixed address and an occupation. He made a life there, for a while. Or a living. Squatting, picking up work with bands here and there, drawing the dole, but there was a lot of down time. Literally. He smoked his way through a lot of dope. Had a full season of self-pity. Disbelieving at first, then bitterly resigned. He’d composed vengeful letters in his head to Trish, rehearsed phone conversations he couldn’t afford to have long-distance. And what was he going to say?
‘You are the girl who broke my heart!’
At the time he thought it a killer line.
He moved into a basement flat in Clapham for a bit. A scene of industrial clutter. Stacks of speakers, cables snaking underfoot, the strewn innards of amps which he rented out piecemeal. Pale monsters, emissaries from Mo’s night-time world, would march through the garden at noon forcing him out of bed, staggering under the weight of Bose speakers with gaping beaks, colliding sometimes with the becalmed sheets on the whirligig line put out by the woman who lived in the upstairs flat. Somewhere along the way, work drifted out of his existence and his existence became his work.
No, not true. It was a dark winter’s evening in the flat in London – what might have been the love nest he would have shared with Trish – when it struck him. He hadn’t done a gig in weeks; the rain had seeped in under the front door of the flat so the basement hallway was awash. He’d had to put towels up against the crumbling sash windows to keep the moisture at bay and he thought – only love would keep you hopeful in this grief-stricken climate.
She walks the corridor of glass towards the gate, her heart as heavy as that morning she left Mo. It’s half a lifetime ago, well half her lifetime anyway, but the pangs of betrayal are as sharp as when it happened. She’s not reminded very often, except when there’s a man around. But then, there’s often a man around. She can’t turn back now, anyway. A planeload of travellers sitting on the tarmac would curse her from a height. The public address system would name and shame her. Airport security would hunt her down. And if she were to go back, what exactly would she say to Mo Dark? I’m sorry would seem a bit lame after all these years.
Maybe she could sympathise with him on the death of his mother; Neet had died a couple of years ago. Breast cancer apparently – died in St Jude’s. The irony of it. It must have hit Mo hard. A mortal blow. But then, hadn’t Trish already delivered that? She chastises herself. Look, Mo Dark is probably heading up some indie record label in Los Angeles by now, has destroyed his septum snorting too much coke and is on his third wife. (While you’re a lowly TEFL teacher who’s just made a mess of an interview that might have allowed you your chance of escape.) That bloke you’ve just seen, he’s not the director of a record label, is he? Not dressed like that, so it can’t be Mo. And if you turn back and the bloke isn’t Mo, then you’ll look really stupid and you’ll have missed your flight into the bargain.
She hurries determinedly towards the gate. But something just won’t let go. A thread of plaintive possibility niggles at her. She halts on the moving travelator. Sun-glare blinds her. She turns around and begins to run, the wheels of her case on the ridges making the sound of an aggravated buzzard. She crashes into one person, then another. She finds herself thwarted by the travelator’s momentum like she is trying to push the giant hands of time backwards. She turns back and faces forward; she will go to the end of this section, then she’ll turn back. Yes, that’s what she’ll do; she can put this right. She can go back to the fork in the road.
Mo is slouching back to his trolley when he thinks he hears her call. He doesn’t believe it at first; thinks it’s the dope. It’s true what they say: you do hear voices in your head. He hears Neet’s mostly, now that she’s dead. Poor Neet, who demanded so little from him. Was she like all the rest, keeping her expectations low to avoid disappointment? No, it was more than that, it was as if she expected him to turn out as he had and welcomed it, as her punishment. Because of what she’d done, merely by having him
. The impossible equation: a single mother, a brown baby, the 1960s, Ireland. Long after Trish, he’d tried asking straight out about his father, but even on her deathbed Neet wouldn’t relent.
‘I’ve been your mother and your father, that’s all you need to know.’
Like a bad line from Chinatown.
He’s standing over a trolley full of plastic bags, and what’s that – a bed roll? What have I done, she thinks, I’ve missed my flight for a complete stranger. Not just that, a hobo, for God’s sake. Fuelled by some mad notion that she can undo everything. And then he turns around.
‘Mo?’
Her voice comes out of a dream to him. The dream of the past. That time Neet had taken the stabilisers off his bike on the avenue. One minute she was running along behind him, laboured breathing in his ear, her hand on the saddle. He could feel the wind rushing by him making his cheeks smart.
‘Don’t let go,’ he roared into the wind. He was picking up speed. He felt the heady exhilaration of being in flight. Then her voice from a long way back.
‘You’re on your own, Mo, there’s a good boy, you’re doing it on your own!’
He wobbled, veered crazily and fell off.
You’re on your own, Mo.
‘Mo? Mo Dark?’ the voice demands. ‘Is that you, Mo?’
Is it? Is this really him?
He turns to answer.
MISS IRELAND
The maid stuck her head in the gas oven one Sunday afternoon in the Devoy house, 27 Prosperity Drive, but not before she had fed and changed the baby – Fergal, it was – and put him down for his nap. The family was out visiting Nana Devoy, as they always did after second Mass, and the maid had timed it, or so Betty Fortune had heard, so the deed would be done before they got back and before Fergal woke again. She had put soaking towels in the gap between the kitchen door and the floor so that the fumes would not escape into the rest of the house and left a scrawled note pinned to the kitchen door saying DANGER – KEEP OUT. There was a deadly precision to the arrangement, a precision Irene Devoy had never noticed in the girl before, though she didn’t voice this, not wanting to speak ill of the dead. She wanted everything about the terrible scandal that had been visited upon her household to be proper because what Irene felt deep in her heart about the suicide of the maid was selfish relief.
Liam had suggested the maid. She can deal with the baby, the night feeds, and help out with the chores etc., etc., Liam had said. Etcetera was a phrase he used a lot, and it covered a multitude. But Irene couldn’t complain. Liam was a good provider. With a new baby in the house, he was worried about Irene losing her beauty sleep, as he called it; that was why Quinny was hired in the first place.
Of course she wasn’t Quinny when she came. She was Marguerite Quinn, recommended by a colleague of Liam’s in Public Works. She was a country girl, as all these maids were, and on first sight, Irene’s heart took a dive. She expected someone mousy and cowed, but Quinny was a big girl, big-boned that is, with breasts and curves sheathed in a black Bri-Nylon polo, a skirt in houndstooth check tight around the beam end, and black stockings with, Irene noticed, a ladder stopped above the knee with nail polish. She wore kitten heels. She had long auburn hair, long enough to sit on – which delighted the boys – and brown eyes, large and placid. And she had a beauty spot, pasted high on her pale cheekbone. The only way in which she satisfied Irene’s expectations was in her accent, flat and tinkerish. She called Irene Missus.
‘Where have you been working before this?’ Irene asked her.
‘Worked for a lord in the County Meath, Missus. In a castle. With a moat and all. But I was let go.’
‘Oh.’ Irene felt a tiny tremor of alarm. She waited for an explanation but the girl offered none.
‘Well, we don’t have a castle here,’ Irene said, laughing nervously as she showed Quinny the box room in the back that they’d cleared for her and the baby. With the cot in there it looked poky and the sun went in just at that moment, so it took on a dingy air. Irene was about to apologise. Then she thought better of it. This was a maid, for God’s sake.
‘Now, come and meet the boys.’
Rory was seven and Owen coming up for three, and it was he who lispily christened her Quinny. Marguerite was too exotically long and syllabled for him, and since every name he’d mastered had a long e at the end and sounded diminutive – Daddy, Mummy, Rory – Marguerite became Quinny. Irene rather liked it. It had the ring of a family retainer, as if Quinny was comfortably old, someone they’d inherited from the generation before. Until people clapped eyes on her, that is. Once they did, she was back to being the maid. The young one, the pretty one. The postman, who’d been to America, called her Red.
Before she came, Irene had nursed visions of being munificent with the maid, being the lady of the house, firm but fair. But once Quinny arrived in the flesh, a whole new set of ambitions attached themselves to her. She imagined schooling Quinny in housewifery and, in some hidden part of her, maybe even becoming like a mother to her, or if not a mother a helpful older sister. (Irene felt her singularity in a male household.) But Quinny’s manner did not allow any of Irene’s vague fantasies to be enacted. There was something feral about her, Irene thought, like a hibernating animal that was only barely house-trained. Not that there was anything to complain about in Quinny’s work. She did the night feeds without complaint, she got Rory up and out to school in the mornings, and gave Owen his breakfast. She would even bring Irene a cup of tea in bed where she was allowed to lie on for the first time in years. Quinny’s attitude to work, though, was graceless. She had a kind of phlegmatic loathing for the tasks Irene herself hated – cleaning the bathroom, ironing the sheets. She handled Fergal with a brusque expertise. (Irene remembered how tentative she’d been as a first-time mother with Rory and she was sure, as a baby, he had sensed that, somehow.) Irene couldn’t identify the source of her unease about Quinny except perhaps that in a very short time her boys became more attached to Quinny than they were to her.
Rory’s face would fall when he came in from school on Wednesdays forgetting it was Quinny’s day off. Owen would trail up to her room and sit on her bed waiting for her to come home. Or if she was doing the ironing – in the dining room with the radio tuned to Luxembourg – he would sit at her feet and play with the rolled-up socks. Irene would watch her to see what it was that Quinny did differently. She ignored the boys benignly, Irene discovered, let them talk and chatter. She didn’t lead their conversations, she followed them. She was like a bigger, duller child.
When the children were in bed, Irene would urge Quinny to join Liam and her in the sitting room to watch TV, thinking that this might make her more malleable.
‘No thanks, Missus,’ she would say, ‘I’ll stay in the kitchen, if you don’t mind.’ Or she would go to her room, Irene guiltily seeing her chaste single bed pushed up against the cot, the scarred bedside locker they’d bought second-hand, the curtained-off alcove in place of a proper wardrobe.
‘We’ve fallen on our feet there,’ Liam said, very pleased with himself.
They had, Irene had to admit.
But still, she wanted more from Quinny, or more of her.
She tried being friendly, gently prodding the maid with the kind of questions that allowed the possibility of another life outside the confines of Prosperity Drive. Have you friends in the city, do you go to the pictures, or, this said blushingly, do you have a boyfriend? That, Irene suspected, was the rock all maids perished on. No, Missus, Quinny would say. But Irene couldn’t believe that. Not of a girl with false eyelashes and a beauty spot. There had to be a romance. Irene’s own young life had been shaped by such certainties, her life before Liam, and what’s more they had been made flesh. As Irene Cardiff, she had once been Miss Ireland. (The inner picture of herself, if she closed her eyes, was wearing the Connolly ball gown with the black velvet bodice, the petalled waistline, and those full skirts of pleated linen gauze, and the two runners-up, like a pair of comely handmaidens,
settling the winning sash on her hips; her crowning moment.) People took note of her luminous green eyes and white even teeth, her clear complexion and oatmeal hair, her still pert figure – despite three babies. She could see it in their gaze; she was used to frank admiration. What they didn’t know was that she had once been a beauty queen. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of it. She’d represented her country, after all (and reached the final sixteen at Miss World in London). But among her neighbours, wives of clerkly types, legal people, engineers, the Miss World contest would have been regarded as common and shoddy, she was sure. It would lower the tone, that’s what they would think. So when she chatted to Betty Fortune, or Edel Elworthy, and especially Miss Larchet, she mentioned she had been an air hostess before her marriage, but never the beauty queen business. Air hostess was a job, a glamorous occupation; beauty queen was a state of mind. They’d think her a ninny.
Her marriage to Liam Devoy had won her a sense of achieved seriousness. His grandfather had done something in 1916, and Liam was part of the organising committee for the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Rising. That’s who she was in the eyes of neighbours, the capable pretty wife of an up-and-coming civil servant with a serious pedigree. If they knew about Miss World, they’d look at her differently. They’d regard her carefully tended blondness, her discreet make-up (she never went out of the house without what Liam called her ‘warpaint’), and her stylish clothes as some kind of striving after a station in life to which she was not entitled.
Prosperity Drive Page 7