Prosperity Drive

by Mary Morrissy

  Tim was lost.

  ‘Rhymes with?’ She’d cocked a saucy eyebrow. Tim had to think hard. Sometimes Reggie made him feel quite maidenly.

  Now that he’s up he goes to the window and stares out over the water. His is a docklands flat. Regenerated. The water below is a hemmed-in canal basin. At the other side is a large flour mill. A pair of monolithic towers of bleached concrete rise up looking like they’ve been lightly dusted with confectionery sugar, a six-storey warehouse of blistered stone with cataracted windows stares back at him. As Tim watches, a door opens in the lowest floor at water level and a man steps out on to a metal platform. He lights up. His cigarette tip glows against the inky water and the glower of a wakening sky. In his white baker’s coat and paper hat he looks like a clownish doctor, a refugee from a Marx Brothers fancy-dress party, stepping out of a portal of the last century. Tim inches the sash window open a fraction. The rattle of a candy-coloured commuter train leaving the depot at the far end of the basin animates the silent scene. Its empty windows are ablaze, a glow-worm on the move, its clatter at a distance like industrial knitting. There it is, Tim thinks, the world is officially awake now.

  Paris is an hour ahead but even so Tim does not dare to ring Reggie at this hour. She would be livid. Their life is like this – careful calculation and fearful discretion. One weekend in three they spend together. Here, there or somewhere in between. The rest of the time airline schedules keep them apart. To anyone looking in from the outside, they are a boom-time couple. What is the sound of boom? The rush and seethe of cappuccino-makers, Tim would say, the bloated heartbeat of car stereos. But these were only signature tunes of prosperity. What of the boom itself? Was it the low, threatening rumble of thunder, the zip and whistle of fireworks or the flat thud of explosion? The abstract sound of boom.

  ‘Oh God, Tim,’ Reggie would say when he would speculate like this, ‘get a life!’

  But Tim is old enough to remember what everyone calls the bad old days. Dole queues and hunger strikes, explosions on the streets, when everything seemed in short supply, except chronic damage.

  The first time the Man with the Quiet Voice comes to your house he brings a comic. You sprawl on the kitchen floor as the colours leap out at you in great muscled arms – Zap! – and fiery explosions. Boom! He and Mum sit at the kitchen table. There is silence between them just like when you and Mum are together, Mum doing the ironing, the smooth swaying motion of her hand, the small slap of the iron’s flex hitting against the legs of the board. It creaks when she puts her weight behind something tricky – the collars and cuffs of Dad’s shirts. She hums along to a tune playing on the radio, catching a word here and there. Except today she’s not ironing; she’s saying small soft things to the Man with the Quiet Voice and then laughing in a silvery way. You can see the Man is holding her hand, examining her fingers like the Doctor checking for warts. You know what’s going to happen next. She’s going to open her mouth and say Aaaaah.

  ‘Aw, Rosemary!’

  It’s Dad, voice vivid with complaint.

  ‘What?’ Mum turns around, hand on hip.

  ‘How many times have I told you – I don’t want Timmy reading comics.’

  Dad stands, arms crossed, bulging biceps, cape flying.

  ‘Sure he can’t read yet, isn’t he just looking at the pictures?’ Mum says.

  ‘I just don’t want this kind of rubbish in the house.’ Dad leans down and whips the comic away. Whoosh!

  He rips it in two.

  Wa-a-h! Hot tears of injustice.

  ‘Perfect!’ Mum bangs the iron down. ‘Just perfect!’

  He likes the disruption that is Reggie Mundy. Her flights away, her lavish returns. He’s in love, or at least in thrall, and he has never felt so helpless. He is dazzled by her and dazed by the distance between them. When he turned seventeen, she was going into High Babies. Then there’s her job. A trolley dolly with Plein Air, that’s how she described herself.

  ‘We’re the cheap and nasty airline,’ she explained. ‘Our on-board snacks are called Plane Cheesy. Says it all.’

  He finds Reggie’s sardonic tone, this light contempt, disconcerting.

  ‘Our safety instructions are to stop screaming and lower your mask. And if you’re travelling with children, it’s time to pick your favourite.’

  Tim loves his work; it’s a calling. If he ever got to the point of regarding it as lightly as Reggie does hers, he’d have to jack it in. He took her on a tour of the studio one night when P45 was recording. She was coolly impressed.

  ‘P45,’ she breathed. ‘That makes you a legend!’

  Or did she mean a has-been, Tim wondered.

  When other teenagers were buying rock albums, he was buying LPs of sound effects. Most people could detect that boy in him, until, that is, he saved some coked-up boy band from mediocre oblivion. Then, he was a wizard.

  ‘My God, Tim, it’s dark down here,’ Reggie had said. ‘Don’t you feel buried alive?’

  In comparison to her harsh, over-lit world, the studio must have seemed sunk in a pre-modern gloom but Tim did his best work in the graveyard hours. There was a sanctity about the studio then as if it were a cathedral of sound, though sometimes that idea was hard to sustain, watching wasted musicians sitting around smoking their brains out. He was the organist: the sound channelled through his hands and became transformed. He wanted to mix music so that each constituent part – the woozy reverb of a bass, the crystalline ting of a hi hat, even the grating dry rub of a palp along a guitar string – would detach itself and cry out, so that the listener might think he was stoned. He loved the absolute clarity of those moments himself, the certainty of singular sensations. That’s what he wanted to reproduce, that purity. But he couldn’t possibly explain that to Reggie. Purity? Reggie?

  Once you meet the Man with the Quiet Voice in the church. You have to sit at the end of the last pew on the aisle that leads to brazen glory. He and Mum go off to light candles. What’ll I do, you ask. You say your prayers, Timmy, there’s a good boy, Mum says. What’ll I pray for? Mum seems flustered. She storms up the aisle. She seems always to be running away. Pray for your mother’s intentions, sonny, the Man with the Quiet Voice says as he follows her, coat-tails flying. Their voices came back to you, solemn and jilted, from the side aisle where the shrine to the Blue Our Lady is. What’s that man’s name, you ask when Mum comes back. What man, she replies crossly.

  They had met in Paris. It sounded romantic in the telling. What they neglected to say was that it was not in the Luxembourg Gardens or Montmartre, but in a launderette on Rue Pascal on a Sunday afternoon. Tim was enduring the desolate idleness of a foreign city; the band was sleeping it off at the hotel. There were museums he could have gone to but Tim was not up to the solemn, wearying silences of art. He was drawn into the launderette by the sound of it.

  ‘How sad is that!’ Reggie said.

  No sadder than doing your laundry amidst the splendours of Paris, Tim thought. It was one of those automated places. A voice from a tall headstone of stainless steel barked the machine number, the programme required, the length of the wash. It was a flat voice, daleky, robotic. Tim liked the effect of it and the absurdity of the disembodied voice like a muezzin calling for prayer, issuing instructions to the unwashed.

  When he stepped inside the small glassy shop he was met with the bland owlish glare of stacked washers and dryers. Reggie was standing in front of the talking plinth, coins in one palm, the other hand raised in expansive helplessness while she barked at the flinty dial. ‘But how much do I put in?’

  ‘Can I help?’

  She turned swiftly. He got an impression of blond exasperation.

  The Man with the Quiet Voice appears out of the bathroom wearing Dad’s dressing gown. You are lying in wait outside for the game you and Dad play. You would hide in the well of the stairs and when you heard the bathroom door open, you would leap out with a tiger growl – Grrr! – and Dad would grab you and tickle you until you cried f
or mercy. You pounce. Jesus Christ, the Man swears. Denis, Mum cries and puts her hand over her mouth. Then she yanks you up roughly by the arm from the top step and propels you down the landing. Go to your room, this instant, and not another word!

  Dee-da, Dee-da, dee-da, dee-da …

  Of course, he compared her to Ruth – Ruth whom he probably should have ended up with. See, Tim argued with himself, I’m thinking of ending up with someone while Reggie is only starting out. Tender and pliant Ruth Denieffe who’d exuded an easy empathy, while being vehement on his behalf. Ruth who got the music thing – I’m a failed singer, she would say tartly, I know about vocation. She was a teacher, a zealot for instruction, a fierce and unlikely authority figure who stood at only five foot two and scared her pupils half to death, or so Tim suspected. Ruth had been mournful, half-finished songs in the bathroom and eerily silent when they made love. Reggie was operatic, all noise and protest. Ruth crept around him with her cloud of feline hair, her childlike limbs, her soft velour wardrobe. Reggie was a fusty mess of smudged cotton balls on the bedside table, her eyes in little dishes in the soap hollow of the bathroom basin, her clothes and heels all sharp angles. Reggie felt like danger, flashy and menacing as gold fillings; Ruth had been soothing balm.

  His relationship with Ruth had seemed like a premature rehearsal for what Tim thought real life would eventually be. They’d had five years that were as good as marriage. He’d met her parents, spent Christmas with them once on Prosperity Drive. Her footballer brother was home from England and drank too much and there had been a bit of a scene, Ruth’s mother dissolving into tears, her father maintaining an honourable silence as Barry harangued them about how they’d always favoured Ruth and John over him, despite the fact that he had made something of himself. Tim had never met John who had gone into a monastery straight after school. He was talked about with a reverence that Tim associated with the long-dead. Tim was fascinated – weren’t other people’s families so much easier to read, he thought. None of it had put him off Ruth. It was just he couldn’t quite believe that he had got it right with her; couldn’t trust to it. And when he had suggested to her that they take a break – just a break, that was all he meant so he could chastise himself into conviction – Ruth had given up without a whimper. He had expected resistance, a fight, but she had seemed primed for defeat as if she had never quite trusted him.

  ‘Phee-ew,’ she said. ‘I’ve been expecting this.’

  Was it relief or brave regret he heard? He never could work it out.

  He turns on the TV and slumps in front of it with the sound down. The breakfast news comes on. The newscaster, dressed like a sober schoolboy, sits casually on the side of the desk, feigning informality. Suddenly there is live coverage. Footage of panic, a fluorescent street strewn with wrecked cars, the glare and din of fire engines. Stretchers bearing shrouded forms being humped inexpertly along; the walking wounded lean and limp. Northern Ireland, Tim thinks dully, an old response, but no, he corrects himself, aren’t we living in a time of peace? The Middle East, then. He catches a glimpse of the wrought intaglio of an art deco Metro sign. Jesus, this is Paris! Where Reggie is. She might be lying under debris, mangled, mutilated. Her fiery head crushed, her hair smeared with blood. He imagines phoning her and her mobile ringing out. Before he can locate the remote, the carnage has disappeared and it’s back to the newscaster with a tickertape of shares running along the bottom of the screen. Has he dreamt it up?

  Bleary-eyed, he makes for the kitchen, checking the clock over the cooker hood before starting to make coffee. It is 7 a.m. The clock makes a silent digital calculation. He still expects it to declare itself. He remembers the magnified announcements of the wall clock in his grandmother’s parlour, which measured the hours with a grinding wheeze and the minutes with a disapproving tick, as if every moment mattered. And every moment did. In Mellick there was a time for the kettle to be boiled, for the cake of bread to be taken out of the oven, for the incantation of the Angelus.

  The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary …

  ‘You’ll love it,’ his father had said in that tone of false encouragement. Like when he wanted Tim to play football. Thwack!

  ‘Will Denis be there?’

  ‘Who?’ Dad barked.

  Mum glared at him and left without saying goodbye.

  The two weeks they were away – a package holiday to the sun; well, they’d sent men to the moon, hadn’t they? – seemed endless. He listened to the mournful bellowing of cows, the slap of their full fat udders swinging rudely from side to side, the splattery skeetering of hooves in the mud, the hup-hup of the boy who drove them. To the racket of the tractor and the baler passing by the gate. To the melancholy ripple of birdsong when he was put to bed even though it was still light outside.

  ‘Time for bye-byes,’ Gran would say. She still used baby talk though he was nearly seven.

  But mostly he was listening out for the scrunch of wheels on gravel and for Mum to come home.

  To his shame he is persistently and sickeningly jealous. He has fantasies of throttling anybody who looks crooked at Reggie. He would use his bare hands, blacken eyes if need be. Ker-pow! He has logged away all of the stray names she mentions – Jason, the steward who’s emphatically not gay, Ted, the divorced pilot, Marco, the great guy on the ground at Fiumicino – so that when she’s delayed he visualises her being with one of them simply because he knows their names. He has pressed her gently for details.

  ‘This guy, Jason, have I met him?’

  Reggie would shake her glorious hair. ‘No, he lives in Paris with Kate,’ she would say evenly.

  ‘And Ted?’

  ‘We met him at check-in once, remember? Tall guy with epaulettes? Drives a plane.’

  ‘I’m only asking,’ he would say.

  ‘You’re not only asking, Tim, you’re checking up on me – there’s a big difference. Don’t you trust me?’

  No, no, no. He could see how clichéd it was, the jealous older man making inventories of possible betrayal. Even after a year with Reggie, he still felt like he was handling unstable explosives, except he was the one ready to go off at any moment.

  The last time you see the Man with the Quiet Voice is in Bradleys. You remember the cold clammy feel of the gauge as the shop lady measures your bare feet for sandals and your mother kneading her fingers on the top of the clover pattern in the leather to make sure you have enough room to grow. Suddenly, he is upon you. This fella’s going to be big as a house, eh, Timmy, me boy, he says loudly. He grips you on the shoulder and does a trick with his hand so that a florin suddenly appears at his fingertips. Denis, Mum hisses. Jesus, Rosemary … The two of them go off and huddle in a corner of the shop. And Mum says please, please. And the shop lady says ‘Would Sir like to … ?’ You flex your feet in the new sandals with the blond soles. You don’t want him here. You want it to be just you and Mum and the shop lady marvelling at what a big boy you are as she puts your old shoes in the cardboard box that is like a coffin for a hamster. And when the shop lady attaches the balloon that comes free with each purchase to your finger, you want that moment just for yourself too. And you want to wave to the lady and to reach up for Mum’s cool hand. You don’t want her saying don’t and please and not in front of the child or the shop lady saying ‘Is everything alright, Madam?’ or the man saying Jesus Christ and you can’t and please, please. Or Mum suddenly catching you and dragging you out of the shop with the Man coming after and it’s such a squeeze in the doorway that … Bang! It is all over. He burst my balloon! you yell. You are out on the street and Mum is crying. And the Man with the Quiet Voice is standing in the doorway. No, no, it was just an accident, Mum says, we’ll get you another one. Her tears keep coming. The string is still attached to your forefinger. It trails on the pavement behind you with the torn red scrap that was your balloon. That man … you begin again. And she turns, your mother, and strikes you – Wham! – across the face. There is no man, she says. Do you hear me? There is no
man.

  To this day he cannot bear to be in a room full of balloons; too much imminence.

  ‘A sound man?’ Dad is incredulous.

  His mother presses START. It is his sister Maeve’s birthday and she is baking a cake so their conversation is punctuated by the aggravated whirr of the Magimix.

  ‘He’d be an engineer, though,’ Mum counters, ‘a sound engineer. That’s what they call it.’

  ‘He’ll be gofer in a studio, more like. Making the tea.’

  ‘We all had to begin somewhere, Frank.’

  Frank Shaw, self-made man, scrap-metal merchant, bristles. He is clutching his son’s exam results; Tim is sixteen and wants to leave school. He’s eavesdropping at the kitchen door, egging his mother on silently.

  ‘No son of mine,’ his father starts. STOP.

  The no son of mine speech is well rehearsed. Tim can recite it by heart.

  ‘Your son has always answered the call of a different drum.’

  Mum is scraping the bottom of the bowl. Tim can hear the impatient slap of the rubber spatula.

  ‘You’ve always been a fool about that boy, Rosemary. Needs a good kick up the arse, if you ask me. Look at this – an F even in Geography!’

  ‘What does any of it matter, once he’s happy?’

  ‘Oh well, excuse me, pardon! Once he’s happy! There’s a recession on out there, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  Rush of the tap as his mother fills the mixing bowl and sets it aside to steep.

  ‘He’ll be turning his back on everything I’ve built up.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Frank, isn’t it obvious he’s never going to follow you into the business?’

  ‘Not to me,’ Dad says and for the first time Tim feels sorry for him.

  Dad used to take him along to the scrapyard on Saturday mornings. It was a hellish place even though his father sat in an elevated Portakabin high above it, doing business over the phone, looking down on the hillocks of twisted metal, the mountains of toothed machine parts, the crushed fangs of cars. Dad didn’t seem to register the sudden, calamitous vomiting of scrap from the buckets of the diggers, the hollow volcanic thud of empty skips being hoisted and dropped, the shattering waterfall of shards rushing down the chutes into huge containers. How could he bear all that deafening medieval clangour, and still have appetite for battle when he got home?