Her father’s illness had infected all of them. Norah could barely remember a time when he hadn’t been sick.
‘It’s just that Daddy’s not going to get better.’ Her mother’s lips trembled a little when she said this.
Norah waited. She felt sure by the rising pitch of her mother’s sentence that there was worse to come.
‘Did you hear me?’ her mother asked, crossly, or so Norah thought, as if her attention had been wandering.
‘He’s going to die, Norah, your precious daddy’s going to die,’ she said all in a rush as if Norah’s silence had forced the admission out of her.
Since that day, Norah felt there had always been a spiteful undertow at work between herself and her mother, as if, despite their apparent closeness, something bitter and illicit was at work. Whatever governed the surges of the relationship – the volatile moon, who knew? – it had reached its lowest point when Louis came on the scene. Louis, her husband. Or ex, she should say. X marks the wound. It was not that her mother disapproved of him; in fact, she professed to like Louis. She thought him presentable, husband material, as if he were a bolt of cloth at a knockdown price. He got on with people. That was Louis’s gift. His affability. But her mother imbued Norah with a terrible uncertainty about him.
‘Are you sure?’ she kept on asking as if there was something unstable, not about Louis but about Norah. As if she couldn’t depend on Norah’s feelings about anything, least of all about her beloved. That’s what her mother used to call Louis. Your beloved. And Norah couldn’t work out if it was sarcasm or envy.
‘I wonder,’ her mother would muse, ‘what your father would have made of him.’
Trish takes up several pages in Norah’s address book, each old address scored out to make way for the new. Even on paper she seems elusive as if, in reversal of their childhood pattern, she is intent on wriggling out of Norah’s grasp. When she finds the number, she hesitates. Ringing Trish always involves effort – effort to sound upbeat, generous, which in the circumstances is difficult to sustain. She lifts the phone and listens to the soft burr of the dial tone. She rehearses openings. I’ve done something terrible. You won’t believe this. I didn’t mean to. Now I’m afraid I might do it again. It’s just that her helplessness provoked me. How dare she be so weak, so frail that my impatience could actually wound her? My mere impatience! She dials the long number.
‘Pronto!’
It wasn’t Trish; it never was. A seemingly endless parade of voices answered for her. This was Claudia, who had next to no English.
‘Can I speak to Trish?’
‘Patreezia non c’è.’ Whatever it meant, Norah recognised the no in it.
‘This is her sister.’
‘Norah?’ Claudia queried. She might not speak English but she could put two and two together. Norah almost blurts it all out to Claudia but no, that would be a false confession, cataloguing her crime to someone who doesn’t understand her. Her panic ebbs and another sensation replaces it, seething, vengeful.
‘Can you pass on a message?’
‘Messaggio, sì,’ Claudia says after a few seconds of cogitation.
‘It’s about my mother,’ Norah begins before remembering to keep it simple. ‘Please tell my sister her mother is dead.’
‘Dead?’ Claudia repeats. ‘Morta? Madre? ’ Her husky smoker’s voice reaches an incredulous pitch.
‘Sì,’ Norah says obligingly and puts the phone down. That would get Trish’s attention.
There are things about her situation that Trish has never understood. It is not the mortifications of being a carer; Norah can handle those. It is being back on home territory, joining the roll call of the damaged and the lost, as if her adult life had simply and silently unspooled. She sometimes meets the other adult children of Prosperity Drive when she is out on her errands. There is Barry Denieffe, who got a trial with an English soccer club and went off as a teenager to some dismal mill town across the water. It wasn’t that he hadn’t made it, exactly; he had just never made it to the First Division. He was back now living with his ageing parents, idle mostly; what, she wondered, did a retired footballer do with his life? Barry had been a frighteningly good-looking boy (Norah had nursed a painful crush on him for a while) with a mop of unruly jet-black hair, dark brown eyes and a lithe, loose arrangement of his limbs as if his body owned him. When they had played football on the street, Barry counted as three on the team he played for. Now if you passed him, you’d nearly give him a penny. His muscle had turned to sag and, it was rumoured, there was a broken marriage behind him. It was, Norah thought as she passed him, as if he had been sheltering this beaten, lonely personage for years inside the burnished armour of a cocky athlete.
Then there was Mary Elizabeth Noone. Her parents had insisted on this full handle even when they were kids, and would berate anyone who dared to shorten it. She was a fat, middle-aged envoy from a skinny and delicate childhood. She’d had scarlet fever and that weakens the heart. But the weakness, it transpired, had actually been of the mental variety. She lived alone in her parents’ home (she was a late and only child) and failed to keep herself clean. Ballooned by medication she talked loudly to herself on the avenue. (As a child this was considered charming and fey; even the adults played along with the notion of Mary Elizabeth’s imaginary friend.) Now her voice boomed out in hostile interrogatives shouted across the street at all comers. ‘Are you still my friend?’
Even the dead companions of childhood come back to haunt Norah. She remembers Julia Fortune who overdosed in a hotel room − in New York, was it? Some love affair gone wrong, apparently. And Hetty Gardner, that little American kid who was killed falling off her bike going down Classon’s Hill. Or Finn Motherwell, the asthmatic. Finn had been deemed Norah’s special friend. When he was poorly, Mrs Motherwell would send for Norah so that she could read to him in bed.
‘Here’s our little Florence Nightingale,’ she used to say, looking at Norah doe-eyed even though Norah hadn’t volunteered for the position: she’d been summoned. It wasn’t that she didn’t like being with Finn. His frailty made him like an honorary girl and he seemed to like, and be grateful for, Norah’s attention. But he would often fall asleep before Norah had finished even a chapter. She would sit in his room, book in hand but unlistened to, and feel miserably duped.
Armed with the baton of the newspaper, Norah climbs upstairs and resumes her position of vigilance. If Patrick were here now, she thinks, he’d be thirty-four. She imagines a personable, jokey man (she imagines Louis) with a blond wife and three small children, their father’s face (from the bank of photographs on the sitting-room mantelpiece) transposed on to a slender frame – and with a more trendy haircut. He would have called her Sis, breezed into the house all cheery and have been able to cajole their mother out of every sour and wrinkled mood. A capacity of which Norah would be jealous, of course. God, even her fantasies disown her!
On the off-chance that her mother is listening, she calls out the next clue aloud: ‘Pined quietly in misery feeling the pinch, six letters, last one d.’
But it is no good. She cannot distract herself. The black squares of the grid are like holes torn in the sky. Compulsion, like the urge for nicotine, overtakes her. She picks up her mother’s thin wrist, the scraggy chicken part at the back of her hand where she is just bone. Gathering the slack skin between her fingers, Norah squeezes. Hard. Her mother’s eyes flicker open. She looks at Norah wordlessly but there is no shock, or even surprise. It is as if she expected it.
Then the telephone rings.
‘Norah?’ It’s Trish. ‘She’s gone?’
Norah can hear the disbelieving wobble in Trish’s voice.
‘Yes,’ she can hear herself saying, evenly, steadily.
‘Nipped,’ her mother interjects suddenly.
‘What was that?’
‘That was Tena. Tena’s here with me.’
‘Oh, Norah,’ Trish says and there is a snotty sound, emotion clogging in her nose. Th
en there are noisy tears. She can imagine Trish’s face reddening up, the fishy pout of her lips, her ugly wail. That’s the trouble with caring, Norah thinks, it makes you care less.
‘I should be there,’ Trish says. ‘Are you alright?’
Finally. Norah is about to answer but the lump in her throat won’t allow it.
‘Just come home,’ she says. It sounds like a confession, as if she had told Trish about the bruise.
‘Norah,’ Trish rushes in, ruining the cadence. ‘I have to tell you something … the reason I couldn’t …’
There is a smothering sound; Trish wiping her face with her sleeve.
‘Louis,’ she says simply.
‘What do you mean, Louis?’
‘Nothing happened, Norah, I swear it.’
For some reason the group photograph at her wedding comes to Norah’s mind. The guests scattered artfully on the lawn in front of the hotel and the photographer calling out designations – ‘Bridal party, the bridesmaid, best man and the groom’s parents, please.’ There is Trish, swathed in the full-length plum taffeta with the spaghetti straps Norah had chosen, and Louis in his penguin suit, nuzzling his nose into her corsage. And Norah, foolish and deluded bride, thinking how lovely they get on so well. Like a brother and sister.
‘It was me,’ Trish is wailing now, ‘all me, all in my head.’
And what about Louis’s head, Norah wants to scream.
‘He never knew … I swear to God. How could I tell him something like that? But I couldn’t stay, that’s why I went away. I couldn’t be near the pair of you, feeling what I did …’
Norah puts her hand up to stop Trish though it’s a useless gesture; she can’t be seen. She doesn’t want to be party to this, some secret Morse of her marriage being tapped out in front of her after the fact.
‘I was trying to do the right thing …’ Trish has moved on now to self-justification; Norah has to stem that.
‘Do you want to say hello to Mother?’ She hears Trish’s intake of breath.
Norah places the receiver in the crook of her mother’s neck. Her mother beams – a special smile for the prodigal. She leaves them to it. She rushes down the stairs, out the front door and into the street. It’s early summer and Prosperity Drive looks at its most benign. A phantom moon graces the still-bright sky. Windblown blossoms from the cherry trees nestle at the kerbsides; laburnums weep over the pebble-dash walls. The first street games would be starting about now – hopscotch, skipping and football. Standing outside the garden gate, she sees Finn Motherwell in his Aertex shirt, his ragged V-neck jumper, a pair of crumpled shorts and those spindly legs, knees like doorknobs. He’s standing in goal, between two sweaters acting as goalposts, and he’s sucking on his inhaler. When he fell over, all the boys thought he was fooling. When they couldn’t rouse him, someone went for his mother. Norah remembered Mrs Motherwell in her flour-daubed pinny, hurrying up the street, then dropping to her knees at this spot. (One of the older girls had thoughtfully made a pillow of one of the goalpost sweaters.) Mrs Motherwell, a squat homely woman with prominent teeth, keened and moaned, while all the kids watched, aghast at this demonstration of passion. She crushed Finn’s head to her breast like the marble Pietà in the Servants’ Church. This must have been what it was like for Our Lady, Norah had thought; only begotten son took on a whole new meaning.
What she’d done or failed to do hadn’t made any difference to Finn. As it wouldn’t with her mother. Only the secrets and lies would persist, leaving their indelible marks.
BODY LANGUAGE
Suddenly, miles inland, Trish can hear the sea. It’s in the middle of Beginners’ English in an upstairs room at the Eureka Language School on the Corso Vannucci, the wooden casements thrown open to a lilac dusk and the lazy, muted purr of the passeggiata drifting up from the street. Seven eager Italians gaze up at her as, mid-sentence, her hearing ebbs away and the ocean rushes in. They are doing The Body. She is pointing to her calves – polpaccii – when the hissing starts. By the time she’s got to orecchio, her ear is a seashell seething with tide. She dismisses the class early; it is too disorientating to hear their plaintive chorus of body parts coming at her in waves, as if on a staticky radio. She tries worrying at her ear to clear the sibilant fog. She remembers the sensation from childhood, the chlorine-clogged hum of the swimming pool. The trick then was to tilt her head sideways and wait for a trickle to emerge. She leans over but it only intensifies the underwater boom. She feels she’s drowning in waves of home …
For as long as she could remember Trish had wanted to be elsewhere. When she was eight a new estate had been built at the end of Prosperity Drive. There were a half a dozen bungalows, detached, all of them different. These houses had lush open spaces in front in place of hemmed-in gardens and some of them had names emblazoned on timber signs or engraved on small boulders in the grass like the tombstones of deceased pets. For Trish it was like straying into a small patch of TV America. Here a boy in jeans and a baseball cap might appear out of one of the doorways and drive off in his father’s Buick. Her best friend might live in Number 4 and be a cheerleader rather than Connie Long, fat, loyal and haunted by the Third Secret of Fatima, who lived over a newsagent’s shop in the village. Trish pestered her mother to move.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Patricia, they’re way beyond our means.’
Means were often mentioned by her mother. It infuriated Trish; everything about her mother’s candid widowhood infuriated her. Even the gritty courage of her mother’s loneness made her mad. She remembered camping trips where her mother played the dad, collecting the kindling, lighting the fire, or outings to the countryside in an unreliable Volkswagen that she had belatedly learned to drive. Not many mothers drove then, and the necessity that had prompted her mother to take up driving (several years after her father’s death) seemed to make it a heroic undertaking. She worked nights at the telephone exchange so she could be with her girls when they got home from school. Leaving Trish’s sister Norah in charge, she would rush out of the house at eight in the evening oozing crisp scent and a daytime efficiency. She would ring from work on the hour to check that everything was okay. In the mornings Norah prepared breakfast and packed their lunches, while their mother slept. The house seemed hungover; she and Norah tiptoed about and talked in whispers while the golden glow from the bedside lamp leaking under the door of their mother’s room gave off hints of bordello. Although there were only five years between them, Norah had always seemed much older. It was she who had been mother’s little helper, witness to their father’s death, a grave and stubborn child schooled in the intricacies of adult grief, a vigilant reader of moods. Because she remembered their father (Trish would practise calling him Dad but it seemed as slangy as referring to Christ’s father as Joe) Norah had always seemed as weighty and grounded as a parent. For her the word had been made flesh. But for Trish her father hovered, incorporeal, like a notion of Christian perfection. Dead and revered he belonged to a time before the world had fallen. Or was it before Trish had fallen?
Trish liked to hear her mother talk about work – the flirty conversations she had with men while connecting them to far-off places, the gossip about the ‘girls’ at the exchange, their doomed romances, their broken engagements. When they rang up they would simply ask for Edel, and Trish would have to do a double take to remember that it was her mother they were talking about. This night-time place that her mother escaped to bristled with a youthful, dangerous energy, a far cry from Prosperity Drive where she and Norah were stranded among mothers and fathers. Trish despised all couples – those walking arm in arm on the street, or even the ones clearly at odds, hurling insults at each other like Connie Long’s parents. The taunting confidence of even badly working families, the rectangular rectitude of them, made the world their mother had built seem rickety and frail as an isosceles triangle. All that work, all her mother’s labours, only emphasised what they could never have: the seamless symmetry of family.
Trish
does not remember her father; any knowledge of him comes through Norah. She conjures up Fifties films, a man with a hat and pipe and flecked tweed overcoat, the brilliance of hair oil, the complicated mysteries of shaving. She was six – and absent – when he died. A neighbour, Mrs Devoy, had taken her away for a few days to give her mother a break so that her father’s death, for Trish, has become a time of lazy blur and unexpected reward. A seaside chalet, the crash of waves, the rough gaiety of the Devoy boys. This is as far back as her memory goes – to that china-blue timber hut, Mrs Devoy in a black bathing suit, her skin glistening with tiny specks of sand, lifting her high into the air against a shimmer of sea. When Trish thinks of her birth it is that moment on the beach as if Mrs Devoy had delivered her there on the sand. As if she had just popped out, shiny and new. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t fit; wrong mother, for one. It is a milestone for Trish, the first conscious memory she is sure is hers.
As a teenager, Trish imagined her life as a film, as if every moment of her day was being recorded by an electronic eye. It buoyed her up to imagine the drum of a soundtrack in her ear, the glide of a camera in her wake, a voiceover more knowing than she was. It was the only way she could transform the stifling landscape of Prosperity Drive into the vast meanwhile of movies. (That and taking two European languages at school, shunning History for Italian.) Even when she went further afield, Trish could not shake off the sensation that they were living in an abandoned outpost. In the summer she and Norah would pedal for miles along the coast road to the public baths. They were open-air sea baths, penned in by whitewashed walls but with the wide open horizon clearly visible. The windswept esplanade pushed out into a thin, dirty sea with the lofty leftover bustle of Empire; the dingy seafront houses peeled. The Irish Sea sucked and slapped and retreated so far it seemed to disappear, leaving the strand puddled and bereft. When Trish thought of it now, she felt sorry for it, if it was possible to feel sorry for a place. From this distance she realised that her vision of home was coloured with a good deal of self-righteous, adolescent gloom. She had to concede that there had been moments when, in a sudden burst of winter sunshine, the cobalt-blue sea and the seagull-chequered beach could have been an exotic and undiscovered Arctic shore. But these transformations had always been fleeting, and as an adult, Trish could only achieve them when she was stoned.
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