Prosperity Drive

by Mary Morrissy

  In Italy she is emphatically elsewhere. In the ten years she’s been in Perugia, her mother’s mild eccentricities have given way to the bottomless pit of regression that is Alzheimer’s. Early onset. She has to be spoon-fed – infant food, egg in a cup, milky tea from a beaker with a teat. When she drifts off in mid-chew, Norah has to bark to retrieve her attention. ‘Mother, Mother!’ (Both of them have stopped calling her Mam; it is too soft, too companionable.)

  ‘They get stuck in a certain time,’ the doctor has explained to Norah. ‘Often the richest time of their lives, courtship say, or early marriage.’

  ‘Which must be why she keeps on telling me to be quiet or I’ll wake the baby,’ Norah remarks when Trish rings home. ‘She’ll use the commode for the day nurse, but not for me, oh no! I have to take her to the loo …’

  Norah’s reports of their mother are marked by a cruel frankness, and although her talk disturbs Trish, she lets Norah continue. It’s a trade-off for not being there.

  ‘It’s like potty training in reverse …’

  Trish switches off, preferring to remember holidays years ago when her mother would gaily pee in the middle of a field in full view. There was no skulking in the bushes for her.

  ‘In our day,’ she would tell the girls, ‘we just went in the orchard and buried it.’

  Trish, a fastidious child, would avert her eyes as her mother lifted her skirts with flirtatious abandon. The only thing that would stop her was the witness of cows. Whenever her mother saw the black-and-white plaid of a herd she would turn and run. The cows would stare complacently, intent on their placid, lugubrious chewing, but for her mother they were somehow a threat: it was the only dark spot in her gaiety. Now she seems all dark spots, a querulous patient, reduced to the soiled intimate whiff of an invalid.

  Trish steps out on to the Corso. There are things she should pick up – bread from the bakery, vegetables for dinner, some fresh pasta. But how can she function, half deaf, in the interrogative clamour of the marketplace? Besides, it is soothing to walk like this, melding with the drifting crowd, her jilted ear unable to tune into the sharp fragments of conversations all around her. It reminds her of her early days in Italy, surrounded by the babble of a language she didn’t understand. It was a kind of newborn sensation to sit in a café or a bus assaulted by the racket of conversation whose meaning she couldn’t hope to decipher. For several glorious months she was like a mute infant, wordless and uncomprehending, feasting on strange beauties, depending on exaggerated gesticulation. Innocent. But, like babyhood, it was a passing phase. She couldn’t pinpoint the day when she didn’t have to look out the windows of the train to check on the names of the stations, when she had ceased to remark on the nutmeg hills, or register the sentried cypresses and the umber church towers, when the landscape had retreated to a homely distance. It took several years but she had certainly reached that stage when Norah announced that she was coming to visit.

  Even with Louis out of the picture, Trish dreaded the prospect. Norah would probably want to talk about her marriage break-up even though almost a year had passed since it had happened. If it were anyone else, Trish might have relished a post-mortem. Her early twenties were spent in such tortuous inquisitions with her pals. Long winey nights in perpetual dusk picking through the entrails of broken love with inferior men. But she’d never done that sort of thing with Norah. Norah didn’t confide; she was too elder for that. And if she did bring the marriage up, Trish was afraid Norah would detect her guilt and mistake it for the fatal lack of empathy that had always dogged their relationship. Would she be able to last a week in Norah’s company without succumbing and mentioning Louis’s name?

  When Norah arrived, Trish showed off shamelessly. The balmy nights, the lavender hue of Perugia’s medieval streets co-operated in the ruse. Away from home where she was so rootedly righteous, Norah had seemed at sea, ponderous and heavy-limbed. She’d got sunburnt on her first day, which Trish saw as a ridiculous failing; she was bamboozled by the noughts in the currency. While Trish was out teaching during the day, Gianni showed Norah the sights. They zoomed around on Gianni’s scooter with Norah riding pillion, clinging perilously to his slender frame. He was a Classics scholar but doing hours at the Università per Stranieri to pay the rent. Gianni’s training meant he was the perfect tour guide. He spoke of the ancients as if they were immediate relatives; he read the architecture as if it were as obvious as motorway signage. For him history was not something separate, whereas for Trish the charm of Italy was its lack of associations. She did not want to have it all explained away, by Gianni or anyone else. But she was delighted that he was around for Norah’s visit (though they had broken up shortly afterwards). He looked good with his dark shoulder-length hair and his unexpected green eyes and he had impressed Norah as thoughtful and steady. He had been a vital part of her armour; he had helped to throw Norah off the scent. But, she kept on reassuring herself, there was no need to worry. Norah had no idea, no idea at all.

  The evening before Norah was due to leave they sat outdoors at a pavement table on the Corso at sundown drinking beers and watching the evening crowds stroll by. Norah had not mentioned Louis once, which unnerved Trish more than if she’d spent the week bad-mouthing him. At least that way he would have been a presence; this way it was as if he was dead.

  ‘How long more do you think you’ll do this?’ Norah had asked.

  Trish bristled, as if being in Italy were some trinkety experiment.

  ‘What do you mean? This happens to be my life, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘But you can’t be a penniless foreign language teacher for ever, Trish.’ She couldn’t work out if Norah’s expression was pitying or stricken. ‘It’s just that Mother often asks …’

  ‘Mother probably doesn’t know who I am any more.’

  ‘That’s not true … she has moments when she’s perfectly lucid.’

  ‘She thinks I’m still a baby – you said so yourself.’

  ‘Come home, Trish, before she forgets everything.’

  But Trish did not want to see the shambling mother replica that Norah described; perversely, she wanted the tomboy mother of her teens, the woman who had embarrassed her by trying to make up to her what could not be made up for. Or the mother at the airport, biting back tears, repeating the only two Italian words she knew – spaghetti and Caruso. Or was that the beginning of the illness? She couldn’t say to Norah – I want to forget everything and can’t. And out of a kind of panic about Norah’s naked entreaty, she asked, ‘How’s Louis?’ Anything to distract from the coming-home business.

  ‘What do you mean, how is he?’

  ‘I mean, how are you two? Now, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’

  ‘Do you ever see him?’ Trish asked. She could hear the longing in her voice, but Norah was too irritated with her to notice. Could it be that …

  ‘He’s gone to America,’ Norah said miserably. ‘And he has someone else.’

  Even further away than before, Trish thought.

  Now she lets herself into the gnarled front door of the flat on Via Alessi, and climbs the stairs wearily, still worrying at her ear.

  ‘Pat-ree-z-iah!’ Claudia shrieks from the other room. ‘Telefono!’

  It still irritates Trish, this strange elongation of her name with the squeal inserted in the middle of it and the long yawn at the end. She struggles with their names – the Fabrizios, the Giuseppinas – why can’t they do the same?

  ‘La tua sorella,’ Claudia says as she retreats to her bedroom, half shod in slovenly bedroom slippers, cigarette in hand. Claudia smokes in a sullen sexy sort of way, drawing fiercely but exhaling slowly, leaving lazy queries of smoke overhead. Nursing her ear, Trish goes to the phone. She lifts the receiver. The hum in her ear adds to the echoey sense of distance.

  ‘Trish?’ Norah says tentatively.

  Who else would it be, Trish thinks.

  ‘It’s Mother.’

&nb
sp; ‘What about her?’ Trish asks, panicky.

  Three months ago, Norah had rung with the same tone of voice and told Trish that her mother was dead. She’d never understood why. Shock tactics? Some macabre carer’s joke? Or an unconscious desire to punish Trish for a crime she didn’t even know about? Every time she rings now, Trish braces herself. (After all, even in the story, the wolf finally came.) And Norah’s lie about her mother being dead had another consequence. It had made Trish confess. About Louis. She’d felt a compunction to explain her absence. Thinking there was nothing to lose, she’d blurted it out. Not all the details, no; Norah wouldn’t have wanted to hear that. But the scene replaying in Trish’s head as she confessed was the engagement party when it had all started.

  When Louis and Norah had got engaged, they’d had a party on a boat in the harbour. It was quite a showy thing for Norah but Louis was a party animal, a showman, jokey in a brotherly sort of way. He and Trish laughed at the same things; he was playful with her and she sort of flirted with him. But only because it was utterly safe – he was her sister’s boyfriend and not her type at all. Buffet food was served below deck and Louis’s musician friends (he played in a trad band at the weekends) were providing the music down there. Trish had come up on deck for a smoke. It was a Saturday afternoon, windy, a blue sky with racing cloud, and the air as zingy as toothpaste. Dan Gildea, Norah’s gay friend from work, was taking snaps of the happy couple.

  ‘Come on, baby sis,’ Louis called out to Trish and gestured to her to join them where they stood leaning against the guard rail. ‘Hold it a minute, Dan.’

  Trish sidled over and stood beside Norah.

  ‘Don’t want to be muscling in,’ she said to Norah.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Louis said, leaning out and winking at her.

  ‘Ready?’ Dan shouted.

  There was a sudden turbulence behind them, a roaring swell and a fevered agitation of the water.

  Next thing Trish felt Louis touch her on her bare arm. The one that was stretched along the rail behind Norah’s back. Louis clasped it at the elbow and stroked it once. She felt a charge from it. Was it intended or did she just imagine that part of it? Something was changed by that touch, that’s all she knew. Something in her. She leaned out to check but Louis’s profile beyond Norah remained set. Just at that moment, Dan took the photo so Trish’s face was obscured by a windswept nest of hair. But Norah kept the snap; she even had it framed, although Louis was a squinting parody of himself in it and Trish was reduced to a tangled blur. Only Norah was looking at the camera.

  ‘Oh it’s not for us I’m keeping it,’ she told Trish. ‘Look at me, I look like I’m about to be taken to the gallows.’

  No, Norah had kept it because the commotion they’d sensed as the picture was being taken was a huge cruise ship that had glided into the frame as Dan pressed the button. The ship filled the entire background – a giant white wall of glinting windows, a riveted fortress on the move. There must have been six floors of decks and the passengers were crowded at the rails, a sea of indecipherable faces, some waving, others sending out semaphore flashes with their cameras, others just standing there, forlorn with farewell. The whale-ish ship dwarfed the three of them and blotted out everything else – the jaunty sky, the choppy waters, the landmark beacon at the mouth of the harbour.

  ‘Surreal,’ Norah would marvel. ‘It’s all about what’s going on in the background.’

  Trish had stayed for the wedding and then bolted. That touch had driven her to Italy and given her the elsewhere she’d always longed for. She’d told herself it was honour or renunciation, virtues she associated with Norah, but she suspects now it was simply cowardice.

  The phone gives off a cackle.

  ‘They’ve moved her, to the hospital,’ Norah is saying. That’s the way it is with Norah: no preliminaries.

  ‘Oh.’ Trish switches the receiver to her good ear.

  ‘I think you’d better come.’

  ‘I can’t just drop all my classes …’

  ‘Patricia!’ Norah interjects sharply, the command of the sickroom. Several seconds tick by. Trish can hear a faint chipmunk babble in the background, a dozen other conversations jamming up the airwaves.

  ‘If it’s a question of money,’ Norah offers.

  ‘No, no, it’s just …’

  Superstition? That if she stays away she can ward it off. The truth is, she hadn’t expected a warning. She’d expected a fait accompli, a swift and retributive absence as it had been with her father.

  ‘I thought you’d want to be here … for the end. It’s very close.’

  Too close, Trish thinks.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  She’s angry with Norah – this is her territory; she knows how to do it. She was there when their father died. Mostly Trish doesn’t want to face Norah, with the confession about Louis lying there between them.

  ‘Hurry,’ Norah says, ‘please hurry.’

  The note of pleading in Norah’s voice scares her. She gets off the phone and promptly throws up.

  When Trish wakes the next morning the room appears sluggish, but as soon as she tries to lift her legs over the side of the bed it becomes animated, and tossed by some unseen storm it begins a sickly rotation that makes her retch. She finds herself clutching the bedside table in a vain attempt to hold everything down, to slow the movement, to induce stillness. But even that slight exertion brings her out in a prickling sweat. The world seems to have shifted on its axis. It is slipping away from her like the deck of a sinking ship.

  ‘Madonna!’ Claudia exclaims. ‘Che cosa?’

  ‘A brain tumour, probably,’ Trish says, ‘that’s what got my father.’

  Claudia lights up in the doorway of Trish’s room. She blows her smoke rings out into the hall in deference to Trish’s condition. Trish watches her intently, hoping that if she latches on to something fixed she will feel less queasy. But Claudia appears to be miles away, trapped in a vertiginous distance, like a slothful Virgin in a seashell grotto, reduced to a speck by an artist demented by the rules of perspective. It makes Trish’s stomach heave to look at her. Meanwhile, booming in her ears, she can hear Norah’s voice as if her temples house the breathy bowl of the telephone. She spends the day in a fever but by evening the room has stopped lurching around her and the nausea has abated. She feels well enough to go to the doctor – the English doctor. Trish has never fully trusted the Italian lexicon of illness; after all, they didn’t have a distinct word for hangover.

  ‘It’s an inner ear infection,’ the doctor tells her. ‘Quite common. A simple course of antibiotics should clear it.’

  ‘Will I get my hearing back?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says lightly. ‘Any loss is temporary.’

  While he is scribbling out the script in his illegible hand, Trish enquires about air travel.

  ‘Well, as they used to say, is your journey really necessary?’

  Trish hesitates. She feels a strange panicky rush, the prelude to denial.

  ‘No …’ she answers doubtfully, afraid that the doctor can see right through her, as if her deafness has made her transparent.

  ‘Well, then,’ the doctor says, rising. ‘You can afford to wait.’

  Out on the flinty blue piazza Trish feels curiously bereft. In the distance a church bell bleats. Or is that a cock crowing? A huddle of pigeons at her feet takes fright, flapping fiercely as they scatter skyward. The shuttered architecture averts its gaze. A cold wind whips about her as she stands on the deserted cobbles. The puddles shiver. Her clogged head throbs; in her belly she feels the umbilical dread of reconnection.

  Flying back, the oceanic rage in her ear is replaced by an entombed silence. In the twilight capsule of the aircraft, she remembers her journey out. The cosmetic ease of Duty Free: the bleak rush of getting off the island; the anticipation of being in the heart of Europe and not secreted away on a tiny speck in the Continent’s armpit; and trying not to think about Louis. She finds her
self dissolving into tears. She’s crying, but without sound it isn’t like grief, it is like something simulated and shallow. She is in a different kind of elsewhere, tramping through a sonic snow, muffled and woolly. She thumps her ear with her fist, desperate to get it to work. But she is deaf to all appeals, even her own.

  The light in the hospital room is warm and dim, the blinds tilted downwards. Trish and Norah sit, one on each side of the bed. The silence – apart from their mother’s shallow breathing – and the crepuscular light make it impossible to tell what time of the day it is. The air is rank with the creamy, erotic smell of lilies. Trish bought them at the airport, not wanting to arrive empty-handed.

  ‘Funeral flowers,’ Norah said as she arranged them in a vase.

  Trish resented the implied reproach. As if she’d got her timing wrong. Not late, but too early. The etiquette of death would always defeat her.

  When she had arrived, Trish had approached her mother’s bed cautiously. The chestnut rinse her mother had used in her hair had drained away leaving a delicate sheen of silver. Someone – probably Norah – had combed it and it lay fanned out on the pillow. Trish had bent over her mother in the bed. She was barely conscious, her eyes closed, her brow creased with the effort of drawing breath. All Trish could do was to lift her limp hand and hold it momentarily before letting it fall again. It had seemed inappropriate to kiss her – even on the forehead. (That was what you did to a corpse.) There was not a flicker of recognition. It was true what Norah had said, her mother had forgotten everything, including Trish.

  Being close at hand has made no difference. There has been no absolving of grief, just a banal mood of solemnity. Her hearing has clarified but there is still a feeling of remove, as if she’s thousands of miles away. She feels cheated. After so much evasion there is nothing to fear except this, an embarrassed anxiety, the secret wish for it to be over. She rises and paces up and down. She and Norah have been by their mother’s bedside for almost a week. There is all the time in the world but they don’t talk about Louis. Their days are punctuated instead by the routine sounds of the hospital which reach them in their shuttered room but lay no claim to them − the dull thud of footsteps in the corridors, the officious swish of doctors on their rounds, the squeal of trolleys. At mealtimes there is the metallic din of soup urns and the dolorous toll of aluminium domes clamped on dinner plates.