Prosperity Drive (15 page)

The crowd surged behind them. In the mirrors she could see hands raised with notes crumpled in them.

‘What do you say, Hugh Grove?'

She felt a kind of power now as if she'd got the upper hand.

‘What would be the point, after all this time?' he asked.

It hadn't occurred to her that she might be the one doing the persuading.

‘Oh, Norah dear, the world has done its job on you, alright,' he said, bleary-eyed.

‘Well, then,' she said, touching his arm, feeling suddenly sorry for him, ‘
you
don't have to feel responsible for it.'

‘Oh God, Norah, I don't know …'

‘Is that a yes, then?'

He smiled wearily but he agreed, as she knew he would.

* * *

The night of the Christmas party Elaine was still up when he got home. She'd dressed the Christmas tree and was sitting in the darkened sitting room, the fairy lights flickering on and off among the silvered baubles. She'd had a bath and was sitting on the sofa with the TV on but the sound low so as not to wake Hugh Junior who was just after his night feed
and asleep in the Moses basket at her feet. She smelled of bath salts – almond blossom, was it, or passion flower – and there was a dampness in her cleavage just visible beneath the folds of her white towelling dressing gown. It parted at the knees and he could see the tiny reddened tributaries of veins around her knees. The rewards of childbirth, she'd said ruefully more than once. She looked up when he came in but said nothing, merely opened her arms and Hugh fell upon her gratefully like a man saved.

‘Get in!' he ordered.

Owen stood, damp, on the cobbled quay, hands on hips. Below him the ornate prow of the black gondola and the upturned face of the gondolier, beaming. A professional rictus. The choppy water glinted. Her stomach heaved.

‘Murph,' Owen warned. ‘I'll go without you.'

In that moment, she despised him. His doughy face and his squinty glasses and his sandy hair standing on end. His little paunch and his embarrassed-looking legs in crumpled shorts. There was no end to her catalogue of contempt.

‘Venice,' he had said that morning, towelling his damp hair and looking out of the high casement window overlooking the canal. ‘City of lovers …'

She had expected a roll call of masterpieces; Giorgione's
La Tempesta
, Bellini's Madonnas, Titian's
Presentation of the Virgin
.

‘Canals, gondolas,' he went on.

‘Gondolas?'
Wingbeat of alarm. Wingbeat of memory.

‘Well, it
is
what Venice is famous for. We'll have to take a spin in one at some stage.'

Rock and lurch of water. A pair of splintered glasses.

When Owen went down to breakfast ahead of her, she rang her mother.

‘Is all well in the bedchamber?' her mother had asked.

* * *

It was Owen who had insisted they wait; part of his deference to her culture. He often spoke about her culture – it made her think of the laboratory – though she had grown up in the same suburb, albeit that the Devoys owned a semi-detached, half red-brick on Prosperity Drive and she lived in a flat over Uncle's takeaway in the village. Her notion of village was the dim memory of her grandmother's house, part of a rickety huddle, drenched and rotten. In time, Uncle had graduated from the modest quarters over the shop, leaving the place to Kim's mother.

Despite their proximity, Kim hadn't met Owen until college though he'd ordered food many times from the Great Wall, he'd told her. The No. 24, he'd said, Chow Mein. With chips, he'd added sheepishly. Typical, she thought, remembering her time serving behind the counter as a schoolgirl and taking orders on the phone. It was chips with everything.

He'd been right about the waiting, though. For two whole days, they hadn't ventured out of their cool, tiled room. The heavy double doors remained closed to the world, the eyelids of the slatted window shutters turned demurely down. They made love hungrily, repeatedly. The sheets were musky with the days-old scent of their sex. Exhausted, they drowsed deeply, lethargic with ravishment and the clenched release of orgasm. They did not shower or wash; they bathed instead in the pungent secretions of lust. They barely ate – they snacked on nuts and chocolate from the minibar. They slurped beer and spilt spumes of it over one another and watched as it seethed in ferment on their heated skin. In the afternoons they coupled on the marble floor and slept afterwards resplendently naked, waking in twilight, gathering the sheets from the tiles to swathe around them as they journeyed to the bed and started again. They emerged on the third day to barbed sunshine and a sky fat with dark cloud. She could sense rain in the air. The clouds spoke to her.
It was what she looked at when the others were defecating so as not to shame them.

* * *

Owen was itching to get started though Kim had lounged in bed late, lazily reluctant to quit their pungent nest. It was an indolence that alarmed him. He watched her body curled like a cat in the crushed sheets at noon.
Stink and sweat of daytime, bone-cold nights. Seventeen bodies huddled together to sleep, fetid clothes, salt larded in the creases.

‘Come on, Murph,' he'd said, fingering her silky hair which fell in a fan on her back-turned shoulder. He ran his hand over her delicate haunch, marvelling at its perfection and his own unworthiness. She seemed to him in that moment the most perfect creature he had ever seen. That was when he remembered Quinny. Out of nowhere the memory of her kneeling as if in adoration in front of the oven, her head to one side, her hair falling about her shoulders.

‘Come back to bed, Doctor,' Kim purred and gripped him blindly. He pulled his hand away sharply. Suddenly the foul airlessness of the room, the rank sheets, Kim's sour unwashed smell revolted him and he wanted out.

Once out, she had seemed happy to walk across the pigeon-scattered expanse of San Marco or to follow him along the narrow alleyways of the Giudecca which plunged into darkness or unexpectedly led back to a shy piece of waterway. There was water all afternoon, glimpsed between stone and arch and pooled between flagstones in sad, unexpected corners, wet pockets of secrecy. Late in the day, a misty rain began to fall. Owen had brought a transparent plastic rain cloak, one he used for cycling to college, and they shared it, wandering until twilight when the air, moist with intermittent drizzle, cooled to a lavender chill. Perhaps it was the weather, or the unpeopled melancholy of off-season Venice, but by dusk he felt invaded by a bleak sense of bereavement. He blamed it on the intrusive memory of Quinny. She hadn't crossed his mind in years. She was a maid who'd looked after him when he was a child, to whom he'd been very attached, or so his mother told him.
He remembered her hair mostly; auburn, unruly, so long she could sit on it. You were her pet, his mother would say, with an odd emphasis. His treasured pink bunny had come from Quinny. There was a postcard of the beach in Courtown where they used to go on holidays, in which Quinny had featured, straw-hatted and solitary, minding his baby brother Fergal, and shielded from the sea by a striped windbreak. He'd kept the card for years, a childish treasure, until it, like Quinny, had vanished. All he is left with are these fragments of memory as if all of it had happened to someone else.

Just like now. The ordinary tramping about was so at odds with their first days of erotic intimacy that it rendered them strangers, and strange to one another in the glare of the world. Or was it the ghostly impersonators who were out here on the street? The watery movement of Venice made him doubt everything. He could see now that he had been afraid of their wantonness, afraid he would never be able to satisfy her. What kind of a fool was he to trade sexual pleasuring for
this
ridiculous sightseeing? Which was why he'd struck on the idea of the gondola to take them swiftly back to the scene of their delicious crimes.

‘I mean, it, Kim,' Owen threatened.

No more matey Murph. He must really be angry now. She'd never really seen him angry. Not her mild-mannered Owen who had wooed her so tactfully, who had, right from the start, bided his time. For several years he had been Dr Devoy from Art History who came into the Campus Café to order the lunch special and an Americano; he seemed to survive on a diet of spag bol and caffeine. She made a beeline for him because he always left silver under the saucer. And he always talked to her in a way which suggested that she wasn't just the little immigrant waitress, or a refugee from the sciences. (She was studying Pharmacy.) He'd asked her her name – always a trick question. Nobody in Ireland could get their tongue
around Phuong; she'd wanted to be Margaret or Elizabeth but her mother had decreed otherwise. We must, she said, hold on to as much as possible.

‘Kim,' she'd said. ‘Kim Nguyen.'

‘Noo-en,' Owen tried it out. ‘Noo-en. Sounds strange.'

‘It's a very common name,' she'd said, ‘like …'

‘Murphy?' he prompted.

That's where his nickname for her had come from. She liked it; it made her feel neutral.

On graduation day just as the group photograph was being taken on the steps of the Aula Maxima, Kim peering from under her mortar board, trying to pick out her mother in the crowd, saw Dr Devoy make his way across the quad and step into the picture. In that moment he was transformed into her tousled, slightly shambling Owen. She called him doctor now only to poke fun at him and draw attention to the eight years between them.

He had been so keen to avoid cultural faux pas that he ended up drawing attention to insults she'd missed.

‘Murph, have you seen my address book? You know, the little red book. Oh God, I didn't mean that!'

Don't mention the war.

It was just this deference that had won her over, so used was she to chronic, low-grade cruelty and casually intended slights. (At school she had been the Yellow Pack, the Flied Lice, her family lumped together as Boat People.) But Owen would never knowingly hurt her and she clung to that knowledge.

‘Would it not be more suitable if you did not marry out,' her mother had said when, after their short and utterly proper courtship, Owen had proposed.

‘But it was you who wanted us to assimilate,' she countered, bristling.

Wasn't that what all the education was for? she wanted to say. What her mother had slaved over deep-fat fryers for all these years? To marry well?

‘Still, you should not marry before your sister,' her mother replied.

‘That,' Kim had said, ‘is the old way.'

Her sister Mai, brow knitted, looked up from the jigsaw she was doing with Lu. He had spread out the thousand pieces that made up the mythical scene – Sinbad the Sailor on the High Seas – on the dining-room table. Perplexed at the air of disapproval, he shifted his gaze from one face to another; he was seven and a lone boy among women. Mai was still wearing her paper hat and the blue nylon housecoat with the Great Wall logo on the breast pocket. Kim fought off the familiar undertow of guilt at being the younger sister. While she shared a flat with three girls from the lab, Mai still lived at home.

‘I'm twenty-three, practically an old maid,' Kim went on, sensing the resistance. ‘You wouldn't want to scupper my chances, would you, Mai?'

Mai said nothing.

‘Look,' Lu cried, holding up a jagged piece, ‘here is the lady's face from Sinbad's ship!'

The boy stood as a rebuke between them.

‘The figurehead,' Mai said to him, ‘it's called the figurehead.'

‘Would you, Mai?' Kim persisted.

‘It is not a question of personal wishes, Kim,' her mother said. ‘It is a matter of form.'

‘No,' Kim told Owen decisively, ‘let's walk back.'

Smell of diesel – until the engine broke down. She gets that whiff passing a petrol station forecourt and she has to cover her mouth to stem her rising gorge. Then the sickening tilt as they drifted. She wakes up sometimes in a cold sweat imagining the bed is the junk and the room is the sea, refusing to settle. Her stomach remembers the hunger pangs. Nothing would stay down.

‘Ah, Murph, we've been walking for ever,' he complained, though he prided himself on his tourist stoicism.

She shrugged.

‘Look, I'm not even sure I could find my way back.' This was a lie; he knew exactly where he was. Unlike her, he'd been here before.

‘Anyway, it'll cost too much,' she said. ‘They're a tourist trap, you said so yourself.'

She remembered everything.

Thirst – in the midst of all that water – a terrible thirst.

Everything he said, banal, throwaway remarks, his most pompous assertions
.

‘Oh, come on,' he wheedled. ‘It'll be romantic.'

She looked away, arms across the breasts he had so recently fondled, her neck taut, something in her temple throbbing.

‘
You
go, then,' she almost spat.

She was wearing that cute little denim jacket over a polka-dot sundress. Like a Saigon streetwalker, he thought savagely.

This was meant to be a treat. He wanted them to drift into the sunset – muted, though it was, by the rain – steeped in the rose-water light. She would lounge on the red velvet cushions as the gondolier plashed lazily. His bride. He was secretly proud of the possessive. But she would never be all his. Just this morning she had been on the phone to her mother. In the middle of their honeymoon! Over something
he'd
said, no doubt. He'd eavesdropped on the nasal tones which always sounded peeved to him. He knew the intonation was crucial. A tiny inflection could transform mood and meaning. But he'd never learned her language – even the college language lab didn't run to Vietnamese – so he didn't understand those shifts; he only knew when they had happened.

Wake of the big ships, mountains of swell. Huge tankers, their armoured flanks like impenetrable fortresses would loom up in the night and bear down on them. She would arch her neck back, her gaze clambering up the sheer slopes of those vast riveted surfaces and see no end to them. When the ships passed that close, they
were transfixed with terror and delight. Could they be seen? Would they be swallowed up? Or picked up? But by whom?