Prosperity Drive (19 page)

‘It's nothing personal,' Bob Gardner explained to Julia's mother, ‘it's just too painful for her. Maybe after a while …'

But time only solidified Jenny's dark resolve. The milestones in Julia's life – leaving school, her first boyfriend, going to college (the first of the Fortunes to do so because she was the last) – these exaggerated the chasm between her and the Gardners. There were times in her teenage years when Julia would pray for them to disappear. Why don't they move back
to America, she would wonder, vehemently wishing for the very thing that had haunted her childhood. Why don't they move on? But for all their seeming transience, they were as rooted (or stranded?) in Prosperity Drive as the Fortunes were. She'd heard – but never saw since she was never permitted to enter their house again – that Jenny Gardner had preserved Hetty's bedroom exactly the way she had left it, her unopened Christmas presents still intact in their shiny wrapping. (She had asked for a surprise that year, Julia remembered; only Jenny knew what was wrapped up inside.) So Julia's last image of Hetty was at the moment of flight, her body in mid-air, still intact, still joyous and alive, her head laced and tinselled with Christmas …

‘Hush now, hon,' Gloria was saying, rubbing her back as if she were winding a child. ‘Your friend Julia wouldn't want you to be grieving like this, now would she? She'd want you to be getting on with your life, making a fresh start.'

Julia nodded dumbly. Of all the dislocating experiences of the past 24 hours, this was the strangest, hearing herself being described posthumously in the third person. It was like someone walking over her grave. She shivered.

‘Maybe, hon, you should get some sleep?'

Gloria steered her to her door as if she were feeble. She had trouble with the key – everything in this country turned the wrong way – and Gloria took it from her and opened the door of 1210. Her passport was lying on the floor where Valentin must have slipped it under the door when he got no reply. She picked it up and put it on the bedside locker.

‘Alright now, honey?' Gloria asked.

Julia nodded. Thank you seemed such a paltry thing to say to this woman to whom she had blurted out her entire life so she said nothing. She took her clothes off, letting them drop where they fell, and crept into bed. There was a dull thudding in her head, a drumbeat of drink and grief. She looked at her watch. It was almost 2 a.m. She closed her eyes
but the room spun about making her feel sick. Sleep seemed out of the question. Maybe now was the time to do it, sick and sore and purged.

She rose and went into the bathroom. She opened the cabinet – she was cut in two by the gashed mirror – and fished out her nail scissors. She went back into the room and picked up her passport. She opened it to the halfway point and began to hack through its pages until only the covers remained. She gathered up the shredded remains, put them in the wastebasket and stepped out once more on to the balcony. Sheltering the flame with her hand, she struck a match and set fire to the contents. Her past flared briefly, singed and then shrivelled into charred blackness. Smudges of it escaped and danced briefly in the frosty air, mingling with the hot clouds of her breath. If anyone could see her, they would think her crazy – or a jumper. A naked woman on a balcony going up in flames. She didn't care.

‘Happy Christmas,' she whispered into the darkness. ‘Happy Christmas, Hetty Gardner.'

After a month in Faithful, Arkansas, Ted Gavin met Paula Spears in the only bar in town where he could get away from work. Skipper's was the sort of place his students would never frequent. There were no happy-hour specials, no imported beers, and no bloated big screen tuned to sport. The only soundtrack was the low murmur of conversation and the thwock and rumble of balls from the pool tables in the back room. The other patrons were ageing, down at heel, occasionally raucous and seriously intent on quiet oblivion. They approached drinking with a steady diligence, as if it were a vocation. Joy and inebriation were intermittent by-products of the process but for a lot of the time it was work, something to be got through. As he settled in at the bar, Ted noticed the lone woman perched precariously on the next stool and said hello. It was an old impulse – from home – though he was careful to say it as neutrally as possible, so it could be ignored or taken for an unattributed grunt if unwelcome.

‘Howdy,' she said cheerfully and that's how it started.

Ted was relieved to have met Paula, to have met anyone. Even he realised that drinking alone in a place like Skipper's would have been too despairing, too lonely, too effing sad.

They met at Skipper's every Thursday – as if by chance. It had never become a fixed arrangement. Neither of them
owned a mobile phone. They were pals, drinking partners, mates – he did not have the exact word for what Paula was to him. Female friend? Too cold and tame. Fuck-buddy? Hardly. He had never slept with Paula, never felt even the merest twinge of lust, and for Ted that was a blessing. (He had a history of miscalculation with women – with a few drinks he could come over all gamey but he couldn't sustain the bravado.) Sex had never come into the equation with Paula; for starters, she must have a decade on him. She was a small, wiry woman with stick-thin legs and pragmatically chopped blondish hair. Her face was the only fleshy part of her – smooth, moon-like, with unaccountably merry eyes. Ted couldn't have described what she wore – some nondescript uniform of faded denim and pallid cotton. He could not even say she dressed carelessly; that would seem too deliberate, too much of a statement. Paula's clothes seemed immaterial, even to her. She didn't excite strong feelings in him; in her company, Ted found himself slowing, mellowing. They pondered on trivia – why are suitcases in films always empty, where does the Midwest end?

‘The Midwest doesn't end,' Paula used to say, ‘it just goes on and on.'

Ted had only the vaguest idea where Paula lived and he had never invited her back to his hangar-like flat in a student block by the railway tracks. It was one large, high-ceilinged room, sparsely furnished, with a bathroom attached. The place was clad in aluminium siding and the acoustics were terrible. There was a heavy-footed football player living over him, whose progress across the floor above sounded like rolls of thunder and made the light fittings epileptic. He had never invited anyone there. Three nights a week, at 3 a.m., a goods train would roll by, thunderous but slow. The trains were so long – once he counted sixty-two cars – that it could take a half-hour for them to pass, by which time their
ponderous trundling would have lodged deep inside his brain. Afterwards, he couldn't sleep in the surging silence. Silence didn't bother him, but this busy emptiness did. It had become part of his routine never to be home on the nights the trains rolled.

He and Paula would sit companionably and drink until Paula's money ran out. Usually before his. She worked on a checkout in a supermarket. But what either of them did, didn't seem to matter much. That was a relief for Ted. Usually when he mentioned he was a writer it aroused the kind of curiosity he couldn't bear, given the state of his novel – sprawling, amorphous, impossible to explain away in a quick sentence. He would start: it's about a woman in recovery from a disastrous marriage – as if you could recover from a disastrous marriage – who escapes by solitary drinking, well, not just drinking … All his explanations ran into qualifying clauses. What he didn't say was that it was about his mother, with the names changed to protect the guilty.

Of course, they shared stories. It's what people do over drinks in a bar with no laid-on entertainment. Paula's story was unremarkable in its soap opera misery. She was a doomed statistic come to life. Her first marriage, a teen wedding – shotgun, of course – was to Donny who did a flit when the baby was six months old. He picked up his coat one evening, she said, and just walked. It was a detail so deliberate that Ted immediately made a mental note of it. He imagined the coat – a lumberjack's large check, lime-dusted at the cuffs (Donny was a bricklayer) and saw a sandy-haired youth with a belligerent mouth, hooking a thick finger through the collar loop, maybe swinging it over his shoulder as he sauntered out to his car. Sauntered was how he'd do it, Ted decided. Or maybe he hadn't even planned it beforehand so his casualness was genuine. A single tumbleweed would brush by the steel toe of his boot as he opened the
car door. No, it would be a truck, wouldn't it? … Ted shook himself; these writerly riffs were too self-indulgent by far.

Paula moved in with her sister who was shacked up with Larry Spears. And, well, Larry was unemployed and Paula and baby Mikey were around the apartment all day while Jen was out at the plant and, well … Paula inhaled so deeply on her cigarette, her cheeks sucked into cadaverous hollows … well, things happened.

‘He had two of us pregnant at the same time,' she said. ‘I was further along. So I made him pick. And I won! The big door prize.' Her laugh turned into a tubercular hacking.

Marriage number two lasted five years by which time Paula had had Debra, several miscarriages, and had taken to drinking to dull the pain of bruised cheekbones and black eyes inflicted by Larry Spears. She stayed – for the kids – and to prove herself right.

‘I'd lost my sister over this guy,' she said, stubbing out her cigarette and making a sour face. When she finally came to her senses and left Larry, she was so far gone on alcohol she couldn't look after the kids. That was six years ago.

‘The funny thing is I didn't drink at all until I met him,' Paula said.

Well, if you can't beat them, join them, Ted thought.

‘I never beat them if that's what you're thinking … just couldn't handle them and the drink …' she said hotly and downed her vodka in one go.

Except for such flashes of feeling, she told Ted her sorry tale matter-of-factly, dry-eyed. It had the tone of a well-rehearsed and strangely impersonal monologue, the sort of thing he imagined you'd hear at an AA meeting. Everything about her seemed to have already passed into a kind of dirty realism, Ted thought. But although her life sounded fictional, he never doubted that Paula was telling the truth.

His own story, in comparison, seemed almost well adjusted.

‘Well,' he began, ‘I'm Irish, as if you hadn't guessed.' He gestured to his flame-coloured buzz-cut flecked with grey. ‘And the accent.'

He had won a green card lottery in the Nineties; his sister Joan had entered his name. Before getting legal he'd worked on construction sites in New York.

‘I was the joker, the storyteller, the Paddy with the gift of the gab. The fellas on the buildings with me were always telling me to write it down. So I did.'

He didn't tell Paula that he'd kept the writing a secret. (She was getting the official version.) The scribbling wasn't something that would have gone down well with the blokes he worked with by day and went drinking with by night. For all their loud exhortation, they'd have thought a writer in their company suspect. But the idea they had so casually planted was surprisingly tenacious. Ted's writing ambitions grew in the dark he had consigned them to. Sometimes he thought it a curse – this ‘idea' of writing – but the urge was the strongest he'd felt in years. Strong enough to make him apply for and get through a writing programme in Syracuse and get him this, his first teaching job.

‘That's how I ended up in Faithful,' he told Paula.

There had been a girl in Syracuse. Sandy. Rangy, intense, she looked like a throwback to the Seventies (before Ted's time but he recalled her type from films his sisters watched –
The Graduate, Play Misty for Me
) with a toffee-coloured mane of hair which she swung about like an extra arm – as much a part of her emphatic expression as her voice. She was like his very own cheerleader, as if he were a personal project. She enthused about the raw energy of his prose, his untutored way with words, his Irish syntax. But still, he doubted her. Was she trying to butter him up? Had she fixed on him only for the curiosity of his accent, the whiff of the working class from him, the otherness of his experience? He remembered a
trip they had taken towards the end, when, in his mind, their destinies had irretrievably forked. The trip had been Sandy's idea; she had a car. A mystery tour, she said.

‘You're going to love it,' she told him as they drove towards the coast.

She brought him to Breezy Point, a gated community of Irish-Americans who had clustered together on the far tip of the Rockaway Peninsula.

‘It'll be like going home,' Sandy had said in her relentlessly confident way. Immediately he felt his truculence rising. Why did people presume you were homesick, he wondered, and that all you wanted was to go home? And if home wasn't on offer, that you'd be charmed by a miniature version of it, transplanted to Queens and set behind gates? They arrived at a checkpoint. Yes, a checkpoint with a mechanical arm and a lockhard with a cap!

‘Not to worry, with your accent I'm sure we'll pass,' Sandy said gaily. She was right. The bloke in the uniform waved them through. Oblivious to his irritation, Sandy pointed out the store names – Deirdre Maeve's, the supermarket, the pub called the Blarney Stone. Ted seethed; she had brought him to theme park hell. The shore was the only place that seemed authentic. It could have been somewhere on the coast of Donegal. At home, he had always loved the sensation of being on the edge of land, of being able to look out and see nothing ahead but the tantalising horizon. But now he was on the other side and he knew what he was looking back on.

When he and Sandy stepped out on to the beach, they were almost blown away. The wind whipped the words out of their mouths. Sand swirled about them as they trod down a narrow passageway in the dunes between a high fence strung with netting. Notices were pinned on the wire.