Prosperity Drive (26 page)

Her mother-in-law's eyesight was failing.

Norah drew up a chair beside her.

Mrs Plunkett registered no surprise at her former daughter-in-law being there. Just as she had barely reacted when Louis told her they were separating. It was as if their lives were inauthentic in some way, Norah had thought, as foreign and as passively regarded as a television soap opera.

‘Did you come down today?'

‘Yes, on the train,' Norah replied, wanting to elaborate but finding nothing more to say. There had never been much small talk between them.

‘I find the days very long here,' Mrs Plunkett said after a while. ‘I can't get round, do you see. I can't get round like I used to.'

‘Have you heard from Louis?' Norah asked. She was still hungry for news of him then, or even to talk about him in a kindly and abstracted way.

‘In the summer you can walk in the garden but with my pins I've seen the last of the garden, I'd say.'

‘Does he write?' Norah asked gingerly.

‘Timmy there,' Mrs Plunkett gestured conspiratorially to the man with the amputated legs. ‘Timmy there's always asking how much land I have. I think he's after me.'

Norah abhorred this flirty gaiety. She preferred the patients who sat sunk in primeval gloom. A restive silence fell between them.

‘It's night-time there now,' Mrs Plunkett said suddenly.

‘Night-time where?'

‘Where Louis is,' she said quietly. ‘I count the hours …'

As did Norah, frequently. It was a kind of mental housekeeping. Before going to sleep she would do a quick calculation and think, without rancour or envy, he's probably leaving work now, or going to the cinema, maybe. It was a way of placing him, of rendering him fixed.

‘And neither of us have him,' his mother said.

The key turned stiffly in the lock and Louis stepped into the small hallway, which smelled of damp disuse. It was icy as if the cold fingers of death had edged their way into the place. The kitchen of the small cottage had been ‘improved' since Norah had been there last. There was a fridge now in place of the bucket of water Mrs Plunkett had once used to store milk. The fireplace had been bricked up and in its place a two-bar electric fire with mock coals had been installed. Louis stooped and plugged it in. It cast a phosphorescent glow on the parquet-look lino which had been laid over the old flagstones. The
only sign of life in the place was Louis's two bags opened and spilling out their contents on to the floor. He fished out a woollen sweater and put it on. (It was true, Norah thought, exile makes people soft.) Then rummaging further he retrieved a bottle of duty-free whiskey. He hunted around for glasses, sliding back one door and then another of the kitchen cabinets, which released musty little bouquets of neglect. He found two dusty tumblers with bees painted on them, free offers with a honey promotion.

‘So,' Louis said, setting the bottle and beakers down on the kitchen table. It could have been an interrogation scene: two near strangers sitting on hard chairs in a darkening room lit only by the sickly hue from the fireplace.

‘So,' he repeated, ‘how have you been?'

She felt she had so little to offer. Years of recuperation, a steady but mean renewal of her life. She spoke about her job; she was head of her department now with her own office and a car. She did not talk about men. It was an unwritten rule between them, a kind of deference. He enquired about Patricia, the baby sis, he always called her. And her mother, of course, who was slipping slowly into senility.

‘The poor old bird,' Louis said, refilling their glasses. ‘Who's looking after her?'

‘I am,' she said.

‘Oh, I see, the dutiful daughter.'

‘I couldn't just abandon her.'

‘Like I did, you mean.'

The accusation sat between them in the gathering dusk. Louis narrowed his eyes over the plume of spirits in his glass. Norah watched him covertly. She could barely see him in the deepening shadows so she had to imagine his bog-coloured eyes, those big soft hands of his, the fluttering nerve in his cheek. As she had done for five years.

She remembered once, shortly after they separated, finding a note from Louis in the kitchen. He still had a key to the
house. She had never got round to asking for it back. The kettle had been broken and he had scribbled a message to her on the back of an envelope.

‘What you need,' it read, ‘is a new element.'

For a moment she thought he was being philosophical and she remembered standing there contemplating this proposition, basking in his new wisdom about her, as if he were offering one last remedy in a gnomic code. Then, stung by her own foolishness, she crushed the note into a tight ball and set fire to it in the sink.

Darkness fell. The reproachful silence between them blossomed into a mournful but easy complicity. Too easy, Norah thought.

‘I really should be going,' she said.

‘You can't drive with all that drink in you,' he said.

She'd learned to drive since they'd split up; it seemed apt, as if she were finally taking control of her life. A blue Micra sat outside, a nifty compact, a perfect ladies' drive, as the salesman described it. Louis put a restraining hand on her wrist. It was the first time he had touched her since they'd met.

‘I can't, Louis.'

‘Why not?'

‘Not here.'

‘You mean people will talk? Hell, let them. I mean, technically, we're still man and wife.' He cupped his hands over hers. They sat like that for several minutes like children making a solemn pact. She could feel goose pimples rise on her forearm. She attributed the stirrings within her to the artificial heat and the whiskey.

‘Don't, Louis, please.'

She disentangled her fingers.

‘The Big No,' he said in mock basso.

She rose and shrugged on her coat.

‘Is this it, then?' he asked.

* * *

It was she who had asked that question when they had parted. After the break-up (she favoured the term break-up; it suggested a dramatic shipwreck as opposed to breakdown, which was like an engine running out of steam) she felt obliged to remove the framed photograph of their wedding from the mantel. But she still kept a holiday snap of him stuck into the corner of the dressing-table mirror. There had been no final ritual – no death, no divorce – so he remained there like some lost figure, a hostage or a pilot missing in action. They were still, after all these years, just separated, as if only time and circumstance were keeping them apart. The Ex, she would say jokingly, if anyone asked who it was. The ultimate abbreviation. The Ex. Shedding the ring had taken longer. It took until Louis stopped wearing his. She had met him by chance on the street. It was the first thing she had noticed, the naked finger. He had rubbed at it self-consciously.

‘I didn't see the point,' he had said.

She had felt betrayed. Somehow she had always thought that this was something they would do together. She had imagined a grand gesture, the pair of them standing on a bridge and flinging the gold tokens high into the air and watching them dazzle briefly before falling into the waters below.

They made love desperately on his mother's bed. She had thought it would be like a gentle stroll through a childhood haunt; a marvelling at the orchard's windfalls, an easy climb to the dark aperture of the old barn, a cushioned fall in the springy hay. Instead they clawed at one another, all fingernails and spittle. They wrestled greedily, their sweaty flanks slapping against one another, both of them bellowing and braying, joyously aghast at this suddenly unleashed appetite. They lay afterwards on the candlewick bedspread, smelling of semen, their good clothes crumpled and gaping. If they had been naked it would have seemed less illicit, Norah thought. And yet
as they lay there, fingers barely touching, eyes locked in the questioning embrace of aftermath, she realised that this was the first time she had desired Louis. It had not been a matter of comfort. Her own, or his. An hour passed in a grave, sprouting silence.

‘I'm an orphan now,' Louis said finally.

He had broken the spell. She had forgotten his weakness for lofty self-pity. She pulled herself up and wedged several pillows behind her. His hand rested lazily against her thigh. She listened as his breathing grew quieter, steadier, and he drifted into sleep. She wanted to reach out and stroke his hair or touch the blue-veined skin around his temples but she was afraid of her own tenderness now. And, anyway, she would only wake him and what was the point in that?

It was the early hours of the morning before she slid from the bed. She wrapped her coat around her and stepped into her abandoned shoes. She stood for a moment in the doorway before picking her way through the dark kitchen.

‘Bye-bye,' she called out softly as she pulled the front door to. There was no reply. As she drove through the moonlit countryside she thought of him lying on the littered remains of the conjugal bed, like an undiscovered corpse.

‘Dee-da.'

‘Did you hear that?' Frank Shaw has just come into the kitchen. It is a late summer's evening after rain, drenched and lambent. He is in shirtsleeves, tie loosened, elasticated braces like forked leather tongues. ‘He said Daddy!'

Rosemary, rubber-gloved in suds, turns around to look down at her toddler son. Little Timmy is sitting in the playpen on an upholstered bottom, clenched fist aloft in salute.

‘Dee-da.'

The child seems rapt at something going on at calf level – the tanned denier of his mother's stockings, her pert kitten-heeled slippers, the pink feathery rosette on her instep that he always wants to eat.

‘He said Daddy!'

‘No, he didn't!' Rosemary lifts a glass in her muffled paw and holds it up to the golden light.

‘I tell you, he said Daddy.'

Timmy's father stoops down, a big urgent face leering through the bars. ‘Say it, Tim, say it again.'

Dee-da.

‘Oh, Frank, you're hearing things.' Rosemary tamps down something on her eyelid with the back of her pink gauntlet.

‘Say it, Tim, Da-dee. Da-dee.'

‘Dee-da!' the child brays. ‘Dee-da!'

Today you have been to see the Man with the Quiet Voice who smells of tobacco and wet tweed and isn't called the Doctor. The Doctor has an office full of sneezes, a torch with a blazing light and a finger made of sandpaper that he puts on your tongue. Not like the Man with the Quiet Voice who sits on a wet park bench with his hands hiding in his pockets while the rain drips from the hood of the go-car down on to your knees. Mum sits beside him in her clear plastic raincoat so that you can see her dress and her cardy and everything underneath. How's my little man, the Man with the Quiet Voice says, gripping your nose in a fleshy vice between his big fingers. Say hello, your mother says, sweet and secretful. Say hello to the nice man, Tim.

‘Tim! Ti … m?'

His name has always sounded emaciated to him. Timid, timorous, a thin-lipped emaciated hum. When the strangeness of waking up calling out his own name passes, he thinks it might have been Reggie calling him. Maybe she's left a message and it's her subliminal voice that has woken him. But no, when he checks, the red light is steadfast.

‘You still have a machine!' Reggie marvelled.

Voicemail and texts and disembodiment, that is Reggie. Now, there's a name! He loves the two-syllable strength of it, the juicy rich double consonant of the diminutive.

‘Yeah, well, you can imagine what convent girls made of Regina,' she'd said. ‘They pronounced it with an I!'

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.