Prosperity Drive (29 page)

How the argument with Trish had started Norah couldn't remember, but once ignited it followed the same trajectory so that it was always the same argument, essentially. It was late at night close to Christmas and Norah had come in from a party.

‘Well … ?' Trish demanded when Norah threw herself on the sofa and kicked off her shoes; they were pinching her. Trish, fourteen and extravagantly bored, got up and turned the sound down on the TV. Their mother was on night shift at the telephone exchange.

‘Well what?'

‘How did it go?'

The party had been a washout. The boss had asked her up to dance and she'd made a fool of herself. Mr Grove, years older than her, had always made her feel uncomfortable. He had a lascivious manner, a viperish laugh. In his company,
Norah felt lumpish and raw as if the joke was always on her. And yet, and yet when he took her in his arms, she had felt a swell of helpless weakness. Not like a swoon, it couldn't have been that, she argued with herself. No, it was a strange tenderness that overcame her but seemed to emanate from him. It was unaccountable. This was Hugh Grove! (Huge Rove, the girls in the office called him on account of his wandering eye.) It had made her cry. She'd wept on his shoulder during a slow set.

‘Oh, Trish,' she said, ‘it was the office party. What do you think happened?'

‘I dunno,' she said, shrugging. ‘Did you get off with anyone?'

Trish purported to have a jaded and mechanistic view of romance.

‘As if I'm going to tell you that.' Norah remembered her embarrassed exit from the dance floor, escorted by her friend Dan, who'd intervened as Mr Grove stood, hands hanging, staring after her and everyone smirking, thinking he'd tried to feel her up.

‘You never tell me anything,' Trish said.

Norah knew this trope by heart: her shortcomings as an elder sister. After their father had died, Trish had often pestered her about him – what was he like, what did his voice sound like, why did he die? – impossible questions that irritated Norah as if she were the repository of all grown-up information.

‘Ah, go on,' Trish had said, ‘tell me.' She was standing in front of the TV, a hectic car chase playing out silently behind her.

‘Tell you what?'

‘Anything … you're the one who acts like you know everything. Miss Know-all!'

Something about Trish's tone, the peeved assertion of both Norah's superior knowledge and her withholding, rankled. Some hot little bubble of anger popped and it was out before she could stop herself.

‘Okay, okay, here's something you don't know. We had a brother.'

‘What?'

‘Before you were born,' Norah said.

‘And why did nobody tell me?' Trish said, grabbing Norah by the wrist. For a minute she thought Trish was going to give her a Chinese burn. In their childhood tussles, it was Trish's trademark torture; she would manacle Norah and screw the skin into a handcuff of pain. Even if she had, Norah couldn't have answered. She didn't know how Patrick had come to be hidden in the first place. Her mother and she had never spoken of it, not even to decide that Trish shouldn't be told. But once it was said, Norah felt a sickening turnover of betrayal – as if she'd exhumed some grubby secret of her mother's – and a lurch of shame that was all hers.

‘Is that why I'm called Patricia – to make up for him?'

That had never struck Norah before and she shook her head but Trish was disbelieving.

‘You and Mum,' she said, letting Norah go and pushing her away, ‘you and your secrets.'

Norah potters around the kitchen cleaning the grill and watching a bad soap on the little portable TV she bought when she moved back home. She picks up the crossword where she left off. Working her way methodically through the black-and-white grid on her own, Norah sees the neat satisfaction of filling in all those blanks. Certain things remained cryptic, of course. Like what had made things between her and her mother so difficult. Not just now; always. Her father's death had bound them, but in a covert way. It had forced them to become a team, joined them in the freemasonry of grief. Norah was eleven, old enough to understand, her mother decreed, thus granting her pre-eminence. She had taken Norah into the dim cramped space under the stairs to break the news. (Well, it was the place of punishment in the house, where she
and Trish were sent when they misbehaved.) Her mother said they wouldn't be disturbed in there, meaning by Trish. She, being only six, had to be spared, but Norah was privy – that was the word.

‘You know the way your daddy's been sick?' her mother began. She was sitting on an upturned orange box (where Norah, the punished child, usually sat). The highest point of the space under the stairs was piled with cardboard boxes of old and broken things. Norah was able to stand upright but only just and the sloping ceiling with its peeling timber boards made her want to duck. Her mother had not turned on the light – a naked bulb over the door – but she had left the door open a crack, letting in the sickened light of the house.

‘Well,' her mother went on matter-of-factly, ‘you know the way his hair's fallen out and he hasn't been able to keep things down …'

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. Then 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 …'