Prosperity Drive (3 page)

One of the men in hats finally comes up trumps. He and her mother haggle on the driveway. Gone now the flirtatious tone of distress.

‘My late husband was very mechanically minded. The engine is clean as a whistle. And, as you can see, not a mark on the bodywork,' she says proudly. ‘He was devoted to it.'

Devoted to
her
, Norah wants to say.

She cannot believe the car is actually going to be sold. She thought her mother's air of plaintive ineptitude would make the men in hats think she was trying to sell them a pup. But no, this large bald man (he has taken his hat off and it sits territorially on the roof of the car) is now patting his chest pocket in search of a pen to write out a cheque. Norah, standing at the other side of the car, wants to raise her hand
and say stop in a commanding tone that will make the adults pause, and obey. But though she can stem the slow tide of her mother's mourning with an angry glare, she cannot battle against the calculated transactions of survival.

‘Come inside, won't you?' her mother says to the man.

Norah loiters outside as the man follows her mother into the house. When they are out of sight, she fishes out a coin from her pocket and digs it into the Austin's paintwork. She draws a line from the front passenger door backwards, a searing, silent protest. Spite fuels her, or is it revenge? Whatever it is, it is deeply satisfying. When the man emerges, she is sitting on the garden wall, legs swinging. She smiles sweetly and waves as he reverses the Austin out on to the road. He drives off unaware of the damage she has done on his blind side.

Norah Elworthy, seventeen, is going out on her first date. She is slimmer now, her puppy fat having fallen away. She thinks, of course, that her thighs are too big, and wishes she could fit into a size 12 and a B cup. She has just stopped being a schoolgirl. The intervening years have been unremarkable. They have passed in a blur of brisk normality, a normality Norah's mother considers a triumph. Your father would have been proud of the way we've managed, her mother says, generously including both Norah and Trish in the achievement. There is still an air of financial hazard, unspecified but ever present. The absence of a breadwinner, Norah has learned, does not mean that they've gone hungry. But there is a constant impoverishment of confidence. Nothing is ever as solid again. This is what not having a father means.

What has changed is that Norah would now welcome the chance to share in her mother's ruminative wistfulness that once seemed so dangerous. She would like to be the companion in the kitchen talking about the fleeting and seemingly unnecessary presence that their managing has reduced her father to. But it is too late for that. Having fended off the bereaved
companionship her mother offered, she is left only with a field of combat.

‘What do we know about this boy?' her mother asks, standing by the bedroom door as Norah wrestles into a pair of jeans.

‘Nothing,' Norah replies. ‘That's the whole point.' Then she relents. ‘I told you I met him at the bicycle shop.'

He mended her puncture then asked her out.

‘A bicycle mechanic, that's all we need,' her mother says, sighing.

‘I'm not marrying him, Mother,' Norah says, ‘we're just going out.'

She feels a fluttering anticipation. She could soon be engaged in a romance, a hazy notion of chaste kisses and hand-holding.

‘He has a car,' she adds, as proof of his suitability.

His name is Dave. At twenty-one, he is enormously older than her. He is small, dapper-looking with a little goatee beard and moustache and he is wearing a suit and tie, which he straightens as he sits into his squat, low-slung Mini, catching his reflection in the wing mirror. Norah feels scruffy and more knowing than she is. She regrets not having worn a dress.

‘Why don't we go for a drive first?' he says as she gets in beside him.

It is the dirtiest car she has ever been in. Motor magazines with lurid covers, maps and pieces of paper wash up on the floor. In the dish-like dashboard a bruised apple sits, some leaking pens, a half-eaten sandwich, a blackened cloth, a silvery spanner. There is an oily smell and something else, something rancid like milk gone off. But he seems hardly to notice so she stifles her disgust.

‘Nice car,' she says.

‘Oh, it's just a runaround.'

She's
just a runaround, Norah corrects him in her head.

‘I don't know much about cars,' she says and immediately regrets it. She has successfully stubbed out the conversation. He drives rakishly, too fast she thinks, but she is glad that he is taking charge. She concentrates on the exterior, the neon-lit suburbs giving way to overgrown country lanes.

‘I know just the spot,' he says, ‘you can see the whole city spread out, the lights and the harbour. A lovers' lane,' he adds, looking at her and smiling slyly.

The word lovers frightens her.

They are climbing now into the foothills that overlook the city. Through the gaps in the hedges she can see the intricate embroidery of lights as if sewn on to the inky sky. He takes a sudden left turn and drives in an extravagant arc on to a gravelled open space. They come to a piercing halt at a metal barrier and he switches the engine off. The keyring jangles nervously in the ignition. They sit for several minutes in the busy darkness. She is about to admire the view when he shifts, reaching his arm across and dragging her towards him.

‘Come here,' he says.

He crushes his bristly mouth on hers while he fumbles with his fly.

‘Here,' he commands, ‘take this.'

He forces her free hand down on his penis, wrapping her fingers expertly round it and thrusting with his own hand. He has stopped kissing her now and she gazes at the moon face of the speedometer while he works away fiercely. The spanner on the dash glints dully. Within minutes he has come. Her fingers are a mess of clammy ooze.

‘I've been waiting for that all week,' he says, sighing luxuriantly.

He gazes ahead as if the twinkling panorama was what he'd been missing. Her hand still rests on his thigh. She is afraid to move it. He rummages in his pocket and produces a handkerchief which he uses to wipe himself off, then hands it to her. She finds herself saying thank you. He zips up and then
puts the car into reverse and with a great screech of wheels he spins it around and roars back out on to the road again.

He tries small talk on the way back. How many in her family, what she's going to do next, his job at the bike shop. What he really wants to be is a car mechanic and run a garage of his own.

‘What about a drink?' he asks.

Norah knows she cannot face that, not after this brute business between them.

‘No,' she says, ‘I think you should drop me home. My mother will worry.'

Shamefully, she is back in Prosperity Drive by nine o'clock. As she gets out of the car she grabs the spanner from its nest of litter on the dashboard.

‘Going to put a spanner in the works?' he jokes.

She walks around to his side of the car. He rolls down the window – is he expecting a kiss? – and sticks his head out companionably then withdraws it quickly as Norah lifts the spanner and smashes the wing mirror in one deft swipe.

‘Hey!' he says.

His reflection is splintered into a malevolent spider's web.

‘Cars,' she yells at him. ‘Cars are
she
!'

The YMCA was like coming home, in a weird unwanted way. Well, he
was
a Catholic, and a man, and if you counted thirty-eight as young (habitual covering-up can make your life
seem
long) then he qualified on all counts. They started him small with
Polliwogs
(
Get your child acquainted with the pool, introduce them to front paddlestroke and wetball
). He couldn't believe his luck. Angels with water wings. Little legs cycling chubbily in the blue, fat digits clutching his shoulders. All glorious trust for him – Gabe Vance. Mister Vance to the kiddies. The Y insists on it, Yelena Markova had told him with a Brighton Beach twang. Miss this, Miss that, she sneered. He was disappointed she hadn't a trace of the treacly Slavic accent her name suggested. She was a fiercely angular woman – no, girl, he would have said – with a cruel mouth and bleached tresses. How did she maintain them, he wondered; as a veteran he knew what a lethal cocktail pool chlorine and hair colour was. Back home he used to teach Seniors' Sessions. The old birds' hair turned copper and ochre and all class of strange lurid hues because of the chemical mix. He recalls with a shiver their lumpy bodies squeezed into Lycra, bulging arms, gnarled hands threaded with blue-rinse veins. Bunions shiny as tubers and knees flapping like elephants' ears. He remembers mostly the banality of decay.

He'd opted for the elderly at a time when he was still struggling with his … predilections. When he still believed; believed
in a cure, that is. When he had thought that staying out of the way of temptation could save him and avoidance might banish his worst cravings. But the withdrawal symptoms had been agony; not being in contact with children every day had made him distraught and reckless. That time at the Municipal Baths – long after he'd left the seminary – he'd almost been ruined sneaking into the female changing rooms. A convent school had rented the pool out. He'd hidden in an empty cubicle dragging a
CLEANING IN PROGRESS
sign across its mouth and pulled the curtains to. His feet had given him away. His size tens under the jellyfish hem of the curtain. A fat girl, plump and juicy, her towel wrapped like a tube around her, sneaked up on him and poked her head slyly through the crack in the curtains he was using to peer out. Fish eyes met. She let out a piercing shriek and dropped the towel, revealing her ample puppy-fat thighs, her chillingly bare pubes. It was worth it, well, almost.

‘There's a man in there,' she yelled, pointing a finger while he shrank into a corner of his dank, wet little room. ‘Miss Malone, there's a …'

There was a kerfuffle, the flurry of little girls' wet feet slapping on tile – he was surrounded by babble, a tableau of pink, offended-looking damp flesh and gaping chatter. He squared his shoulders, straightened his tracksuit bottoms and yanked the curtains from their moorings with a decisive whiplash. The metal rings screamed as if they'd been molested; a whistle blew. Miss Malone strode in – a ramrod-straight greyhound of a woman with steely hair. Spare and lean.

‘What, sir, are you doing in here?'

The Sir threw him off. Last time he'd heard Sir was at school – Yes Sir, No Sir, three bags full Sir.
Mister Vance, Sir
– rich with polite irony and armed with a cane –
bend over.

‘Maintenance,' he said. ‘Curtains.' He gestured emptily to the still shivering rings and added Ma'am to match her Sir.

‘Can't you see there are children here?' she demanded, placing a protective manacle on the shoulder of the one who'd caught him out. Oh yes, he wanted to say.

‘Very sorry, Ma'am,' he answered, backing away, stumbling into the foot-bath, fumes of disinfectant reaching his nostrils while he fumbled blindly behind him for the door to the pool. The girls tittered. How quickly he had turned from bogeyman to figure of fun.

‘I've a good mind, young man …' Miss Malone began and he thought, I must stop her.

‘The manager told me the pool was free. I'm very sorry, Ma'am. Please don't tell the manager or else I'll lose …'

‘Very well,' she interrupted. He knew she was the type who could not bear abjection. ‘On your way.'

That was when he knew that abstinence was not the answer.

All behind him now. New life, new country, fresh start. Here at the Y on 21st Street, Yelena Markova by his side and a classful of bobbing
Guppies
in the pool.
Leave the flotation devices behind! Learn to synchronise basic strokes!
The Y likes to exhort, some old evangelism still at work, even with seven-year-olds. About the age he was when he got his first inkling. You're kidding, his American friends say, the ones he trusts enough to tell. He's wary, obviously. You knew at seven? It is the age of reason, he starts, then starts again. Well, I was being groomed. That's the way it was, even in the Sixties. His Uncle Pascal was a missionary priest in Africa. He appeared first (completely without warning, his mother muttered, and no cake in the house) on a summer's evening, a beautiful balmy St John's Eve, when the days only barely surrender to darkness.

‘It's like Finland here,' Uncle Pascal had said, as if he were a tourist in his own place. ‘Land of the midnight sun.'

He was very geographical in his references. As if his head were a globe, Gabriel's mother said afterwards, noting his
receding hairline, resentful of his name-dropping. ‘Finland, how are you!'

Uncle Pascal was unlike any priest Gabriel had come across before. He was burly and tanned with freckled hairy forearms, an open-necked shirt you might play golf in, and no sign of a dog collar. And he had a dream, a pipe dream.

‘We're thousands of miles from water where I am.' A village in the Sudan. ‘And I was thinking, what we need is pipes, man. If we could import the piping and lay it down, then we could bring the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak.'

He paced, gesturing with one hand, whiskey tumbler in the other. To Gabriel's ears it sounded like business, not religion. Pascal's plan was to beg sufficient lengths of pipe from factories in Ireland and export them to his desiccated African mission.

‘That's a hell of a lot of piping,' Gabriel's father said.

‘Granted,' Uncle Pascal conceded, ‘but it's a damn sight easier than trying to irrigate with natural resources. My God, man, there hasn't been rainfall there in three years!'

As if to mock him, the eaves dripped. Outside was all green blur and drench; balmy St John's Eve giving way to the deluge.