Prosperity Drive (34 page)

‘Your doll is as stupid-looking as you,' Mary Elizabeth said.

Trish ran home, patting Flossie's thinning head.

‘Well,' said Mam, ‘we'll have to send her to the doll's hospital, the place where sick dolls are made better. If her hair is falling out then she must be very sick.'

Flossie had to be kept in the hospital for seven days and Daddy collected her when it was time. When he produced Flossie from behind his back, Trish couldn't believe it. He'd brought the wrong doll home. This Flossie no longer had long blond hair; she had a perm and it was blue! Trish examined Flossie closely; everything was the same – the pink dress with netting that she'd worn into the hospital, her cloth shoes, her long-lashed eyes – all except for the new hair.

‘It's a blue rinse,' Mam said and she and Daddy seemed to be smiling. ‘Just like Granny Elworthy!' Mam added, and Daddy didn't smile any more.

‘She's had a hair transplant, see,' Mam said, parting Flossie's curls to show Trish a new skullcap of plastic that Flossie had acquired from which the blue hair grew. But Trish didn't want to see it. This wasn't Flossie but some skullcapped impostor, a changeling doll the hospital had sent back in Flossie's place thinking Trish wouldn't notice. It wasn't just the Granny Elworthy hair; everything about Flossie had changed.

She could never love her in the same way; how could she? She wasn't the same doll any more; not the doll to whom Trish had whispered all her secrets. Where were those secrets now? Buried under Flossie's sewn-on scalp, that's where. And lost to both of them.

When she heard Norah telling Barry Denieffe that they should give until it hurt, Trish knew what she would do.

‘You're going to donate Flossie?' Mam asks. Disbelieving.

‘For the starving children of Biafra,' Trish tells her seriously.

‘Aren't you the best girl, for giving away your favourite dolly?' And she gives Trish a hug and smothers her with kisses.

For the first time Trish feels the cool thrill of deception. By saying nothing she has fooled her mam. It's a lie without words. She feels a hard pellet in her heart where before she knew only softness. She can't wait now to be rid of the doll with the strange thing growing on her head.

They cannot know it but those children saved her. If they hadn't been there, Audrey might well have kept on going, become known as the probationary nurse who walked off the job just weeks from getting her badges. They stopped her in her tracks, pushed their way into her drama, the living asserting their precedence over the dead. The living with all their little trinkets. How poignant and pointless the things we leave behind, she will think often over the years as she gathers up the belongings of her little patients who've passed on. Often the parents can't bear it, don't want to be reminded of the gay balloons, the spangled optimistic get-well cards, the stick drawings by small invalids. Audrey never keeps these; she gathers them in cardboard boxes, tags them and puts them in an office in the basement that Nita Dark found for her. (Nita knows every nook and cranny of this place.) In case the parents should ever come back. They never do; never want to set foot in St Jude's again.

Audrey has never kept a memento of a sick child. But the treasures of the healthy children on Prosperity Drive are something else. These she keeps as talismans: the lucky objects that kept her loyal to her vocation and taught her this. Distraction is what we seek; like children in the midst of a tantrum, we can be diverted by shiny inconsequential things,
a change of tone. When she looks at them, Audrey considers these her real badges of honour.

Of all of them, the postcard is the thing Audrey treasures most. Blank on the back, she had found it stuck between the pages of a
Reader's Digest
in the job lot she bought from the children that day. She thought the magazines would be handy for the waiting room in St Jude's. Short, distracting and not too demanding; that's what you need when you're waiting for bad news and you've exhausted your store of small talk. At the very least, there's the cartoons and the little teasers and jokes. When the card fluttered out, Audrey kept it. She didn't know why. The randomness of it, she supposed, as if it was meant for her.

It is, she thinks, like a child's eye view of heaven. China-blue sky, albino sand, lime green and red buckets and spades. Stalks of tough seagrass frame the view as if the photographer, like a peeping Tom, had parted the stalks to steal the image. There is a young woman in the mid-ground wearing a dark dress, her legs folded beneath her, her profile shaded by a straw sun hat. A striped canvas windbreak shelters her and a baby, who's lying on its back on a turquoise beach towel, curled hands aloft. You can just about make out the plump folds of the child's thighs and the pale globe of its hairless head. The mother has her hand on the baby's stomach which is clothed in something white. Maybe she's tickling the child; you can imagine it gurgling with glee. Or maybe as a new mother she can't bear not to touch the child, the umbilical connection made flesh. Either way, mother and baby are absorbed in each other, their gaze ruling out the rest of the scene. There are some swimmers in the sea, a couple of children thrashing in the shallows. In the far distance, the beach sweeps away into the white litter of a seaside town and the blue hills.

The image evokes the burnished contentment of a childhood day at the seaside with all its gay accessories – the sun hats, the windbreak, the buckets and spades. Or perhaps it is simply the memory of heat that the postcard captures. Whatever it is, Audrey knows that in her dark days – and she has had them – how could you not? – she imagines that this is where all the lost children have gone. To a day littered with colour and a sickle-curved beach that seems to go on for ever.

Edel had never told anyone how she and Victor had met. She was ashamed of it because it had not been a lucky accident. She had seen him and wanted him; the direct line between wanting and having had never been so clear to her. He had been sitting at the heel bar. It was the latest innovation at Roches Stores, an American idea. There was a high counter like a saloon bar and a row of tubular stools with red leatherette cushions, fixed to the floor with bolts. A neon light that read ‘While U Wait' flashed on and off overhead. It was a Monday, mid-morning, quiet. Edel had already twice tidied all the little compartments on the electrical counter where she worked, sorting the miniature bulbs and the fairy lights, standing the squat white fuses upright, marrying the two-pronged plugs, male and female. She was loading coins into the till when she saw him halt at the counter opposite. She busied herself – Roches' biggest boast was ‘our staff are never idle'. She stacked batteries while she watched him heave himself up on to one of the high stools at the heel bar and unlace his shoes. He deposited them on the countertop and she heard him say ‘Heels and soles'. He had a newspaper folded into his jacket pocket and he fished it out and began to read.

There was something absurd and defenceless about him sitting there in his stockinged feet. The heels of his socks were worn thin and she could see the dull rose of skin through them. There was a hole in the big toe. It put him at a
disadvantage, she thought, as she eyed him surreptitiously. His dark hair was cut jauntily and slicked down with hair oil which gleamed under the store lights. He had a fleshy face, scrubbed and babied-looking. He wore heavy-framed spectacles. Oh dear, she thought, they'll have to go. He was smartly dressed, a tweed sports jacket (no elbow patches, thank God) and a shirt and tie. There was a noticeable crease in his dark pants – a mother's touch, she hoped. A clerk, she guessed, taking his elevenses out of the office. The shoemaker set to on the shoes. It was a noisy machine with a belt drive that whined like a dentist's drill. The heel bar seemed to Edel like a pocket of heavy industry in the midst of household linens, electricals and cosmetics. It had the fumy smell of a factory and the clattery serious air of male business. The regular customers were nearly all men; the women who came to the heel bar were usually limping and in distress, bearing a stricken stiletto or a single shoe with an amputated heel.

Heels and soles took less than ten minutes, Edel knew. She would have to move quickly. She was alone at the counter and shouldn't leave. Vi (no, she corrected herself, Miss Hunter – Roches' policy forbade staff using one another's Christian names, too familiar) would not be back from her break for another fifteen minutes and the shoemaker was already on to the left shoe. The neon sign tantalised. The shoes were being handed over now. Money was changing hands. There was the sharp ring of the till. Edel watched as he bent over to tie his laces. Then he eased himself down from his high perch. He flexed his feet in his newly minted shoes, turned on his fresh rubber heels and walked away. And then she noticed that he had left his newspaper behind. She darted out from behind the counter across the aisle, whipped the paper and ran after him. She caught up with him at the main entrance. Cold blasts of air came in through the revolving door, meeting the dry heat of the store. She tugged gently at his sleeve. He wheeled around.

‘Your newspaper,' she said, ‘Sir.' (More of Roches' policy.)

He smiled, at first surprised, then gratified.

‘Why, thank you, Ma'am,' he said.

She saw a flicker of appraisal. Her move.

‘Why don't you ask me out?' Edel asked boldly.

The revolving doors gasped hot, then cold.

‘Why don't I?' He smiled cheekily, then stashing the paper under his arm was swept away in the cool carousel of the glassy doors.

A week later, Victor Elworthy came back and bought a two-pronged plug at the electrical counter and asked Edel Forristal to a matinée at the Savoy.

Edel felt she had come a long way. She felt it particularly when she went home to Mellick. And contrary to her expectations it was not a pleasant sensation. She had been so homesick in the city at first, staying in a damp bedsitter on the North Circular Road where the bulbs were always blowing and the public phone in the hallway was always ringing – but not for her. She spent weeks waiting for someone to shout up into the well of the landing – ‘Call for Number 4'. She felt rebuked by the gay chatter of the girls in Number 3, their stifled laughter on the landing on their way back from a late night, their sleepy early morning conversation. She lived near the cattle mart then. She remembered the loneliness of those drear November mornings, watching the cattle being shipped in, their wild eyes visible through the slats of the trucks, their caked tails waving feebly, their plaintive protests audible over the hissing of tyres, the jangle of bicycle bells, the drone of buses. It made her feel doubly desolate. The bellowing cattle reminded her not only of home, but of the loneliness of home, the suffocating sadness of a place that felt already abandoned even before she had left it.

Then she met Babs who worked in Hosiery. They moved into a cheerier flat. Granted there was still green mould growing
in the shared bathroom down the hall and the electricity meter was greedy as an infant. Suddenly in the midst of cooking dinner the last coin would drop down and the bubbling of potatoes, or the chops hissing on the pan, would quietly subside like the stealthy withdrawal of affection. The hothouse glow of the two-bar fire would fade slowly to black while plumes of steam from their damp washing, straddling the backs of the kitchen chairs, gloomily exhaled. When Edel looked back on it, everything in this world seemed metered, monitored, rationed. Oranges were a luxury; war a live memory. But after six lonely months Edel felt she had arrived.

The city became, thanks to Babs, a place of possibility. Babs knew where to go – picnics in the Botanic Gardens, afternoon tea at the Metropole where you could easily snaffle a second iced fancy from the cake tray if you took the precaution of sharing a table. Edel would remember this time as a kind of courtship. A courtship with the city itself in which the crowded tram rides to the sea and the smogged rough and tumble of the municipal baths were like shyly offered gifts. She liked the city's mix of serious grandeur – the pot-bellied former parliament, the flint-faced university, the declamatory statues of patriots – and the slatternly charm of the streets with their fruit sellers, their littered pavements, the garish fluorescence of ice-cream parlours. It was just such a mixture of gravity and contingency that she wanted in a man.

Victor worked nights. He was a Linotype operator on the
Press.
Later in their courtship he had taken her on a tour of the works one Sunday morning when the case room was idle. He proudly showed her his keyboard, which to Edel looked for all the world like her mother's treadle sewing machine. Bigger certainly, more masculine, the heavy ingots of lead hanging on pulleys hinting at a more weighty purpose. But what was he, really, only an industrial typist, Edel thought, refusing to be visibly impressed. Another evening he took her
to see the presses run. They stood in the loading bay, a smell of ink in the air as the press thundered and rattled. Only then could Edel begin to understand Victor's urgent pride in his work − the hugeness of the press, the pulse and noise like the roar of war. Oil-begrimed men clambered on the platforms of the vast machine beneath the feathery wave of the newspapers as they reared and dipped overhead with the crazy motion of a rollercoaster. Other men sorted and bundled the copies as deftly as if they were large decks of cards. Then, packed and smacked, the papers juddered down rollered chutes into the black gape of the delivery vans. All in the dead of night, as if secretly. Saturday was the only evening they could meet, and even then Victor was wide awake and buoyant at midnight when Edel was ready for bed. She tried not to dwell on this mismatching too much; it brought her back to the manner of their meeting. By rights, she should have waited. Waited for the right man to come along. Trusted to chance.