Prosperity Drive

by Mary Morrissy

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Morrissy

  Dedication

  Title Page

  The Scream

  The Gender of Cars

  Lot’s Wife

  Gracefully, Not Too Fast

  Diaspora

  Miss Ireland

  Claims and Rebates

  The Great Wall

  Love Child

  Twelve Steps

  Drag

  Assisted Passage

  Clods

  Boom

  Chinese Burns

  Body Language

  Sick, Dying, Dead and Buried

  While You Wait

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  All the characters in this mesmerising book begin their journeys on Prosperity Drive. Everything radiates out – often internationally – from this suburban Dublin street, and everything eventually returns to it. It is an Ireland in miniature. Like an exploded novel, Prosperity Drive is laid out in stories, linked by its characters who appear and disappear, bump into each other in chance encounters, and join up again through love, marriage or memory.

  The form of Prosperity Drive reflects and embodies the theme of dislocation. Exploring family ties and small coincidences, the stories are united by recurring imagery, echoing a kind of collective unconscious, and the magnetic force of place. While each story is discrete, and stands perfectly alone, when read together they have an extraordinary cumulative effect. Through the central drama of the Elworthy family, the collection has a strong narrative arc, very similar to that of a novel, making explicit to the reader secrets withheld from the characters.

  A stunningly original construction, this journey in stories is very much like life itself: a series of circles and trajectories, a process of learning how to love and how to lose that love. Heartbreaking and hilarious in turn, always incisive and exquisitely written, this is a thrilling book by a major Irish writer.

  About the Author

  Mary Morrissy has published three novels – Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey – and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (1993). She has won a Hennessy Award and a Lannan Literary Foundation Award and currently teaches at University College Cork.

  Also by Mary Morrissy

  A Lazy Eye

  Mother of Pearl

  The Pretender

  The Rising of Bella Casey

  for Colbert

  PROSPERITY DRIVE

  Mary Morrissy

  THE SCREAM

  She is lying at the top of the stairs, her shoulder crushed against the newel post, her hands clawing for the banister. Her hair is fanned about her. It is too long; she would never have let it grow this much, though Norah – or is it the nurse, the foreign girl? – keeps it clean. The shampoo they use smells of nettles; she gets whiffs of it now as if she were lying in a field. She cannot remember the last time she had colour in her hair, though once she would have been particular about such things. Was it weeks ago, or months? Time has bloated and clogged. These days, oddly, it is only when she has fallen that she comes to her senses. It brings her to know mostly the unpalatable. Just now, for example, a flight below – down to the return, then down again – sitting at the kitchen table is her daughter watching a small portable TV while she lies here, stricken.

  A microwave with pictures is how Norah has described it. It is one of the new things that has been added to the house.

  ‘So you can have the big TV upstairs,’ Norah had said, ‘all to yourself.’

  The ground floor of her own house is a mystery to her now, like upstairs might be to a child frightened of the dark. It is so long since she’s been in the kitchen that she has to work to imagine it. In her mind’s eye she sees it flooded with a gauzy early morning light coming in through the French window Victor had installed forty years ago when the walls smelled of lime and the house had a bald, ripening air; as did their lives.

  Norah is at the table, a pale full moon of melamine on a tubular pod – unless it has been changed too – eating a meal. She can hear the lonely scrape of cutlery. Norah had brought dinner upstairs to her on a tray earlier and had fed her, spoon by spoon, though she hadn’t much interest. Appetite evades her these days. In the end Norah had whipped the dish away. Or was that the nurse? Sometimes she gets them mixed up.

  She may be confused about some things, but just now, Edel Elworthy – that is her name, she is sure of that – knows that as she lies here, her daughter has turned up the volume on the TV. She can hear the unctuous urgency of a hair advertisement – gloss and sheen and self-worth all rolled into one voice of honey – and she knows that Norah is deliberately ignoring her.

  It isn’t as if Norah doesn’t know she’s fallen. When Edel falls, she finds herself making whimpering sounds; they seem to just come out of her as if the child in her is talking. Which is the opposite to what she feels. Because when she’s stretched like this, incapable and dependent, everything else about her situation is for once, clear; luminously so. It’s one of the reasons she tries to get out of bed, against Norah’s wishes and the strict command of the nurse. Because once she’s upright she feels a clarifying rush in her head just as the power drains from her legs. It’s a sensation like flying, but sickening like vertigo. And there’s an exhilaration in it too, a nauseous euphoria. She’s not aware of even wanting to be vertical until she’s out of bed on mottled legs that seem so gelid and blue they can’t be hers. And then before she crashes, there’s another sensation, a monstrous feeling like the discovery of a squalid secret. And then she goes down.

  She imagines what she must look like to Norah, or the nurse, or whoever might be looking down at her. Everyone has an arm’s length view, people trying to keep their distance. Her hair wild and ragged like an ancient wizard’s, her mouth open – it must be, she’s making noises – her body gnarled and frozen in this arch and petrified pose. She thinks of a poster one of the girls used to have tacked on to the wall of their bedroom when they were teenagers. She can’t remember if it was Trish or Norah. (Even before this calamity their combined adolescence had blurred into a general fug of secretive passions and obstinate grievance.) It was a picture of a creature painted in a wavery, sick kind of way; it must have been Trish, she was the arty one. Edel couldn’t even tell if it was meant to be human. It had big hollows for eyes, its paws clasped in horror to its cheeks and its mouth open emitting the soundless howl of a nightmare. Maybe that’s what people do now when they see her, hold their hands up in horror and scream silently? Or is that creature her? Though she is making sounds and drooling on her quilted breast, and Norah knows and still won’t come.

  Between her and Norah is the cupboard under the stairs. She can hear Norah rummaging in there sometimes. Well, it is where the Hoover is kept as well as the iron and board, a box with shoe polish and rags, tins of gumption and cartons of detergent giving its normal musty smell a purged overtone. One of the first things Norah did when she moved back in was to get a light installed in there with a 100-watt bulb, though Edel is sure that 60 watts is all the fixture can take.

  ‘So that we can see what’s in there,’ Norah explained.

  Edel knows what’s in there. Boxes of old Christmas decorations, tangled threads of fairy lights, Victor’s dressing gown packed in tissue paper because she couldn’t bear to part with it. Her own wedding veil – for one of the girls, she had thought. Something borrowed. Or something old. But Norah didn’t want it and Trish showed no inclination to walk down the aisle. There is Victor’s toolbox – he was handy, she’ll give him that – still with its trays of nails and washers, its accordion floors packed wi
th chisels and screwdrivers and tins of 3-in-One oil. There are brooms and mops and dustpans, her gardening shoes, spare bulbs, some defunct lampshades – quite sound but out of fashion now. It’s not chaotic; well, it wasn’t the last time Edel was in there. No, it was always orderly. But it is the only place in the house where useless things are still kept – too good to throw out, but not old or precious enough to be of value.

  Usually, as soon as Edel hits the floor, Norah is up to rescue her. She rarely even gets to the top of the stairs, but lately, Edel notices, her response has become slower. It is as if she knows Edel is deliberately defying her. And once Edel is lying down again she can’t explain, not when Norah has manoeuvred her back into bed with a firmness of touch that seems, somehow, more impersonal than the nurse’s. Not when Norah is looming over her. Edel doesn’t have the words in her head then for the sensation of clarity that comes over her when she is upright.

  She thinks she understands why lately Norah has refused to come running. Payback. When the girls were babies and woke in the night and she was an exhausted young mother, she would often lie in bed just listening. She would be wide awake but resistant to the drowsy peeved wails of Norah or Trish. Often it was Victor who, just shortly abed from the night shift, would nudge her in the ribs and say: ‘Edel, it’s Norah.’

  Victor always knew which one of them was calling. She’d tell herself that it was only laziness that kept her horizontal, or the hope that it was one of those cries that might die away rather than rev up into something more hostile and aggrieved, but she knows, too, there was sadism in her refusal. Let them cry for a bit, she would think, why don’t I just let them cry.

  If Norah would come now, Edel might be able to say what she gets up to say every time she makes one of her escape attempts. She would say to Norah – thirty-seven last birthday, she thinks – remember when you were a little girl? A few times she has managed to blurt out these words but Norah has only hushed her. Then she leans down and with great effort – Edel is not heavy but she’s a dead weight – puts her arms under Edel’s shoulders and lifts her with that brusque tenderness Edel has come to know as her elder daughter’s signature touch.

  ‘Try not to talk,’ Norah always says.

  And Edel surrenders, saying to herself, not to worry, Norah knows, she knows already.

  Victor said she was too hard on the girls. Her word carried weight – a sharp smack on the bottom or across the back of the legs. It was how children were brought up in those days. And it was how Victor had been raised. His mother, revered for her sanctimonious indulgence and his father, stern and forbidding, who used his belt when it was necessary. He wasn’t cruel, Victor used to say, he was efficient. It pained his father to punish them and so it was done in silence. Children were meant to be subdued, Victor would say, we were dealt with, not talked to. His father thought most people – particularly women – talked too much. Yack, yack, yack, he would mime when he came across Edel and her mother-in-law trading stories about Victor. This was in the early days of her marriage and Edel liked to discuss Victor with anyone who’d listen. His mother was a natural ally in this. Victor was her favourite and she talked of her eldest son as if she was similarly smitten. After a while, Edel felt they were like a pair of teenagers nursing a crush that could only be deliciously speculated about but never requited. Victor’s father, emphysemic and tethered to his tank of air, said listening to them made him breathless. When the children came, Edel was pleased to see how good a father Victor was and how much he wanted to help. If the girls misbehave, he would say to her, I’ll talk to them. So though it was Edel who would send them under the stairs for serious wrongdoing – tantrums, smacking one another, giving cheek – it was Victor who dealt with them. He talked to them in the velvet darkness.

  She’d only opened the door a fraction. It was a partial view, she kept telling herself, years afterwards. A sliver. She’d sent Norah in there for backchat. Norah was six and had acquired a stubborn lower lip and a fascination with the word ‘no’ since starting school. She was Edel’s firstborn, a blackberry of a child, with her dark brown eyes and almost black hair and her ripe cheeks and her little breathy voice with its appealing hoarseness. That day – it was a humid summer’s day, hot and broodily grey after days of rain as the sun tried to burn away the cloud – Norah had run into the garden and sunk up to her ankles in the newly rotovated earth. Victor was only then getting round to the garden. For the first six years they were in the house, the garden was a wilderness, choked with weeds and scutch grass growing up around the builders’ debris. Now Victor had taken it in hand and it was a churned-up mess, a ploughed field rather than the manicured lawn and privet hedges Edel had in mind. These things take time, Victor had said. But the earth had been turned in April; now it was June and no progress had been made. New shoots of grass were already growing in the overturned clods.

  Norah had a high-tide mark of mud on her legs and was refusing to change her socks and sandals. Trish had just woken from her nap and was being grizzly about her food. When Edel told Norah a second time, instead of ignoring her, Norah simply said no. Then she stamped her foot and, for good measure, said no again. Edel caught Norah by a dimpled arm and with Trish straddled awkwardly across her hip, busily making a sodden pulp of a rusk in her fist, Edel opened the door under the stairs and propelled Norah inside. She was rougher than she had intended to be, but she was furious. Norah always seemed to play up when Edel had her hands full, as if she sensed Edel’s fluster. Edel swiftly locked the door and breathed a sigh of relief with her back to it. Norah beat on the door with her fists and started to bawl. Tears of injustice and complaint and, of course, then Trish chimed in. Victor’s head appeared over the banisters. Freshly out of bed and in the middle of shaving, his face was awash with lather.

  ‘Jesus, Edel, what the hell is going on?’

  She felt tears sprout in her own eyes.

  ‘It’s Norah,’ she wailed like a wronged child, ‘she just will not do as she is told.’

  Victor sighed.

  ‘Let me finish this,’ he said above the din, ‘and I’ll talk to her.’

  She went back into the kitchen, set Trish down unceremoniously on the high chair, and wiped the child’s face clean of the mealy mess. Then she took two or three deep breaths. She hated Victor to see her like this as if she were unable to manage her own children. As if she needed some kind of supervision. She stepped out into the yard, a small apron of concrete beyond the kitchen door bounded on one side by two outhouses – one a lavatory, the other a coal bunker. Thanks to Victor, this was what they were reduced to for a place for the children to play. It was a real sun trap, though, and the next-door neighbour’s roses hung over the wall and dropped their petals on the Elworthys’ side. Unlike Edel, Miss Larchet had plenty of time to cultivate her garden. The petals gave the place an exotic air. Edel imagined a lover scattering them for her. The sun broke free of the gunmetal clouds. She thought she would sit out in the gratifying sun for a bit, until she had calmed down. It was a chore moving the high chair out and finding a shady spot so that Trish would not be scorched in the early afternoon heat. Having dispensed with the rusk, Trish had decided she wanted a drink so Edel had to retreat into the kitchen to make up a bottle. All was quiet within, she noticed, and she relented on her hardness of heart against Norah and decided to fetch her out and interest her in doing something with the fragrant petals strewn in the yard.

  Before she had opened the door she heard the low murmur of talk within. She inched it open a fraction. It was Norah she saw first, astride her father’s knee. He was down on his hunkers. She had one arm resting on Victor’s bare shoulder – he was still in his vest, his newly ironed shirt was hanging in the kitchen – the other one entwined around his neck. Norah was wearing that nice, smocked sundress that had come in a parcel from America with the little cap sleeve slightly off the shoulder and her head was turned at an angle that Edel could only describe to herself afterwards as seductive, her shoulder cocked
like a model posing for a calendar. Her little leg was dangling – she seemed to have shed the sandals and socks – and her small, plump foot was cupped lovingly – that was the only word she could use – in Victor’s hand. And then one of them, Edel didn’t know which one, maybe Victor with his fist, slammed the door shut on her. She backed off, feeling as if she’d been struck. The low murmur resumed inside. She hurried back through the kitchen and stood in the small yard among the fallen petals trying to quell the quick pulse of alarm racing through her. Trish had fallen asleep at a comical angle, one arm flung over the side of the high chair, the other bunched at her heart in a fistful of terry-towelling bib. She didn’t know how long she had stood there when Victor came to the back door.

  ‘There, see,’ he said, ‘everything’s quiet now. I’ve told her she’s got to stay in there for another ten minutes.’

  Edel turned slowly. Victor was busily buttoning up his shirt; she could see the crease lines on the sleeves that she had left with the iron.

  ‘You’ve got to talk to her, Edel, that’s what does the trick,’ he said, giving her a look she couldn’t decipher.

  She suddenly felt adrift in her own world, as if her understanding had slipped its moorings. Victor spoke to her as if in rebuke but the expression on his face, where had she seen that before? After making love, that’s when; just after he had relieved himself. That’s how it always seemed to Edel, as if relief was the most explicit proof of Victor’s affections. As long as she saw that look of rueful satisfaction, Edel was happy. It was enough.

  With Victor gone, the house returned to a squeamish silence. Edel went to fetch Norah. Victor had not locked the door but Norah had stayed inside in the gloom, sitting on an upturned orange box, still barefoot and crooning to herself, which stopped as soon as Edel opened the door. Norah looked up. Her face was rapt, blissful. It startled Edel. Norah’s socks like grubby slugs were on the floor, as were her sandals, the buckles still tied as if they had been torn off in a hurry. Edel quelled her irritation – she was forever telling Norah that she would ruin her shoes if she didn’t open the buckles. But it wasn’t Norah she was irritated with, but Victor; he’d obviously encouraged her.