When they came out of the consultant’s office, he even thought of saying to Edel why don’t we climb into the back of the car and do it there and then, like I’m a kerb crawler and you’re on the game. But he didn’t. Edel would have been repulsed. As if the only thing the news had made him feel was that he wanted to give her one. When that’s not it at all. Being in the waiting room has made him greedy. Greedy to have and to hold. He wants to grab hold of the girls, Norah in particular. He doesn’t know why. He shouldn’t have favourites but damn it, man, he’s dying, and she’s his firstborn and it’s Norah he wants. To touch her and hang on to her for dear life.
‘Norah,’ he calls, weakly. ‘Norah?’
The stalls were laden with battered treasures. An armless doll with eerily closed eyes, any number of cheap gawdy ornaments, a box of marbles, several Dinky cars, a set of dominoes, stacks of comics and women’s magazines, some Reader’s Digests, a couple of furry toys, jigsaws, moth-eaten paperbacks … The children crowded together behind the stalls – there must have been a dozen of them – as Audrey fingered their lovelorn merchandise.
When she looked up, there was Mo Dark. He was the only child she knew by name because he lived in the porter’s lodge with his mother, Nita, who worked in Accounts Payable. He would stand out, anyway, what with the colour of his skin. The fat girl, who seemed to be the ringleader, prodded Mo forward.
‘He’s a Biafran orphan,’ she said. ‘He was smuggled out in the last airlift by an Irish missionary.’ Despite herself, Audrey smiled. Mo looked sheepish. He knew she knew it was a lie. But a lie in a good cause. And Mo was skinny and dark enough to fit the bill.
‘These are his Airfix models,’ the girl went on, ‘he’s donated three of them.’ The spindly planes sat on the counter – beautiful and intricate.
The blue-rinse doll was the next to catch Audrey’s eye.
‘It’s had a hair transplant,’ the smallest of the girls told her, a dark, sprite-like creature. ‘See!’ She parted the doll’s middle-aged perm to demonstrate. A bald doll with a new head of hair. Audrey wanted to laugh out loud. Has God done this, she wondered. Has God got a sense of humour?
‘Lemonade?’ another girl demanded, perilously holding up a large jug filled to the brim. ‘Only thruppence!’
‘Hetty’s mother made it,’ the ringleader informed her. Hetty poured it gingerly into a paper cup. Audrey grimaced as she swallowed; it was eye-wateringly bitter.
‘Fairy cake?’ Hetty urged.
‘Julia baked them,’ the ringleader said, pointing at a tall girl with a grey gaze and a brown fringe that kept catching in her eyelids.
‘Or these glossy magazines?’ prompted a gangly boy, holding up copies of Vogue.
‘Woo-hoo!’ another boy jeered. ‘Barry likes ladies’ magazines!!!’ He had the knotty look of a scrapper but then he broke into a terrifying wheeze, smothered by a deep draw on an inhaler.
Surrounded, Audrey scoured her uniform pockets for small change. Soon, she would have to go back, explain herself. She’d probably be fired; a dereliction of her duty of care. If you can’t deal with grief, you’re in the wrong job, she could hear Matron say. What about the parents? How do you think they feel? Audrey peeled back the paper casing around the fairy cake and bit into the sawdusty taste of desiccated coconut.
Irene Devoy was doing the ironing on a midsummer’s Friday afternoon in an empty house. Rory and Owen in Irish college for a glorious three weeks; Fergal over at his Nana’s, Liam at work. Six months pregnant, she found the silence of the house oppressive with the children away and had to have the transistor radio on, even if it was turned down low, so as not to feel completely alone. When the boys were about, there was no respite; they brought the flurry of the street with them. They were always grappling with one another, pushing and wrestling and no matter how many times Irene sent them back upstairs to come down properly, they thumped about the house as if they were intent on bringing the very walls down. But without them, it seemed too solid, too enclosing, and seethed with absence.
When the doorbell rang – a set of chimes that rang once when the bell was pushed and sounded a lower note with a disappointed cadence when the finger of the caller was lifted off – Irene knew by the length of the exhale that it was a child. One of the neighbourhood kids looking for the boys, she supposed. When she answered she found Norah Elworthy on the threshold with her younger sister Trish in tow.
‘Rory and Owen are not here, girls,’ she said brightly. A bright tone could be deflective, especially with children, and often worked to dispel her own gloom.
Irene always had difficulty placing Norah in terms of age – was she older or younger than her Rory? She could never remember. But she knew Trish was nearly six. She was born the same day as Fergal, she and Edel Elworthy like twin barges on the street, eyeing each other’s bumps competitively. Norah was uncertainly plump, hair tied wispily in two limp plaits with a severe middle parting. Despite Edel’s best efforts, Irene noticed that she always looks slightly dishevelled as if keeping her hair pert and her clothing straight was all too much for the girl. Trish, on the other hand, was scampish-looking, much darker and prettier than her sister. Her hair was cropped short – not the way Irene would do it if she had a girl, too tomboyish – but her clothes, a navy pinny over a white T-shirt, were just so. Hard to believe those two came out of the same house.
‘We’re looking for donations,’ Norah said, ‘for the starving children of Biafra.’
Irene had seen the photographs. The flyblown faces, the distended stomachs, ribcages like bared teeth.
‘Money?’ Irene asked, sighing. They were plagued during the summer by children with their hands out – bob-a-job, selling lines for charity.
‘No, we don’t want money,’ Norah said, ‘we want things. We’re having a sale. A bring and buy sale. You bring something and then you buy something else.’
The girl might find it hard to keep her hair and clothes straight but Norah could be a haughty miss. Still, it was a good cause.
‘I might have some cast-offs from the boys. In the garage. Follow me.’
The Elworthy girls trailed after her as she heaved the up-and-over garage door. She rummaged first in the shelves on the dim back wall of the garage. More Liam’s domain. Nothing much there – some neglected-looking tools (Liam was not what you would call a handyman), the blade of a hacksaw, some fishing line on a spool. On the floor there were a number of cardboard boxes filled with miscellaneous items, old toys, things that no longer worked. The first items of her own she came across were a stack of her magazines. Women’s Weekly, Women’s Own, Women’s Realm. At the bottom of the pile she found years-old issues of Vogue. She didn’t know why she kept these. The fashions displayed inside – the floral shirtwaist dresses, the Chanel suits – which used to give her so much pleasure, were now very dated. They belonged to a world that was as impossibly glossy as the paper they were printed on. But Irene had belonged to such a world once, if only in a minor key. In her early twenties she had been a beauty queen. Now she was rummaging through boxes in her suburban garage, the mother of three sons with another on the way, a mound of ironing to get done and no help in the house. She threw the Vogues after the other magazines, into Norah’s large plastic bag.
In one of the wooden crates there were some old soft toys belonging to the boys, too grubby to be passed on to the new baby, a couple of jigsaw boxes with thousands of pieces, half of them missing, probably – in they went. This was handy, she thought, a way to control the rising tide of stuff that three boys and a grown man generate. In another of the boxes marked in Liam’s hand DO NOT THROW AWAY she found some Reader’s Digests. She looked at the dates – some of them went back to before they were married. They were clutter, pure and simple, taking up space that could be used more productively. If she could clear away these boxes on the floor, then Liam could park the car in here again. Wouldn’t he thank her for that? He was always saying they were turning into the Fortunes, whose car had mos
s growing in the window frames from being left out in all weathers. There were a couple of Ed McBain paperbacks – Liam liked those tough guy kind of books; private dicks, wasn’t that what they were called? And he liked war. Here were some Nevil Shutes. Holiday reading, he said, but she felt sure he wouldn’t read these again. Maybe it was his work that made Liam hang on to everything. He was in the Department of Public Works. He was forever talking about restoring and renovating, cleaning monuments, resurrecting the past. Remembrance. That’s when she thought of the postcard. Afterwards, she would wonder if the idea had been there all along, because the thing Irene really wanted rid of was tiny. A needle in a haystack.
‘Hold on there,’ she ordered Norah and Trish and hurried back into the house. She climbed the stairs and went into Rory and Owen’s room. She reached in under Owen’s bed, her fingers finding dust-bunnies until they hit something solid, a rectangular tin box that once contained a selection of Turkish Delight, a Christmas present from one of Liam’s maiden aunts. It was Owen’s treasure box. Irene rummaged through a set of football cards, a shiny conker, two small marbles (or were they the eyes of a blinded teddy?), a pencil sharpener, a sticky badge from the Horse Show, until she found the card lying face down on the floor of the tin like a groundsheet. She considered for a moment getting rid of the entire box. That would be easier to explain. But none of these other things were offensive to her. Just this, the card. Irene lifted it out and looked for one last time at the girl in the picture from five summers ago. The girl who’d been their maid. The girl who was dead now. Who had killed herself in this house. Who was dead and mourned, not by Irene, but by her nine-year-old son who kept this as a memorial to her. Irene slid the card into the patch pocket of her apron. She closed the lid of the box and pushed it back under the bed, sending it as far as she could into the cobwebby darkness. Maybe Owen would forget there ever was a tin box. She went downstairs, out the front door and back into the garage where Norah was still patiently waiting. She heaved a set of Reader’s Digests from Liam’s box and slipped the card into one of them before tossing them into the gaping mouth of Norah Elworthy’s bag.
The doll’s name was Flossie, and it was given specifically to her by Auntie Babs – not like most of her other toys, which were hand-me-downs from Norah. Auntie Babs, who was her godmother, sometimes stayed over in their spare room when Daddy was at work and Mam wanted to have some fun. Flossie had a plastic head, arms and legs but her body was soft and pillow-like. She had shoulder-length blond hair and a fringe. She was Trish’s favourite doll. She’d had Flossie since she was three. Which was ages ago. Flossie went everywhere. To bed, on holidays, to school. She had been chewed on, been sick over, trampled on, driven over by Daddy in the car, even put through the washing machine and the wringer, but as Mam always said – Flossie was indestructible. But that wasn’t true, was it? Flossie had got sick. Her gorgeous blond hair began to come away in handfuls. There were bald patches all over the top of her head; her fringe disintegrated. Trish was inconsolable. When she took Flossie out on the street, Mary Elizabeth Noone said the doll must have picked up nits at school and that’s why her hair was falling out.
‘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.
WHILE YOU WAIT
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.
Prosperity Drive Page 26
