Free Prosperity Drive by Mary Morrissy

she could feel the tiny pulse of his fontanelle. She wandered into the snail-littered garden.
    ‘I don’t know why. I don’t know what I was looking for,’ Nan said. ‘Your poor mother was long gone.’
    She planted a kiss on the baby’s forehead. She called out Neet’s name, lovelorn in the night. Neet pushed aside a net in an upstairs casement, lifted the metal hatch and leaned out into the stock-scented night.
    ‘Look what the stork left!’
    Sounds outlandish now. A fairy tale. Like something out of Thomas Hardy. (He’d seen Far From the Madding Crowd on TV one night with Neet.) But, look, he was five years old. And hey, it was the Sixties. Those things happened then. Around the same time, Nan had told him, another little boy, a toddler, was abandoned in the doorway of Woolworth’s coming up to Christmas, a note pinned to his coat collar with a heartfelt plea for someone to look after him. Only difference was he was white. And that story was true.
    The contents of her bag on the monitor are in sepia and as plain and unadorned as a child’s drawing – all outline, nosubstance. The goon beckons to her magisterially. She looks over her shoulder towards the concourse, rattled by the thought, however unlikely, that once again she’s turned her back on Mo Dark. The bloke’s still standing there but she’s further away now and she hasn’t got her contacts in. Even if she could see clearly, she couldn’t exactly abandon her shoes and her bag and run in bare feet after a stranger who looks like Mo Dark. That would make her look guilty. Guilty of something. She passes barefoot through the empty doorway.
    Despite her tall tales, he was sure of Nan, sure of her uncomplicated love, in a way he wasn’t of Neet. He saw himself and Neet as semi-detached, like a pair of movie Nazis – his mother helmeted at the controls, Mo dwarfed in the little sidecar. His was a life of female demarcation. Nan did the birthday parties, Neet the trips to the cinema, the camping trips. Nan did Hallow’een. She made costumes, cowboys and pirates – eyepatches and fringed hats. The masks helped, the sleek shades of the Lone Ranger, the dripping plastic of the ghoul. His favourite, though, was the ghost. Shrouded in a white sheet with holes scorched out for the eyes, nobody could guess who he was.
    Trish is thinking of the first time with Mo. She’d had an argument with her mother and had stormed off, heading for St Jude’s. Down by the mortuary was a good spot for a sulk. The dead centre of St Jude’s – a place the living avoided superstitiously. There was a funeral that day. She watched as the attendants opened up the double doors of the mortuary and slid a coffin surreptitiously off the trestles and on to the brassy tray of the hearse. They worked silently and stealthily as if even here, in the house of death, discretion was required. She stretched out on the grass and let the soughing of summer leaves crowd out the rerun of hostilities with her mother playing in her head. A shadow fell across her. How was it thateven with your eyes closed, you could sense someone was there? When she opened her eyes to a silhouette against sun-glare, that someone was Mo Dark.
    They had played together as kids. Sprawling soccer matches − more stoppages than play while the boys argued over fouls and penalties − complicated street games with chanting and finger-pointing, the lonely hiding and frantic seeking. But educational segregation and puberty had put paid to their childish ease. Now she was shy of him, locked in her convent blues while he swaggered about in ripped jeans, a sanctioned drop-out.
    ‘Hi,’ she said and he silently took that as an invitation. He lay down beside her on the grass. She sat up, pulling at her school pinafore where it had rumpled up underneath her. It was one of those drowsy summer afternoons, the riled bee-hum of a lawnmower somewhere in the distance, and the sway of leaves overhead, and suddenly – not even