Free Prosperity Drive by Mary Morrissy Page A

suddenly, lazily (that was the curse of adolescence – the awful tedium of it) Mo leaned over her and stroked her cheek. She remembered still the rapture of it, the silky feel of his hand on her skin, soothing after the aggravation with her mother, as if he was trying to quiet the clamour in her head. Then his lips were on hers and her swoony acquiescence gave way to enraged passion, as if some switch had been thrown. She was eating his face and clawing at his belt and they probably would have done it, there and then, if some busybody nurse hadn’t come along.
    ‘Mo?’
    The nurse was a burly creature with butch hair, a corpulent body encased in white armour; her name tag read Audrey Challoner. She stood towering over them, flushed with indignation – and embarrassment – as they hurriedly tried to fix themselves. Mo rose up to sitting, cross-legged, trying to quell his erection. Trish fidgeted with the buttons on her shirt.
    ‘Hi, Aud,’ Mo said, shading his eyes against the glare. The nurse’s? The sun’s?
    ‘Come on, Mo,’ she said in that infuriatingly reasonable tone adults used to suggest candour rather than judgement. ‘Not here, okay? Just not here.’
    She turned away without a backward glance, leaving Trish and Mo in a queasy backwash.
    ‘Will she tell on you?’ she asked Mo.
    ‘Aud?’ he queried. He knew most of the hospital staff by their first names. ‘Nah,’ he said lazily – as lazy as his first move.
    Although nothing had really happened, there was no going back from the day of trespass in St Jude’s. Sometimes Trish thought she and Mo were loyal to the transgression rather than to each other. Their trysts always followed the same pattern – fevered groping and lecherous disarray always teetering on the brink of the absolutely forbidden.
    When her mother found out that she and Mo were an item – that’s how she put it − she issued florid warnings.
    ‘Remember Shan Mohangie,’ she said. ‘ He was from Africa, murdered his Irish girlfriend. A teenager, just like you. Worked in a restaurant, what was it called? The Green Rooster, that’s it! Killed her in a jealous fit, and then chopped her into little pieces and put her in a pot!’
    ‘This is Mo, Mum, Mo from St Jude’s,’ Trish said. Exasperated.
    Looking back on it, Trish could see only the other fascinations about Mo. He was a sometime roadie for Wingless Stock, a vegetarian heavy metal band. He was nineteen and out in the world. And like her, he had no father. Except where hers was indisputably dead, his was just missing. She couldn’t resist prying. Hadn’t his mother ever talked about it, told him the story? He would shake his head. So she invented her own scenario – his father might have been a student, at the College of Surgeons, maybe? They had loads of foreign students. Africans, Indians. Who knew? Maybe your dad’s still around, she pestered Mo, maybe we couldtrack him down? She envied him this live connection somewhere out there, far away from the confines of Prosperity Drive. But Mo refused to co-operate.
    ‘I’m Neet’s son,’ he said, ‘isn’t that enough for you?’
    The trouble with Trish’s questions was they made the silences between him and Neet manifest. Nan was gone by then; she’d been taken by a stroke that had left her lopsided and speechless. He was angry. Angry with Neet; angry that she didn’t seem to miss Nan at all, barely mentioned her even, angry that she had let him drop out of school with barely a protest, angry that she had allowed him to move out. It was only across the yard, mind you, to an aluminium caravan like a piece of downed artillery parked at the gable of the house. It had lain idle for several years but Neet had helped him fix it up. Nevertheless, he had pinned a skull and crossbones on the door with a KEEP OUT signed scrawled underneath – meant, of course, for her. He’d turned it into a fetid hole, subverting the tight-lipped presses, the picture window with its