by Liz Nugent
Andrew did not mind that I did not want to host parties or socialize with other couples. He said he was quite happy to keep me to himself. He was kind and generous and considerate. He usually backed away from confrontation, so we did not have many arguments. In a heated moment, he might kick or throw inanimate objects, but I think everyone does that from time to time. And he was always terribly contrite afterwards.
Andrew worked his way up through the ranks until finally all his time on the golf course paid off and three years ago he was appointed as a judge in the Criminal Courts. He was a respected member of society. People listened to him when he spoke, and quoted him in the newspapers. He was widely regarded as having the voice of reason on matters legal and judicial.
But last year, Paddy Carey, his old pal, accountant and golfing partner, had left the country with our money. I thought that, at the very least, Andrew would be careful with our finances. That was the husband’s job, to be a provider and to look after the economic well-being of the household. But he had trusted Paddy Carey with everything and Paddy had fooled us all. We were left with nothing but debts and liabilities, and Andrew’s generous salary barely covered our expenditure.
Had I married badly after all? My role was to be presentable, beautiful, charming – a homemaker, a companion, a good cook, lover and a mother. A mother.
Andrew suggested selling some land to developers to raise capital. I was horrified at the suggestion. Nobody of our status would do such a thing. I had spent my whole life in Avalon. My father had inherited it from his father, and it was the house in which I was born. And the house in which my sister died. I was not going to compromise on selling any part of Avalon. Nor was I going to compromise on the money we needed to pay the girl.
But we had to take Laurence out of the hideously expensive Carmichael Abbey and send him to St Martin’s instead. It broke my heart. I knew he was unhappy there. I knew he was victimized because of his class and accent, but the money simply wasn’t there. Andrew quietly sold some of the family silver to pay our debts, and we kept the wolf at bay. He could not risk being declared bankrupt, as he would have been forced to resign from the bench. We had never lived extravagantly, but the few luxuries that were normal to us began to disappear. He gave up his golf club membership but insisted that he could still pay my store account at Switzers and Brown Thomas. He always hated to disappoint me.
But now, this? A dead girl in the boot of the car in the garage. I was sorry she was dead, but I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t or couldn’t have strangled her myself under the circumstances. We just wanted our money back. I couldn’t stop thinking about the scars on the girl’s inner arm. I had seen a documentary about heroin addicts on the BBC, and reports of a heroin epidemic were in our newspapers. It seemed obvious that she had injected our money into her bloodstream, as if our needs and wants hadn’t mattered.
As Andrew slept fitfully, whimpering and crying out occasionally, I made plans.
The next morning, a Saturday, Laurence slept late. I warned Andrew to say as little as possible. He readily agreed. He was hollow-eyed, and there was a tremor in his voice that never quite went away after that night. He and Laurence had always had a fraught relationship, so they were not inclined to be conversational. I planned to get Laurence out of the house for the day, send him into town on some errand or other while Andrew buried the girl in our garden. Andrew was shocked that we would bury her here, but I made him see that, this way, she could not be discovered. We were in control of our own property. Nobody had access without our permission. Our large rear garden was not overlooked. I knew exactly the spot where she could be buried. In my childhood there had been an ornamental pond under the plane tree beyond the kitchen window, but Daddy had filled it in after my sister’s death. Its stone borders, which had lain under the soil for almost forty years, were conveniently grave-like.
After Andrew had buried the body, he could clean out and hoover the car until there would be no trace of fibres or fingerprints. I was determined to take all precautions. Andrew knew from his job the kind of thing that could incriminate a person. Nobody had seen us on the strand, but one can never be too sure of anything.
When Laurence arrived at the breakfast table, he had a noticeable limp. I tried to be cheerful. ‘So how are you today, sweetie?’ Andrew stayed behind his Irish Times, but I could see his knuckles gripped it tightly to stop it from shaking.
‘My ankle hurts. I tripped going upstairs last night.’
I examined his ankle quickly. It was very swollen and probably sprained. This scuppered my plans to send him into town. But I could still contain my boy, confine him to quarters so to speak. I strapped his ankle and instructed him to stay on the sofa all day. That way, I could keep an eye on him, keep him away from the rear of the house where the burial was to take place. Laurence was not an active boy, so lying on the sofa watching television all day and having food delivered to him on a tray was no hardship to him at all.
As dusk fell, when everything had been done, Andrew lit a bonfire. I don’t know what he was burning, but I had impressed upon him the need to get rid of all evidence. ‘Think of it as one of your court cases – what kind of things betray the lie? Be thorough!’ To give him his due, he was thorough.
However, Laurence is a smart boy. He is intuitive, like me, and he noted his father’s dark mood. Andrew was snappy about wanting to see the television news, terrified, I suppose, that the girl would feature. She did not. He claimed he had the flu and went to bed early. When I went upstairs later, he was throwing things into a suitcase.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I can’t bear it. I have to get away.’
‘Where? Where are you going to go? We can’t change anything now. It’s too late.’
He turned on me then for the first time, spitting with anger.
‘It’s all your fault! I’d never have met her if it wasn’t for you. I should never have started this. It was a crazy idea to begin with, but you wouldn’t stop, you were obsessed! You put too much pressure on me. I’m not the type of man to …’ He trailed off because he was exactly the type of man to strangle a girl, as it happens. He just didn’t know it until now. Also, my plan had been perfect. He was the one who ruined it.
‘I told you to pick a healthy girl. Didn’t you see the marks on her arms? She was a heroin addict. Don’t you remember that documentary? You must have noticed her arms.’
He broke down into sobs and collapsed on the bed, and I cradled his head to muffle the sound. Laurence mustn’t hear. When the heaving of his shoulders had subsided, I upended the contents of the suitcase and put it back on top of the wardrobe.
‘Put your things away. We are not going anywhere. We will carry on as normal. This is our home and we are a family. Laurence, you and I.’
2
Karen
The last time I saw Annie was in her bedsit in Hanbury Street on Thursday the 13th of November 1980. I remember that, as usual, the place was immaculately clean. No matter how disordered her life was, Annie was always madly tidy since her time in St Joseph’s. The blankets were folded neatly at the end of her bed, and the window was wide open, letting the freezing air into the room.
‘Would you not close the window, Annie?’
‘When I finish my smoke.’
She lay back on the bed, smoking her short, untipped cigarette, while I made a pot of tea. The mugs were lined up neatly on the shelf, upside down, handles facing front. I poured two scoops of tea leaves from the caddy into the scalded pot and poured on the boiling water. She looked at her watch.
‘Two minutes. You have to let it sit for two minutes.’
‘I know how to make a cup of tea.’
‘Nobody knows how to make it right.’
That’s the kind of thing that always drove me mad about Annie. She was so stubborn. There was her way, or the wrong way.
‘It’s freezing.’ She wrapped her long cardigan tightly around her, the sleeves dangling below her hands.
When the two minutes were up, she gave the nod and I was allowed to pour. I handed her a mug of tea and she emptied her ashtray into a plastic bag which she carefully folded over before placing it in the bin.
‘Are you sure it’s sealed?’ I was being sarcastic.
‘It’s sealed.’ She was serious. She reached over and closed the window and then sprayed the room with one of those rotten air freshener cans that filled the room with a smell that would choke you.
‘How’s Ma?’ she asked.
‘She’s worried about you. So is Da.’
‘Yeah, right,’ she said, her lip curling sideways.
‘You didn’t stay long on Sunday. You’re always rushing off somewhere. He does worry about you.’
‘Sure.’
My sister and me were always very different. I like to think I was a good child, but maybe that was just in comparison to Annie. I was quick at school, but things have always been easier for me. If we were in a shop together, the assistants would ignore her completely and serve me. People want to help me and do things for me. Annie always said it was because I’m pretty, but she never said it in a jealous way. We looked alike to a certain extent. As children, we were referred to as ‘the carrot tops’ on account of our flaming red hair, but we were different in one obvious way. Annie was born with a harelip. She had a botched operation when she was a baby, and her top lip was stretched and flattened at the front. She had a scar stretching down from her nose to her mouth. My mouth turns upwards at the sides, so I look kind of smiley. I think that’s why everyone says I’m pretty. I’m not really. I look in the mirror and I just see carrot-top Karen.
When we were small children, Annie regularly went missing. We’d be playing with the neighbours out the front of our house, and Ma would come out and say ‘Where’s Annie?’ and we’d all be sent off to look for her. She’d be in a street beyond the patch we were allowed to play in, and once, she’d hopped on a bus into town and Mrs Kelly who lived in number 42 had spotted her and brought her home. Annie was just curious, I think. She wanted to know what was around every corner. Back then, Da and her were close. She used to climb up on his shoulders and he’d piggyback her around the house and she would scream with laughter, but I was smaller and afraid to go up that high. By the time she was a teenager, though, Da and Annie were at war.
My sister had a reputation. Ma said she kicked her way out of the womb feet first and she hadn’t stopped kicking since. In secondary school, Annie was in trouble all the time for giving cheek to the teachers, stealing, vandalism, mitching, and beating up other girls. She was smart for sure, but couldn’t settle to learning. She was slow to read and slower to write. I am three years younger, but by the time I was seven my reading and writing were better than hers. I tried really hard to help her, but she said the letters didn’t always make sense to her. Even if I wrote down a sentence and asked her to copy it, the words would come out as a jumble. She’d been moved to two different schools by the time she left at fourteen. She could just about write, but her main hobbies by then were smoking and drinking. Ma tried reason, talking to her, bargaining with her, but when that didn’t work, Da tried violence. He beat her and locked her in our room, and I know it killed him to do it. ‘Jesus, Annie, look what you have me doing!’ and he’d go quiet and not speak for a few days. But that didn’t work either, and eventually the worst thing that could happen in a family back then happened. We didn’t know until she was four months gone.
All hell broke loose. She was only sixteen. The father was a boy her own age who, of course, denied all responsibility and said the baby could be anyone’s. He and his family moved away shortly after that. Da called the parish priest, and he and a guard took Annie away to St Joseph’s in a black car. I didn’t see her again for nearly two years.
When she returned, she was completely altered. That was where all her tics and cleaning obsessions started. She had never been like that before. Her appearance was a shock. Her fiery red hair was gone because her head had been shaved. She was painfully thin. On her first night back, in the room we shared, I asked her to tell me what it was like to be locked up in a mother and baby home, and she said it was a living hell that she wanted to forget. She told me about the day the baby was born. It was the 1st of August. She called her Marnie. ‘She was perfect,’ she said, ‘even her mouth was perfect.’ When I asked what happened to the baby, she turned her face to the wall and cried. For the first two months after her return, she used to hide food under her bed. She jumped at the slightest noise. Neither Annie nor my parents ever mentioned the baby. We tried to be normal and Annie tried to settle. Da got her a job cleaning in the bakery he worked in. Her hair grew back, but she dyed it black. A really harsh blue-black. It was her rebel statement.
A few months later, on the 1st of August, I bought Annie a gift in the Dandelion Market, an identity bracelet. I had the bracelet engraved with the name ‘Marnie’. I’d been saving up for a while, but it wasn’t real silver so it tarnished quickly. She never took it off after that, though. Da commented on it one day.
‘What’s that thing you have on?’
She stuck her wrist in his face, but he couldn’t make out the word on the bracelet.
‘It says “Marnie”,’ she said, ‘your granddaughter’s name if you must know.’
Gradually, Annie went back to her old ways. She was fired from the bakery by Da’s boss because her work was shoddy. After that, the frostiness between her and Da was unbearable and she moved out of the house. I admit that I was glad when she moved out.
Though she was always a rebel, when it came to my schooling, Annie leaned hard on me to do my homework and stay out of trouble.
‘You’ve got brains and beauty, Karen,’ she said. ‘You need to use both of them.’
I am clever enough, I suppose, and I liked school, but I worked hard to remove the stigma she had tainted me with. My teachers recognized this. ‘You and your sister, chalk and cheese!’ said Miss Donnelly one day, scoring me a B in an English test. When I meant to leave school at fifteen and try for work in the Lemons factory, Miss Donnelly spoke to Ma and Da and told them that I could stay on to do the Leaving Certificate. Nobody in our family had ever done the Leaving Certificate. My parents were thrilled and Annie was over the moon. ‘You’ll take the bad look off me!’ she said.
I wasn’t a natural genius, but I studied hard to justify Ma and Da’s pride. Then, when I got reasonably good results, there was talk about going to university. I knew that keeping me in school had been a strain on my parents when I should have been out earning, and I could probably work my way through college, but I couldn’t decide what I would study. English and Art were my best subjects, but if I studied English in college, I would have to do a three-year arts degree and then a year’s HDip just to be a teacher, and if I did Art I’d have to go to an art college and Ma said there were no jobs for artists. Anyway, I had the wrong accent for university.
Ma thought I should do a secretarial course. There were still some jobs for typists, though they were few and far between. I liked the idea of that a lot better, and AnCO were running six-week courses for girls who had got good Leaving Certificate results. Annie was disappointed in me. ‘You could have gone to college, you could have got a grant.’ She didn’t understand my reluctance. I was not curious like she was. She loved that I had stayed in school, but when she was drunk, she mocked me when I used big words that she didn’t understand.
Annie got bits and pieces of cleaning work here and there, but most of the time she was on the dole, living in a bedsit not too far away. Ma gave her money sometimes on the sly. On her Sunday visits, Da would try and pretend he was glad to see her, but I think he was ashamed of her, though he denied it later. He couldn’t understand why she was so different to the rest of us. Ma and Da and me all worked hard for what we got. We were quiet and tried to avoid trouble. Annie went looking for it.
After I did the course, I got a job in a dry-cleaning company, typing up invoices and doing a bit of
bookkeeping as well. I can’t say I loved it, but I met Dessie Fenlon there. Some of the men I dealt with were sleazy, passing comments on my figure or making smutty remarks, but Dessie was different. Just respectful, like. One day, I saw him giving one of the young lads a clip around the ear for the way he’d talked to me. Dessie was one of the van drivers. He was quite shy, and it was six months before he got up the courage to ask me out. I think he thought the age difference was too much. He was twenty-six, almost nine years older than me. The best part of the job was when he’d come in to do pick-ups or drop-offs, because we’d be giggling and flirting like mad. We started going out properly then. He said he couldn’t believe his luck that I’d said yes to a date. When it was clear to everyone else in the shop that Dessie Fenlon and I were an item, the comments stopped. Dessie was quiet, but he could be fierce too if you crossed him. He had a reputation as a scrapper and had thrown a few punches in his time.
The job was dull and I was bored most of the time, but I was earning enough to move out of home too. I said to Annie that we could get a flat together, but she wasn’t too keen on the idea. I was disappointed. I mentioned it to Ma, who told Da. He said, ‘Don’t move in with Annie, she’ll drag you down to her level.’ I wonder whether, if I had moved in with Annie, things would have been different. I wonder if Da remembers saying that. If it haunts him. I don’t want to remind him. He’s already suffering. We all are.
On that last day I saw her, she was agitated but excited about something. She said she was going to buy me a proper painting set because she knew that I still loved sketching and painting. I should have been excited about the promise of a gift like that, but I knew Annie too well. She was annoyed that I wasn’t jumping up and down with happiness, but Annie was always swearing to buy me things or to do things with me, and they rarely ever happened.