by Liz Nugent
I did my best to avoid spending time with Helen in the following weeks, but she phoned regularly, ostensibly to check that I hadn’t told anyone about the sex.
‘I don’t want them to think that I’m a slut.’
I didn’t tell her that the boys in my class already called her a slut, even before we’d had sexual intercourse.
She continued, ‘It’s just something I needed to get out of the way, you know? To see what all the fuss was about.’
I could feel her disappointment. I guessed if she had wanted to offload her virginity, I would probably not have been her first choice. As hurtful as this dawning realization was, I wondered if other boys had rejected her before she chose me. And then I wondered how likely it was that a boy in my class would have refused sex from any girl. So she did choose me. Poor Helen.
‘Sorry,’ I said, when we first talked on the phone after that night.
‘God, no, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have … it was just … let’s never mention it again.’
‘Sure.’
There was a pause and then I had to ask because I needed to know. ‘So are you my girlfriend or anything like that?’
‘Do you want me to be?’ She was slightly incredulous. How the hell was I to answer that?
‘Well, I suppose …’
‘Great, that’s great.’ Her voice brightened. I wasn’t sure what to say.
‘… Are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s OK then? To call you my boyfriend? And we don’t have to … you know …?’
‘What? Ever?’
‘Well, maybe … sometime, but not soon … OK?’
‘OK … well, goodnight.’
‘See you tomorrow?’
‘Yes, probably.’
‘Goodnight.’
I should have been celebrating the fact that I had a girlfriend, even if it was just Helen, but I was afraid to have a confidante. If I voiced my fears, that would legitimize them and make them real. Helen got upset and clingy. She was paranoid and claimed that I had obviously just been using her for sex. She swore that if I told anybody we’d done it, she’d tell them what a small penis I had, and that even if it was huge, the flab of my belly would have hidden it anyway. I had really struck gold with my first girlfriend.
Helen visited Avalon, often uninvited. ‘Jesus! Look at the fucking size of your house!’ she said the first time she came over. I shushed her, asking her to be polite in front of my parents. She just about curbed her language, but I could tell that she didn’t really care what people thought of her. I knew that Mum and Dad were unimpressed by her. Mum was cold and stiff in her presence, made awkward polite conversation and then left the room. Dad caught her siphoning vodka from a bottle in the drinks cabinet into a small lemonade bottle one time. I had taken the blame and said it was my idea. Normally he would have been incandescent at something like that, but he just shuffled away, muttering. I’m sure he thought Helen was a bratty teenager, but maybe he was relieved that I had a girlfriend. As far as I knew, he didn’t tell my mother about the vodka. Helen didn’t care.
Christmas holidays came finally on the 19th of December. It was a mixed blessing to be out of school. On the one hand, I didn’t have to face the bullies, but on the other hand, the courts were closed and my dad was at home a lot more. I was nervous around him. Also, there was the small matter of my school report. Since the night the guard had come to our door, I had given up doing my homework or revising. I was not concentrating on schoolwork at all, preoccupied as I was by the fact that I was living with a liar and a murderer, probably.
I thought about forging the report. I wasn’t bad at forgery. In my old school I used to do it for friends, but in St Martin’s I had quickly offered up this skill to avoid beatings. I forged sick notes from parents, school reports, train tickets. There was one attempt to have me forge £10 notes, but then they’d beaten me up when it proved unsuccessful, as I’d told them it would be. I decided to be honest about the report, but I worried about my father’s reaction.
I had already disappointed him by not being athletic and not loving rugby or golf. One time, he had forced me to endure eighteen holes of golf in his company. I never knew how to have a conversation with him, and I couldn’t hit the ball more than three yards. On that particular trip, I embarrassed him in front of his friend. It was a ‘father and sons’ outing, suggested no doubt by his friend, who belonged to a posher golf club than Dad’s one. The other son was a good bit younger than me, but I disgraced myself by fainting at the fourth tee and had to be rescued by a golf buggy and carted back to the clubhouse. When Bloody Paddy Carey had done his worst, Dad had to cancel his golf membership, claiming that he just didn’t have the time. Every cloud.
But I had always managed to maintain top grades. He didn’t need another reason to go ballistic. And I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to control my own reaction if he did. Mum would try to play it down and point out that Bs and Cs were still very good.
I handed the blue envelope over to my dad on the first day of the holidays, thinking I just needed to get it over and done with. He opened it absent-mindedly as I waited nervously, but as he scanned through it, he didn’t seem angry at all. ‘Where are all the As? You’ve slipped,’ he said.
Mum picked it up then. ‘Oh God, Laurence!’ she said after she’d read the whole thing. ‘It’s not a disaster, darling, but what has happened to you?’ And before I could answer, she said, ‘It’s that girl. She’s a distraction. Not a tap of work is being done while she’s around.’
‘Her name is Helen,’ I muttered.
‘Don’t talk back to your mother,’ snarled the suspected murderer/kidnapper, but he left the room then and didn’t mention it again.
Mum gave me a lecture: she was going to keep a closer eye on me, she said, and I could catch up on the lost As over the Christmas holidays. ‘Of course, it’s all my fault, I could tell that girl was trouble the moment I heard about her. I should have put a stop to it then.’
I managed to ring Helen and tried to tell her that we needed to cool things down a bit.
‘Fuck that,’ she said, ‘are you a man or a mouse?’
I didn’t answer the question.
Mum worried as Dad began to look old and ill. I tried not to think about it, but I couldn’t settle. Mum said we should just be gentle around him and try not to make any demands on him. She confided there were serious financial worries that he refused to discuss with her. I played along with her concerns, insisting that my too-small blazer was fine and there was no point in getting a new one for the last five months of school. She admitted we simply couldn’t afford to buy what we needed.
I had never known my dad to be beaten by stress before. Stress and depression were my mother’s weaknesses. As he became more frail, I realized that I was possibly the only person who knew the real reason for his decline.
I turned eighteen on Christmas Day. Helen and I exchanged gifts the evening before, when she called to Avalon. Helen said I was a cheap date because she’d only had to get me one combined birthday/Christmas gift. It was a Star Wars T-shirt (we’d seen The Empire Strikes Back by then), but I didn’t dare try it on in front of her. I told her it would be great for the summer. As I suspected, it was too small. I got her a pair of earrings made of pieces of coloured glass. She said they were lovely and that she’d been meaning to get her ears pierced anyway.
I was angling with Helen to try sex again, but she said I’d put her off. My hand was red from being slapped away. That is my abiding memory of that Christmas Eve – me wheedling, her slapping.
The big day started out as the usual family affair. We ate in the dining room instead of the kitchen. The table was set with linen and crystal, and Dad, for the first time since, well, since that time, made an effort to be on good form. He faked jollity and merriment and read the same lame jokes we’d heard every year from the Christmas crackers. He complimented the food, and although I could see how much it irked him, he ignored
the amount I heaped on to my plate. I decided to take advantage of the birthday/Christmas Day amnesty and ate an entire box of Quality Street. Neither of them commented.
We opened our presents. Among other things, I got a Rod Stewart Greatest Hits album that I really wanted. I had bought my mother a charm for her bracelet. I got her one every year. It was a tiny figurine of a ballet dancer. Mum had done ballet when she was young and could have studied it in London as a teenager but refused because she was scared of being homesick. Mum never went on holidays. She couldn’t bear to be away from Avalon for more than a day. As a twelve-year-old child, she had been painted doing exercises at the barre in the manner of Degas, and the large rosewood-framed canvas hung over the mantelpiece. She still practised her steps and did stretching exercises for hours every morning in front of the mirror in the dance room upstairs. She loved her new charm, but then I knew she would. I gave Dad a Rumpole of the Bailey book. He liked the television series, liked to complain how unrealistic it was, but would never miss it.
‘Thank you, son, very thoughtful.’ He seemed to be genuinely moved, and I began to feel a glimmer of something for him, and to wonder if all would be well. And then I thought of Christmas Day in Annie Doyle’s house, and her mum and dad and sister staring at the empty space at their Christmas table. I knew they were not having a good day.
Dad wanted to make a fuss about the fact that I was eighteen, and gave a nice speech about how I was a man now and that soon I’d be out in the world, in charge of my own decisions, and that he knew I would make them proud. Mum tutted at the bit about me being out in the world, but poured me a small glass of wine, my first legitimate glass of alcohol, and then presented me with an extra gift, something specifically from her, she said. It looked like a jewellery box, but when I opened its hinged lid there was a solid gold razor inside, nestled in a velvet mould. It was a family heirloom and had been her father’s.
I knew this was momentous for her and that she wanted it to be so for me, but my father couldn’t help himself.
‘For God’s sake, Lydia, that’s ridiculous! Laurence doesn’t even shave yet,’ he said with a sneer. ‘He’s a late developer, aren’t you, boy?’
It was true that I did not yet need a razor, but I was fully developed in every other way and was sorely tempted to tell him I’d already had sex. Mum was hastily trying to calm things down. Her refereeing skills were second to none. ‘Maybe he doesn’t need it quite yet, but he soon will!’ she said brightly, putting her hand firmly on my father’s arm.
My father squirmed for a moment and said rattily, ‘Yes, yes, of course he will.’ He gave me a manly playful punch on the shoulder. I tried not to wince, not from the pain but from the insincerity of it.
‘Cheers! Happy birthday!’ said my mum as she raised her glass, and we all clinked glasses.
I met my father’s eyes and I could see that he was trying to look at me in a genuine way just for that briefest moment, trying to see who I was. I held his gaze. A moment of understanding passed between us in which I could see some decency and he could see his son beneath the layers of flesh. The moment faded though, when the phone rang. Mum went out to answer it.
‘It’s that girl!’ she called from the hallway. I could hear the heavy sigh in her voice.
Dad threw his eyes to heaven in exasperation. ‘It’s Christmas Day!’ As if there was a law that you couldn’t use the phone on Christmas Day.
‘It’s my birthday,’ I reminded him. He remembered and smiled indulgently at me. I felt again the knot of anxiety in my stomach. He looked so damn benign, but I knew the truth.
The phone call from Helen was brief.
‘Happy birthday! And Christmas! What did you get?’
I listed the gifts I’d received.
‘Is that all? I thought you would get more than that.’ Helen thought that a big house equalled rich equalled extravagant. It is rarely the case.
I could hear the yelling of her brothers and loud pop music in the background.
‘Mum looped the fucking loop and got Jay and Stevo a drum kit. The mad bitch.’ Jay and Stevo were six and eight years old respectively. Then all I could hear was a deafening clash of cymbals, and Helen and two other voices roaring, ‘Shut up!’
My mother put her head around the cloakroom door and gave me her ‘Get off the phone’ look. Conversation was more or less impossible at Helen’s end anyway because of the cacophony, so I bade her farewell. As I approached the kitchen, I could hear the clatter of them clearing up in there. Dad said, ‘What kind of moron rings on Christmas Day?’
‘Andrew, I don’t like her any more than you do, but for God’s sake can you just try and be nice to him for one day? It’s his birthday!’
‘What does she even see in him? The size of him. She’s no oil painting but –’
‘He is your son! Can’t you please –’
I coughed. I wanted them to know that I’d heard them. They both looked uncomfortable, and my father at least had the grace to be embarrassed. I had never heard him express his opinion about me so blatantly before. By now I felt hot and restless. I was all too aware of this scornful, sour, superior presence standing at the kitchen sink, looking out of the window, pretending Annie Doyle didn’t exist and wishing that I didn’t either. I hated him. I wished he were dead.
6
Karen
After Da had reported Annie’s disappearance to the guards, we expected news within a day or two, but it didn’t happen quite like that. We went to the station that Friday night, the 21st of November. Detective Mooney seemed to take our concerns seriously. We gave him descriptions of the clothes missing from her wardrobe.
‘Any distinguishing features?’ he said. I pointed to her mouth in the photograph. ‘And she wears an identity bracelet that she never takes off.’
‘So her name is on the bracelet?’
‘No, it just says “Marnie”.’
‘Is this Marnie a friend?’
Da glared at me. ‘Never mind about that. Marnie is someone she used to know. The name isn’t important.’
I know that the next day they interviewed the girls who lived in the house with Annie. I went to Clarks’s Art Supplies to ask if my sister had bought a painting set on the previous Saturday. I showed the girl behind the counter a photo of our Annie. Annie was pretty drunk in the photo, but it was the best one we had. It had been taken the year before at my uncle’s fiftieth birthday party. In all the other photos she had her hand over her mouth, obscuring her most notable feature. The guards had rejected all of those, but I knew Annie would be furious that we were putting out the photo she had tried to tear up. ‘I look like a bleedin’ mutant!’ she had said.
The girl in the art supplies place remembered Annie coming in weeks previously, examining the painting set and talking about coming back to buy it. She said she had suggested that Annie could leave a deposit, but she had said she would be back with the full price. It wasn’t surprising that Annie had never turned up. I was annoyed with myself for even hoping that she might have.
I wondered if she had travelled to London for an abortion. If she’d been pregnant, there is no way she would have risked being sent back to St Joseph’s. But if she’d gone to have an abortion, she would have packed a bag, and she would certainly have been home by now. In desperation, I spent a morning on the phone to all the hospitals in Dublin. None of them had any record of her or of anyone matching her description. Detective Mooney told me he had covered the same ground with the same results.
Ma spent all her time in the church, praying for Annie’s return, but Dessie and me took time off work to go out looking for her. We talked to the locals in the Viking. I thought they’d be more likely to talk to me than to Ma. We knew some of them to see. They all knew Annie, smiled when talking about her. ‘She’s some demon for the Jameson’s,’ said the barman, who, no doubt, had never refused her cash. They had wondered where she’d been. I asked if she’d ever been there with a boyfriend. One of her ‘friends’ lo
oked a bit cagey then. ‘A few,’ she said, and Dessie got that mortified look and left the pub.
We went to her boss at the cleaning agency too. The guards had already talked to him by the time we got there, and he refused to talk to us, saying he’d already told the guards all he knew. ‘She’s a pain in the arse,’ was all he said. ‘I was going to fire her anyway.’
Three days after we had reported Annie missing, the guards got in touch with the landlord right before he was about to clean out her flat. He was furious apparently and ranted about lost rent. They searched it from top to bottom. And I think that’s when they began to take a different kind of interest in Annie.
On Wednesday the 26th of November, Detective Sergeant O’Toole rang and asked us to go to the station, Ma, Da and me. We all exhaled with relief. We convinced ourselves they’d found her.
At the station, Detective Mooney brought us into a small windowless room. There were only two chairs in it, and somebody went to get three more so that Da and I could sit down too. They wanted us all to be sitting down before anything was said. Ma got nervous then, clutching her rosary beads. ‘What’s all the drama for? Can you not just tell us where she is?’