by Liz Nugent
‘If it ever came out, we would be disgraced,’ he said. I reassured him: who would believe that we would do such a thing? He still refused. ‘We can’t afford it,’ he said.
I sold the Mainie Jellett painting that Daddy had sworn would be worth something one day. I always thought it hideous, but Daddy was right about its value. Andrew still threw objections in the way. ‘How will I know I can trust a girl who would do something like this?’ he said.
I wish I had put more thought into the question of trust. It’s not like Andrew could march her into a doctor’s surgery for a pregnancy test. He was too well known. He suggested that I deal with her once she was pregnant, but that was out of the question. I did not know how to talk to those people. He was the one who saw them every day in the courts – ‘the dregs of society’ he called them. He only eventually agreed to it when I stopped eating for a week. But the plan was merely theoretical until we found the right woman. That was a lengthy process. It’s not something he could casually raise as a suggestion in the Four Courts. We couldn’t ask anyone for recommendations. Andrew had approached a few women, but he said they were either disgusted when he suggested dinner, or else they were interested in beginning an affair. Besides, they were the wrong type of women. Middle class or too old.
Then, one night out of the blue, he told me about a young woman he had caught red-handed lifting his wallet as he bought a newspaper at a kiosk on the street that afternoon. She begged him to let her go, said she’d do anything he wanted. She cried and pleaded with him. She said she needed the money to buy medicine for her sick little sister. He took pity on her, gave her £5 and drove her home.
‘You believed her?’ I asked him.
‘Not really, but she seemed desperate.’
When he said the word ‘desperate’, it all fell into place for me.
‘What age was she? Did she look healthy?’
Andrew immediately understood my questions, and shook his head. ‘Please, Lydia, I know where you’re going with this and I don’t like it.’
‘Are you shaking your head because she didn’t look healthy?’
‘No, she’s young and fit, but –’
‘Does she know who you are?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Do you think the place you dropped her off was her real home?’
‘I doubt it, unless she lives above a pub called the Viking.’
‘You have to find her. She sounds like a perfect candidate.’
He argued against it. He said that he didn’t want the mother of his child to be a thief.
‘I will be the mother of the child. Find her.’
He found her easily enough within a few weeks. She was leaving the Viking. He asked her to get into his car and she did.
It had been a perfect plan, but as it turned out, Annie Doyle was an addict and a prostitute with a harelip who slept with my husband four times and then said she was pregnant. But she wanted more money than he was offering. She demanded £300 per month, and £600 when the baby was born. After five months and £1,500, he admitted there was no sign of a bump. The girl couldn’t or wouldn’t produce any document to confirm that she was pregnant. So I forced him to confront her that night, and of course the stupid little thief admitted that she wasn’t pregnant at all, and said that she’d go to the papers with her story of how a high court judge had paid her for sex and tried to buy her baby. She was utterly shameless. I couldn’t believe that she would be so dishonest and so cruel, but I didn’t know then that she was a heroin addict and a prostitute. Not until she was dead. I have since read that nearly all prostitutes are heroin addicts, and addicts are capable of anything.
I never got the baby I wanted so badly, and the stress of it all killed Andrew. I hold Annie Doyle entirely responsible.
8
Laurence
Wishing my father dead, and then having him actually die minutes later, made me feel very strange, powerful and guilty at the same time. As if I had made it happen.
I had never been to a funeral before. Everyone told me to ‘stay strong’ and that ‘you’ll get through it’, but I felt fine. I accepted condolences on behalf of my zoned-out mother, kept Granny Fitz supplied with tissues, and carried the coffin down the aisle with Uncle Finn and the paid pall-bearers. It was a lot heavier than I expected. My shoulder ached for days afterwards. The worst part was having to restrain Mum at the graveside and keep her and Granny Fitz apart.
Dad’s friends and some neighbours came back to the house afterwards. Helen was there. I was glad to see her, and she held my hand in the kitchen when the priest came to say goodbye. She pointed out that we had even more in common now that we were both fatherless. I questioned what she meant by ‘more’.
‘Ah well, you know, the way we’re both freaks,’ she said. ‘Fatherless freaks.’
It had a certain ring to it.
‘At least you know your father’s dead. I’m not even sure who mine is!’
She told me I was very brave and that she didn’t think it was unmanly to cry at one’s father’s funeral. I got the impression that she wanted me to cry so that she could make a display of comforting me and being a girlfriend. I accepted her hugs and squeezes gratefully, but I had no need of comfort.
Two boys from my class came. I don’t remember speaking to them before, but they hadn’t particularly bothered me in school. They shoved Mass cards into my hand but didn’t stay long because they were on their way to Funderland to meet girls. A few boys from my old school, Carmichael Abbey, came also and we made unspecific plans to meet up again in an undefined number of weeks’ time.
Afterwards, when everybody had departed, Helen and I washed up and put all the linen and silver away, and Helen helped me put my mother to bed.
We came downstairs then and opened a bottle of whiskey.
‘It’s really OK to cry, you know,’ said Helen again. ‘Your dad’s just died and you’re acting like nothing’s wrong.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You think you are, but it will hit you later.’ She gave me a consoling hug, but I wanted sex and suggested we go upstairs since Mum was knocked out on sleeping pills.
Helen refused. ‘You’re some weirdo, you know that?’ she said.
Afterwards, I tried to think about my father the way he had been before the money troubles, before my weight gain and before Annie Doyle. He had not always been a bad father to me, and it was clear that he adored my mother. Although he could sometimes be impatient with her, I think he felt he didn’t deserve her. I often caught him simply gazing at her as if she were a prize painting. He did every single thing he possibly could to make her happy. Even after Bloody Paddy Carey, he didn’t cancel her Switzers account, though she swore she could easily give it up. I think he was jealous of my mother’s love for me. He hated how close we were. She loved him too, but I think not as much as she loves me. A strange triangle.
My mother took his death very badly. It was like before. After her miscarriages, my mother had had to be sedated for days. Her inability to conceive after my birth broke her heart, and Aunt Rosie’s constant pregnancies and eight children depressed her. For weeks after the funeral, I renewed her tranquillizer prescriptions, and soon my mother was calm and distant and, just as in the past, she was no longer a mother, or a widow, or a daughter-in-law, or even a woman, but just a shadow. However, this time she showed no signs of recovering.
I was managing reasonably well. I got Mum to sign cheques that I cashed at the bank and, as far as I could see, we weren’t destitute yet. The new school term had started and, while I missed a few days here and there, I was capable of preparing my uniform and lunches, and I could cook oven chips and sausages (my favourites), and the mourners’ shepherd’s pies and beef casseroles had stocked our freezer well. I marked their efforts out of ten, grading for taste, texture and presentation. I also did additional general shopping.
After three weeks, Mum had stopped communicating altogether and slept almost all the time. Eventua
lly, I rang an old friend of Dad’s who was a doctor. He’d been at the funeral and told me to call him if I needed anything. I wish people wouldn’t say that when they don’t mean it. I ended up having to beg him. He very reluctantly agreed to come to the house, a big tall man with a sinister death-rattle cough of his own which he used to punctuate every sentence, and which only underlined the gravity of what he was saying. He examined her in her room. Then he came down and started asking me questions about how I was managing, cough-splutter, what I was eating, splutter-hack-phlegm, as if I were the patient. He suggested that my mother needed residential psychiatric care, that she needed to ‘go in somewhere for a rest’. I thought this was a mistake and said so. I suggested that all she needed were stronger tablets and time. Dr Death-Rattle insisted she needed professional medical supervision. My mother, even in her drug-induced stupor, screamed at the thought of going into a mental hospital.
Dr Death-Rattle broke the Hippocratic oath and told my uncle that my mother was in a terrible mental state and that I was coping alone. I sincerely regretted getting a family ‘friend’ involved. An enormous fuss ensued, and despite my insistence that I could look after myself, that I was eighteen, an adult, Granny Fitz declared she was moving into Avalon ‘to look after the boy’ while my mother was committed to St John of God’s. I didn’t get a say. The doctor had informed my school, who immediately pretended to be very concerned for my welfare. The headmaster expressed grave concerns about my unexplained absences, my undone homework and my free-falling grades. They hadn’t given a shit when I was beaten up every day in my first month there.
‘It’s what your father would want,’ said Granny Fitz, arriving with a large suitcase, as if that settled everything. Aunt Rosie, Uncle Finn, the doctor and the headmaster agreed. My mother was taken to St John of God’s one day while I was at school. When I got home, Granny was sweeping up broken glass, so I guessed that my mother had not gone without a fight.
Granny Fitz was seventy-seven years old, physically fit and mentally sharp. When I was a small child, she had doted on me. I was her first grandchild and she couldn’t spend enough time with me. She lauded all my early achievements and boasted about me to her friends. Mum and she fought over me like I was a puppy. But where Mum indulged my every whim, Granny was stricter. She was appalled by how much weight I had gained over the last year and had berated my mother for feeding me so carelessly. With Mum now out of the way, she ran our home like an army camp. I hated it, hated the fact that she was there, treating me like a child. I was desperately worried that my mother would never be well enough to come home. I escaped to Helen’s house as often as I could, partly for the company and the kissing and the possibility of more, but largely because I ran the chance of a decent-sized meal and some proper TV shows. I could always scrounge a mini-pizza or a Vesta curry. I met her floral famous-poet mum. She looked like Helen, not even that much older really. She was a hippy who chain-smoked and spoke in a deep voice. She drank beer from the bottle. When she wasn’t writing, she worked as an editor for a literary journal and hung out with long-haired, denim-clad men, who would be there from time to time. I had met Helen’s little brothers by then; they were raucous and foul-mouthed like Helen, but were welcoming and friendly. ‘Jesus Christ, look at the size of you!’ said the oldest boy the first time I met him. The younger one sniggered behind his hands. It was worth it if it meant a mini-pizza or a slice of toast with the obligatory cup of tea.
Granny Fitz didn’t like Helen. She said she was ‘uncouth’ and ‘common’. I concede she was probably uncouth, but she definitely wasn’t common. There were not too many girls like Helen. She and I met up in a pub a few times, but Granny smelled alcohol on my breath and tried to ground me. She belittled my outrage and insistence that I was an adult and could legally drink now, challenging me to earn the money to pay for it. She didn’t know about the cheques my mother had signed. Granny insisted that I needed to study and that I should put Helen ‘on ice’ until after the exams. I agreed that I would only see her at weekends, but I lied and said I was going to the library when I went to see Helen during the week.
Under Granny’s regime, there was four months of food rationing, restricted pocket money and enforced labour. After the first six weeks, we kind of got used to each other. We lived in an atmosphere of mutual intolerance, but as time went on we became almost cordial. I put it down to Stockholm syndrome. The IRA hunger strikes were in the news. I wondered if my grandmother was making some kind of political point with our tiny meals. There was nothing that drove Granny Fitz to distraction more than seeing me seated, particularly in front of the television. I was allowed only to watch Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons and The Angelus. Everything else was off-limits. The only other time I was allowed to sit down was to study.
I don’t know why I could no longer study, but I had just lost interest. There didn’t seem to be any point to it any more. I was anxious about my mother, and Annie Doyle was still haunting my dreams. So when I was sent to study, I mostly just wrote mad fantasy stories in which I was saving Annie Doyle, or going for dinner with Annie Doyle, or having sex with Annie Doyle. I kept the Marnie bracelet under my pillow. If only Granny had known. She invented jobs to keep me on my feet. She had me digging up hedges through permafrost in February, carrying rubbish from the attic to the shed at the end of the garden, and then back up again. She offered me as a dog walker to a dotty old neighbour.
Granny Fitz made no secret of the fact that she thought my mother was weak and selfish. Granny had lost a son, her ‘flesh and blood’, and ‘you don’t see me languishing in an institution, leaving a poor child to fend for himself’. I suppose I must give her some credit for acting in what she thought were my best interests. She must have known that I despised her by my permanently surly mood and scowling expression, but she ignored my bad attitude and put a lock on the fridge. Once or twice I heard her sniffing or crying, but when I came into the room she would quickly dab her eyes and bark an order at me. I realized that she was mourning her son.
I visited Mum every week and complained bitterly about Granny, but my mother wasn’t really able to respond in any meaningful way, not for ages. I would try to remind her of happier times and point out all the charms on her bracelet to remind her of the significance of each one, but there never seemed to be any visible improvement. I worried that she might never recover. She would sit beside me and stroke my face and smile at me like a blind person might. The medication was doing its thing, I suppose, allowing her mind to heal.
Eventually, she began to engage a little bit, talking about the stories in the newspapers and the TV shows she watched. She was growing painfully thin and complained of not being able to sleep because of her new medication. She gradually began to notice me again. She wanted to get better. She was terrified of being locked up for ever.
One day she told me, ‘At least there’ll be no more miscarriages. Now that Dad’s gone.’ Her eyes brimmed.
‘I’ll look after you, Mum,’ I promised.
Her eyes brightened and warmth returned to her face, and I began to hope that she might soon be back to her old self.
One day, I returned from school to find that my grandmother had bought me a whole new set of casual clothing. Her choices were surprisingly fashionable: proper jeans, jackets, Tshirts, sweatshirts, pullovers. I was used to elasticated waists and plus-size jumpers.
‘Don’t you ever look in the mirror?’ she said.
The answer was no. Usually I avoided the mirror, or else only took in isolated parts – the recurring spot on my chin, the bruise on my knee where I’d been pushed against the wall at school, the tuft of hair behind my left ear that refused to be flattened by Brylcreem or comb.
‘Go up and try them on,’ she said. ‘I can return anything that doesn’t fit.’
I went up to Mum’s room because there was a full-length mirror in there. Even as I passed the mirror to lay the clothes on the bench, I got quite a surprise. The person looking back a
t me was unfamiliar. I won’t exaggerate, I was still fat, but I had certainly lost some chins and a few rolls of flab around my stomach. My face had structure and I could see the rounded top of my cheekbones. With the increased physical activity and tiny portions, I should have expected to be losing weight. I had noticed that my collars had loosened up, but the elasticated waistbands had obviously adjusted by themselves. Helen had said something about how she was glad that I was making an effort for her, but I hadn’t understood until now what she meant. Most of the new clothes fitted well. I looked, for the first time in over two years, merely chubby, as opposed to obese. Maybe my Star Wars T-shirt would fit now.
I stood back and did a twirl, and when I turned again to face the mirror, Granny Fitz was standing in the doorway, looking at me with pride and satisfaction.
‘You’re almost there. That’s what you’re supposed to look like. I know I’ve been hard on you, but I needed you to see what you could be, without making you self-conscious about it.’
I was tongue-tied. If this had been a film, I would have run over and hugged her, but it wasn’t. My grandmother was not the tactile type. We had never exchanged hugs or kisses. We stood smiling awkwardly at each other.
‘Your mother is coming home on Tuesday. She is better than she has been since Andrew’s death,’ she sniffed. ‘I’m sure she cares about you, but you mustn’t allow yourself to get into that condition again. You could be a very handsome young man. Look!’ She indicated the mirror.
I looked hard and saw the man and not the boy. But the boy in me was excited. Mum was better! I couldn’t wait for things to get back to normal, whatever the new normal was going to be, without Dad. I beamed at Granny, and for a moment there was a truce. And then she ruined everything by turning me to face the mirror and saying, ‘See? You are just the image of your father.’
The Saturday morning before my mother’s homecoming, we were in the kitchen and Granny pointed to the flower bed beyond the window. ‘That’s still a mess. Would you go out and fix it up? When was it planted?’