Unravelling Oliver

by Liz Nugent

  The girl was clearly unstable. Within a month or two, I heard that she dropped out of college, and then Michael rang me to say that she was dead.

  I tried to have a reaction to this. I tried to cry. I expected guilt or anger but instead there was a strange emptiness, another void to add to the one already at the core of my soul, if such a thing exists. I had rejected her and hurt her, but I felt nothing, except that she was one less reminder of that summer. I am sorry that she did not think life was worth living. Another man could have loved her the way she needed. She was very beautiful, after all, and adorable, pleasant, easy company most of the time, before France. Several men I knew would have wanted nothing more than a date with the alluring and elusive Laura Condell. I regretted that she died but it was not my fault. None of this was my fault. I was supposed to be wailing and gnashing my teeth apparently, but I had really done guilt by then, and it was of no benefit whatsoever.

  I left college the following year with a 2:2, a good enough degree. I would have liked to start my own business importing wine or something like that, but with no capital and no collateral, it was out of the question.

  Out of financial desperation and seeking guidance, I even went to my father’s house one evening and rang the doorbell. I stepped back and waited, saw the curtain twitch, saw him seeing me, and then the curtains were drawn by an unseen hand and the door remained shut.

  Eventually I got a dull job working alongside unambitious people in the offices of the Inland Revenue as a clerical assistant, the lowest form of life, but it allowed me to rent a flat on Raglan Road, a better part of Dublin. It didn’t take too long to move house. One battered suitcase and a refuse sack containing my mugs, pots, kettle and radio. And the locked wooden box, its key in my pocket.

  My new home was even smaller than the one I had before, but location, location, location. I lived on beans and eggs and tea, and met up with some of the old crowd every summer to go travelling, having scrimped since the previous year. I lied about what I was doing, pretended to be rising through the ranks of the diplomatic corps. My sense of envy festered.

  By early 1982, I was getting rather depressed. It had taken me seven years to move up one grade from clerical assistant to clerical officer, and that was only because someone died. I was sick of the penury, sick of the pretence and sick of myself. It seemed that I was doomed to this misery for the foreseeable future. There was no one to rescue me. Unable to control my thoughts, I recalled the hero who could have rescued me, if I hadn’t killed him. I remembered that kind old man, the boy, and a time when there were possibilities, when I was surrounded by decency. The box on top of the wardrobe in my room underneath its layer of dust called to me.

  Several times in the intervening years, I had been on the point of throwing out the leather-bound books, thinking that doing so would ease my guilt. But I never did. It would have been sacrilegious. They represented something beautiful, something that I had destroyed, but which nevertheless I needed. I could not explain the need, not then. On that night, in that moment of torment, I only wanted to remember.

  With shaking hands, I unlocked the box. I read the stories again. There were twenty-two of them in total, some already neatly typed up by me in the pages of the leather-bound books, some written in blotted ink by a shaky hand on loose sheets that I’d carefully placed between the pages. I did not sleep for a week thereafter, but then a few bottles of cheap wine helped me to forget the child for whom they were written and the hand that wrote the original drafts. Remembering had been a mistake. Or so I thought.

  Gradually, it dawned on me that these stories could be my escape route. If they had not died, if I had become somehow part of their family, would these stories not also have become mine? I was the only one that the old man had trusted to transcribe them. Why? Why a strange Irish boy he did not know? Why not a local scholar? Why did he choose me? If Jean-Luc was no longer around to benefit from these stories, well then, why not me? The fire was just the result of a minor deception that went awry, I told myself, desperate to justify my plagiarism, and once I had made the decision, it was easy. I only needed to rewrite them in English, change any identifiable details and publish them under a pseudonym, just to be sure. If I were to publish a couple of thousand copies in an Irish print run, I might be able to secure a future for myself.

  The first publisher I approached expressed interest, and that expression of interest allowed me to engage an agent who quickly negotiated a rather quick and unprecedentedly lucrative deal on the strength of the fact that I could pitch at least ten sequels on the spot. I immediately bought a good linen suit and a sports car on hire purchase from the proceeds of the advance.

  A month later, I met Alice, who was to be my illustrator, at the launch of another book whose author my agent also represented. I could not believe my eyes when I saw her first drawings of Prince Felix. Without any guidance, she had captured the essence of a small French boy, nine years dead.

  I invited Alice to come away with a small group of us to Paros on holidays. I planned my seduction terribly well and it was surprisingly easy, made easier by the clown that was Barney, who not only permitted his girlfriend to come travelling with me, but also arranged with her mother to look after Eugene in Alice’s absence. It wouldn’t have made a difference in the end. She was predisposed to love me because, as she later confessed, she was in awe of my stories.

  By the time the first one was published, I already believed that I’d written it. The advance blurb was so positive that I immediately thought my father might change his attitude towards me if I was successful, if he had something to be proud of, so I invited him to the launch. He did not come. I made no further attempt to contact him after that.

  Alice and I got married and I lived happyishly ever after. Alice was happy enough too, I suppose, once she’d resigned herself to being childless and got used to the idea of the imbecile being in a home, although my liaisons upset her from time to time, when I was careless enough to be caught, usually when Alice had done something to irritate me. But I was never careless with my darkest secret and kept it locked away in its wooden box.

  It turned out that my meek and mild-mannered wife was more sly and devious than I could have imagined. Three months ago, she returned from her little cookery trip without Moya. Moya had finally got the courage to leave her husband for a Frenchman she’d met at the school. I had long ago come to the conclusion that Moya was a pain in the arse and had been in the process of dropping her, though God knows she did not take the hint easily. Now that Moya had left Con for another man that wasn’t me, I felt nothing but relief, though admittedly my pride was a little wounded.

  I noticed that Alice was particularly quiet, and Moya’s early-morning phone call from France a few days previously had put me on edge. With nothing to lose, had Moya spitefully told Alice of our affair? When Alice had caught me out before, it usually led to weeping and stony silences for days and recriminations and stomping off to the spare room for a month until I promised to give up the floozie and never do it again. But I knew that this one would hurt more deeply. Alice had always thought of Moya as a friend, and it had been going on for years, not just one of my ten-weekers. When I broached the subject of Moya with her, she only said how devastated Con must be and that she hoped Moya would find happiness, but Alice’s mood was odd. She had a sudden confidence that I didn’t quite trust. I thought maybe she knew about my affair with Moya but was relieved that Moya was now out of the picture. I rationalized that either Moya’s absence made her more secure or she felt finally superior to Moya. I was quite wrong.

  Four days after her return, on that chilly November evening, Alice prepared this terrific meal and said nothing at all until the raspberry roulade.

  ‘Did you get the recipe for this on the cooking trip?’ I said, trying to be breezy.

  ‘It’s funny that you should mention that. I had a very interesting time. You never asked exactly where we went. Let me show you the brochure.’

 
; I saw the word ‘Clochamps’ before I saw the picture of the chateau and was instantly shocked into speechlessness.

  ‘Madame Véronique remembers you very well.’

  I still could not say anything. She stood up, took the fork out of my hand and lowered her face to mine.

  ‘You are a fraud, a liar and a thief!’

  So I punched her. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

  The really ironic thing is that by the time Alice discovered my true deceit, I was actually working on my own book. The first truly authored by me. It wasn’t a children’s book at all. It was a very dark tale about neglect, abandonment, grief and lost children. It was loosely based on the story of Cain and Abel. I wonder where I got the idea?

  My God, writing is boring. Starting was the worst part, and it has taken me almost five years to write sixty pages. All I had been doing for the previous twenty-four years was reading, parsing, translating, and then using my trusty thesaurus to change the words around to take the Frenchness out of them. That was hard work too and took a great deal of skill. Though, as it turns out, writing does not come naturally to me. Under the guise of Vincent Dax, I regularly gave interviews to the media, exclaiming that the Prince of Solarand books pretty much wrote themselves. It was my little insider joke. Now that I have attempted to write, I can understand why other authors were so infuriated by my statement. Well, I continue to be baffled by theirs.

  ‘I was born to write!’ they might say, or ‘I couldn’t do anything else!’ Pathetic.

  If anybody had bothered to work it out, I did credit the old man with writing the books, in the form of my pen name.

  My wife, I had always thought, was a mouse, but now she had sharpened claws and revealed a feline arrogance I had never seen before. When I returned after my quick diversion to Nash’s, I found she had broken the lock on the wooden box, and the leather-bound books were on the kitchen table beside her. Her suitcase, only recently unpacked from her trip to the French cookery school, stood beside her. So she was leaving me. Fine. No problem. Off you go.

  Only then, she calmly told me that the suitcase was packed for me, that she was returning the books to Madame Véronique, that I must leave her house. I told her she was being ridiculous. It did not have to be this way. I started to explain myself. Where was the harm in publishing what would probably have been discarded anyway?

  Alice did not want to listen. My whole life was a lie, she said, reminding me that it was the books that had made her fall for me in the first place, reminding me of some of the more cringe-worthy things I may have said to her at one time or other – ‘I couldn’t write these without you’, ‘You’re my inspiration’ – and of the many dedications to her on the acknowledgement pages: ‘… and finally my best to Alice, without whom none of this would be possible’.

  I realized something I had failed to notice for the last thirty years. You don’t have to love a person. You can love the idea of a person. You can idealize them and turn them into the person you need. Alice loved the person that she thought I was. One way or another, I have managed to kill all the people who have loved me so far.

  Where is my mother? Where is she? Couldn’t she have loved me? I may have killed her too. The whore.

  Jean-Luc, my little friend, I remember the small arc of your arms around my shoulders and the heft of you as I piggybacked you around the terrace.

  Monsieur d’Aigse, who showed me nothing but generosity and kindness, you opened your heart and your home to me and made me welcome when I offered you nothing in return but death, and then later, theft.

  Laura, you were a normal happy girl until I chased you and somehow poisoned you to the point when death was your only option.

  Shame flooded my head and I felt again like the boy who was not good enough to see his father because he had spilled juice on himself, like the boy whose father inspected him like one would a horse, looking for defects.

  When I attacked Alice for the second time, these thoughts went through my head as I punched and kicked and bit and slammed and dropped and wrenched and tore.

  24. Barney

  I couldn’t believe my eyes when I answered the door very late that night three months ago to find Oliver covered in blood. At first I thought he’d been in a car accident. He was shaking like a leaf, but he said he wasn’t hurt and when I looked a bit closer, I could see that he didn’t have any wounds.

  ‘Jesus, what happened!?’ says I.

  ‘It’s Alice,’ he says, ‘she needs help.’

  I’m glad my mam is dead now because if she’d been around for this, her nerves would have been shot and I wouldn’t be allowed out of the house.

  I left Oliver sitting in a chair in my hallway and ran over to Alice’s. The hall door was wide open and I went in, dreading what I was going to find.

  She was in the kitchen. At first sight I thought it was just a load of laundry piled up against the back door, waiting to go into the machine, but then I noticed smears of blood across the floor and on the wall above and I realized that it was Alice. God, the image of that will never leave my head, so help me. I knelt down by her side and lifted her head. Her breathing was shallow, but she was conscious. I was crying now, as I tried to hold her and reach the phone on the wall behind her. Little frothy bubbles of blood were coming out of her mouth. I roared at the 999 people to get an ambulance and gave them the address. They said they’d send the guards too, but I dropped the phone because I couldn’t hold Alice and talk to them at the same time. I wanted to be talking to her. In films on the telly, they always say that you should try and keep the victim awake because if they lose consciousness, they die, so I was talking to her, telling her to hang on, and she was looking at me, the beautiful eyes that I had loved my whole life, even though I had no right. She was trying to say something but I told her to save her energy, and the sight of the blood pouring out of her was terrible and I held her close and said, ‘It won’t be long now, hang on, love, hang on.’ She did say a word and I guessed it before she finished saying it. ‘Eugene,’ she said and then she passed out.

  The ambulance came and took her away, and then the guards arrived and I remembered that Oliver must still be sitting in my hall. I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but by now I obviously knew he’d done it. I remembered how snotty he’d been in Nash’s earlier in the evening when he threw a pack of fags at me. He was covered in her blood. So I told the guards where to find him, and watched as they escorted him out of my house. He looked up at me, all that swagger and confidence gone out of him, and I realized that no matter how educated he was, how rich or how posh, I was a better man than him. I always had been.

  All those years ago, when he stole her from me, I didn’t put up a fight. I practically gave him my permission. I thought Alice deserved someone better than me. I should have fought for her.

  I visited her in the hospital the next day but she never regained consciousness, so now I visit her once or twice a week and I hold her hand and talk to her because in films sometimes that works and you can get a fella back to normal. I tried bringing in old songs she liked and I put headphones on her head, but she never stirred. One day I was chatting away, reminding her of the time we went to Galway and got drunk on the port, and she opened her eyes and I roared for the doctors, but they said it was nothing and that just because she opened her eyes doesn’t mean she’ll get back to normal. I saw a film, a foreign one about a fella who was in a coma like her, but he knew what was going on and you could tell because one of his eyes would follow you round the room. Alice opens her eyes now from time to time, but not like she’s seeing anything, just as if she’s blinking but in reverse, if you know what I mean. She smiles sometimes. I hope she’s remembering happy times.

  I don’t think she’s going to get better now, but I still like to go in and chat because you never know.

  I started going to see Eugene too. He’s just the same mad fella he always was. Delighted to see me. The other day, didn’t he lift me u
p in a chair and off we went! I was scared out of my wits and this bossy one screams at him to put me down, but weren’t we only having a bit of a laugh.

  Oliver has signed over guardianship of Eugene to me. It was all done through solicitors. It was complicated because Alice is his next of kin, but she’s not dead and Oliver’s her next of kin even though he half killed her. Oliver had the nerve to ask if I’d go and visit him. Apparently, he wants to ‘explain’ himself. Fuck him.

  Enough of him. I’m having Eugene come and live with me. There’s social workers and assessments and all sorts involved, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen. I’ve cleared out Mam’s room, and I’ve wallpapered it, and I’ve bought loads of books for him. Not those books, obviously, but other ones. I got a CD player too for his room. The fella tried to sell me an MP3 player, but sure what would I want with one of those. I already had to buy all my records on CD after the record player broke and I couldn’t get a replacement. It’ll be the MP3 this week and something else next week. I can’t keep up. I got a new car too. The back seats are high up so that Eugene will be able to see out properly. I’m giving up smoking. It’s really hard, but it wouldn’t be right with himself in the house. Eugene and me will have a grand time.

  Every time I visit him, he asks when Alice is coming. I can’t tell him yet. I’ll take my time and think of something. Maybe he won’t be upset to visit her in the state she’s in. I don’t know, but I know when he moves in with me, he’s going to want to run around to his old house and see her. It’s all boarded up now. I’ll have to think of something to tell him.

  The papers called it ‘The House of Horror’. It seems to me that if you stub your toe at home these days, they call it ‘The House of Horror’. They are having a field day. In the first month afterwards, I had to go in and out my back door because of what they call the ‘media scrum’. They want my story. My story is that I loved and lost. They won’t get many headlines out of that.