by Liz Nugent
By the time the final bell rang in school, I was almost sick with anticipation. Even the idea of an alternative to the usual Friday night ritual – homework, dinner, watch Bonanza and The Dukes of Hazzard on television by myself, then the Nine O’Clock News and a chat show with Mum, a snack and then bed – was exhilarating. Dad usually went for dinner and drinks with colleagues on a Friday. Mum didn’t like socializing and was always at home. But this morning, Dad had made rather a big deal of the fact that, since I was going out, he would spend the evening at home with my mother. The significance of this only became clear much later, after the policeman’s knock on the door. For me, at the time, it meant that I could not back out of my arrangement with Helen. It would require too much explanation, and I couldn’t bear to see my father’s disappointment.
At last I stood on the doorstep of Helen’s home. It was in a housing estate with a communal green area in front of the houses. I wondered what it would be like to have neighbours that you probably saw every day, coming and going. The wooden gate swung listlessly on one hinge, the white paint flaking off it. My father would never have allowed Avalon to fall into disrepair; anything broken or damaged was fixed or replaced immediately, regardless of our changed circumstances. Appearances were important to him. Helen’s family were slovenly, I decided. They did not have a long driveway and land like we had, but a short front garden and a gravelled area for a car. There was no car.
I got quite a surprise when she answered the door. We had both just got out of school, but Helen had found the time to change her clothes, curl her hair (her straight, silky hair was the one thing I really did like about her) and apply make-up. The lipstick was a dark purple and had stained her teeth. Her black leather-look jeans were not tight enough on her bony legs to achieve what I assume was the desired effect (Sandy in Grease). Helen looked like a proper grown-up. I was immediately at a disadvantage. In my tight school blazer, I was still, painfully, a schoolboy.
‘S-sorry,’ I stammered. ‘I didn’t have time to change …’
But Helen was delighted to see me. ‘Come in!’ Her welcome was effusive. Had she worried that I wouldn’t come?
The house reeked of cigarette smoke and was overwhelmingly floral. Rugs, curtains, upholstery, table mats, carpets, cushions and wallpaper. I could have been in the Botanic Gardens. And there were scribbled words everywhere, on walls and mirrors. There were sheaves of paper and books of every size and description on every surface.
‘Oh yeah, my mam’s a poet,’ said Helen by way of explanation. ‘She’s out for the night and my little brothers are staying with Auntie Grace, so we’ve the place to ourselves.’
This information was given casually, but meaningfully. There was now nobody who could stop whatever it was that was going to happen. Judging by Helen’s demeanour, at the very least kissing was definitely going to happen.
‘Is your dad at work?’ I asked, not without a little hope.
‘My dad? I haven’t seen him in years.’
I wondered when The Kissing would begin.
‘We can have dinner now – there’s pizzas I can just throw in the oven. They’re only small. How many do you want?’ She produced a bag of frozen discs from the freezer. I wanted four. No, five.
‘Two, please,’ I said. I was aware that my appetite was a source of great amusement to some, and I had not forgotten the promise of her mother’s cake, though I was slightly concerned there was no sign of it.
‘Have three,’ said Helen, ‘they’re only small.’
I warmed to her now, as she tore the cellophane with her teeth.
‘Do you like gin?’
‘Does your mum let you drink, then?’
‘What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.’
Helen poured us some drinks. I remembered the carnations in my satchel, which I’d left at the front door. I had meant to present them to her on arrival. It seemed to me like the moment had passed. If we were now to drink gin, then The Kissing was imminent and the flowers were no longer necessary.
I knocked back the gin and tonic she had poured for me. I winced at the sharp taste. I then realized why my parents sipped at their alcoholic drinks. Nevertheless, I managed to drink two more gin and tonics in quick succession.
Dinner was pleasant enough, I suppose, though I know I ate four of the pizzas, leaving Helen with one. I recall enquiring after her mother’s cake, and hiding my disappointment on finding myself presented with what I would describe as a sliver of plain sponge cake on a floral plate. Helen poured us more gin. When The Kissing started, I was very pleased. We had sort of inched towards each other on the living-room sofa. Her hand stroked my thigh. I am not sure who started it, but there were teeth and tongues and sucking and slopping noises.
I admit that I quickly became aroused. Helen did not fail to notice, and suggested that we go to her bedroom. I baulked. I hadn’t planned on SEX. Of course, my underpants were clean (Mum was strict about that), but I was sure sex meant getting naked, and even in my drunken state I was not looking forward to displaying my flab. I never did it in school. I regularly forged notes from my mother to the games teacher about my bad knees. My knees would not have been bad if they hadn’t such a huge burden to carry.
After one more very quick drink, we went up two flights of stairs. I stumbled a bit and then decided it would be a great idea to jump the last few steps. By this stage we were howling with laughter, and it was hilarious when I toppled over and twisted my left foot. It was a bit sore and there was quite a gash on my ankle, but I didn’t make a fuss. I wondered how she was going to explain the blood on the stairs to her mother, but she implied that her mother mightn’t notice. I was pretty curious about Helen’s mother.
Then we entered Helen’s room. ‘I changed the sheets this morning,’ she said, as she unbuttoned her grandfather shirt. I turned away to give her privacy, but then realized how silly that was and turned back to face her. She stood before me in nothing but a pair of underpants that featured a tennis racket motif on her hip. I didn’t know she played tennis. Downstairs, I hadn’t dared to squeeze her breasts, and I knew she was thin and I really should have anticipated the reality, but I had expected some breasts. She had definitely had breasts when fully clothed. Where had they gone? Mine were significantly larger than hers, and I immediately felt my physical deflation. I began to feel nauseous and hot.
‘Get in, then!’
She was lying under the covers with her arms behind her head.
‘There isn’t much room,’ I said truthfully.
‘Well, you’re going to be on top, so it’s fine.’ She was very bossy. ‘You’ll have to take your clothes off.’ A pause. ‘I seriously don’t mind about you being fat, you know.’
I hardly cared myself now. I just needed to get it over and done with. My school uniform dropped bit by bit to the floor, but taking her example, I kept my underpants on until I was in the bed. Then began an amount of unseemly grunting and squealing from the two of us, and copious sweating from me, as we discarded our pants and I tried to negotiate my way up the correct corridor. Helen handled things, so to speak, and guided me in the right direction. It was absolutely brilliant for the first three minutes, but after that it was a struggle not to vomit. I tried to think about Farrah Fawcett, but it was no good. I don’t wish to go into further detail about The Sex. Suffice to say that I didn’t enjoy it. It was uncomfortable and messy, humiliating on my part, and I was glad when Helen said she’d had enough. Pregnancy was not something we had to worry about.
‘You haven’t done this before, then?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
I was surprised. I took some solace from her admission.
Helen and I parted on awkward terms.
‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ she said anxiously as we lay in bed after The Sex. She expressed my concern exactly.
I rootled around the bottom of the bed for my Y-fronts, squashing Helen and pinching the tiny amount of flesh on her ske
leton in the process. She winced in pain.
‘Never,’ I said, a little too vehemently, as I clambered out of the bed, noting as I did so that my ankle was extremely painful.
‘You’d better go. Mam will be home soon.’ It was clear we both wanted to draw a line under the encounter.
‘My ankle is swollen,’ I said as I pulled up my elasticated trousers, trying desperately to suck in my belly.
‘How can you tell?’
I thought that was a bit much. Coming from a girl who could potentially be my girlfriend.
I was sick into a hedge on the way home. My watch registered five past eleven as I hobbled up the driveway to Avalon, and I knew I was in for some sort of inquisition. The lies I had prepared about Herbie Goes Bananas and my ‘friends’ seemed feeble now. I hadn’t anticipated explaining vomit stains on my trousers and a busted ankle.
To my surprise, the garage doors were wide open and there was no car in the driveway, which meant that my father must have gone out after all.
When I let myself in the front door, the house was silent and in darkness. Mum had obviously gone to bed. Relieved, I pulled off my clothes in the laundry room and stuffed them into the washing machine with the rest of the pile from the basket, then stopped for a full glass of water in the kitchen. I climbed the stairs as quietly as I could, crept past my parents’ bedroom door and crawled into bed.
As I lay there, I wondered if this was how I was supposed to feel, now that I had had sexual intercourse. I had expected that I would feel strong, masterful and virile. In fact, I felt tearful, resentful and sick. Maybe it was the gin. I’d never had that before either.
Anyway, that’s what I was doing on Friday the 14th of November 1980, the night my father murdered Annie Doyle.
4
Lydia
The eleven days after the girl’s death were the most stressful, waiting for the axe to fall. We bought all the newspapers and listened to every news bulletin, waiting for a report on her disappearance, but nothing happened. Andrew went to work, and I did my exercises, went out to the shops, made dinners, tended to our son and the house, and from time to time I would lock myself into my bedroom and put on my mother’s scarlet lipstick. It had been decades since I had used it, and though it had completely dried out, the pigment was as vivid as ever and I would use some Pond’s cream to smooth it on to my mouth, and look in the mirror and see her peering back at me.
Sometimes, I would wake and wonder if Annie’s death had all been an awful nightmare, but every night when Andrew came home, one look at his increasingly grey face told me that it was no dream and that we would never wake up. From the kitchen window, I could see the freshly dug grave. I had asked Andrew to buy some plants to take the bare look off it, and now, at the end of a cold November, it was an obscene riot of colour.
I hoped, though.
‘Nobody is looking for her,’ I said. ‘Maybe she won’t even be reported missing. I mean, if Laurence went missing, we’d be calling the guards within a few hours, wouldn’t we?’
‘You would,’ said Andrew. ‘I’d be inclined to let him have some breathing space.’
‘But … this girl. Obviously, nobody cares about her.’
‘It’s only a matter of time until the alarm is raised. You’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise.’
On Tuesday the 25th of November, our doorbell rang during dinner. Andrew went out to answer it while I took over carving the ham. I heard the beginning of the conversation and realized that it was a guard. I could see Laurence was listening intently, so I closed the door and turned up the radio while forcing myself to remain calm.
When Andrew returned to the table, I could see that his face was ashen. I didn’t dare ask him what had happened in front of Laurence, so instead I engaged him in a conversation about the boiler in the hot press that needed lagging. He nodded curtly and withdrew behind the Evening Herald. Laurence was staring at his father’s hands. Large hands, more weathered than one might expect for a member of the judiciary. Andrew snapped the paper to smooth the pages, which momentarily startled me. He put his newspaper down. ‘What time were you home, that night you went to the cinema with your friends?’ he said to Laurence.
‘Oh, em … before twelve anyway. You said I could stay out till then …?’ Laurence said, and I noticed his cheeks flushing.
‘Good, good, never heard you come in. We were fast asleep, weren’t we, Lydia?’
I didn’t know what to say. What had the guard said? Had we been seen on the strand after all? Andrew was clearly lining up Laurence as an alibi. It was a clever move, but he was being too obvious.
‘I suppose –’ I said.
‘Fast asleep,’ Andrew repeated.
Laurence looked baffled. I winked to reassure him that everything was fine.
He was not reassured.
‘What did the guard at the door want?’ he asked.
‘Oh, was it a garda?’ I said, keeping my voice casual. ‘Is there something wrong, Andrew? Something to do with a case?’
As a judge in the Special Criminal Court, Andrew had presided over a trial of IRA members two years previously. He had even been subject to some non-specific death threats. There had been talk of a sentry box being installed at the end of our driveway for a security guard, but Andrew wouldn’t countenance it. ‘I refuse to live in a fortress,’ he had said, and I agreed. Senior gardaí visited us on a semi-regular basis to discuss his safety and protection, but were usually invited into the library to talk matters through with my husband in private. Andrew rarely mentioned his work to us.
He paused before answering. ‘Nothing to do with any of my cases. A young woman has gone missing. The guard was just making routine enquiries. I told him I stayed in that entire weekend, two weeks ago.’
I was watching Laurence’s face and I saw flickers of confusion.
‘Oh, that’s dreadful! Where was she last seen? Around here? Why was he making enquiries here?’ I feigned concern, but I needed to know. Why did they come to our door?
Andrew took up his paper again, obscuring his face while he said, ‘They think a car like mine was seen recently near the girl’s home.’
That car. A vintage navy Jaguar, and Andrew’s pride and joy – he insisted on doing all the running repairs on it himself – it drank fuel and cost a fortune to run. He had been trying to sell it since Paddy Carey had sunk us, but couldn’t find a buyer. Why hadn’t he been discreet enough to park it away from her door?
‘Well, isn’t that just ridiculous? They had the nerve to question you? You need to have a word with someone about that, Andrew. The nerve.’
‘Well, it is an unusual car, Lydia. They’re just doing their job.’ There was a hard edge to his tone.
Laurence was looking from one to the other of us. Andrew excused himself from the table and left the room.
‘Mum … was Dad … didn’t he go out that Friday night? His car wasn’t in the driveway when I came home.’
I was surprised that Laurence had such a good memory about a night nearly two weeks previously, but he was right. I didn’t want to have to contradict him. My poor boy was so confused. ‘No, darling, it was there.’
But I had to protect myself too. ‘I had a migraine on Friday and went to bed very early, and your father must have come upstairs before you came home, I suppose. You just heard him yourself – he was home and so was the car.’
‘But were you awake when he came to –’
‘Laurence!’ I laughed now. ‘Why all the questions? Would you like another slice of brack?’ I knew how to distract my son.
The phone rang in the cloakroom. I was glad to get out of the room and desperate to talk to Andrew to see how much the guard knew. I answered the phone to a girl who asked to speak to Laurence. I was surprised. Nobody had rung for Laurence in months, and certainly no girls.
‘It’s for you,’ I told him, ‘a girl called Helen.’ He blushed to his roots as he went to take the call.
I found Andrew up
stairs, pacing the bedroom. ‘We’re going to be arrested. The guards know. They know!’
‘What do they know? Exactly what did you say to them? Tell me.’
‘Her family reported her missing on Friday. The guards questioned the others who lived in her house, and one of them said that she’d been visited by a man in a car like mine.’
‘What type of car? Was she specific? Why did you park at her door? Fool!’
‘They know it’s a dark-coloured vintage car. He said she thought it was a Jaguar or a Daimler. Oh, Jesus.’
‘And does she have a description of you? Did she see you?’
‘No, she couldn’t have. I thought I was being really careful. I always wore that old trilby hat of your father’s with a scarf pulled up around my chin. Nobody around there ever saw my face. I didn’t want to be recognized, you know?’
‘Where is that hat?’
‘What?’
‘Where is the hat? Right now?’
‘In the cloakroom … Oh, Christ. They might come back with a search warrant.’ He began to tremble.
‘Stop it. Don’t fall apart, I can’t bear it. How many of those old cars are there in Dublin? Ten … fifteen maybe? The guard is just crossing you off a list. Nobody saw your face. I’m your alibi. You were here, home with me.’
‘But I think Laurence knows …’
‘He doesn’t know anything. We can convince him of that. Don’t give him any reason for suspicion. Throw some water on your face and come downstairs and join us in the drawing room.’
I flew downstairs into the cloakroom where I found Laurence still chatting on the phone, sitting on the wooden stool directly under the old trilby. I thought it had been on the same shelf for thirty years. I remember Daddy wearing it. I hadn’t wanted to throw it out. But now it had to go.
‘What do you want, Mum?’
‘Nothing. It’s fine.’
