by Liz Nugent
Eventually, at my request, Laurence paved over the flower bed and cemented the old bird bath on top of it. He planted a few shrubs around the edge of the raised platform. It still looked odd, like a sacrificial altar. Laurence averted his eyes from the kitchen window at all times. After a while, he installed a blind and kept it closed. The kitchen was gloomy now. We made more use of the dining room, which previously had only been used on special occasions. Laurence insisted that we sell Andrew’s car. We got a shockingly low price for it and bought a small tin-can run-around. I taught Laurence to drive. He was a quick learner.
Before Andrew’s death, the plan had always been that Laurence would study Law at Trinity College and then be apprenticed to Hyland & Goldblatt, the law firm that Daddy had founded in 1928 with Sam Goldblatt. Andrew worked there until he was appointed to the bench, but now most of Daddy’s and Andrew’s friends were either long since dead or had moved on and started their own practices. Besides, even if we could have availed of a student grant for Laurence, we would still have had no income.
Laurence took civil service exams after the Leaving Certificate. I had hoped that he might be recruited for the diplomatic corps, but it seemed that was impossible without a university education. He was given a choice of the motor tax office or an unemployment benefit office. I thought that the motor tax office might have more prospects, that perhaps they might train him as a tax accountant, but he did some investigation and found that would not be the case. I was horrified at the thought of his mixing with unemployed people, but he pointed out that we were both unemployed people.
‘Women go to work now too, you know, Mum.’ The notion of me getting a job was of course preposterous. I was trained for nothing and I have never mixed with outsiders. It was too late for me.
We survived on my widow’s pension and Laurence’s meagre wages, but as he was one of few men in his department, he was promoted quickly and steadily. Within four years he was in management, supervising a group of four or five. He made friends easily, and socialized after work on Fridays. I wondered at his ability to socialize. I never had it – not after the accident, anyway, but perhaps that is because I was home-schooled thereafter. I knew that Laurence did not enjoy his last schooldays, but that was all tied up with a sudden move to a new school, his father’s death, exam pressure and discovering the body of that girl. He certainly retreated into his shell after that. Thankfully, that put paid to his relationship with the awful Helen girl. I knew Laurence would never commit to a girl like that, so when they split up I was relieved, although disturbed to discover that she had broken up with him, after cheating on him with another boy. Bizarrely, they even stayed in touch after that and she still called to the house from time to time. She was training to be a nurse. I was astonished that a girl like that would enter a caring profession, but she boasted about moving out of home and annoyed me by suggesting that Laurence should get a flat. Laurence did not want to move out, nor could he afford to keep two households, so thankfully it was out of the question.
Laurence started dating a girl from work, a quiet nervous mousy thing called Bridget. I could tell that she liked him more than he liked her, that the relationship was quite one-sided. She certainly phoned him more than he phoned her, and when I answered the phone, she whispered and said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ more times than were called for. But he started to exercise and lose weight again, and I wondered if he was really doing it to impress this mouse. He showed me a photograph of her once. She was quite average-looking, and a heavy fringe covered her eyes. I relaxed more after that. He would not leave me for her. Still, I helped him with his diet.
Acquiring or giving birth to another baby was now out of the question. I knew that there was no possibility of it. I had passed fifty. Laurence was an adult now, no doubt about it, but I was secure enough to know that he would not leave me. Laurence knew that I could never manage on my own. He would stay with me here, in Avalon.
11
Laurence
I never spent more time in the kitchen than I had to, which was difficult considering my love of food, but I rearranged the cupboards and moved a lot of it into the pantry with the fridge. I wanted to brick up the window so that I wouldn’t have to look out on that … tomb, but Mum wouldn’t let me. The compromise was a blind that is permanently lowered. It admits low-level light. We cannot employ a gardener, and not just because we can’t afford to, so I tend to the garden and the grave with great reluctance.
It is a terrible, terrible thing to live with, this knowledge of a murder – and the evidence right here – but now it is too late for us to do anything. It is five years since I discovered it. Since it can be established that I am the person who paved it and put the bird bath on top, I am implicated in the cover-up.
After I discovered Annie Doyle, I became fearful of everything. If I could not trust my own father, who could I trust? Not Helen. Helen dumped me the day after we got our Leaving Cert results. The circumstances were sordid. She had sex with the boy in my class who had bullied me the most. He made sure I knew about it. I didn’t care that much by then. I didn’t really care about anything. I was humiliated, but she was never the love of my life. I didn’t think I would ever have a love life.
I didn’t stick to Granny’s diet and exercise regime. I became obese again, revolting and disgusting. I caught my reflection in shop windows sometimes and turned away, sickened by the sight.
Going to university was no longer an option for me, but it may have been a blessing. I liked working in the dole office. Apollo House was right in the heart of the city, surrounded by shops and offices and pubs. At first I shadowed others as they showed me how to go through the various application forms with the claimants and then how those claims were processed. There was an awful lot of paperwork involved. I didn’t really get to process any actual claims for the first few months. I did a lot of carbon-copying, and delivering files from one section to the other, and fetching teas and coffees. At the end of the process, our office issued a giro, which could be cashed in the post office across the road. This was all tightly controlled and well managed. Every section of about eight staff handled about 500 claims. The section was made up of two clerical assistants and five clerical officers, one of whom was the supervisor. Our supervisor was middle-aged Brian, a widower with three grown-up children – he didn’t appear to be very clever, although he was very nice to all of us.
In the beginning I was scared of the unemployed. I’d heard about them from my father, who had referred to them as layabouts and spongers. I had the impression that they were all criminals. Although a few of the people we dealt with were just out of prison, most were ordinary people who had lost jobs or were looking for them. Unemployment rates were high and all kinds of people were turning up to sign on. Middle-class housewives abandoned by their husbands, college dropouts, winos and junkies. The father of a former classmate, and our old butcher, who had been put out of business by the new supermarket – they joined the type of people who had never been employed. Queuing up for a government cheque was the great leveller, and yet they didn’t get to go for a drink together afterwards and discuss how their day had been. Unemployment was something they experienced on their own in their long empty days at home, or mooching around the park, drinking tea in cheap cafés and trying to make it last. I understood that loneliness without ever having experienced it.
The claimants were usually nice to me – I guess because they thought I was making the decision whether to give them money or not. We did have a little power, and if someone was particularly aggressive I learned there were ways of delaying a claim, or ‘losing’ the paperwork, if you were so inclined.
In a few months, I learned far more about the world than my years of schooling had given me. And I had real friends in a way I had never had before. Mum didn’t understand that, and it was only when I was out in the world that I realized how unusual she was in that respect. She had no friends.
Work was good for me. My job was n
ot difficult and my colleagues were very nice. I almost couldn’t believe my luck. I got to go and spend every day with a bunch of people who didn’t bully or demean me, doing work that didn’t exactly tax me, and at the end of every week I got money for it. Not a lot of money, but I didn’t have rent or a mortgage to pay, so there was almost enough to pay our household bills and have the occasional cinema trip and a few drinks after work most Friday nights before catching the last bus home. The section I worked on was made up of all kinds of people of all ages.
Dominic was a gum-chewing DJ at his soccer-club disco who couldn’t say a sentence without the words ‘know what I mean?’ tacked on the end. He didn’t want to be thirty, I think. He’d have preferred to be my age. Chinese Sally was a little older than me. She was actually half Korean, half Irish, but had grown up in Tralee. Everyone still referred to her as Chinese Sally and she had got bored with correcting them. Evelyn was the oldest of us all. She was a bitter, chain-smoking alcoholic with a line in filthy jokes and no-good ex-boyfriends. She had grown up in the inner city. Pretty Jane was my age. She was the first lesbian I had ever met. She wasn’t at all what I expected. She had long hair, and wore skirts. Arnold was a 24-year-old father of three who didn’t like children – ‘I love my boys, right? I just can’t stand them.’ He was always broke and miserable. He was a grade above me, but clearly wasn’t earning enough to keep a family of five.
We were a strange mix and yet we all got along. Not one person mentioned my weight. Everybody’s quirks were accepted, though they did call me Posh Boy because of my south County Dublin accent, but in an affectionate way. It seemed to me that none of us had had a childhood dream of working in an unemployment benefit office. We had all just landed there from our different walks of life and would probably pass the time there until retirement.
In June 1982, even though I had only been in the job seven months, I was promoted from clerical assistant to clerical officer (now I was allowed to talk to claimants on my own!). There was a small pay increase. Sally was furious. ‘Just because you’re a man!’ she said. She had been there for nearly two years without promotion, but I couldn’t help my gender. Mum and I were just about keeping our heads above water.
There were girls in the office who were perfectly nice, and reasonable-looking, and while they didn’t run screaming when I talked to them, neither did they give any hint of encouragement. I didn’t feel romantically attracted to them at all. I was still in touch with Helen, who had a succession of boyfriends and was never stuck for company. Helen and I had a strange kind of friendship. As awfully obnoxious as she was, part of me liked her honesty, her ability to say what she thought without fear. If she’d discovered her dad had killed someone, she’d probably have beaten the shit out of him before she called the guards. She took a proprietorial interest in my sex life.
‘Why don’t you ask out a fat girl?’ she said. It was her idea of being pragmatic. ‘They probably feel as self-conscious as you do. You need to get into the dating game soon or you’ll be stuck with your crazy mother for the rest of your life.’
I didn’t like the way Helen always referred to my mother as unstable or mad. It wasn’t fair.
‘I’ll tell you what’s not fair,’ insisted Helen, ‘it’s not fair that your mum has never suggested that you could move out on your own. She seems to expect you to look after her for the rest of her life. She could sell that fecking mansion and you could both get apartments and live your own lives. It’s ridiculous the way you carry on – as if she’s your wife rather than your mother!’
This was a sore point with me. Even people in work had said the same thing. They just didn’t get it. I liked living at home. Avalon was huge. My mother and I got on well, and I wasn’t heartless enough to leave her on her own. Mum wasn’t like other women. She would have hated the idea of an apartment. There was no reason for me to change my domestic circumstances. Besides, I didn’t want to leave her alone with the corpse beyond the kitchen window. Though, strangely, it seemed to bother me more than her. Maybe in the future, if I fell in love and wanted to get married, I might consider it, but that was extremely unlikely.
At the end of the summer of 1984, two things happened.
A new girl, Bridget Gough, had joined the office. I didn’t notice her until Jane informed me that someone had a crush on me. Apparently, I had held the door open for Bridget one day, and another time I’d got up to give her a seat in the break room. Bridget was eighteen, and worked as a secretary to one of the managers, Mr Monroe. She had indirectly asked questions about me, Jane said – where I lived, if I was single. I was stunned. Somebody had a crush on me? Jane pointed out the girl to me. She was normal-looking with shoulder-length brown hair. She was a little overweight perhaps, and had a bad squint, but she was not a freak like me.
Jane and Sally were determined to play Cupid, and inveigled everyone else into their childish plot. It was mortifying. They invited her to Mulligan’s with us one Friday, insisting that she should sit beside me. As soon as we’d had our first round, Arnold went to the bar and returned with drinks for Bridget and me only, as everyone else made excuses that they had to go, had things to do. I was convinced they were just going to decamp to the nearest pub. Bridget and I sat mutely. I tried to be polite.
‘So, do you like the job so far?’
‘Yes!’ She beamed at me.
Silence.
‘And Mr Monroe treats you well?’
‘Yes!’
Silence.
‘Do you have any hobbies?’ I remembered writing a similar question to a German pen pal when I was ten.
‘Yes! Photography,’ she said, still grinning inanely at me with her good eye. Her bad eye looked at the nicotine-stained ceiling.
I think she realized that she needed to pull her weight in the conversation then. She spoke very fast, almost without taking a breath.
‘I love taking photos of just ordinary things, you know? Leaves, raindrops on glass, the way a chair is positioned in a room, or a bin lorry at the end of the street. When I was fourteen, I won a camera in a school raffle. It was quite a good one and I’ve been taking photos ever since.’
‘That’s good.’
‘You were the first person to speak to me in the office, you know. I’d been there two weeks and nobody apart from Mr Monroe and Geraldine had said anything to me, and they were just talking about work stuff, you know the way it is, and then on the fifth of June – I remember because it was my birthday – on the fifth of June, you came out of the gents and I came out of the ladies at the same time and you bumped into me and you said, “Excuse me.” It was so nice of you. I really appreciated that.’
Bridget was clearly someone who’d never been the focus of much attention in her life.
‘And then, one day in the break room, you offered me a seat beside Sally and then she started talking to me, and really, if it wasn’t for you, nobody would have talked to me at all!’
I knew what it felt like to be ignored, but I wasn’t sure what it felt like not to be noticed. I imagine they are very different experiences.
‘Right. Well, I’m glad you’re settling in. Do you live nearby?’
‘Not too far. I’m in a flat in Rathmines. It’s a bedsit really. I’m from Athlone.’
‘Can I have your phone number?’ It was the least I could do.
Bridget dived into her bag, took out a pen and scribbled her name and number on to a beer mat. Instead of a dot over the ‘i’ she’d drawn a little love heart.
‘Thanks a million,’ she said. If only needy were attractive. I made a show of putting the beer mat into my breast pocket. She leaned forward for a kiss on the cheek, but I deliberately misunderstood her and pulled her scarf up where it had slipped on her shoulder. I got up to leave, saying I’d call her. She gathered her bags and followed me to the door. She looked at me expectantly and I knew I was supposed to say when I’d call her, but I did the cowardly thing and waved goodbye.
Earlier that day, the other nota
ble incident had happened. I was sitting at the Fresh Claims desk, going through all the forms with the new claimants, when a man sat down in the chair in front of me. I didn’t look up, as I was noting something on a previous claimant’s form, and asked him to bear with me for a moment. He handed his application form across the desk without saying anything. I finished with the previous form and filed it and then faced this new claimant. He was a heavyset man, and I didn’t recognize him straight away. Even when I saw his name at the top of the form, it didn’t immediately click with me, but when I looked him in the eye, I knew him. Gerry Doyle (Gerald on the application form and his documentation), father of Annie. How many times had I pored over those newspaper cuttings of the press conference? In the intervening years he had lost some hair, and what was left of it was silver. His face was ruddier and more bloated-looking than I recalled. I coughed and shifted in my chair. I excused myself and went out the back door of the office for a gulp of air. I wanted to throw up, but I forced myself to calm down and return to the desk. I noted all his details on the form. I imagined I could see the sorrow in him, the loss of Annie. He was separated from his wife, Pauline.
