Lying in Wait

1 Lydia

My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it. After we had overcome the initial shock, I tried to stop him speaking of her. I did not allow it unless to confirm alibis or to discuss covering up any possible evidence. It upset him too much and I thought it best to move on as if nothing had happened. Even though we did not talk about it, I couldn’t help going over the events of the night in my mind, each time wishing that some aspect, some detail, could be different, but facts are facts and we must get used to them.

It was the 14th of November 1980. It had all been arranged. Not her death, just the meeting to see if she was genuine, and if not, to get our money back. I walked the strand for twenty minutes to ensure that there was nobody around, but I needn’t have worried. The beach was deserted on that particularly bitter night. When I was satisfied that I was alone, I went to the bench and waited. A cruel wind rushed in with the waves and I pulled my cashmere coat around me and turned up the collar. Andrew arrived promptly and parked not far from where I was seated, as instructed. I watched from thirty yards away. I had told him to confront her. And I wanted to see her for myself, to assess her suitability. They were supposed to get out of the car and walk past me. But they didn’t. After waiting ten minutes, I got up and walked towards the car, wondering what was taking so long. As I got closer, I could hear raised voices. And then I saw them fighting. The passenger door swung open and she tried to get out. But he pulled her back towards him. I could see his hands around her throat. I watched her struggle, mesmerized momentarily, wondering if I could be imagining things, and then I came back to myself, snapped out of my confusion and ran to the car.

‘Stop! Andrew! What are you doing?’ My voice was shrill to my own ears, and her eyes swivelled towards me in shock and terror before they rolled back upwards into her head.

He released her immediately and she fell backwards, gurgling. She was almost but not quite dead, so I grabbed the crook lock from the footwell at her feet and smashed it down on to her skull, just once. There was blood and a little twitching and then absolute stillness.

I’m not sure why I did that. Instinct?

She looked younger than her twenty-two years. I could see past the lurid make-up, the dyed black hair, almost navy. There was a jagged white scar running from a deformed top lip to the septum of her nose. I wondered that Andrew had never thought to mention that. Her jacket had been pulled off one arm during the struggle and I saw bloodied scabs in the crook of her elbow. There was a sarcastic expression on her face, a smirk that death could not erase. I like to think I did the girl a kindness, like putting an injured bird out of its misery. She did not deserve such consideration.

Andrew has always had a short fuse, blowing up at small, insignificant things and then, almost immediately, remorseful and calm. This time, however, he was hysterical, crying and screaming fit to wake the dead.

‘Oh Christ! Oh Jesus!’ he kept saying, as if the Son of God could fix anything. ‘What have we done?’

‘We?’ I was aghast. ‘You killed her!’

‘She laughed at me! You were right about her. She said I was an easy touch. That she’d go to the press. She was going to blackmail me. I lost my temper. But you… you finished it, she might have been all right…’

‘Don’t even… don’t say that, you fool, you idiot!’

His face was wretched, tormented. I felt sympathy for him. I told him to pull himself together. We needed to get home before Laurence. I ordered him to help me get the body into the boot. Through his tears, he carried out my instructions. Infuriatingly, his golf clubs were in there, unused for the last year, taking up most of the space, but luckily the corpse was as slight and slim as I had suspected, and still flexible, so we managed to stuff her in.

‘What are we going to do with her?’

‘I don’t know. We have to calm down. We’ll figure it out tomorrow. We need to go home now. What do you know about her? Does she have family? Who will be looking for her?’

‘I don’t know… she… I think she might have mentioned a sister?’

‘Right now, nobody knows she is dead. Nobody knows she is missing. We need to keep it like that.’

When we got home to Avalon at quarter past midnight, I could see by the shadow from his window that the bedside light was on in Laurence’s bedroom. I had really wanted to be there when he got home, to hear how his evening had been. I told Andrew to pour us a brandy while I went to check on our son. He was sprawled across the bed and didn’t stir when I ruffled his hair and kissed his forehead. ‘Goodnight, Laurence,’ I whispered, but he was fast asleep. I turned out his lamp, closed his bedroom door and went to the bathroom cabinet for a Valium before I went downstairs. I needed to be calm.

Andrew was trembling all over. ‘Jesus, Lydia, we’re in serious trouble. Maybe we should call the guards.’

I topped up his glass and drained the bottle into my own. He was in shock.

‘And ruin Laurence’s life for ever? Tomorrow is a new day. We’ll deal with it then, but we must remember Laurence, whatever happens. He mustn’t know anything.’

‘Laurence? What has it to do with him? What about Annie? Oh God, we killed her, we murdered her. We’re going to prison.’

I was not going to prison. Who would look after Laurence? I stroked Andrew’s arm in an effort to comfort him. ‘We will figure it out tomorrow. Nobody saw us. Nobody can connect us with the girl. She would have been too ashamed to tell anyone what she was up to. We just have to figure out where to put her body.’

‘You’re sure nobody saw us?’

‘There wasn’t a soul on the strand. I walked the length of it to make sure. Go to bed, love. Things will be better tomorrow.’

He looked at me as if I were insane.

I stared him down. ‘I’m not the one who strangled her.’

Tears poured from his cheeks. ‘But maybe if you hadn’t hit her…’

‘What? She would have died more slowly? Or been permanently brain-damaged?’

‘We could have said that we’d found her like that!’

‘Do you want to drive back there now and dump her, ring an ambulance from the phone box and explain what you are doing there on the strand at one o’clock in the morning?’

He looked into the bottom of his glass.

‘But what are we going to do?’

‘Go to bed.’

As we ascended the stairs, I heard the whirr of the washing machine. I wondered why Laurence had decided to do laundry on a Friday night. It was most unlike him. But it reminded me that my clothes and Andrew’s really needed to be washed too. We both stripped and I set aside the pile of laundry for the morning. I washed the sand off our shoes and swept the floors we had passed over. I deposited the sand from the dustpan in the back garden, on the raised patch of lawn beyond the kitchen window. I studied the ground for a moment. I had always thought of having a flower bed planted there.

When I slipped into bed later, I put my arms around Andrew’s trembling form, and he turned to me and we made love, clawing at and clinging to each other like survivors of a terrible calamity.

Andrew had been a very good husband until just a year previously. For twenty-one years, our marriage had been solid. Daddy had been very impressed with him. On his deathbed, Daddy had said he was relieved to be leaving me in good hands. Andrew had been Daddy’s apprentice in Hyland & Goldblatt. He had taken Andrew under his wing and made him his protégé. One day, when I was about twenty-six, Daddy had telephoned me at home and told me that we were having a special guest for dinner and that I should cook something nice and get my hair done. ‘No lipstick,’ he said. Daddy had a thing about make-up. ‘I can’t stand those painted trollops!’ he would say about American film stars. Daddy’s views could be extreme. ‘You are my beautiful daughter. No point in gilding a lily.’

I was curious about this visitor and why I should dress up for him. I should have guessed, of course, that Daddy was intent on matchmaking. He needn’t have worried. Andrew adored me right away. He went to enormous lengths to charm me. He said that he would do anything for me. ‘I can’t stop looking at you,’ he said. And indeed, his eyes followed me everywhere. He always called me his prize, his precious jewel. I loved him too. My father always knew what was best for me.

Our courtship was short and very sweet. Andrew came from a good family. His late father had been a consultant paediatrician, and though I found his mother a little contrary, she raised no objections to our relationship. After all, when Andrew married me, he would get Avalon too – a six-bedroom detached Georgian house on an acre of land in Cabinteely, south County Dublin. Andrew wanted us to get a house of our own when we got married, but Daddy put his foot down. ‘You’ll move in here. This is Lydia’s home. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

So Andrew moved in with us, and Daddy gave up the master bedroom and moved to the large bedroom on the other side of the corridor. Andrew grumbled a little to me. ‘But, darling, don’t you see how awkward it is? I’m living with my boss!’ And I admit that Daddy did order Andrew around quite a lot, but Andrew got used to it quickly. I think he knew how lucky he was.

Andrew did not mind that I did not want to host parties or socialize with other couples. He said he was quite happy to keep me to himself. He was kind and generous and considerate. He usually backed away from confrontation, so we did not have many arguments. In a heated moment, he might kick or throw inanimate objects, but I think everyone does that from time to time. And he was always terribly contrite afterwards.

Andrew worked his way up through the ranks until finally all his time on the golf course paid off and three years ago he was appointed as a judge in the Criminal Courts. He was a respected member of society. People listened to him when he spoke, and quoted him in the newspapers. He was widely regarded as having the voice of reason on matters legal and judicial.

But last year, Paddy Carey, his old pal, accountant and golfing partner, had left the country with our money. I thought that, at the very least, Andrew would be careful with our finances. That was the husband’s job, to be a provider and to look after the economic well-being of the household. But he had trusted Paddy Carey with everything and Paddy had fooled us all. We were left with nothing but debts and liabilities, and Andrew’s generous salary barely covered our expenditure.

Had I married badly after all? My role was to be presentable, beautiful, charming – a homemaker, a companion, a good cook, lover and a mother. A mother.

Andrew suggested selling some land to developers to raise capital. I was horrified at the suggestion. Nobody of our status would do such a thing. I had spent my whole life in Avalon. My father had inherited it from his father, and it was the house in which I was born. And the house in which my sister died. I was not going to compromise on selling any part of Avalon. Nor was I going to compromise on the money we needed to pay the girl.

But we had to take Laurence out of the hideously expensive Carmichael Abbey and send him to St Martin’s instead. It broke my heart. I knew he was unhappy there. I knew he was victimized because of his class and accent, but the money simply wasn’t there. Andrew quietly sold some of the family silver to pay our debts, and we kept the wolf at bay. He could not risk being declared bankrupt, as he would have been forced to resign from the bench. We had never lived extravagantly, but the few luxuries that were normal to us began to disappear. He gave up his golf club membership but insisted that he could still pay my store account at Switzers and Brown Thomas. He always hated to disappoint me.

But now, this? A dead girl in the boot of the car in the garage. I was sorry she was dead, but I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t or couldn’t have strangled her myself under the circumstances. We just wanted our money back. I couldn’t stop thinking about the scars on the girl’s inner arm. I had seen a documentary about heroin addicts on the BBC, and reports of a heroin epidemic were in our newspapers. It seemed obvious that she had injected our money into her bloodstream, as if our needs and wants hadn’t mattered.

As Andrew slept fitfully, whimpering and crying out occasionally, I made plans.

The next morning, a Saturday, Laurence slept late. I warned Andrew to say as little as possible. He readily agreed. He was hollow-eyed, and there was a tremor in his voice that never quite went away after that night. He and Laurence had always had a fraught relationship, so they were not inclined to be conversational. I planned to get Laurence out of the house for the day, send him into town on some errand or other while Andrew buried the girl in our garden. Andrew was shocked that we would bury her here, but I made him see that, this way, she could not be discovered. We were in control of our own property. Nobody had access without our permission. Our large rear garden was not overlooked. I knew exactly the spot where she could be buried. In my childhood there had been an ornamental pond under the plane tree beyond the kitchen window, but Daddy had filled it in after my sister’s death. Its stone borders, which had lain under the soil for almost forty years, were conveniently grave-like.

After Andrew had buried the body, he could clean out and hoover the car until there would be no trace of fibres or fingerprints. I was determined to take all precautions. Andrew knew from his job the kind of thing that could incriminate a person. Nobody had seen us on the strand, but one can never be too sure of anything.

When Laurence arrived at the breakfast table, he had a noticeable limp. I tried to be cheerful. ‘So how are you today, sweetie?’ Andrew stayed behind his Irish Times, but I could see his knuckles gripped it tightly to stop it from shaking.

‘My ankle hurts. I tripped going upstairs last night.’

I examined his ankle quickly. It was very swollen and probably sprained. This scuppered my plans to send him into town. But I could still contain my boy, confine him to quarters so to speak. I strapped his ankle and instructed him to stay on the sofa all day. That way, I could keep an eye on him, keep him away from the rear of the house where the burial was to take place. Laurence was not an active boy, so lying on the sofa watching television all day and having food delivered to him on a tray was no hardship to him at all.

As dusk fell, when everything had been done, Andrew lit a bonfire. I don’t know what he was burning, but I had impressed upon him the need to get rid of all evidence. ‘Think of it as one of your court cases – what kind of things betray the lie? Be thorough!’ To give him his due, he was thorough.

However, Laurence is a smart boy. He is intuitive, like me, and he noted his father’s dark mood. Andrew was snappy about wanting to see the television news, terrified, I suppose, that the girl would feature. She did not. He claimed he had the flu and went to bed early. When I went upstairs later, he was throwing things into a suitcase.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I can’t bear it. I have to get away.’

‘Where? Where are you going to go? We can’t change anything now. It’s too late.’

He turned on me then for the first time, spitting with anger.

‘It’s all your fault! I’d never have met her if it wasn’t for you. I should never have started this. It was a crazy idea to begin with, but you wouldn’t stop, you were obsessed! You put too much pressure on me. I’m not the type of man to…’ He trailed off because he was exactly the type of man to strangle a girl, as it happens. He just didn’t know it until now. Also, my plan had been perfect. He was the one who ruined it.

‘I told you to pick a healthy girl. Didn’t you see the marks on her arms? She was a heroin addict. Don’t you remember that documentary? You must have noticed her arms.’

He broke down into sobs and collapsed on the bed, and I cradled his head to muffle the sound. Laurence mustn’t hear. When the heaving of his shoulders had subsided, I upended the contents of the suitcase and put it back on top of the wardrobe.

‘Put your things away. We are not going anywhere. We will carry on as normal. This is our home and we are a family. Laurence, you and I.’

2 Karen

The last time I saw Annie was in her bedsit in Hanbury Street on Thursday the 13th of November 1980. I remember that, as usual, the place was immaculately clean. No matter how disordered her life was, Annie was always madly tidy since her time in St Joseph’s. The blankets were folded neatly at the end of her bed, and the window was wide open, letting the freezing air into the room.

‘Would you not close the window, Annie?’

‘When I finish my smoke.’

She lay back on the bed, smoking her short, untipped cigarette, while I made a pot of tea. The mugs were lined up neatly on the shelf, upside down, handles facing front. I poured two scoops of tea leaves from the caddy into the scalded pot and poured on the boiling water. She looked at her watch.

‘Two minutes. You have to let it sit for two minutes.’

‘I know how to make a cup of tea.’

‘Nobody knows how to make it right.’

That’s the kind of thing that always drove me mad about Annie. She was so stubborn. There was her way, or the wrong way.

‘It’s freezing.’ She wrapped her long cardigan tightly around her, the sleeves dangling below her hands. When the two minutes were up, she gave the nod and I was allowed to pour. I handed her a mug of tea and she emptied her ashtray into a plastic bag which she carefully folded over before placing it in the bin.

‘Are you sure it’s sealed?’ I was being sarcastic.

‘It’s sealed.’ She was serious. She reached over and closed the window and then sprayed the room with one of those rotten air freshener cans that filled the room with a smell that would choke you.

‘How’s Ma?’ she asked.

‘She’s worried about you. So is Da.’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said, her lip curling sideways.

‘You didn’t stay long on Sunday. You’re always rushing off somewhere. He does worry about you.’

‘Sure.’

My sister and me were always very different. I like to think I was a good child, but maybe that was just in comparison to Annie. I was quick at school, but things have always been easier for me. If we were in a shop together, the assistants would ignore her completely and serve me. People want to help me and do things for me. Annie always said it was because I’m pretty, but she never said it in a jealous way. We looked alike to a certain extent. As children, we were referred to as ‘the carrot tops’ on account of our flaming red hair, but we were different in one obvious way. Annie was born with a harelip. She had a botched operation when she was a baby, and her top lip was stretched and flattened at the front. She had a scar stretching down from her nose to her mouth. My mouth turns upwards at the sides, so I look kind of smiley. I think that’s why everyone says I’m pretty. I’m not really. I look in the mirror and I just see carrot-top Karen.

When we were small children, Annie regularly went missing. We’d be playing with the neighbours out the front of our house, and Ma would come out and say ‘Where’s Annie?’ and we’d all be sent off to look for her. She’d be in a street beyond the patch we were allowed to play in, and once, she’d hopped on a bus into town and Mrs Kelly who lived in number 42 had spotted her and brought her home. Annie was just curious, I think. She wanted to know what was around every corner. Back then, Da and her were close. She used to climb up on his shoulders and he’d piggyback her around the house and she would scream with laughter, but I was smaller and afraid to go up that high. By the time she was a teenager, though, Da and Annie were at war.

My sister had a reputation. Ma said she kicked her way out of the womb feet first and she hadn’t stopped kicking since. In secondary school, Annie was in trouble all the time for giving cheek to the teachers, stealing, vandalism, mitching, and beating up other girls. She was smart for sure, but couldn’t settle to learning. She was slow to read and slower to write. I am three years younger, but by the time I was seven my reading and writing were better than hers. I tried really hard to help her, but she said the letters didn’t always make sense to her. Even if I wrote down a sentence and asked her to copy it, the words would come out as a jumble. She’d been moved to two different schools by the time she left at fourteen. She could just about write, but her main hobbies by then were smoking and drinking. Ma tried reason, talking to her, bargaining with her, but when that didn’t work, Da tried violence. He beat her and locked her in our room, and I know it killed him to do it. ‘Jesus, Annie, look what you have me doing!’ and he’d go quiet and not speak for a few days. But that didn’t work either, and eventually the worst thing that could happen in a family back then happened. We didn’t know until she was four months gone.

All hell broke loose. She was only sixteen. The father was a boy her own age who, of course, denied all responsibility and said the baby could be anyone’s. He and his family moved away shortly after that. Da called the parish priest, and he and a guard took Annie away to St Joseph’s in a black car. I didn’t see her again for nearly two years.

When she returned, she was completely altered. That was where all her tics and cleaning obsessions started. She had never been like that before. Her appearance was a shock. Her fiery red hair was gone because her head had been shaved. She was painfully thin. On her first night back, in the room we shared, I asked her to tell me what it was like to be locked up in a mother and baby home, and she said it was a living hell that she wanted to forget. She told me about the day the baby was born. It was the 1st of August. She called her Marnie. ‘She was perfect,’ she said, ‘even her mouth was perfect.’ When I asked what happened to the baby, she turned her face to the wall and cried. For the first two months after her return, she used to hide food under her bed. She jumped at the slightest noise. Neither Annie nor my parents ever mentioned the baby. We tried to be normal and Annie tried to settle. Da got her a job cleaning in the bakery he worked in. Her hair grew back, but she dyed it black. A really harsh blue-black. It was her rebel statement.

A few months later, on the 1st of August, I bought Annie a gift in the Dandelion Market, an identity bracelet. I had the bracelet engraved with the name ‘Marnie’. I’d been saving up for a while, but it wasn’t real silver so it tarnished quickly. She never took it off after that, though. Da commented on it one day.

‘What’s that thing you have on?’

She stuck her wrist in his face, but he couldn’t make out the word on the bracelet.

‘It says “Marnie”,’ she said, ‘your granddaughter’s name if you must know.’

Gradually, Annie went back to her old ways. She was fired from the bakery by Da’s boss because her work was shoddy. After that, the frostiness between her and Da was unbearable and she moved out of the house. I admit that I was glad when she moved out.

Though she was always a rebel, when it came to my schooling, Annie leaned hard on me to do my homework and stay out of trouble.

‘You’ve got brains and beauty, Karen,’ she said. ‘You need to use both of them.’

I am clever enough, I suppose, and I liked school, but I worked hard to remove the stigma she had tainted me with. My teachers recognized this. ‘You and your sister, chalk and cheese!’ said Miss Donnelly one day, scoring me a B in an English test. When I meant to leave school at fifteen and try for work in the Lemons factory, Miss Donnelly spoke to Ma and Da and told them that I could stay on to do the Leaving Certificate. Nobody in our family had ever done the Leaving Certificate. My parents were thrilled and Annie was over the moon. ‘You’ll take the bad look off me!’ she said.

I wasn’t a natural genius, but I studied hard to justify Ma and Da’s pride. Then, when I got reasonably good results, there was talk about going to university. I knew that keeping me in school had been a strain on my parents when I should have been out earning, and I could probably work my way through college, but I couldn’t decide what I would study. English and Art were my best subjects, but if I studied English in college, I would have to do a three-year arts degree and then a year’s HDip just to be a teacher, and if I did Art I’d have to go to an art college and Ma said there were no jobs for artists. Anyway, I had the wrong accent for university.

Ma thought I should do a secretarial course. There were still some jobs for typists, though they were few and far between. I liked the idea of that a lot better, and AnCO were running six-week courses for girls who had got good Leaving Certificate results. Annie was disappointed in me. ‘You could have gone to college, you could have got a grant.’ She didn’t understand my reluctance. I was not curious like she was. She loved that I had stayed in school, but when she was drunk, she mocked me when I used big words that she didn’t understand.

Annie got bits and pieces of cleaning work here and there, but most of the time she was on the dole, living in a bedsit not too far away. Ma gave her money sometimes on the sly. On her Sunday visits, Da would try and pretend he was glad to see her, but I think he was ashamed of her, though he denied it later. He couldn’t understand why she was so different to the rest of us. Ma and Da and me all worked hard for what we got. We were quiet and tried to avoid trouble. Annie went looking for it.

After I did the course, I got a job in a dry-cleaning company, typing up invoices and doing a bit of bookkeeping as well. I can’t say I loved it, but I met Dessie Fenlon there. Some of the men I dealt with were sleazy, passing comments on my figure or making smutty remarks, but Dessie was different. Just respectful, like. One day, I saw him giving one of the young lads a clip around the ear for the way he’d talked to me. Dessie was one of the van drivers. He was quite shy, and it was six months before he got up the courage to ask me out. I think he thought the age difference was too much. He was twenty-six, almost nine years older than me. The best part of the job was when he’d come in to do pick-ups or drop-offs, because we’d be giggling and flirting like mad. We started going out properly then. He said he couldn’t believe his luck that I’d said yes to a date. When it was clear to everyone else in the shop that Dessie Fenlon and I were an item, the comments stopped. Dessie was quiet, but he could be fierce too if you crossed him. He had a reputation as a scrapper and had thrown a few punches in his time.

The job was dull and I was bored most of the time, but I was earning enough to move out of home too. I said to Annie that we could get a flat together, but she wasn’t too keen on the idea. I was disappointed. I mentioned it to Ma, who told Da. He said, ‘Don’t move in with Annie, she’ll drag you down to her level.’ I wonder whether, if I had moved in with Annie, things would have been different. I wonder if Da remembers saying that. If it haunts him. I don’t want to remind him. He’s already suffering. We all are.

On that last day I saw her, she was agitated but excited about something. She said she was going to buy me a proper painting set because she knew that I still loved sketching and painting. I should have been excited about the promise of a gift like that, but I knew Annie too well. She was annoyed that I wasn’t jumping up and down with happiness, but Annie was always swearing to buy me things or to do things with me, and they rarely ever happened.

‘A proper set. I saw it in Clarks’s window, paints in tubes in a big wooden box with all kinds of brushes. All watercolours and inks, not oils. You see? I remember everything you told me about your art stuff – I know you don’t like oils. It’s gorgeous. The box is really old-fashioned-looking, but it’s brand new and there’s loads of things in it. I’m buying it for you on Saturday morning. I really am. I promise. Come round on Saturday, in the afternoon.’

‘Where will you get the money for that?’

‘Never you mind, I’ll have the money.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I will. Do you not believe me, Karen?’

It was easier to play along, but I knew it was never going to happen. Like the time she said we’d go for dinner in Sheries in Abbey Street a few weeks before that, and I’d waited half an hour outside in the cold but she never showed up, and when I rang her about it, she’d said she was busy and we’d go another time.

Despite all this, I loved Annie. She wanted the best for me, wanted me to learn from her mistakes. She warned me off fellas, told me I was too good for the lads round our way and that I should keep myself for someone special. I didn’t always obey her. Nobody could make me laugh like she could, and although her time in the mother and baby home turned down her brightness, the old spark was beginning to re-emerge by the time she vanished into thin air.

‘Promise, you’ll call on Saturday? About three, yeah? I can’t wait to see your face when you open it.’ So I promised, not daring to hope that she’d keep her word but never imagining that I wouldn’t see her again.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring Dessie.’

Her face clouded over. They’d got on well to begin with, though he thought she was a bit wild. He didn’t like how drunk she’d get and, like Da, he didn’t like me spending too much time with her. When I told him about Annie’s pregnancy and her time in St Joseph’s, his attitude to her worsened.

‘She’s one of them slappers?’ he said. ‘Who was the father, or did she even know?’

I was disgusted by his reaction. I ignored him for weeks then and avoided talking to him in work, but he didn’t give up and eventually he won me over again with a bunch of flowers and a written apology. He said that he shouldn’t have called my sister names. But if Dessie, who was basically good and kind, thought that way about Annie, so did everyone else. He was never comfortable in her company after that, and Annie wasn’t stupid.

‘What’s wrong with your fella?’ she said once in the Viking. ‘He’s always in such a hurry to leave.’

‘He just doesn’t like this pub much,’ I said, which was true. The Viking was a rough enough spot, in a semi-derelict part of town. Teenage glue-sniffers hung around the area. Dessie had often given out about the fact that we had to meet her there, but Annie was a creature of habit. ‘It’s full of alcos,’ he said, but I pointed out that could be said about most pubs in Ireland. Annie was clearly a popular character in the bar and was one of the youngest regulars. Late in the night, a sing-song would start and Annie, worse for wear, would sing ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ or ‘I Will Survive’ in a loud voice. Dessie hated that. ‘She’s making a show of herself,’ he’d say, and though sometimes I agreed, she could still carry a tune and had full recall of the lyrics. I wasn’t going to stop her enjoying herself.

When I called to her flat on Saturday, I’d decided not to bring Dessie along. I wasn’t all that surprised when she wasn’t there. That evening I rang her, and the girl who answered the phone in the hall said she’d take a message.

At Ma and Da’s on Sunday, Annie didn’t show up. Lunch after twelve-thirty Mass was the only family ritual we held on to, and Annie still turned up most of the time.

‘Did she ring you, Ma, to say she wasn’t coming?’

‘She did not, the strap,’ said my da, who took her feckless behaviour as a personal insult. I played it down.

‘She might have the flu – the flat was freezing when I saw her on Thursday.’

‘Did she not have the gas fire on?’

‘She did, but you know she always opens the window when she smokes.’

‘She gets the smoking from you,’ my mother said to Da.

‘That’s all she got from me, Pauline, I can tell you.’

I changed the subject, asked Da if he was going to the greyhounds on Thursday.

The next day, Monday, I called round again with Dessie and there was no answer from her flat but I caught another girl on her way out. There were three bedsits in the two-storey house with a shared bathroom. I asked her if she’d seen Annie. ‘Not since Thursday or Friday, now that you mention it. I thought she was away. It’s usually her radio that wakes me.’

That was the first time I felt a bit worried. Annie wouldn’t have gone away without telling me. Besides, where would she have gone?

‘With some fella?’ Dessie suggested, but clammed up again when I gave him a sharp look.

We’d usually be in touch twice or three times a week, but on Wednesday I still hadn’t heard from her. I called to Ma’s, but she hadn’t heard from her either.

‘Did she say anything to you about going away?’

‘Not a thing. It’s weird.’

I was still there when Da got home from the bakery.

‘She’s probably off on the piss somewhere. She’ll turn up.’

‘She’s never disappeared for so long before. It’s been nearly a week.’

‘When last did you see her?’

‘Last Thursday. She told me to call round on Saturday. She promised me she’d be there.’ I didn’t tell him about the painting set. There was no point.

‘She promised, did she?’ he said sarcastically.

On Friday when we still couldn’t contact her, we all knew something was wrong. Da and me went to her flat together while Ma rang round her friends and some of the girls she used to work with. At Annie’s flat, one of the other tenants said she hadn’t been there all week. We called the landlord from the phone in the hall and he came round, a large sweating man with a big nose, complaining about being disturbed after 6 p.m. He let us into her bedsit with his enormous set of keys. Everything was as neat as a pin as usual, but all the clothes I knew she had were still in the wardrobe, except her grey herringbone coat, the woollen sleeveless dress Ma had bought her for her birthday and the knee-high purple boots. I didn’t want to go rifling through all her stuff, but a quick glance told me she hadn’t gone on a trip. Her long holdall bag was still under the dresser. A single mug sat in the sink with a spot of mould in the bottom of it.

‘She’d never have left that there, Da, if she knew she was going away. Maybe for a few hours, but that’s got to have been there for days.’

The landlord said, ‘Her rent is due next week you know. I won’t be left out of pocket.’

‘Would ya shut up!’ said my da, and inside I cheered because he was standing up for Annie and it was a very long time since I’d heard him do that. The landlord told us to leave, and said that if he didn’t get his rent the next week, he’d be putting Annie’s stuff in a bag on the doorstep.

When we got home with our news, Ma was worried sick. None of Annie’s friends had seen her in over a week, and said she hadn’t turned up for two cleaning jobs in the city centre. That alone would not have rung alarm bells, but my timid mother had bravely gone into the Viking after dark. The regulars there all knew Annie, but they said she hadn’t been in for over a week.

‘Do you think she got herself knocked up again and went back to St Joseph’s?’ said Da, a tone of concern creeping into his voice.

‘She’d never go back there, Da, not in a million years. I know she wouldn’t.’ Ma agreed with me. ‘And even if she was pregnant, why would she go anywhere without her clothes, or a bag?’

‘I’m ringing the guards,’ said Da on Friday the 21st of November 1980.

3 Laurence

I heard him say it quite clearly.

‘The weekend of the 14th of November? Let me think… hold on now… let me see – ah, yes, I was here with my wife. Why do you ask, Garda?’

‘The whole weekend? You didn’t leave the house?’

‘Yes, well, I got home from work on the Friday about six o’clock and didn’t go out again.’

It was a lie.

‘And was it just you and your wife here? Nobody else?’

‘My son was out that Friday. But I think he was home before midnight. What is this about?’

‘Well, sir, it’s just that… a car was seen visiting the home of the missing woman over recent months, sir… Like yours, sir… the old Jaguar.’

The guard’s tone was nervous, subservient. Too many ‘sir’s. It was clear he had drawn the short straw when sent to question my dad. Or Judge Fitzsimons, as he was more recently known.

‘And may I have your name?’ my father asked, and although I couldn’t see him, I could hear the air of superiority in his voice, coupled with a strange tremor that was new. The kitchen door behind me was only slightly ajar, and I strained to hear what followed on the doorstep.

‘Mooney, sir. I’m sorry to be having to ask, like—’

‘And what exactly is your rank, Mooney?’ He lingered on the ‘oo’ in Mooney.

‘I’m a detective, sir.’

‘I see. Not a detective sergeant or a detective inspector, then?’

I knew that tone. Dad could be rude or dismissive with strangers and he could fly off the handle. He intimidated me sometimes. I’m not sure that he meant to. He just did.

At the other end of the table, my mother was looking at me quizzically.

‘Is that your fifth potato, Laurence? Go on, quick, while your father isn’t looking.’

I hadn’t been counting.

My mother got up, muttering about the draught. She closed the door behind me and turned on the radio and began to hum along tunelessly to the song playing. I said nothing, but now I couldn’t hear what was being discussed at the front door.

My father had just deliberately lied to the guards. I admit I was taken aback by his lie. He was being asked about his movements almost two weeks earlier. I remembered that Friday night very clearly indeed because I was having my own adventure. I had also lied about my whereabouts. I had told my parents that I was going to the cinema with school friends, when actually I was losing my virginity to Helen d’Arcy, who lived in Foxrock Park, just twenty minutes away.

I had not intended to have sex with Helen on our first real date. I did not find her physically attractive. She had very nice silky blonde hair, but her frame was both wide and too thin. Her face, which was unnaturally big, sat on top of a scrawny neck. My own skin was flawless in comparison, perhaps because it was stretched.

I went to Helen’s house simply because she invited me. I did not get many invitations.

She had caught up with me as I was returning from school a few weeks earlier. It was raining, as usual. School was awful. I had only started in St Martin’s Institute for Boys the previous January because of Bloody Paddy Carey. I tried very hard not to let my parents know how much I was bullied in my new school. There was a particular group of four or five boys, all brawn and no brain. They did not often attack me physically after the first month, but my books were stolen or defaced with disgusting slogans, and my lunch was taken and replaced with items too revolting to mention.

Helen’s school was one of the fee-paying ones a little closer to town, but she lived near our school. I had overheard stories about her from other boys in my class. I felt a kinship because the bullies in my class seemed to have as much contempt for her as they did for me.

I heard her before I saw her. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked. I turned. Her green uniform skirt, made of some hairy fabric, was worn to baldness in places and the hem had come down on one side. I could see the inside of her collar was threadbare at the neck.

‘Laurence. Fitzsimons.’

‘Ah yeah, I’ve heard of you. Why do they call you the Hippo? You look normal to me.’

I warmed to her immediately. ‘I am normal. They just don’t like me.’

‘Well, who gives a fuck what they like? Do you live on Brennanstown Road? I’ve seen you around.’

I lived in Avalon, a large detached house with a well-kept garden at the end of the road, but I wasn’t sure if I should tell her. She didn’t seem to mind whether I responded to her questions or not. We ambled companionably onwards. When we passed Trisha’s Café, she suggested that I buy her a Coke. I hesitated.

‘OK then, I’ll buy you one,’ she said as she pushed the glass door open. It would have been rude not to follow her. Unfortunately, the bullies were already there, sitting near the counter.

‘Oink, oink!’ one of them shouted in our direction.

‘Fucking eejits,’ said Helen, ‘ignore them.’

We very rarely had bad language in Avalon, but now, in the same five minutes, I’d heard fuck and fucking. From a girl. I used bad language too sometimes, but never out loud.

Helen strolled coolly to the counter and returned with two Cokes.

I shoved two 10p pieces towards her to pay for them.

‘You don’t have to. Just because I paid, it doesn’t mean you have to ask me out.’

Ask her out?

‘I want to pay. It’s fair.’

‘Fine,’ she said. There was a lull in conversation as we sucked our Cokes through thin straws. And then she said, ‘You’d be quite good-looking if you weren’t fat.’

It was not news to me that I was fat. My mother said it was puppy fat and that I’d shed it soon enough, but I was seventeen. My father said I ate too much. My scales said fifteen stone. I hadn’t always been big, but over the last year, since I’d moved schools, my eating habits had gone completely out of control. The more nervous and miserable I was, the hungrier I felt. I love food, and mostly the fattening stuff. But this was the first time that a non-parent had said I was fat without a look of disgust.

‘Your hair’s nice,’ I said, to return the compliment. She looked very pleased.

‘I love food too, I probably eat more than you,’ she said. Helen obviously had no idea just how much food I could put away.

‘If you could give me about three stone, we’d both be perfect.’

Helen and I met a few times in the weeks after. We took it in turns to buy the Cokes. Then one day Helen said, ‘Do you want to come to my house tomorrow night?’

‘For what?’

‘To visit me? To kick off the weekend?’ she said, as if it was completely normal to be invited to girls’ houses. ‘My mum has made this amazing cake that’s going to get thrown out if it’s not eaten.’

We had only known each other a few weeks, but already she knew which buttons to push. An arrangement was made for after school, an address written down on the inside cover of my jotter.

At home that evening, I tried to be casual and breezy. ‘I won’t be in for dinner tomorrow, I’m going to the cinema with some of the lads,’ I lied, as casually as I could. I focused on my copybook with fierce concentration. My dad perked up: he was delighted.

‘Well, isn’t that great now, great altogether. Going out with pals, eh? What are you going to see? There’s a new Star Wars one, isn’t there?’

We had been to see Star Wars together as a family. Dad and I had enjoyed it, but Mum had put her hands over her ears during the explosions, jumping at every clash of a light sabre. After that, she swore she was never going to the cinema again.

‘Herbie Goes Bananas,’ I said confidently, trying to ignore the crimson creep from my collar.

‘I see,’ said my father, slightly deflated and puzzled. ‘Well, that’ll be good, won’t it, going out with friends?’ He looked meaningfully at my mother, pleased no doubt that I finally had friends, but she was concentrating on cutting me a slice of cheesecake. I tried to nudge her hand a little to make the slice bigger, and she did so with a sigh and shake of her head.

‘I’ll take that one,’ said my dad. ‘Give the boy a smaller bit.’ Nothing got past him.

‘Just be home by midnight.’

‘Midnight?! But we don’t even know who these people—’

‘No more about it, Lydia.’ Dad closed the subject.

Midnight. Janey Mackers, I was amazed. I’d never had a curfew before. I hadn’t needed one, but midnight seemed generous. Thanks, Dad. But now I had to go through with the date with Helen. I was pretty sure it was an actual date. In less than twenty-four hours. I was partly looking forward to it and partly terrified.

Preparing for a first date was tricky. I knew this from the cover of Jackie magazine in the newsagent’s. There were ten steps to it, apparently. I could guess two of them: fresh breath and flowers.

After some thought, I decided that, while there might be ten steps for a girl, there could only be two for a boy. I was on top of the fresh breath. After we left Trisha’s, I had bought myself a new toothbrush and some Euthymol toothpaste, even though it practically took the mouth off me. I figured that if it was that painful, it must be more effective.

Flowers. It was November. There were, however, some nice pink and white carnations blooming in my father’s greenhouse that I raided late that night while my parents watched the Nine O’Clock News. I wrapped the stalks in some tinfoil and put them gently on top of my schoolbooks in my satchel.

On that fateful Friday, my father gave me £2 after breakfast and told me to enjoy myself. Money was a huge issue in our house at that time. Dad’s accountant, Bloody Paddy Carey (it was the only bad language I ever heard my father use), had absconded with our money a year previously. Dad was furious about it. We weren’t allowed to tell anyone. The accountant had been a close friend, or so my father thought. Carey had several high-profile clients who had been badly burned, and the story had been all over the media. So far, my father’s name had not been mentioned publicly. He was extremely stressed about this; he was mortified that Bloody Paddy Carey had made a fool of him, and that he might not be able to keep my mother in the style to which she was accustomed. We had had a full year of shouting and slamming doors, and endless talk of tightening our belts. So to get £2 out of my dad without even having to ask was most unexpected. I thought that maybe I could buy shop flowers now, but since I already had some, it would be a waste. I wasn’t sure what I should spend the money on.

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 skeleton 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 upstairs, 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.’

I would retrieve the hat later.

Laurence joined us in the drawing room. I was trying to keep things breezy to distract him from his father’s shaken demeanour. ‘So who’s this Helen?’ I said, but Andrew hushed me and turned up the volume on the TV. The news was on. It wasn’t the top headline, but maybe the third or fourth item.

‘Concerns are growing for the whereabouts of a 22-year-old Dublin woman who went missing eleven days ago. Annie Doyle has not been seen since the evening of Friday the 14th of November, at her home on Hanbury Street in Dublin’s inner city.’

There was a grainy photograph of the girl. Dark, thin, lots of make-up, clad in a denim jacket, grinning at someone behind the photographer with a beer glass in her hand. She was caught unawares, it seemed, the deformed top lip revealing crooked front teeth. I glanced over at Andrew. He was staring intensely at the television.

‘That must be the woman they were asking you about earlier, Dad.’

‘Shhhhh!’ Andrew said furiously.

A Detective Sergeant O’Toole, leading the investigation, was speaking: ‘…a dark-coloured luxury vehicle was seen in the vicinity of the woman’s home in preceding weeks. We believe that the male driver was a regular visitor to Miss Doyle’s home. We are asking anyone who noticed anything suspicious to notify the gardaí immediately.’

Then they moved on to another story about fuel shortages. Laurence was looking at Andrew, no doubt wondering why he was being so intense. I had to break the atmosphere. ‘I hope they catch whoever it was. That poor girl,’ I said.

Neither Laurence nor Andrew said anything.

‘Who’d like a cup of tea?’

Laurence shook his head, but Andrew was clutching the arms of his chair. I needed him to snap out of this trance.

‘Darling?’ I said a little sharply.

‘What? No,’ he barked. He was very pale. He noticed Laurence looking at him. He flinched a little, and then said, ‘So, who is Helen?’

‘She’s my… my girlfriend.’

‘Girlfriend!’ I whooped, delighted to have the chance to break the tension in the room. ‘Did you meet her at the cinema that night? When you went to see Herbie with your friends?’

Because of what happened, I’d never really asked him about that night, but I should have been suspicious that he was going out with ‘friends’. He found deception difficult, like his father, and now the truth came spilling out.

‘I didn’t go to the cinema with friends. I went to Helen’s house. She asked me over. We ate pizza and watched The Dukes of Hazzard, and that’s all I’m telling you.’ He looked to Andrew for a response. ‘Dad?’

‘That’s great, Laurence, great.’

There was clearly more to Laurence’s date than he was prepared to tell us. I was unsettled by this. I recalled the washing machine going that night. Laurence and I did not, as a rule, keep secrets from each other. Not until now. But I had to take control as Andrew left the room again without a word. I took Laurence’s hands in mine.

‘Laurence, do not interrupt me now. I don’t know what you got up to with this Helen, and I don’t want to know, but you lied to your father and me. You came home with a sprained ankle and gave us a cock and bull story about where you were going, and I don’t know what you were doing in the laundry room that night, I’m not even going to ask. Your father gave you two pounds to enjoy yourself at the cinema, so I’ll have that back, thank you. We are an honest family and we do not tell lies to each other. Is that clear?’

Although none of us mentioned the dead girl again at home, her name, Annie Doyle, was impossible to avoid in the two days after that first news report. Her photograph was on the second page of Andrew’s Irish Times the next day, the same photo with the crooked-toothed deformed smile. She had last been seen that Friday afternoon, entering her home. There were unconfirmed sightings of her around the inner city that morning, and the guards appealed to anyone who might have come into contact with her that day.

A photograph and an interview with her parents appeared in the newspapers the day after that. I studied the photograph. A detective stood behind the remaining three members of the family. You could tell straight away that they were poor. Annie’s father’s face was strained with pain, and his eyes were glassy with exhaustion. He looked rough, unshaven and stocky. His wife was unremarkable. There was another daughter with them in the photo, with her head down and her face hidden behind a mane of hair. Annie’s mother was quoted as saying that she was a good girl really, a very intelligent girl, she said, very bubbly and popular growing up. They appealed to the public to look out for her. They just wanted Annie to come home. Reading it, I couldn’t feel the mother’s anguish. I tried, but I couldn’t imagine it. I wondered what Annie’s father would say if he knew what his darling daughter had been up to. He might actually be relieved to discover that she was dead. And yet I was more sympathetic to him than his wife. The press report went on to detail what Annie had been wearing when she was last seen: a herringbone coat, purple boots and a silver-plated identity bracelet. Unremarkable, cheap stuff that half the young girls in the country might be wearing. They noted that her red hair was dyed black.

I relaxed after that. A week later, more salacious reports about Annie Doyle hinted at an unfortunate history of institutionalization and shoplifting. They didn’t say it outright, but they implied that she was a prostitute. I was disgusted. Andrew swore he’d had no idea, but admitted she had agreed to the plan far more readily than he had expected.

‘I should have known, I should have guessed,’ he said.

Still, fortunately for us, she was the kind of girl to put herself in the way of trouble and the last person the guards would link with a family like ours. They had nothing to go on except a vaguely similar car. They never came back with a search warrant. I had burned Daddy’s trilby in the fireplace the first chance I got. They would find nothing unless they literally went digging, and we gave them no reason to.

The new flower bed in the back garden initially unsettled me. Naturally it brought up memories of my sister. But I find you can get used to anything eventually.

Shortly before Christmas, Andrew and I went out to dinner together. I very rarely went on nights out, and they had been even less affordable since Paddy Carey, but I thought he needed a little treat. We had been through so much. Besides, I wanted to talk to him in a public place where he would not be able to overreact. I made sure the maître d’ found us a corner table where we could not be overheard.

I waited until the main course before I broached the subject.

‘You love Laurence and me, don’t you, darling?’

‘What… yes… why are you asking me that? Of course I do.’

‘It’s just that… if anything should happen… if anything were to be discovered—’

‘Christ, Lydia.’ He dropped his cutlery.

‘I mean, it’s all fine, I’m sure we’re safe now. The fuss has died down. Nobody is looking for her any more, but just if…’

‘What?’

‘Well, I hope that you would think of Laurence.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘If they caught you, if, for some reason, they found evidence and could arrest you, and there was no way out of it, well, you could say you did it on your own.’

He looked at me, open-mouthed, and I was glad I had chosen this quiet restaurant, because I knew that if we had been at home he would have shouted and thrown things around. I have always known how to manage my husband’s temper.

‘You see, darling, if Laurence lost both of us, in such awful circumstances, his life would be ruined. But if they got you, you could say that it was just a transaction gone wrong. A lovers’ tiff. You could tell them that she was trying to blackmail you, and that would be true! But I could say I didn’t know anything about it, and Laurence and I could go on afterwards and rebuild our lives. Isn’t that what you would want for us, darling?’

His lower jaw quivered, and when he eventually spoke he sounded, ironically, as if he were being strangled.

‘I was a fool to go along with your crazy plan. I did it because I loved you. I will do whatever you want. You get your own way, yet again. You always do. But don’t pretend you are doing this for Laurence.’

Andrew never understood the strength of a mother’s love.

5 Laurence

I hated the way they said ‘disappeared’, as if Annie Doyle had vanished into thin air when clearly something had happened to her, something bad. The idea of my father being involved in a woman’s ‘disappearance’ would have been absolutely preposterous before that day. He was a respectable guy and, reading between the lines of the Sunday World, she had been a junkie and a prostitute. He had never even had an affair – not that I was aware of, anyway. But he knew something about it. I was sure of that.

First, he lied to the guard about having been home that night, and then he tried to tell me that he’d been in bed when I knew he was out, because his car wasn’t there when I got home. Mum went to bed early with one of her migraines and he must have sneaked out afterwards. That was suspicious enough, but when I read about the silver-plated identity bracelet in the newspaper, I was really alarmed. The report detailed things that Annie Doyle had been wearing when she disappeared.

Two days before that, my mother had asked me to replace the hoover bag. She hated dirty work and it was always my father or I that did this chore. When I had removed the bag, something shiny was poking a tiny hole through it. I pulled it and a filthy, dust-covered string came out. When I blew off the dust, I could see a thin metallic chain attached to a narrow bar. The bar was inscribed with the name ‘Marnie’. The clasp was stained a deep red. There were no links at the other end of the bar – half of a bracelet, I guessed. I casually wondered who Marnie was, and put it in a kitchen drawer, assuming it belonged to my mother. I thought it might have been hoovered up by mistake, but I forgot to mention it to her.

Now, having read the latest on Annie Doyle, I understood its significance and realized that Mum would never have worn such a bracelet. Mum wore only gold antique jewellery. A silver-plated bracelet would have been too modern and cheap for her. When I got Dad on his own in the kitchen, I showed him the bracelet that I’d found.

‘I found this in the hoover. It’s not Mum’s, is it?’

‘Give it to me.’ It was an order. ‘It’s just some rubbish.’

He threw it into the bin and promptly left the room without any explanation. I fished it out of the potato peelings and the pieces of fat cut from the previous night’s meat. When I had rinsed it under the tap, I wrapped it in tissue and put it in my pocket. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I knew it was evidence of something. I dreaded to think what, but it seemed important that I should hang on to it.

And then, a few days later, I was coming home from school when I noticed a squad car pull up outside our gate. I almost started to hyperventilate. Were they here to arrest Dad or was it just one of their routine visits? A heavyset guy got out just as I turned into the driveway. I recognized him from the television news. It was the man in charge of the missing person investigation. Another man sat in the back seat and a uniformed guard was the driver.

‘How’r’ye, son. I’m Detective Sergeant Declan O’Toole, and that there’ – he nodded towards the back seat – ‘is Detective James Mooney. Do you live in there?’ He pointed towards our house.

‘Yeah.’

Detective Mooney got out of the car and stood behind O’Toole. ‘And what’s your name?’

‘Laurence Fitzsimons.’

‘And is your father home?’

‘I don’t think so. He doesn’t normally get home until after six.’

Detective Mooney nodded and walked back towards the car, but O’Toole told him to hold on. He had a sly smirk on his face. I didn’t like him.

‘So you’re the son of Judge Fitzsimons, are you?’

‘Yeah.’ I wanted to run away up the driveway, but the guard put his hand on my shoulder to keep me there.

‘Well, aren’t you a fine big lad.’ He was trying to be my friend. I said nothing. ‘Tell me something, Laurence, do you remember the weekend of the 14th of November, two weeks ago now.’

‘Yeah, why?’

‘Were you home that weekend yourself?’

I wondered if I should ask to have a lawyer present, but the detective was keeping it all very casual. He wasn’t writing anything down. But I was terrified.

‘I was in my girlfriend’s house that Friday night. You can check with her.’

‘Ah here, no need to be defensive, sonny. I’m not accusing you of anything at all, it’s just a routine thing I’m doing here, y’know?’ He was much more confident than Mooney, who I had heard questioning my dad. He was… jolly.

‘Why are you asking me about that weekend?’

He ignored my question. ‘And tell me now, was it a late night like, that Friday? What time did you get home to your own bed? Or did you?’ He nudged and winked at me as if we were a comic double act.

‘I had a midnight curfew. But I was home just after eleven.’

‘A curfew, eh? And were your mam and dad waiting up for you to get a full report?’ He winked again.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You’re sure now? Both of them?’

‘Yes.’ I kept my voice as still as possible, though I could not control the flush in my cheeks. The lie came so easily, it surprised even me.

‘And did your dad go out again that weekend at all?’

‘No. We all stayed in.’

‘Don’t you have a great memory?’

‘I remember it because I sprained my ankle and Mum and Dad were home the whole time, fetching me stuff.’

‘Grand, that’s all I needed to know, sonny. I’m just crossing people off a list. It’s a dirty job, but sure, someone has to do it, ha?’ He winked again and went to get into his car.

‘Are you not going up to the house?’ I said, nodding towards Avalon.

‘No need, no need at all.’

Detective Mooney, who had stood silently all this time, whispered urgently into O’Toole’s ear. O’Toole waved him away, annoyed, but said, ‘Oh, one more thing, does your dad ever wear a hat? A trilby-type hat?’ He pulled a photograph of a hat out of his pocket. ‘This shape,’ he said, pointing at the photo. I heaved a huge sigh of relief.

‘No. Never. He doesn’t have a hat.’ O’Toole looked at Mooney with smug satisfaction on his face.

‘Good, good, that’s it then, I’ll be on my way.’

‘But why are you asking about that weekend, and my dad and a hat?’

He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Ongoing investigation, but you’ve nothing to worry about now, off you go!’ He tooted the horn and drove off.

They were looking for a different man, a man who wore a hat. I needn’t have lied at all. Dad was guilty about something, though – maybe he had gone out that night for another reason. I was almost relieved to think that he might be having an affair, and the bracelet belonged to his fancy woman, Marnie. None of the reports had mentioned the name on the bracelet, and one would assume that it would be the woman’s own name, Annie. So Marnie must be Dad’s floozie. That was better than… whatever had happened to a missing prostitute. The knot in my stomach loosened.

Mum was cutting fabric on the kitchen table when I came in.

‘Mum,’ I said jovially when I got in the front door, ‘Dad’s off the hook. They’re looking for a fella in a hat!’

She didn’t look up. ‘What are you talking about, darling?’

‘There were two detectives outside just now, and one of them was asking me about that night, the night he questioned Dad about, but they’re looking for a guy in a hat.’

She smiled sweetly. ‘Good heavens, a guard asking you questions. What did you tell him?’

‘I told him Dad and you were here when I got home from my night out and that Dad didn’t even own a hat.’

She laughed. ‘So ridiculous, questioning a schoolboy.’

‘I hope they catch him.’

‘Who?’

‘The fella in the hat!’ I foraged in the fridge for some cheese and cut two slices of thick bread from the loaf.

‘Leave room for your dinner,’ said Mum. As if.

I was relieved that I no longer had to think about this girl. After the newspapers had been thrown out, I had retrieved them from the bin and cut out the articles about the missing woman. Unusually, Dad had recently been buying all of the newspapers, including the ones he had claimed to despise. We were not a house that would ordinarily take the Sunday World. At first, there was just information about where she had last been seen, a description of what she may have been wearing, but the later reports suggested that she was leading a sordid life. I had been poring over them nightly, looking at her snaggle-toothed grin, her misshapen mouth, desperate to rule out my father’s involvement. I had raided the desk in his study, looking for evidence of an affair he was having, but really looking for some link between him and Annie Doyle. I don’t know what I expected to find – a photograph? A legal case file that named her? It was ridiculous and I knew it. Prostitutes did not give receipts or hand out business cards.

I had had nightmares in which I was having sex with Annie in Helen’s distorted bedroom, and others in which I was stabbing her viciously with my father’s silver letter-opener and then I’d see my mother’s face, and I’d wake up, drenched in sweat and guilt-ridden. Now I was free of all that.

Until two days later, when I noticed a gap on the shelf where my grandfather’s old trilby hat had been for as long as I could remember. I asked Mum where it had gone. ‘Oh, I think your father finally threw it out,’ she said absent-mindedly, and all the fear and anxiety swept back up into my heart. I nervously asked Dad if he had thrown out the hat.

‘Why do you want to know?’ was his first question, before he claimed that he didn’t know what had happened to it, his voice quivering as he spoke.

I knew. I knew for sure he was lying.

I didn’t do anything with this knowledge. I was scared of what it meant. I had lied to the guard now, so I could go to jail too. What had he done with the woman? I know we were broke, but if he was going to kidnap someone, shouldn’t he have chosen someone rich? He wasn’t that desperate, surely. And where were the ransom demands? The IRA had kidnapped a man but everyone knew it was the IRA, and they kidnapped a rich guy, a foreign industrialist. My father was not a stupid man. That led me to the idea that maybe Annie Doyle had been in trouble with the IRA or some criminal gang, and Dad had given her the money to move away abroad with a new identity. Dad was helping a young woman in trouble. Wasn’t that more likely? But if that was the case, why were the police not involved? Maybe the guards were not being told because the case was so sensitive that it had to be entrusted to a judge. I tried to believe that version of events because, as unlikely as it seemed, the alternatives were too dreadful to contemplate.

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’ looked 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?’

Detective Sergeant O’Toole had been the person we’d been in touch with over the phone in the last few days, but none of us had met him. He was mid-thirties, a stocky build, but he had a shaving cut on his chin and one just under his left ear. I noticed these small things to distract myself from what I now knew was going to be bad news. I realized that if there had been good news about Annie, we would have been told over the phone. Mooney sat beside Detective Sergeant O’Toole on one side of the table and the three of us sat on the other. The table was old and battered, the size of a teacher’s desk. It looked like chunks had been carved out of it with penknives, and it had been graffitied with doodles of topless women and scrawls of ‘fuck the pigs’ and suchlike in pens and markers.

The detective had a file open in front of him. I couldn’t see what had been written down, but I could see the photo of Annie. We had put it up everywhere we could – on lamp posts and in shops, pubs and church porches.

Detective Sergeant O’Toole introduced himself as Declan and asked our first names. He looked me over a bit too long in a way that made me slightly uncomfortable.

‘Did you see me on the television last night? We’re taking this very seriously.’

Ma had seen him interviewed, and treated him like a famous person. Me and Da had missed it because we’d been out looking for Annie.

‘Well now, to be honest I thought we’d get a better response, but I must say at the outset that we have not found Annie.’ A sob escaped from Ma. The tension was driving us all crazy. He ignored her distress and continued: ‘But we have made a few discoveries that I’m not sure you are aware of.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Did you know that your sister is a heroin user?’

‘She isn’t. I mean, she likes a drink but she wouldn’t go near drugs.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Da.

‘When we searched her flat, we found certain items under the mattress that lead us to believe that she is a regular user.’

‘Like what?’ asked Ma.

‘Syringes, foil wraps, a ligature.’

I was shocked. I knew about heroin addicts. You’d see them sometimes around our neighbourhood. They were all hopeless cases, living on the streets, begging for their next fix. I’d seen them with my own eyes. Annie wasn’t one of them. Ma said nothing but cried quietly.

‘She’s not like that,’ said Da, ‘she can be trouble all right, but she’s too smart for drugs.’

‘Gerry,’ said O’Toole, ignoring my ma’s distress, and I didn’t like the condescending way he said it, ‘did you know that Annie has been caught shoplifting three times in the last year? She’s been up in court. The last time, the judge said he’d lock her up if she came before him again. She is not living a good life.’

Da went quiet then, but I was shocked and furious. ‘Why are you saying that? Annie’s not a thief! And she wouldn’t have the money for drugs. It’s not true, and even if it was, where is she? Have you done anything about finding her?’

Mooney looked towards the ceiling, in embarrassment I think, while O’Toole continued.

‘She got the money from items she stole and then sold on to a third party… and’ – he coughed, but it was a fake exaggerated cough – ‘from other sources.’

He reached out, put his hands flat on the table and addressed himself to Ma. ‘Pauline, we all have to be calm now. I admit that we don’t know where she is, but it seems that she had regular gentlemen… clients… over the last few months, and they might also have paid for her habit.’

It took a few moments for the impact of what he was saying to sink in. Ma was still bewildered, but Da leaped up, sending his chair crashing backwards.

‘Are you saying my Annie is a prossie? Is that what you’re saying? Because I’ll break your face if that’s what you’re after hinting.’

I pulled Da by the sleeve as O’Toole jumped out of his chair and pushed Mooney in front of him. Mooney moved behind Da, put a calming arm on his shoulder and spoke quietly. ‘Now, sir, we’re just dealing with the facts here to help us find your daughter.’ Da was breathing heavily, clenching his fists together, then pulling at his hair.

‘Da, please stop! Sit down.’

He slumped back into his chair. O’Toole nodded at Mooney, who stood sentry beside Da. O’Toole leaned forward and spoke quietly.

‘I understand that it’s upsetting for you to hear this, but we looked into Annie’s background. We know that she spent two years in St Joseph’s. You sent her there yourself, Gerry.’

Da put his hands over his face.

‘Now, I have to ask you a question and I want you to think hard before you answer it. Do you think there is a possibility that Annie might have taken her own life?’

I didn’t have to think hard at all. ‘No, absolutely not.’ It had already crossed my mind, but Annie was optimistic on the last Thursday I’d seen her. She was upbeat and hopeful of getting money from somewhere. She had left no note. There was no body. Annie would not have done that to us. Despite the constant arguing with our da, there had always been some sort of a bond between them. She wouldn’t even have done it to him. Ma and Da readily agreed with me.

‘Not our Annie,’ Ma said.

‘Well, we can never rule it out and I’m happy to proceed with the investigation. However, as you might guess, the news coverage so far hasn’t proved very… fruitful. But I know a few people in the press who might be interested in the human angle of the story. Would you be prepared to talk to them this afternoon, if I was able to get them down here to the station?’ O’Toole was excited by this, I could tell.

‘Just me?’ said Da.

‘All of you.’ He nodded towards me. ‘Sure, it’s no harm to put a pretty face forward.’ He winked at me. I was disgusted.

‘And tell them that my Annie is a drug addict and a prostitute?’

‘Well, of course, there would be no need to reveal any of those more… troubling details. I’m just talking about a straightforward appeal for your daughter to come home. We have no evidence that any harm has come to her, but she may be in the company of some, shall we say, unsavoury types. It would just be you three talking to a few reporters, no big deal. None of the other… information would be released to them.’

Detective Mooney looked at Da gravely. ‘I think it’s your best chance of finding her, Gerry.’

We argued about it. Ma wanted to do it, but Da was reluctant. They had a massive row in front of O’Toole, and I was caught in the middle.

‘You were always ashamed of her,’ Ma said to Da.

‘Can you blame me, Pauline? I’m hardly going to be boasting about my junkie whore daughter, am I?’

‘So you’d be happy if she was dead in an alley somewhere, would you? You’d be happy if you never saw her again?’

‘No! I’m not saying that. I just worry about what happens next time she goes off on a bender. I’m worried sick, if you must know.’

‘She’s your flesh and blood. We have to find her.’

‘I agree with Ma. What if she’s in some bad situation? She’s not on a bender. If the people she’s with know that the guards are looking for her, they might send her home.’

‘We don’t even know that she hasn’t gone off somewhere—’

‘We do know, Da. All her stuff was still there. She wouldn’t have taken off and left her stuff behind.’

We went back to the garda station in the afternoon. Dessie came with us, though he sat at the back of the room. I’d told him about the drugs and prostitution. He was utterly shocked. ‘Jaysus,’ he said, ‘I never knew she was that bad.’ He shook hands firmly with my dad, as if it were a funeral. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

Da just glared at him. Da was still unenthusiastic about meeting the reporters, and Ma was really nervous. O’Toole said, ‘Don’t worry if you break down and cry when you’re talking about Annie,’ and I thought that was a strange thing to say because he was almost hinting that we should cry. Detective Mooney told us, ‘Just be honest, tell Annie that you want her to come home.’ Da said, ‘I do want her to come home,’ as if the guard was challenging him. ‘It’s OK, Da,’ I said.

We were brought into a bigger room with a big conference table and sat on one side of it with O’Toole. I couldn’t call him Declan. I noticed that he had had his hair cut since that morning. I guessed he didn’t give a damn about Annie and just wanted to be in the papers. He’d been so pleased with himself about being on the telly. When a photographer requested our photo, O’Toole jumped up and stood between us with his arms out, like Jesus in a holy picture of the Last Supper. A few men scribbled into jotters and clicked their cameras as Ma and Da talked about Annie. O’Toole looked meaningfully at me, urging me to say something, but I just sat with my head down and said nothing. I didn’t want to cry in front of strangers.

I had information too that I had not shared with my parents; it would have hurt them too much. Earlier, before the press conference, O’Toole had taken me aside. He put his arm around my shoulder in a way that was supposed to be comforting, but I felt like gagging from the smell of his overpowering aftershave.

‘Karen,’ he said, ‘if there’s anything I can do, you know? I hate to see you suffering, like.’

‘Don’t you have any leads on where she went? Any clue as to what might have happened to her?’

‘Afraid not, but we’ve tracked down her pimp. He thinks she was seeing fellas on her own for the last few months. She wasn’t on the streets like she’d been before, but she seemed to have money for heroin. Sometimes, you know, a girl is better off with a pimp because he’ll offer her some protection.’

‘And did you arrest him?’

O’Toole seemed perplexed. ‘For what?’

‘For being a pimp! Isn’t it illegal?’

He actually laughed at me. ‘Now, don’t be getting upset, a pretty girl like you. Pimps are useful to us in other ways.’

I was livid. ‘I bet they are.’

He released me from his grip then. ‘I’m on your side, you know. I wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you, if I were you.’

I was shocked by how threatening he was. I needed to play along with him or he wasn’t going to help us.

‘I’m sorry, it’s just that… I’m worried… we’re close, me and Annie.’

‘I suppose it hurts that she kept secrets from you.’ He rifled through his desk and pulled up a copybook, like an old school jotter. ‘We found this with the syringes under the mattress. It’s not of any use to us, but maybe you’d like to keep it?’

I reached out to take it from him, but he held it aloft. ‘What do you say?’

‘Thank you, Detective Sergeant.’ I smiled sweetly.

‘Declan.’

‘Declan.’

‘She’s not great at writing, is she? Did she go to school at all?’

I tried not to glare at him.

‘There’s some large cash amounts listed in there. We don’t know what they refer to. If you can shed any light on them, let us know? Prostitutes would never make that amount. The going rate averages at ten pounds for full sex,’ he said. He suggested that she must have been providing ‘very special services’ for the amounts listed in the notebook. It took me a few moments to understand what he was getting at. I thought of my sister, who I had shared a room with throughout my childhood. I was still trying to take in the fact that she might be a prostitute. He insisted that the addresses and phone numbers had all been checked and led to nothing.

He wrote his own phone number on a piece of paper. ‘Ring me any time. Any time you want to talk.’

‘About Annie?’

‘About anything.’

I recognized Annie’s scrawl at once. It was a diary of some sort. Her handwriting and spelling were terrible. But it was so… Annie, and when I read the contents, I felt sick. Sick about reading her personal stuff, but heartbroken for what she’d written. The first entry was a letter, dated shortly after she came home from St Joseph’s four years earlier.

There was a lock of soft, downy, almost yellow hair stuck to the page with Sellotape.

As well as writing, there were things like cinema tickets pasted to the pages like a scrapbook, and random phone numbers, cash amounts and badly spelled hotel addresses. Some recent entries were listed with a ‘J’ on one side of the page and ‘£300’ on the other. I could make no more sense of it than O’Toole.

After the reporters printed our interview, information came flooding in. Annie had been spotted in five different pubs and two restaurants in Dublin, working in a café in Galway, a hotel in Greystones, an office in Belfast. Countless possible sightings. Detective Mooney kept us updated, but even he admitted that they didn’t have the resources to follow up on every single call. Not properly. Me and Dessie chased up a lot of them ourselves. We took the bus and went to hotels and pubs and shops with her photo, but it was infuriating. It seemed like some of the people who had ‘spotted’ Annie just wanted to be part of the excitement of a missing person’s case. Their stories didn’t hold up, or they were contradicted by their friends. Often they were just people with problems of their own that wanted some attention. Each new lead excited us for a time, but none of them checked out.

A week after our press interview, the muckraking began. New headlines appeared: ‘Missing Annie’s Heroin Addiction’ and ‘Annie Doyle’s Secret Teen Pregnancy’. There were vague references to gentlemen callers, and anyone with a brain could see what they meant.

Da and Ma were distraught. Da and I went straight to see O’Toole. ‘How did they know? You said you wouldn’t tell them any of that private stuff!’

O’Toole played the shocked innocent. ‘We’re launching a full investigation into how those details were leaked, Gerry. I can assure you, we’re just as upset as you are.’

Detective Mooney, I could tell, was furious. His eyes blazed at O’Toole. I knew it was O’Toole who had done the leaking. After the press conference, I saw him and some of the reporters laughing and joking together. He posed for photographs with them. I was sure he would not hesitate to provide any dirty details they wanted. Maybe he told them to hold off for a week, so that the articles couldn’t be connected to him.

To me, the tone of these reports seemed to imply that Annie deserved whatever she got, and if she was dead in a ditch, she had nobody to blame but herself. Even Dessie was upset by all the coverage. ‘It’s as if she doesn’t matter,’ he said.

Within three weeks, everything stopped. No leads, no investigation. Gradually, the name Annie Doyle disappeared from the headlines. I guess nobody cared enough to really investigate the vanishing of someone like Annie. If she had been a posh rich girl without a ‘troubled’ history, they would not have given up so quickly.

I couldn’t stop thinking of that first entry in Annie’s copybook. It had been written four years earlier, but the pain in that letter was obvious. What if she had travelled to St Joseph’s in Cork to find out where her baby had gone? What if something happened to her in Cork?

I rang O’Toole.

‘Did you ask St Joseph’s?’

‘What?’ He didn’t appear to know what I was talking about.

‘St Joseph’s in Cork, where Annie was forced to give up her baby.’

‘Oh yeah, I did, yeah.’

‘And what did they say?’

‘They didn’t have any information that would be helpful.’

‘But did they say she had been there? Had she gone down to find out where the baby was?’

‘Karen, a beautiful girl like you, all this worry is doing you no good. You have to leave this investigation to us. We’re doing everything we can.’

‘Like what?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Like, today. What are you doing today?’

There was a pause before he said, ‘You know, Karen, patience is a virtue.’

‘I’d just really like to know what you’re doing to find my sister.’

‘Would you like to discuss it over a drink?’

I hung up.

I rang St Joseph’s in Cork. I didn’t know who I should speak to. The place was run by nuns. The woman who answered the phone identified herself as Sister Margaret.

‘I’m trying to find out if my sister visited in the last five weeks, please? Her name is Annie Doyle.’

‘And why would she visit here?’

‘She… she had a baby there in 1975. The baby’s name was Marnie. I have her date of birth, if that helps? She stayed there until December 1976, when she gave up the baby.’

There was a rustling of papers then.

‘I see. Do you know what her St Joseph’s name was?’

‘No… I… what do you mean?’

‘All the girls who come here are given new names.’

‘Her name is Annie Doyle. She’s missing. I think the guards were in touch with you?’

‘Not that I recall. If you can’t give me her house name, I can’t help you.’

‘Wait, but don’t you keep records? Where did you send her baby? She might have gone looking for her.’

A long silence followed.

‘I don’t know who you are talking about. Perhaps she went away because she was ashamed.’

Ashamed. I bit my tongue.

‘Lots of girls in her position go away.’

‘Away? Where?’

‘Just… away.’

‘Can I come and see you? I can bring a photo. It’s been in the papers. The guards are looking for her.’ I couldn’t hide the desperation in my voice.

‘We don’t talk to the papers. Nobody who leaves here ever comes back voluntarily.’

This one was a right bitch.

‘Can I find out where her baby is, at least? She could have gone looking for her.’

‘If your sister was here for two years and left without her baby, it means that she took a while to make up her mind, but she must have eventually signed the adoption papers. The whereabouts of the child is privileged information and will not ever be released. The baby will have been placed with a good Catholic family. I can’t help you. Goodbye.’

I reported what I had discovered to my parents. Ma cried. Da broke down too, which wasn’t like him. ‘I should never have sent her there. We could have kept her here. She wouldn’t be the first on the street to have a bastard child.’

Ma reared up on him. ‘Bastard child? That was my grandchild, and yours too. She might have been all right if we’d kept her at home, but you were always too bloody proud for your own good. I let you beat her and I let you send her away and now, I think… I think she’s…’

Ma didn’t finish the sentence, but we all knew what she was thinking. I left the house and went back to my own flat. I couldn’t accept it. Annie, my big sister? Annie was larger than life, people said. She couldn’t be dead.

Ma and Da had always been a team. I hadn’t known till now that Ma had wanted to keep Annie and her baby at home. The cracks in their relationship began to appear then. On a later visit home, I noticed Ma had moved into my old room.

My relationship with Dessie strengthened. He had been really kind and helped me put up posters in shops and bars near where Annie had lived and in buildings she had cleaned. O’Toole fobbed us off with excuses and didn’t return Da’s calls. I tried to believe that no news was good news.

But by Christmas, Annie had been gone for six weeks. I rang O’Toole myself. On Christmas Eve, I met O’Toole – Declan – for a pre-arranged drink in O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street. I had tried to arrange a meeting with him in the station, but he had refused and insisted on a drink instead. ‘Less formal, you know what I mean?’ I knew what he was playing at, but I had no other way of speaking to him. He was already drunk by the time I joined him. I told him the nun in St Joseph’s had no recollection of anyone from the guards ringing there about my sister. He didn’t care enough to deny it. He just shrugged his shoulders and smiled awkwardly.

‘You need to forget about her. All this worry will give you wrinkles and you’re a beautiful girl.’

‘What? I’m not just going to forget about her.’

‘We could go back to my flat and open a bottle of vodka and I could help you forget?’

He put his hand on my thigh. I knew he was sleazy, but I hadn’t thought he would be so obvious.

‘No, thank you,’ I said, removing his hand, unable to keep the disgust out of my voice. ‘You’ve met my boyfriend, Dessie?’

‘Don’t be a fucking ice queen. You’re better-looking than your sister, you know. You could charge more.’

I threw my glass of Guinness in his face. He jumped up, and as I hurried out of the bar, he roared after me, ‘You stupid fucking bitch! She’s dead. Everyone knows it but you.’

7 Lydia

All the pressure got to Andrew in the end, I suppose. My relationship with him was strained, to say the least. I was used to being the one who was looked after, but now I’d find him weeping in the shower and uncommunicative for days at a time. He stopped socializing completely, took sick days from work and stayed in bed. I urged him to see a doctor, but he said he was afraid of what he might say. He didn’t want to be anywhere near me. One evening, I found him in bed in one of the spare rooms.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I don’t want to share a bed with you any more.’

‘But, darling, why? What have I done?’

He looked so exhausted. ‘Nothing. You managed everything really well. I just hate that you were able to.’

I ignored the implication of what he was saying. ‘Come back to our room. Laurence would be so upset if he thought we were fighting. And we’re not fighting, are we, darling?’

He allowed himself to be led back to our bed. I offered him one of my tranquillizers, but he refused. ‘You and your pills,’ he said. I kissed him gently on the mouth, but he turned his head away, unable to respond. I hoped that he would snap out of this humour soon. Apart from anything else, it was tedious.

I should have taken it more seriously. My poor husband had physically aged a decade in a month, his movements had slowed down, and he started shuffling around like an old man. I should have realized that the strain of keeping our secret on top of the financial trouble would be too much for him, but when I look back on it now, I am so sorry that Laurence’s birthdays and Christmases were ruined for ever. The twenty-fifth of December will never be a good day for us.

The day started off relatively well. I made a special appeal to Andrew to get out of bed and be in good spirits for Christmas Day and Laurence’s birthday. We gave him our birthday gifts, and we all exchanged Christmas presents. It was almost how it used to be. Andrew’s mother Eleanor was due to come over after she had dined at Andrew’s brother’s house.

After dinner, Andrew and I were in the kitchen, cleaning up. He was moaning about Laurence’s weight and his uncouth girlfriend. He was being quite cruel about the idea of them being a couple. I did not like her either, but my intuition told me it was a passing fancy. Helen’s mother was Angela d’Arcy, a poet of note, so status-wise she was just about acceptable, but Andrew, so quick to be irritated these days, said, ‘What does she even see in him?’ and then I saw Laurence. He had been standing at the kitchen door and heard Andrew’s whole tirade. We had allowed Laurence to have a little wine with dinner to celebrate the fact that he was eighteen, but I don’t think the drink suited him, because he had this really aggressive, hostile expression on his face when he looked at Andrew, as if he despised him.

‘There are worse things to be than fat,’ Laurence said insolently.

‘Oh dear, please let’s not fight,’ I said, trying to broker a truce, but Andrew ignored me.

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘Nothing,’ said Laurence, sullen.

‘I’m sorry you heard me say those things. I know I haven’t been very… well recently…’

Laurence left the room abruptly, slamming the door behind him, not allowing his father a chance to apologize.

Andrew turned to me. ‘He knows.’

‘Don’t be silly, darling. He doesn’t know anything.’

‘But the way he looks at me… he won’t even be alone in the same room as me any more—’

I cut him off. I was determined the dead girl wasn’t going to ruin Christmas for us. ‘We are not talking about that. You should speak to Laurence. Let him know that you actually care about him.’

‘For God’s sake, Lydia, of course I care about him, but I don’t intend to smother him like you do. He’s eighteen. He’ll have moved out of the house by the end of next summer.’

‘Don’t say that. He can live here as long as he likes.’

‘Well, if I was him, I’d be gone like a shot. You indulge him like he’s a little boy. You need to let go.’

‘I would have been able to let go if you hadn’t destroyed our plan by killing that girl.’ I whispered it.

‘So now it’s OK to talk about it, is it? When it suits you? Her name was Annie.’ Andrew’s temper flared. I knew to stay quiet. He would brook no interruption in this mood. He whispered furiously, ‘You carry on as if nothing has happened, and I’m living a waking nightmare, in dread of every knock on the door. You have it all arranged. If anything happens, I go to prison and you and Laurence go away and live a very nice life without me. Can you imagine how a judge might be treated in prison?’

I moved the glass and decanter out of his reach because he was very angry, angry enough to smash something, but he barely noticed.

‘Have you ever loved me the way I love you? Really? I actually liked Annie. You chose her, remember? I didn’t mind that she was a plain-looking girl, because it was less of a betrayal of you. She was different of course, but she was sweet and funny…’

I put my hands over my ears, but I could still hear him.

‘…but it was only ever you, and now I have to look at her fucking grave out the kitchen window every day! I did it all for you—’

I wanted to speak up then about the violence of his language, but he put his hand up as a warning to me.

‘And no, of course you didn’t ask me to kill her, but you kept on and on at me – “Don’t let her make fools of us”, “Get the money back from her”, “You should never have trusted her”, “Why did you believe her?” – on and on and on until the pressure was unbearable. And when Annie threatened to blackmail me, I snapped. And she was a living human being. I’m on a knife edge, Lydia, don’t you see?’

He clutched at his chest and I thought he was being overly dramatic but then he gasped for breath. I watched in horror as he tried to steady himself against the table. I reached out to stop him falling and he grabbed my hand.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ I said, like an idiot, because any fool could see he was having an attack of some kind. He slipped downwards, and I tried to hold him up. His eyes were open, pleading and desperate. He could no longer speak, but I could see that he was begging me to help him. I pulled at his shirt collar, but he had taken off his suit after Mass and was wearing a loose open collar and no tie. I tried to hold on to him, but he was too heavy. He fell through my arms and slumped past me, across the table, displacing the turkey carcass from its serving platter, and then he was face down across the table, his hair in the turkey grease.

I looked at the turkey, which had dropped off the end of the table and slid along the slight slope in the kitchen floor to rest at the skirting board beside the door. I had ordered a big turkey, even though there were only three of us. Daddy had always said a small turkey looked mean, and we could make sandwiches and stews from the leftovers, and all these thoughts about the turkey and how many ways I could prepare it went through my head as my husband died, there and then, in front of me. I stood in shock in those ten seconds while he fought to breathe, until he was entirely still. I looked from him back to the turkey on the floor, trying to believe what I was seeing. And then I tried to shake him. I turned him over and blew into his mouth, but nothing I did worked. I screamed for Laurence. He came immediately and took in the scene at once. My poor brave boy.

Without saying anything at all, Laurence picked up the turkey and put it in the swing-top bin, forsaking the sandwiches and stews. He went to the cloakroom to call for an ambulance and returned with a brimming glass of brandy for me. He mopped the floor and then moved Andrew carefully on to it and put one of the kitchen cushions behind his head. He wiped the grease from the side of Andrew’s face and his hair with a tea towel. I wanted to close his eyes, but there was a kind of empty innocence in them and I needed Laurence to see that. He went to ring Andrew’s brother, Finn, who could relay the news to their mother, Eleanor.

Perhaps because it was Christmas Day, the ambulance took an hour to arrive, or maybe it was because Laurence had told them that Andrew was already dead and therefore it was not an emergency. Eleanor, Finn and his wife, Rosie, were there by then. Finn was shocked but stoic about his younger brother’s passing. They were not close.

Rosie swung into action, making phone calls and filling glasses while Eleanor just cried silently in Andrew’s leather armchair. I resented her sitting there. Andrew was her baby. Eleanor and I tolerated each other most of the time, but she never pulled her punches. Her role as the family matriarch entitled her to say whatever she wanted, and it was usually critical. She could never refrain from commenting about Laurence’s weight. Andrew usually visited his mother alone, and when she came to visit us I sat on my hands and bit my tongue. In our grief on this saddest of days, we did not make any attempt to comfort each other.

I think I went into shock after that. Finn and Laurence found my tablets and fed them to me. I was put to bed and woke up hours later, screaming for Andrew. Laurence came and sat with me, rubbing my arm, assuring me that everything was going to be OK and that he would look after me now. It seemed so stupid to me, a little boy saying he was in charge. The pain of this loss was so much worse than all of the miscarriages.

In the few days before the funeral, I stayed in bed, leaving all the arrangements to Finn and Rosie and my son. I lived in a tranquillized haze. There was some fuss over the clothes that Andrew was to be laid out in. Laurence had chosen Andrew’s favourite mustard-coloured corduroy slacks and burgundy cardigan, and Eleanor was horrified that he wasn’t in his best suit. I was beyond caring.

The funeral happened without my input. I felt as if I were underwater in a swimming pool and everything was happening above my head, beyond the surface of the water. I watched, absorbed, but could not engage. I stood in a receiving line, shaking hands with hundreds of people: politicians, broadcasters, coroners and lawyers. Laurence, by my side, kept me upright and supplied me with tissues. My emotions broke through when I watched Laurence carrying the coffin that contained his father’s corpse. I began to scream, and everyone stood away from me in horror until Rosie and one of her sons hustled me out of the church into the waiting black Mercedes. She found some pills in my bag and I was glad to take them. Eleanor got into the car and told me that I must conduct myself with dignity, and I wanted to slap her, but the pills began to work so I looked out of the window on the way to the graveyard, watching people carrying shopping bags, waiting at bus stops, chatting over hedges, as if nothing had happened. When the coffin was later lowered into the ground, Laurence held firmly on to my arm.

Back at Avalon, Rosie and her brood handed out sandwiches to the forty or fifty people who milled around our reception rooms. I recognized two or three of the women from some outings I had endured in the distant past, and I wondered who had invited them all. The wives of Andrew’s former colleagues filled our freezer with stupid, useless casseroles and pies, all labelled neatly. They marvelled at the size of our home. A few boys from Laurence’s old school came, and that girl Helen was there, clinging on to Laurence every chance she got, but Laurence was taking care of me. A wizened priest wanted me to pray with him, but I couldn’t bear to be in the room with him, and Laurence led him away towards Eleanor, who was more accepting of his condolences.

In the wake of Andrew’s death, I found it impossible to climb out of the fog. I spent most of my days in bed, and when I ventured downstairs I stared at the television, trying to ignore the empty armchair beside me. I simply could not stop crying. Laurence would bring food on a tray and feed me like I was a baby, and I would eat mechanically, without tasting.

When my mother-in-law and Finn and Andrew’s friends telephoned to see how I was coping, I did not go to the phone but asked Laurence to take messages. I let the condolence cards pile up without opening them. I swallowed tranquillizers to blot out the pain, but really they just took the edge off it and stopped the rising panic that threatened to overwhelm me. I was forty-eight years old. Laurence was all I had now – my boy who was growing up way too fast. And I was terrified he would not want to be my baby for much longer.

After Laurence was born, I had nine miscarriages. They devastated me, every one of them, the pain and the loss and ultimately the fear. I carried one as far as four months, and we really thought we were safe then. I’d never held on longer than ten weeks before that. It was the glorious summer of 1977. We celebrated by having dinner in our favourite restaurant, Andrew, Laurence and I. And then, right after our dinner plates were removed, I felt that dreadful and familiar tearing in my womb and I doubled over in agony. Within seconds, pools of blood seeped on to the velvet-upholstered seat beneath me. Andrew realized quickly what was happening and carried me out to the car, leaving a dribbled trail of my insides on their plush carpet as we went. Fourteen-year-old Laurence was white-faced and crying, but even he knew. ‘Is it the baby, Mum? Is it?’

Usually, after the miscarriages, it took me a week or two to return from the dead place I occupied with my lost foetuses, but that time it was much longer.

Doctors could do nothing to help me. Three different adoption agencies turned us down. I assumed it would be a matter of making a generous donation, but there were all sorts of interviews where Andrew and I were grilled separately and then together. The questions were deeply intrusive. I told Andrew to use his status, but it didn’t seem to do any good. He pulled every string available to us, and although the first two agencies were not prepared to give their reasons for denying us a child, the third agency gave us a written report. They said that they thought I had not dealt properly with issues in my childhood, and they regretted that I might not be able to meet the needs of a new baby. They said it was strange that I had no close friendships and that I rarely left my family home. When I got that report in the post, I went straight into the agency and screamed blue murder at the woman on reception until she called security. Andrew came to take me home, and after that he insisted we couldn’t apply to any more agencies.

We had never given up on trying for our own baby, even when we had planned that Andrew would get that girl pregnant and pay her for the child. He had been supposed to find a young healthy girl who was poor enough to go along with it. The plan was that once she was pregnant he would visit the girl once a month and pay £200 per month of pregnancy and £500 on the baby’s arrival. A lot of money for a poor girl. A lot of money for us. Though the idea was straightforward, I had to plead with Andrew to go through with it. I had to beg him.

‘Doesn’t Laurence deserve a sibling? We’ll tell him that we were finally accepted by an adoption agency.’

‘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. Eventually, 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, T-shirts, 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 at 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?’

I couldn’t remember exactly, but I knew it hadn’t been there for that long before Dad died. I grumbled and delayed, but Granny insisted. ‘I can’t believe Andrew left it like that with random plants just dumped into the earth. Go on out and dig the whole thing up. There’s some dahlia tubers ready to go in the potting shed. It all needs to be replanted. Go on now, it will be a nice surprise for your mother. You can do it on your study breaks.’

It was April now, almost Easter, and it was still whip cold outside, though there had been no frost that week. I wrapped up in a woolly hat and cardigan and Dad’s wellington boots, and fetched the shovel and rake from the shed. As I began to dig at the edge of the raised bed, I discovered a granite border about six inches below the surface. I remembered old black-and-white photographs of an ornamental pond at this spot with a bird bath at its centre, and it occurred to me that maybe it would cheer up Mum if I could restore the pond to its former glory.

I consulted with Granny and she was fully encouraging. I didn’t have the first clue how to go about it though, so before I dug any further, I took myself off to the library and borrowed A Complete Guide to Garden Ponds. Granny and I pored over the right way to approach it, and I had to go back into town to buy some rubber sheeting with which to line the pond.

On Sunday, having spent the morning pretending to study, I started digging again in earnest. I was excited by how pleased Mum would be. Reinstating the pond would take a few weeks, but it was a project that she might take an interest in. She would be proud of my efforts and see that she didn’t need Dad to do everything around the house. My mother always liked to have Avalon perfectly preserved, exactly how it was in her childhood. A few modern conveniences had been acquired over the years, like a dishwasher and washing machine, but Mum would have nothing to do with them until the cleaners had to be let go after Paddy Bloody Carey had done his worst. I thought that the restored pond would delight her. The stone bird bath had lain wrapped in hessian in the corner of the shed since long before I was born. I didn’t want to get too ambitious, but I thought that later, in the summer, with a bit of expert advice, I could re-install that too.

The instructions in the pond manual suggested that I needed to dig down quite deep, about four feet, because a brick layer had to go under the rubber sheeting, to allow for earth shifting and ground stability. But then my spade hit something odd, and I could see some kind of fabric under a half-torn piece of black plastic, peeking through the soil. I brushed the earth back with my father’s boot, curious and irritated at the same time. I didn’t immediately recognize the herringbone pattern. I bent down to pick it up. And then the stench hit me.

I shouted out loud in horror and disgust, and, unable to look away, pushed the plastic upwards with the tip of my boot. Above the herringbone cloth, a tuft of unnaturally black hair was visible, while creatures of many legs and none slithered and crawled through the cavity behind part of an exposed lower jawbone. The crooked snaggle-tooth was unmistakable, though the flesh around it was blackened and bloated. I quickly shovelled all the soil back on top of Annie Doyle, my tears blinding me as I did so.

Granny rapped at the kitchen window, calling through the glass that it was getting dark, that dinner would soon be ready and that I should come in and shower and change. I returned the gardening tools to the shed and went into the house, stopping in the dining room for a swig of brandy straight from the decanter. I went upstairs and showered. In the bathroom cabinet, Mum’s Valium bottle stood on the shelf. I had never taken one before, but I knew how they were effective in lessening her panic, so I put my mouth to the tap and swallowed a tablet.

I don’t remember much of our dinner conversation, just that I fought to stay awake and Granny commented on how quiet I was. She prattled on about this and that, and when I could no longer keep my eyes open, she said that maybe digging out the pond was a bit much for me and that she would do a bit of digging herself tomorrow. I struggled then to be aware, insisting that I was fully capable and would get back to it during the week after school.

‘Well, if you’re sure?’

I went straight to bed, and slept the best night’s sleep I’d had in many months, without dreaming, until my alarm went for school the next day. The horror took hold of me once again.

At breakfast, Granny was peering out the kitchen window. ‘I thought you were digging out the pond? It looks like you’ve filled it all in.’

I made up some nonsense about having to weigh down the rubber sheeting to settle it before I removed the earth again. She looked doubtful, but was happy enough to assume that I knew what I was doing.

I was a small pebble being washed out to sea by an enormous, storm-force wave and there was nobody I could turn to for help. School that day was… I have no idea. Helen was waiting for me at the bus stop when lessons were over.

‘May I come to your house for dinner?’ I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

‘What about Granny?’

‘Fuck Granny.’

‘Ooooh, Lar, what has she done this time?’ Helen was used to my giving out about Granny.

‘Nothing, I just want to go to your place.’

Helen took this as a compliment, but really it was nothing to do with her. I wanted to be surrounded by her and her noisy brothers and her gravel-voiced mother. I wanted there to be chat and squabbles and music and television, clamour and distraction. I didn’t want to go home and look out my kitchen window.

Perhaps because of the contrast, that evening in Helen’s was one of the most enjoyable I’d ever had. Her mother was pleased to see me, in her perceptive way: ‘Oh, Lar, look at you – you look great – but a little pale.’ She didn’t mind when Helen and I cracked open cans of beer at the dinner table, and I found my voracious appetite had returned as I forced more and more food into my maw.

‘I think you’ve had enough,’ said Helen as I scraped the last crumbs of an apple pie on to the side of my fork. Helen and I went upstairs ‘to study’ and fumbled with each other in an ungainly fashion, and I got further with her than any time since we’d had full intercourse, but not quite there.

‘Jesus, you’re persistent tonight,’ she said, ‘but you’d better go home. It’s nearly eleven and Granny will have the guards out looking for you.’

When I got home, Granny was livid. ‘I’d made a special dinner for you as it is my last night, and you didn’t even have the decency to ring to let me know. It shows a complete lack of consideration. What was I supposed to think? I suppose you were in that girl’s house?’

I apologized. I should have rung her, but I knew she’d have forbidden me from going to Helen’s on a school night. Mum would be home tomorrow. How was I going to tell her what I had found? She had been through so much already. But I would have to tell her eventually. I cursed my father for what he had done, not just to Annie Doyle, but to us too. What would happen to us now? I didn’t think my mother would be able to handle it.