Liz Nugent - Lying in Wait

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.