Liz Nugent - Lying in Wait

‘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.’

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.