Liz Nugent - Lying in Wait

‘I don’t think your mother will be able for it. Can you not tell her?’

Da was right. Ma had her faith to protect her, however misguided it might be. There was no reason to tell her. It wouldn’t change anything.

I took Da back to his house and made him coffee. I asked him if I could stay the night in my old room. Our old room. Mine and Annie’s. He raised his eyebrows.

‘Everything all right with Dessie?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Did he hurt you? If he laid a finger—’

‘No, nothing like that. I’ll go home tomorrow. I just need a bit of space.’

I found an old nightie of Ma’s and went into the bedroom. I turned on the radio to stop myself from thinking about the way Annie had filled this room with her personality. They were playing that song again, ‘Feed the World’. There had been a big concert a few weeks previously in London to raise money for famine victims in Ethiopia. The famine was all over the television news these days. They showed footage of tiny children with sticks for bones and bloated bellies full of air. We had done a charity fashion show to raise money. Some of the other models went to the Live Aid concert in London. I’d said to Dessie about trying to get tickets and going over for a weekend, but he went on again about saving money for a house and starting a family.

I’d got married too young. Yvonne was right. And it wasn’t the age difference that was the problem between us. Dessie was suffocating me. He just wasn’t the right guy for me. I’d known it for a long time, but hadn’t wanted to admit it. Aside from the Annie thing, he wanted to know where all my modelling jobs were, what kind of venues, what type of clothes I’d be wearing. He demanded to see the Polaroids from the shoot immediately afterwards, and he wanted to meet Yvonne. So far, I had been able to put him off. I felt like it was too late to do anything about my marriage. Could I find a way to fall in love with my husband again?

I thought about ringing him to let him know where I was, but it would have meant getting up again and going downstairs to the phone in the hall, disturbing Da. As I pulled the curtains, I looked down into the street below and for a second I thought I saw that man from Da’s dole office looking up at our house, but he soon moved off along the street.

I went home the next day. Dessie was furious. ‘You could have rung me. I was worried sick. You should know, of all people, what it’s like when someone goes missing!’

I had been prepared to be sorry, but this drove me up the wall. ‘I did not “go missing”. If you were really worried, you’d have rung my da. And Annie did not “go missing” either. She was murdered. And the guards have known it for years. They just didn’t think it important enough to tell us.’

Dessie took hold of my shoulders to hug me, and I let him because there was nothing else I could do.

‘I’m sorry, love.’

‘It’s OK, let’s just forget about it,’ I said, only I wasn’t going to forget about it.

I had a few jobs over the following weeks that kept me fairly busy, but I tracked down and met one of the girls who had actually seen the old Jaguar. She had been living in the shared house with Annie. I remembered she worked in H. Williams on Baggot Street, so I found her there. She was frosty with me, and said she would never have stayed in the house if she had known what was going on there. She was referring to the prostitution, I assume. She had already told the guards everything she knew, she said. I had managed to charm some old car brochures out of a gamey old high-end car dealer, and I got her to look at them. We narrowed it down to the Jaguar Sedan brand produced between 1950 and 1960. She said she’d only spotted the driver twice but that he had looked ‘prosperous’, had worn a pinstripe suit and a trilby hat pulled low over his eyes. She couldn’t recall anything else particular about him: he had been regular height, no beard or moustache that she could remember. She couldn’t guess at his age as she hadn’t seen his face. She said she’d seen the car parked around the corner from the house more times than she’d seen him, over a period of about six months. She’d seen him get out of it once, and the other time she’d seen him saying goodbye to Annie at the doorway. She had never seen him or the car since Annie’s disappearance, though she had continued to live at that address for a year afterwards. I asked her if she had ever seen other men coming and going to Annie’s flat and she said no, that she had assumed Annie conducted her ‘business’ elsewhere.

I chased up Dessie’s mechanic about his friend who restored vintage cars, but he told me that Dessie had told him not to worry about it. Dessie was making decisions for me again. Without consulting Dessie, I insisted on getting the number of the man, who was called Frankie and had a garage out in Santry. I rang him to ask if I could meet him to ask a few questions, saying that I was looking for a particular car to use on a photo shoot. He wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. He was too busy flirting with me. He guessed there were about twenty cars fitting that description in Dublin. He had only ever serviced two of those vehicles, one for a car museum and one for an octogenarian who lived in County Offaly. He gave me some names and numbers of other mechanics who specialized in old cars.

I had no further luck with those. One of them led me a merry dance, and neither of them had any helpful information. I was hitting a brick wall. Dessie was getting suspicious about where I was going and what I was doing, and I resented having to lie to him.

Early on a Saturday morning in September he reached for me in bed, and I realized that I couldn’t stay with Dessie any longer. The previous evening he had quizzed me about numbers called on our itemized phone bill. I didn’t even know our bill was itemized, and it would never have occurred to me to check it. I had lied, badly, and he confronted me with the news that he had rung the numbers and found out they were all mechanics and car dealers. There was a row, and again he had told me I was stupid and obsessed and ridiculous. For the sake of keeping the peace, I had apologized and backed down and we had kissed and made up. But the next morning, I woke up feeling angry. Angry at myself, mostly, for not standing my ground. I turned away from his kisses.

‘It’s not working, Dessie. Us, I mean.’

‘Ah, Karen, don’t be like that. Sure, I’ve forgotten all about it.’

‘Yeah, until the next time. I’m sick of it. You’re checking up on me all the time. Turning up out of the blue to collect me from jobs.’

He sat up and leaned on one arm.

‘You’re embarrassed by the van, is that it?’

‘Christ, Dessie, that’s not it at all. You don’t even know how you’re controlling me all the time. Checking my phone calls? For God’s sake.’

‘I wouldn’t have to check if you were honest with me.’

I raised my voice now, my frustration levels growing. ‘I’m not able to be honest with you, ’cos you go off the deep end. You have practically ordered me to forget about my sister!’

‘Not this again. Jesus.’

He got out of bed and went into the bathroom, and I waited, listening to the long stream of piss, grateful for a moment to collect myself. By the time he came back, I had calmed myself for the storm I knew I had to face.

‘I don’t want to be married to you any more.’

It happened so fast that I didn’t see it coming. There was just a brief flash of his hand towards my face. I felt the air whip past my cheek. He dropped his arm at the very last second so that no contact was made. Dessie was handy with his fists. If he had meant to hurt me, he could have. Dessie didn’t want to hurt me. It was the opposite.