Liz Nugent - Lying in Wait

At the time, I was so distraught that I couldn’t trust my own judgement. I had been wrong about everything. Dessie was incredibly kind to me. He offered a solid shoulder and assured me that everything would be OK. Ma and Da were shocked. Laurence had fooled them too, especially Da. Ma thinks that Laurence probably intended to kill me too, but we’ll never know now.

When I think of the nights I shared with him, I want to pull clumps of hair from my head. Sometimes, I do. The guards warned us to stay away from Avalon after Laurence got out of hospital. I didn’t want to go near the place, but Da badly wanted to beat the living daylights out of him. I am still so angry that he got off scot-free. Laurence murdered my sister and I never got to know how or why, and even if he is brain-damaged, I don’t think that is enough punishment because he doesn’t have to live with himself in the way I do.

Because I had some kind of public profile then, Yvonne could do nothing about protecting me from the media. Ma and Da’s house was besieged, and somehow they found my flat. They couldn’t name Laurence, but they could name me and Annie, and reprint photographs of me alongside lurid headlines. Dessie offered me a place to stay and I went home with him. I drank myself into oblivion in those first few weeks. I was a mess. The police interrogations seemed endless. Detective Mooney had been wrong about the murderer being dead, though they couldn’t rule out the possibility that Laurence’s father had helped him, despite Lydia apparently insisting that he would never have done such a thing. Poor Lydia. This time, the guards were taking it seriously, now that there was a middle-class Cabinteely man involved.

It was three days after I had called the guards from the phone box that I realized the significance of the garden monument that Laurence had built. My suspicions proved to be true. The guards had sealed off the house and were searching through everything. They found some essays in Laurence’s handwriting about dating Annie and having sex with her. I still feel sick at the thought of it.

I never intended to get back with Dessie, not then, but he was so rock steady and so ready to forgive. I thought if we got back together, I could make things right and turn back the clock to when we’d been happy. Yvonne thought that the notoriety would die down after a while, and that I could resume my career, as I was still in demand in Europe, but the whole modelling scene seemed so stupid and trivial to me. Dessie said the money would be handy, but he let me make my own decision. Eventually, I got a job in Arnotts’ shoe department. Dessie was as protective as ever, but that was what I needed back then. He tried not to comment on my drinking in the beginning.

We have a house in Lucan and two children, Debbie and Stevie. I should be happy. I should be able to let go of the past. And I should never have gone back to Dessie. After a while his protective ways turned into full-scale intimidation and bullying. He has never raised a hand to me again, but he doesn’t have to because he knows that I am afraid to ever leave him. Our daughter drives him up the wall. She was wild like Annie when she was a teenager, and he blamed me. I drank more wine and blocked it all out. Stevie is a good boy. He’s a lorry driver, getting married this year. I don’t have much of a relationship with him. Dessie and Stevie stick together. Debbie and Stevie stick together. Nobody sticks to me.

When the news scandals broke in the 1990s about the Mother and Baby homes, I thought about looking for Marnie, but Dessie went ballistic when I mentioned it.

‘Jesus Christ, Karen. Remember how your last search went? Are you stupid or what?’

I am stupid. A fool.

The only person I see on an occasional basis is Helen. I’m not sure why we still meet up, but we do. Every six months or year or so, we’ll go to a pub and rehash the whole story, as if we were old soldiers reliving our days at the front together. Helen is now a pharmaceutical sales rep on her second husband, a lab technician. She never had children. We still don’t like each other very much, but we are somehow bonded by our experiences of Laurence Fitzsimons.

She still visits Avalon. I didn’t understand why she bothered, but she said that in the beginning Lydia paid her to do shopping and cleaning and to help with caring for Laurence. Helen says it’s hard to see Laurence as a murderer when she is giving him a bath and spoon-feeding him his dinner. I can’t see him as anything else. In the last few years, Laurence and his mother have lived in just three rooms downstairs. Lydia has run out of money, anything left of any value has been sold off, and she can no longer pay Helen.

‘So why are you still helping them?’ I asked recently.

‘For the house!’ she said triumphantly.

She admitted that she had had papers drawn up. About ten years ago, she came to an arrangement with Lydia. She got Lydia to make a will, leaving the house to her, as long as Helen comes once a week with shopping and anything they might need. The arrangement is that Lydia can stay there until she dies. Lydia and Laurence never leave the house at all. Helen says Avalon is worth millions now, even though it’s in bad repair, and I don’t doubt it.

I feel sorry for myself a lot of the time, and I really need to stop drinking soon, but the person I feel most sorry for is Lydia. How must it feel to be the mother and full-time carer of a killer? She must be well over eighty years old. Helen says she has dementia now. I think that must be a blessing.

I can’t remember if I fed Laurence today. He is crying a lot and we are very cold.

When those boys came and threw stones at our windows and smashed them, when was that? I went to call that man, the one who adores me, but I don’t think the telephone is working. Daddy will be very cross when he comes home and finds glass everywhere.

I lie on the sofa under a rug, but the broken spring is hurting my ribs.

The girl… Helen… that’s her name, I remember! She’s not a girl any more, but her, the one who always came. She brings coal sometimes when she comes with shopping in her car. But today we are very cold and I cannot find the matches. Diana took them from me. She says we mustn’t play with matches.

Andrew says I must stop Laurence from crying. Maybe he is teething. I have pushed him out into the garden and tied him to the drainpipe to stop him wandering.

Mummy is calling me to come in for dinner. I love the smell of her perfume. I follow it indoors.

It is dark outside. I can still hear him crying.

Thank you to my agents: Marianne Gunn O’Connor for her loyalty and loveliness, and Vicki Satlow for carefully placing me into the best international hands.

Thank you to my editor, Patricia Deevy, for her sound judgement and for steering me away from the cliff edge. Thank you to my homies at Penguin Ireland – Michael McLoughlin, Cliona Lewis, Patricia McVeigh, Brian Walker, Carrie Anderson and Aimée Johnston – who all ensured that this book made it into your hands.

Thank you to the amazing team at Penguin UK – Stephenie Naulls, Rose Poole, Keith Taylor, Holly Kate Donmall and Sam Fanaken – who made me look literate and for making sure you heard about the book. Thank you to Caroline Pretty for her gimlet eye to detail and chronology. Thank you to Leo Nickolls for the stunning cover design. Thank you to Catherine Ryan Howard for being my social media maven.

Sincere thanks to the Irish Writers’ Centre and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for support in the form of the Jack Harte Bursary, which afforded me the time and space to work on this novel. A royal thank you also to Judith Gantley at the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco for treating me in the manner to which I would like to be accustomed.