Liz Nugent - Unraveling Oliver

Shame flooded my head and I felt again like the boy who wasn’t good enough to see his father because he had spilled juice on himself, like the boy whose father inspected him like one would a horse, looking for defects.

When I attacked Alice for the second time, these thoughts went through my head as I punched and kicked and bit and slammed and dropped and wrenched and tore.

Icouldn’t believe my eyes when I answered the door very late that night three months ago to find Oliver covered in blood. At first I thought he’d been in a car accident. He was shaking like a leaf, but he said he wasn’t hurt and when I looked a bit closer, I could see that he didn’t have any wounds.

“Jesus, what happened?!” says I.

“It’s Alice,” he says. “She needs help.”

I’m glad my mam is dead now because if she’d been around for this, her nerves would have been shot and I wouldn’t be allowed out of the house.

I left Oliver sitting in a chair in my hallway and ran over to Alice’s. The hall door was wide open and I went in, dreading what I was going to find.

She was in the kitchen. At first sight I thought it was just a load of laundry piled up against the back door, waiting to go into the machine, but then I noticed smears of blood across the floor and on the wall above and I realized that it was Alice. God, the image of that will never leave my head, so help me. I knelt down by her side and lifted her head. Her breathing was shallow, but she was conscious. I was crying now, as I tried to hold her and reach the phone on the wall behind her. Little frothy bubbles of blood were coming out of her mouth. I roared at the 999 people to get an ambulance and gave them the address. They said they’d send the police too, but I dropped the phone because I couldn’t hold Alice and talk to them at the same time. I wanted to be talking to her. In films on television, they always say that you should try to keep the victim awake because if they lose consciousness, they die, so I was talking to her, telling her to hang on, and she was looking at me, the beautiful eyes that I had loved my whole life, even though I had no right. She was trying to say something but I told her to save her energy, and the sight of the blood pouring out of her was terrible and I held her close and said, “It won’t be long now, hang on, love, hang on.” She did say a word and I guessed it before she finished saying it. “Eugene,” she said, and then she passed out.

The ambulance came and took her away, and then the police arrived and I remembered that Oliver must still be sitting in my hall. I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but by now I obviously knew he’d done it. I remembered how snotty he’d been in Nash’s earlier in the evening when he threw a pack of cigarettes at me. He was covered in her blood. So I told the police where to find him and watched as they escorted him out of my house. He looked up at me, all that swagger and confidence gone out of him, and I realized that no matter how educated he was, how rich or how posh, I was a better man than him. I always had been.

All those years ago, when he stole her from me, I didn’t put up a fight. I practically gave him my permission. I thought Alice deserved someone better than me. I should have fought for her.

I visited her in the hospital the next day but she never regained consciousness, so now I visit her once or twice a week and I hold her hand and talk to her because in films sometimes that works and you can get a fella back to normal. I tried bringing in old songs she liked and I put headphones on her head, but she never stirred. One day I was chatting away, reminding her of the time we went to Galway and got drunk on the port, and she opened her eyes and I roared for the doctors, but they said it was nothing and that just because she opened her eyes doesn’t mean she’ll get back to normal. I saw a film, a foreign one about a fella who was in a coma like her, but he knew what was going on and you could tell because one of his eyes would follow you round the room. Alice opens her eyes now from time to time, but not like she’s seeing anything, just as if she’s blinking but in reverse, if you know what I mean. She smiles sometimes. I hope she’s remembering happy times.

I don’t think she’s going to get better now, but I still like to go in and chat because you never know.

I started going to see Eugene too. He’s just the same mad fella he always was. Delighted to see me. The other day, didn’t he lift me up in a chair and off we went! I was scared out of my wits and this bossy one screams at him to put me down, but weren’t we only having a bit of a laugh.

Oliver has signed over guardianship of Eugene to me. It was all done through solicitors. It was complicated because Alice is his next of kin, but she’s not dead and Oliver’s her next of kin even though he half killed her. Oliver had the nerve to ask if I’d go and visit him. Apparently, he wants to “explain” himself. Fuck him.

Enough of him. I’m having Eugene come and live with me. There’s social workers and assessments and all sorts involved, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen. I’ve cleared out Mam’s room, and I’ve wallpapered it, and I’ve bought loads of books for him. Not those books, obviously, but other ones. I got a CD player too for his room. The fella tried to sell me an iPod, but sure what would I want with one of those. I already had to buy all my rec-ords on CD after the record player broke and I couldn’t get a replacement. It’ll be the iPod this week and something else next week. I can’t keep up. I got a new car too. The backseats are high up so that Eugene will be able to see out properly. I’m giving up smoking. It’s really hard, but it wouldn’t be right with himself in the house. Eugene and me will have a grand time.

Every time I visit him, he asks when Alice is coming. I can’t tell him yet. I’ll take my time and think of something. Maybe he won’t be upset to visit her in the state she’s in. I don’t know, but I know when he moves in with me, he’s going to want to run around to his old house and see her. It’s all boarded up now. I’ll have to think of something to tell him.

The papers called it “The House of Horror.” It seems to me that if you stub your toe at home these days, they call it “The House of Horror.” They are having a field day. In the first month afterward, I had to go in and out my back door because of what they call the “media scrum.” They want my story. My story is that I loved and lost. They won’t get many headlines out of that.

Infamy is a lot more interesting than fame, it seems. It is not just the tabloids who think so. An acre of newsprint was used up in documenting the fall from grace of the successful writer who turned out to be a plagiarist and a wife beater. Pundits who might previously have described themselves as close personal friends are now granting interviews in which they claim that they always knew there was something strange about me. They speculate that I was in the habit of beating my wife, despite the lack of evidence at the trial to support the theory, and they relate conversations that never happened that imply I was always violent and that Alice was terrified of me.

One rag published a school essay from more than forty years ago to highlight my bad prose and to illustrate my unfocused narrative. The PhD students who once flocked around me like acolytes claim I have destroyed their careers and their credibility. Poor babies. Critics claim that somebody who had no children could never have written stories that appealed to them so much. That is not what they said at the time. In fact, they said back then that it was because I did not have the responsibility of children that I hadn’t fully grown up and therefore could more easily access the mind of a child. Fools. They have delved into my past and my background and asked questions about my parentage. They haven’t got too far with that.