Lying in Wait(12)

I hardly cared myself now. I just needed to get it over and done with. My school uniform dropped bit by bit to the floor, but taking her example, I kept my underpants on until I was in the bed. Then began an amount of unseemly grunting and squealing from the two of us, and copious sweating from me, as we discarded our pants and I tried to negotiate my way up the correct corridor. Helen handled things, so to speak, and guided me in the right direction. It was absolutely brilliant for the first three minutes, but after that it was a struggle not to vomit. I tried to think about Farrah Fawcett, but it was no good. I don’t wish to go into further detail about The Sex. Suffice to say that I didn’t enjoy it. It was uncomfortable and messy, humiliating on my part, and I was glad when Helen said she’d had enough. Pregnancy was not something we had to worry about.

‘You haven’t done this before, then?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither.’

I was surprised. I took some solace from her admission.

Helen and I parted on awkward terms.

‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ she said anxiously as we lay in bed after The Sex. She expressed my concern exactly.

I rootled around the bottom of the bed for my Y-fronts, squashing Helen and pinching the tiny amount of flesh on her skeleton in the process. She winced in pain.

‘Never,’ I said, a little too vehemently, as I clambered out of the bed, noting as I did so that my ankle was extremely painful.

‘You’d better go. Mam will be home soon.’ It was clear we both wanted to draw a line under the encounter.

‘My ankle is swollen,’ I said as I pulled up my elasticated trousers, trying desperately to suck in my belly.

‘How can you tell?’

I thought that was a bit much. Coming from a girl who could potentially be my girlfriend.

I was sick into a hedge on the way home. My watch registered five past eleven as I hobbled up the driveway to Avalon, and I knew I was in for some sort of inquisition. The lies I had prepared about Herbie Goes Bananas and my ‘friends’ seemed feeble now. I hadn’t anticipated explaining vomit stains on my trousers and a busted ankle.

To my surprise, the garage doors were wide open and there was no car in the driveway, which meant that my father must have gone out after all.

When I let myself in the front door, the house was silent and in darkness. Mum had obviously gone to bed. Relieved, I pulled off my clothes in the laundry room and stuffed them into the washing machine with the rest of the pile from the basket, then stopped for a full glass of water in the kitchen. I climbed the stairs as quietly as I could, crept past my parents’ bedroom door and crawled into bed.

As I lay there, I wondered if this was how I was supposed to feel, now that I had had sexual intercourse. I had expected that I would feel strong, masterful and virile. In fact, I felt tearful, resentful and sick. Maybe it was the gin. I’d never had that before either.

Anyway, that’s what I was doing on Friday the 14th of November 1980, the night my father murdered Annie Doyle.





4


Lydia


The eleven days after the girl’s death were the most stressful, waiting for the axe to fall. We bought all the newspapers and listened to every news bulletin, waiting for a report on her disappearance, but nothing happened. Andrew went to work, and I did my exercises, went out to the shops, made dinners, tended to our son and the house, and from time to time I would lock myself into my bedroom and put on my mother’s scarlet lipstick. It had been decades since I had used it, and though it had completely dried out, the pigment was as vivid as ever and I would use some Pond’s cream to smooth it on to my mouth, and look in the mirror and see her peering back at me.

Sometimes, I would wake and wonder if Annie’s death had all been an awful nightmare, but every night when Andrew came home, one look at his increasingly grey face told me that it was no dream and that we would never wake up. From the kitchen window, I could see the freshly dug grave. I had asked Andrew to buy some plants to take the bare look off it, and now, at the end of a cold November, it was an obscene riot of colour.

I hoped, though.

‘Nobody is looking for her,’ I said. ‘Maybe she won’t even be reported missing. I mean, if Laurence went missing, we’d be calling the guards within a few hours, wouldn’t we?’

‘You would,’ said Andrew. ‘I’d be inclined to let him have some breathing space.’

‘But … this girl. Obviously, nobody cares about her.’

‘It’s only a matter of time until the alarm is raised. You’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise.’

On Tuesday the 25th of November, our doorbell rang during dinner. Andrew went out to answer it while I took over carving the ham. I heard the beginning of the conversation and realized that it was a guard. I could see Laurence was listening intently, so I closed the door and turned up the radio while forcing myself to remain calm.

When Andrew returned to the table, I could see that his face was ashen. I didn’t dare ask him what had happened in front of Laurence, so instead I engaged him in a conversation about the boiler in the hot press that needed lagging. He nodded curtly and withdrew behind the Evening Herald. Laurence was staring at his father’s hands. Large hands, more weathered than one might expect for a member of the judiciary. Andrew snapped the paper to smooth the pages, which momentarily startled me. He put his newspaper down. ‘What time were you home, that night you went to the cinema with your friends?’ he said to Laurence.