Lying in Wait(17)

She laughed. ‘So ridiculous, questioning a schoolboy.’

‘I hope they catch him.’

‘Who?’

‘The fella in the hat!’ I foraged in the fridge for some cheese and cut two slices of thick bread from the loaf.

‘Leave room for your dinner,’ said Mum. As if.

I was relieved that I no longer had to think about this girl. After the newspapers had been thrown out, I had retrieved them from the bin and cut out the articles about the missing woman. Unusually, Dad had recently been buying all of the newspapers, including the ones he had claimed to despise. We were not a house that would ordinarily take the Sunday World. At first, there was just information about where she had last been seen, a description of what she may have been wearing, but the later reports suggested that she was leading a sordid life. I had been poring over them nightly, looking at her snaggle-toothed grin, her misshapen mouth, desperate to rule out my father’s involvement. I had raided the desk in his study, looking for evidence of an affair he was having, but really looking for some link between him and Annie Doyle. I don’t know what I expected to find – a photograph? A legal case file that named her? It was ridiculous and I knew it. Prostitutes did not give receipts or hand out business cards.

I had had nightmares in which I was having sex with Annie in Helen’s distorted bedroom, and others in which I was stabbing her viciously with my father’s silver letter-opener and then I’d see my mother’s face, and I’d wake up, drenched in sweat and guilt-ridden. Now I was free of all that.

Until two days later, when I noticed a gap on the shelf where my grandfather’s old trilby hat had been for as long as I could remember. I asked Mum where it had gone. ‘Oh, I think your father finally threw it out,’ she said absent-mindedly, and all the fear and anxiety swept back up into my heart. I nervously asked Dad if he had thrown out the hat.

‘Why do you want to know?’ was his first question, before he claimed that he didn’t know what had happened to it, his voice quivering as he spoke.

I knew. I knew for sure he was lying.

I didn’t do anything with this knowledge. I was scared of what it meant. I had lied to the guard now, so I could go to jail too. What had he done with the woman? I know we were broke, but if he was going to kidnap someone, shouldn’t he have chosen someone rich? He wasn’t that desperate, surely. And where were the ransom demands? The IRA had kidnapped a man but everyone knew it was the IRA, and they kidnapped a rich guy, a foreign industrialist. My father was not a stupid man. That led me to the idea that maybe Annie Doyle had been in trouble with the IRA or some criminal gang, and Dad had given her the money to move away abroad with a new identity. Dad was helping a young woman in trouble. Wasn’t that more likely? But if that was the case, why were the police not involved? Maybe the guards were not being told because the case was so sensitive that it had to be entrusted to a judge. I tried to believe that version of events because, as unlikely as it seemed, the alternatives were too dreadful to contemplate.

I did my best to avoid spending time with Helen in the following weeks, but she phoned regularly, ostensibly to check that I hadn’t told anyone about the sex.

‘I don’t want them to think that I’m a slut.’

I didn’t tell her that the boys in my class already called her a slut, even before we’d had sexual intercourse.

She continued, ‘It’s just something I needed to get out of the way, you know? To see what all the fuss was about.’

I could feel her disappointment. I guessed if she had wanted to offload her virginity, I would probably not have been her first choice. As hurtful as this dawning realization was, I wondered if other boys had rejected her before she chose me. And then I wondered how likely it was that a boy in my class would have refused sex from any girl. So she did choose me. Poor Helen.

‘Sorry,’ I said, when we first talked on the phone after that night.

‘God, no, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have … it was just … let’s never mention it again.’

‘Sure.’

There was a pause and then I had to ask because I needed to know. ‘So are you my girlfriend or anything like that?’

‘Do you want me to be?’ She was slightly incredulous. How the hell was I to answer that?

‘Well, I suppose …’

‘Great, that’s great.’ Her voice brightened. I wasn’t sure what to say.

‘… Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s OK then? To call you my boyfriend? And we don’t have to … you know …?’

‘What? Ever?’

‘Well, maybe … sometime, but not soon … OK?’

‘OK … well, goodnight.’

‘See you tomorrow?’

‘Yes, probably.’

‘Goodnight.’

I should have been celebrating the fact that I had a girlfriend, even if it was just Helen, but I was afraid to have a confidante. If I voiced my fears, that would legitimize them and make them real. Helen got upset and clingy. She was paranoid and claimed that I had obviously just been using her for sex. She swore that if I told anybody we’d done it, she’d tell them what a small penis I had, and that even if it was huge, the flab of my belly would have hidden it anyway. I had really struck gold with my first girlfriend.