Lying in Wait(18)

Helen visited Avalon, often uninvited. ‘Jesus! Look at the fucking size of your house!’ she said the first time she came over. I shushed her, asking her to be polite in front of my parents. She just about curbed her language, but I could tell that she didn’t really care what people thought of her. I knew that Mum and Dad were unimpressed by her. Mum was cold and stiff in her presence, made awkward polite conversation and then left the room. Dad caught her siphoning vodka from a bottle in the drinks cabinet into a small lemonade bottle one time. I had taken the blame and said it was my idea. Normally he would have been incandescent at something like that, but he just shuffled away, muttering. I’m sure he thought Helen was a bratty teenager, but maybe he was relieved that I had a girlfriend. As far as I knew, he didn’t tell my mother about the vodka. Helen didn’t care.

Christmas holidays came finally on the 19th of December. It was a mixed blessing to be out of school. On the one hand, I didn’t have to face the bullies, but on the other hand, the courts were closed and my dad was at home a lot more. I was nervous around him. Also, there was the small matter of my school report. Since the night the guard had come to our door, I had given up doing my homework or revising. I was not concentrating on schoolwork at all, preoccupied as I was by the fact that I was living with a liar and a murderer, probably.

I thought about forging the report. I wasn’t bad at forgery. In my old school I used to do it for friends, but in St Martin’s I had quickly offered up this skill to avoid beatings. I forged sick notes from parents, school reports, train tickets. There was one attempt to have me forge ￡10 notes, but then they’d beaten me up when it proved unsuccessful, as I’d told them it would be. I decided to be honest about the report, but I worried about my father’s reaction.

I had already disappointed him by not being athletic and not loving rugby or golf. One time, he had forced me to endure eighteen holes of golf in his company. I never knew how to have a conversation with him, and I couldn’t hit the ball more than three yards. On that particular trip, I embarrassed him in front of his friend. It was a ‘father and sons’ outing, suggested no doubt by his friend, who belonged to a posher golf club than Dad’s one. The other son was a good bit younger than me, but I disgraced myself by fainting at the fourth tee and had to be rescued by a golf buggy and carted back to the clubhouse. When Bloody Paddy Carey had done his worst, Dad had to cancel his golf membership, claiming that he just didn’t have the time. Every cloud.

But I had always managed to maintain top grades. He didn’t need another reason to go ballistic. And I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to control my own reaction if he did. Mum would try to play it down and point out that Bs and Cs were still very good.

I handed the blue envelope over to my dad on the first day of the holidays, thinking I just needed to get it over and done with. He opened it absent-mindedly as I waited nervously, but as he scanned through it, he didn’t seem angry at all. ‘Where are all the As? You’ve slipped,’ he said.

Mum picked it up then. ‘Oh God, Laurence!’ she said after she’d read the whole thing. ‘It’s not a disaster, darling, but what has happened to you?’ And before I could answer, she said, ‘It’s that girl. She’s a distraction. Not a tap of work is being done while she’s around.’

‘Her name is Helen,’ I muttered.

‘Don’t talk back to your mother,’ snarled the suspected murderer/kidnapper, but he left the room then and didn’t mention it again.

Mum gave me a lecture: she was going to keep a closer eye on me, she said, and I could catch up on the lost As over the Christmas holidays. ‘Of course, it’s all my fault, I could tell that girl was trouble the moment I heard about her. I should have put a stop to it then.’

I managed to ring Helen and tried to tell her that we needed to cool things down a bit.

‘Fuck that,’ she said, ‘are you a man or a mouse?’

I didn’t answer the question.

Mum worried as Dad began to look old and ill. I tried not to think about it, but I couldn’t settle. Mum said we should just be gentle around him and try not to make any demands on him. She confided there were serious financial worries that he refused to discuss with her. I played along with her concerns, insisting that my too-small blazer was fine and there was no point in getting a new one for the last five months of school. She admitted we simply couldn’t afford to buy what we needed.

I had never known my dad to be beaten by stress before. Stress and depression were my mother’s weaknesses. As he became more frail, I realized that I was possibly the only person who knew the real reason for his decline.

I turned eighteen on Christmas Day. Helen and I exchanged gifts the evening before, when she called to Avalon. Helen said I was a cheap date because she’d only had to get me one combined birthday/Christmas gift. It was a Star Wars T-shirt (we’d seen The Empire Strikes Back by then), but I didn’t dare try it on in front of her. I told her it would be great for the summer. As I suspected, it was too small. I got her a pair of earrings made of pieces of coloured glass. She said they were lovely and that she’d been meaning to get her ears pierced anyway.

I was angling with Helen to try sex again, but she said I’d put her off. My hand was red from being slapped away. That is my abiding memory of that Christmas Eve – me wheedling, her slapping.

The big day started out as the usual family affair. We ate in the dining room instead of the kitchen. The table was set with linen and crystal, and Dad, for the first time since, well, since that time, made an effort to be on good form. He faked jollity and merriment and read the same lame jokes we’d heard every year from the Christmas crackers. He complimented the food, and although I could see how much it irked him, he ignored the amount I heaped on to my plate. I decided to take advantage of the birthday/Christmas Day amnesty and ate an entire box of Quality Street. Neither of them commented.